Fat guy in a Nazi coat: Former JBS member J.T. Ready, the "Tommy Boy"/"Black Sheep" of the white supremacist movement, takes part in an October 24 neo-Nazi rally in Riverside, California. Incidentally, Ready wasn't kicked out; he left of his own volition.
People who passively ride a wave shouldn't be surprised to find themselves washing ashore in the unwanted company of some feculent flotsam. That's certainly the case with Appleton's decision, back in 2006, to make opposition to the Brown Peril -- in the form of illegal immigration from Mexico -- the central focus of its activism and recruitment.
No, that campaign didn't result in a huge windfall of recruits to the JBS, as Alan Scholl insisted that it would. Furthermore, if you visit the JBS website today you'll find that it devotes relatively little attention to the immigration issue. In fact, it doesn't appear at all on the "Advocacy Action" page (as of October 28). Sure, the issue bobs to the surface every once in a while, but it doesn't command the sense of urgency it once did.
Now that the collapse of the credit bubble has reduced demand for cheap labor, immigration from Mexico is sharply down, other matters -- such as the effort to audit and abolish the Fed, to oppose the renewed push for socialized medicine, and combat the ever-metastasizing Homeland Security State -- demand much more attention.
While there's no shortage of immigration-related problems -- most of them either created, abetted, or exploited by the federal government -- it simply isn't the civilization-threatening challenge that the JBS pretended it was in its effort to catch a Republican-aligned "wave."
In 2006, shortly before I was stabbed in the back by the liars and charlatans running the JBS, I wrote a piece describing how the immigration "debate" was a phony exercise, and how the most important threat to freedom was the effort to build and expand the homeland security state. Ironically, the same people who petulantly took offense over that essay -- that is, JBS upper management -- have validated my position by de-emphasizing immigration almost to the point of forgetting about it.
Furthermore, a very potent illustration of my point was made over the weekend in Riverside, California with the help of one of Alan Scholl's prize JBS recruits, Falstaffian neo-Nazi gadabout J.T. Ready.
"Oh, you vicious brute!" lisps one of Ready's more assertive colleagues after he absorbs a punch from a Chicano radical. Rather than waddling to the defense of his frail, delicate man-friend, Ready was ... well, somewhere in the back. It's pretty clear that these guys aren't representatives of the Master Race.
Ready was one of a handful -- say, a dozen to 20 -- neo-Nazis who staged a provocation (neither "demonstration" nor "protest" seems a suitable term) in Riverside, California.
Several hundred counter-protesters, fronted by a contingent from the Chicano radical group Brown Berets de Aztlan, turned out to confront the Nazis, reciprocate their insults, and exchange a few ineffective punches.
So the lines were drawn between two groups of ethnic poseurs -- comic-opera radical racist groups (neo-Nazis waving Swastika banners on one side, Brown Berets flying the Mexican flag on the other) -- with a large contingent of heavily armed riot police in the middle.
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As Maxwell Smart might say, this was the old "order out of chaos" trick, albeit carried out on a very small scale.
Say, where have we seen this cartoon before?
Well, a little more than a decade ago, back when The New American actually permitted its writers to commit acts of investigative journalism, that publication ran two cover stories (one of which is still available on-line) describing this dialectical strategy at work and getting into the details of specific incidents and personalities used to carry it out.
Ready (the gelatinous mass in the center wearing a Sgt. Schultz helmet) does a quick impression of "Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker" while one of his boyfriends works the bullhorn. The most recent mini-riot in Riverside offers a splendid opportunity for the JBS and TNA to do what they once took pride in doing: Using current events to educate people about the tactics and strategies -- including the cultivation of racial collectivism -- of those who seek total power.
Giving that incident a little attention would be especially appropriate in light of the enactment of a new federal "hate crimes" measure. It's almost as if the spectacle in Riverside had been staged to coincide with that development -- a piece of street theater intended to dramatize the supposed resurgence of "right-wing hate groups" and the purported need for increased federal scrutiny of "anti-government" radicals on the right.
So a piece on the Riverside incident, if done with the intention of uprooting that one blossom of ugliness and examining its roots, would be both helpful and timely.
It would be difficult for TNA to provide a suitable examination of this case, however.
First of all, the -- ahem -- bold and insightful people running the JBS fired the last guy who attempted to put the immigration issue into a larger strategic context involving the use of that issue to build a domestic police state. There are people in the current TNA writing pool -- beginning with Bill Jasper, the nation's best investigative reporter -- who could do this issue justice.
However....
The high-visibility role played by former Bircher J.T. Ready in the Riverside incident makes it ... let's say, "problematic" for Appleton to give it the proper coverage. This is especially true in light of Appleton's huge and growing vulnerability on account of Jack McManus's dilettante dabblings in anti-Semitism.
I think the last thing Appleton wants is for Ready's activities to provide a news hook on which to hang an examination of Jack's lengthy career propagating what Art Thompson called (circa 2000) Jack's anti-Jewish "religion" (no, by that he did not mean traditional Catholicism). At the time, Art was worried that Jack's anti-Jewish activism might prompt the malign interest of Morris Dees. Well, J.T. Ready has come to the attention of the degenerate Dees and his comrades at the SPLC. So the dreaded "linkage" already exists, thanks to the strategic blindness and ineptitude of the current Appleton junta.
Heckuva job, Artie and Company.
