"Loathing Lincoln"

For years the Vermont secessionist movement has been a proponent of Abraham Lincoln historical revisionism. Lincoln bashing by the Second Vermont Republic leadership has been a staple of the local seceshers, along with promotion of the scribblings of Lincoln hating "writers" such as avowed neo-Confederates like Thomas DiLorenzo and Donald Livingston; both served as advisory board members of the then nascent SVR.

Next week the Louisiana State University Press will be releasing John Barr's Loathing Lincoln which examines both 19th century and modern day Lincoln bashers and historical revisionists. Today's Lincoln haters permeate the present day neo-Confederate and secessionist movements. Imagine my utter lack of surprise when I found in the book's bibliography a notation about the neo-Confederate Livington's contribution to then SVR co-chairman Rob Williams' hate journal.

One of the very first times that I heard Williams, a Vermont secesher leader and an adjunct faculty member at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, speak about Lincoln was on a local radio program. Williams railed:

"We have to get over our hero worship of Abraham Lincoln. He really was instead of the "Great Emancipator", we like to call him the "Great Centralizer." (sic) He essentially invented a new and novel unconstitutional interpretation and then foisted it upon half the country that was trying to leave..."

"Lincoln was very clever and maneuvered the South into firing the first shots..."

Hogwash! Or as one caller to the radio program directly challenged Williams, "Academic nonsense." Williams' media acumen was lauded by neo-Nazi and eventual member of Williams' exclusive Free Vermont listserv, James Duncan aka "Donnachaidh," at the hate forum of the Vanguard News Network ("No Jews, Just Right") here. Duncan so loved the Vermont secesher movement that he even minted an SVR coin in silver with his very own profile on the coin face. At the listserv he liked to swap wisecracks about lesbians, race mixing and rounding up Vermont law enforcement for some kind of trials when the seceshers took over. Duncan was the seceshers largest out of state contributor to its gubernatorial candidate, Dennis Steele, who when he learned of Duncan's background still publicly opted to keep the money. Duncan had more than 6,300 deeply anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic and neo-Confederate posts on the neo-Nazi hate forum. What he never disclosed there or elsewhere was his predilection for salt and pepper porn. Go figure. Duncan/Donnachaidh disappeared from the Internet (at least using those identities) shortly after his hateful neo-Confederate activities were exposed by this blog.

A noted researcher of the modern neo-Confederate movement, Ed Sebesta, wrote of Barr's new work,

"What I think is going to be interesting is when the public realizes that there is this modern movement that hates Lincoln. Lincoln is the personification of the modern democratic egalitarian America. This is why he is hated so much by neo-Confederates who dream of a hierarchical society. The attacks on Lincoln are attacks on modern democratic egalitarian America."

"Some so-called "heritage" groups are going to seem much more ominous to the American public as the public realizes how hostile neo-Confederates are to Lincoln, that it isn't a few cranks, but a movement, and further realize that this movement is hostile to modern democratic egalitarian America. Also, it will be realized that indulging the Lost Cause view of the Civil War has consequences."

More details about Barr's Loathing Lincoln can be found at Sebesta's anti-Neo-Confederate blog here.

To preorder Barr's excellent work use this Amazon link.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Rob Williams Continues to Maintain His Ties to League of the South White Supremacists

Since the Vermont Commons newsletter folded last fall we've heard little from its former publisher, Rob Williams. A couple of movie reviews or some such (I keep expecting to see his various recipes for the crow he's been munching on throughout this winter) but little more.

Williams is a part of the Associate Faculty at Champlain College in Burlington, VT. He has something to do with "Creative Media" at the college. That figures. He's been "creatively" making shit up for years. You know, like the Vermont secesher movement is doing better than being on life support since its inception.

It was in February of 2010 that Williams made his intellectual hajj to the center for restoration of the Confederacy, The Abbeville Institute, to become a contributor to the eventual output of a conference entitled, "State Nullification, Secession and the Human Scale of Political Order," a book about the alternative historical universe inhabited by Vermont secessionists and their neo-Confederate allies.

A little history at this point will be beneficial:

Yankee Secessionist Back in Cahoots with Neo-Confederates
Posted in Neo-Confederate by Rob Waters on October 1, 2009

Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center exposed an unsavory collaboration between the Second Vermont Republic (SVR), a quirky left-leaning band of New England secessionists, and the white supremacist League of the South, long categorized by the SPLC as a hate group. Their shared goal was to build a national secession movement.

