Are anti-Marriage Equality Activists Preparing to Resort to Secession?

A few days ago Christianist windbag and conspiracist nutter Joseph Farah, publisher of the evangelical online hatesite called World Net Daily proposed exactly that but is apparently ignorant of the fact that Christian haters have tried that before.

A little more than ten years ago Cory Burnell, a failed member of the leadership of the Texas branch of the racist League of the South, proposed that Christians from across the country emigrate in 12,000 member waves to the State of South Carolina where they'd eventually takeover the various legislative districts. Well, Corey failed miserably but not before getting an invite to visit Vermont by Second Vermont Republic's own Rob Williams where Burnell condemned "sodomite marriage" to Vermont's seceshers. To date, Vermont's seceshers still consider same-sex marriage to be an unsettled issue in Vermont.

Here's what Farrah said,

Does Same Sex Marriage Warrant Secession?

"I know there are millions of Christians, Jews and others who would pull up stakes and move to another country that honored the institution of marriage as it was designed by God – a union between one man and one woman.

As Jesus said it: 'For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.'

Is there one state in 50 that would not only defy the coming abomination, but secede in response? The rewards could be great. I would certainly consider relocating. How about you?

The founders of this country found a place of refuge in America and shaped it into the greatest self-governing nation in the history of world. Just think what one state could do if it simply stuck to the principles that made this country great? Americans wouldn’t have to cross an ocean to rediscover what brought most of our ancestors here. We could simply drive.

Are any states so inclined?

I haven’t heard this question raised by anyone else. So I’m raising it now. We don’t have much time before the nine high priests in black robes decide to follow Baal instead of the One True God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We need a Promised Land. We need an Exodus strategy.

[snip]

"Are there any governors or legislatures out there among the 50 states willing secede to offer a refuge for the God-fearing?"

Various forms of this misbegotten scheme have been tried before by the likes of Burnell and Jason Sorens' failed New Hampshire Free State Project. The idea always fails because of the huge cost attached to uprooting 10s of thousands of disgruntled religionists and other true believers - it's simple economics. The bucks trump the hate.

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Will He or Won't He?

Back in February I challenged Vermont's last secessionist, the failed publisher of the defunct secesher propaganda rag Vermont Commons, Rob Williams, to once and for all renounce his ties to the racist and anti-Semitic hate group known as the League of the South after the LoS announced its plans to celebrate the murder of Abraham Lincoln by the deranged secessionist John Wilkes Booth here. This came after LoS's ironfisted leader, Michael Hill, organized a guerrilla group that he called "The Indomitables" and had directed his members to arm themselves with a variety of weapons including train derailers!

Here we are three months later and all we've gotten from Williams is crickets but not so at LoS. Now comes the revelation by the Southern Poverty Law Center that, not unlike the SVR super hyper secret listers of 2009-2010 that this blog exposed, the LoS had a members only secret Facebook page where like the SVR group they could chat about Jews, pesky women, homosex, miscegenation and "tribes." Here's the SPLC story.

So, with a fresh revelation of racist and anti-Semitic chat by his supposed allies at LoS the question remains, will Rob Williams ever distance himself from his bigoted friends at the League of the South or are we to assume that he approves since they, like he, are seceshers?

I think we know the answer.

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Another One Bites The Dust

Enough isn't being said about failures of the secessionist movement. What's left of the group that called itself the Second Vermont Republic is a mere shadow on a cloudy day of what it used to be. At its greatest, SVR claimed 125 "members," that is until its founder, the Dixie singin' Thomas Naylor, eliminated memberships and declared himself a "think tank." He stopped bankrolling the Vermont secesher print journal, Vermont Commons and funding their gatherings so their visibility became nil. Then Naylor up and died a year and a half ago and that brought the few remaining VT secesher antics to a screeching halt.

Similarly, Ed Sebesta over at the Anti-neo-Confederate blog reported yesterday about the folding of the Southern Nationalist Network website, a website that had been devoted to the racist and anti-gay nature of the "emerging" Southern secessionist movement. Most of its membership seems to come from the depleted ranks of the League of the South, Sons of Confederate Veterans and a few mostly defunct chapters of the Klan. It seems that the SNN feels that they've been so successful in their demonstrations, where they number usually less than ten, that they no longer have the need for a platform like a website. Su-u-re. In the 21st century the path to success lies in restricting your public access.

Here's Ed's report:

Southern Nationalist Network Website is Supposedly Shut Down Because It is Claimed That It Has Been a Big Success
May 8, 2015

"The www.southernnationalist.com website has shut down."

"The person who ran it claimed that the website was shut down for this reason:"

"Over these past 5 years demonstrations have been held to rally folks to the idea of independence for Dixie. Many people have become serious Southern nationalists. Due to this rise in activity SNN will be shutting down; in order to begin a new phase that will inspire even more folks to get involved in the movement."

"So because the website was successful it is being shut down and the ownership given up. I would like to suggest another possibility, the SNN wasn't going anywhere."

"You look at photos of the League of the South/SNN demonstrations and you realize that there aren't a lot of people at the demonstrations."

"Or perhaps there wasn't any money to pay the bill. Even if you were going on to another activity you would retain ownership of the existing site to refer people to your new site or activity."

"I don't think the SNN's demise is a great advance. It didn't seem to be accomplishing much. I thought because they were protesting they might get recruits. Direct action, protests often get people involved. But it seems there isn't seem to be any public support for the SNN's agenda."

The Southern seceshers got maybe ten people to turn out, on a good day, for their demos. Not unlike VT seceshers who at their last Statehouse stunt got maybe a dozen people from instate, some visiting allies from out-of-state and a few of the nutters from that worn-out act called Bread and Puppet Theater. The VT seceshers were spread out so thinly on the Statehouse floor that they had to shout to hear each other.

So, if you want to see one of the last remaining seceshers in Vermont, you'll have to go to the Waitsfield or Warren Fourth of July parade (no irony there, huh?) where you'll get to see Rob William's wizened scowl.

UPDATE Sunday, May 10, 2015, 12:00 PM: There's a particularly vicious racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic website called Occidental Dissent run by a white supremacist and neo-Confederate scumbag named Brad Griffin a.k.a. Hunter Wallace where the commenters are lamenting the passing of the Southern Nationalist Network. Included in the collective wailing and whining is this post by the piece of shit who ran the racist Southern Nationalist Network, another neo-Confederate waste of time by the name of Michael Cushman. Here's his bullshit:

Palmetto Patriot says:
May 9, 2015 at 4:44 AM

Thank you very much to those who read and supported the site. I enjoyed running SNN and met quite a few really good folks thru it. It was intended to be more than a blog. We did regular podcasts, videos, organised (sic) activism, etc. It was much too much for me to operate by myself once I began to work more hours. Even with a little help it was too much. I also felt it had served its purpose by popularising (sic) the term and ideology ‘Southern nationalist’ among those in pro-Southern and pro-White circles. We mostly defeated the Rainbow Confederate forces and moved the Southern secessionist movement in an ethno-nationalist direction. That said, we were not seeing a lot of growth in our ranks despite a lot of time, money and effort being put into the project over 5 years. So I think it is time for the next thing. To get a different – better – result something new must be tried, I think. We need talented people to step up with new ideas for spreading our worldview. For the last few months I have been focused on writing a Golden Circle book. I recently finished the first draft of that and will soon start a new book project. As HW says, I do plan to start a new blog – a much less ambitious but more manageable site than SNN.

