Divisions In White Nationalism

I just caught this podcast on Youtube.

Host: “What causes these rifts? A lot of it is class. Boots vs suits. Then there are the wonks vs trolls. We’re doing right-wing journalism and winning the internet every day.”

“There seems to be a real network in Europe and it’s a lifestyle. It’s more of a lived breathed reality.”

Richard: “Nick was such an extreme ethno-nationalist that he was one of my parodies of ethno-nationalism. For instance, he hates Swedens. He said, ‘The Swedes are next to niggers.’ I’m all for poking fun at people, but if you think that, I’m not sure we are on the same page.”

Host: “That’s a joke. He says, ‘Behind every Jew, there’s a Swede.’ It’s not real.”

I was just checking out the Youtube channel Alt-Right Andywhere I found this Richard Spencer podcast. They also offer the David Duke show, Stormfront, Daily Shoah, Grandpa Lampshade, and Thirty Minutes in the Oven, Season One, Episode Eight.

Richard: “He felt I was down on working class guys. I’ve not talked about this publicly, I invited the League of the South leader, Michael Hill. I had done a podcast with him. I invited Michael Hill to be a speaker at the [June 2015] NPI conference. He was excited. Then he said, I can’t share the stage with a known homosexual, i.e. Jack Donovan. I said, Jesus would probably share the stage with a known homosexual and he did not take that well. He was also saying things like Guillaume Faye is a Zionist. Look, Guillaume Faye has made some comments that he understands the idea of a Jewish homeland. He also lives in Europe where there are laws about what you can say.”

Host: “I heard people say he was a sell-out because he believes in the Holocaust and he can’t not say that or he’ll go to prison for five years.”

Richard: “Everyone has a limit. I don’t talk about the Second World War at all. I have my own doubts about mainstream historical consensus, but it is not my thing. I’d rather not talk about that. I don’t need one more thing. I’ve never denounced someone on that. The idea of calling someone a coward if they don’t go all the way.”

“The reason I disinvited [Matthew Heimbach] was not because I was trying to suppress anti-homosexual views. I don’t know if you have seen that [Nightline] interview he did where he dressed up as a Klansman…”

Host: “He’s writing checks that the movement has to cash.”

Richard: “He laced up jackboots on camera. Why? You’re being American History X.”

Host: “Isn’t that exactly what the enemy wants?”

Richard: “Unfortunately, in the United States, we don’t have the lifestyle thing going. It’s an online lifestyle… There’s something more authentic in Europe. There does seem to be a tendency to going into tribalism and ethno-nationalism, and if you see other white people as the enemy, that’s a problem.”

“I think the Civil War was 100% about race. It was two white people killing themselves over the race question.”

“[From the northern side:] We want free white people tilling the soil, not these massive plantations with hundreds of negros and all the danger that brings.”

“I don’t have a dog in this fight… I look back at the whole thing as deeply tragic.”

“The essence of conservatism is conserving something — a people, a race, a class, a way of life.”

“I am curious if people can find earlier uses of the term [Alt-Right].”

Paul Gottfried wrote for Takimag Apr. 7, 2008:

A Paleo Epitaph

Even now an alternative is coming into existence as a counterforce to neoconservative dominance. It consists mostly of younger (thirty-something) writers and political activists; and although they are still glaringly under-funded, this rising generation is building bridges on the right.

Richard Spencer: “There was a conservative revolution in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s… We have a lot of their ideas. I don’t think anybody called them the Alt-Right but there was language like that.”

“That got my wheels turning. I wrote in a blog Aug. 6, 2008: ‘The intellectual bankruptcy of neo-conservatism as well as the stagnation of movement conservatism should give paleos, traditionalists and anyone else on the Alternative Right some cause for optimism.”

Based on a speech he gave about ten days earlier, Paul Gottfried wrote for Takimag Dec. 1, 2008 (with Richard Spencer as his editor composing the headline):

The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right

We have youth and exuberance on our side, and a membership that is largely in its twenties and thirties. We have attracted beside old-timers like me, as I noted in my introductory paragraph, well-educated young professionals, who consider themselves to be on the right, but not of the current conservative movement. These “post-paleos,” to whom I have alluded in Internet commentaries, are out in force here tonight. And they are radical in the sense in which William F. Buckley once defined a true Right, an oppositional force that tries to uncover the root causes of our political and cultural crises and then to address them.

