White-Power Politics in Nevada

[Jahness]

White-Power Politics in Nevada

[Newsweek]

Vegas: White-Power Politics

Aug. 22, 2005 issue - Do white supremacists have a real chance of
running
a slate of candidates across Nevada next year? Their new White Peoples
Party, a subset of the National Vanguard (formerly National Alliance),
a
racist and anti-Semitic organization whose lineage can be traced to the
American Nazi Party in the '30s, needs just 7,914 signatures by August
2006 to qualify for ballot access. That would make it the nation's only
party with an explicitly racist platform, according to the
Anti-Defamation League.

Getting that many signatures should be "almost effortless," says party
founder Michael O'Sullivan, 41, a Las Vegas real-estate broker. "Many
minorities agree with us," he tells NEWSWEEK. "They don't want their
race
mixed with ours." O'Sullivan wouldn't give the number of members in his
group, but ADL Nevada director Cynthia Luria says his ranks are growing
amid a resurgence of racism in the Southwest. She fears that people
will
sign O'Sullivan's ballot petition thinking they're opposing illegal
immigration—the National Vanguard has posted an
anti-illegal-immigration
billboard over a highway advertising a phone line on which the group
calls for a "proud white America"—and not be aware of the rest of the
platform. "There are people who have legitimate concerns about those
issues," she says. "These aren't those people."
—Steve Friess