Thomas H. Naylor: "Obviously A Good Confederate"

I received a message last week regarding an unusual Naylor sighting.   It seems that the Second Vermont Republic's founder, Thomas H. Naylor had been booked for a segment (scroll to just past the mid-point of the program where his segment starts) on a well-known hate radio program called The Political Cesspool on Memphis' WLRM during TPC's month long "celebration" of Confederate History Month this past April.   The show's host, James Edwards, is a longtime racist, anti-Semetic, white supremacist, white separatist activist [1] [2] whose Confederate History Month broadcasts were sometimes also hosted by his friend and associate Winston Smith, reputed to be the well known white supremacist and former head of the neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist White People's Party, also known as Harold Covington.  Maybe, maybe not, but it wouldn't be surprising considering that Edwards' guest list reads like a Who's Who of America's anti-civil rights, anti-Semetic, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, white separatist, racist, umm, cesspool:

Michael Hill, the League of the South president

Thomas DiLorenzo, a Second Vermont Republic advisory board member, a League of the South member and instructor at the LoS Institute for the Study of Southern History and Culture, as well as an anti-civil rights, anti-union writer.  Here's a recent promotion of Edward's program at the notorious Stormfront.org hatesite featuring the SVR's DiLorenzo. NOTE: Stormfront often takes down these links after they discover that people they consider unsympathetic to their "cause" are using them, so don't be surprised if it's gone missing when you get there.

Gordon Baum, CEO of the Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known as the Whites Citizen's Council)

Steve McIntyre, a reenactor whose specialty is Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who founded the Ku Klux Klan and is reputed to have ordered the massacre of black POWs during the Civil War

Larry Pratt, an anti-Semitic, white supremacist, militia advocate

J. Stanley Lott, a slavery/Lincoln history revisionist

Sam Dickson, a former Ku Klux Klan lawyer and a Holocaust denier, Lincoln history revisionist and Council of Conservative Citizens member

Ted Pike, a Cesspool regular, anti-Semite and white supremacist (for a taste of his anti-Semetic bile, watch this or this)

A few of the other past "guests" on Edwards' show:

David Duke, who needs no introduction; read the praise that the people at his website give Edwards here

Mark Weber, a renown Holocaust denier

Jamie Kelso, a racist, anti-Semite, neo-Nazi kingpin at the notorious Stormfront.org website

Peter Gemma, a Council of Conservative Citizens member

Robert Barkdoll, a white supremacist and head of the Missouri League of the South chapter

Peter J. Peters, a Christian Identity leader, white supremacist and anti-Semite

... and many, many more of this bigoted, hateful ilk

For the first time in the Edwards interview Naylor admits to having commissioned his methodologically challenged poll of Vermonters on the subject of secession, conducted for him by UVM's Center for Rural Studies.  You can see for yourself Naylor's questionable, paid for, 2006 Vermonter Poll questions that he often refers to as a UVM poll in a third person manner that doesn't disclose his direct involvement or reveal UVM's contract-only relationship to his poll. [3] [4]  Naylor now says:

"A year ago we commissioned a statewide poll (to be conducted) by the University of Vermont to find out how many secessionists there were in Vermont."

According to his "poll," 47 people said they would support secession and from that he has extrapolated that tens of thousands of Vermonters directly support secession.  When you add to the equation his "thumb on the scale" questionable methodology and the margin for error, it's more likely that the true number of supporters could meet in a phone booth.

Naylor continued:

"We're always asked, "How many people support your cause?" and we didn't know.  The answer one year ago was 8% of the eligible voters supported secession.  One year later that number had jumped from 8% to 13%."

"Jumped?"  Let's not extrapolate too much there, Tom.  If you bothered to factor in the two polls margins for error, you haven't even filled that phone booth yet.  Your increase could be, in fact, a decrease.  Once again Naylor is keeping the actual poll questions for the 2007 poll to himself as he did with the 2006 poll.   He has to since he's no doubt employed the same type of cheesy polling questions as he did last year.

As if to underscore his complete detachment from the real political world in Vermont, Naylor states that his goal and strategy is,

"(T)o persuade the (Vermont) state legislature to convene a convention... convened to consider one issue, namely articles of secession."

