By: Ed Pilkington
Protecting Barack Obama has presented the US secret service with the greatest challenge in its history, not least because the real threat comes from right wing extremist groups operating inside America.

In just over a year, the number of groups has risen from 149 to 512. “Anger is spilling over from people who believe Obama is coming to remove their liberties, seize their guns, enslave the white American nation. What’s new is that they can now recruit and communicate online, and that makes it very much more dangerous for the president.”

The Southern Poverty Law Centre began life in 1971 as a tiny law firm specialising in civil rights cases. It took on the might of the Ku Klux Klan, and was duly rewarded by having its offices razed and its senior lawyers targeted for assassination.

But it kept on going and grew to be one of the most respected monitoring groups of right-wing extremism in America today.

Recently it brought out a report called Terror From the Right, which identifies, in chronological order, the serious home-grown plots, conspiracies and racist rampages that have been cooked up in America since the Oklahoma City bomb in 1995.

The list runs to 10 pages of closely printed type and itemises 75 domestic terrorism events, from plans to bomb government buildings to attempts to kill judges and politicians.

Each of the incidents aimed to change the political face of America through violence, courtesy of groups with such titles as Aryan People’s Republic, The New Order and The Hated. But in the summer of 2008 the chronology takes on a sharp change of tack.

Entries, which had been running at one or two per year, start coming faster. And instead of a variety of different targets, one name crops up time and time again: Barack Obama.

The first such entry is for June 8, 2008. Six people, linked to a militia group in rural Pennsylvania, are arrested with stockpiles of assault rifles and homemade bombs. One of the six allegedly tells the authorities that he intended to shoot black people from a rooftop and predicts civil war should Obama, who five days previously had cleared the Democratic nomination for president, be elected to the White House.

   President Obama surrounded by security in this 2008 picture.

Next entry: August 24, 2008. The day before the opening of the Democratic convention in Denver at which Obama was nominated, three white supremacists are arrested in possession of high-powered rifles and camouflage clothing. They are talking about assassinating Obama.

October 24 2008: Less than two weeks before the election, two white supremacists are arrested in Tennessee over a bizarre plan to kill more than 100 black people, including Obama.

January 21, 2009: The day after Obama’s inauguration, a white man is arrested in Massachusetts, having allegedly killed two black immigrants and injured a third. He says he was “fighting for a dying race”.

June 10, 2009: James von Brunn, aged 88, walks into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and shoots dead a security guard. Von Brunn, who died last month in jail awaiting trial, left a note that read: “Obama was created by Jews.”

In the 13 months that Barack Obama has been the occupant of the Oval Office he has been the subject of an extraordinary outpouring of emotion from the American electorate.

At the start it was largely adulatory, though more recently the adoration has been drowned out by a cacophony of criticism from tea party activists, birthers, global-warming deniers and viewers of Fox News. At the same time, largely hidden from view, there has been a layer of antagonism towards Obama that lies well beyond the boundaries of reasonable political debate.

That has been a fact of life for Obama and his family since long before they took the keys to the White House. On May 2, 2007, fully 18 months before election day, he was assigned a secret service detail — much earlier than any other presidential candidate in American history.

The precise reasons for the move have never been disclosed, but there was certainly a mood in the air sufficiently palpable to disconcert Michelle Obama.

A senior US official in the State Department has told the Guardian that before he decided to run for the presidency, Obama had actively to win Michelle over to the idea by assuaging her fears about the potential of an attack on him, her and/or their two daughters.

Michelle would have been aware of the backstory here: that Colin Powell had declined to run for the 1996 Republican nomination partly because his wife Alma feared his assassination at the hands of white supremacists.

Over the course of the long presidential race, Michelle spoke openly about her anxieties and how she had determined to overcome them, telling 60 Minutes that she had decided to fling herself into the race because “I am tired of being afraid”.

According to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s new account of the 2008 election, Game Change, she eventually felt relaxed enough to crack sardonic jokes about the subject. “I’ve already gone out and increased our life insurance on (Barack),” she quipped. “You just can’t be too careful!” But as the Southern Poverty Law Center survey shows, the issue of safety and the 44th president remains anything but a laughing matter.

“Virtually every domestic terrorist event we have identified since June 2008 — when it became obvious that Obama was going to win — has been directly related to him,” says the author of the report, Mark Potok.

