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.

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

"Loathing Lincoln"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dear 'Baghdad Rob' ..."

(Recently, Rob Williams, the Vermont secessionist leader, groupie and America hater, had a hissy fit over one or more of my posts.  I'm not linking to his screed because it's, well, embarrassing to him and it might seem like I was kicking him when he's down lower than he has ever been since the Vermont secesher movement began 10 years ago this month [an anniversary that I can't find him noting somewhere, anywhere, in his ongoing, incessesant, ineffectual promotion of his neo-Confederate cause]).

I've taken to calling Vermont secessionist, Rob Williams, "Baghdad Rob" because he shares so many of the unhinged qualities of the former Iraqi Propaganda Ministry mouthpiece during the outset of the war in Iraq, Baghdad Bob.

Like Baghdad Bob, "Baghdad Rob" has little to no sense of irony.  Baghdad Bob announced to the world press that Americans were commiting mass suicide at the gates of Baghdad while in the the background of the camera shot of Bob's announcement, American tanks were rolling through the Baghdad city square. Not unlike Baghdad Bob, "Baghdad Rob" would like to sell his independence hokum to a group larger than his (and I'll use Second Vermont Republic co-founder Ian Baldwin's salient comment about the size of the Vermont secesher group) "small community" of secesher hoopleheads like Dennis "Hit List" Morrisseau, Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner, Jim Hogue (an unconvincing Revolutionary War reënactor), Gary Flomenhoft (promoter of a seditious plot to secretly reconstitute an unelected group to restore the long disband Council of Censors, a plot that came to a screeching halt when I exposed it on this blog here during their failed 2010 election debacle), Gaelan Brown (a secesher "expert" on UFO's, chemtrails and the US military "plot" to obtain secret alien technology in exchange for resources on the dark side of the moon), Vermont Commons web editor and anti-Vermont National Guard sham activist, Juliet Buck, and Matt Cropp (whose efforts to install secessionists or himself in a variety of public and non-profit offices has been a complete and more than utter failure).  Most, if not all of these low achievers, declared their "provisional capitol" to be a B&B in Hancock, VT after their dismal showing in the 2010 election cycle, which was first only to their even more miserable showing in the 2012 election cycle.

Other than the dead guy and your Brooklyn flack, have I left someone out, Rob?

In a juvenile post that employed thinly veiled homophobia and a scatological reference, "Baghdad Rob" launched into tirade about his criticisms of this blog based on his unbridled hatred for blogs that (1) write the truth, (2) don't drink the secesher Kool-Aid and (3) don't accept direction from a media master like "Baghdad Rob," who drove his print journal into a financial ditch and then a year and a half later blamed Tropical Storm Irene and not his own shortcomings, and who is left with a cheesy blog that is little more than a nest of conspiracy theorists (Rob's a 9/11 Truther) whose latest includes a despicable, parent and child hating Sandy Hook Truther; the usual anti-Vermont National Guard hate rhetoric in pursuit of fixing a bad personal property gamble; delusionist, anti all of Vermont's statewide and legislative elected representatives; fake, uncredentialed "journalists" like William Boardman and Christopher Ketcham who routinely fail to disclose their personal, extremist agendas; as well as anti-Semites, segregationists, misogynists, racists and homophobes.

"Baghdad Rob's" irony meter must have been on mute when he wrote this:

"Or, haters (a k.a. "Thomas Rowley"), you can just keep on keeping on with hating on the Vermont independence crowd. Anonymously. With no transparency or accountability for your words. It is easier that way, of course. And safer. To be anonymous. In the closet. Hidden."

