Bolder by the day

-- by Dave

I'm not sure if I should say anything, but it seems to me things are a lot more active on the overt white-supremacist front these days. (This in contrast to the 1990s, when all the activity was on the pseudo-mainstream "Patriot" front.) I'm not sure if it means anything, but if it does, it can't be good.

Mostly, it seems that, whereas white supremacists have tried to sublimate and disguise their message and their agendas for the past couple of decades and longer, we're seeing a lot more undisguised and unrepentant racism these days. Maybe they're taking their cues from their media icons.

There was the policewoman in the video above who posted some ugly remarks on YouTube and wound up taking an early retirement:

The Columbus police officer whose racist and anti-Semitic Web site prompted protests from residents and City Council members has resigned and will seek retirement benefits for a disability.

Officer Susan L. Purtee, 60, a member of the Police Division for 15 years, was not pressured into resigning, police spokeswoman Amanda Ford said.

"She did this of her own free will," Ford said.

Purtee, who could not be reached at her Grove City home last night, turned in her resignation Thursday. It's effective Sept. 22.

"I believe she's on scheduled vacation until then," Ford said.

... Purtee's Internet videos, created with her sister, Barbara Gordon-Bell, 52, of Coral Springs, Fla., blame Jews, blacks, illegal immigrants and Cubans for a variety of the nation's problems. The sisters call themselves "the Patriot Dames."

In a telephone interview last night, Gordon-Bell said her sister has put a video on YouTube since the news of her Web site broke Aug. 28. The video, titled "O'Reilly 9-12-07," responds to Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly's discussion of her.

In it, Purtee says someone threatened to kill her. She says she never did anything wrong and that she has protected people in the inner city, many of whom have called to offer support.

In the video, she also blames Jews for calling her "trailer trash" and says everyone in her department knows from her record that she's not racist.

Purtee was off-duty when she made the videos with her sister. The women never mention where Purtee works, though their Web site, www.thepatriotdames.com, notes that she is a law-enforcement officer.

What exactly induces closeted racists to "come out", as it were, and expose their real beliefs to daylight? Evidently this law officer (whose record, according to one report, is less than sterling to begin with) somehow felt she could remain anonymous, which speaks volumes about her judgment to begin with.

In any event, the organized haters are also coming out more brazenly too, like the outfit in Flint, Michigan, calling themselves the "Rollingwood Skins," vowing to take a high public profile and "clean up" the town's influx of brown folks:

The Rollingwood Skins are part of what the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., sees as an upswing of hate activity fueled by anti-immigration fervor. In the past two years, the SPLC estimates 144 new extremist groups have formed to "harass and intimidate immigrants."

Mark Potok, director of the SPLC intelligence project, said the immigration debate is a boon for Nazi groups.

"It's really a debate about people with brown skin," said Potok. "It's an issue for them to exploit."

Loree said he believes nonwhites and illegal immigrants have ruined Flint's parks and destroyed neighborhoods with drugs and crime.

With his swastika flag pin and shaved head, he's unhappy with the state of the city as a whole. The Rollingwood Skins - named for a park near Flint's Kearsley Dam that Loree said has fallen into disrepair - say they want to clean up the area.

The group has spent the past two months passing out red fliers directed at "white Americans" and asking people to join and "reclaim your white heritage." Loree said he isn't afraid to parade down neighborhood streets in a brown shirt with his swastika flag aloft.

By speaking out against what he sees as slights against white people, Loree said he is trying to boost pride for his race.

He insisted he doesn't advocate violence to cure society's ills.

"I'm not Hitler," said Loree.

That's not to say he doesn't agree with a lot of Adolf Hitler's beliefs, though.

Ah yes, it's a veritable Springtime for Hitler in the American hinterlands. A Minuteman organizer from Arizona has been seen hanging with his homies from the National Socialist Movement in Nebraska:



From the SPLC's Hatewatch site:

“J.T.” Ready, a prominent Minuteman Civil Defense Corps volunteer and anti-immigration activist based in Phoenix, has been flitting around the edges of the neo-Nazi movement for more than a year now, quietly creating a profile on the racist social networking website New Saxon and attending a private gathering organized by the neo-Nazi organization National Vanguard.

But when the National Socialist Movement held an anti-immigration rally in Omaha, Neb., on Sept. 1, the leader of the Americans First nativist extremist group was making his public debut as a full-blown neo-Nazi. Photographs (above) captured a grinning Ready, clad in a grey business suit, standing side-by-side with NSM members who wore brown-shirt uniforms with swastika armbands. Any doubt that Ready was an open white supremacist, as well as a hard-line nativist, evaporated at that point.

Don't ask me what's going on. Must be something in the water.