by Heidi Beirich
Southern Poverty Law Center
June 2008
From 1777 until 1791, Vermont was an independent state complete with all the trappings — a constitution, a flag, even a mint to pump out its own money, the Vermont copper. But in 1791, Vermonters happily joined the new United States. Now, some of the locals want out.
In 2003, the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) sprang up to push for the independence of Vermont, a tiny, idyllic Northeastern state with fewer than 630,000 residents. In its seemingly quixotic quest, SVR took up the mantra that small is beautiful, arguing that secession would lead to sustainability, ecological balance, an end to military entanglements overseas, and a better life. SVR activists designed a new green flag for Vermont and started selling T‑shirts, particularly popular with the state’s many tourists, that read, “U.S. OUT OF VT!”
But in recent months and years, SVR’s actions have gone from way out to worrying. Starting in 2005, SVR leader Thomas H. Naylor — along with SVR’s very close ally, the Cold Spring, N.Y.-based Middlebury Institute that is headed by longtime leftist Kirkpatrick Sale — began openly collaborating with a collection of Southern extremists to build a national secession movement.
SVR’s disturbing new partner is the white supremacist League of the South. The Alabama-based group is against interracial marriage, believes the old Confederacy never surrendered, and wants to reestablish “the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions” in a newly seceded South. It seeks to accord different classes of people differing legal rights in what sounds very much like a medieval theocracy of lords, serfs and clerics. League intellectuals have defended both slavery (which was “God-ordained”) and segregation, a policy described as protecting the genetic “integrity” of both blacks and whites. Right after Hurricane Katrina, league members put up “whites only” housing offers, including one from Alabama offering a trailer to a “white family of three or four,” and another from Tennessee offering to temporarily house a “White Christian family.”
Many Vermonters have been shocked by this alliance. After all, the Green Mountain State was the first to abolish slavery in 1777, and its men fought fiercely to preserve the union in battles during the Civil War, some of which are proudly commemorated in paintings displayed inside the gold-domed State House. But Naylor isn’t worried about his fellow Vermonters’ concerns, hotly defending as critical his newfound alliance with members of the radical right.
“For the last 30 years, people have been speculating on the idea of far left meets far right, and I saw the possibility for that not to be fantasy but to be real,” Naylor told the Intelligence Report. “The objective is to bring down the Empire.” The League of the South, Naylor added, though “not perfect,” is “not racist.”
Birthing a movement
Talk of secession has been heating up in Vermont since the early 1990s and even before. In 1991, then-Lt. Gov. Howard Dean moderated debates in seven towns that then voted for secession. That same year, University of Vermont professor and current SVR advisor Frank Bryan argued for secession in a series of well-publicized debates with Vermont Supreme Court Justice John Dooley. With the election of George Bush and the onset of the increasingly unpopular Iraq war, secessionist sentiment in traditionally liberal Vermont picked up, with a 2006 University of Vermont poll showing 8% of residents interested in the idea.
It was Naylor who turned that sentiment into a movement, founding SVR after self-publishing The Vermont Manifesto in 2003. Naylor was spurred to create SVR by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which he does not believe were organized by Osama bin Laden, a “fundamentalist living in a remote cave,” but rather were the ultimate result of American arrogance. In his manifesto’s preface, Naylor writes: “Our nation has truly lost its way. America is no longer a sustainable nation-state economically, politically, socially, militarily or environmentally. The Empire has no clothes.” A perennial curmudgeon, Naylor regularly berates government officials. He calls Vermont’s elected officials “enemies of the state” and has labeled six-term Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, “a world-class prostitute.”