And when I speak about the postpaleos, it goes without saying that I’m referring to a growing communion beyond this organization. It is one that now includes Takimag, VDARE.com, and other websites that are willing to engage sensitive, timely subjects.

Radix Journal:

THE ALT RIGHT AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CONSERVATISM

This essay [by Kevin DeAnna], which has been lightly revised for clarity, was first published at Taki’s Magazine on July 26, 2009. The author had recently founded a right-wing youth group called Youth For Western Civilization.

Hence, Youth for Western Civilization[9], despite mostly being funded out of what’s left of my salary (post condo fees), has garnered huge headlines and controversy, even though we don’t have a single employee. Thus far, YWCers can’t even really be placed on the “Alternative Right,” as we are essentially just echoing standard conservative rhetoric on immigration, multiculturalism, and American identity. (The difference is that we actually mean it.) But even this moderate approach is too much for leftists. Calls to completely transform the structure of the American economy meet far less opposition than suggesting that we enforce existing immigration laws. This tells us what the real forbidden issues are in America today and where the Left really sees the battle lines falling. (Hint: they don’t really care about monetary policy.)

Richard: “We’re over Ron Paul.”

“I was always radical. I was interested in German idealism. I was not interested in Paul Kirk. I got into graduate school by writing a paper on Carl Schmitt.”

“I got red-pilled intellectually by Jared Taylor. I was against the Iraq War… I grew up in a bubble. We had a token black in my class in high school. In college, UVA, it’s a bubble. There are some blacks but everyone self-segregates. I always tried to avoid race for the reason it’s icky and people are going to call you a bigot.

“Reading Jared Taylor, I was like, oh wow, you can think about this sanely. It opened up a whole world.

“I didn’t change that much. When I was writing in 2008, 2009, I was in that paleo and libertarian milieu. We were trying to get out of conservatism. That’s why I like the saying, ‘Become who you are.'”

“The Alt-Right banner now is for people who are racially conscious, skeptical of conservatives, and aware of the Jewish issue and you take that seriously.”

“We are not like Ted Cruz, who believes that we are not conservative enough. This let’s go back to the Constitution, let’s have free markets, lets fight for freedom around the world.”

Host: “Gottfried’s Future of the Right — willingness to make friend/enemy distinctions, defending Western Civilization, masculinist and violent.”

Richard: “The Alt-Right style is a willingness to confront the enemy. Willing to use harsh language. There’s also the Alt-Right ironic trollish style.”

Host: “We were trained by humiliation to be cucks and we’re using humiliation to break the conditioning.”

Richard: “Part of being Alt-Right is that we are coming out of this catastrophe.”

“If your starting point is that America is the greatest culture ever developed, then I can’t really talk to you. This is not. This is a catastrophe that we are living through.”

“There is something inauthentic about cucks who say America is the greatest culture created. They’re LARPing.”

“The definition of friend-enemy must be on a racial basis… France can’t decide to declare war on Germany.”

“The Paleos missed their moment. Tom Fleming at Chronicles alienated every young person with any talent. He has minions. They went in goofy directions. They weren’t doing things that challenged the system. They became irrelevant. A liberal could almost read Chronicles and think, these radicals, what will they do next? Hahaha.”

“They’re sitting on money but money can’t buy you influence. Ricky Vaughn has 1000x their influence and he is doing it all for free.”

Southern Poverty Law Center:

On Thursday, ABC’s Nightline ran a revealing profile of Matthew Heimbach, founder of the White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland and a rising star on the white nationalist scene. Nightline tagged along with Heimbach as he tried to recruit college students to his cause and sought allies in unexpected quarters.

Heimbach is positioning himself to be the next David Duke – with Duke’s blessing. When asked by Nightline if he sees a young version of himself in Heimbach, Duke responded immodestly: “If you combine honesty, sincerity with intelligence, I think he has the potential to be quite an effective leader for these ideas.”

Hatewatch has documented Heimbach’s radicalization and embrace of Klansmen and neo-Nazis. It’s no surprise then that he told Nightline that the races must divide up the United States into racially pure enclaves. In his vision, there would be trade among the enclaves and visas would be required for cross-border visits.

