“The Klan’s Vile Post-Charleston Recruiting Spree”: Pathetic, Sick And Disgusting Lollipops Of Hate
Days after the massacre at a black church in South Carolina, some Americans woke to a vile surprise: KKK fliers with candy on their lawns.
The propaganda—stuffed into plastic baggies with pieces of peppermint and Tootsie Rolls—included a phone number for the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Planted under the cover of darkness, the fliers were distributed in California, Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.
It’s not something local police departments are taking lightly, and some have even reached out to the FBI for assistance. The Rockdale County sheriff’s department in Conyers, Georgia, collected more than 80 fliers and is investigating whether anyone can be charged with criminal trespass or littering.
“Whether it was a joke or from an organization doesn’t matter to me,” Sheriff Eric Levett told The Daily Beast. “The fact that it was done during this time is ignorant and cowardly.”
A message on the hate-spewing hotline, based in North Carolina, salutes 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who was charged with murder for the killing nine people in Charleston. Roof penned a racist manifesto before the June 17 mass shooting and wanted to start a “race war.”
“We in the Loyal White Knights of the KKK would like to say hail victory to … Dylan S. Roof who decided to do what the Bible told him,” a man chirps in the recording. “An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. They [black people] have spilled our blood too long. It’s about time someone spilled theirs.”
“If it ain’t white, it ain’t right,” the message concludes. “White power!”
Robert Jones, of the Royal White Knights in North Carolina, told The Daily Beast that the Klan is undergoing a national recruitment drive that coincidentally started around the time of the South Carolina murders.
“We’re doing this from the East Coast to the West Coast, just to let people know the Klan’s in their community,” said Jones, the grand dragon of the hate group based in Pelham, N.C. “Especially with all the stuff that’s in the news—in South Carolina they’re wanting to take the Confederate flag down.”
Jones told The Daily Beast that he supports Roof’s crime, but preferred that he “shot the correct people,” such as minority drug dealers rather than churchgoers.
“It’s a racial war against our people,” Jones said. “The more the media pushes multiculturalism down our throat, the more you’re going to see killings like this.”
In Pryor Creek, Oklahoma, the Klan also recently caught cops’ attention when it got personal—naming and urging a boycott against local Mexican restaurants.
The fliers from the Northeastern Oklahoma Klavern warned of the same supposed “black on white” violence that spurred Roof’s militancy, and pushed “civil ways to discourage these animals from our community,” the Pryor Daily Times reported.
“Stop going to Maggie’s Mexican Kitchen … [she] thinks she can talk trash about white people in Spanish, thinking none of us will understand her anti-American, anti-white rhetoric,” read the flier discovered on Father’s Day. “Or, El Humilde Mexican Restaurant, which takes your money while employing illegals and sending our American currency back to their homeland.”
Captain Rod Howell of the Mayes County sheriff’s department in Pryor told The Daily Beast that “the timing’s not a coincidence.”
“They’re doing it for a reason,” Howell said. “They’re trying to get as many people as possible to put some fuel in the fire. With the political climate the way it is today, it’s really tough right now.”
Meanwhile, Alabama residents were horrified by the racially-charged hate bags filled with candy.
“I didn’t even know the KKK was alive and well,” Shannon Phillips of Lake View told local news station WIAT. “I certainly didn’t know it was in our area. It disturbed me that they put Tootsie Rolls in here trying to appeal to children. I mean that’s just pathetic, sick, disgusting.”
Phillips said she and other neighbors scrambled to pick up the bags before kids could find them.
“Why would they put a piece of peppermint candy in here? There’s no sweetness involved in this group,” fumed another resident, Charley Buckland, to ABC 13. “This is a very sad, sad situation when you find these in your yards. It’s very disheartening.”
Cops in nearby Bessemer, Alabama, filled a 30-gallon bag with the bulletins, which officers collected from one church and more than 60 homes.
“If we find out who has done it, we’ll deal with it,” Police Chief Nathaniel Rutledge Jr. told The Daily Beast. “For right now, it’s criminal littering at the very least.”
After the fliers were found in Topeka, Kansas, the police chief there called the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI and held a press conference with the city’s Black Ministers Association.
Other fliers were found as far as Fullerton, California, a city of 135,161 in Orange County. Proclaiming “Save our land, Join the Klan,” some of the baggies—anchored by rocks and candy so they wouldn’t blow away—misspelled “California.”
“It’s just wrong. There’s no words,” Fullerton resident Alia Cass told CBS Los Angeles. “Racism isn’t born. It’s taught.”