To most Vermonters, SVR was originally seen as a far-out outfit that engaged in publicity stunts to push secession. At least in the beginning, its most enthusiastic supporters seemed to be the Glover, Vt.-based Bread and Puppet Theater troupe, a merry band dedicated to “cheap art” whose building hosted SVR’s first statewide meeting in October 2003. One SVR attention-grabber was a “memorial service” held on March 4, 2005, commemorating the day in 1791 that Vermont joined the union. The service included everything from a reading from Ecclesiastes to the strains of Chopin’s “Funeral March.” A funeral procession with a New Orleans-style jazz band carried a flag-draped coffin containing the “deceased First Vermont Republic” to the State House in Montpelier, where it was placed at the feet of Vermont Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen’s statue. SVR even achieved a symbolic political success, persuading the legislature to designate Jan. 16 as Vermont Independence Day to commemorate the establishment of the First Vermont Republic in 1777.
Naylor’s leftist credentials were enhanced greatly by his close friendship with Kirkpatrick Sale, whose Middlebury Institute he helped found in 2005. Sale, a contributing editor at the left-wing journal The Nation and a chronicler of the militant, 1960s-era Students for a Democratic Society, is best known as the author of The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, a 1991 history that was the first to denounce Columbus for “founding” the New World and ushering in the destruction of its native peoples. Between 1965 and 1968, he was editor of The New York Times Magazine. Thirty years later, in 1995, Sale was named as a “visionary” by the Utne Reader, a liberal journal. Sale also is known for his hatred of technology, once famously smashing a computer to bits on a New York stage.
In 2005, the Vermont secessionist movement also spawned a popular independent newspaper, Vermont Commons, that the SVR describes as a “sister organization.” The newspaper promotes nonviolent secession and a “more sustainable Vermont future.” Both SVR and Vermont Commons argue that the United States has become an unsustainable “empire” in need of dismantling.
From Mississippi to Montpelier
The image of SVR as a quixotic band of idealistic Vermontophiles fighting for an independent Green Mountain State has taken a public beating since 2006, when Naylor and Sale began openly working with the League of the South and other neo-Confederates. But the fact is that from the beginning, the SVR has been in many ways a Southern import that pushes 19th-century claims about states’ rights and a revisionist take on Lincoln and the Civil War.
Naylor, the SVR’s 71-year-old founder, is a born-and-bred child of the Deep South. He apparently developed his secessionist ideas under the guidance of former League of the South member and Emory University philosopher Donald Livingston — a man Naylor told the Intelligence Report is the “philosophical guru of the Second Vermont Republic” and who is also published in Vermont Commons. Livingston — who told the Report in a 2001 interview that “the North created segregation” and that Southerners fought during the Civil War only “because they were invaded” — has attended most of SVR’s events. Livingston is also featured in the SVR video, “U.S. Empire and Vermont Independence,” alongside SVR stalwarts Frank Bryan and Jim Hogue, who is an Ethan Allen reenactor.
Naylor is a
native of Jackson, Miss. Some of his father T. H. Naylor Jr.‘s correspondence is found in the archives of the infamous Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a secret state spy agency that was formed to battle integration. The elder Naylor was even featured in the notorious film, “Message From Mississippi,” which promoted the joys of segregation. Now retired, Naylor taught economics at Duke University in Durham, N.C., for 30 years, and has written 30 books, ranging from tomes on computer simulations to political works on Gorbachev. In the early 1990s, he worked as a consultant for companies in the USSR. During that time, he became convinced that the break-up of the Soviet Union was a harbinger of America’s future.
Although the younger Naylor told the Intelligence Report that while in college he refused to stand when “Dixie” was played at the University of Mississippi’s football games, his ideology is now rife with neo-Confederate ideas. By 1997, Naylor, in his book Downsizing the U.S.A. — co-authored by William Willimon, the dean of chapel and a professor of Christian ministry at Duke University in North Carolina — was calling the Civil War the “War Between the States.” Parroting the neo-Confederate anti-Lincoln line, Naylor calls Lincoln “arguably the worst” president in American history. “Lincoln invaded the Confederate States without the consent of congress,” he wrote in his Manifesto, adding that Lincoln “may have also been the father of American internal imperialism.”
