Fellow-Traveling With Fascists (UPDATED)

A good friend who is a very active JBS member suggested that my observation below about JBS management letting Bill Jasper "off his leash" could be interpreted as a swipe at Bill. It wasn't intended to be read that way: Bill isn't a lapdog in any sense, for anybody. My purpose was to criticize management for abandoning the practice of investigative reporting, something at which Bill excels above practically any writer in the country. Bill knows everyone, has read everything, and is a tenacious reporter -- and yet TNA's current approach permits him to do little if anything in terms of getting beneath the skin of a story and finding out what's really going on. I think this is inexcusable, and it's not at all Bill's fault. Besides, if TNA were still doing reportage of this kind, the JBS might have avoided stepping on the landmines I describe below: Bill did tremendous work a decade ago while spelunking in the neo-Nazi underground during his investigation into the Oklahoma City Bombing.

One other comment. Bryan Turner, who is mentioned in this post, makes a comment below to the effect that I was somehow "seduced" away from the truth and into becoming a critic of the JBS. Yes, I've been very critical of current management for several reasons, of course, but any honest reader would recognize that my view of the field staff -- Bryan among them -- and membership remains one of admiration and appreciation.

I do find it odd, however, that Bryan could find something seductive about my current situation, as if some unnamed emissary of the enemy had approached me with the following offer a year ago: "Hey, Will, you're a decent writer who makes an adequate living working for a cause you believe in, but you could do SO much better. How about this: We'll arrange for you to be fired and have your reputation attacked by four guys you consider friends, guys for whom you risked your job a year ago, leaving you without a steady income or health insurance as you try to provide for a family of five small children and an invalid wife! All you have to do is to turn away from the truth and `attack the only organized effort to expose and route [sic] the Conspiracy!'"

"Hey, what a deal!" I would eagerly reply, in this hypothetical scenario. "I've ALWAYS wanted to experience the thrill of unemployment, personal betrayal, and financial misery! How could I resist such a SEDUCTIVE offer!"




Arizona State Legislator Russell Pearce, featured guest on the inaugural broadcast of the JBS radio program "Freedom's Voices."

Bryan Turner is the JBS Coordinator for Arizona and, as one would expect, a genuinely nice and decent guy. He has also been chosen to host the new JBS radio program, "Freedom's Voice," beginning next Monday (October 1).

The announcement from Appleton notes that Mr. Turner's first program will feature an interview with "Arizona state Representative Russel [sic] Pearce to discuss his efforts at fighting illegal immigration in Arizona."

This offers an opportunity for Bryan to do some authentic "journalism of first instance," something at which The New American once excelled (and could again, if the timid little boys running the JBS would let Bill Jasper off his leash).

Russell Pearce aspires to become a U.S. Congressman from Arizona, filling the seat now occupied by Republican Jeff Flake. Like many Republicans, Pearce has become fixated, to the point of obsession, on the issue of illegal immigration.

Unlike many (one hopes most) Republicans, Pearce is exceptionally chummy with neo-Nazis. Well, with one neo-Nazi in particular: Former Mesa City Councilman and dishonorably discharged Marine J.T. Ready.

J.T. Ready, Arizona anti-immigrant activist, at a September Nazi rally in Omaha; Ready is second from the right in a suit and tie. See another photo of Ready at the Nazi event below.


A few weeks ago, Ready attended an anti-immigrant rally (explicitly anti-Mexican and anti-Jewish in tone and substance) in Omaha, Nebraska sponsored by the National Socialist Movement (NSM). He was identified as a "special guest speaker" at the event. Organizers also gratefully noted the attendance of "the new NSM Arizona unit," which was apparently tied with a group from Kansas for the distinction of "having the most guys in attendance...."

Earlier this year, a pseudonymous writer for the left-leaning Phoenix New Times (which does some impressive investigative reporting -- once again, something The New American once offered) discovered that Ready was also a regular poster at a Nazi-aligned social networking site called New Saxon.com. Ready has defended New Saxon as a means of "defending the unity of our racial family" and "helping make the dream of a safer world for white children possible."

I can certainly get behind those sentiments ... once it's recognized that there is only one race, the human race, and when the modifier "white" is removed from in front of the word "children."