He goes on to say that he envisions a 2/3 to 3/4 vote of the 180 or 200 members at that convention being needed in support of the articles of secession for them to be passed credibly. He believes that this can and will happen in Vermont and at the Legislature's behest.

Yeah, right.  And he's got his political ace, Peter Moss, working on that.

Later in the interview, Naylor repeats one of his regular talking points about the dissolution of the "Soviet empire" and the six satellite states shaking off their "shackles" and asserting their independence [5], which got Edwards all warm and fuzzy, saying, "What can happen in Europe can easily happen here."

What?  Don't any of these guys know that as soon as those six countries shook off those shackles they immediately joined NATO and European Union, a mega-state of nearly 500 million people?  I'm beginning to think that they're all missing a few stars and bars.

Now before the "let's not have any guilt by association" crowd gets all lathered up, I should point out that Naylor did not just participate in the broadcast.  He acknowledge knowing that his interview was a part of a series of interviews for Confederate History Month (see companion guest list above that was available to him at the time) and he later asked for contact information from Edwards so that he could keep in touch with these scum.  Moreover, Naylor has been pretty diligent about posting on his website his appearances, interviews and press.  Actually, he's been something of a media whore about it, and yet oddly this one didn't seem make into his media scrapbook.  Nor has Rob Williams at "Vermont Commons" been crowing about the interview on his blog, as he usually does whenever someone in the media mentions SVR. Why's that, Tom?  You too, Rob.  Why is it that I always have to dig up the dirt for Vermonters?  Why did you hide from this one?

Fortunately, Edwards & company ran out of time before Naylor could launch into another one of his self-described "fantasies" about Vermont seceding and then joining the Canadian Atlantic provinces to form a new country that he calls New Acadia. [6]

At the risk of transgressing Godwin's Rule, all this talk about Europe with a couple of white separatists whose programs are feature at a neo-Nazi website with a man who has a weak grasp of European history and some far fetch fantasies about redrawing the map of North America reminds me of another mid-20th century European who moved nonexistent armies around maps of his make believe empire while eastern European artillery pounded his bunker.

Edwards closes the program calling Naylor a "good confederate" and, while acknowledging a female guest from an earlier segment of the show, he admits that

"(A) lot of the times (sic) The Political Cesspool is like a prism... it's all male; it's all white."

Prism probably isn't what he meant but I'm sure he'd be the first to say that metaphorically speaking, he's not a bright light.  Nor can Thomas Naylor be called particulary bright for having done this interview.

Update (10/4): Two months after the Naylor visit to the nasty, racist Political Cesspool radio hate show, Kirkpatrick Sale, Middlebury Institute partner of Thomas H. Naylor, did a segment with the Cesspool host, James Edwards and his co-host Eddie "The Bombardier" Miller, on the July 2, 2007 Political Cesspool show.   You'll need to wade through a half hour of bigoted bile where Edwards and Miller first joke about napalming liberals and then move on to heap praise David Duke, calling him "(A) great friend of ours & a great man," along with saying toward the end of the program, "We are blessed to have a good friendship with the Duke people and Duke himself," as well as describing the "Duke-meister" as "(O)ne of our heroes; one of our good friends."   The reading of fan mail comes at the end of the show, like one listener's paean of sorts to their show's musical selections (always white), who signs himself as being from "OntariJew, the Zionist Republic of Canada," and who they thank profusely for his comments.   When Miller compares Bush to Hitler, Edwards chastises Miller to not disrepect "the German gentleman," and later Edwards goes onto critcize "the media, the establishment, Zionist press."   Yuck!

Sale does the usual fan dance employing all the familiar talking points: a poll "by university people" without ever mentioning the that the four questions were written and paid for by his friend Naylor (with possible input from himself); the ludicrous notion that the Vermont legislature will overwhelming vote to secede; that Vermonters, by some kind of referendum process not presently provided for under the state constitution will also vote overwelming for secession; an appeal to the UN for recognition (of whom Naylor has said, "It's hard to imagine a more impotent institution than the... UN"; etc., ad nauseum.

If you have the stomach for it, research for yourself as I have some of the sponsors and promotional spots on the program. It's an eye-opening look at the type of folks Sale and Naylor value contact with more than the Vermonters that have been purged from the SVR.