They Just Don't Care, Do They? (Updated and expanded, 7/13)

(See additional update below)

Correction, Please!

Mexican Anschluss in Arizona?

Item: 

In a June 29 essay burdened with the alarmist title "Eighty Mile Swath of Arizona Surrendered to Cartels," The New American addressed what it called "the menacing terror of drug traffickers and human smugglers that have all but taken adverse possession of the region."

"Eighty miles from the border with Mexico in Arizona, the federal government has posted signs warning Americans not to approach any closer to the border, as it is a region of `active drug and human smuggling' and that those that ignore the warning may “encounter armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed,'" wrote TNA contributor Joe Wolverton II.

Those warning signs, he insisted, are "white flags of surrender flying 80 miles within the border of the United States of America. Is [sic] such examples of federal contempt of the border crisis enough to convince those who scoff at cries of treason and invasion?"

Correction:

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any territory in Arizona has been surrendered to Mexico, or to narcotics gangs operating out of Mexico. A Border Patrol agent stationed in the supposedly surrendered territory responded to a question about this supposed cession by dismissing it as "false information." 

The claim that the Obama administration turned over the territory to Mexico originated with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, a publicity-fixated Republican neo-con and ally of John McCain. Babeu's jurisdiction does not abut the border with Mexico. Clarence Dupnink, sheriff of neighboring Pima County, which does share a border with Mexico, insists that border violence has actually decreased in recent years. 

Drug smuggling and related violence -- which are unavoidable bi-products of the demented "war on drugs," an unconstitutional and counterproductive effort to regulate the bloodstream of Americans -- are a problem for Arizona (albeit a smaller one now that it was several years ago). The same is true for sections of Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere.

Many crime-ridden urban neighborhoods are controlled by drug-dealing ethnic gangs; for example, some neighborhoods in Philadelphia are run by the Dominican mafia. Does this mean that parts of Philadelphia have been surrendered to the Dominican Republic? Do the depredations of the Russian mob in Brighton Beach mean that Brooklyn's "Little Odessa" is now an island of Russian sovereignty?

Keep an eye peeled for an upcoming TNA piece retailing Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's latest bombshell disclosure -- the sudden surge in beheadings committed by illegal immigrants in the Arizona desert!

The Obama Administration Running Legal Interference for New Black Panthers? 

Item:

"The New Black Panther Party has been a controversial subject for a number of reasons," wrote GOP stenographer Raven Clabough a July 10 posting on the TNA website. "On Election Day 2008, Black Panther member King Samir Shabazz and national chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz were caught on video bearing billyclubs outside of a Philadelphia polling center. An investigation was launched and charges of voter intimidation were made, but the Department of Justice, under the leadership of Eric Holder, elected to dismiss the case."

Correction:

The New Black Panther Party -- a less-than-fearsome group that is equal parts comic opera and street theater -- is a pretty loathsome outfit, and neither they nor anybody else should be permitted to intimidate voters for any reason. The Justice Department examined the behavior of NBBP cadres and decided to drop the criminal probe.


That was the Bush-Mukasey Justice Department, not the Obama-Holder Justice Department. 

The decision was made three months before either Obama or Holder had anything to do with the matter. 


J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney-turned-GOP activist, claims that under Obama and Holder the voting rights section of the Justice Department repeatedly showed "hostility" toward prosecuting intimidation cases involving "black defendants and white victims," and said that its dismissal of the NBBP case illustrates this institutionalized bigotry. 




Thomas J. Perrelli, identified by Adams as the one who ordered the dismissal of the case against the NBPP, wasn't confirmed until three months after the Bush administration dropped the criminal complaint.

Deputy Assitant AG Julie Fernandes, who per Adams' version ordered subordinates not to prosecute minority voter intimidation cases, didn't start at her post until six months after the criminal case was dismissed.

Why wasn't Adams outraged when the Bush-Mukasey Justice Department dropped the criminal probe of the NBPP? Why is he trying to give the Obama-Holder Justice Department all of the blame for this, when, at most, they were simply building on the decisions of their predecessors?