That's rich. That's coming, Baghdad Bob-like, from the guy who seemed to be in charge of the 2009-2010 super secret secesher Free Vermont Listserv, populated by candidates and, um, co-conspirators in the effort to hide from Vermont's electorate all that the Vermont secesher candidates intended to do if elected to office. They talked freely when they thought no one was listening, yet when I exposed their nonsense on October 3, 2010 they chose to shutdown their listserv on October 4 and I don't believe that they've ever fessed up to their activities there to date.  So much for transparency, eh, Rob? Naturally, their Great White Godfather, Thomas H. Naylor, excused their activities on the listserv as being thought to be private and that they were merely "Internet cowboys," although I've yet to hear a peep from their blowhard leader, "Baghdad Rob."  Wassup with that?  And what exactly does "Baghdad Rob" mean by "safer?"  Of course, it's not like Vermont secesher leaders, neo-Confederates, Vermont Commons'anti-Semitic bloggers and their ilk haven't haven't threatened  perceived opponents in the past, is it, Rob?

"Baghdad Rob" oversaw conversations for more than a year on the listserv amongst racists, conspiracist nutters, economic whack jobs, immigrant haters, homeless haters, women haters, lesbian haters, including his own posts about the "Israeli Mafia" and about his having bragged that he'd,

"spent 4 years defusing the SVR/(racist)LOS (not so) nonsense and it is finally done, even in the blogosphere."

Yet he never tried to shutdown the extremists.  So how'd that work out for you, "Baghdad Rob?"  Didn't your "Independence Party," as you like for one day in 2010 called it, lose every friggin' race it entered?

And I'm not even going to drag up his "Don't Ask, Don't Care" policy that he's maintained for his hategroup allies since February of 2007.  Hell, he's even continued his association with hategroup League of the South bigwig, Donald Livingston, by contributing to his neo-Confederate throwaway collection of essays as recently as 2011.

In his deranged post "Baghdad Rob" called me out (again!) with his not so vaguely homophobic,

"Your call. We're here when you are ready to come out of the closet."

Ya see, Rob, I don't meet in bars (as you've previously suggested) with racists, homophobes, misogynists, Jew haters or their persistent allies, like you.

Unlike you, "Baghdad Rob," I've never, ever sat down with convicted felons, the neo-Confederate, racist, hate group, League of the South board directors, anti-Semites, the virulently anti-gay and led by neo-Confederate, hate group members, Christian Exodus.  Ya see, hate insinuates itself into many of "Baghdad Rob's" willing associations, so much so that he sees it in everyone else, especially those who, like me, find his chosen, hate enabling, out of state friends to be so repugnant.

Perhaps this is the reason that, according to published reports, Williams' wife "does not agree with secessionism."

"Baghdad Rob" has never responded to my earlier suggestions as to how we might mend fences and engage by his first renouncing the extremists he so willingly embraces.  Perhaps, since his movement is so off-the-rails, he may be willing now to publicly cull his nest of hateful bloggers and his still active association with national neo-Confederate and hate group principals, as an opening act of good faith.

In the meantime, warmest regards Rob,
Rowley


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

Thomas H. Naylor: The Extreme Makeover Begins

When I saw last week in the Seven Days political blog, Off Message: Vermont Politics & News, the piece on the passing of secessionist

Thomas H. Naylor from Vermont's political scene, a scene that he'd had virtually no impact on whether the subject was office holders, public policy or, frankly, being a politically relevant "mover and shaker." His moving and shaking consisted of endlessly repetitive essays that he published at his own website, as well as at a number of other anti-Semitic and racist websites, and an ever evolving series of plots and schemes that usually consisted of a half dozen to a score of similarly addled secesher cohorts in costume of some sort. Naylor's own personal favorite was a green blazer with a Vermont National Guard battle flag pin that he'd purloined for use as his own Second Vermont Republic standard, all topped by his affected Quaker Oats guy hairdo. When he was feeling particularly frisky, in a Gilbert & Sullivan kind of way, he'd top off his costume, over the shoulders, with a full-sized, regimental Vermont National Guard battle flag. Unfortunately, the 7Days piece had the whiff of tribute about it, right down to the secesher book plug for the source, Vermont Commons blog publisher, primary Naylor reputation and secesher activist fluffer, and likely heir apparent to the throne of the "emerging" principality of Vermont or whatever these assholes intend to call their Empire next, Rob Williams.

