Today I decided to go trawling for neo-Nazis, to learn something I did not previously know, and discovered an interesting (to me) story.
It starts in 1967 when the Overseas Weekly, a sometimes lurid tabloid newspaper designed for U.S. military personnel (sample below) published
an expose of neo-Nazis in the U.S. Army in Germany. I can't find the original article, but here, in this tweet and the next, is a summary subsequently published in Jet Magazine. Please read.
Note that the story reveals 21-year-old medic Bobby Lee Pace of Nacogdoches,Texas, as one of the leaders of this group of American Nazi Party members in the U.S. Army in Europe.
This was 1967, a year before the first DoD regulations on extremism (and those would primarily be concerned with left-wing extremism, given opposition to the Vietnam War). The Army wasn't sure what to do with Pace, who got a write-up of his activities in Stormtrooper Magazine.
But it was a little embarrassing for the U.S. to be sending Nazis to Germany (we kind of had a history of not liking Nazism in Germany), so the Army shipped him home--not disciplining him--and gave him leave.
It turned out that Pace had become a neo-Nazi years earlier, while a young teen in east Texas, and tried to recruit others. He later dropped out of high school and joined the Army.
Pace arrived back in the U.S. just as the American Nazi Party was beginning its slow disintegration in the wake of the assassination of its founder, George Lincoln Rockwell. But Pace kept himself busy in subsequent years, as Nazis do.
In fact, in 1976, he was charged with possession of an explosive weapon after his Houston, Texas, apartment, went up in flames. Note that investigators found Nazi literature as well.
One might think this would be a warning call, but Bobby Lee Pace was not a man who learned lessons easily. A handful of years later, in 1982, he was arrested for trying to sell a machine gun.
He more or less disappears from the record at this point, but seems to have died around 2010 or so. I leave you with this remembrance from one of his former classmates: "Bobby Pace was different..."
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One of the things I have been doing for around 29 years or so is what I call "trawling for sovereign citizens." Because they use so many specific phrases, you can search on those phrases (on the web or, say, a newspaper database) to find more sovereign activity.
Let's try!
One phrase often used by sovereigns today is "cestui que trust;" sovereigns believe everybody has one and you can claim it and get magical powers (see example below from a ruling on a bankruptcy filing). So let's grab a time machine and go hunting.
Let's use a newspaper database and go back to the 1980s to plug that phrase in. Within minutes, I've spotted an early sovereign citizen using it in a 1984 sovereignty declaration made in a newspaper (they are, though, using the phrase differently than a modern sovereign would).
Thread. I noticed "U.S.S. Liberty" was trending and immediately knew why. On this day in 1967, during the Six Days War, Israeli air and naval forces mistakenly attacked a U.S. naval vessel, killing and wounding a large number of U.S. personnel. The attack was the result of the
confusion of war and several significant errors by the Israeli military and was a tragic, preventable incident. Many of the details of that incident remain disputed even today, but what is not in dispute is that for the past 60 years antisemites and anti-Israel ideologues have
used the incident to create conspiracy theories and to spread antisemitic and/or anti-Israel sentiment within the U.S. Given the current tensions and controversies, it was only natural that they would use the anniversary of the attack to continue this tactic.
8th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that a sovereign citizen representing him/herself using sovereign citizen arguments would not in and of itself be disruptive/obstructive conduct serious enough for a judge to refuse to let them represent themselves.
The ruling includes some excerpts from court, such as this one. Here, saying he is on special appearance means that he claims he is not appearing as a witness or defendant but is only there to contest the court's jurisdiction over him. Saying he is the "beneficiary" means that
he is claiming he is not the person being prosecuted; rather an artificial entity created by the illegitimate government is the actual target of prosecution, not the flesh and blood person. This is also why he describes himself as a third-party intervener rather than a defendant.
This is a bizarre modernization of the right-wing mantra that the Ku Klux Klan was founded and run by Democrats. See next tweet.
"GOP lawmaker claims KKK is ‘the military wing of the Democratic Party’ in closed door meeting ahead of antisemitism hearing"cnn.com/2024/05/08/pol…
There is no such thing as "the KKK," in the sense of a singular organization (not since circa 1944). There are instead a number of tiny, independent Klan groups. All of them are right-wing, none of them have ties to "the Democratic Party." They are, though, racist & antisemitic.
Every version of "replacement theory" is racist; most are white supremacist. The notion that immigrants coming to the U.S. "have no interest in being Americans" is an ancient anti-immigrant trope that 200 yrs ago was used on the Irish/Germans (& every immigrant group since).
I decided to have YouTube playing (on my smart tv) while I was working on something at home today and randomly searched for a video related to my home town, El Paso.
What I had selected turned out to be someone who had come to El Paso (for the first time) basically to look for
hordes of "illegal aliens." She knew nothing about the city before she traveled there, but started driving around downtown El Paso, at 7:45am on a Wed. Everywhere she looked, she saw more "visitors," as she referred to them. Yet to a non-paranoid person familiar with
El Paso, the video showed El Pasoans working, shopping, waiting for the bus, waiting for places to open. It also showed some probably from Juarez who had come across for the day to shop or work. Many of the streets were pretty empty, because most places weren't open yet.
I've long been interested in "Nobel Prize Winners Gone Bad," like William Shockley, who later fixated on racist "intelligence" theories. Today I came across one I didn't previously know about: Frederick Soddy, winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And co-author of this:
The British Soddy was co-author of this 1939 pamphlet, "Abolish Private Money, or Drown in Debt," complete with antisemitic stereotype on the cover. His fellow author, Walter Crick was uncle to another famous Nobel Prize winner, Francis Crick. Crick was an outspoken antisemite.
Soddy, seemingly, was not much better. Note that they published their pamphlet through a group, the Nationalist Press Association, which was known for its antisemitic output.