The Obama administration won the civil case against the NBBP by default. It didn't pursue an injunction against the entire organization -- which was the department's original approach -- focusing instead on the one individual whose actions, captured on tape, were clearly illegal.

What Adams describes as "reverse discrimination" has been referred to by others involved in the decision as a disagreement over strategy and priorities among "career people" in the department. This seems entirely plausible, pending corroboration from Adams of his alarming accusations of official misconduct that, if true, would be grounds not only for impeachment but criminal prosecution.  

UPDATE --

While the people in charge of TNA are pandering to the Fox-aligned demographic by retailing breathless accounts of Afro-Militarism, an Arizona offshoot of the National Socialist Movement -- led by former JBS member, Hitler fanboy, and likely federal asset J.T. Ready -- are actually taking people hostage at gunpoint.

The New Black Panther Party's alleged "voter intimidation" involved one NBBP goofball -- roughly one-eighth of the group's entire membership -- making faces and saying offensive things. The NSM's "border patrols" are quite likely to get someone killed.



Obama's a foreign-born usurper -- we read it in the check-out line!

Item:

"Globe magazine has jumped into the citizenship controversy with a July 12 cover story that states, `Obama was not born in the U.S.,' writes Raven Clabough, who appears to be TNA's liaison to the Hannitized. "The supermarket tabloid may not have the best track record for accurate reporting among mainstream publications, but it does have a large circulation and its voice and what it has to say will undoubtedly bring the issue of Obama's citizenship to the attention of a lot more people and cause them to consider seriously if there is anything to it."

Correction:

Actually, there's nothing to correct here, because there's no story -- at least none that The New American would have bothered with back when those producing it aspired to provide credible news and thought-provoking commentary. 

To the extent that there is "news" here, the substance of it would appear to be this: Whether or not Obama's an illegitimate president owing to foreign birth, a large-circulation tabloid has lent its support to that theory, and this will have an impact on the opinions of its readers (make that "browsers"). 

This isn't reporting. It's not even blogging. It is pure, undisguised pandering of the worst and most transparent variety. And it is an all-sufficient indictment of the abysmal standards that prevail at what was once an exceptional publication. 

Oh, If Only We Had a Military Dictator....

Item:


In a paean to "Operation Wetback," the paramilitary Border Patrol operation that rounded up and deported millions of Mexican laborers, Dr. Roger McGrath extols the "bold, decisive, and forceful leader" who presided over it: General Dwight Eisenhower (who was president at the time), and Lt. General Joe Swing, Director of the INS. 

"It took a military man, who thought that national borders should mean something" in order to defeat the "unholy alliance of agribusinessmen and other employers," in concert with perfidious Mexicans, to subvert the border and undermine the labor market in the southwest, writes McGrath. 

The problem began during World War II, when, "with so many Americans in the service — and fighting and dying overseas — Mexicans illegally entered the United States to take advantage of employment opportunities, especially as agricultural laborers."

Fortunately, Eisenhower and Swing were willing to employ military means to beat back this invasion, offering an example we would be wise to follow, concludes Dr. McGrath.


Correction:


First of all, it's notable to see Eisenhower -- not Robert Welch's favorite public figure -- being extolled as not only a hero, but as something akin to the savior of the republic, in the pages of The New American. Perhaps the TNA editorial staff decided it was acceptable -- in this one instance -- to traffic in "nuances" that differ from Mr. Welch's views. (Of course, publicly differing in "nuance" from the incumbent JBS management is a firing offense, or at least it was in one specific instance.)


Of greater significance is the omission from Dr. McGrath's essay of any mention of the 1942 "Bracero" treaty between the U.S. and Mexico. 

