The Paranoid Persuasion
With its November-28 cover story, “My Life as a White Supremacist,” Newsweek has published what amounts to an extended press release from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Featuring a flaming cross on the cover and pictures of brown-clad stormtroopers from the National Socialist Movement on the inside, one expects to read a suspenseful tale of intrigue and deception in the heart of America's vast Neo-Nazi underground—a kind of Turner Diaries in which The System is triumphant. What actually emerges is a story of government incompetence, the usual self-interested hyperventilating about a non-existent revolutionary movement, and the deluded actions of a sad old paleo-American, who sacrificed his life for people who hate him.
The story profiles one John Matthews, a Vietnam veteran and “ardent anticommunist” who had “long run in extremist circles.” Matthews, inspired by John Wayne, fought for his country in Vietnam. He returned to the United States, found that the nation “showed no respect for what he sacrificed,” and learned his comrades were contracting chronic health conditions from exposure to Agent Orange. Matthews become a part of the militia network around one Tom Posey, whom Oliver North and the Reagan Administration used to supply the Nicaraguan contras with weapons. Once he outlived his usefulness, however, Posey was prosecuted by the government. (Oliver North went on to Fox News.) Though he was eventually cleared, an embittered Posey allegedly began talking about stealing weapons and blowing up a nuclear plant to start a revolution. Matthews went straight to the FBI, who recruited him as an informant. He would stay an informant for the next 10 years.
The author of the piece, R.M. Schneiderman, then takes us on a rather boring adventure, as Matthews meets with various self-important militia leaders who talk about elaborate schemes . . . but don’t seem to do very much. Hilariously, Schneiderman notes Matthews’s handler was a Black named Donald Jarrett, who “wore nice suits and kept his hair closely cropped” (as if he’s assuring us that he wasn’t wearing dreadlocks and a hoodie.) Given that the DEA is looking for ebonics translators, I suppose we should be grateful for that. Without much of a story, Schneiderman resorts to a grab bag of various media clichés about the “far right” and simply mixes them all together. Matthews sat in church pews “with would-be abortion-clinic bombers” (no elaboration). A supposed Vietnam vet shows up to a meeting wearing a green bomber jacket, which, we are solemnly informed, “was popular among skinheads at the time.” The story picks up when this man talks about robbing armored cars . . . but unfortunately it turns out that he, too, is FBI agent. For a report about 10 years in the Nazi underground, there’s not much of an underground and seemingly no Nazis.
There is, however, some semblance of the American Right, and there’s always good money for a reporter who can pathologize it. Schneiderman sneers, “Posey went on about the New World Order, which to extremists like him meant the threat of global takeover by an assortment of international organizations including banks, the United Nations, and other elite institutions.” One sighs with relief that such a view has no basis in truth and is only held by “extremists.” Even so, if only Posey had dressed in all black, instead of camo, and taken a shit on a police car, he could have been recognized as a proto-Occupy protester and be getting an adoring interview on Democracy Now as we speak.
The $PLC Racket
Wayne Lutton of the The Social Contract journal joins Richard to discuss the Southern Poverty Law Center and their business model of slander and shakedowns.
The Social Contract's special report on the SPLC can be read here.
Appetite for Destruction
If anyone doubted that the “anti-discrimination” racket is more motivated by a desire to crush their opponents' bones into dust than philanthropy toward the dispossessed, he need look no further than a two-year campaign to deprive a woman of her livelihood—which happens to involve helping minority children.
Cuban-born sugar billionaire Pepe Fanjul and his wife, Emilia, operate The Glades Academy, “a Florida charter school that aims to help poor black and Latino children.” In 2008, the Southern Poverty Law Center broke the word that the Fanjuls employ Chloe Black as Mr. Fanjul's executive assistant at Florida Crystals and Mrs. Fanjul's spokeswoman promoting the school.
They added that Chloe Black is the wife of Don Black, the proprietor of Stormfront.org, the web's first major website dedicated to white nationalism. He and their son Derek host a racially focused daily radio show on WPBR-1340 AM in Palm Beach County.
Who's Afraid of Russia Today?
The Southern Poverty Law Center is going after Russia Today for providing a forum for “extremists” and encouraging “the burgeoning Patriot movement.” Over the past five years, RT had become a welcome alternative news source for many. In fact, this anti-RT campaign was launched around the same time as that television channel made it to Youtube’s Top 100, while the ratings of several American news networks had plunged.