Look, allow me to digress, and let me be entirely blunt:

I'm the biological son of a Mexican laborer; I grew up in eastern Oregon and southeastern Idaho. I was raised in a church that taught that my dark brown skin was a token of a divine curse inflicted by God on my distant ancestors. As an American of Mexican ancestry living in a community that was about 80 percent white and 95 percent Mormon, I collided with casual racism on many occasions. For example: As a teenager I learned, through a mutual friend, that a young lady of my acquaintance in Rexburg, Idaho was admonished by her parents not to ask me to a girl's choice dance because I was "too dark" -- as in "dark and loathsome," the description given to my putative ancestors the "Lamanites" in the Book of Mormon.

As a college student I had a Klansman -- yes, a real-life Klansman -- as a roommate. I twice saved his life when he went into insulin shock. The fact that some people don't care for my skin color neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. I consider prejudice of that sort to be a disability, and perhaps a sin -- until it is welded to State power,when it becomes a threat.

Ready and his merry little band of epicene racial collectivists have their welding torches lit. And Russell Pearce is entirely comfortable in that company.

Ready was a speaker at a June 16 "March for America" immigration control rally at the Arizona State Capitol. Pearce was also a prominent speaker at that rally, and he and Ready were practically joined at the hip (which would make it sort of tricky to goose-step, one would suppose).

Yes, there were many others who participated in that event, including a stand-in for Representative Ron Paul. Latin-Americans who favor stronger border controls were well-represented at the event as well. But only Pearce appeared to be comfortable in Ready's company. (One can only imagine what Ready -- and perhaps Pearce as well -- thought of the presence of so many dusky-skinned people.)

The photo above originally appeared on the website of a white supremacist group called the White Knights of America (WKOA). The photograph below shows Ready chatting amicably with Robert Travers, who edits that website on behalf of the WKOA.















The WKOA, which laments the "Mexicanization" of the USA, describes itself as a "growing White Nationalist organization dedicated to White Racial survival through the resurrection of Pride in our Heritage and culture: Pride, Honor, Devotion, and Loyalty to our women Folk and communities-at-large...."

So far, so anodyne, I guess. My problem here is not with white "pride, honor, devotion [or] loyalty"; it's with nationalism, particularly of the racially exclusive variety. Nationalism requires a consolidated, unitary government, rather than the decentralized constitutional republic we were given. And racial nationalism always involves exterminationist policies of some variety -- whether those policies are pursued in the interests of Volkisch lebensraum in central Europe, or "Manifest Destiny" in the American West.

And I'm pretty sure the fluttery phrase about honoring "our women Folk" could be translated as: "Non-whites -- stay away from our white wimmin!"

The Arizona Chapter of White Knights of America. J.T. Ready is third from the left. Are these guys your idea of "respectable" prospects for JBS membership, Alan?

So I'm pretty sure the heroic White Knights of America would consider my marriage to the fair-skinned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Korrin -- and the five phenotypically diverse children whom God has blessed us with -- to embody the most serious threat to the racial community they seek to preserve uber alles.

Look, I don't think these guys would represent a significant threat to the republic, were our republic still viable. Chances are that guys like those in the photo above are nice enough when you meet them on a person-to-person basis. It's when they assemble in a pack and start spouting warmed-over Nuremberg Rally rhetoric that they become troublesome. They should be perfectly free to peddle their ideas peacefully to anybody who will listen.

Here's what troubles me:

Shortly before he brought about my termination last year, Alan Scholl explained to me that the JBS was going to use the immigration issue to build a huge mass movement and turn it against the "Insiders." Since that time, the JBS has become practically monomaniacal on the subject, something I suspect reflects Alan's own preoccupation with the idea that Mexicans (or "them," as he prefers to call such people) are ruining our economy and culture.

Over the same period, The New American has published numerous stories describing the Brown Peril, dutifully illustrated with photographs of little brown people working at jobs they've supposedly "stolen" from U.S. citizens.

And now the featured guest on the inaugural broadcast of the JBS radio program is an Arizona state politician who is on astonishingly chummy terms with a conspicuous neo-Nazi activist and white supremacist agitator. The same politician, incidentally, was caught a year ago circulating an anti-Semitic and anti-Mexican screed snagged from the website of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi outfit founded by William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries.

