Previously All-Talk White-Supremacist “League of the South” Now Forming Paramilitary Unit

Photo from the S.P.L.C.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based non-profit organization which monitors hate groups, announced this week that it has learned that the League of the South is forming a paramilitary unit to be called “the Indomitables.”

The League of the South, whose name is inspired by Italy’s similarly right-wing, anti-immigrant, separatist Northern League (Lega Nord), is the most prominent organization in the United States working toward the secession of the Southern states as what it in particular would call Confederation of Southern States (C.S.S.).  (The original secessionist South, during the Civil War, was officially the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.).  The League wants the C.S.S. to be the eleven core C.S.A. states, without Texas and with Kentucky and Oklahoma added.  Texas, of course, has its own separatist movement.)  Though it claims to be mainly interested in “preserving Southern culture,” its rhetoric is shot through with intolerant, often white-supremacist, ideas, and its membership overlaps heavily with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi parties.  For a while, the League sponsored registered state political parties, primarily in Georgia and the Carolinas, called the Southern Party (S.P.).

Michael Hill, president of the League, has described the group’s aims this way: “We are for the survival, well-being, and independence of the Southern people.  And when we say ‘the Southern people,’ we mean white Southerners.  We are an ethno-nationalist movement and we want a free and independent South for our people, as our homeland.  That’s pretty much what we are fighting for.”

Michael Hill, president of the League of the South

Information on a novel paramilitary turn for what had until now been mainly a group that makes lots of noise comes from leaked internal documents and anonymous sources within the group, according to the S.P.L.C. article on the subject.  One of the internal documents outlining the plans is by President Hill himself, who writes, “We desire that our women and children be warm and snug while the world outside rages.  And as our due for that we must face the world.”

“The Indomitables were conceptualized at the LOS national meeting earlier this year,” according to the S.P.L.C. article by Ryan Lenz, “and appear to be coming online quickly, with Floyd Eric Meadows, 43, of Rome, Ga., who also goes by Eric Thorvaldsson online, in charge of ‘training,’ according to sources within the group and internal documents.”  The article also releases confidentially acquired images from Thorvaldsson’s Facebook presence, which is full of pagan iconography and white-supremacist “dogwhistle” references like “‘earning’ his red bootlaces––awarded in skinhead culture for drawing blood for ‘the movement.’”

The Indomitables’ head trainer, Floyd Meadows, posted this on Facebook
recently using his pseudonym.

Hill responded to the S.P.L.C. revelations by stating defiantly, on his blog, “Even if we are––and you really have no idea on earth if we are or not––setting up a Southern militia or some other form of paramilitary organization, we are doing nothing that free men have not done for centuries.  Deal with it and stop your whining.”

Nazi-style insignia used in confidential
League of the South documents leaked to S.P.L.C.

“The primary targets,” Hill went on, “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.”

The League has been in the news lately because one of its members, Michael Anthony Peroutka, is running for a council seat in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  Peroutka, who ran for U.S. president on the Constitution Party ticket in 2004, says he deplores racism in all forms but refuses to distance himself from the League.  His own Republican Party, however, has distanced itself from him from the beginning of his county council candidacy.

Michael Peroutka, posing with a fellow secessionist, whose former job he once applied for.

Not long ago, Hill told an interviewer, regarding the upcoming September 18th referendum on independence in Scotland, “We think it’s a great thing that the Scottish people actually get to go to the polls and decide their future with a vote.  That’s something that I hope that we can do one day.”  But, unlike the League, the Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) is not backing up its political efforts with an armed terrorist squadron.  Despite constant references to the South’s unique “Anglo-Celtic” culture, the League of the South is starting to sound less like Scotland’s separatists and more like those in northern Nigeria or southeastern Ukraine.

Due to the “Anglo-Celtic” connection, St. Andrew’s crosses and similar insignia recur in League of the South heraldry.
See an article from this blog for more detail on Confederate–Russian–Ukrainian-Scottish separatist vexillological affinities.

Thanks to Jan Pierce for first alerting me to this story.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, will be on shelves and available on Amazon in February 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Tales of Two Racial Supremacists—One of Them Working for Homeland Security

Two different racial supremacists made headlines within the past week, one white and one black.  Both operate online and have ambitious agendas.  One is even working for the United States government.  First, we’ll look at the white supremacist.

