Over the past two days, I've been posting an ongoing series on connections between racist groups and dominionism--including a
gallery of rogues of the dominionist movement who have links to racist and militia groups.
We wrap up that "rogues' gallery" today by focusing on the connections between racism and three dominionists in particular--Kenneth Blackwell (the Ohio secretary of state and infamous dominionist apologist), John Ashcroft (and to a lesser extent, a front-group his dad runs) and young-earth creationist Kent Hovind--the last of which may be going to jail soon because of those connections.
Kenneth Blackwell
Kenneth Blackwell is a well known dominionist apologist. He's explicitly partnered with Rod Parsley's "Patriot Pastor" movement to solicit votes among dominionists--a series of acts that have literally caused practically every mainstream Christian and Jewish congregation in the Columbus area has filed a joint complaint with the IRS against the two dominionist congregations at the center of the "Patriot Pastor" movement. Infamously, Blackwell also promised to "deliver votes" for Bush in the 2004 election (he was, and still is, Secretary of State--which in Ohio has the power to certify vote counts); Rolling Stone has since found evidence to suggest that massive voting fraud may have occured in Ohio including irregularities in polling, suspicious errors with electronic voting machines, and explicit favoritism towards the very dominionist groups supporting him and Bush. Not only that, but Blackwell is known to have supported Christian Reconstructionism and is reportedly a member of the Coalition for National Policy--a secretive think-tank of dominionists and neoconservatives where literal "five-year plans" and such are made for dominionist political strategy and funding is secured for dominionist and neoconservative causes.
What may be surprising is Kenneth Blackwell's support of racists and by racists, especially with him being an African-American. (This, sadly, is not unknown and not without historic precedent.)
As it turns out, both Cincinatti.com and the Akron Beacon-Journal have reported on Blackwell's links with none other than Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America:
The Democratic-leaning ProgressOhio Web site is blasting Republican gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell, claiming his companion on a southern Ohio bus trip this weekend has ties to racist and militia organizations.
Blackwell is to embark today on a three-day tour with Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America.
Brian Rothenberg, former spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party and now executive editor of ProgressOhio, said Blackwell should be ashamed to associate with Pratt, whom he described as an extremist.
Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo said Blackwell has no concerns about appearing with Pratt and doesn't believe the allegations about him are credible.
You've actually seen Larry Pratt mentioned several times above--Pratt has a known history of partnering with both "anti-abortion" groups connected with domestic terrorism and with racist groups. Multiple sources have documented this:
(from
expose of racist links with neoconservative Pat Buchanan)
Another disturbing and consistent pattern of Buchanan's is hiring trusted staff members who work with, or are part of, racist and militia groups. For example,
-- Larry Pratt, co-chairman of Buchanan's campaign, is a major figure in the militia movement, and has appeared at workshops and on TV shows sponsored by white supremacist "Christian Identity" groups.
. . .
Larry Pratt, Militia Man
Pratt, who took a leave of absence from Buchanan's 1996 campaign after his background became known, is a major supporter and promoter of militias, and said of Buchanan, "I'm quite sure he would support exactly what the founders of our country had in mind. They put the militia into federal law, and it is still in federal law in Title X."
The Southern Poverty Law Center charges that Pratt was the person who introduced the concept of militias to the right-wing underground, in 1992. Historian and author Mark Pitcavage, who runs a very comprehensive web site on right-wing extremists, thinks that overstates Pratt's role, since the militia idea floated around Posse Comitatus before 1992, but he agrees that Pratt was an important figure in popularizing militias, comparable to Bo Gritz.
Pratt argues that the Bible calls for citizen militias and that it teaches we have a "responsibility" to keep and bear arms. His 1990 book is called "Armed People Victorious. " He advanced this view in print and in numerous personal appearances at "Preparedness Expo" type events.