Apart from the Obamas themselves, the burden of such a threat falls primarily on the shoulders of the US secret service, and as Joseph Petro, head of global security for Citigroup, puts it, the challenges facing the service today are unlike any period that has gone before. On top of all the usual risks associated with guarding the world’s most powerful politician, there is now the added, explosive ingredient of his race.

“As the first black president he creates a whole other set of issues for the secret service to deal with,” he says.

Petro can claim to be something of an expert in this area: he spent 23 years as a special agent in the service, four of them, from 1982 to 1986, as the man who stood beside Ronald Reagan. He knows what it’s like to be the last line of protection, how it feels to be in a milling crowd in which you are surrounded by thousands of potential assailants, what it is to live with the constant knowledge that any mistake — a split second taking your eye off the ball — could be fatal.

Petro has a formula for measuring the potential dangers for any particular incumbent of the White House. You take the general atmosphere of the times in which they are in office and combine it with the specific personality that the president brings to the job. In both regards, he says, Obama presents a huge task.

Big challenge

“In Obama, we have a president with a very unique personality who likes to be out with the people. Put that together with the political atmosphere of these times that is highly partisan and vitriolic, then include race, and we’ve got a big challenge. There’s no margin for error.”

Petro’s point about the role the president’s personality plays in his own safety is ably illustrated by the single most disastrous failure in the secret service’s history — the event that every incoming trainee agent spends hours and hours studying until it is drilled into his or her bone marrow.

Judged by modern security standards, the shooting of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, should for several reasons never have happened. The parade route Kennedy took was publicised in advance — a cardinal sin by the rule book of today.

Lee Harvey Oswald had a relatively easy line of fire from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, which would these days have been thoroughly swept and sealed off. But it was the orders given by Kennedy himself that did for him — the president asked for the removable plastic roof panels to be taken off his limousine and for agents not to ride on the back of the car, thus leaving himself utterly exposed.

In the last analysis, as Kennedy proved at his own cost, a president can only be as safe as he allows himself to be. Agents can advise the commander-in-chief what is best for his security, but they cannot give him orders.

Public engagement

During his presidential campaign, Obama would regularly mingle among crowds of astonishing size. But since his inauguration he has clearly responded to the guidance of his protecting agents, detaching himself considerably from direct public engagement. To some extent, that is only normal — he is no longer running in an election.

But for a president who promised to break down barriers between politicians and people, it is noticeable how sparingly he is seen in public these days, and how the events he does appear at are almost invariably staged indoors.

Over the years, the secret service has developed a range of technological devices for improving security. Petro recalls asking Reagan on several occasions to wear a bulletproof vest. (Reagan would grumble and groan but usually comply.)

Over the last decade, such innovations have come thick and fast. A whole new array of gadgetry has been added to the service’s armoury, from face-recognition technology to a new generation of armoured vehicles.

Obama rides in a Cadillac with military grade eight-inch thick doors; on election night in November 2008 he gave his victory speech to a crowd of almost a quarter of a million people from behind bullet-proof glass walls designed to foil sniper attacks.

But gadgetry is only as effective as the people who use it. In the last analysis, the human factor remains supreme, as was illustrated last November when two reality show hopefuls gatecrashed a White House function, penetrating the inner core of the building and shaking Obama’s hand. As it happened, they had no malice towards the president. But in the mindset of the mortified secret service that didn’t matter; they could have done.

Which on some level is the nature of the beast: being president of the United States is a high-risk enterprise, as Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John Kennedy all found out the hard way. Danger can come at a president from any number of directions.

Impaired capacity

It can come from the lone deranged gunman. It can come too, theoretically, from international terrorism of the Islamist variety. But al-Qaeda experts point out that the closest the group has come to a direct attack on the president was 9/11 itself.

“From al-Qaeda’s view, to assassinate the president would be very desirable,” says Yehudit Barsky, a terrorism specialist at the American Jewish Committee. “But it would be difficult for them to go after him not because they don’t want to but because their capacity is so impaired.”

Which is why in the overall assessment of risk to Obama, so much attention is settling on right-wing extremist groups who are already operating inside America, are armed and ideologically motivated, and in some cases potentially capable of desperate acts.

This brings us back to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been tracking the activity of potentially violent militia groups since the last great wave in the 1990s when the so-called Patriot movement ballooned in proportion to rising rightwing anger towards Bill Clinton and fears of impending gun control. That wave of opprobrium culminated in the Oklahoma bombing in which 168 died and 680 more were injured.