And he adopted a revisionist view of the causes of the Civil War that has been roundly rejected by most serious historians. “Most Americans think the Civil War was fought about freeing the slaves, but rather it was fought to preserve the union and build an empire,” Naylor told The (U.K) Independent last October.
Naylor also is down on desegregation. In a 2007 essay, “Minority States NOT Minority Rights,” Naylor criticizes segregation but also “forced racial integration,” complaining that the federal government was in the 1950s and 1960s “ordering me to associate with minorities whether I like it or not.” Overall, Naylor can’t abide by the idea that since civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s, “minority rights always trump states’ rights.” He asks if integration “disempowered minorities, diluting their influence over their communities and implying that every solution to their problems always lies in the hands of the majority-backed government?”
New Friends
Naylor’s reasons for moving to Vermont are explained in Downsizing the U.S.A. He portrays his then-hometown of Richmond, Va., as overcome by crime and angry African Americans, saying it was in a “death spiral.” When he moved to Vermont in 1993, Naylor almost immediately started calling for an independent state. He pines for a separate Vermont, perhaps allied with other Atlantic maritime entities, that would resemble Switzerland or Luxembourg — countries Naylor considers as close to perfect as possible. In Downsizing the U.S.A., Naylor sounds a theme similar to that of many white supremacists, suggesting that some parts of the country could be broken up according to ethnicity. “If Palestine could be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state, why can’t independent African American, Hispanic, and Native American states be carved out of the United States?”
In Vermont, Naylor grew close to an unlikely secessionist, the renowned diplomat George Kennan, described by Naylor as “the godfather of the movement.” In his 1994 autobiography Around the Cragged Hill, Kennan had suggested breaking the U.S. into “a dozen constituent republics” for reasons that don’t sound that different than Naylor’s. In a letter to Naylor quoted in The American Conservative, Kennan wrote of “unmistakable evidences of a growing differentiation between the cultures, respectively, of large southern and southwestern regions of this country” and worried that “the very culture of the bulk of the population of these regions will tend to be primarily Latin-American in nature.” Kennan questioned whether American society should be “recklessly trashed” for what he called “a polyglot mix-mash.”
Though he has spent his entire life in the New York region and been a regular on the progressive intellectual scene in New York City, Kirkpatrick Sale, too, has sounded very Confederate of late. When addressing the League of the South’s convention last fall in Chattanooga, Tenn., Sale came off like a newly minted neo-Confederate. Describing himself as a “Northerner but with the blood of the South running through my veins,” Sale told the cheering audience that he was descended from the Sale clan of Virginia and Kentucky and that one of his ancestors, Charles “Chic” Sale, wrote a popular story in Southern vernacular on building outhouses called The Specialist. At the end of the league conference, the audience stood and sang “Dixie” together. In a more recent essay, Sale described his view of what happened when the South seceded the first time: “They were ruthlessly attacked and their society eventually destroyed.”
Early last October, Sale’s institute co-hosted with the league the Second Annual North American Secession Conference in the same Chattanooga venue. With about 60 attendees, most of the conference’s speakers were members of the league or prominent neo-Confederate activists. The event also attracted interest in white supremacist circles outside of the South. For example, publisher Bill Regnery, backer of the white supremacist National Policy Institute, which issues reports on such things as “The State of White America” and “Conservatives and Race,” was on hand. For a movement supposedly led out of Vermont and New York, Southerners seem now to be at least co-driving the bus.
Left meets right
Four years earlier, in November 2004, SVR held its first serious conference in Middlebury, Vt., in conjunction with Fourth World, a left-wing British secessionist group supported by Sale. That was the beginning of the close partnership between Sale and Naylor.
Attended by 35 people, the conference produced “The Middlebury Declaration,” named for the place where it was signed, the Middlebury Inn. The original signers were Naylor, Sale and Donald Livingston, the former league leader. The declaration asserts that “[t]he American empire, now imposing its military might on 153 countries around the world, is as fragile as empires historically tend to be, and that it might well implode upon itself in the near future.” Hence the need for a “new politics” based on separation. Secessionists with League of the South connections were soon involved. Naylor said they approached SVR “as a role model.”