McGrath depicts Mexican laborers as "taking advantage" of dislocations in the labor market caused by the war socialist economy of WWII. In fact, it was the FDR regime that invited those laborers into the country through the 1942 Bracero Treaty, which didn't expire until 1963. Through that agreement, the U.S. government imported millions of Mexicans to labor as "guest workers" in fields, factories, and other productive roles left vacant because of mobilization for the war. 

Mexico at the time was in the midst of its own depression, which was even deeper and more tragic than ours. So it's not surprising that millions of Mexicans -- in some cases, literally entire villages -- migrated northward in search of the promised wage of 30 cents an hour (which was specified in the treaty). Nor is it surprising that the northward migration didn't flow tidily in government-established channels. 

"Operation Wetback" was not the first time Mexican laborers who had come north to fill jobs left vacant in wartime were rounded up and expelled. During Woodrow Wilson's War, as well, fan informal Bracero-style agreement was reached with Mexico that permitted laborers to come north with their families. Many English-speaking American citizens born in this country pursuant to that agreement were among those eventually rounded up and summarily expelled at gunpoint.

None of this is mentioned or even alluded to in Dr. McGrath's homily regarding the supposed virtues iron-handed military rule.

By omitting "Bracero" from this discussion, McGrath produces a caricature: The villains are insidious Mexicans "stealing" jobs from American draftees, and conniving businessmen bereft of civic virtue. 

The "heroes," by way of contrast, are "decisive, forceful" military leaders in positions of political authority -- guys like Lt. Gen. Swing, whom McGrath describes as "[h]andsome and square-jawed with sparkling blue eyes, white hair, and a bearing that suggested strength and decisiveness...." Yes, someone like that is just the hero to beat back the Brown Peril, isn't he?

Mini-clarification, July 18: In the photo caption on page 37 in the print edition of TNA's July 19 issue, there is a fleeting reference to the "Bracero Agreement" as providing to Mexican laborers "a legal way to enter the United States and work." This truncated, inadequate description is the only mention of Bracero in the entire article.

Observations:

The TNA stories examined above display the superficiality, selective credulity, and opportunism that have come to characterize the publication since -- oh, let's pick a date purely at random; how about October 2006? Dr. McGrath's story, produced by a capable writer and long-established academic figure, represents something worse: Deliberate omission in an effort to promote an ideological agenda.

There was a time, not long ago, when TNA would take the time and invest the effort to examine and report on issues responsibly, rather than simply retailing whatever resonates with the Republican-wedded, Fox "News" and Talk Radio-obsessed sub-population. 

They're too busy riding the wave in Appleton to take the time and care to find out if part of Arizona really is under the rule of throat-slitting Mexican narcotics lords, or if the Holder-era Justice Department really is a festering pit of Afro-racist corruption. 

But this would require actual reporting, and it might complicate the effort to pander to the lowest common denominator -- and in the cases discussed above, that denominator runs right along one of the fault-lines Robert Welch warned about.

 

        "The Cressbeckler Stance": JBS-TV's New Star Attraction?

Why bother watching Art Thompson stumble through the latest installment of "cranky old reactionary reads the newspaper"? Joad Cressbeckler offers pretty much the same content in a much more entertaining way:

A Meeting of the Minds in Mesa? (Updated, June 24)

Neo-Nazi planetoid J.T. Ready rallies his boyfriends...

 While Jack McManus is in Mesa today (June 22), he really should make a courtesy call to local anti-immigration activist J.T. Ready. The two of them see the world in very similar terms, at least in their choice of enemies.

Like McManus, Ready served in the Marines, albeit briefly and without honor or distinction: He somehow managed to be court-martialed twice. 

More recently, Ready -- a conspicuous representative of the National Socialist Movement -- was briefly a member of the JBS, despite the fact that the Birch Society has an ironclad rule against collateral membership in anti-Semitic and other bigoted groups. That rule apparently didn't survive Jack McManus's decades-long involvement with a schismatic Catholic group founded by unabashed anti-Semite Leonard Feeney. 

...Ready following a post-rally beer or two.

Both the NSM and the Feenyites embrace political models under which severe civic restraints would be imposed on Jews and others, albeit for different reasons. 

