April 14, 2014; Washington Post

This morning, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes and racist activities, revealed that it had identified the alleged shooter in yesterday’s assaults on a Jewish Community Center and a Jewish retirement community in Kansas as a former “grand dragon” of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Frazier Glenn Cross is actually Frazier Glenn Miller; he was once sued by the SPLC “for operating an illegal paramilitary organization and using intimidation tactics against African Americans.

Miller has run for the U.S. Senate (2010) and the House (2006) using ads that reportedly urged whites to “take the country back” from Jews and “mud people.”

A post by Heidi Beirich on SPLC’s site reveals that Miller is one of many hatemongers active on the internet. “Miller is a raging anti-Semite who has posted more than 12,000 times on Vanguard News Network (VNN), whose slogan is ‘No Jews, Just Right.’ VNN founder Alex Linder has openly advocated “exterminating” Jews since December 2009. Miller, a close partner to Linder, has called Jews ‘swarthy, hairy, bow-legged, beady-eyed, parasitic midgets.’” Miller, one of VNN’s largest donors, also printed and distributed thousands of copies of VNN’s newsletter, the Aryan Alternative.

And in case you want to take solace in the “one crazy perpetrator” argument, she also writes that “a forthcoming SPLC study will show that nearly 100 people in the last five years have been murdered by active users on another prominent racist website, Stormfront.org.”

In this moment of renewed grief, NPQ wants to take a moment to remind its readers of the enormous role the SPLC has played over the years in publicly monitoring and surfacing all manner of hate crimes and activities. —Ruth McCambridge