Heimbach told Nightline’s Byron Pitts that racial separation could happen without violence, but he is prepared for whatever comes. “God willing it won’t, but some things are worth fighting for,” he said.

While Heimbach’s recruitment efforts appeared to yield few results, he did find an ally of sorts. Speaking with Reverend Mmoja Ajabu, a radical black nationalist, Heimbach suggested they could hang “a couple bankers” to strike a blow against their common foe. “I think we’re finding common ground,” responded Ajabu.

Heimbach later told Pitts that he’d rather work with black nationalists than white traitors. He “sees only one place for them.” “And that is?” inquired Pitts. “In a ditch.”

From Southern Poverty Law Center:

About Michael Hill

Ironically, Hill was a professor for years at a historically black college before establishing the League of the South in 1994 as an institution devoted to reviving Southern heritage and, eventually, pushing for secession. As Hill spurred the group to become increasingly racist and militant in the late 1990s, most of the other academics who joined in 1994 fled as racial extremists took their place in a much-diminished institution. During the first decade of the 21stcentury, the group grew increasingly radical, talking about a coming “race war,” forming a paramilitary unit, and talking increasingly of weapons.

In His Own Words

“The destruction of states rights in the South was the first necessity leading to forced policies undermining the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and its institutions. [Arch-segregationist Alabama Gov. George] Wallace rightly identified the enemy and fought it until the attempt on his life in 1972.”
— Southern Patriot, 1998

“[T]he evil genie of universal ‘human rights,’ once loosed from its bottle, can never be restrained because rights for women, racial and ethnic minorities, homosexuals, pedophiles, etc., can be manufactured easily.”
— Essay posted to Dixienet.org, 1999

“In part, [the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks] spring from an ‘open borders’ policy that has for the past four decades encouraged massive Third World immigration and thus cultural destabilization. Hence, these acts of violence were also the natural fruits of a regime committed to multiculturalism and diversity, hallmarks of empire rather than of nation. … [T]his is America’s wake-up call to forsake its idolatry and to return to its true Christian and Constitutional foundations.”
— Essay posted to Dixienet.org, 2001

“If the scenario of the South (and the rest of America) being overrun by hordes of non-white immigrants does not appeal to you, then how is this disaster to be averted? By the people who oppose it rising up against their traitorous elite masters and their misanthropic rule. But to do this we must first rid ourselves of the fear of being called ‘racists’ and the other meaningless epithets they use against us. What is really meant by the [multiculturalism] advocates when they peg us as ‘racists’ is that we adhere to ethnocentrism, which is a natural affection for one’s own kind. This is both healthy and Biblical. I am not ashamed to say that I prefer my own kind and my own culture. Others can have theirs; I have mine. No group can survive for long if its members do not prefer their own over others.”
— Essay posted to Conservativetimes.org, 2007

“Yes, the South has a ‘black’ problem. It also has a ‘yankee’ problem. But our biggest problem—and one even Christian members within our own ranks refuse (or fear) to acknowledge—is the ‘Jewry’ problem. Indeed, organized Jewry has been at the root of most of the South’s troubles for the past 100 years.”
— On an internal League of the South Facebook group

“We Southern nationalists do not want a race war (or any sort of war). But if one is forced on us, we’ll participate. … Southern whites are geared up and armed to the teeth. … So if negroes think a ‘race war’ in modern America would be to their advantage, they had better prepare themselves for a very rude awakening. White people may be patient, but our patience does have a limit. You do not want to test that limit.”
— “A few notes on an American race war,” May 6, 2015

“Never underestimate the perfidy of the organized Jew. He is craft enough to manipulate both sides in a conflict for his own advantage. From my experience and studies, I have come to the conclusion that his main enemy is European man—the inheritors of Christendom—and his main weapons against us are the various Third World peoples (including Muslims) he employs as his street-level foot soldiers, debt, propaganda, and our own guilt. If we are to survive, we must combat these weapons, and soon.” — On an internal League of the South Facebook group, December 8, 2015

