Vegas: White-Power Politics in Nevada

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
Newsweek