Eight years ago, when I first moved to Richmond, I was astonished that the local cable access channel allowed neo-Nazis to publicize their Jew hatred and racism. Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center has released a “Hate Map,” and Jay Tea of Wizbang is calling bullshit on the number of hate groups that SPLC has identified. It’s easy to see why. When you check the list for Virginia, you have 22 hate groups identified. The problem is, instead of just identifying the KKK, the SPLC has identified five separate chapters as five separate hate groups. Um… you know, I really think that the KKK gets to stand for only one hate group, no matter how many chapters it has. Ditto for the National Socialist Movement: It’s got three chapters identified, one that apparently doesn’t even have a city attached. The American Renaissance is identified twice. So let’s subtract the duplicates, and Richmond now has a total of seven fewer hate groups, making it 15 hate groups in a population of more than six million citizens. It’s still 15 hate groups too many, but I’ve just helped reduce the hate in Virginia by a third. And all without leaving my computer.
There you go, Jay. Another state down.
“Not that it’s illegal, and not that it isn’t protected speech, but still—Toto, I don’t think we’re in the Northeast anymore.”
Roundabout 1930, at least, the most comprehensive “racial purity act” was passed in .. Indiana (of course, Virginia had Walter Plecker, whose war against the population known as Melungeon is well known). Yeah, Indiana provided the gold standard for that sort of thing and, yeah, the Nazis pretty much ran with it, adding that famous “German efficiency” (not that I want to stereotype: it is, after all, FRANCE that’s deporting Gypsies these days).
In other news .. America’s $60 Billion arms deal with the Saudis. Yeah, let’s give ’em a juicy reward for financing the global spread of Wahhabism, a 200 year old hate cult (Islam’s answer to Cromwellism, surely).
Pablo, Indiana isn’t the northeast, and I was talking about the year 2002. I’m not saying there weren’t and aren’t racists there—New Jersey still has an active KKK—but my point remains that I never saw any neo-Nazi shows on television growing up in NJ. But I saw them here, in 2002. It was a shock.
Pablo that is an unwarranted slur on Oliver Cromwell, to compare him to the vicous Wahhabbi cult. He was anti-Catholic, true, but he was very tolerant of an amazing variety of Protestant Christian groups. His break with the Long Parliament basically came because the Parliament meant to outlaw the Independent Protestant sects by adopting the Scottish method of church governance, Presbyterianism (you want a real intolerant Prod, look at John Knox). And Old Noll was the man who got the English government to let the Jews live in England once again, openly as Jews. To his credit, Charles II continued this toleration of Jews after the Restoration.
The SPLC counts the different Klan cells separately because they do not answer to a single leadership, and in fact often hate each other (surprise, surprise).