Background

Sporting a white beard intended to give him the look of a Confederate Army officer, native Alabamian J. Michael Hill has done more than anyone to create a new, racially tinged Southern secession movement. Ironically, Hill taught British history for decades as he developed his thinking about the nature and religion of the South at historically black Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Hill was always an oddity at the school, roaming the campus wearing a Confederate flag pin and waxing nostalgic to his mostly black students about the “War Between the States.” In 1996, Hill told columnist Diane Roberts that his black students adored him; what he didn’t say was that he apparently did not share their warmth. In a 2000 posting to the invitation-only AlaReb E-mail list, Hill mocked his former students and co-workers. “A quote,” he wrote, “from a recent affirmative action hire: ‘Yesta-day I could not spell ‘secretary.’ Today I is one.'” He continued: “One of few benefits I got on a regular basis from having taught for 18 years at Stillman College was reading the class rolls on the first day of class.” He went on to list several “humorous” names of his black students, ending with, “Where do these people get such names?” Hill resigned from Stillman in 1998. Although school officials never said so publicly, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported that Hill had become “an embarrassment” to the administration.

Hill began to develop his ideas about a new Confederacy in the 1970s, while studying under Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, two extremely conservative history professors at the University of Alabama. His mentors wrote Cracker Culture, a book that argued that the South was settled primarily by “Anglo-Celts,” while in the North it was British Protestants who predominated.

Expanding on his old professors’ controversial claim that the South was different from the North because its population was “Celtic,” Hill published two books on Celtic history in the early 1990s. In 1994, he became an activist and put his ideas into practice, creating the Southern League, which was later renamed the League of the South (the original name was a takeoff on the separatist and anti-immigrant Northern League of Italy, but had to be changed after a baseball league of the same name threatened to sue), or LOS. The LOS envisioned a seceded South that would be run, basically, as a theocratic state marked by medieval legal distinctions between different types of citizens, with white males at the top of the hierarchy.

Started with 40 people, the LOS initially included four men with Ph.D.s on its board, along with Jack Kershaw, who was once active in the segregationist White Citizens Council in Nashville and who remained on the board as late as 2009.

Hill’s LOS started out complaining about the media treatment of white Southerners but quickly developed into a racist group calling for a second secession, attacking egalitarianism, describing antebellum slavery as “God-ordained,” opposing racial intermarriage, and defending segregation as a policy designed to protect the “integrity” of both the black and the white races.

An early sign of the League’s underlying racism came in 1995, when Hill set up a student chapter at his alma mater, the University of Alabama. Within months, its members began to verbally attack gays, and chapter president Thomas Stedman wrote to the student newspaper to claim that “blacks did not invent … anything of note anywhere in the world.” Hill also praised extremists like the Holocaust-denying and immigrant-bashing Jean-Marie Le Pen of France, calling for “others like Le Pen to arise.” The “ravages of multiculturalism and so-called diversity,” Hill said, are anathema to him. Hill described the Pledge of Allegiance as “nationalist propaganda [meant] to indoctrinate” children with socialist ideas about government.

In 2003, Hill led an attempt to resuscitate the Southern Party, another neo-Confederate organization. And he attacked the Supreme Court after its ruling in July of that year striking down anti-gay sodomy laws, saying the court was helping to advance what he called the “sodomite and civil rights agendas.”

In 1998, just after he left Stillman, Hill claimed that the LOS had some 15,000 members. In 2000, the Southern Poverty Law Center added the organization to its list of hate groups based on its white supremacist ideology. Four years later, Hill’s former mentor, Forrest McDonald, who had attended the first meeting of the LOS in 1994, denounced him, telling the Intelligence Report that Hill’s racism had destroyed the group. By 2009, the League of the South could only draw a handful of participants to its events, and its publications were produced sporadically.

But as Hill saw his academic support flee and his organization’s membership dwindle, his rhetoric grew more extreme, his racism more explicit. The Civil War, he says, wasn’t about slavery. It was the imposition by godless Yankees of a materialistic, capitalist industrial system on a South that embodied the only surviving remnant of “orthodox Christianity.” He decried the “evil genie of universal ‘human rights,’” and called egalitarianism a noxious “Jacobin” doctrine. America’s traitorous “elite masters,” he complained, had allowed it to be “overrun by hordes of non-white immigrants.”

In a 2012 essay, he claimed that white people are endowed with a “God-ordained superiority.” Whites of “honor, genius and principle” left us with a “glorious heritage,” while black people “have never created anything approximating a civilization.” Slavery, he wrote, was “successfully defended from a Biblical standpoint” until “the institution’s legitimacy was systematically undermined in the name of ‘equality’ and misappropriated ‘Christian ethics.’” He also waxed nostalgic for the Jim Crow system of racial oppression.

