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

Cascadia? Nuts!

Years ago secession guru, anti-Semite and a co-founder of the Second Vermont Republic, Kirkpatrick Sale, made the surprising admission that a good many of the secessionist organizations listed at his Middlebury Institute (much to Middlebury VT's chagrin) were little more than websites comprised of only a few or one member. While he described his own group as an "umbrella" organization, it too was little more than a website maintained by another anti-Semite like Sale called Carol Moore.

Sure, the now dead baas of SVR, the Dixie singin' Thomas Naylor was also a member of MI but that was pretty much it. The MI organized and sponsored a couple or three poorly attended (primarily by racists from the League of the South, the Alaska Independence Party and the Hawaiian independence movement) conferences, mostly in the Deep South, that were little more than gatherings of the same small group of committed racists and anti-Semitic secesher assholes - Michael Hill, Donald Livingston, Rob Williams, Naylor, Sale, the Dexters, ad nauseum. Stunts, really, designed to get some AP and FOX News coverage and accomplished little more. Except for the overtly racist LoS, they've stopped even doing that. All the "big plans" - Town Meeting articles, constitutional conventions, candidates standing for elective office - have come to naught, as well as to an end.

Recently the San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece titled "Cascadia Secession Apparently Not As Easy As It Sounds" on the Left Coast secesher group Cascadia Now! After a word salad interview of seemingly one of its few members, Brandon Letsinger, the Chronicle lays bare the phoniness of the group. (Note: The group claims thousands of members but offers no proof, much as Naylor once claimed that more than 60,000 Vermont voters supported secession but when the time came to vote far less than 1% of Vermont's registered voters supported the secesher gubernatorial candidate, a number comparable to the average of spoilt ballots in an election.)

Then the Chronicle's Caille Millner got down to it:

"When it came to the question of how this republic might come about, however, Letsinger was more circumspect. He thinks politics are “irrelevant, negative, and toxic.” Cascadia, he emphasized, is about “an identity” to connect the region’s 15 million people."

"To this end, Cascadia Now! has a soccer team (they want to play Quebec), a poetry festival, and a Scouting Association. They have their own beer, “Cascadian dark ale,” made with hops from the region."

"The crowd seemed pleased. Cascadia sounded like great fun until the next speaker, Joshua Clover, took the podium."

"Clover is a 52-year-old UC Davis literature professor who specializes in political economy. He came prepared with his own PowerPoint slides; he wanted to tell the crowd about the history of secession movements in the 20th century. (I told you Kadist was sly.)"

"Cheerfully, Clover talked about how previous breakaway movements around the world had led to battles, purges, invasions and sieges."

"As the bodies stacked up, I could feel the energy in the room shift into discomfort."

"What had happened to the hops? Where had the positive identity gone?"

"As for freedom from the shackles of the empire, well, Clover didn’t think Cascadia would have that, either — not in today’s global market. 'It’s unclear what regionalism could mean unless a place is prepared to, say, make its own refrigerators.'"

"Right now, Clover said in a buoyant voice, all of the world’s refrigerators are made in China."

"Clover wasn’t done yet. He layered a demographic map of the United States over that of Cascadia. Look at the dots, he urged us. Cascadia is 'a peculiarly non-diverse region with the exception of some native peoples for whom previous secessions have proven deadly.'"

"Cascadia, he said, represented 'demographic anti-blackness.'"

"It took the audience a few moments to come up with questions after Clover sat down."

"But his gimlet-eyed view of Cascadia’s Happy Valley had an unexpected benefit: Some audience members discovered that they had a few doubts about this whole secession thing."

"An audience member asked Letsinger about the steps that Cascadia had taken to reach out to the region’s indigenous people. Letsinger said that they had engaged in outreach, and that some of the tribes had “similar values” about environmentalism and activism. Cascadia’s values, he added, were attractive enough that others would come to them."

"But the question persisted, and Letsinger got annoyed: 'I’ve heard this, the idea that this movement is not diverse enough so you need to reach out to these people. We see that as a colonization of our values.'"

"The idea that a suggestion to reach out to historically oppressed people would cause the Cascadia movement such suffering! It was so dazzling, so bizarre, that I almost missed the next question."

"'Cascadia seems more like a brand, like a shared narrative fantasy,' said an audience member. She wanted to know, essentially, what the plan was to make the idea more concrete."

"Unfortunately, making Cascadia concrete would require, well, politics. Letsinger wanted to keep talking about bioregionalism, about creating a brand that was “open source,” about how Cascadia Now! makes all of its own merchandise."

"I felt the evening’s vision of freedom and positivity ebbing quickly away, and I felt so bad for Letsinger that I didn’t even ask him to explain his statement about colonization. Instead I asked him about how Cascadia could avoid the violence that had plagued so many other breakaway movements throughout time."

"'It’s a good question,' he said, and admitted that violence would be a breaking point for him personally."

"He wanted a model more like Scotland, where the voters had had a choice. But the voters in Scotland voted not to secede, and that election had a degree of seriousness that I hadn’t gotten from this discussion. I walked out of Kadist with new questions, like:"

"Does Cascadia really want to secede? Or do they just want a good beer?"

Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner

Oddly enough, early SVR member and longtime syncophant, Peter Buknatski a.k.a. "Petey Sweety," was a registered at the Vermont Secretary of State's website as an owner of Second Vermont Republic Beer, Ale and Brewing or some such nonsense which has likewise come to naught. Little wonder then that Williams got some serious wood over the alcoholic aspect to the article in his own post at his hate blog (Note: I do not link to Williams' hate site; it's easily found if you have to.)

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

Kirkpatrick Sale's Gaff(e)

Updated below on 9.29.10

"The Godfather" of the secession movement, such as it is, and head of the Middlebury Institute "think tank," Kirkpatrick Sale, has a years long history of allying with the white supremacist group, League of the South [1] . He runs a tight crew and is not one to take independence streaks lightly, at least not from those that he sees as his minions.

Here's a priceless divulgence that's come from The Source wherein not only does Sale crap all over a Canadian secessionist counterpart, Sebastian Ronin, who's something of a Fredo type character from what I've been able to find, he also then takes a nasty swipe at Harold Thomas' Ohio Republic blog. Harold's essentially a one-man band who's like a gerbil in a wheel, spitting out worthless posts about secession-is-just-around-the-corner almost daily, which is a helluva lot more than "Don" Sale can say. Otherwise, Harold's a decent, well-meaning sort who doesn't deserve such contempt from an equally ineffectual blowhard like Sale.

Sale was responding to an inquiry regarding Ronin's idea to gather "everybody together under a single umbrella" organization.

What's so telling in all of this backstabbing by Sale is what Sale is saying about the real state of the secession movement in this communication from him to his fellow flounderers:

"There have been three North American Secessionist Congresses (NOT conference - a congress implies delegates from real organizations, which is what we strove for) under the auspices of the Middlebury Institute. I decided not to have a fourth this year since I wanted to gauge the movement and find out which groups were real and active and which were only websites and individual toys.

Ronin stepped in last year and proclaimed this 2019(sic) congress, without consulting me or as far as I can see anyone else. He has no real organization, and the experience Thomas (Naylor) and I had with him when he spoke badly at the congress in New Hampshire suggests that he's a loose cannon and an uncollegial type out for his own self-hype.

I would suggest that we have nothing to do with his call for a congress--and indeed I see no sign of any real group supporting him. He has one ally in Ohio, but that's another website individual, not a real secessionist organization.

If I see signs of a revival of secessionist activity, by real groups that are active in recruiting and mobilizing, I will certainly call another congress. At the moment I don't judge the activity sufficient to warrant that, and I think it would be a mistake to waste any energy on Ronin's self-aggrandizing scheme.

That's my opinion.

Regards,
Kirkpatrick

Kirkpatrick Sale
Director, Middlebury Institute
MiddleburyInstitute.org
JKELAS@aol.com"

Three months later Sale published a more rosy assessment of secession at that weird Lew Rockwell website, but his candor in the communication above really says it all. Funny thing though is that in the Lew Rockwell piece Sale seems to like what one-man websites are doing - you know, like Thomas Naylor's one-man website and "think tank," Second Vermont Republic. Perhaps Sebastion Ronin and Harold Thomas just haven't been obsequious enough for Sale's liking.

In all probability Rob Williams' knew of Sale's self-important message, it did not make it into "Vermont Commons" Fall edition. Of course that shouldn't be surprising since truth isn't the underlying mission of a propaganda outlet like VTCommons. Instead, its ever-present "secession is just over the horizon" message was repeatedly spat out again and again in the VTCommons Fall 2010 edition.

Update: 9.29.10



Oh dear, Arnold, er Rob. I've touched a nerve, no,? You're that desperate? Spelling error? That's all you got? All you have with that is a hint of my past life. Fishing is what I still do and I think you know I've gotten a nice haul. Oddly, Herr Döktor, you even lack the sense to know that when applied to a movement political whore like Sale, the definition is of the Kinsley sort, as in,

"A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."

You see, Rob, here in the blogosphere, when someone who is himself prone to spelling errors plays "gotcha" at that level, and scuttles out from their self-imposed walk-away to play that card and nothing else, it's a given that they've got nothing else. The edit correction to the title should give you something diversionary to talk about at the next circle jerk, er, campaign strategy session.

No, the crap you published by Sale is nothing more than the same secession-is-just-over-the-cliff stuff you've been peddling for years and of the sort he posted to the other crazies at Lew Rockwell that I mentioned. Nothing at your journal by him that corresponded to what I posted, so there was no reason to link to it. But you keep doing that ineffectual proganda thing of yours and let's just see how many votes short of 60,000 Naylor "extrapolated" that translates into.

Interesting though that you didn't link to my post so that the rest of the Sweathogs could read what I said for themselves. Oh, well. With a movement organization that couldn't fill a small classroom, I guess it's important for you to keep them from running from the building should they find out that you've been deceiving them.

I'm glad that you, Matt and the rest of Naylor's flying monkeys still have time, despite the weighty demands of campaigning, to stop by and read this blog. You might want to continue with that since there is so much more to come.