By: Kate Briquelet, The Daily Beast, June 24, 2015
“Reclaiming The Turf”: On Our Own Terms, Running On Issues That Have Traditionally Been The Staple Of A Democratic Agenda
I’m growing increasingly weary of the kind of political analysis exemplified most recently by Dana Milbank. He takes a look at some recent polling that suggests more people are identifying themselves as liberal and prefers this explanation.
A third theory, which I find compelling, is that the rise in liberalism is a backlash against the over-the-top conservatism displayed by the tea party movement. The Pew Research Center and others have documented a dramatic increase in ideological polarization within political parties over two decades. The Republican Party has long been dominated by conservatives, and the recent rise in liberalism among Democrats may be a mirror image of that — the beginnings of a tea party of the left.
A “tea party of the left?” Oh puhleeze!
Let’s spend just a moment recapping some history. First of all, with the routing that Ronald Reagan gave Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election, a lot of Democrats decided that it was time to moderate and play some ball on Republican turf. That gave us things like “the era of big government is over,” signing on to the need to reform welfare, and a big push to “get tough on crime.” The overall conversation felt – to many of us on the left – like it was being based on Republican terms.
And then came eight years of Bush/Cheney. As I wrote previously, by the end of their term it was clear that Republican policies had left us mired in two wars in the Middle East, careening towards a second Great Depression, and a federal deficit that was ballooning out of control. At that point, smart pundits knew that the real 2008 presidential election was the one that happened in the Democratic primary. Whoever won that one was likely to be our next POTUS because – no matter how loudly the right wing screamed – the majority of Americans were done with Republican policies.
It was in that scenario that the tea party was born – stoked by the racist fears of this country having elected our first African American president. As just one example of how radical these folks are, let’s remember that they are the ones who wanted to blow up the entire global economy rather than raise the U.S. debt ceiling. That their “establishment” accomplices were willing to take us to that brink on a couple of occasions tells us all we need to know about how radicalized the Republicans have become.
Now we have had six and a half years of a Democratic President who ended those two wars, has presided over the longest expansion of private sector job growth in our history and provided millions of Americans with access to health care. The candidate most likely to be his successor is running on such non-radical notions as raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation, investing in infrastructure, addressing climate change, immigration reform, criminal justice reform and expanded educational opportunities.
In other words, Democrats are reclaiming the turf. That means having the conversation on our own terms and running on issues that have traditionally been the staple of a Democratic agenda. That they also happens to align with the views of a majority of voters in this country means that it is the opposite of tea party extremism. The mirror Mr. Milbank sees is the one Democrats are holding up to reflect the views of the people they’re running to represent.
That’s what is making it cool to be a liberal again.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 21, 2015
“One Of The Most Powerful Tools White-Power Groups Have”: A History Of Hate Rock From Johnny Rebel To Dylann Roof
What makes a young man a racist killer? Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old charged for the murder of nine people at a historic black church in Charleston last week, was “normal,” his cousin told a reporter, “until he started listening to that white power music stuff.” It’s not clear exactly what Roof was listening to or how it influenced him. But it wouldn’t be surprising if music were one of the channels through which his racism crystallized; hate rock is one of the most powerful tools white-power groups have to spread their ideology to young people.
Christian Picciolini was a middle-class teenager from the suburbs of Chicago who loved punk rock. In the late 1980s he started listening to Skrewdriver, a British band formed in the regular punk sphere that morphed into a notorious neo-Nazi group. “When I heard the white-power lyrics I felt like they spoke to me,” Picciolini recalled. “My neighborhood was rapidly changing, I knew people whose parents were out of work because of minorities taking their jobs—at least, that’s what I thought at the time.” He was attracted to the aggressiveness of the music, to the way it channeled his angst. Yet he perceived its message to be a positive one. “It seemed like they were asking people to stand up and protect their neighborhoods and families. I realized later they were calling for violence.”
Picciolini says that music was the “primary” reason he became a skinhead; he didn’t come for the racism, but he absorbed it and in turn used music to bring other kids in the Rust Belt into the fold. “Music for us was the most powerful tool—definitely the most effective recruiting method,” he says. Within a few years Picciolini was the front man for the first American white power band to play in Europe. “There’s white pride all across America/White pride all across the world/White pride flowing through the streets/White pride will never face defeat!” he sang to 3,000 skinheads in Weimar, Germany, when he was 18. After selling hate rock out of his backpack for a while, Piccionlini opened a record store, where he kept the white-power music behind the counter. He estimates that it accounted for 75 percent of his revenue.