Speaking at a Vermont Independence rally that same year was John Remington Graham, an expert on the Francophone independence movement in Quebec, Canada, and an affiliated scholar at the League of the South’s Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History. The main outcome of the meeting was a decision to create a think tank to explore secession around the world. That idea came to fruition with the establishment of Sale’s Middlebury Institute in 2005 as a sort of secessionist gathering point that posts material on its website about secessionist groups around the world. The institute also holds conferences on secession, two of which have prominently featured league members as well as other neo-Confederates.
In November 2006, SVR and the Middlebury Institute co-hosted the First North American Separatist Convention in the Montpelier State House (which, ironically, is graced by a large statue of Lincoln). The secessionists-only conference brought together several groups, including the Free Hawaii movement and members of the Alaskan Independence Party. But the bulk of the crowd even then was made up of Southern groups including the racist League of the South; Christian Exodus, a theocracy-minded outfit headed by a former league leader from Texas; and the Abbeville Institute, which was established by Donald Livingston i
n 2003 after he finally left the League of the South due to its “political baggage.” Livingston’s institute is devoted to the “Southern tradition,” including what it describes as the ignored “achievements of white people in the South.”
In October 2007, the league, Naylor and Sale met again in Chattanooga for the Second Annual North American Secession conference, an event organized by the Middlebury Institute and this time officially co-hosted by the league. The conference issued the “Chattanooga Declaration” — a document that pronounced the “old left-right split meaningless and dead” and called for “diversity among human societies.” It was while in Chattanooga that Sale spoke so fondly of his Southern roots.
Sale defended the league to reporters, telling The (U.K.) Independent that fall that he wanted to show the “folks up north” that league members are “legitimate colleagues” who have been wrongly declared “racists.” (Sale declined to discuss the league, its history or anything else with the Report, saying by E‑mail that he did not trust it “for one instant to be fair or truthful.”) Sale has hotly contested the SPLC designation of the league as a hate group, telling The Associated Press in 2007 that the league — whose leader, former university professor Michael Hill, has engaged in such activities as sending out E‑mails mocking the names of his African-American students — “has not done or said anything racist in its 14 years of existence.”
Hard to Starboard
Naylor and Sale don’t just share secessionist chitchat with their new neo-Confederate friends. Over the last two years, they have both become ensconced in the neo-Confederate movement and collegial with several extremists. For example, Naylor serves as an “associated scholar” at Livingston’s Abbeville Institute, whose ranks are filled with current and former league members. Another Abbeville “scholar,” Scott Trask, has written for the white supremacist newsletter American Renaissance, which is devoted to proving the intellectual inferiority of minorities and recently claimed that blacks are incapable of creating any civilization.
SVR, the Abbeville Institute and the League of the South Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History all share as an advisor Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor at Loyola College who has done more than anyone to push the idea that Abraham Lincoln was a paragon of wickedness, a man secretly intent on destroying states’ rights and building a massive federal government. “It was not to end slavery that Lincoln initiated an invasion of the South,” DiLorenzo writes in his 2002 attack on Lincoln, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. “A war was not necessary to free the slaves, but it was necessary to destroy the most significant check on the powers of the central government: the right of secession.”
Appointed to the SVR advisory board in 2005, Marco Bassani, an Italian college professor, is also an associated scholar at the Abbeville Institute. More importantly, he is a member of the xenophobic and anti-immigrant Northern League, whose leader, Umberto Bossi, has described African immigrants as “bingo-bongos” and suggested opening fire on the boats of would-be illegal immigrants to Italy.
Besides speaking at league conferences, Sale’s speeches are for sale at Georgia League of the South leader Ray McBerry’s Dixie Broadcasting, where Sale is described as a “social liberal who supports the Constitutional concept of the right of secession.” The league advertises on its website that it will participate in the Third Annual North American Secessionist Convention, to be put on by Sale’s Middlebury Institute next fall.