Pratt was invited to speak at the widely publicized 1992 rally in Estes Park, CO by Pete Peters, a leader of the Christian Identity Movement. At the same rally, Peters said "Your enemies are pumping all the Talmudic filth they can vomit and defecate into your living room." (The Talmud is a Jewish holy book). Christian Identity religions hold that Jews are a "mud people" and that "Israelites" referred to in the Bible are not Jews, but actual "Aryan" or "Celtic" peoples. Jesus could not have been Jewish, in their view. Usually they claim that He was British. Other speakers at the same rally were Richard Butler, pastor of the Aryan Nations church in Idaho, and Louis Bream, former head of the Texas KKK.
Pratt admits appearing several times on a television show hosted by Pete Peters after that rally. The Wall Street Journal reported that Pratt has written for "the Jubilee", an openly racist and anti-Semitic publication, and the group that publishes it sells two audiocassette tapes of Pratt's lectures. Pratt spoke at the Jubilation Conference, sponsored by Jubilee's publisher Paul Hall, Sr., in 1993.
Pratt has appeared at a number of other extremist rallies, including a Christian Identity meeting in Branson, Missouri a few days after the Oklahoma city bombing, the "Dallas Preparedness Expo 95" (along with Mark Koernke of the Michigan Militia and Bo Gritz), and the "U.S. Constitution Restoration Rally" in Lakeland Florida, in 1994 (where Red Beckman argued that the constitutional amendments banning slavery and giving blacks' full citizenship were never ratified). Pratt is a contributing editor to a newsletter published by United Sovereigns of America, a group that sells extremist materials including the forged anti-Jewish "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and the Posse Comitatus handbook.
In defense, both Pratt and Buchanan deny any racism. (To be fair, even the Jewish Anti-Defamation League admits it does not have evidence of Pratt himself making racist or anti-Semitic statements.) In fact, Pratt is married to a black woman. Pratt also says he is a member of the group "Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership", an extreme pro-gun group that raised controversy a few years ago by linking the Brady Bill (waiting period before gun purchase) to Hitler and the Nazis. That does not mean Pratt himself is Jewish, though. He says the president of that group likens him to "those righteous gentiles that resisted the Nazi murderers."
In any case, the significance of this is not Pratt's personal views -- it's that one of Buchanan's national campaign chairmen has frequent contacts with, and is happy to ally himself with the most extreme right-wing elements. It's ironic that Buchanan attacks Dole for working together with Democrats but finds no problem in his staff working with neo-Nazis.
Per
Rick Ross Institute--an exit-counseling group that monitors coercive dominionist groups in particular--Pratt also has a long history of association with racists, including literal neo-Nazis and Christian Identity promoters.
John Ashcroft
John Ashcroft is infamous for being one of the first persons to bring pente-style "spiritual warfare" theology to the government; his inauguration ceremony as US Attorney-General featured a mockery of King David's coronation in which his father (who is an Assemblies pastor and founder of one of the numerous front-groups the Assemblies operates) smeared Wesson oil on his head. Ashcroft is also an example of what may be one of the most egregrious church-state violations ever documented--the Assemblies of God donated over $20,000 to his re-election campaign in 2000 when he was running for senator. (He later lost the election to a dead man.)
As noted, Ashcroft's family is an example of a multi-generational dominionist household; Ashcroft's dad is founder of an Assemblies frontgroup known as Chi Alpha--a group that promotes itself as a "Christian fraternity" but in fact is an Assemblies "ministry"--essentially as the Assemblies' version of Campus Crusade for Christ or Maranatha. (In fact, it is one of the earliest of the numerous Assemblies frontgroups, having been founded in 1947.) In what is yet another link between dominionists and racists, Chi Alpha supports known racist young-earth creationist Ken Hovind (featured below) and has held talks featuring Hovind on campuses.
As it turns out, Ashcroft, too, has links to the infamous Larry Pratt, per none other than Time Magazine:
Nearly three years ago, as Sen. John Ashcroft was considering a run for the presidency, he composed a hand-written thank-you note to a man many politicians would run from. Neatly inscribed on Ashcroft's Senate stationery, the letter went to Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, a firearms lobbying group considered extremist even by many conservatives.