The scene that Picciolini was a part of has been associated with various acts of racial violence. Wade Michael Page, who murdered six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012, was a member of several bands, including Youngland, a popular group that performed around Orange County. Youngland was known mainly for its song “Thank God I’m a White Boy,” a worked-over version of John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” Page sang vocals on “Activist or Terrorist,” a track on Youngland’s 2003 album Winter Wind that concluded: “Activist or terrorist depends which side you’re on/Defend against the invader this war will greet your son/Hey you gotta go not your home anymore/If you don’t move quietly you’ll be forced to war.”
Most white-power bands today play what sounds like punk or heavy metal, but white nationalists have channeled their ideology through everything from country to Celtic folk. The scene’s locus has historically been Northern Europe, but crackdowns on hate speech abroad eventually drove the scene to the United States. Distinctly American contributions include a Cajun musician from Louisiana called Johnny Rebel who pioneered a racist strain of country music in the 1960s in response to the civil-rights movement. His early singles include “Nigger Nigger,” “Some Niggers Never Die (They Just Smell That Way),” and “In Coontown.” He made something of a comeback after 9/11 with a song called “Infidel Anthem,” a promise of vengeance that, while heavier on the profanity, is similar in thrust to Toby Keith’s mainstream country hit, “Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue (The Angry American).”
In the late 1990s leaders of white-nationalist groups became more intentional about using music as a recruiting tool, particularly to middle- and upper-class kids like Picciolini. “I am overjoyed at the success we are seeing with the White Power bands,” wrote David Lane, a member of the neo-Nazi group The Order, in a fanzine in 1998. “I must confess that I don‘t understand the phenomenon, since my preference runs to Wagner and Tchaikovsky, but the musical enjoyment of us dinosaurs is of no importance. White Rock seems to reach and unify our young folk, and that is the first good news in decades.” In 1999 the leader of the National Alliance, William Luther Pierce, acquired a label called Resistance Records, which advertised itself as the “soundtrack for white revolution.”
Though white-nationalist rockers sometimes billed their music as an alternative to the “corporate” music business, certainly the music’s potential to raise revenue along with new recruits was not lost on its backers. Resistance was bringing in close to $1 million a year for the National Alliance in the early aughts, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which “helped to take the National Alliance to an all-time high in terms of membership and funding.”
In 2004, a white power label called Panzerfaust Records launched “Project Schoolyard USA” with the tagline, “We don’t just entertain racist kids: We create them.” Panzerfaust made 100,000 copies of a mix CD priced at 15 cents apiece, in the hopes that fans would buy them in bulk to distribute to middle and high schoolers. “[W]e know the impact that is possible when kids are introduced to white nationalism through the musical medium,” Panzerfaust’s owner Bryant Cecchini (who also went by the name Byron Calvert) wrote on his website. The CD included bands like the Bully Boys, who sang about “Whiskey bottles/baseball bats/pickup trucks/and rebel flags/we’re going on the town tonight/hit and run/let’s have some fun/we’ve got jigaboos on the run.” The following year, Panzerfaust collapsed amidst a debate about whether the label’s cofounder was actually white.
White-power groups have struggled to get their music onto the airwaves and into record stores and concert venues. The Internet now offers a cheap and easy way to reach listeners. There’s Micetrap Radio, for instance, which prides itself on being “the very first internet radio program to play White racial music.” Its website streams “the noise of our white generations” 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The SPLC has had some success cutting off online distribution networks: Apple started to pull white-power groups from iTunes late last year after the SPLC identified dozens of hate bands whose music was being sold through the service. The group is still pressing Spotify and Amazon to remove a number of bands.
C. Richard King, a professor at Washington State University who studies white supremacist culture, says that music is “one of the two most important pathways by which someone goes from wherever they’re at to being engaged or committed to something we might call white power.” The other pathway is the Internet, and the two are often bundled together. “If you wanted to be into white power thirty years ago, you had to show up at a bookstore or go to a Klan rally or a Nazi march. Now, one can simply log on and hit some keywords in Google and you can find the music and the websites,” King explained. While white-power music circulates now through online communities instead of between teenagers’ backpacks, King said that live shows, by giving people a reason to get together, continue to nurture white-supremacist communities in the real world.
Should the white-power music scene be more heavily policed? First Amendment free-speech rights protect hate rock to a greater extent in the US than in Europe, where authorities have taken an aggressive stance. In Germany, police developed a smartphone app to alert officers when one of some 1,000 neo-Nazi songs indexed in a federal database is played at a club or on the radio. But stricter regulation of hate speech in Europe hasn’t silenced white-power bands or dismantled neo-Nazi groups; it’s just led them to adopt more deeply coded racial language, King said.