Is Pearce a member of the JBS? There was a time when someone as chummy with a significant white supremacist as Pearce is with Ready would be red-starred, at least. If Pearce isn't a member of the JBS, doesn't his baggage make him the kind of figure the JBS should avoid?

Will Bryan Turner mention any of this in his interview with Pearce, and press him about it?

I find the ironies here to be all but indigestible.

*When I was kicked to the curb a year ago, the supposed reason for firing me was the concern that something I had written on my personal, after-hours blog might reflect badly on the organization. No, I wasn't consorting with neo-Nazis or white supremacists. My transgression was much graver: I was taking pot-shots at corrupt Republicans, their totalitarian agenda, their dim-witted, bloody-handed leader, and their bullying media shills.

*The chief instigator of my firing, Alan Scholl -- a guy who avails himself of any excuse to swan around in a Confederate Army costume, incidentally* -- originally threatened to fire me -- the organization's most prominent (and, I think, only) Mexican-American staffer -- several weeks earlier because I had publicly expressed concern over the lop-sided (and strategically misguided) emphasis the JBS was giving to the issue of illegal immigration while doing nothing to oppose the destruction of the Bill of Rights.

*In trying to justify firing me, Alan has insisted that my "extremism" was driving away "respectable" people the JBS was seeking to recruit. What kind of people did you have in mind, Alan -- genteel, reasonable folks like the nattily-dressed Brownshirts in Omaha, or the tattooed skinheads posing with J.T. Ready in front of an Arizona lake?

*One thing I've not previously mentioned is that just days before I was fired, I participated by telephone in an issues meeting in which we discussed State of Emergency, Pat Buchanan's book about immigration. (Mr. Buchanan very kindly provided me with a personalized autographed copy.) Asked if I thought the JBS should carry the book, I said that it was -- as one would expect -- passionately and engagingly written and very compelling. However, I was troubled by Mr. Buchanan's assumption -- made insistently throughout the book -- that liberty won't survive in the USA unless it retains a majority Euro-American population. Why should we assume that the love of liberty, and understanding of our Anglo-Saxon political heritage, are somehow related to melanin content? I asked. I don't know how my points were received (I was communicating by phone, remember), but it's interesting that, once again, this took place just days before I was fired for no reason Appleton can clearly and honestly explain.

When I was representing the JBS in media interviews and speaking tours, I would frequently point out that the organization was opposed to all forms of collectivism and adamantly opposed to racial and religious bigotry. I was inspired to learn of the role played by the Society in the 1960s, when it mobilized to thwart an effort to instigate racial warfare in the town of Americus, Georgia. Delmar Dennis, the JBS Coordinator who -- at great personal risk and no small personal sacrifice -- infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, exposed the "Mississippi Burning" murderers, and actually saved the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., was and remains a hero to me.

As with so much else that has happened in Appleton over the past couple of years, the JBS management's apparent embrace of Russell Pearce is a cause for significant disillusionment on my part -- either because they don't know about the filthy pond Pearce has been swimming in, which means the JBS management is criminally inept, or because they do, which would be monumentally worse.

So once again, here's the key question:

Will Bryan Turner confront Pearce about all of this?


A CORRECTION

Gary Benoit writes the following with reference to an item previously published in this space:

"I am not `co-mingling two separate events.' There was no key 3-2 vote to `install' Vance Smith as president and CEO of RWU either after October 21, 2005 or after Steve Bonta's resignation from RWU. Vance Smith, recall, was already president and CEO of RWU when Steve resigned."

_____

*I should point out that I have kept a Confederate flag over my desk for years in recognition that the Confederacy -- for all of its manifold weaknesses, chattel slavery being the most obvious -- was asserting the same rights claimed by our Patriot forefathers in 1776. I admire men like Lee and Jackson for that reason, and cherish my Confederate ancestry (by adoption). Alan has the right to wear a Confederate Army costume to Church dress-up functions, but given his twitchiness about Mexicans I wonder what element of the Confederate heritage he is celebrating.