Heh!

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There's A New Hate Group In Town

And given the current baas of the Second Vermont Republic's very low bar for who he'll work with in pursuit of secession I think that Burlington VT's Champlain College adjunct staffer, Rob Williams, is gonna find this to be a match made in heaven. The Middlebury, VT based Creativity Alliance hates Jews, "coloreds," "niggers," race mixing and mestizos. Williams has long worked with and supported important neo-Confederate figures in the racist and anti-Semitic League of the South like Michael Hill, Franklin Sanders and Donald Livingston, so working with the Rev. Pat Tracy of the neo-Nazi Creativity Alliance should be an easy fit.

The Spring 2015 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center lists the neo-Nazi Creativity Alliance as located in Middlebury, VT on their national hate map here. The contact information for the North American liaison for the Creativity Alliance's Reverend Pat Tracy, PO Box 1006, Middlebury, VT 05753 northamerica@creativityalliance.com can be found on pg. 4 of their handbook here. Their very particular and extremely racist and anti-Semitic membership requirements and obligations can be found on pages 7-10 of the handbook. The average, present day SVR member should fit in quite nicely.

Coincidentally, Middlebury, VT is also the original home to SVR co-founder Kirkpatrick Sale's racist enabling and anti-Semitic Middlebury Institute.

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Second Vermont Republic Ally Celebrates the Sesquicentennial of a Murder for Presidents Week

Longtime Second Vermont Republic ally, advisor and friend at the neo-Confederate hate group called the League of the South, by way of its president and champion of the Southern War of Treason, Michael Hill, has issued this proclamation at its website:

Honoring John Wilkes Booth

"The League of the South looks to the present and future. However, from time to time we do look back at our past.

This 14th of April will mark the 150th anniversary of John Wilkes Booth’s execution of the tyrant Abraham Lincoln. The League will, in some form or fashion, celebrate this event. We remember Booth’s diary entry: “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.” A century and a half after the fact, The League of the South thanks Mr. Booth for his service to the South and to humanity."

"Stay tuned . . ."
"Michael Hill"

I know I should probably give up trying to get him to do it but I'm going to ask Rob Williams, the last remaining Vermont secesher, one more time to renounce and denounce the League of the South and once and for all end SVR's ties to the racist hate group.

UPDATE: 11:00 PM, 2.17.15
Almost six and a half hours after I put the above post up, Green Mountain Daily's Jack McCullough added his voice to the call for SVR to put some daylight between themselves and the racist hate group, the League of the South. It's likely, though, that all we'll get from Rob Williams will be one of his trite aphorisms or homemade secesh bromides.

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The Vermont Secession Movement Winds Down

It's been apparent for some time that what remains of the Vermont secession movement is drawing justly to a close. Long a movement founded in deception and of lies and of hatred it could only go this way.

Some trace the beginning of the end to the first revelations in 2007 that the Vermont secesher movement was joined at the hip to racists at the anti-Semitic, white separatist group called the League of the South, which is affiliated with the KKK and the Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known as the White Citizens Council and commonly called the "Uptown Klan"). Like the LoS the Vermont seceshers, who call themselves the Second Vermont Republic, are vehemently anti-Semitic. That is a fact, as well as the racist, segregationist and conspiracist leanings, that has been exposed here at this blog by way of the writings of SVR bloggers like the Dixie singin' founder of SVR Thomas Naylor who had fantasized about creating an anti-Semitic white homeland, convicted felon and LoS Board of Directors member Franklin Sanders, neo-Confederate Lincoln historical revisionist Thomas DiLorenzo, failed secesher candidates for the Vermont Senate Dennis "Hit List" Morrisseau, Gaelan Brown, a conspiracist loon, and Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner, Kirkpatrick Sale (who argues that Israel should be "undone"), Robert S. Griffin (UVM's own white nationalist professor), conspiracist anti-Semite Jacqueline Brook and Carol Moore, to name only a few.

Over the past year or so the SVR publisher, Rob Williams (who is also a member of the adjunct staff at Burlington's Champlain College), has been busy rhetorically cleansing his various secesher sites of the grossly bigoted posts of his bloggers. There are now a zombie like collection of rotten links that abound at his sites but he just can't help himself since new anti-Semitic posts have found their way onto his site, along with increasingly vicious anti-American, and in that way anti-Vermont, posts.

I had to smile when he posted a false claim that he had "invented" the idea that Vermonters get outdoors to enjoy the snow by attaching a numerical requirement to be recognized for doing so. He's calling his effort "#VT99". In doing so he betrays his roots from away since apparently he's unaware that such numerical recognition for how much a Vermonter might be enjoying the outdoors has been a part of the Vermont scene for many, many years. Probably the most notable was the Vermont 100 Club at Killington from a couple of decades ago that had to do with how many days a year that you used your season pass. He calls for 30 minutes of snow related activity on 99 days - sound familiar? Around Vermont that's called getting the mail and taking out the compost. He's even created a euro style bumper sticker to go with it that he's offered for free to his readers, for which, I have it on good authority, that there have been few, if any, takers. That's just a small measure of how mammothly unsuccessful his secession related endeavors - his print journal distribution and conventions featuring bigots from out of state and his plan to get secession articles on 200 Town Meeting ballots by 2015 (so far zero) and his constitutional convention scheme - have been for years. SVR founders Naylor, Ian Baldwin and Williams were all famously unsuccessful in getting their families, spouses and local communities to join them in their secesher delusions.

Hilariously, on Wednesday Rob posted the ironically titled "Secession, the Reasonable Option Everyone Resists" by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., a neo-Confederate founder of the League of the South. Rob signs off his post with his trite "Long Live the UNTied States," to which I'd ask, "Exactly what state or states are those, Rob?" - delusional asshole.

Rob Williams is now pretty much all that remains of the membership of 20 or nutjobs in the SVR. Don't forget to shut off the lights as you leave, Rob.

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Texas' Sam Houston on Secession

Andy Hall over at the Dead Confederates blog has posted an address made by then governor of Texas, Sam Houston, in 1860 on the topic of Texas' seceding - he wasn't for it. The observations that Houston made then have relevance for our time. Tiny, nearly non-existent groups like the anti-Semitic Second Vermont Republic and the white supremacist League of the South have been making a mighty noise for more than ten years, far out of proportion to their actual importance to the body politic. In Houston's time the discussion was of much more urgency then but, as I said, his remarks still hold true today, particularly when you factor in the absurd Lincoln historical revisionism of SVR's Rob Williams and the racist, would be goons at LoS. Just substitute the then empires of Great Britain and Spanish America for today's expansionist Greater Russian Empire and the growing Chinese Empire, and Houston's words become prescient for our time and argue just as convincingly against secession today.