"Thanks to you and GOA," Ashcroft wrote, the senator planned to call for significant changes in a juvenile-justice measure then working its way through Congress. An original cosponsor, Ashcroft ultimately withdrew his support for the bill because of the provision cited by GOA.
There is no evidence of further contact between Ashcroft, George W. Bush's nominee for attorney general, and Pratt, though Ashcroft had put out feelers to GOA activists in New Hampshire while exploring a presidential bid seven months earlier, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Nor is there anything unusual about a senator responding in writing to an interested citizen. But the discovery of the senator's personal note to Pratt is likely to fuel Democratic charges that Ashcroft is insensitive to minorities and civil liberties.
At the time Ashcroft wrote to Pratt, the Virginia-based activist was already branded as a pariah even by those considered to the right of the GOP: Two years earlier, he had been forced to step aside as co-chairman of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign after news reports of his association with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and militias.
Kent "Dr. Dino" Hovind
Kent Hovind is one of those rarities in the dominionist movement--held up as a darling by dominionist groups including Chi Alpha, yet regarded as someone to be disavowed even among young-earth creationist groups (Answers In Genesis, the largest "intelligent design" group in the US, has in fact specifically asked young-earth creationists not to use arguments by Hovind).
Hovind has come up with some decidedly peculiar ideas (even for dominionist "young earthers")--including the mix of young-earth creationism and cryptozoology (he claims, among other things, dinosaurs still exist as Mokele-Mbele, the Loch Ness Monster (which is in fact inaccurate--most cryptozoologists consider Nessie a plesiosaur, not a dinosaur) and such--as opposed to dinosaurs still being around in the form of sparrows and ducks and hawks, which is closer to the mainstream paleontological view).
Hovind is probably most infamous for a monetary challenge where he has offered $250,000 to the first person who can "prove evolution". What Hovind doesn't mention is that the conditions given are almost impossible to meet--not only must someone prove evolution but cosmogenesis and biogenesis (two fields not technically related to evolutionary theory) but must prove them all equally (which is not something science has yet accomplished; different levels of theory exist for cosmogenesis, biogenesis, astrophysics, and evolution) and must prove that they occured "without God" (which would disqualify a few notable paleontologists, notably minister Robert Bakker)--but has attempted to weasel his way out of paying the reward in many ways. When a very elegant proof was offered of the evolution of the polar bear from the brown bear (something that is very well documented; polar bears split from the brown bear around the same time that we split from Neandertal man; the recentness of the split was proven recently with the first discovery of a polar-brown hybrid bear, the likely result of polar bears moving into brown-bear territory thanks to climate change), Hovind claimed that bears in general were the same "kind" (and Hovind has been unwilling to define what "kind" may be in modern cladistic nomenclature systems--it could mean anything from phylum on down to genus or species, and likely means "whatever Hovind decides it does"). Apparently only one paleontologist has ever met Hovind's conditions enough to satisfy criteria for a mere debate with Hovind (the president of Faith and Reason Ministries, presumably because John Callahan could also debate theology--and this took place at Hovind's church in a biased, non-referreed atmosphere approaching a kangaroo court.
Other tactics that Hovind has used to try to get out of paying up include demanding proof that dogs and bananas had a common ancestor (which is pretty damned difficult if not impossible--the closest ancestor would have been prokaryotic or a base eukaryote) and demands that someone recreate the Big Bang in a laboratory setting to prove cosmogenesis (!). There is also evidence to suggest that the "judging board" Hovind claims would review such claims is in fact a one-member board consisting of Hovind himself, or possibly Hovind and members of his flock and has falsely claimed to not have received responses to his challenge.
Hovind's "degree" is also from a rather notorious diploma mill; it is only authorised by its home state (Colorado) to issue religious degrees and its only source of "accreditation" is itself from a known accreditation mill; a Patriot University "degree" is actually illegal to use in several states, including Oregon, which require doctorates to be issued by accredited colleges only. (The typical examples of Patriot University "courses" are given here.)