In the last two years, Sale and Naylor even signed on as guests for the now-defunct Tennessee-based hate radio program “The Political Cesspool,” run by white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens board member and David Duke pal James Edwards. Naylor, who has been a guest twice on the program whose guest line-up reads like a Who’s Who of the racist radical right, appeared during its celebration of “Confederate History Month” in April 2007.
In the case of Israel, Sale has views that are common to the far left and the far right. In a 2003 article for the left-wing journal Counterpunch called “An End to the Israel Experiment? Unmaking a Grievous Error,” Sale asks “[w]hether the 50-year-old experiment known as the state of Israel has proven to be a failure and should be abandoned.” He points out that “[t]he [Jewish] diaspora, after all, has existed since 70 A.D., far longer than the state has, and might even be thought of as the natural or historic role of Jewry.”
Naylor sees it similarly. “We have a government that is unconditionally allied with the state of Israel, which is an apartheid terrorist state,” he told the Report. He complained that the entire congressional delegation of Vermont “supports Israel.”
‘Hating America’
Some Vermonters continue to stand by Naylor despite concerns. Vermont Commons Editor Rob Williams told the Intelligence Report that although his organization is completely separate from SVR, Naylor is “no racist” and a man whom he considers “a colleague” and whose essays his paper will continue to publish. A member of SVR’s speakers bureau, Williams added: “The ‘racism’ charge, by the way, has become a convenient way for a few outspoken Vermonters who may not agree with our goals to throw stones at us.” The real racist, Williams said, is “the United States empire.”
But playing footsie with neo-Confederates has cost SVR, as several members have left the group or distanced themselves from it in recent years. Former executive director Jane Dwinel quit the group in 2006, telling the Report later that she had had sharp disagreements with Naylor. John McClaughry, a supporter of decentralization, told the Report that SVR has “shaded over to hating America.” According to the Vermont Secession blog, Dan Dewalt, a former SVR advisory member, was dismissed from the group for merely raising irksome questions about Naylor’s connection to groups including the league.
Even many of those who remain Naylor’s colleagues are worried by SVR’s new Southern friends. “You’ve got to watch whose conference you go to. There’s no doubt about it,” SVR advisor Frank Bryan told the Report. Added longtime SVR ally Jim Hogue, “If [Naylor] was very flattering toward the League of the South, and they’re racist, that was probably a bad idea.”
In the face of these criticisms, Naylor remains defiant. “I don’t give a shit what you write,” he told the Intelligence Report. “If someone tells me that I shouldn’t associate with the League of the South, it guarantees that I will associate with the League of the South.”
Sale seems to be losing friends, too. Roane Carey, an editor who has worked with Sale at The Nation, told the Intelligence Report: “The Nation has no sympathy for or connection to the League of the South or any group of that ilk. A couple of years ago, we found out that the Vermont secession movement had the astonishingly poor judgment to make an alliance with the [League of the South], whose thinly disguised racism and closed-mindedness we condemn without reservation.
“It’s one thing to call for devolution, local self-rule, small-is-beautiful politics — even, in some circumstances, the idea of secession — in the cause of ending empire and enhancing democracy, personal liberty, equal rights and environmental sanity,” said Carey. “It’s quite another to make nice with groups, such as the League of the South, that use the language of secession and regional or local self-rule as a means of promoting Old South revanchism.” Carey added that he hopes Sale “comes to his senses.”
Despite SVR’s best efforts, for now the union appears to be safe — Vermont secessionists failed to obtain the signatures needed to put independence resolutions on 2008 Town Meeting Day ballots. They will try again in 2009.
The Political Implications of the UFO Phenomenon and the "ET" Myth
Note that this former League of the South member was also the self-declared “official blogger” for Rand’s dad in 2012:
Note that Jack Hunter wasn’t just a member of the League of the South. He used to be a chairman. With a resume like that it’s no wonder his services are in such high demand!