Here's Andy's post in its entirety:

Houston: The Union Is Worth More Than Mr. Lincoln
Andy Hall, December 22, 2014

Everyone knows that Sam Houston, governor of Texas during the secession crisis of 1860-61, opposed secession and opposed Texas joining the Confederacy. He famously predicted a long and bloody war would follow, with disastrous consequences for the South regardless of the outcome.

But I recently came across this address he made in Austin, sometime during the 1860 presidential campaign, in which Houston laid out the pro-slavery argument against secession. It’s a very different take on an old dispute:

"[The seceded states] will soon whip themselves, and will not be worth whipping back [into the Union]. Deprived of the protection of the Union, of the aegis of the Constitution, they would soon dwindle into petty States, to be again rent in twain by dissensions or through the ambition of selfish chieftains, and would become a prey to foreign powers. They gravely talk of holding treaties with Great Britain and other foreign powers, and the great advantages which would arise to the South from separation are discussed. Treaties with Great Britain! Alliance with foreign powers! Have these men forgotten history? Look at Spanish America! Look at the condition of every petty State, which by alliance with Great Britain is subject to continual aggression."

[edit]

"When [the Union is] rent in twain, British Abolition, which in fanaticism and sacrificial spirit, far exceeds that of the North (for it has been willing to pay for its fanaticism, a thing the North never will do), will have none of the impediments in its path, now to be found. England will no longer fear the power of the mighty nation which twice has humbled her, and whose giant arm would, so long as we are united, be stretched forth to protect the weakest State, or the most obscure citizen. The State that secedes, when pressed by insidious arts of abolition emissaries, supported by foreign powers, when cursed by internal disorders and insurrections, can lay no claim to that national flag, which when now unfurled, ensures the respect of all nations and strikes terror to the hearts of those who would invade our rights."

[edit]

"But if, through division in the ranks of those opposed to Mr. Lincoln, he should be elected, we have no excuse for dissolving the Union. The Union is worth more than Mr. Lincoln, and if the battle is to be fought for the Constitution, let us fight it in the Union and for the sake of the Union. With a majority of the people in favor of the Constitution, shall we desert the Government and leave it in the hands of the minority? A new obligation will be imposed upon us, to guard the Constitution and to see that no infraction of it is attempted or permitted. If Mr. Lincoln administers the Government in accordance with the Constitution, our rights must be respected. If he does not, the Constitution has provided a remedy."

"No tyrant or usurper can ever invade our rights so long as we are united. Let Mr. Lincoln attempt it, and his party will scatter like chaff before the storm of popular indignation which will burst forth from one end of the country to the other. Secession or revolution will not be justified until legal and constitutional means of redress have been tried, and I can not believe that the time will ever come when these will prove inadequate.​"

It’s interesting to see a prominent figure as that arguing against secession for the protection of the peculiar institution. But then again, Big Sam was never entirely conventional.

(h/t Andy Hall)

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Racist Writer for White Supremacist, neo-Confederate Website Outed by Southern Poverty Law Center

During the past few months there's been a back and forth of outing and doxing going on that's shaken the racist right to its jackboots. The racists at Occidental Dissent have been on an outing campaign of their own which has produced not very compelling results. Yesterday the SPLC dropped the latest bomb - a writer and moderator for the avowedly racist and virulently anti-Semitic mouthpiece for the neo-Confederate League of the South supporting website mentioned above, Occidental Dissent, who goes by the pseudonym "Jack Ryan" is in fact John V. Ellis of Hyde Park, Chicago. SPLC has the whole story here.

Tit for tat, eh Jack?

Speaking of the racist League of the South, we've been waiting for months for the current head of the so-called Second Vermont Republic, Rob Williams, to renounce and denounce SVR's past and present ties to the LoS and its militia. Well, one can always cling to the wistful hope that Williams will one day come to his senses.

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McSecession - National Journal Pairs Second Vermont Republic With the League of the South in Scottish Independence Article

Update At Bottom

With less than a week to go to the Scottish independence election, the usual spate of articles about nothing begin to appear. National Journal, a DC insider publication that like many others is straining for eyeballs on the web in a post print era has produced another in a series of articles that treat the tiny Vermont secession movement as a contender. The NJ highlights, as though they're relevant to the Scottish situation, three largely unsuccessful U.S. secesher outfits

I'll start with the second featured first: Cascadianow! From their About page,

"CascadiaNow! is working to become a grassroots, umbrella non-profit organization that provides resources and direct services to groups, projects, and community partners to raise awareness of Cascadia, celebrate our distinct regional identity and culture, and increase the independence of the Cascadia bioregion."

They've been on the web for 8 years and they're just now "working to become" a tax free 501c3 and nothing more than an "umbrella" thing. This is just the sort of e-group that secesher maven, Southern National Congress delegate and all around crank, Kirkpatrick Sale, has complained for years about, calling such groups little more than a website address. And the NJ writer Kaveh Waddell moused his way to their website and "interviewed" the leader of the group.

Third up for NJ's Waddell was the loudest, if not the largest secesher organization in the U.S., the notoriously ludicrous and hateful League of the South. Waddell's interview elicits the fact that the LoSers racist leader, Michael Hill, has virtually no insight into the Scottish independence effort and goal. Hill ignorantly states that a successful "Yes" vote for Scottish independence will be,

"a brick out of the wall of centralization and the old idea of empire-building"

News Flash!: A primary goal of the the Scottish independentistas would be accession (as opposed to secession) in 18 months to the European Union with its more than 200,000 pages of laws and regulations that make it arguably the most centralized union on the planet, as well as one of the largest economic empires to have ever existed. Hill must be smoking too much kudzu.

Nowhere in his fawning outline of the LoS's past and present does NJ's Waddell reveal that the collection of aging felons, Klansmen and racists is being replaced by a new generation of racists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis and potential felons. I say potential because they've formed a militia called "The Indomitables" who intend to target for guerrilla war type action journalists (pay attention Waddell), politicians and "elites." Waddell completely missed the racism and new radicalism that permeates today's LoS. As for Waddell's repeating LoS's claim "at one point recently to have 25,000 members," Waddell offers no explanation whatsoever as to why at repeated LoS demos over this past summer the average turnout was only 10 of the racists.

First up, though, was my favorite; an interview of the Second Vermont Republic's new baas and a member of Champlain College's adjunct staff, as well as a self-described historian, Rob Williams wherein Williams is positively wet-his-panties giddy over the upcoming Scottish independence vote and what he wrongly conjures it to mean to the essentially non-existent Vermont secesher movement. Williams unjustifiably effuses that,

"'I think the Scots have done a fantastic job of really making secession sexy,' Williams told (Waddell). 'If you look at the way the secession conversation has unfolded in the past several years, they've really tapped into what makes Scotland Scotland. That's something we've been trying to do in Vermont.' Williams thinks Vermont should follow suit, playing up the symbols, culture, and history that make the state unique."

Williams' muddled understanding of history causes him to conflate Scotland's centuries long struggle to re-assert independence from a United Kingdom created from the threat of force of arms with his boutique style secesher clown show. While there has always been a large segment of the Scottish body politic, including the present leader of the Scottish House of Parliament, supporting the independence line, under Williams' leadership the Vermont seceshers have disastrously fielded candidates that polled in the low or fractional digits of the electorate (99.24% of votes for governor in 2010 were for someone other than the secesher candidate).