In the United States, a better approach to burying the subculture might be to drag it into the light. “The thing that America really needs is to talk about and engage race, and to take seriously what the foundations of the music are. The music is not the product simply of disturbed individuals or people who are disaffected,” said King. “It emerged out of a much longer history of how blacks and blackness get thought about and how whites think about whiteness.”
American popular music expressed many of the ideas about race that permeate what is now defined as a fringe genre well into the 20th century. As King and his co-author David Leonard write in Beyond Hate: White Power and Popular Culture, it was only once overt racism became impolite that there was reason for “white power” music to occupy its own subculture. In the contemporary era too the boundaries between white-power music and mainstream punk and rock are more porous than one might assume. For instance, Skrewdriver was influential in wider punk circles before the band’s racial politics fully crystallized.
If American popular culture and white-supremacist ideology are no longer in explicit alignment as they once were, the idea that white America needs defending still pervades mainstream politics and culture—the way the right talks about immigration is a clear example. “We need to get those myths, those ideas, that history out. We need to talk about them and engage them seriously,” King agues. Rather than dismiss the genre, “we need to have more conversations about the content of the music—why it’s being produced, why people are listening to it, what is it that makes a young guy in this day and age wear flags from Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.”
For Christian Picciolini, what led him to the white-nationalist movement was ultimately what took him out of it. At his record store he talked with customers he might have otherwise avoided—people who were black, Jewish, or gay. As he found himself bonding with someone over a punk or a rockabilly record, he became increasingly embarrassed about the stock of hate music behind the counter. “I couldn’t deny the feelings that I felt for these people,” he says. He dropped out of the skinhead scene, and stopped selling white-power music. His revenue plummeted and the store went bankrupt. In 2010 he co-founded a peace advocacy group called Life After Hate, and this spring, he released a memoir.
Dylann Roof walked away from what might have been a similar redemption. According to reports, he spent an hour with his victims inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church before he shot them. He “almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to him,” sources told NBC News. The day after, a crowd assembled at the Morris Brown AME church in Charleston for a prayer service. They sang “My Hope is Built,” a hymn that ends, “On Christ the solid rock I stand/ All other ground is sinking sand/ All other ground is sinking sand.”
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, June 23, 2015
“The Southern Strategy Is Dead”: Does The Republican Party Have An Alternative?
On Monday afternoon, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) announced that she now supports removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the statehouse in Columbia. While the reaction of the Republican presidential candidates to the terrorist attack last week in Charleston and the subsequent debate about the flag has been cowardly at best, this is nevertheless a significant moment, with broad implications for the place of race in American politics. To put it simply, the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” is all but dead.
As political strategies go, it had a good run — nearly half a century. In 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned on behalf of the “silent majority” who wanted nothing of civil rights protests and uppity young people; he told them he’d deliver the “law and order” they craved, and there was little question who they were afraid of. It was called the Southern Strategy because while the South had been firmly Democratic since the Civil War, Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act initiated an exodus of Southern whites to the Republican Party, enabling them to build an electoral college majority with the South as its foundation. They would win five of the next six presidential elections with that strategy.
A key component was to make the GOP the default party of white people, by running against what they associated with black people — not just civil rights, but things like poverty programs and crime. It required ongoing reminders of who was on who’s side. So in 1980, Ronald Reagan announced his campaign for president in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. He was not there to promote racial healing. Four years earlier, Reagan had told audiences how appalled he was at the idea of a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps, and he spent a good deal of the 1980 campaign railing against welfare queens. The race of the (largely fictional) offenders was lost on no one.
And as Stanley Greenberg, then a political scientist and now a leading Democratic pollster, found in his classic 1985 study of Macomb County, Michigan, the entire phenomenon of “Reagan Democrats” was built on racial resentment. “These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics,” he wrote. “Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives; not being black is what constitutes being middle class; not living with blacks is what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live.”
So when Reagan’s vice president ran to succeed him, it was little surprise that he would employ an inflammatory racial attack against his opponent, repeating over and over again the story of escaped convict Willie Horton. If Michael Dukakis were elected, George Bush’s campaign convinced people, hordes of menacing black felons would rampage through the land, raping white women and emasculating their husbands. They didn’t say it in quite those words, but they didn’t have to; Horton’s mug shot (aired endlessly on the news) and the story of his crimes was more than enough. While Bush is now treated as a noble and kind elder statesman, we shouldn’t forget that he ran one of the most racist presidential campaigns of modern times. “By the time we’re finished,” Bush’s strategist Lee Atwater said, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”
Today a Republican presidential candidate wouldn’t feature Willie Horton as prominently as Bush did, but it isn’t because they’ve seen the moral error of their ways. It’s because it doesn’t work anymore. While nearly nine in 10 voters in 1980 were white, their proportion has been dropping for decades, and it will probably be around seven in 10 in next year’s election. Mitt Romney won all the Deep South in 2012, and won white voters by more than 20 points — but still lost to Barack Obama by 126 electoral votes.