The centre’s latest report, released last week, records an astonishing mushrooming in extremist anti-government Patriot groups who see the Obama administration as a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans. The numbers leapt from 149 in 2008 to 512 groups in 2009, of which 127 were classed as paramilitary groups.

“We know there has been a spike in activity across a broad range of things, particularly with regard to the notion that this government is illegitimate,” says Brian Levin, a criminologist who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University.

Conspiracies

Levin says the phenomenon is evident in rural areas around the Appalachian mountains and Great Lakes and into the west and Pacific north-west, where new armed militia groups are spontaneously emerging; and he has no doubt about why this is happening right now: “We’ve always had people who hate the president, we’ve always had conspiracies, but the fact that we have a black president at a time of economic tumult makes these conspiracies much more volatile among a far wider group of people.”

Chip Berlet, an analyst of right-wing extremism at the Massachusetts-based group, Political Research Associates, estimates that there have been nine murders by individuals who have white supremacist, xenophobic or anti-semitic leanings since the inauguration of Obama. Berlet sees similarities in the current foment to the militia agitation of the 1990s.

“Anger is spilling over from people who believe Obama is coming to remove their liberties, seize their guns, enslave the white American nation. What’s new is that they can now recruit and communicate online, and that makes it very much more dangerous for the president.”

Montana is one of the rural states where resurgent extreme right-wing activity can be detected. Travis McAdam has been tracking such activity for the last two decades on behalf of the Montana Human Rights Network, so has a unique vantage point for what is going on today.

“The hatred that’s there is very real. It’s more than a gut-level hatred of having an African-American as president, it’s also ideological — these people see black people as sub-human. Groups are popping up that have a new message and are using Obama to recruit new members.”

White supremacist forums that provide closed talking shops for members only have been abuzz with anti-Obama rhetoric since the presidential election. In one such talkboard, monitored by a watchdog group, a correspondent writes: “If we want to see the overthrow or the cleansing of society then we should support Obama being where he is! I believe in the coming war. With this Nig as President he will just speed up the process. He’s a catylist! Is’nt this what we want?”

Another says: “Our backs are really against the wall now. We need progressive activism and we need to be solution orientated. For a Whiter future for our children.” Yet a third says: “I never thought I’d ever see the day when a monkey ran my country & I’m 34. I weep for our children.”

For McAdam, the crucial question is how to sort this body of vitriol into its constituent parts — to separate out those individuals and groups who may be offensive and repulsive in their choice of words but are essentially harmless, from those that have the potential to be truly violent. He likes to think of it as a funnel, at the top of which are many people drawn to radical right groups for all sorts of reasons — gun rights, taxation, Obama-as-alien, or whatever. Most never go further than that level, but some do.

Oklahoma bomber

“As they dig into the subject, going down into the funnel, they start to lose connection with the social networks around them that keep them tied to normality. Down, down they go, and eventually out the other end of the funnel emerges the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, who says, ‘Our country is under attack, I must do something about it.’”

It’s the thought that some may be emerging from the end of the funnel at this politically charged moment, McAdam says, that bothers him so, and makes him think that “violence against President Obama is a real concern”.

McVeigh, executed in June 2001, is a name that crops up frequently among the extremism monitors. It comes up again when Mark Potok gives his last word on the threat to Barack Obama.

The white supremacists and anti-government militia who are out to get the president should not be underestimated, he says. “These groups aren’t al-Qaeda. Most of them look vastly more bumbling than effective.” But then he adds: “It only takes one to get through. Timothy McVeigh taught us that.”

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Past racial insensitivity by Sotomayor detractor. Ref: Sessions vows third GOP vote against Sotomayor

   By: Ken Bode
Sometime next week, Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed as the first person of Hispanic descent ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the past 219 years, there have been two women and two African-Americans on the court along with 106 white males.

Sotomayor will be confirmed because the Senate Judiciary Committee could find nothing disqualifying in her 17 years experience on the federal bench. Still, suspicious Republicans on the panel turned to her personal views, especially as related to ethnicity. Has ever a single sentence been so blown out of proportion as when Sotomayor suggested that because of her life’s experiences a wise Latina might reach a better conclusion than a white male?

Especially for the ranking white male on the Republican inquisition forces on the committee, Sotomayor’s comment was deeply troubling. In the mind of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Sotomayor’s comment revealed excessive racial sensitivity, and Sessions sought to turn it into a mountain blocking Senate approval.