The tone of the 7Days piece, right down to the journalistically unusual headline, "R.I.P. Thomas Naylor," prompted Naylor's groupies, running the gamut from sciolistic to snarling partisans, who were already desperately trying to burnish the Thomas Naylor image, to wax apoplectic when commenters at the blog weren't, in their estimaton, sufficiently mournful or barfing up praise for possibly one of the most mean-spirited and hateful individuals in Vermont, their hero Thomas Naylor. In a post that did a far better job of summing up the life of Thomas Naylor and his impact on Vermont politics at a different political blog, Green Mountain Daily, right down to the lump of coal that Naylor's conduct here in Vermont has so richly earned, publisher jvwalt wrote:

(A lump of coal for) "(t)he late Thomas Naylor of the secessionist group Second Vermont Republic, for leaving a legacy of lies and bitterness behind him. Some may say it's unkind to speak ill of

the recently deceased; my view is that we should speak plainly of their lives for good and ill. And in Naylor's case, primarily ill."

"When Naylor first formed SVR, he attracted a variety of Vermonters from across the political spectrum, including quite a few leftists who were disgusted with the Bush war on terror. Turned out that he had allied himself with some southern neo-Confederate types, and had some very questionable views on the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. And when confronted about his views and associations by blogger "Thomas Rowley" and front-pagers here at Green Mountain Daily, he reacted with angry denials and furious counterattacks, and an attempt to undermine the career of at least one of his critics."

"And in the process, he made it clear that he held some pretty noxious views. Afterward, a lot of his associates broke ties with him and SVR. The group continued to sputter on, but it ceased to be a meaningful force in Vermont politics. And in the immortal words of Louis Armstrong:"

"When you're lyin' six feet deep,
no more fried chicken will you eat,
I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you."

I could not have said it better. Plans are underway over at Vermont Commons for remembrances about Naylor, in what'll likely be an effort to gloss over his many negative qualities and to commence a canonization process. I intend to speak truth to that effort. Yesterday I received an email from a prominent neo-Confederate researcher who wrote,

"(Naylor) had lived a long time in Virginia and in (the) community in which he had lived for years (he) search(ed) for a white fantasy republic in a strange land. (Naylor) fled Virginia to flee African Americans and Vermont was to be his white refuge."

"He descended into madness."

So true. Vermonters are about to witness a small, perfect storm of the false consensus effect as the minuscule remains of the Vermont secesher movement whip themselves into a wailing frenzy over their now quite dead baas.

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

A Review: Rob's Cry-Baby Letter to Seven Days and His Contribution to a Secessionist Collection of Essays About Their Alternate Historical Universe

Recently Rob Williams, a journalist poseur, wrote a scathing letter to the editor to Seven Days (fourth letter down) claiming that,

"For years... [he claims that he has been the victim of] ad hominem slander... [being] accus[ed]... of “racism” (for talking with other independence-minded groups of different political stripes), “anti-Semitism,” (for criticizing the Israeli government’s harsh treatment of Palestinians and D.C.’s powerful pro-Israel lobby) and “neo-Confederate-ism” (for pointing out that Abraham Lincoln used the Civil War to radically reinvent the U.S. Constitution by centralizing federal power at the expense of individual states — Vermont included)."

Actually, Williams is a dyed-in-the-wool neo-Confederate because of his ongoing neo-Confederate four-way with the likes of neo-Confederates Donald Livingston, Thomas DiLorenzo, Kirkpatrick Sale and the baas of the Second Vermont Republic, its Dixie singin' "scholar," the Magnolia Vermonter, Thomas Naylor. Additionally, he's just contributed to a soon-to-be neo-Confederate bible, "Rethinking the American Union for the 21st Century," (already steeply discounted despite being more than a month from its October 31 release date) along with fellow neo-Confederates like the book's editor, Donald Livingston, contributors DiLorenzo, Kirkpatrick Sale and other cranks that are normally found palling around at Livingston's neo-Confederate "think tank," the Abbeville Institute. (NOTE: Secesher "scholars" all seem to need to call some spare room in their home a "think tank"; "think" Thomas Naylor's Second Vermont Republic "think tank"; Kirkpatrick Sale's Middlebury Institute "think tank.")