That doesn’t mean the GOP’s center of gravity doesn’t still lie beneath the Mason-Dixon line. Republicans control nearly all the state governments in the South, which provides them laboratories for their latest innovations in governing, and their hold on the House of Representatives is built on their strength in the South. But as a strategy to win the White House, counting on white people — and the white people who respond when their racial hot buttons are pushed — won’t ever succeed again.
The party’s candidates are still coming to grips with this reality. They’ve pandered to racists for so long that not upsetting them is still their default setting; when the issue of the Confederate flag came up, the first response almost all of presidential candidates had was just to say that the people of South Carolina will decide, which is procedurally accurate and substantively irrelevant. But if South Carolina’s governor can come out against the flag, it really is a signal that times have changed.
Smart people in the GOP know that if the party is going to win the White House again, they can’t do it with the Southern Strategy that served them so well for so long. The question now is whether they can come up with an alternative.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Week, June 23, 2015
“The Lessons Of Charleston”: The Real Threat To America Is Right-Wing Terrorism
On Wednesday night, a man named Dylann Storm Roof allegedly entered a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, during a prayer meeting. There he reportedly sat quietly for almost an hour, before opening fire with a pistol and killing nine people. He has since been captured.
When a mass shooting happens, people naturally wonder about the motivation. What we know so far is that Roof made overtly racist remarks to his friends; boasted a Facebook profile picture that showed him wearing the flags of white supremacist African states; and allegedly told one of the victims, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” It seems a safe bet that racism was a likely motive in the Charleston shooting.
Until we know more about the gunman, it’s impossible to get more specific than that. What can be said, however, is that the attack is congruous with America’s history of white supremacy and right-wing extremism, a real domestic threat that far outstrips that of Islamist terrorism. If terror is the mortal threat it has long been trumped up to be, then we must conclude that our whole political and law enforcement apparatus has been pointed in the wrong direction.
First, this should be emphasized: Random murders of black civilians are not some historical aberration. On the contrary, they were the very foundation of the political system in the American South for something like 90 years. Segregation and Jim Crow did not just mean separate drinking fountains, but a system of racial subordination in which blacks were controlled through fear of psychotic violence. This shooting spree is the worst single incident in many years — but it doesn’t hold a candle to the Colfax Massacre. If he had done it in 1890, the Charleston gunman probably wouldn’t have even been arrested.
That ugly history has not been confronted in a remotely honest way. Right now, the flag of treason, chattel slavery, and apartheid flies over a Civil War memorial on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse. In 2014, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley defended this placement, noting that she had heard no complaints from local CEOs.
That brings me to right-wing militant activity, which also has not been confronted. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security finished a report on right-wing extremism, started during the Bush years. It argued that the election of the first black president, the Great Recession, and veterans having trouble adjusting to civilian life (Timothy McVeigh was a veteran of Desert Storm), and other factors might lead to a spate of terrorist attacks, similar to what happened in the 1990s. It was mainly a cautionary note, proposing little aside from increased watchfulness and naming no specific threats.
Nevertheless, the backlash from conservatives was immediate and fierce. Pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin spun it as indicting all veterans and conservatives. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano eventually withdrew the report, and apologized repeatedly.
Six years later, how have things turned out?
Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.
In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Arie Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012. [The New York Times]
Those few Islamist plots — a great many of which were basically created wholesale by the FBI — are presented as justification for tremendous effort on the part of law enforcement and the military. They assassinate American Muslims overseas. They deluge American mosques with infiltrators and spies. They keep innocent people in Guantanamo Bay for year after year.
Since 9/11, right-wing terrorists have killed more than five times as many people as Islamist ones. Yet a short study warning to keep a watchful attitude towards the former is met with enraged hostility. It reveals both the small actual danger of Islamist terrorism, and the utterly ridiculous and hypocritical way in which anti-terrorism resources are allocated.
Still, if conservatives are confident in their ideas, and do not subscribe to the paranoid delusions of the sovereign citizen, white supremacist, or neo-Nazi movements, they should not feel threatened by close investigations of such people. But I’m not holding my breath.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, June 19, 2015
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