Sessions knows about racial insensitivity. Now the lead Republican interrogator, Sessions was at the Judiciary Committee witness table 23 years ago, nominated for a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan. Then, too, the issue was excessive racial insensitivity. Sessions was serving as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, and some of the things he’d been doing and saying were brought to the attention of the committee.

For example, Sessions called a white civil rights attorney who litigated voting rights cases “a disgrace to his race.” He addressed an assistant U.S. attorney as “boy” and warned him, “Be careful what you say to white folks.” He admitted he thought the Ku Klux Klan was an “OK” organization until he learned that some of them smoked pot. Also, Sessions condemned the NAACP and ACLU as “un-American” and “Communist inspired,” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”

   Jeff Sessions [ Enlarge ]
But it was what he did that mattered most. Sessions served as U.S. attorney at a time when black voter registration drives were threatening white control of county courthouses in rural Alabama. Who wins elections for governor or senator is of minor importance to the locals compared to who wins the job of county sheriff, prosecutor, judge, clerk, treasurer and assessor.

In the 1980s, Perry County, Ala., retained its old plantation roots of unremitting distrust between its black majority and white minority. With black voter registration surging in Perry County, control of country government was dangerously close to shifting. So U.S. Attorney Sessions used the power of his office to back charges by the white courthouse crowd that a black civil rights group was tampering with absentee ballots.

An investigation was ordered and federal officials were waiting at the post office when the Perry County Civic League mailed 504 absentee ballots for the 1984 Democratic primary. The ballots were opened, marked, numbered and searched for erasures or new markings.

Searching for evidence of tampering, FBI investigators contacted 1,500 black families in Perry County, terrifying many first-time voters in their 70s and 80s. Among those charged with 29 counts of altering ballots and mail fraud was Albert Turner, an adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Turner helped plan the Selma march and was later chosen to guide the mule train that carried King to his gravesite. He and his two Perry County co-defendants faced 115 years in prison.

The investigation is estimated to have cost the government $500,000, and it produced evidence so thin that it took the jury less than four hours to throw out the case.

Sessions was so obviously guilty of racism and overreaching his prosecutorial authority that the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 8-to-6 to derail his nomination. The majority against him included two Republicans and his home state senator, Howell Heflin.

I covered those events for NBC News, and during the Sotomayor hearings I wondered what Jeff Sessions had learned about racial insensitivity and impartiality. Evidently, not much.

About The Author(s): Ken Bode — is the Pulliam Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and a Hudson adjunct fellow. His academic career includes being the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism as well as the Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1998 to 2002; a John L. Hughes University Professor and Director of the Center for Contemporary Media at DePauw University from 1989 1997; and an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University from 1965 to 1969 and at SUNY Binghamton from 1969 to 1970. Bode is a 1961 graduate of the University of South Dakota, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in philosophy and government. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1963 and 1966, respectively. He has taught at Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Binghamton. Bode was a post-doctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1978 and a Poynter Fellow in journalism at Yale University in 1989. He also was a senior adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis.

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Republicans played the RACE-CARD to the hilt on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor — carefully camouflaged by Senate Republicans but BLATANTLY espoused by media THUGS like Rush FAT Limbaugh, Glenn “Cry-Baby” Beck, Sean KLANnity, Bill Osama Bin O’Reilly, Newt “Family Values” Gingrich ….and many other THUGLINGS on Republican Radio.

Last Sunday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” blasted GOP opponents for employing “racial politics” as Sotomayor went through her Senate confirmation hearings last week.

“You had one leader (Tom Tancredo) of the Republican Party call her the equivalent of the head of the Ku Klux Klan,” Leahy said. “Another leader of the Republican Party called her a bigot (Newt Gingrich). To (Senate Republican Leader) Sen. (Mitch) McConnell’s credit, he has not used those things, but the leadership of the Republican Party came out against her long before we ever had the hearing, long before they had a chance to look at her record. I think that’s unfair.”

Leahy said he was angered that Sotomayor’s ties to Hispanic organizations were regarded by some as grounds for suspicion. “Come on. Stop the racial politics,” he said.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., also a judiciary panel member, objected to the assertion.

“I don’t think that was unfair,” Sessions said. “She said that she thought she was fairly treated. Other commentators, objective leaders, civil rights leaders have said that.”