Williams prattles on to misstate historical fact.

"The Vermont independence movement has already taken some of these lessons to heart. The movement has its own flag—borrowed from Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys militia—and a "reasonably robust network" of activists. What they're missing, Williams said, is the grassroots power of the Scottish campaign. "The Scots have proved that with a lot of time and effort and energy, you can build a political and economic conversation around independence," he said.

Williams said the success of the Scottish movement has had a positive effect on the Vermont independence movement, no matter the outcome of Scotland's referendum. Williams could hardly conceal his excitement for what's happening overseas. "If I didn't have to teach," he told me, "I'd be in Edinburgh right now!"

First off, Williams and his "reasonably robust network" of misfits, who now probably number somewhere under ten, stole the battle flag of the successors to the Green Mountain Boys, the Vermont Army & Air National Guard, and dishonor it by having done so. He also in saying that "the Scots have proved that with a lot of time and effort and energy, you can build a political and economic conversation around independence," leaves out the fact that there's is a valid, lawful claim made for hundreds of years, unlike the threadbare, historically perverted claim of the Vermont seceshers. The comparison of the two movements is typical of the hubris upon which Williams' leadership style is based, just like the spirit of sacrifice shown in his statement that if he didn't have to work he'd be right there with the Scots. What an empty, unself aware, blowhard Rob regularly shows himself to be.

As long as Williams' "activism" amounts to social media, a defunct hate blog, an occasional Statehouse stunt that can only attract 20 or so mostly out of staters and alliances with out of state hate groups like the League of the South, the Union is very, very secure.

What Waddell's article fails to disclose (beyond the seething anti-Semitism of the Vermont seceshers and the race hatred of the LoSers) is that most economists agree that Scottish independence will lead to a serious recession for Scotland that would probably extend to England itself, but that at least the "golfing in Scotland will be a lot cheaper.”

http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/2007/02/rob-williams-svr-co-chair-breaks.html

http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/2012/03/rob-williams-continues-to-maintain-his.html

http://vermontsecession.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/second-vermont-republic-vermont-fairy.html

http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/2011/02/vermont-commons-bloggers-anti-semitic.html

(h/t Spelunker)

UPDATE September 17: Days have passed since in his first post in months at his Second Vermont Republic website Williams sought to conflate some meaning for his dead movement from events in Scotland. An opportunity (again) was missed by Williams to renounce and denounce the racism and calls from violence now eminating from his allies at the League of the South in crowing about Waddell's throwaway e-piece about U.S. seceshers to put some or any distance between his group and the LoS; stupid is as stupid doesn't.

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"The Cheese Stands Alone" Part IV - The League of the South Establishes A Militia Unit

At its annual meeting in June this year, Michael Hill, president of the League of the South announced the creation of a paramilitary group called "The Indomitables." No, really. The Southern Poverty Law Center has an exclusive report here.

On July 15 Hill posted on his blog an e-call to arms entitled "A Bazooka in Every Pot." Since then he's continued to ramp up the rhetoric that includes an outline of intended targets for his strike group,

"the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite..."
Michael Hill, League of the South führer and lunatic-in-chief

Hill has established a General Staff packed with KKKers, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He's even created some Nazi style iconography for the outfit.

In a twelve point manifesto from his group, #1 is,

" The mantra “Violence [or the serious threat thereof] never settles anything” is patently false. History shows that it indeed does settle many things. Please don’t forget this—your enemy hasn’t."

My question to the new baas of the Second Vermont Republic, Rob Williams, remains when will he renounce and denounce his racist, neo-Nazi, KKKer allies at the League of the South" for the climate of hate and danger that they are creating in the nut bar pursuit of secession? Other than to take down a letter written by Thomas H. Naylor that once called for the League to renounce racism from his hate blog called Vermont Commons, Williams, a member of the adjunct faculty at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, has done nothing to put any distance between himself and the other conspiracy obsessed hate group, LoS.

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A Look Back at Yet Another Year of Misses, Missteps and the Mistakes of Vermont's Foundering Secession Movement

Two years ago today the screwballs of the Vermont secessionist clowncar announced their opening salvo of a Takeover Vermont movement - they were "amassing" candidates to occupy the entire Senate of the Vermont Statehouse, step into the governor's and lieutenant governor's office, along with a fistful of House seats. History will note that none of their candidate's came even remotely close to anything more than a piddling showing in any race. Perhaps that was because two months before the 2012 election I'd exposed their super-secret listserv where they waxed poet about their love for antiSemitic, misogynistic, racist and homophobic tropes, as well as their contempt for Vermonters who they believed to be gullible. Fortunately, those same Vermonters didn't fall for the crap that the seceshers were passing out. So I thought that today might be a good day to look back at the year that followed the 2012 debacle, 2013.

Last year at this time Vermonters throughout the state were breathing a collective sigh of relief that the decade long attempt to establish a dictatorship of the seceshatariat and associated argle-bargle had come to an abrupt end with the passing of the Magnolia Vermonter, Thomas H. Naylor, who was by any reasonable estimate a racist and Jew hater. Gone too is his dream for a do-over on women's reproductive rights and marriage equality. My criminy, if only he'd lived long enough to troll Duck Dynasty rednecks who're into making duck sounds on dick-like instruments with other duck dudes while disparaging gays, blacks and other non-Christopsychos, who knows how much he might have seceded, er, succeeded into making this a world more appreciable of other neo-Confederate "scholars" like his longtime butt-buddy Kirkpatrick Sale. We can all remember when Second Vermont Republic co-founder Sale said of the state Israel that it could be "unmade." Nothing could speak to the delusions of these secesher clowns more than that kind of looney ideation about the end of the Jews once and for all... a final solution proposed by the very core of the leadership of the SVR.

In 2013 the hoopleheads at the hate website Vermont Commons still ground out misinformation and the latest anti-Semitic, conspiracist garbage but not at anywhere near the same rate as they had in the past. The promise to have a new print junk journal resuscitated for 2013 turned out to be more pure secesher bullshit. Rob Williams, who presides as the top mouth breather at the VTCommons hate blog, idiotsplains to everyone who doesn't see him coming but realizes that would have been a good idea once he gets into his wet-dream shtick about "the emerging Vermont independence movement" that they're going to prevail, that's despite getting no one elected and no legislator to announce support for their fantasy. Ain't. Ever. Gonna. Happen. Rob. And that's no matter how many bumper stickers (that people throw away once they get clued into the racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of hate that comes with it) and useless commentaries and Facebook posts that Rob, Matt Cropp, Juliet Buck and the other tiny group of bedwetters plaster onto the Internets. Vermonters won't forget Williams' role as the then vice chairman of Second Vermont Republic in bringing neo-Confederate racists and segregationists to our state to arouse a secesher dream of division and exclusion. The KKK inspired and slavery loving group that Williams thought so much of that he had them on the SVR advisory board was the infamous League of the South, a group he has yet to denounce although only a bit more than a year ago he claimed to have put an end to the criticism of his group for having sought to affiliate with racists. (How's that going, Rob?) Like the neo-Confederate wing of the hate based secesher movement, Williams' hate blog will no doubt keep chugging along promoting attacks on Israel, Jewish "international bankers", the Vermont legislature, rule of law, etc. in its usual ineffectual way.

