A Self-Inflicted Smear (UPDATED 8/22)

(See the update at the bottom of this essay)

The Reich man for the job? J.T. Ready -- Arizona GOP precinct committeeman, unapologetic neo-Nazi, and prominent spokesman for the state's "immigration control" movement.


During my years in Appleton I became wearily familiar with a tactic that's come to be known as the "sandwich smear."

Here's how it works: Find two unsavory, disreputable organizations, persons, or movements and insert a reference to the John Birch Society between them. Now you don't have to trouble yourself to build an actual case against the JBS, or its positions and activities, since it will acquire the unpalatable flavor of its rhetorical surroundings.

The prototypical example of this tactic was delivered by Nelson Rockefeller in his address to the 1964 GOP Convention, in which he served up an open-faced variety of the sandwich smear, execrating what he called "extremists" such as "the Klan, the Communists, and the John Birch Society...."

Many variations on this tactic have been employed to traduce the organization. When called on to deal with them during my time on staff I would point out that the Society has consistently opposed all forms of collectivism, including -- and, when appropriate, especially -- that of the racial variety.

This is illustrated by the work of Delmar Dennis, who was nearly evicted from the JBS for joining the Klan until it was learned that he had been asked by the FBI to infiltrate a Klan organization that was carrying out what could only be called a campaign of criminal terrorism against black Christians.

Dennis's story isn't a tidy one, and his role as an informant and witness in the "Mississippi Burning" murders does raise some troubling constitutional questions. But any honest observer of that story would have to respect Dennis's lonely heroism, and the principled opposition to murderous bigotry both he and Robert Welch displayed by organizing a campaign against the Klan to compliment efforts being made to expose other ethnic grievance groups being used to foment violent conflicts during the late 1960s.

Given this, the vehemence with which the Society has fought efforts to tar it as racist are quite understandable. Like Ron Paul today, Robert Welch wasn't interested in tearing windows into men's souls; he didn't presume to police the personal beliefs and associations of members, but he wouldn't countenance efforts to promote bigotry as a matter of public policy. That's a good and worthwhile distinction, I think. But the credibility of that position is very fragile.

Which brings us, again, to the case of Arizona state legislator Russell Pearce and neo-Nazi agitator J.T. Ready.

Pearce is running for a state senate seat. Elements of the Arizona Republican Party who don't care for him and his views have put into circulation two fliers intended to drive up Pearce's negatives; the second of them features photographs of Pearce in comradely poses with Ready -- and a photo of Ready grinning like a drunken lemur at a Nazi gathering in Omaha, Nebraska.

In his element: Ready is second from the right.


This episode presents an interesting permutation of the sandwich smear, in that for once the JBS isn't in the middle. Nathan Sproul, the spokesman for the anti-Pearce faction, explains the campaign: "This is about whether or not the Republican Party in this state is going to be the party of Russell Pearce and White supremacists and the John Birch Society or whether we are going to be the party of John McCain and Jon Kyl."


Apparently, this campaign has been organized by a number of businessmen who oppose Arizona's employer-sanctions law, which was written by Pearce. That measure, which assumes that immigrants who have come here without government permission are "stealing" jobs, is intended to compel business owners to vet their hires through the federal "e-Verify" system. It is also intended to impose severe penalties on business whose owners "knowingly" hire such immigrants. Repeated violations would result in the economic "death penalty" -- permanent revocation of an entrepreneur's business license.


That law is stupid, cruel, and self-defeating. It is precisely the kind of business-killing bureaucratic intervention the JBS used to fight, before it became -- under its present purported leadership -- monomaniacal about the Brown Peril. How many times have JBS lecturers on speaking tours and at youth camps explained the evil of licensure, how it transforms a God-given right into a state-conferred privilege. The Arizona measure, written by a JBS darling and no doubt the beneficiary of Birch support, compounds that evil by compelling business owners to review their hiring decisions with the Feds via e-Verify.


Even before Pearce's measure was enacted, it was prompting business owners to relocate; in fact, it drove some manufacturers to relocate across the border in Mexico.


'Twas a famous victory ... for racially tinged populism masquerading as patriotism. And it's the handiwork of the state legislator to which the JBS attached itself, and through whom it is now linked to the malodorous Mr. Ready.

