More on James Edwards (Thomas Naylor's Hate Radio Friend) & Others

As first reported here at the beginning of this month, Thomas Naylor was on Janes Edwards' The Political Cesspool for its Confederate History Month series of broadcasts. Naylor stressed his Mississippi roots and made arrangements to stay in contact with Edwards in the future. Edwards was so impressed with Naylor that he felt moved to observed that Naylor was "obviously a good Confederate." Who could disagree with that?

Since that post there have been a series of virulent comments here that underscore the fact that even among today's new, cleaned up version of the neo-Confederate movement that now calls itself a movement for "peaceable secession," old habits, like menacing threats directed to critics, die hard.

This week my copy of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Fall Intelligence Report arrived in the mail and who should a focus for the issue be but none other than Thomas Naylor's new friend, James Edwards. The report on Edwards makes clear that while Edwards is a great admirer of David Duke, he's been careful to avoid making Duke's earlier mistakes, much like the Naylor/Sale axis has sought to avoid the earlier mistakes of often overtly racist neo-Confederates. I've listened to a number of his broadcasts now and find that even the "new" racists and anti-Semites just can't help themselves. This sidebar to the article on Edwards gives you a small sense of what he's really like. Here's one example:

On the Jews (Feb. 20, 2007):
"A lot of their motivation is that they hate Christianity. They hate what we call the WASP establishment … and they're using pornography as a subversive tool against us. Jews are by and large dominant in the porn industry. I don't need to spend time convincing people the sky is blue. You know, connect the dots and look at the names of people controlling our media, and you find out what the common denominator is. … These Zionist Jews are more interested in subverting the dominant culture, which would be the European culture here in America, than they are in helping us and assimilating into our culture."

While the SPLC piece points out that Edwards has gone to great lengths to avoid situations where he might be seen and photographed where disturbing symbols might be found, as happened to his friend and hero David Duke, here's one unusual case that I found over at this blog where he can be seen at a demonstration (at left) with a Confederate flag:

Edwards even received considerable mention in the Intelligence Report's editorial on the mainstreaming and legitimization of extremism in America. The Intelligence Report also has an interesting piece on one neo-Confederate hate group having a dustup over "political extremism correctness," to coin a new phrase.

An example of the "new look" efforts that the neo-Confederates and their friends are pursuing is the growing problem of secessionists who have been actively engaged in "cleaning up" the articles on their own groups and associates by deleting unfavorable material or altering critical text. Apparently some of this is even being done for pay. This, however, is an exercise that is doomed to fail.

One prominent player in this unethical practice has been Carol Moore, a secession advocate and blogger at "Vermont Commons." [1] In her VTCommons blog post, Carol mentions that my blog "evidently is really anti-secession." Not so fast there, Carol. Early on I was very much in the undecided camp. I really hadn't formed a solid opinion when I started out, but the clear connections to racists, anti-Semites, historical revisionists and unethical activists is something I choose not to ignore.

All the chaff that Carol throws up in her blog piece never adequately addresses the concern that many here have that if secession in Vermont leads to secession elsewhere, as Naylor and his neo-Confederate allies intend, will we not have had a hand in bad things happening to people elsewhere? Maybe that's an end result that a Carol Moore or a George Bush can be comfortable with, but I can not. In a clear example of her situational ethics, Carol has ignored Wikipedia guidelines in her attempts to "sweeten up" the secessionist articles. [2] [3] [4] [5]

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, says the site discourages such “conflict of interest” editing. “We don’t make it an absolute rule,” he said, “but it’s definitely a guideline.” [6]

An example of the Carol Moore's whitewashing efforts on behalf of one white supremacist, secessionist organization, the League of the South, is this one on behalf of its racist head, Michael Hill. On October 7, 2007, she replaced this:

The issue of race has become a source of controversy and dispute within the LoS, and in groups like Second Vermont Republic which has members loosely affiliated with it. LoS President Michael Hill has argued for the centrality of Christian white men in the movement: "But let us never deny (for the sake of pleasing the implacable Cultural Marxists) that we, the descendants of white, European Christians, are central to a movement to preserve and advance a particular civilization, cultural inheritance, and physical place."[12] Hill has also advocated the ideology of kinism, and would outlaw racial intermarriage and non-white immigration, expel all “aliens” (including Jews and Arabs), and limit the right to vote to landowning males over the age of twenty-one.[13]

With this, that in addition to replacing racist statements by Hill with his statements about the SPLC, deletes and obscures any connection in these issues with the Second Vermont Republic:

The issue of race has become a source of controversy about, and dispute within, the League of the South. In articles on its web page Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) accuses the League, and especially its President Michael Hill, of holding racist beliefs and making racist statements.[12]After SPLC issued a year 2000 report labeling LoS a "racist hate group," Hill "welcomed the designation as a 'badge of honor'," alleging SPLC has "a very leftist agenda, these sorts of things are designed to discredit you publicly."[13]

Carol has even edited the Wikipedia article about herself more than a dozen times. [7]

Over at Green Mountain Daily, Julie Waters has an interesting post that relates to what the Naylors, the Edwards, the Moores, the Sales, the Bushes, the Cheneys, et al, try to accomplish in their efforts to mainstream what is clearly offensive - having us get so accustomed to having them around that we start to not notice some of their crummier aspects any longer. Julie Waters piece underscores for me why we must remember to not ignore the potential impacts of our actions to others far from here or to get used to bad people who do bad things. These are concerns that Naylor would pooh-pooh away with his "different strokes for different strokes" rationale that really is cover for white supremacists, anti-Semites and other hate groups, and are not the issues that he would wish us to believe that he ostensibly refers to in his writings.

What Carol Moore, James Edwards, George Bush, Thomas Naylor, Dick Cheney, Kirkpatrick Sale, the few remaining Second Vermont Republic deadenders, white supremacists, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and the like seem to forget is that, as Shakespeare said, "in the end the truth will out."

Update (10/29): Oh, my! Carol Moore's got her sweats in a knot! You can read her admissions and menacing, overwrought retort here.