One of the major groups promoting Hovind is Chi Alpha, a group that is in fact one of forty-odd frontgroups of the Assemblies (as noted above); another major promoter is none other than Jack Chick (yes, of the Jack Chick tracts).
This is all bad enough. Rather more disturbing, however, is Ken Hovind's links to the "tax protester" movement--linked to racist groups like Posse Comitatus and "Christian Patriot" groups--and Hovind's promotion of racist literature himself.
Hovind formerly ran a park known as "Dinosaur Adventure Land" that was apparently built without proper permits; when the city of Pensacola moved to shut it down, Hovind used arguments commonly used by "Christian Patriot" groups to claim he didn't need to get permits to build a park used by kids:
It may have been built with heavenly intentions, but a judge has ruled that the creationism theme park known as Dinosaur Adventure Land still must obey earthly laws.
Escambia County authorities this week locked up a museum building at the theme park on North Palafox Street in Pensacola after Circuit Judge Michael Allen ruled the owners were in contempt of court.
Owners of the park, which shows how dinosaurs may have roamed the Earth just a few thousand years ago, did not obtain a building permit before constructing the building in 2002. They have argued in and out of court that it violates their "deeply held" religious beliefs, and that the church-run facility does not have to obtain permits.
After almost four years of litigation, the judge disagreed and said the county has the authority to close the building until the owners comply with regulations.
. . .
Legal questions are nothing new for Dinosaur Adventure Land and the leaders of the church group that operates it:
· In 2004, The Internal Revenue Service raided Hovind's home and businesses. Agents said Hovind had failed to pay taxes. That case is pending, and federal attorneys declined to comment about it.
· While the building permit case was in court, the ownership of the theme park was transferred to Stoll, who resides in Washington State, according to court papers. Stoll has been investigated at least twice by federal authorities, court records show.
Last year, the U.S. attorney in Seattle filed a lawsuit against Stoll, charging him with promoting a scheme encouraging people to avoid paying taxes by claiming to be religious entities, according to news reports.
A federal judge ruled against Stoll, ordering him to stop the practices. Stoll said Thursday that he doesn't recognize the ruling because he was never properly served with court papers.
The lien by the IRS was the result of legal efforts that
literally have been ongoing for over fifteen years; in the original 1996 decision against Hovind (for failure to pay taxes), he initially tried to file bankruptcy by claiming "God owned" all his property and even did a tactic common in the militia "tax protester" movement--namely, filing bogus liens and filing bogus lawsuits against IRS agents:
Soon thereafter, on February 20, 1990, the debtor prepared and had served on Revenue Officer Powe by the Escambia County Sheriffs Department a document entitled "Asseveration [sic] of Invalid Lien/Levy" in which the debtor contended that the IRS tax lien/levy was invalid and that he was an inhabitant of the "Florida Republic". The debtor further threatened to sue Revenue Officer Powe in federal criminal court for her actions and did in fact file a lawsuit against her individually in federal district court, which was later withdrawn.
Notwithstanding the debtor's listing under penalty of perjury in his schedules and statement of affairs that he has no income, has no expenses, and owns no property, the evidence shows otherwise. Records from the State of Florida, Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles ("DHSMV") reflect three motor vehicles, a 1987 Mercury, 1989 GMC, and 1984 Honda titled in the debtor's name. Real property records from Escambia County, Florida reflect that the debtor and his wife purchased a home on December 16, 1993 from Ernest and Voncile Hicks and gave the Hicks, a mortgage in the amount of $60,000 encumbering the home. The testimony of Mrs. Hicks together with a closing statement from the sale, reflects a purchase price of $90,000 for the house with the debtor paying $30,369.43 down. Mrs. Hicks' testimony further established that the debtor makes regular payments on the mortgage and has in fact paid in advance on the mortgage. Typically, payments are made with third party checks made payable to the debtor and endorsed over to Mrs. Hicks. In February, 1995, the debtor paid $3,265.00 for the installation of central heating and air conditioning in the house. Additionally, the debtor has three children all of whom attend a private Christian school for which he and his wife pay approximately $4,800.00 per year in tuition and fees.
