Skinheads In Suits
OC white supremacists call upon a notorious Long Beach State professor in an attempt to mainstream their movement
In the summer of 2009, in an orange-colored conference room at the Ayres Hotel in Costa Mesa, the attempted mainstreaming of Orange County’s violent white-power movement began in earnest.
The occasion was the annual meeting of the Fountain Valley-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the country’s premier Holocaust-denying organization. In attendance were members of Freedom 14, a collection of skinheads and convicted criminals who spent most of the past year near the Huntington Beach Pier, passing out fliers preaching white-power ideology masked as reasonable discourse. Also there at the Ayres: Kevin MacDonald. Over the years, the Long Beach State psychology professor has courted controversy for books and articles asserting Jews have kept their culture throughout the millennia as a strategy that lets them compete against and subvert Western civilization. His works have been denounced by his 49ers colleagues, civil-rights organizations—seemingly everyone except white supremacists, who revere him as their movement’s contemporary intellectual giant.
All along, MacDonald has insisted he isn’t an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi and definitely not a racist—he’s just a hard-working academic whose work happens to have an exclusively skinhead following. “I don’t necessarily endorse all of the attitudes reflected in all of the articles,” MacDonald wrote to the Southern Poverty Law Center in regards to a 2008 exposé in its Intelligence Report magazine showing the professor’s courting of the extreme right through submitting his work in their publications and accepting their grants.
But at that summer IHR meeting, MacDonald began shedding his regular-guy façade. And with his introductions to Freedom 14 and other local neo-Nazis at that conference, the professor began the first steps toward emerging as a full-fledged bigot. As first reported by the Weekly in a Jan. 5 post on our Navel Gazing blog, MacDonald is now partnering with Freedom 14 and a notorious neo-Nazi lawyer to publicize a new political party modeled after England’s fascist British National Party, a new party created explicitly to deport all non-whites.
The American Third Position Party was formally created on Oct. 15, 2009, in Orange; it was decided that Los Angeles-based attorney William D. Johnson would be its chairman. Johnson became nationally reviled last year after details emerged about his past while he ran for an open Los Angeles County Superior Court judge seat. As revealed by the legal newspaper Metropolitan News-Enterprise, the lawyer—writing under the pseudonym James O. Pace—wrote a book in the 1980s advocating the repeal of the 14th and 15th Amendments and the creation of the Pace Amendment, which would limit American citizenship to non-Jewish whites and Latinos who “are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is in the British Isles or Northwestern Europe.” Everyone else would get deported.
The American Third Position Party (which abbreviates its name A3P) has made the Pace Amendment the primary plank of its political platform, with the only change being that African-Americans would be allowed to stay instead of being traded for white South Africans, as Johnson originally envisioned. “Recent immigrants, or those who have become citizens since 1965, who have a genuine need to return to their respective countries of origin will be afforded generous cash grants to help them return home,” states a party pamphlet obtained by the Weekly. “If we do not act in the interests of our people immediately, we will become a minority in our own country, in only a few decades’ time.”
At that Orange meeting, MacDonald was voted in as A3P’s director, a post that the party’s bylaws state “influences the course of the party and provides guidance to both the Chairman and President.” And he is already promoting the party: In a Dec. 14 interview with Internet white-power radio show Radio Free Mississippi, MacDonald said that deporting minorities would be the first action the party would carry out if it ever came into power. He also came out against homosexuals and predicted a future that was “very dangerous for whites,” where they’d be “at the mercy of other people” with “historical grudges” against them. “If white people don’t wake up . . . we deserve to simply lose,” MacDonald said. “If nobody fights back, we deserve our fate.”
MacDonald has not returned an e-mail from the Weekly seeking comment for this story.
A3P isn’t the first time Freedom 14—which takes its name from the 14 Words, a white-power slogan that states, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”—has tried to create a white-power political party. In May, to much of the same fanfare in white-supremacist circles the new party has received, it launched the Golden State Party (GSP), which sought to represent whites in California elections. The GSP website is no longer available for viewing, but cached versions obtained by the Weekly show that the homepage for its position essays used the same pictures and captions as the current website of A3P. Furthermore, the A3P and GPS position essays not only advocate the same issues, but are also almost the same, word-for-word, with only GSP switched to A3P. And the website for the GSP has the same registrant as Freedom 14’s website, nearly the exact layout and shared the same P.O. box as Freedom 14’s mailing address.
The Orange County Register revealed the connections between GSP and Freedom 14 in a September article that also disclosed that GSP chairman and Freedom 14 member Tyler Cole was a two-time felon. The Register exposé embarrassed Freedom 14 and caught it unawares, according to a source that requested anonymity. “They really, truly want to pass themselves off as normal, and having a felon lead their efforts at a political party just wasn’t going to cut it,” the source said.
Shortly after the Register article, Freedom 14 decided to abandon GSP and used its newfound connections with MacDonald, the IHR and other white supremacists to try anew. Members were part of the meeting at which A3P was officially founded. Soon after, they began cryptically fishing for recruits on Stormfront.org, the web’s premier neo-Nazi discussion board. One poster, who had previously declared himself to be a Freedom 14 member, wrote shorty after the founding A3P meeting: “Our infrastructure is being built, we have a qualified spokesperson, a platform, brochures, a newsletter, and we’re currently working on our site and a few membership materials. We already have a structure established, to include leadership.”
“We’ve learned a lot and are ready to give it another go,” the poster continued. “It should be considerably better this time around.”
Or have they learned? The person listed as the A3P’s treasurer and registrant for the party’s IRS paperwork is Sean Vaxmonsky, a convicted thief and drunk driver who, at press time, was considered a fugitive by the Orange County district attorney’s office. His latest crime? Failure to appear in court on Dec. 14 for driving without a valid driver’s license.
The majority of this story originally appeared on the Weekly’s news blog, Navel Gazing.