Ready and his comrades would insist that only those who belong to the volkish nation -- people of supposedly "pure white" extraction -- would be citizens; the Feenyites insist that the state must be controlled by their proprietary brand of Catholicism. Although they disagree about the particulars of government administration, both groups agree that Jews should be disenfranchised and, if necessary, expelled. 

Where the subject of illegal immigration is concerned, however, I doubt there is any daylight between McManus and Ready. Among other things, they've both endorsed the deployment of the military at the border as a means of turning back the Brown Peril from Mexico.

Neither of them seems to have noticed that, both in Arizona and nationwide, immigration  -- both legal and illegal -- is sharply down since the housing bubble collapsed. The same downward trend is apparent regarding violent crime in Arizona.

Jack's Summer Speaking Tour is entitled "Stealing the American Dream: How Illegal Immigration Affects You." In terms of title and marketing, this is pure, undisguised pandering, coupled with opportunistic scapegoating: In a time of severe and deepening economic hardship, Jack and the bankrupt JBS brain-trust are encouraging people to believe that brown people who speak with funny accents are the cause of their misfortune. Needless to say, where Ready and his goose-mincing boyfriends are concerned, Jack's message is coming in five-by-five.

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the JBS went to great lengths to explain how people of Ready's ilk are used to cultivate conflicts that expand government power at the expense of liberty. (In fact, William F. Jasper produced Pulitzer-worthy work on the subject.) Right now, the panderers running the organization are so worried about finding a "wave" to ride they're willing to allow themselves to be co-opted. 

Get a room, guys: Ready and Russell Pearce

The most acute threat to the "American Dream" in Arizona, as elsewhere, is a profligate, incurably corrupt government that has destroyed our economy and is suffocating our liberties. This has nothing at all whatsoever to do with immigration; our enemies are not the people misruling Mexico, or those driven from that country northward; it is the people controlling the regime in Washington, D.C.

The dated, ill-informed presentation Jack will disgorge this evening will have nothing to do with the causes of Arizona's economic afflictions. The current issue of Harper's magazine offers some genuinely terrifying details: 61.5 percent of all Phoenix mortgages are "underwater"; unemployment is probably running at about 18 percent, or higher; the newly created town of Maricopa, forty-five minutes southwest of Phoenix, suffers a "distress index" (percentage of home sales involving bank-owned or pre-foreclosure properties) of 76.8 percent. 

"In a neighborhood called Maricopa Meadows," writes Ken Silverstein, "we rolled past a block of McMansions, all but a handful of which had gone into foreclosure." Silverstein's guide observed: "You've got people doubling up in houses so they can split utilities.... The story is the same from here to Queen Creek to Buckeye, in all these places that people scattered before the crash." 

As the New York Times recently reported, the real estate industry in Arizona -- which, like Nevada, fell prey to a delirious, Fed-financed real estate frenzy earlier this century -- is now essentially a subsidiary of Fannie and Freddie. When the Fed's bubble was expanding, Realtors sold homes to unqualified buyers at grotesquely inflated price. Now that the bubble has burst, Realtors are doing a similarly brisk business in repossessions. 

A threat to the "American Dream"? Murder victim Brisenia Flores.

In all of this, the chief villain is the Federal Reserve. 

To the extent illegal immigration played a significant role, it was in providing  relatively inexpensive labor during the boom. Now that the bust has descended, the jobs are gone and the laborers go elsewhere. 

What this means is that the immigration problem -- yes, "problem," not "crisis" -- is what the JBS used to call a "tangent" -- a distraction from much more important matters. 

Rather than exercising leadership, Art andJack are content to join in the torchlight parade: They extol the supposed merits of Joe Arpaio, the Mussolini of Maricopa County, and promote the "papers, please"  measure promoted by Ready's political paramour, Russell Pearce.