As a result, in 2002 the IRS won not only a judgement against Hovind but in fact
in fact Hovind's bogus lawsuits against the IRS were dismissed with prejudice.
At least one Hovind watchdog site (and there are quite a few, including this site) notes Hovind's extensive links with the "tax-protester" movement centered in "Christian patriot" groups. Formerly, the site had excerpts of one of the Pensacola News-Journal articles on Hovind, one which has been mirrored on Dark Christianity:
Soon thereafter, on February 20, 1990, the debtor prepared and had served on Revenue Officer Powe by the Escambia County Sheriffs Department a document entitled "Asseveration [sic] of Invalid Lien/Levy" in which the debtor contended that the IRS tax lien/levy was invalid and that he was an inhabitant of the "Florida Republic". The debtor further threatened to sue Revenue Officer Powe in federal criminal court for her actions and did in fact file a lawsuit against her individually in federal district court, which was later withdrawn.
. . .
In the face of all of the foregoing, the debtor apparently maintains that as a minister of God everything he owns belongs to God and he is not subject to paying taxes to the United States on the money he receives for doing God's work. While in his correspondence to the IRS he denies being a tax protester., the evidence overwhelmingly establishes otherwise. At the hearing on this motion, debtor's counsel represented to the court that the debtor was now ready to do everything which was required of him to comply with the Bankruptcy Code and the Internal Revenue Code including the filing of tax returns and payment to the trustee in accordance with the plan filed immediately prior to the hearing. However, the debtor himself never took the stand during the hearing to testify to that nor has he ever filed any amended schedules and statement of affairs to reflect his true financial status. Given this debtor's history and the documentary evidence presented, I cannot find that this debtor has any intention of complying with the Bankruptcy Code nor with the Internal Revenue Code.
Eventually, Hovind ended up suffering the same fate as most folks in the "Sovereign Citizen" movement using those bogus arguments--
arrest:
A Pensacola evangelist who owns the defunct Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola was arrested Thursday on 58 federal charges, including failing to pay $473,818 in employee-related taxes and making threats against investigators.
Of the 58 charges, 44 were filed against Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo, for evading bank reporting requirements as they withdrew $430,500 from AmSouth Bank between July 20, 2001, and Aug. 9, 2002.
At the couple's first court appearance Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis, Kent Hovind professed not to understand why he is being prosecuted. Some 20 supporters were in the courtroom.
"I still don't understand what I'm being charged for and who is charging me," he said.
Kent Hovind, who often calls himself "Dr. Dino," has been sparring with the IRS for at least 17 years on his claims that he is employed by God, receives no income, has no expenses and owns no property.
"The debtor apparently maintains that as a minister of God, everything he owns belongs to God and he is not subject to paying taxes to the United States on money he receives for doing God's work," U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Lewis Killian Jr. wrote when he dismissed a claim from Hovind in 1996.
. . .
In the indictment unsealed Thursday, a grand jury alleges that Kent Hovind failed to pay $473,818 in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes on employees at his Creation Science Evangelism/Ministry between March 31, 2001, and Jan. 31, 2004.
As part of the ministry, Hovind operated the Dinosaur Adventure Land at 5800 N. Palafox St., which included rides, a museum and a science center. He also sold literature, videos, CDs and other materials and provided lecture services and live debates for a fee.
The indictment alleges Kent Hovind paid his employees in cash and labeled them "missionaries" to avoid payroll tax and FICA requirements.
. . .
The indictment also says the Hovinds' made cash withdrawals from AmSouth Bank in a manner that evaded federal requirements for reporting cash transactions.
The withdrawals were for $9,500 or $9,600, just below the $10,000 starting point for reporting cash transactions.
Most of the withdrawals were days apart. For example, the indictment shows three withdrawals of $9,500 each on July 20, July 23 and July 26 in 2001.
The indictment also charges Kent Hovind with impeding an IRS investigation.
Among the ways he is accused of doing:
· Filing a frivolous lawsuit against the agency demanding damages for criminal trespass.