Nearly a year ago, I warned that this would happen -- if the Society didn't avail itself of an opportunity to confront Pearce about his relationship with Ready and have him clear the air. The debut of the Phoenix-area radio program Freedom's Voice offered a perfect forum to accomplish this: Imagine how the organization would have benefited had they been the ones to challenge Pearce about this matter in public.

The people running the outfit from Appleton (to borrow a phrase) never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.


This could have been done so easily. It would have taken maybe three minutes of air time, at most. I don't blame the local hosts of that program (which was promoted on the JBS website) for this omission. The blame belongs with the people at the top, whose primary occupation by now must be finding creative new ways to avoid blame.


Yes, broaching this issue in public would have been nasty, since J.T. Ready -- who comes off as a hybrid of Goering and Chris Farley's Tommy Boy -- was a Birch Society member for a while.


The former Mesa City Councilman, convicted thief, and Marine Corps cast-off claims to have been praised in the Bulletin for his success in recruitment and that he resigned his membership, rather than being kicked out. I've not been able to verify either claim, and I'd trust Ready about as far as I could throw him. (Actually, since fecal matter has very low specific gravity, I could probably throw him much farther than he can be trusted, his trans-Falstaffian girth notwithstanding.) JBS staffers insist that Ready, like others of his ilk, lied his way into Society membership. If that's the case, why didn't they take the opportunity to say so, even as they got Pearce on record about the matter?


One final aspect of this mess needs to be addressed.


In the June 22, 2006 Birch Blog entry that eventually got me fired ("Phony Immigration Debate vs. Real Police State Threat"), I offered the following observation near the end of the essay:


"For a long time our would-be rulers have been looking for an issue that could entice people into surrendering their freedoms: The threat of Communism, the scourge of narcotics, the menace of international terrorism.... They seem to identified the threat of illegal immigration as
just the thing they've been searching for. Right now, tens of millions of conservatives, including many who have been suspicious about the Patriot (sic) Act and similar measures, appear willing to submit to invasive, militarized enforcement measures in order to curb illegal immigration."


With that in mind, watch and listen to this brief clip in which J.T. Ready -- addressing an immigration control rally in Arizona -- not only throws a bouquet at Russell Pearce, but explicitly calls for the militarization not only of the national borders, but of domestic law enforcement, in order to turn back the Brown Scourge:






UPDATE

"Three Arizona Republican congressmen are calling for the removal of a low-level party official from Mesa, accusing him of being a neo-Nazi and sullying the party's image," reported the August 21 Arizona Republic. "J.T. Ready, who ran for Mesa City Council in 2006 and was elected a precinct committeeman in west Mesa's legislative District 18 later that year, is not fit to represent the party, the congressmen said. Jeff Flake, John Shadegg and Trent Franks made their appeal in a letter to Tom Husband, chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, in a letter dated Tuesday.

Actually, it's not clear that Ready is the proverbial card-carrying member of the National Socialist Movement, the organization that sponsored the rally above, even though he is unabashedly an exponent of National Socialism. This explains the reflex with which he accused his Republican critics of selling out "to the Zionists and the international bankers."

If Ready's account of his time on the JBS membership rolls is to be believed (see my caveat in that regard above), it appears that the Arizona GOP has somewhat more stringent standards than the present JBS management: Ready, as he tells it, resigned from the Society of his own accord, but the Arizona GOP is at least making an effort to throw him out.


One interesting point in the Republic story deals with what appears to be a very tight relationship between Ready and Pearce: "Although Ready ran against Pearce in the 2004 legislative primary, Pearce endorsed Ready when the latter ran for City Council in the spring of 2006." Of course, Pearce now claims that he hardly knew Ready, and had no idea of his neo-Nazi convictions and activism.

What brought Pearce and Ready together was their shared obsession with the subject of immigration from Mexico. And that's what brought both of them together with the JBS.


There is absolutely nothing wrong or improper about being very concerned over the problem of illegal immigration, of course. But for the past two and a half years the JBS had become practically monomaniacal on that subject (and probably would be so today, were it not for what Appleton, taking its cues from the neo-cons, is treating as a sudden revival of the Cold War). It's really not surprising that this obsessive focus on immigration led to the Society finding itself in the same pigpen occupied by the likes of Ready and Pearce.

It was surprising, and disappointing, that the current management didn't avail themselves on an opportunity to confront Pearce about his involvement with Ready, thereby putting some appropriate distance between principled immigration activism and unfiltered totalitarian bigotry.

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.