Vermont secession theology, like most faith based ideologies and theologies, has a well developed eschatological component. The world as we know it is going down (peak oil, peak fracking, peak F-35s, you name it) and there's only one way to escape the horrors and that's through the secesher rapture (Now where have I heard that before?). Tie that with their confiscatory economic theories that promote the largest grab of private property since the Stalin era and you can get a sense of why their political campaigns have been so, like, totes failed.

VTCommons contributors were able to maintain their reputation as being invariably late to the media party, such as when Gaelan Brown, the renown VTC house derp, who wrote about the compost sales tax debacle six months after it had been covered much more responsibly and professionally by Vermont's print and electronic media. Brown failed to disclose his own bottom line interest in the composting industry in his piece for VTCommons', uh, journal hate blog, a huge journalistic no-no. Me wonders how his conspiracist exposé of the collusion between the U.S. military and space aliens over extraction mineral resources from the dark side of the Moon in exchange for advanced alien military technology is going - oh, and don't forget the hidden truth about aircraft contrails that Brown has the scoop on since that's bigger than the Snowden disclosures (except for the difference that Snowden's dealing with, like, facts and truth, and not the attenuated sort of truth churned out by Teh Secesher Crheyzies!).

2013 entertained no new secesher conventions such as the small nations thing that was to be funded by some bored prince that Naylor and the mini-Naylor, Rob Williams had been sucking up to, nor has any secesher made a meaningful announcement to run for office in 2014 - heck, for their 2012 run debacle they wouldn't shut up even when they had no right to speak, so why are they so silent now? No Jim Hogue "Ethan Allen" drag shows that I noticed. Not even a peep for months from the not-so "Senator" Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner despite his still having an inactive 2014 campaign website of sorts. Speaking of never-gonna-be senators, I've been following the random, mostly just for nothing Denny "Hit List" Morrisseau comments which read more like deranged outbursts as he derps the net and should give'em a mention but I've misplaced my Morriseau-to-English dictionary and without that they still don't make sense. Suffice it to say that, aside from Naylor himself, Morrisseau, who describes himself as "The Very Foreign Minister of SVR but is more aptly the "impacted bowel" of SVR, is possibly the most staggeringly anti-Semitic passenger of the Vermont secesher crazy train. You can read about his proposed "hit list" for Jews here.

The death of Naylor, the longtime and apparently only Vermont secesher sugar daddy, spelled the end to the gravy train of show conventions and videos attended by tens of people (mostly out-of-staters and sometimes not even that many/few) over the years. One could even speculate that the unseemly association with a group and an e-"publication" that has long term ties to racists, homophobes and anti-Semites in its past and present "issues" led to the departure this summer of one sham radical from a frontline position in the leadership of the minuscule anti-Vermont National Guard group (or as they like to frame themselves, the anti-F-35 movement) or maybe she just got tired of holding the reins on stoopid.

Profoundly failed 2012 gubernatorial wannabe (99.24% of Vermonters all voted for someone else), Dennis Steele, managed to finally snag an interview in 2013 where he mentioned America but not a secesher Vermont while promoting an addictive product that the CDC has been found to contain substances harmful to humans, including carcinogens. Steele even asserts, without presenting any evidence whatsoever that,

"there are a growing number of people who are moving from cigarettes to electronic cigarettes..."

But as the American Cancer Society has noted,

"(while) e-cigarettes have not been shown to be effective tobacco cessation tools and are not FDA approved, some distributors are marketing them for smoking cessation."

Nice going with the new craptacular project, Dennis. Given that New Hampshire has banned them and that New York is well on its way to doing so and that Vermont isn't likely to continue to allow them, you've certainly seemed to have latched onto another big loser. Perhaps you'd have saved something of what's left of your reputation if you'd just taken some more money from out-of-state racists, misogynists and homophobes and had not climbed aboard the poisonous gravytrain of Big Nicotine.

Anti-Semitic "journalism" continued to be a niche product among many VTCommons contributors throughout 2013 including a tasty bit of Rothschild-Federal Reserve conspiracism late last year that cites as a source a video favorite of the head bangers that congregate at Holocaust denial raves. In an apparent end of year attempt to seize the low ground in foisting anti-Semites into the Vermont discussion of, you know, The Jew, VTCommons has highlighted the work of Robert K. Moore, a noted anti-Semite and writer for the Canadian Holocaust Denial work in progress, Michel Chossudovsky’s Global Research hate site.

"As overseer of the anti-U.S., anti-globalization website GlobalResearch, Chossudovsky has manufactured a long list of eyebrow-raising accusations that often read more like wild-eyed conspiracy theories than serious political discourse: the U.S. had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks ("Of course they knew!"); "Washington's New World Order weapons have the ability to trigger climate change"; the U.S. knew in advance about the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, but kept it to themselves (apparently so they could ride to the rescue of devastated coastal regions); big banking orchestrates the collapse of national economies. Of course, all that talk of banking conspiracies can lead one into some bigoted territory. B'nai Brith Canada has complained to the University of Ottawa about anti-Semitic postings on Chossudovsky's site." Source

You know, the Jews, such complainers. So what's their problem, anyway?

Robert K. Moore, an aficionado of drunk culture, seethes Jew hatred in that uniquely 21st century fashion that talks about The Jew without saying the word Jew, "but we all know who we're talking about" kinda way. You know, Rothschilds, Tri-Lateral Commission, architects of the Federal Reserve, the money masters, blada-blada-blada, sorta like wearing a transparent jockstrap for the huge wood he harbors for world Jewry. He also posts his garbage at the vehemently anti-Semitic website of Pater Meyer's called, oddly, Serendipity.

"I regard Judaism as, among all religions, the least worthy of admiration," Peter Meyer, 2004

Similarly, in 2012 when the secesher brain trust was bursting onto the senator/guv campaign scene they connived on their super-secret campaign listserv where they waxed fondly about their similar feelings about world Jewry. There they'd been charmed by their largest out-of-state contributor who happened to be a regular then at the neo-Nazi Stormfront.org website. Williams had cautioned the head of the ticket, Dennis Steele, about sounding as whacked out on the topic as their VTfuhrer, Thomas Naylor, but with little success.

Sadly, VTCommons house anti-Semite, grande dame Carol "Shit-fer-brains" Moore has drifted from her once primary role as the ardent, incessant Jew hater and segregation proponent at VTCommons and at her blog into merely lamenting her Medicare eligible physical form (target weight: 180 lbs!) that's rendered, according to her, her slinky black leotards a mere figment of her imagined past. Maybe in this moment of self revelation she'll finally come clean about the tale that she tells about "choosing" to live in a minority neighborhood because she's, you know, so-o-o committed to whatever the fuck it is that she's up to at the moment - it's really just a marginal area investment property duplex owned by a Maryland Libertarian Party cohort of hers who no likely feels sorry for her tired ass. Oh, and did she ever find a taker for her role as cook for whatever loser would be willing to hump her ass and play the docile, self loathing male that she advertised for on her blog a year or so ago? Sad, Carol, really sad.