And the SPLC is not the only one. The Independent described how
Even before the recent spy scandal about Russian "illegals" in the United States, western intelligence services have been wary about Russia Today's correspondents. One journalist, posted by the Russian channel to a western capital, recalls that she was called to a meeting in a local café by the country's interior ministry before being given her accreditation.
"This guy showed up, and he had a dossier with loads of information about me and my past," says the journalist, who does not want her name revealed. "It was pretty obvious he was working in intelligence, and eventually he came out and asked, 'Is Russia Today a front for a spy network?' I thought it was hilarious, but he was serious."
Both parties seem to have grossly underestimated the viewers’ intellectual capacity. After all, those who watch international channels, particularly via Youtube, are already politically curious and web-savvy enough to gather a variety of conflicting information in order to make sense of it all.
Such viewers are certainly aware of the fact that every news source should be taken with a grain of salt. They know that certain underground blogs offer worthwhile analysis, but are rarely there when “the news breaks.” Large networks like BBC are decent in the area of concise reporting from around the world, but normally adhere to the politically correct “party line.” Al Jazeera offers a very different perspective on recent American wars, but leaves much to be desired when it comes to immigration-related issues in Europe. Russia Today provides great coverage of a variety of subjects – from economics to multiculturalism, but don’t look for the “ins and outs” of Russia’s own politics on that channel. Even local newspapers demonstrate which crucial subjects don’t make it to national-level media and offer clues as to the reasons why.
Broadcasting motivations are not difficult to gauge by following the money trail and critically evaluating the content. RT’s pursuit of pro-Russian agenda is not much different than BBC being a publicly funded entity. Furthermore, the idea that private ownership of massive media conglomerates somehow guarantees objectivity is simply utopian -- to state the painfully obvious.
Speaking of which, if CNN weren’t so eager to tell us what fashion experts thought of yet another couture dress worn by Michelle Obama and actually reported the news, for a change, maybe then RT would have less of a niche to fill.
Why We'd Fear Black Militias
They’ve found a new double standard.
Imagine that the inauguration of President George W. Bush had sparked an explosive rise in African American militia groups. Suppose thousands of heavily armed black men began gathering at training camps in wooded areas throughout the country, devising military tactics for "taking back their country" after what they believed was an electoral coup.
Do you think Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would have reacted to a black militaristic buildup as coolly as President Obama has to the phenomenal growth of white militias?
Since Obama took office last year, the number of white militias has shot up from about 170 to more than 500, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups in the United States. Armed with enough firepower to take on a police department, some of these groups are honing their sniper skills using photographs of Obama for target practice.
They cling to the delusion that the nation's first black president is somehow a subversive working for Muslim extremists, and they aim to bring him down.
"If the people we saw running around armed to the teeth were black, I think their organizations would be destroyed in a matter of hours," Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, told me. "If people saw on their TV screens photos of black militia members shooting at images of a white president, I don't think they would last."
First of all there are black armed organizations called street gangs and they’re killing more people this hour than any white organization will in the next ten years. We don’t see them training in the woods because that requires too much planning and coordination.
But the point may be that street gangs aren’t generally political and as far as that goes there is a double standard on the militia issue. There are a few legitimate reasons for this. The first is that whites have a history of responsible firearms use. There are rural parts of America where young children are given guns to take care of. If they tried that in the inner cities they’d need dump trucks to clear the bodies each weekend. We have a prudent fear of black men with guns that no amount of political correctness will ever beat out of us.
The second thing we have to consider is what kind of ideology a black militia would have. Presumably it would be socialist and for forced integration. In contrast to whites with their guns who want to be left alone, looting and aggression would be the raison d'être of any black armed force which thought the Republicans were white supremacists holding them down. We’d fear them more than any group with a libertarian ideology and rightfully so.
First They Came For Ann Coulter
Whatever you want to say about Ann Coulter, I like her -- partly because she's funny but mostly because I've always sensed that she's more "one of us" than just about any other mainstream political commentator out there besides Pat Buchanan. I guess I agree with her campus detractors in that way.
Well, Ann was invited by some students at the University of Ottawa to speak on their campus and, as reported by Canada.com, before she embarked on her journey to the Great North, she received an email from the University vice-president and provost, Francois Houle, "warning her that freedom of speech is defined differently in Canada than in the U.S. and that she should take care not to step over the line." When she arrived, Leftist protestors made sure she never got the opportunity to violate any speech codes by protesting wildly and getting her appearance cancelled by the campus police.