It looks like Rand Paul is sticking with the “Southern Avenger”. It’ll be interesting to see how the Avenger’s other employers respond. It’s not that Paul approves of discriminatory attitudes. It’s that he hasn’t seen any evidence of it:
Paul/Hunter 2016!!!
Rand Paul decided to reiterate that Jack Hunter’s disavowed writings were totally not racist:
A man that loved Jesse Helms so much that he moved to North Carolina just to be a little closer to his hero is now shockingly close to his hero’s old seat:
Check out Jack Hunter’s latest gig: He’s heading up a libertarian version of the Drudge Report that’s doubling as the platform for showcasing the new kinder, gentler Jack Hunter:
“I remember being on talk radio and saying those things I regret,” he added. “I remember—God—all I wanted for president [was] someone who didn’t want to get us into the next war, and someone who would stop the illegal immigrants who would ruin the country. But being part of the Ron Paul campaign. … I saw that they didn’t give a crap about any of that stuff about immigrants. It doesn’t matter. It makes us worse people. They influenced me....I really shifted my views over a couple of years,” he said. “What millennials believe, the sort of politics they’re attracted to, is minus a lot of those ugly aspects of conservatism. The way some people talk about the migrants on the border, calling them drug dealers—these are children! They’re not all gang members. It blows my mind that these family-values, allegedly Christian people are doing the most un-Christ-like things imaginable”.
Oh wow, so it was while working on Ron Paul’s campaign — where Hunter saw how they didn’t really “give a crap about any of that stuff about immigrants” — that Hunter had his big worldview shift. So...that would have been during the 2012 campaign, and not the 2008 campaign, right?
Hmmm...yeah, that was probably the 2012 campaign that impacted Hunter so deeply. The 2008 Ron Paul didn’t sound like the kind of candidate that would induce immigration-related epiphanies.
So it would seem that Jack Hunter has had a pretty recent conversion to whatever it is he’s embracing now. Let’s hope for Hunter’s sake that he doesn’t end up getting influenced by Rand’s presumed 2016 presidential campaign. It could be ‘two steps forward, three steps back’ for Jack.
There goes Rand being Rand. Again:
Well, in Rand’s defense it would be pointlessly nice for #6 to get repealed. It will also be fascinating to see if this particular mind worm can manage to become part of the GOP’s mantra and “brand” going forward. Because there would be nothing stopping the next non-GOP president from reinstating all those executive orders following the Paul administration so repealing and then reinstating the Emancipation Proclamation could be one of those weird de facto rituals every time the White House switches parties. That kind of flip flopping could make for a useful juxtaposition that could add some much needed clarity:
“Rand Paul’s problem isn’t that he changes positions — it’s that he insists that he can simultaneously hold multiple, contradictory positions on a litany of key issues”. That’s right, Rand’s not a flip flopper. He’s the quantum candidate, capable of holding multiple, contradictory policy positions simultaneously. The candidate of the future is already here.
With Scotland narrowly rejecting secession, Reuters polled 9000 Americans about whether or not they would like to see their state secede. The results: almost of quarter of Americans support the idea. And for self-identified Tea Party members it was a majority:
Former Reagan speechwriter Dougas MacKinnon just can’t stop whistling
DixieReagan:So MacKinnon didn’t address what the status of black people would be in “Reagan” but he did hope to keep Texas out due to “a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some of the folks in Mexico.” Aha.
It’s also worth noting that, should “Reagan” become a nation, Venezuela had better watch out. MacKinnon is on to you Venezuela!
The War on Christmas just got real:
That’s right:
One these years people...One of these years...
Back in February, 15 upstate New York towns on the border with Pennsylvania appeared to have enough support for a rather controversial idea: why not join Pennsylvania, where the grass is greener and the gas, while extremely ungreen, is legally extractable which could put a lot of “green” in local landowners pockets:
So is Pennsylvania about to get 15 new frack-happy towns? It’s too early to say, but keep in mind that it’s not necessarily just New Yorks wannabe frackers that might be interested in moving the state lines.
