Posted on January 20, 2021

First Amendment, Two Interpretations Favor White Supremacists

Waterman, Murfreesboro Voice, January 19, 2021

In May 2019, a group of white supremacists and neo-fascists under the umbrella of American Renaissance (AmRen) held its annual conference at the lodge at Montgomery Bell State Park near Burns, Tennessee. As with every meeting AmRen had held at park since 2012, protesters were on hand to express their outrage at AmRen’s ideology, but more so that AmRen was allowed to discuss and plan its ideological and political strategies in publicly owned facilities.

While the conference attendees appeared to be free to come and go without restriction and enjoyed the comforts of the lodge, the protesters were herded single file through a metal detector and contained in an enclosed “protest pen” about an acre in size with no restroom facilities or running water and very little shelter from the sweltering late-spring heat and humidity. {snip}

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AmRen is the forum for the New Century Foundation, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist hate group. The group uses dubious credentials and pseudo-pedantic language to promote the centuries-old mythology that people of color are mentally, morally and genetically inferior to whites. Members of the group have argued that blacks have a higher incidence of psychopathy than whites and have advocated “peaceful ethnic cleansing” and the creation of a white ethno-state. Many, if not most, of the participants in the January 6 uprising in Washington espouse the same philosophy, and it’s entirely plausible that AmRen subscribers helped to plan and execute this shocking anarchist insurrection.

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Many people thought that the current administration would crater at some point, but few suspected that the fall would materialize as anything so spectacular and terrifying as the January 6 coup attempt, a violent invasion of the Capitol that left at least five dead, threatened the well-being of lawmakers and resulted in damage, desecration and defilement of national holy ground. {snip} But one thing became immediately clear, which is that the perpetrators of this rebellion, who are cut from the same bolt as the Amren crowd—white supremacists, nationalists, conspiracy theorists, alt-right propaganda junkies and maybe even a few sitting politicians—are a threat to the survival of the nation.