The morning news carries a story, the essence of which, is a sadly recurring piece of American life. A summer day camp in Philadelphia paid almost $2,000 so that its black and Latino children could go swimming one day a week at a privately-owned (white) pool club in the suburbs. After one visit, the children were met with a hostile reception by the pool's white patrons, the day camp's money was quickly refunded and the children told not to come back.

Incredibly, the pool club president told the Associated Press that the members of the club were not motivated by race when denying the children entrance after their camp had paid the requisite fee, but that "a lot of kids would change the complexion--and the atmosphere of the club."

Huntington Valley is an upper-middle class overwhelmingly white community with a total population of 20,917. Of those numbers, 158 are black, another 242 are Hispanic and 804 are Asian-American. There are many such residential enclaves in the United States of America. And they form the hard pit of reality inside the white nationalist phantasmagoria. At the end of my book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, you will read the words of one of the recurring characters: white people will "pay $300,000 for a $75,000 home, just so they can live with other white people."

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In November 2007, on the weekend after a $5 million one day "moneybomb" for Rep. Ron Paul's presidential bid, I covered a rally for the candidate in Philadelphia and met a student who had come to pass out fliers attacking him. "He's got truly radical views that are being mainstreamed at events like this," said Matt Sullivan, a liberal who was attending Temple University. A largely white crowd brushed him aside; his fliers, which reprinted racist statements about blacks that ran in an old Paul newsletter, were crumpled up.

Two months later, everyone who followed the race learned that Paul's connections to racists had been hidden in plain sight, in many more newsletters and in speaking engagements. In October 2008, Paul spoke at the 50th Anniversary of the John Birch Society.

All of this has been forgotten in the mainstream press, in which Paul is covered as a compelling political eccentric, but I thought of all it while reading Blood and Politics. At one point, Leonard Zeskind recreates a 1983 meeting of "tax protesters" and "Identity Christians" in Kansas who pass around a flier that can inform their neighbors of why their farms are worth ever less and less. It excoriates "Jewish bankers" and names "the real owners" of the Federal Reserve, including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs.

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When I was just beginning to do the research and writing on this subject matter, in 1981, reporter Dean Calbreath wrote an article for the Columbia Journalism Review describing how he and other reporters had inadvertently become the dupes of white supremacists who regularly and purposefully lied to the press. The moral of that story was simple to me: if you don't trust your source, don't believe anything that you can not independently confirm. During that same period of time, Nashville Tennessean reporter Jerry Thompson infiltrated the Klan and uncovered some startling new information that otherwise would never have come to light. Those messages were not lost on me while writing Blood and Politics: find out as much as you can either first hand or from completely reliable sources.

Several events took place which enabled me to do just that, and write a better book in the process.

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In my book The Accidental American, I write about the immigration debate, which has been so influenced by nativists that we've been unable to pass a fair national policy, much less a modern one that takes globalization and cultural change into full account. Despite endless data about the many benefits immigrants bring, Americans who know better cannot get past their image of brown-skinned immigrants being evil.

My friend Leeann Hall told me this story a couple of years ago. LeeAnn is the director of a federation of community organizations in the largely white northwestern states. In 2006, her responsibilities included reaching put to their members in Weippe, Idaho (population 383) to get their support for comprehensive immigration reform. She arrived to find the townspeople full of the day's big news; after months of searching, federal officials had caught the white supremacist who had been shooting up the local lumber mill. It was widely believed that the terrorist had been living on the white supremacist "Almost Heaven" compound where Colonel Bo Gritz teaches paramilitary and survivalist skills.

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Due to some scheduling changes, Rep. Henry Waxman and Josh Green will not be joining us this week for a Book Club discussion of The Waxman Report. They will be at TPMCafe later this summer instead!

In the meantime, we're extending the great discussion of Leonard Zeskind's Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream into this week. Given recent incidents of violence that have shaped the national debate, this discussion is particularly relevant, and well-served by a panel of experts. Joining Leonard in the discussion are Rinku Sen, President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center and Publisher of ColorLines magazine; David Weigel, an associate editor of Reason magazine and Reason.com and contributor for The Washington Independent; Michelle Goldberg, journalist and author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism; James Ridgeway, Senior Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones and author of Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture; and Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights and Center for New Community.

Catch up on the discussion here - be sure to read the comments, as Leonard and others have actively participated in certain threads - and keep an eye out for new posts today from the participants.