Hal Turner, FBI Informant

[Warning – this post contains some offensive language. — UI]

Hal Turner is a rightwing radio host known for his extremist, far right views. He has a small, hard-core following among white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Hal Turner was named one the “40 To Watch” by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2003:

Just when some thought that the modern white supremacist movement had adopted the calmer language of scientific racism, along came Hal Turner. A belligerent, foul-mouthed talk show host, Turner is the maestro of radio hate — a man who rants about a “Portable Nigger Lyncher” machine, “faggots,” “savage Negro beasts,” “bull-dyke lesbians” and “lazy-ass Latinos … slithering across the border.” And that is just the beginning.

[…]

Turner got involved in politics as well, serving as a Republican committeeman in Hudson County, the North Jersey coordinator for white nationalist Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign, and manager of the 1997 gubernatorial campaign of Libertarian Murray Sabrin.

As early as 1994, he was defending racism, holding a rally for New York radio talk show host Bob Grant, who had been fired from his show for making racist comments about blacks. In the late 1990s, Turner often called in to local radio shows as “Hal from North Bergen,” telling their hosts things like, “The problem with police brutality is that cops don’t use it enough.”

In 2000, Turner sought the local Republican nomination for Congress, and was enraged when GOP leaders instead supported Theresa de Leon, a dark-skinned Hispanic who was the chief financial officer for New York’s Legal Aid Society and the mother of 10 children. It was at this moment that Turner had a reported “epiphany,” deciding the system was rigged against white men and abandoning all ties to the mainstream.

Hal Turner has links to “mainstream” conservatives like Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan. Turner often called into Sean Hannity’s radio show and he worked on Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign. Hal Turner not only caught the eye of anti-racism groups but apparently also Bush’s FBI. Turner was recruited as an informant in 2003 and apparently provided information until he got into trouble for threatening judges in 2008.

They called him “Valhalla.”

But it was more than a nickname.

For more than five years, Hal Turner of North Bergen lived a double life.

The public knew him as an ultra-right-wing radio talk show host and Internet blogger with an audience of neo-Nazis and white supremacists attracted to his scorched-earth racism and bare-knuckles bashing of public figures. But to the FBI, and its expanding domestic counter-terror intelligence operations in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Turner was “Valhalla” — his code name as an informant who spied on his own controversial followers.

Turner’s clandestine past was confirmed this past summer when he was jailed on charges that he made threats on his blog against three federal judges in Chicago. In court after his arrest, federal prosecutors acknowledged Turner’s FBI ties but downplayed his importance and even described him as “unproductive.”

Remember when the rightwing freaked out because the Obama Homeland Security Department released a report (commissioned under Bush) warning of rightwing domestic terrorism? I wonder how much of the information in the report came from Hal Turner?