This past year also gave us the duplicitous spectacle of VTCommons hate blog publisher Rob Williams showing his contempt for the public by crowd sourcing the promotion of a mobile Yak BBQ food cart without ever telling the potential suckers that he'd put his yak herd/ranch on the market four or so months earlier. Didn't he think that sort of disclosure, as in like transparency, was necessary for the marks to really make an informed investment decision, huh? Must be making Champlain College proud of Perfesser Williams, no? That's just the sort of sleazy practice that makes it harder for legitimate kickstarters but, hey, WTF? The kids gotta learn. Heh... And as if to show how unconcerned he is about having provided a hate platform for years at VTCommons, from one of its very earliest issues for the likes of UVM's white supremacist professor Robert S. Griffin, convicted felon & racist LoS Board of Directors member Franklin Sanders to today's stable of anti-Semites, Williams proudly points to his role as publisher of the hate blog on his Champlain College bio. Don't go looking for Griffin's white supremacist essay from VTC issue #2 or Rob's own cheerleader-like hummer for Lincoln hater, white supremacist and LewRockwell.com nutter Thomas DiLorenzo in VTC issue #3 since they've been scrubbed. More intellectual transparency from Champlain College's own inhouse anti-Semite, Herr Doktor Rob Williams.

Looks like the Vermont seceshers won't be crowing, "We winned!" any year soon. Rumor has it that they may be lowering the 2014 "achievement" bar to adopt steal a salute (just like they tried to steal the Vermont National Guard's Green Mountain Boys flag) from the French anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying comedienne Dieudonné called "La Quenelle", "a gesture which involves touching the right upper arm with the left hand whilst keeping the right arm pointed downwards," also called the "reverse Nazi salute." I can almost see the 2014 secesher alumni photo being taken in front of the Vermont Statehouse - not quite enough people to make up a full calendar but with the entire group saluting in a manner that points to the ground in both a symbolic gesture acknowledging the passing of the baas, the Dixie singin' Thomas Naylor, and the death of their movement. I'm sure that the French bigot Dieudonné won't mind and might even welcome the appropriation from a companion anti-Semitic organization. Then the tiny group could do a statewide tour of synagogue's and take selfies of their doing the salute in front of such places - it's all the rage among anti-Semites these days.

The Second Vermont Republic: Vermont's own Y2K but with even less impact. 2014 should prove to be even less impressive as Williams (sans Naylor) continues to shake his fist impotently at Vermonters, the state legislators, statewide office holders, the congressional delegation and passing cars. Rumor also has it that Rob "The Champlain College Media Internets Expert" Williams has been doing a makeover/re-boot of his hate blog at VTCommons; it's pretty much the same ol'turgid, conspiratard nonsense (like the Boston bombing was a "false flag" operation) and anti-Semitism that the site is noted for with some of Naylor's vintage, sage/suckest mind farts cut and pasted on because there's nothing like re-worked failure to keep a website on life support. No doubt that the teevees rollout of the fifth season of Duck Dynasty is on the secesher "must watch" list for tonight. I'll keep you posted.

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

Thomas H. Naylor: The Dog-whistler

Wikipedia: Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. [1] [2]

According to Thomas Naylor, he'd been entranced with the vision of a secessionist state of Vermont for more than a score of years. He'd said that in the first dozen or so years that his was a lone voice, and, like much of what he'd like Vermonters to believe, that isn't true. However, it is true that in this period, and likely before, he had associates who were up to their eyeballs in the South Will Rise Again movement. This association would reveal itself when Naylor launched his own movement that he'd call (despite the very real question that there'd ever been a first one) the Second Vermont Republic (SVR).

In putting together his advisory board he included very few Vermonters but instead he packed the group with neo-Confederate ideologues and white supremacists like Franklin Sanders, a convicted felon and a League of the South (LOS) member of LOS's board of directors; the Lincoln hating, Union hating, unions hating, as well as the hater ofthe Constitution's pesky 14th Amendment with its due process clause that applied the Bill of Rights to the states and its citizenship clause and its equal protection clause that was used to dismantle institutional segregation practiced in Southern states, and Big Tobacco whore, Thomas DiLorenzo; the present day South Carolina delegate to the white supremacist Southern National Congress, Kirkpatrick Sale; the former first director of LOS's historical revisionist Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History before founding the "Lincoln loath(ing)" (Time, 2005) Abbeville Institute, so named for the plantation of John C. Calhoun, a mid-19th century slavery and "states rights" (white supremacy dog-whistle), Donald Livingston. There were others including a member of Italy's racist Lega Nord. [3] Naylor's ties to the national secession movement (an oxymoron?) elements that are the most racist, most committed would be restorers of institutional segregation in the states, and most committed to patriarchy and homophobia is indisputable.

Naylor, just like Teabaggers and racists would do when their world caved in on the evening of November 6, wrote another of his essays titled Obamaland: Vision Free, But Very Cool that was intended to demean his better, President Obama.

You see, in Naylor's alternative universe, the president merely strives to be "cool."  Nevermind the conflicts in the Middle East, the fiscal cliff, congressional pissing contests, real terrorist threats against Americans at home and abroad, nah, he's just into a nigga thing about being "cool."

Don't believe it?  Just consider Naylor's racist, dog-whistle close to his essay:

"Above all, what Obama was about was being “cool.” And it worked in spades."

Truly pathetic, even for a self-described scholar and Dixie singer like Naylor.

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

Tomorrow's the Day

Radical America bashing will be the theme for the day, interspersed with outlandish claims that this group of angry outsiders, each of whom is more unaccomplished, inexperienced and incompetent at governing than the next, is the only collection of malcontents who can properly lead Vermonters into a secessionist future. Problem is, Vermonters aren't interested in going there, and especially not with these clowns.

Never mind that they've lied to Vermonters repeatedly about the real support for their group, which they've claimed to be as much as 18%, when in fact more than 99.24% of Vermonters voted for someone other than their angry, Che Guervara embracing, middle finger waving gubernatorial candidate, Connecticut native Dennis Steele. Never mind that during their 2010 campaign they hid from Vermonters some of their beliefs and intentions. For example, Senator Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner would have Vermont join the South and the Mountain West in becoming a right to work state, thus undermining union effectiveness, and has said so on one of those out-of-state candidate's position sites that he so fond of. Wagner's ravings include this conspiratorial beaut:

"4. Do you know what Agenda 21/Sustainable Development and the Communitarian agenda is? Do you support it? Why or why not?"
"I consider it one of the gravest threats to our livelihoods and freedoms so far this Century, and I am fighting it tooth and nail in Vermont. There is a LOT of money flowing into tiny Vermont to support Agenda 21, going into ‘programs’ to catalog, file, stamp, assess and control Vermont’s agriculture…"

"The battle continues. That’s what I think of Agenda 21."