In late August, the “Hatewatch” service of the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based non-profit which monitors and prosecutes hate groups of all stripes, revealed that a 61-year-old white supremacist named Paul Craig Cobb and his associates were buying up cheap property in Leith, North Dakota—population 24 (officially, 16)—with plans to make the area into a whites-only enclave.  Posting on a supremacist web-forum called White Nations, Cobb has announced plans to locate in Leith, for example, a Dr. William L. Pierce Pvt. Park of Leith, named for William Luther Pierce II, the late Oregon State University physics professor who founded the high-profile neo-Nazi hate-group National Alliance.  Some of Cobb’s admirers are even talking about buying up property elsewhere in North Dakota in order to make the entire state an all-white enclave.  North Dakota is one of the whitest states in the U.S.  Ninety percent of the state’s population is white, mostly German-American and Norwegian-American.  African-Americans are 1.2%.

White separatism?  There’s an app for that.  Paul Craig Cobb, in Leith, North Dakota

North Dakota, of course, is experiencing a demographic and economic boom right now as Americans from all over, and of all political orientations, move there to take advantage of the new economy based on “fracking”—hydraulic fracturing—for natural gas and oil in the North Dakota area.

Cobb moved to North Dakota last year from Canada, where he had faced charges for inciting hatred, and then Montana.  He was fired last month from a construction firm in North Dakota when his views became known.  He is suing for wrongful dismissal.

Leith, in Grant County, North Dakota

Cobb told media that he developed his views earlier, reading Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf at age 11, and he also claims he once worked in Hawaii as a taxi driver in the early 1980s and gave Barack Obama a ride.

Bobby Harper, Leith’s one African-American resident (how many other North Dakota towns are officially over 6% black?), has been targeted by Cobb’s vitriol.  Online, Cobb has called Harper’s wife Sherrill a “filthy race-mixing white woman.”  But the Harpers are staying put, and the other residents say they “have his back.”

The Harpers are determined not to move out of their home town.

It is a credit to the tiny community of Leith that its residents have banded together to let a separatist hate-monger know that he is not welcome there.  Unfortunately, the same cannot yet be said of the second racial supremacist profiled here, Ayo Kimathi, an African-American militant who works at, of all places, the federal Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.).  (That’s his photo at the top of this article.)

It was not until the S.P.L.C. broke the story of Kimathi’s secret second life as an inciter of race war that D.H.S. too notice and, on August 23rd, put him on administrative leave.  Kimathi’s position is as a small-business specialist for D.H.S.’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but by night and on weekends he is a minor celebrity named “the Irritated Genie” speaking to radical separatists the nation over through his online organization War on the Horizon (W.O.H.), which bangs the drums for a violent showdown between American blacks and whites.  W.O.H. preaches hatred of gays and lesbians as well as ethnically cleansing North America both of European-Americans and of “black skinned Uncle Tom race traitors.”

An image from the War on the Horizon website

After being put on administrative leave, Kimathi ranted on the W.O.H. Facebook page, “The war is on!  The smallhats (white so-called jews [sic]) have stepped it up.”  Kimathi appears, here, to adhere to views first promulgated, ironically, by white supremacists, to the effect that Jews are impostors who only pretend to be descended from tribes of Israel, while the true Chosen People are (fill in name of group supremacist making the argument belongs to here).

No fan of Obama, Kimathi calls him “a treasonous mulatto scum dweller ... who will fight against reparations for Black people in amerikkka, but in favor of fag rights for freaks in amerikkka and Afrika.”

Craig Cobb (second from right) posing with Estonian neo-Nazis.
Can someone identify this flag?

Right-wing commentators often criticize the S.P.L.C. for going easy on black nationalist radicals and condemning white racists with disproportionate vigor.  Nonetheless, the S.P.L.C. outing of Kimathi is not a new development for them.  They have long listed Nation of Islam as a hate-group for example, and loudly condemned the bounty the New Black Panthers placed last year on the head of George Zimmerman, the part-Hispanic vigilante who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida.

One thing you have to give Louis Farrakhan: at least the trains run on time.

As for the Nation of Islam, which preaches racial segregation and anti-Semitism and calls white people the product of a genetic experiment by a black scientist gone awry millennia ago in the Middle East, the S.P.L.C. does not like them, but they do have one unlikely fan: Paul Craig Cobb of Leith, North Dakota (see above).  In his view, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan may be an Untermensch, but “he organizes people and they’re for themselves.”  Actually, maybe not such an unlikely fan.  Despite Cobb and Kimathi’s enthusiasm for segregation, birds of a feather do indeed flock together.

[You can read more about Cobbsville and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]