Monday, January 14, 2008

A Suggestion For Thomas Naylor and His League of the South Visitors For Tomorrow Afternoon

Thomas N. Naylor, founder of the now discredited Vermont based secessionist group, Second Vermont Republic, and his partner at the Middlebury Institute, Kirkpatrick Sale, are continuing their effort to convince the outside world that there is a broad secession movement in the United States.   Just as they put together a "2nd Secessionist Convention" held in Chattanooga, TN on Oct. 3 & 4, 2007 that just happened to piggy-back with the annual League of the South convention, also to be held in Chattanooga on Oct. 6 & 7, they've scheduled a Vermont Independence Day Banquet in "conjunction" with their North-South Secession Summit dinner.

An examination of who attended their convention in October shows that the bulk and real base of the "secession movement" continues to be almost exclusively the neo-Confederate white nationalist/separatist/supremacist movement, nearly all of whom are present and former League of the South (LoS) members.   Here's a glimpse into the makeup and the minds of the secessionists who attended Naylor and Sale's effort to create the impression that there's a large, growing secession movement.   Barely 15-20 people at the table, with a few observers and press scattered about the room, and yet Naylor would have us believe that the body of the group represented a great national cross section of secessionists that he refers to as some sort of new Red State-Blue State hogwash, er, paradigm "committed to the peaceful breakup of the Empire."   Nor do tomorrow night's banquet and dinner represent the first time that the MSM has missed the connection between Sale and the LoS.   Here are delegates from the Chattanooga convention:
Cory Burnell - virulently homophobic head of Christian Exodus and former northeast Texas LoS regional director
• Eugene C. Case - LoS Director - MS
• Dexter O. Clark - Vice Chr, Alaska Independence Party
• Lynette Clark - Chr, Alaska Independence Party
Michael Hill - President of LoS - AL
Walter D. Kennedy - an LoS founder and a co-author of The South Was Right! and Myths of American Slavery - considered a presidential run for the Southern Party in 2000 - in 2008 set up a presidential exploratory committee for a run in the GOP primaries - GA
• Larry S. Kilgore - TX Secession and former colleague of Cory Burnell at TX LoS - Also, a fundamentalist Christian candidate in the March 2008 Republican Texas Senate Primary whose platform includes "Texas seceding from the United States to become a sovereign Christian Nation and the implementation of Biblical Law."
• Thomas R. McBerry, Jr. - LoS Director and GA gubernatorial candidate, who also runs DixieBroadcasting, an online radio hosting service that carries, among other hard line neo-Confederate programming, the racist and anti-Semitic James Edwards' Political Cesspool - GA
• Thomas Moore - Chr, Southern National Congress and author of The Hunt For Confederate Gold - LoS - VA
• Thomas N. Naylor - SVR, now of VT but for much of his life VA, MS and a longtime friend of the LoS
• Robert Pritchett - unk
• Kirkpatrick Sale - Middlebury Institute - NY
Franklin Sanders - ex-con - LoS Director - TN
• Mark A. Thomey - LoS Director & Chr, LALoS - LA
• "General" David Towery - Chief of Staff/Chief of Security, Confederate Legion - TN
• Michael C. Tuggle - Chair, NCLoS & LoS Director
It's important to note that there were almost no "delegates" not directly associated with the Middlebury Institute (Naylor & Sale) or the League of the South, except for an Alaskan husband and wife who had their travel expenses paid by the Middlebury Institute and the LoS.   This is not the first time that Naylor and Sale have paid the way of people to a convention so that there'd be someone (anyone!) there that wasn't a dyed in the wool, fire-breathing neo-Confederate from the white supremacist League of the South.   As a matter of fact, Naylor and Sale used the same method of paying for window dressing at their last convention in Burlington and, you guessed it, the Alaskan couple were there.   This type of strategy, designed to give the impression of broader support for secession and their events than actually exists, is what leads Naylor to pull such cheap tricks like his bait & switch banquet designed to fool Vermonters into having dinner with his League of the South friends at the Capitol Plaza Hotel tomorrow night.

Given the number of readers of my post below who are now aware of Naylor's seedy scheme to trick Vermonters into dining with his neo-Confederate friends, you'd think that he'd at least have been a little more forthcoming by now but, nope, not a chance.   The calendar notices and advertising for his event, that he'll more likely use later as publicity misinformation, have been few indeed.   Not even his sister organization, VTCommons, has publicized it.   Here's the calendar submission for his event that he has in this past week's SevenDays that once again has not a word about the North-South Secession Summit dinner that he's holding for his LoS friends in conjunction with his Vermont Independence Day Banquet in the same room:
VERMONT INDEPENDENCE DAY BANQUET
Would-be secessionists hobnob with environmental and anti-sprawl activists at a celebration of Green Mountain State self-reliance. Keynote speakers include Middlebury Institute Director Kirkpatrick Sale and Stephen Morris, author of The New Village Green. Capitol Plaza Hotel, Montpelier, reception 6 p.m., buffet dinner 7 p.m., speakers 8 p.m. $35. Reservations and info, 425-4133.
Maybe he's hoping to dupe unsuspecting Vermont legislators who stay at the banquet hotel, the Capitol Plaza, when the legislature is in session as it is this week.

That said, maybe there'll be time before the dinner for Naylor to take his Southern guests across the street to Vermont State House Hall of Inscriptions to see the large bust of Abraham Lincoln carved by Larkin Goldsmith Mead, who also carved the original statue that first topped the State House dome.   There probably won't enough time for them to hear about Vermont's many efforts, contributions and sacrifices to thwart the secessionists of 1861 that originated from that building during the Civil War but certainly, if they take a moment to ask today's Vermont legislators or visitors to the VT State House, they'll learn how proud Vermonters are of their ancestors contributions and sacrifices to end the Southern slave economy and preserve the Union.

Certainly they won't want to go back home having missed the large wall-sized painting in the Cedar Creek Room on the second floor of the State House commemorating the Civil War Battle of Cedar Creek where the Vermont Brigade delivered a crushing defeat to the Confederacy, ending any further rebel threat to Washington, D.C.   It'd give them something meaningful to discuss at their dinner that, unfortunately for them, won't take their minds far from their unbroken record of failure in the cause of secession.

So long as Naylor and Sale make hobnobbing with racists a tine of the trident in their weapon metaphor for the "new" so-called non-violent secession movement, they're doomed to continue this long record of failure.

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