Wagner's friend, the virulent anti-Semite, Dennis Morrisseau, had this to say when he thought Vermonters wouldn't be gaining access to the super-secret secesher Free Vermont listserv where the seceshers chatted about their various power fantasies and conspiracy theories:

“(I)f we provoke the T(eacher)'s Unions too early in our campaign they will be a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS.....AND A VERY BIG BLOCKING FORCE. This is one of the few places where i might want us to hold our punches until later...”

Free Vermont listserv, December 14, 2009

For those who don't know, this blog got started by exposing the Second Vermont Republic and its leadership's strong ties to the racist League of the South. As recently as last year the Vermont Commons publisher and former SVR co-chair, Rob Williams, contributed an essay to a book edited by a founder of the League of the South; SVR's founder, Thomas H. Naylor, made sounds of disapproval of the racism at LoS that had been apparent to everyone but him up to that point but he did not formally sever ties with LoS, even when LoS's president, Michael Hill, openly declared his and the League's blatant formalization of its racism this past spring. A presenter at tomorrow's sideshow will be Kirkpatrick Sale, a South Carolina delegate to the Southern National Congress, a group made up of many League of the South members like its vice-chairman, Louisiana LoS chairman Mark A. Thomey. Good to see that the racist elements from the South are to be so ably represented by Sale. It should dovetail nicely with the racist proposal that Sale, Naylor and two other old white guys will seek to have the Vermonters present at their dog and pony show formally adopt as an element of yet another of their incessant manifestos and/or declarations. More on that tomorrow.

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

Second Vermont Republic Honcho Thomas H. Naylor Issues a "Call For Action" to the Southern Poverty Law Center

Or as the Dixie singin' Thomas H. Naylor, one of the best known anti-Semitic leaders of the white secessionist movement calls it,
the "Southern Policy Law Center":

"Since 1971 the Southern Policy Law Center (SPLC) has fought racism and hate crimes in America..."

"Forty years later the SPLC has evolved into the cash cow of the civil rights movement and behaves as though it were the left-wing equivalent of the John Birch Society..."

"Today anyone with whom the SPLC happens to disagree is assumed to be either a racist or guilty of a hate crime."

- from Naylor's essay in the July 13-15 weekend edition at the anti-Semitic website CounterPunch

Now, Naylor has been spouting inane, useless crap for years but I think his comparison of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that has litigated at no charge in civil rights cases, for which it receives no part of any of the millions that have been awarded, for decades to a hateful Patriot organization, not so dissimilar to Naylor's own Second Vermont Republic, the John Birch Society, is at the very least laughable.

Naylor's SVR and the JBS are much more similar than would first appear; Naylor runs his group in much the same iron-fisted manner that Robert W. Welch Jr. ran the JBS when he was alive; Naylor and Welch both have railed incessantly against the U.S. government by invoking constitutional nonsense; much like Welch's JBS, Naylor has called for the removal of a litany of government elected and appointed officials for no other reason than they are not adherents to his screwy secesher dictums and beliefs. In short, Thomas H. Naylor and his SVR are the moral equivalent of the constitutionally deranged John Birch Society and his comparison to a reputable, community oriented, civil rights advocacy group like the SPLC is intellectually dishonest and specious. (Full disclosure: Naylor's supporters have claimed that I am a SPLC operative, as though a little know outside of Vermont blog could do better to expose Naylor and his bigoted troupe than merely writing in the pages of the much, much better known and trafficked SPLC Intelligence Report. Ha!)

Naylor's claim that a disagreement with the SPLC leads to the assumption that one is "a racist or guilty of a hate crime" is an absurd slur of an order that Naylor customarily makes about the vast majority of Vermonters .

In Naylor's piece at the anti-Semitic website CounterPunch he maligns the Vermont National Guard, the President, all of Vermont's congressional delegation with a double-dose for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who'd turned down Naylor's entreaties years ago to run as his handpicked secesher gubernatorial candidate (Tommy Boy never forgives a snub), Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of Defense, the CIA Director, all of Wall Street and "Corporate America", as well as every military academy and the R.O.T.C. He concludes by saying,

"Lastly, the SPLC could initiate impeachment proceedings against some of our fearless leaders."

Never mind that the SPLC is constitutionally precluded from initiating impeachment proceedings since that isn't what really's got the hair across Naylor's ass.

You see, last month the SPLC revealed more on the blatant racism of Naylor's longtime asshole buddy, Michael Hill, founder and baas of the League of the South from this recent racist essay of his with much of the truly inane ecclesiastic junk redacted to a few choice quotes:

"Michael Hill, we hardly knew ye.

"Sure, we remember how, as early as 2000, you already were denigrating your black former students at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala., to your friends, mocking their “humorous” names and offering up sensitive jokes like this one: “A quote from a recent affirmative action hire: ‘Yesta-day I could not spell secretary.’ Today I is one.’” Ha! We know all about your 2007 essay, aimed at members of the League of the South hate group you started in 1994, saying that they should quit being afraid of being called “racist” and other, as you put it, “meaningless epithets.”

"But, heck, we were still thinking you were just a garden-variety bigot, a rude jerk who’s too dumb to keep his diarrhea-spouting mouth shut."

"But now here you come, Mike, and make it all plain for us. We just read the essay you published Tuesday, and we see you’re finally displaying the courage of your convictions. You’re an intellectual, and you’ve got an entire system of thought that explains the failings of black people. By gum, you’re not afraid to tell it like it is!"

"White people are endowed with a “God-ordained superiority.” Whites of “honor, genius and principle” left us with a “glorious heritage,” while black people “have never created anything approximating a civilization.” It’s a “monumental lie” that all men are created equal. The very word “racism” was “coined by the Communists.” Slavery was “successfully defended from a Biblical standpoint” until “the institution’s legitimacy was systematically undermined in the name of ‘equality’ and misappropriated ‘Christian ethics’” by the Civil War and all that followed. Emancipating the slaves was “a disaster for whites and blacks alike.” “[I]nstead of whites owing black reparations for slavery and its alleged attendant ills … blacks in reality owe white America (especially the South) a debt that likely will be neither acknowledged nor paid.” After all, slaves had “cradle to grave security.”

"All great points, Mike! We can see how you were once a college professor."

"And then there’s your cool take on Reconstruction. “During the period from 1865-77, whites in the South had seen enough of Negro rule to understand that their (i.e., white) civilization would perish should blacks be given the vote and thus be permitted to control the political system. … Therefore, postbellum Southern blacks were disenfranchised and ‘Jim Crow’ law resulted in a segregated South (today, ‘Jim Crow’ has been replaced by what might be called ‘Jim Snow’ policies that discriminate against whites).” And, as you point out, freed blacks suffered from problems like “family disintegration.” Good point, no matter what those Yankee multiculturalists claim about slavery really tearing apart black families."

SOURCE

Michael Hill's racism has been a well known fact since the 90s but that didn't prevent Naylor and his then co-chair at SVR, Rob Williams, from hopping into the sack with this dirt bag nearly ten years ago and using similarly racist LoS board members as advisory board members to SVR.