· Filing an injunction against an IRS special agent.
· Filing false complaints against the IRS for false arrest, excessive use of force and theft.
· Making threats against investigators and those cooperating with the investigation.
Frighteningly, it appears Hovind may have been keeping an arsenal at the church he runs:
Over Kent Hovind's protests, the judge took away his passport and guns Hovind claimed belonged to his church.
Hovind argued that he needs his passport to continue his evangelism work. He said "thousands and thousands" are waiting to hear him preach in South Africa next month.
But Davis agreed with Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Heldmyer, who argued that "like-minded people" might secret Hovind away if he left the country.
As for the guns, Davis said "ownership was not the issue."
In this case, actually, it seems that the judge was
very smart to seize Hovind's passport. As it turns out, a
"Third Wave" neopentecostal group based out of South Africa which explicitly promotes dominionism in that country may have been trying to sneak him out--and conveniently allowing him to avoid justice.
The info on having guns in the church is disturbing in light of some of the same "anti-abortion" groups linked to domestic terrorism and murder explicitly endorsing "tax protester" movements.
As the Pensacola News-Journal article notes, Hovind is still in trouble with state authorities as well as for promoting "sovereign citizen" schemes to avoid paying taxes:
Kent Hovind also has had run-ins with state authorities.
In April, Circuit Judge Michael Allen ordered the buildings at Dinosaur Adventure Land closed because Hovind failed to obtain a building permit during the 2002 construction. The outdoor theme park was allowed to stay open.
Members of Creation Science Evangelism said at the time that building permits violated their "deeply held" religious beliefs.
While the building permit case was tied up in a four-year court battle, ownership of the theme park was turned over to Glen Stoll, who works with Hovind on legal issues and is based in Washington.
Last year, the U.S. attorney in Seattle filed a lawsuit against Stoll, charging him with encouraging people to avoid tax payments by claiming to be religious entities, according to news reports.
If it were just a matter of Hovind having a small arsenal in his church and promoting militia "tax protester" arguments, that'd be one thing.
Unfortunately, Ken Hovind has explicitly promoted racism of the most virulent sort.
The Southern Poverty Law Center--which in part began investigation of dominionist groups because of the numerous links to racist organisations--details the extent of Hovind's promotion of racism:
Do you think the theory of evolution is a Satanic plot to bring about the New World Order? Are you worried that Darwin's idea produced "Communism, Socialism, Naziism, abortion, liberalism and the New Age Movement?" Then Dr. Kent Hovind is for you.
Hovind, who runs the Creation Science Evangelism ministry from Pensacola, Fla., says the whole Bible is literally true and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. While that may seem par for the creationist course, Hovind also sells anti-Semitic books like Fourth Reich of the Rich and has recommended The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book blaming the world's problems on a Jewish conspiracy.
Environmentalism and income taxes, Hovind says, are designed to destroy the United States and "bring it under Communism." "Democracy," he says, "is evil and contrary to God's law."
Every religion has fundamentalists bordering on extremism; Hovind is notable for his wide reception and for his promulgating of conspiracy theories favored by the antigovernment "Patriot" movement.
A recent Hovind speech at East Memorial Baptist Church, a relatively mainstream church in Prattville, Ala., drew 500 supporters. Hovind says he speaks each month at dozens of churches and even at public schools nationwide.
Yes, you're reading this right. He's explicitly promoting books that are used almost as a gospel by neo-Nazi groups.
For those unfamiliar with the history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it was a screed originally written by the Russian Empire during the reign of the last tsars and used to justify the progroms taking place against the Jewish population. The Wikipedia entry on the book has more info:
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a text published in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century that purports to describe a plan to achieve world domination by Jews.