In 2009 The Chronicle for Higher Education had an excellent profile of Livingston and his Abbeville Institute (read it, it's well worth the time) here.

"(Livingston) started the Abbeville Institute, named after the South Carolina birthplace of John C. Calhoun, seventh vice president of the United States and a forceful advocate of slavery and states' rights. The institute now has 64 associated scholars from various colleges and disciplines. They gather to discuss topics about the South that they feel are misrepresented in today's classrooms. Feeling a chilly reception to its ideas—officials of the Southern Poverty Law Center say its work borders on white supremacy—the group has kept a low profile. Mr. Livingston's own (Emory philosophy) department chair, as well as a number of Emory history professors, say they have never heard of it."

The Chronicle's piece also says of the Abbeville Institute's "scholarly" work,

"(O)utsiders who have heard of Abbeville (Institute) tend not to like what they hear. One historian, whose research includes the cultural history of racism and white supremacy in the United States, and who asked for anonymity to avoid becoming a target of "Southern identity groups," says the lectures he has listened to on the Abbeville Web site (http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org) are dominated by racialism and are "ideological, through and through." There is the condemnation from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group. In 2005, Time magazine pegged Abbeville as a group of "Lincoln loathers."

SPLC had this here in 2004 on Donaldson's basement, er, "think tank":

"(T)he Abbeville Institute but located in Georgia, is led by former LOS board member Donald Livingston, an Emory philosophy professor. Its Web site describes it as devoted to the "Southern tradition," including the allegedly ignored "achievements of white people in the South."

"About 30 people are listed as institute scholars, a staff that overlaps heavily with the LOS institute's staff."

"What these institutes teach is commonly portrayed as the fruit of an intellectual tradition that goes back to the 19th century and even, at the earliest, the colonial era — the line of thought known as "the Southern conservative tradition."

"The Southern conservative tradition stretches all the way back to Thomas Jefferson's belief in the superiority of an agriculture-based society to one built on commerce. Its giants include men like John Calhoun, the preeminent antebellum theorizer in favor of states' rights."

"To many, the tradition includes palpably racist thinkers such as Robert Lewis Dabney, who was chaplain to Civil War Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and Thomas Dixon, whose 1905 novel The Clansman helped spark the 20th century rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan."

"The tradition also boasts of the Nashville Agrarians, a dozen Vanderbilt University-connected essayists who wrote I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition in the 1930s."

"Essentially, this intellectual tradition celebrates Southern agricultural life as Edenic, and contrasts its religious and tradition-bound ways with what is seen as the vulgar materialism of the industrializing North. It is, in the view of many, hopelessly romantic, tied more to an imagined golden age of Southern culture than to an honest appraisal of rural 19th century life as it really was."

"Be that as it may, strains of racism have been intertwined with this tradition almost from the start. In the South, a defense of "tradition" has a habit of ending up as an apologia for slavery."

Despite Williams' Lincoln-hating historical revisionism the fact remains that the slave states seceded to defend slavery and said so in many of the Articles of Secession.

Here's just one of the many, many articles by non-deluded Southerners that amply put the lie to the story that the Civil War was a war of Northern aggression and not about slavery. Transplanted northerners to South Carolina like Kirkpatrick Sale today peddle the lie that the war was not really about slavery.

In his book Livingston makes the anti-Federalist argument that "the virtues of republican life (self-government and the rule of law) were possible only in small polities.” The anti-Federalists, like Livingston and Williams, opposed the US Constitution and its eventual results. That argument was lost nearly 225 years ago. And try as he might, Williams (along with longtime SVR advisory board member and Lincoln historical revisionist, Thomas DiLorenzo) can't successfully argue that Lincoln started what was really started in 1787 and was then continued in the 1830's by Andrew Jackson - the long march of federalism.