The SPLC report, titled “North Meets South,” also documented links between SVR founder and leader Thomas H. Naylor and other extremist organizations. Naylor has appeared on the hate radio program “The Political Cesspool,” which is run by white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens board member James Edwards. He is also an associate scholar at the Atlanta-based Abbeville Institute, which is run by former League of the South leader Donald Livingston and is devoted to the ignored “achievements of white people in the South.”

Naylor initially denounced the SPLC story, calling it “a vicious attack spearheaded by the well-financed, hate-mongering, witch-hunting, left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center.” He cited no factual errors. But a few weeks later, he had second thoughts. In a letter that appeared to signal an end to the alliance, he called on the League to distance itself from racism and hatred. In the July 4, 2008, letter, he wrote, “So long as the albatross of racism hangs around its neck, the LOS can never be a truly effective partner for SVR.” His own group, he said, “risks being tainted by the scourge of racism simply by associating with the LOS.” He provided a few helpful suggestions for the League: Renounce racism, recruit black members, bring in black speakers, and promote Southern racial unity. And one more thing: “the Confederate flag has got to go!”

The divorce didn’t last long, however. Naylor and a close ally, prominent New York leftist writer and editor Kirkpatrick Sale, are now scheduled to speak at a conference on secession being organized by the Abbeville Institute. They will share the stage at the Charleston, S.C., conference in February with neo-Confederate scholars such as Thomas DiLorenzo, Clyde Wilson and Livingston, the Abbeville Institute founder. All three have current or past links with the League of the South. (Go here for profiles of DiLorenzo, Livingston and Wilson.)

The title of the conference is “State Nullification, Secession and the Human Scale of Political Order.”

Reached by telephone at his home in Vermont, Naylor declined to discuss the state of his relations with the neo-Confederates. “This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “It’s the SPLC that’s the hate group. Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

SOURCE

At the 2010 conference a plot was hatched to compile yet another group of essays by secesher "scholars" called Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century that forecasts yet more light at the end of the secesher tunnel and rehashes the various rationales for their thinking. You know, like "it's an 'emerging' movement that's poised to take off at any moment." You just wait and see. No, no, not this very minute but they're getting really, really close. Just you wait. And wait. And wait...

The reality that escapes the SVR deadenders like founder Thomas H. Naylor (an "associate scholar" at the "old times there are not forgotten" Abbeville Institute) and Williams, his former co-chairman at SVR , is that secession in Vermont is as dead as "the Lost Cause." In the book Williams' contribution elevates a bumper sticker he created (no, really!) to the status of a "scholarly essay" that is nothing more than a part of Williams' lame try a creating an Internet meme. His collaboration with the neo-Confederates on this project, "Chapter 7: Most Likely to Secede: U.S. Empire and the Emerging Vermont Independence Effort”, is just one more nail in the self-inflicted coffin of his movement's reputation. Their efforts to get secession articles on even one of Vermont's Town Meeting warnings over the past 5 years have been completely unsuccessful due to Vermonter's disdain for Williams and his fellow secesher's ties to white supremacists, racists, anti-Semites and homophobes. In not one Vermont town are voters buying into their nonsense. The handful of seceshers that ran as candidates in 2010 for various top of the statewide ticket offices squeaked into the low single digits, usually coming in last as the sesechers on the ballot (in Rutland County two seceshers came in last and next to last); the top of the ticket barely made three quarters of 1% of the vote (roughly the same amount that occurs as spoilt ballots in any election). Secesher Robert Wagner's sneaky attempt to introduce a secession ordinance at this past Monday's Town Meeting in Ripton, VT went down in flames.