Numerous independent investigations [1] have repeatedly proven it to be a hoax; most notably, a series of articles printed in The Times of London in 1921 revealed that much of the material in the Protocols was plagiarized from earlier political satire that did not have an anti-Semitic theme. Since the Protocols appeared, its earliest publishers have offered vague and often contradictory testimony detailing how they obtained their copy of the rumored original manuscript.[2] Nevertheless, some people continue to view the Protocols as evidence of a conspiracy, especially in parts of the world where anti-Semitism is widespread. It is also frequently quoted and reprinted by anti-Semites, and is sometimes used as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy, especially in the Middle East.[3]
The Protocols are widely considered to be the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature,[4] and take the form of an instruction manual to a new member of the "Elders," describing how they will run the world through control of the media and finance, and replace the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation.
The work was popularized by those opposed to revolution, and was disseminated further after the Russian Revolution of 1905, becoming known worldwide after the 1917 October Revolution. It was widely circulated in the West in 1920 and thereafter. The Great Depression was an important development in the history of the Protocols, and the text continued to be published and circulated despite its de-bunking as a plagiarism, fabrication, forgery, and hoax.
. . .
Recent research by Russian historian Mikhail Lepekhine traced the Protocols to Matvei Golovinski, agent provocateur of Okhranka, as part of a scheme to persuade Tsar Nicholas II that the modernization of Russia was really a Jewish plot to control the world. Lepekhine discovered Golovinski's authorship in Russia's long-closed archives and published his findings in November 1999 in the French newsweekly L'Express[10]. Golovinski had been linked to the work before; the German writer Konrad Heiden identified him as an author of the Protocols in 1944.[11] Golovinski worked together with Charles Joly (son of Maurice Joly) at Le Figaro in Paris and wrote articles at the direction of Pyotr Rachkovsky, Chief of the Russian secret service. During the Dreyfus affair in France, when polarization of European attitudes towards the Jews was at a maximum, the publication began private circulation as The Protocols in 1897.[12] After the 1917 revolution, Golovinski became a Bolshevik propagandist.
. . .
The Protocols also became a part of the Nazi propaganda effort to justify persecution of the Jews. It was made required reading for German students. In The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933-1945, Nora Levin states that "Hitler used the Protocols as a manual in his war to exterminate the Jews":
Despite conclusive proof that the Protocols were a gross forgery, they had sensational popularity and large sales in the 1920s and 1930s. They were translated into every language of Europe and sold widely in Arab lands, the United States, and England. But it was in Germany after World War I that they had their greatest success. There they were used to explain all of the disasters that had befallen the country: the defeat in the war, the hunger, the destructive inflation.[28]
Hitler refers to the Protocols in Mein Kampf:
... To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. [...] the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.[29]
. . .
The Protocols have had a tumultuous history in the United States ever since luminaries such as automobile mogul Henry Ford began publishing them under the title of The International Jew. The Protocols were republished as fact in 1991 in Milton William Cooper's conspiracy diatribe Behold a Pale Horse, though Cooper himself holds the Illuminati and not the Jews at fault.
To this day, the
Protocols are often quoted by racist groups--including Christian Identity groups in particular--as "proof" of a worldwide conspiracy by Jewish people.
The other book mentioned, Fourth Reich of the Rich, is in almost an identical vein--if even more accusatory--again claiming a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
Another, more recent, SPLC report gives info on other racist and "tax protester" screeds promoted by Hovind:
Opened in 2001, Dinosaur Adventure Land sprung from Hovind's Creation Science Evangelism ministry, which began to evolve in the late '80s. CSE sells videos and audiotapes of Hovind's lectures and his debates with evolutionary scientists, along with books on "Evolution and the New World Order." (At least one of them, Fourth Reich of the Rich, alleges a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.)
Hovind also points his followers to Citizens Rule Book, popular among antigovernment "Patriots"; Media Bypass, an antigovernment magazine with strong anti-Semitic leanings; and titles by America's leading authority on tax-dodging, Irwin Schiff, who was indicted on criminal tax evasion charges in March (see Taxing the First Amendment). Two years ago, Hovind's "fine Christian friend," Joseph Sweet of the Joy Foundation, ran into similar trouble, sued by the feds for allegedly teaching folks how to evade income taxes.
Hovind's also been the subject of DailyKos reports too--notably by
DarkSyde.