Certainly, Williams' complaint about being linked to anti-Semitism and racism can't be taken seriously since he's published material from DiLorenzo (who's had his work published in a Holocaust denial journal and who cites racist sources in his critique of the SPLC ), Paul Michael Craig, Carol Moore (a raving anti-Semite), just to name only a few of these creeps. If he isn't anti-Semitic himself, he's definitely an anti-Semite enabler. When he was advising Connecticut native Dennis Steele's utterly failed gubernatorial campaign last year on the topic of "the Israeli Mafia" he wrote:

"I realize that the Israel plank is near and dear to Thomas (Naylor) - and he'll no doubt mail me another pointed letter scrawled in green pen with more information about the US/Israel connection and tell me that, because I am raising questions here, he will decide to push the "Israeli Mafia" phrase even MORE."

"However, Thomas is not running for office. You are."

"And, the thing is - I agree with Thomas re: Israel."

"I just don't think it makes much sense to use "Israeli Mafia" as a "talking point" for a Vermont independence campaign."

"Why? Three reasons immediately come to mind:"

"#1 - Since most Americans have been conditioned by years of corporate media training to associate anti-Israeli sentiment with Anti Semitism, talking about the Israeli Mafia smacks of antiSemitism blah blah. Holocaust, SVR are racists, etc ad nauseum. I have spent 4 years defusing the SVR/LOS nonsense and it is finally done, even in the blogosphere. Why go there again?" (So how's that working out for you, Rob?)
"#2 - MORE IMPORTANTLY, why not keep our eye on the ball - the United States?"
"#3 - Finally, the "Israeli Mafia" phrase sounds CANNED when it comes out of your mouth. EVERYTHING ELSE YOU SAY sounds like Dennis Steele talking, and kicking ass."

"So - if you decide to continue to use the phrase "Israeli Mafia," then I am asking you to help me think of something to say to Cairn, and others, when they ask."

Years ago, when he was confronted about Livingston's neo-Confederatism and strong links to white supremacists, Williams responded:

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

Williams is an enabler of racialism and bigotry for having invited the white supremacist League of the South and the virulently homophobic hate group, Christian Exodus, to the "talk(s)" that he's sponsored "with other independence-minded groups" over the years in Vermont.

Is Rob Williams a racist? While I have my own opinion on that, that's really more the "damn business" of every Vermonter who Williams proposes to lead into his brave new world of deliberately non-specific proposals for an unlikely "independent" Vermont that Williams would ally with racists, homophobes, anti-Semites and the like.

Williams has also said,

"Secession (began) as a (serious) conversation in New England, (not) in the south. This, also, is a historical fact." (Rob's ALLCAPS deleted)

What our self-professed historian Williams omitted from that statement is that Vermont and its delegate, like the rest of the nation, didn't support the short-lived notions of the Hartford Convention of 1814. Moreover, the three week meeting in Hartford ultimately spelled the end to the - guess who - Federalist Party! That's the group that Williams, Livingston, Naylor, DiLorenzo, Kirkpatrick Sale, et al, ad nauseum so vehemently oppose. That's also an example of the devious nature of Williams and his "small community" (according to a SVR founder and a "Vermont Commons" publisher emeritus or some such nonsense, Ian Baldwin) of Vermont seceshers who routinely twist and pervert the historical record to suit their needs.

In his letter to Seven Days, Williams, whose print publication has failed for five years to convince Vermonters that he and his secesher buddies were nothing more than fringy, ineffectual, batshit crazy, whackjobs, never disclosed that the day before he crafted his recommendations to a real journalist, he'd folded his journal propaganda rag that is more the type of thing that was commonly found on an old fashioned shithouse nail before Charmin came along.

As for his umpteenth sorta invitation to converse,

"Accept invitations to discuss differing political points of view in public dialogue."