And so we come to the book. Finally, one of the sham radicals at the Vermont Commons blog, Juliet Buck, a fairly recent addition to Williams kickline of dullards, conspiracy theorists, 9/11 Truthers, anti-Semites and white supremacists that have contributed to his publishing endeavors, wrote a blog post plug for the book, that was a complete cut and paste from the book publisher's website. The publisher, Pelican Publishing Company or Pelican Press, has been an institution of the neo-Confederate community since 1926:

"(A)lthough neo-Confederacy is reactionary and contains racist, sexist, elitist and antidemocratic positions, these are glossed over with a scholarly veneer of closely argued rationales, references to legislative precedents and philosophical treatises. "
[snip]
"(W)hen examining the proposals forwarded in neo-Confederate publications, it is evident that race is central to this ideology. The 1950s and 1960s are regularly invoked as the decades in which American society spiraled into terminal decline. Integration of schools is lamented, desegregation is derided as "social engineering" and policies like school busing and affirmative action are depicted as vindictive attempts to merge whites and African-Americans together to produce a single, ethnically homogenous and racially undefined identity. Leading neo-Confederate authors argue that racial animosities are now greater than ever in U.S. history and that the periods of slavery and Jim Crow segregation were eras of harmonious race relations."

"Advocates of neo-Confederacy articulate their arguments in numerous books, magazines and websites. One common practice is to reprint copies of pro-Confederate nineteenth century texts, such as those by Confederate Army Chaplain Robert Louis Dabney (1820-1898) and Mathematics Professor and Slavery Apologist Albert Bledsoe (1809-1877). Another is to produce new materials that advocate neo-Confederacy. Often written in a breathless style that makes the reader feel as if they are becoming privy to long-suppressed truths, the most prominent publisher of neo-Confederate texts is Pelican Books of Gretna, La. Its catalogue, which has important books outlining neo-Confederate sentiments, also contains several overwrought polemics including Michael Andrew Grissom's Southern by the Grace of God; James and Walter Kennedy's Was Jefferson Davis Right? and The South Was Right!; Walter Kennedy's Myths of American Slavery and Gordon Thornton's The Southern Nation: The New Rise of the Old South. Other significant neo-Confederate books include Frank Conner's The South Under Siege (1830-2000) which argues that Jews from northern states instigated and funded the African-American civil rights movement and used Martin Luther King, Jr., as a puppet in an effort to "destroy Christianity" and Southern Slavery As It Was by Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson, which selectively interprets slave narratives and rehashes pro-slavery arguments of the mid-nineteenth century to argue that the practice was benign, sanctioned by God and was used as a "pretext" by Unionists to prosecute a war fought over the "biblical meaning of constitutional government" in an effort to suppress Christianity."

SOURCE

For those of you who don't know or may have forgotten, the editor of the book of essays that Rob Williams contributed to is none other than a former early board member of the League of the South, Donald Livingston, who,

"Shortly after the formation of the League of the South in 1994, Livingston became the first director of the League of the South Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History, which was organized to further the group's revisionist takes on American history."

SOURCE

and about whom Williams once famously said,

"Is (Livingston) a racist? I don't know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business, at a personal level."

SOURCE

Livingston was once famously quoted as having said,

"the North created segregation"

SOURCE

I wrote at length last fall about Williams and Livingston's essay compilation regarding their "historical alternative universe" here. Juliet Buck, Williams' book flogging toady, has gotten around to her own cheap promotion of that predictable collection of revisionist thought by reprinting in toto the publisher's promotion. She didn't mention much else about the other contributors who include a North Carolina delegate to the neo-Confederate Southern National Congress, Kirkpatrick Sale; "League of the South" bigwig, Pres. Abraham Lincoln basher and contributor to the anti-Semitic, Holocaust denial publication, The Journal of Historical Review, Thomas DiLorenzo; a minor figure in the neo-Confederate movement who was on the masthead as an advisor of the now defunct neo-Confederate Journal of Confederate History, Kent Masterson Brown; and perhaps even more absurdly, an essay from a wingnut who has claimed that Southern secessionists did not do so with the intent to preserve slavery and that therefore the Confederate flag is not a symbol of oppression and hatred but merely one that honors heritage and pride, one Marshall DeRosa.

One can only wonder what was going through Williams' head when he agreed to go all in with these nutters on a book edited by a founder of the "League of the South."

More on the neo-Confederates that Williams has thrown in with may be found at Ed Sebesta's excellent website here.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Dept. of Corrections

When I first considered creating this blog, because of what I found to be direct connections between the Second Vermont Republic organization and racist ideologues who come primarily from a white supremacist, neo-Confederate group known as the League of the South, I understood that the revelation of these ties could generate some heat.  And not surprisingly, they have.