For instance, how about the Oath Keepers? Might they be interested in such a move? Why yes, yes they are. And they’re far from the only ones. But secession isn’t the only option they’re considering. Turning the state into two almost-independent autonomous regions with a largely powerless state government is also under consideration:
Fracking and guns for everyone! And Oath Keepers! Sounds like a blast!
Of course, if New York breaks itself in two and Upstate New York becomes “New Amsterdam”, the question of revenue sharing is going to be a rather significant issue since Upstate New York is a significant net-beneficiary of Downstate New York’s taxes. So those regions that are planning on replacing all that Wall Street tax money with their new fracking economy had better hope their projections for the amount of frackable gas aren’t wildly overoptimistic. Because otherwise...:
“Let’s be clear...Without New York City, Western New York would be West Virginia. It’d be pretty poor. We wouldn’t like it. Let’s not do that.”
Sounds awesome.
And note the fun loophole available in creating “New Amsterdam”: in 2017, New York gets to vote on whether or not to have a state constitutional convention. And if decides to go ahead with that, the state and federal government wouldn’t even need to approve the plan:
So if you’re living in New York, don’t be too surprised if the “constitutional convention will solve all of our problems!”-meme suddenly becomes trendy over the next two years. While such a plan may not “seem like it’s possible” at this point, keep in mind that pushing a constitutional convention at the federal level is a growing GOP priority across the nation. Also keep in mind that we’re living in the era of Citizen’s United and longer you live under a Citizen’s United-type system, the more possible the seemingly impossible becomes...assuming the seemingly impossible makes Big Money into Bigger Money.
So we’ll see what happens, but whatever comes of this, it’s pretty clear the dream of a Tea Party-ruled “New Amsterdam” probably isn’t going away any time soon.
Some dreams never die. Even when they might kill you.
In the mean time, if you’ve ever wanted to enjoy the waterways and wildlife of Upstate New York, especially along the Southern Tier, now might be a good time to schedule that vacation.
With Alabama legislature already facing the accusation that its decision to close a budget deficit by making it harder to get registered to vote in every predominantly black counties across the state’s “Black Belt” was part of a GOP attempt to suppress the the black vote, stories like this probably aren’t going to help with the voter-suppression suspicions:
It’s also worth noting that Wallace’s portait wasn’t simply moved out of the capitol rotunda earlier this year. It was remove from its place of honor in the capitol rotunda:
Interestingly, Stephen McNair, Alabama’s Director of Historic Sites, was dismissed from his position shortly after the removal of Wallace’s portrait, although it apparently wasn’t in response to the removals. Instead, as the article below suggests, McNair was actually dismissed for a very different reason: In an attempt to save money in the face of a massive budget deficit, McNair was was trying to consolidate the commission with other state agencies to save money (something rather relevent given the closing of offices that make voting easier in predominantly black counties), which apparently didn’t go over well with some of his supervisers. So McNair may not have been fired for removing those portraits, but that didn’t stop Jim Zeigler from taking credit:
Now, in fairness to critics of McNair’s proposal to consolidate the Historical Commission with the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the plan doesn’t appear to actually generate savings. But in fairness to McNair,
the rumor is that he was tasked to develop the plan by the GOP leadership in secret and was only fired after it was discovered:
So who knows what to make of all this, but it looks like Stephen McNair removed George and Lurleen Wallace’s portrait from their honored positions in the capitol rotunda and got fired shortly after their removal, but not for removing the paintings but instead for trying to push an agency consolidation plan that he was secretly tasked to create by the GOP leadership, although the plan apparently wouldn’t actually save money. And following his firing, Jim Zeigler, the state’s auditor and an apparent friend of the pro-segregation/pro-secession League of the South, happily proclaimed that McNair’s firings were a result of the painting removal. And this all happened shortly before Alabama decided to shut down DMV offices in all of the predominantly black counties in the state due to a budget crunch. It’s all a somewhat confusing mess, although mostly just revolting.