Particularly alarming was Hill’s growing penchant for inciting his remaining followers to violence. At a March 2011 LOS meeting in Georgia, he urged members to stock up on AK-47s, hollow-point bullets and tools to derail trains. That summer, at the League’s annual conference, the leader asked, “What would it take to get you to fight? The mantra [that] violence, or the serious threat thereof, never settles anything is patently false. History shows that it indeed does settle many things.”

This increasingly vocal militancy brought the LOS’ ideology and goals closer and closer to those of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement. In a January 2012 email, Hill declared the federal government an “organized criminal enterprise” led by “domestic terrorists,” and told his followers to prepare for a fight.

Hill even took ideas straight from the playbook of the Posse Comitatus, a racist, anti-Semitic group that raged through the Midwest in the late 1970s and 1980s. Adherents of the Posse, which was the precursor to the contemporary “sovereign citizens” movement, believed that sheriffs were the highest legitimate law enforcement officials in the country. In addition to self-defense, Hill advised his followers to use their county sheriffs “as bulwarks against the criminal class. … He can lawfully tell the feds to ‘Go to Hell’ and stay out of his territory.”

The year 2013 saw another major shift in strategy for Hill and the LOS as it adopted new rhetoric against “Southern demographic displacement.” The LOS deemphasized its longstanding objectives of a second southern secession and society dominated by “European Americans” during public events in order to portray a more moderate, conservative image. Under this new strategy, protests began focusing on more traditionally conservative themes such as opposition to immigration and same-sex marriage. Attendees were also required to follow a dress code at LOS demonstrations. Most remarkably, the group banned the usage of the Confederate battle flag at its events, much to the anger and chagrin of many of its members, in favor of a new “southern nationalist” flag.

This shift in the LOS’ policy also led to Hill’s expulsion of Matthew Heimbach, one of the organizations most visible young members, after photos surfaced of Heimbach performing a Nazi salute at events with the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement and the Imperial Klans of America. “Matthew Heimbach, a former member of The League of the South, has apparently decided to cast his lot with Nazis and others who do not represent the traditional South, the Southern Nationalist movement, and The League of the South,” Hill wrote on the Facebook page for an upcoming League event in Tennessee. “Neither he nor his friends will be welcome at our demonstrations.”

But Hill apparently underwent a change of heart less than a year later, readmitting Heimbach and promoting him to a leadership position as LOS training director.

The LOS’ more radical elements returned to the forefront shortly thereafter with the formation of an armed, paramilitary unit dubbed “the Indomitables” by Hill and the LOS’ leadership at the group’s 2014 national conference. The unit was tasked with advancing a second southern secession by any means necessary and embodied the increasingly extreme rhetoric of the group. “The primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run,” wrote Hill on the League’s website. He concluded the essay by quoting Psalms: “Blessed be the Lord my strength who teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight.”

In May 2015, Hill published what was probably his most provocative essay yet, pontificating about the possibility of an American “race war” and warning black Americans of “a very rude awakening” if such a war developed.

Perhaps even more surprising was the appearance of an essay by Hill in The Barnes Review, one of the most well known historical revisionist and Holocaust denial publications. Hill’s essay titled, “The Politics of Provocation: Spiraling Out of Control,” capped more than a year of increasingly anti-Semitic postings in internal LOS Facebook groups.

In the months leading up to the publication of Hill’s article, he regularly posted remarks such as, “Organized Jewry does its reputation among decent people no good by being neck-deep in pornography, the sex trafficking trade, and the homosexual agenda,” for LOS members to fawn over.

In December of 2015, when responding to a question about non-religious individuals joining the LOS, Hill told an inquiring LOS member that, “The League is not the church. Though most of us are Christians, one does not have to be to join our ranks. We do not allow Muslims or Jews, however. Both have proven themselves, as organized groups, to be against our heritage and interests. We will take no chances with them. Your friend is welcome if he is neither a Muslim nor Jew.”

Under Hill’s leadership, LOS members participated in 35 of the 364 Confederate battle flag rallies that followed the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the state house grounds in South Carolina and Alabama in the wake of the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, during the summer of 2015.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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