Naylor's flagrantly defensive attack on the SPLC a month after they'd exposed Hill's most recent racist crap should be an embarrassment to every Vermont secesher but don't look for that. The "new" Vermont secesher leaders like Juliet Buck and Jennifer Stella are too busy attacking their Vermont neighbors and churning out phony "medical" garbage to pay much attention to the continuing racist associations and ball carrying of their Great White Father, Thomas H. Naylor. No doubt Buck and Stella have been inspired by Naylor's hateful, noxious attacks and the toadying over the years by Williams. There's very little surprise then that Naylor's, Williams', Buck's, 2010 secesher gubernatorial candidate Dennis Steele's whacky worldview, as well as those of other ardent Vermont seceshers, coincides with that of those at the new League of the South website "Get Us Off of the U.S.S. Titanic.". Will someone please tell these idiots that there's never been a time in all of history when it didn't seem as though the world might be going to hell in some kind of a Titanic hand basket?

Naylor's greasy form of racism was exquisitely dissected here more than five years ago.

Yesterday, the racialist ideologue, "President" Michael Hill, wrote at the Southern Nationalist Network a similarly blatant racist essay, doubling down on his kith-and-kin horse shit:

"The League of the South wants to see a South where our borders are sealed against massive immigration; a South where the interests of the Southern people (read: White folks) are protected from the ravages of multiculturalism and so-called diversity; a South where a prosperous, self-confident, and distinct people—our people–can welcome into its ranks by its own choice and on its own terms productive and sympathetic immigrants; a South that will be a beacon to those nations that wish to defend a traditional way of life against the purveyors of abstract ideologies and a new world order..."

Ah, a racist slimeball laying down terms for people willing to sign on to second class status in a new slaver society. Let me know how many takers you get for that one, Mikey.

Oh, and for extra fun credit, try this Google search:
racist vermont secessionists

"Southern Policy Law Center" - what a moron. Some loving family member needs to get this aging, hateful, idiotic fool to cap his famed green felt tipped pens before he loses what little remains of his respectability. Oh, wait, too late.

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

It Seems That Another League of the South Sycophant Is Miffed With This Blog

In a rather overwrought post that he titled "PC hit squad attacks The Ohio Republic" the blog's author, Harold Thomas, gets his panties in a knot over a change that I recently made in my Links column. I wrote here:

"On a more personally disappointing note, I've moving the Ohio Republic blog to the same column as Wagner's and Tuggle's, not so much because its author, Harold Thomas, espouses the sort of virulent hatred that oozes from sites like Wagner's, Tuggle's and, of course, Naylor's, but because of the open support he offers Tuggle's vile LOS website.

From that rather direct statement, that Harold is a supporter of much of what goes on in the LOS and thus enables the white supremacist League of the South blog called Rebellion, Thomas contorts reason to synthesize several untrue representations of my positions, opinions and "real agenda." Harold even goes so far as to fetch from the right-wing toolbox of baseless charges that are de rigueur for attacks by a paleoconservative (as he chooses to identify himself) that is the very essence of an allegation intended to eliminate all question as to who is right in a discussion while at the same time donning the mantle of supposed victimhood. Funny but I thought Harold was smart enough to know that use of the term is itself an attempt at to use political correctness and that is why most people with any sense have long ago stopped using it. Here's a definition of political correctness that would seem to leave me out. I've been accused of a lot but never as being a "whining pussy." I leave that to libertarians.

It's much like the old joke, "Libertarians don't want the government telling you what to do; that's what libertarians are there to do."

Cognitive dissonance is often a feature of Harold's posts on this, that and every other friggin' thing under the sun. The post in which he complains about his proper placement among enablers of white supremacism contains this gem:

"The League of the South really is a controversial organization, and does include some avowed white supremacists among its leadership. However, the League does not openly espouse racism in its policy statements..."

Earth to Harold: LOS and Rebellion regularly serve up the same repast of race-baiting gruel, including twisted rationales for race separation. What part of the "espous(al of) racism in its policy statements" don't you get?

Harold's sympathies are not so far removed from the "dog-whistle racism" of Mike Tuggle as he might have us believe. Two years ago today, when Harold mistakenly believed that the white supremacist blog Rebellion was shutting down, he wrote this love letter farewell to an old friend that included one of the premier racist touchstones of the 19th and 20th centuries, "Dixie":

MONDAY, MARCH 15, 2010.

Farewell to an old friend
"Longtime readers of The Ohio Republic know that one of my favorite sources of information was the blog Rebellion. I was notified last week that it had ceased publication. It was unquestionably a Southern blog, with its continuing guerrilla war against the Southern Poverty Law Center and its peculiar attitude toward Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We made a gentlemen's agreement to disagree over the latter issue. A unique feature in recent months was the "Southern music break."

"However, Rebellion contained interesting news and comment about federal follies and secessionism that was not readily available elsewhere – so they were the largest single recipient of virtual buckeyes* from The Ohio Republic. Rebellion was more than a weblog – it was a forum, with some of the most interesting and spirited discussion to appear anywhere in the blogosphere. For many Southrons and this writer, it will be sorely missed."

"Its blogger, Mike Tuggle ("Old Rebel") will remain active, concentrating on growing his organization and working on its quarterly newspaper, Free Magnolia."

"We'll send it off by striking up the band with a rendition of an old Ohio show tune by Daniel Emmett, originally known as In Dixie's Land."

Show tune? "Gentlemen's agreement?" Really???

For any of readers of this blog who may be unfamiliar with the "In Dixie's Land" history, it's straight out of our country's racist past. It was a New York "show tune" long before Ohioans claimed this racist crap as their own. The "show tune" writer that Harold refers to, Daniel Emmett, is the "founder of the first troupe of the blackface minstrel tradition" who wrote extensively for and performed with Bryant's Minstrel's, a troupe that was a hit with both Northern and Southern racists in that troubled time before, during and after the Civil War, also known as the War to Preserve Slavery. Even Emmett, who was reknown for his black-face caricatures of African-Americans (or "slaves" as they were then known) complained that "If I had known to what use they [Southerners] were going to put my song, I will be damned if I'd have written it."

Oh, and Harold, I never "advised" you of shit, no more than you, say, advised me of your new book (I hope you do better than Thomas H. Naylor's who usually ranks in the umpteenth million percentile). I just made the Links change along with a few others in a housekeeping post and you went batshit crazy over it.

I did notice in your Comments in that "whiny" post of yours that you're getting support from an anti-Semitic proponent of "homogeneous communities" (read: "segregated"), as well as one who has a particularly odious castration fantasy, Carol Moore. Figures. No doubt Carol considers you to be a sufficiently neutered libertarian that she now deigns to comment at you blog despite your having once said,

"I also agree with you about Carol Moore, and yes, I have learned to handle her with caution. She has rather heavily colored a couple of comments about me with her worldview, which I do not share."

[and]

"I think Carol Moore's sunspot theory is loony."

Harold engages in "gentlemen's agreements," attracts "loony" bigots to his blog, lauds racist tropes like minstrel shows and hides behind the shield of supposed "political correctness attacks" of others because he can't quite come to terms with his own internal bigotry.

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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.