I don't meet or chat in bars, as you've so often suggested we do, with Aryan Nation types, neo-Nazis, Liberty Counsel douchebags and other fundie creeps, Southern/Northern/Eastern/Western white supremacists or their enablers. Get it?

(Extra credit reading for secesher scholars like Rob here. It's a piece by a real scholar, James W. Loewen.)

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

Second Vermont Republic Advisory Board Member Thomas J. DiLorenzo Gave A Lecture to Another neo-Confederate Group, That Wasn't the League of the South

Ten days ago, Loyola University Maryland economics professor and a longtime advisory board member to the secessionist group, Second Vermont Republic, Thomas J. DiLorenzo was a guest lecturer on February 5, 2011 for the neo-Confederate organization called the Sons of Confederate Veterans, at their Stephen D. Lee Institute gathering.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans has a checkered history and many members are also present or former members of hate groups such as the League of the South, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known as the White Citizens Council), as well as former Klansmen, a Holocaust denial journal editor and neo-Nazis who hold leadership roles in the SCV. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

"From the Mississippi Division of the SCV, comes this new gem: The group wants the state to issue a special license plate, keyed like the Montgomery march to the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, to honor Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest — a millionaire Memphis slave trader before the war, an apparent war criminal who presided over the massacre of surrendering black prisoners at Fort Pillow, Tenn., during it, and the first national leader of the Ku Klux Klan afterward..."
Source: Southern Poverty Law Center

DiLorenzo, in addition to lecturing the Lost Cause crowd at SCV, serves as a scholar shill for the neo-Confederate movement at the Abbeville Institute [6] as does the baas of the Second Vermont Republic, Thomas Naylor. [7]

As UVM professor Frank Bryan (who left the SVR advisory board last year) told the SPLC Intelligence Report in 2008,

"You've got to watch whose conference you go to. There's no doubt about it."

DiLorenzo may not have gotten that message - yet.

(h/t: Ed Sebesta, Anti-Neo-Confederate)


An excellent overview of the neo-Confederate movement can be found here.

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

Nobel Award Winner Calls the Economic Rhetoric of the Second Vermont Republic Advisory Board Member Thomas J. DiLorenzo "Bizarre"

In a scathing column on Thursday, Paul Krugman, New York Times Op-Ed columnist and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (2008), as well as recipient of the prestigious American Economic Association, John Bates Clark Medal (1991), and professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, ripped Second Vermont Republic advisory board member, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, a new one while touching upon DiLorenzo's obsession with Lincoln historical revisionism and other myths of the Old South:

"Mr. (Ron) Paul’s (R-TX) subcommittee called three witnesses, one of whom was an odd choice: Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor at Loyola University and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute."

"What was odd about that choice? Well, Mr. DiLorenzo hasn’t actually written much about monetary policy, although he has described Fed policy — not just recently, but since the 1960s — as “legalized counterfeiting operations.” His main claim to fame, instead, is as a critic of Lincoln — he’s the author of “Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe” — and as a modern-day secessionist."

"No, really: calls for secession run through many of Mr. DiLorenzo’s writings — for example, in his declaration that “healthcare freedom” won’t be restored until “some states begin seceding from the new American fascialistic state.” Raise the rebel flag!"

"O.K., it’s going to be a while before the G.O.P. as a whole embraces neo-secessionism, and Mr. Paul, although highly visible, is, in fact, a somewhat marginal figure even within his own party. But Mr. (Paul) Ryan (R-WI), who led the other hearing — the one at which Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, testified — is a rising Republican star. So it’s worth noting that Mr. Ryan’s hard-money rhetoric was nearly as bizarre as Mr. DiLorenzo’s." (The entire NY Times column may be read here)

Dilorenzo, you may recall, is the Lincoln historical revisionist lauded by "Vermont Commons" publisher, Rob Williams and VTCommons' white supremacist contributor, Robert S. Griffin (See here).

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