The Big Lie of the "Hate Crime"
David Frum's Satanic Girliemen
FrumForum's latest attack on me and AlternativeRight, "Richard Spencer's Nordic Supermen," is notable in that its author, Alex Knepper, has moved beyond the ho-hum "guilt by association" accusations we've come to expect from such people. Earlier he had attempted "guilt by dramatization" and now has tried the exceedingly difficult "guilt by the recounting of an anecdote that reminds the author of the person he's trying to smear." Bold! Knepper's article makes SPLC tactics seem tame and boring in comparison.
The young Alex speaks of his fascination with the esoteric and the fringe, and tells a tale about how he attended a Nordic Pride festival (where, we're not told) and met some Odinists. These rough-and-tumble folks, who wore Thor's Hammers, discussed kith, kin, and bloodlines, and talked about rearing warriors, clearly offended Alex's delicate sensibilities. Alex hints that they're anti-Semitic, but the portrait he paints doesn't lead me to believe that these people have done anything wrong. Our world is full of groups that desire a sense of roots and "Us-ness" -- for proof, Alex might try to join the National Council of La Raza.
I don't have any problem with Pagans, but these people are supposed to be my Nordic Supermen? Really? For nowhere in the article does Alex claim that, say, I was there, that I'm a member of their group, that I even know any of these people, etc. etc. etc.
For further evidence (as if it were needed) of my Nordic supremacy, Alex cites the title of an AltRight article ... by Robert Weissberg, the good-natured, Manhattan-dwelling cosmopolitan who, I'm afraid, is about as far from "Odinic" as you can get.
AltRight and Its Enemies
It's certainly no fun to work so hard building a beautiful website and assembling a top-shelf group of contributors and then be ignored. So I'm glad that AltRight has ruffled enough feathers for the neocons and anti-racist Left (two groups that curiously seem to agree on quite a bit!) to take note. Peter Brimelow and I, and a couple of others, have already given interviews to a representative of FrumForum.com, and I doubt this was merely a fact-finding mission. Expect an article on us in David Frum's website in the near future. Yes, it's likely that this will be a hit piece, and the interviewer often tried to talk me into an Aren't-You-All-Just-A-Bunch-Of-Evil-Racists? corner. But I generally liked the guy, so I'll remain optimistic that the portrayal of us is fair.
Peter Brimelow discusses this issue on the VDARE blog:
I gave two phone interviews today, one to American Prospect’s Jessica Weisberg, who seems to be working on another version of the John-Tanton-is-the root-of all-evil meme, and FrumForum’s Tim Mak about Richard Spencer’s Alternative Right. (AltRight seems to be upsetting the political hegemonists. Here’s another attack, ludicrously blaming AltRight on me.)
Long experience has taught me to have no particular hope of accuracy or even elementary fairness in articles resulting from this sort of interview. But it struck me that they both ended on the same note. Ms. Weisberg asked me what were Tanton’s “real”motives. (Answer: he’s really interested in TREES, dammit! MORE PEOPLE MEAN FEWER TREES! How much clearer can he make it?) Mak asked me, rather nervously, didn’t I think that covering human biodiversity would lead to accusations of racism. (Answer:everything leads to accusations of racism–deal with it.)
Hate Watch
Having just read the Hate Watch bulletin of the SPLC about the cancellation of the American Renaissance conference, scheduled for February 15, I came away with heightened contempt for the "conservative movement." I don't blame the two DC hotels that refused to host the conference for the recent fiasco, or even the Four Point Sheraton at Manassas, which backed out at the last moment. These establishments were properly concerned that those whom Hate Watch describes as "antiracist activists" would vandalize their property and rough up the guests. In today's Western world, and particularly in such decayed former nations as Germany and Spain, the antifascist Left is free to do what it wants, and this often includes going on the rampage against uncooperative reactionaries or stubbornly bourgeois Christians. What is now happening to us is a belated replication of the European "liberal democratic" scene.
Of course, I don't expect the Left to be standing up for someone's right to detail the violent crimes of ethnic minorities. Not that the Left is really against racism. Indeed, it never complains about professors at elite universities who make careers out of trashing whites and in particular white males.