SVR's leadership has taken a number of steps that reflect a deep misunderstanding of what matters to Vermonters.  In response to legitimate concerns expressed by many in our state about their active associations with groups like the League of the South, SVR, through its co-chair, Rob Williams, first replied by openly adopting a policy best characterized as, "Don't Ask, Don't Care."

"Is (Livingston) a racist? I don't know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business, at a personal level."

Following that, on February 19 and again sometime over this weekend, SVR's leadership issued press releases that have relied on half truths, lies, wild and even delusional speculation, and a despicable, desperate personal attack on a well known Vermont blogger and his family. [2]  Naylor and Williams have charged that I have labeled people like Marco Bassini and Jason Sorens as racists. That is a lie.

Bassini has been mentioned only once on my blog, and then only in conjunction with a list of demands from another organization.  I have never written about Jason Sorens. [3]

Thomas H. Naylor and Williams charge that I rely "solely" on the well respected defender of civil and legal rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as my source.  That too is a lie.  One need only look at my very first citation from a source on this blog that was about LoS's avowed racist president, J. Michael Hill, to see that this is not true. [4]

Naylor and Williams also incorrectly allege that the "federal government imprisoned" Franklin Sanders "for tax resistance."  That too is more of SVR's bull in lieu of the real facts.  While Sanders also has been arrested in the past by federal authorities on different charges than the ones that I brought to light, the only imprisonment that I am aware of is that imposed by his fellow Tennesseans for his poorly thought out sales tax scheme that meant to deny the state legitimate tax revenue for the benefit of his customers, not some lofty "tax resistance" as team Naylor and Williams would spin it. Sanders is a mere criminal and nothing more. [5]

I don't intend to spend my time on this blog tracking and revealing all of the misstatements, lies and misrepresentations of fact and substance made by Naylor and his would-be spin meister, the so-called "media expert," Rob Williams, in response to what I post here - that would be a neverending task - but I do insist that they issue an immediate correction to these blatant lies.

Naylor and Williams should understand that Vermonters just aren't buying their dissembling. [6]  They are truly clueless about the damage that they have done and continue to do to their own reputations and that of their organization's.

I also don't seriously expect them to comply and issue the appropriate, unqualified corrections since Naylor and Williams have adopted the iron-fisted leadership style similar to that of the racists at LoS and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and have begun to purge the not-so-true believers from their ranks. [7] [8] [9]

While Naylor and Williams have routinely paid lip service to the notion that they wish "to dialogue" with Vermonters, they have in fact cancelled an important opportunity to do so because they fear that Vermonters would ask them hard questions this coming Sunday about their peculiar associations.  I am not the only Vermonter to note the irony of their replacement event, a funeral. [10] [11]  I mean, really, what was this self-described "think-tank" thinking when the substituted a real occasion for dialogue with a (as one friend might describe it) a Ruritanian stunt?

For a good deal more insight into Thomas H. Naylor's views on "white" Vermont, integration and race in general, I would strongly urge you to read yesterday's post at one of the other sources that I have often relied on in this discussion about secession, secessionists and what it is that Naylor and the SVR would like Vermonters not to know about them.  Here's but a small sample of what that blogger has found:

"In the opening paragraph (Naylor) states, "Since the 1960s the official policy of the U.S. government has been the forced racial integration of public schools, colleges and universities, public accommodations, restaurants, stores, and more recently the workplace." Segregation was forced in some states, with state laws mandating it. Also, who is being forced? Most Americans go to stores, restaurants, workplaces, etc. that are integrated, and don't feel forced, that they have to go to integrated places against their will, because they aren't segregationists. Being forced is the terminology of a segregationist."

"Then Naylor states, "Although this commitment to racial integration once enjoyed broad-based public support, today an increasing number of whites, blacks, and Hispanics have either become ambivalent or hostile to forced integration." The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans of all races support integration. "an increasing number" doesn't really say anything, is it 48 people increasing to 79 people? There is a growing awareness that integration is perhaps only the first step to solving racial issues in America, is that the "ambivalent" that Naylor lumps with "hostile?"

Vermonters have long welcomed newcomers like Naylor who hold disparate views on matters even as contentious as race, but Naylor is fast wearing out that welcome in his increasingly apparent plan to radically alter Vermont society, so that Vermont becomes a stalking-horse for the secessionist goals of white separatist groups like the League of the South.  Is it any wonder that the advisory board out-of-state membership of SVR has been packed with LoS types?