Thomas Naylor Calls the Racist, anti-Semitic George F. Kennan, the "Godfather" of Naylor's Vermont Secessionist Movement

Just when I thought the baas of the Second Vermont Republic, the Dixie singin' Thomas H. Naylor couldn't get any weirder, he goes straight into the batshit crazy corner and pens a big, sloppy wet kiss to a bona fide racist, misogynist and anti-Semite - George F. Kennan.

You see, during the past decade Naylor exchanged some correspondence with an obviously ill, doddering nonagenarian. You can read Naylor's tired attempt at attaching celebrity to his barely hanging on secessionist movement here. What I found so interesting is that Naylor used a recently published biography of Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press, 2011). Oddly, Naylor calls Kennan "the former dean of the American diplomatic corps" when it is well known that Kennan had been ostracized by his fellow white aristocrats for having extremist white supremacist views too distasteful even for those good old, rich and connected white boys.

Naylor quotes extensively from Gaddis' book in support of his contention that an apparently bed-ridden Kennan had embraced Naylor's lost cause.

What Naylor left out was that Gaddis extensively covered Kennan's odious bigotry. Figures.

In 1935, Kennan wrote to his sister:

“I hate democracy; I hate the press. . . . I hate the ‘peepul’; I have become clearly un-American.” In the draft of an unfinished book, begun in the nineteen-thirties, he advocated restricting the vote to white males, and other measures designed to create government by an élite.
Source and also this source

And...

"...(Kennan) wrote in 1932. “We have only a group of more or less inferior races. … No amount of education and discipline can effectively improve conditions as long as we allow the unfit to breed copiously and to preserve their young.” Among these “inferior races,” he singled out blacks and Jews as objects of his frequent harangues. These “rants,” Gaddis writes, might suggest that Kennan was becoming a “dysfunctional fascist.”
Source

And...

...it was a neighbor of his, one J. Richards Dilworth, who divined (Kennan's) true character: “George is ultra-conservative. He’s almost a monarchist.”
Source

He was also a serial philanderer.

Which probably endears him all the more to an old fraud like Naylor.

But I knew that Naylor had jumped the shark of hypocrisy on this one since Kennan was the architect of the policies that fed the Cold War and which resulted in the death of millions. But, of course, that wouldn't matter to Naylor as long as he could flimsily promote a connection to some kind of celebrity for his dying secesher movement. Unfortunately, Naylor's chosen to embrace someone who, like himself, became increasingly irrelevant in his old age.

That Naylor sees Kennan as the "Godfather" of a movement that has maintained its ties to racists, anti-Semites, misogynists and homophobes throughout its sorry, unimportant to Vermonters existence, really comes as no surprise.

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