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For the record Jeff Sessions is a known BIGOT, and was previously denied judgeship on the federal bench due to acts racial intolerance and involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. Sessions said this about the KKK: “…..the Ku Klux Klan was not so bad until I found out that some of them smoked marijuana.” Sessions also referred to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” At his confirmation hearings, Sessions said that the groups could be un-American when “they involve themselves in un-American positions” in foreign policy. Sessions claimed that the remarks had been made in jest. One of those voting against him was Democratic Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama.

The others mentioned above and their underlings are equally hopless or worse — a bunch of rotten, racist NINCOMPOOPS …Castrated Baboons!

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   [ Click Pics To Enlarge ]

   Courtesy: CagleCartoons

G.O.P Psycho, BIGOTED Lies Update:

On Hannity, Breitbart says it was “devastating” to Obama that he “pitched like an Indonesian teenage girl“

Hannity’s “biggest headline this week” is baseless claim Obama “is purposefully trying to hide the real economic numbers“

Dobbs still on birther bandwagon, says “no one” knows “the reality” of Obama’s birth certificate

Crowley looks on as Dobbs falsely claims Barofsky said “the bailout is going to cost… $24 trillion“

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The Howls of a Fading Species

   [ By: Bob Herbert ]
One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.

It’s hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination. Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist,” apparently unaware of his incoherence in the “Latina-woman” redundancy in this defamatory characterization.

Karl Rove sneered that Ms. Sotomayor was “not necessarily” smart, thus managing to get the toxic issue of intelligence into play in the case of a woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, went on to get a law degree from Yale and has more experience as a judge than any of the current justices had at the time of their nominations to the court.

It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry. It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough.

The amount of disrespect that has spattered the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is disgusting. She is spoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowest of the low. Rush Limbaugh — now there’s a genius! — has compared her nomination to a hypothetical nomination of David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. “How can a president nominate such a candidate?” Limbaugh asked.

Ms. Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights organization. In the crazy perspective of some right-wingers, the mere existence of La Raza should make decent people run for cover. La Raza is “a Latino K.K.K. without the hoods and the nooses,” said Tom Tancredo, a Republican former congressman from Colorado.

Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!

Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.

Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”

Never a peep did you hear.

Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 with a salute to states’ rights in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the site where three young civil rights workers had been snatched and murdered by real-life, rabid, blood-thirsty racists?

We’ve heard ad nauseam Ms. Sotomayor’s comments — awkwardly stated but hardly racist — about what she brings to the bench as a Latina. But how often have we ever heard the awful, hateful position on race offered up by William F. Buckley, the right’s ultimate intellectual champion? He felt comfortable declaring, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of public schools, that whites had every right to discriminate against blacks because whites belonged to “the advanced race.”

Right-wing howls of protest? I think not.

Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination is a big deal because never before in the history of the United States has any president nominated a Latina to the highest court. Only two blacks have ever been on the court, and the one selected by a Republican has been like a thumb in the eye to most African-Americans.

The court is a living monument to America’s long history of exclusion based on race, ethnic background and gender. Where is the right-wing protest against that?

It was always silly to pretend that the election of Barack Obama was evidence that the U.S. was moving into some sort of post-racial, post-ethnic, post-gender nirvana. But it did offer a basis for optimism. There is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.

Those types can still cause a lot of trouble, but the ridiculousness of their posture is pretty widely recognized. Thus the desperate howling.

The Anti-Immigrant SKUNK from Colorado, former congressman Tom Tancredo could not resist the smell of LATINA STEW. The filthy bigot who would love to see every single immigrant removed from the United States, is officially out of his hiding hole, with his anal scent glands excreting a strong foul-smelling odor of Racism. Even in retirement, this scumbag cannot hide his hatred for Latinos.

   President Obama Nominated Judge Sotomayor To The Supreme Court on Tuesday

Appearing on CNN, Tancredo suggested that Judge Sotomayor’s affiliation with the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights group, was equivalent to being a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

A congressman from the 6th Congressional District until he retired last year, Tancredo has made statements over the years threatening to bomb Mecca, calling Miami a Third World city and suggesting the U.S.-Mexico border wall separate Brownsville, Texas, from the rest of America.

Two years ago, before giving up his failed presidential campaign, Tancredo famously sang “Dixie” standing in front of Confederate flags in Columbia, S.C. His audience: a secessionist group and others called bigoted hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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