Meanwhile, Ready and his bunkmates -- who consider themselves a self-appointed law enforcement auxiliary -- are bidding fair to become public face of "immigration reform" in Arizona; an Arizona resident murdered his Mexican-American neighbor following an argument over the "papers, please" law (the alleged killer reportedly told the victim -- who had been born and raised in the U.S. -- to "go back to Mexico");  and shirt-tail associates of JBS Speaker's Bureau attraction Chris Simcox (who is in a bit of trouble himself) are accused of murdering an innocent man and his nine-year-old daughter (both of Mexican ancestry) in a deranged robbery plot intended to fund a breakaway Minuteman faction.

No, Jack isn't responsible for any of this, nor is the JBS. But there was a time, once again, when the JBS would use whatever influence it had to defuse manufactured ethnic conflicts, rather than abetting them, either actively or obliquely. (Witness the role the Society played in de-fusing an orchestrated race riot in Americus, Georgia during the 1960s, or Delmar Dennis's speaking tours exposing the Klan.) Even if Jack were inclined to play the role of peacemaker, I don't think he could do so credibly.

For all of these reasons, and many more, it would be entirely appropriate for Jack to break bread with J.T. Ready while he's in Mesa today, even though the spectacle -- like much of what Jack and Art have done to the JBS -- would make Robert Welch weep through gritted teeth.

                                           Update: Appleton's Inexhaustible Hypocrisy

Apparently, there is no limit to what a contributor to The New American can get away with, assuming he or she isn't named William Norman Grigg.

On the TNA website today (June 24) can be found an essay entitled "In Immigration Debate, Politicians are the Problem," by the immensely gifted Becky Akers. Published near the end of Jack's "Stealing the American Dream" immigrant-bashing tour, Akers' essay deftly and effortlessly demolishes the fraudulent foundation of Jack's presentation -- namely, the idea that immigration is an unrelenting "invasion" of alien usurpers who are (as Alan Scholl once put it) "wrecking our economy."

Those blaming immigrants -- legal or illegal -- for the loss of jobs or other economic problems "are scaping the wrong goats," Akers observes. "If they truly want to `fix' unemployment, they should go after politicians and bureaucrats, not immigrants. Government destroys exponentially more jobs than immigrants could ever `steal'...."

Akers observes that "we play right into our rulers; hands when we beseech government to `protect' jobs, whether from immigrants or from foreign competitors via tariffs." Ah, but what about the federal government's constitutional duty to protect each state from "invasion"? Doesn't Washington have a duty to "secure the borders"?

Not exactly.

The Founders, Akers writes, "didn't include `Control movement into and out of the country' among those [limited federal] powers," Akers observes. "In fact, the nearest the Constitution allows government to approach immigration is `establish[ing] a uniform Rule of Naturalization.' But setting the standards whereby people become citizens is far, far removed from walling off our borders or erecting bureaucracies to harass everyone, American or not, with orders of `Papers, please.'"

"When it came to jobs or borders, the Founders knew better than to trust the State," she concludes. "Why don't we?"

Implicit in that question is the following one: Why the hell is Jack McManus abetting misplaced trust in the State in his "Stealing the American Dream" excursion?

Akers' essay is quite comparable to my now-notorious June 22, 2006 "Birch Blog" installment entitled "Phony Immigration Debate vs. Real Police State Threat." We agree that the immigration issue is cynically exploited as a distraction by opportunistic politicians, and it is being used to manipulate the public into accepting police state measures. But Akers actually assails the claim that there is a constitutional case for immigration restriction -- and she does so in an essay published by the JBS while its President is making exactly the opposite case in a national speaking tour.

Art Thompson treated my re-publication of the immigration-related Birch Blog essay as a firing offense, because I was publicly disagreeing with his, ahem, inspired "leadership" in a matter of nuance. There is nothing nuanced about Akers' disagreement, which was published with the imprimatur of TNA editor Gary Benoit -- you know, one of the four former friends who connived to stab me in the back and throw my family to the wolves. 

Nemo me impune lacessit!

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."

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*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.