It was just about the most ordinary-looking group of people you could picture. Thirty folks, the personification of middle America, happily networked in a private room at a popular Cheshire Bridge eatery, Taverna Plaka.
A few minutes later, I was accosted by John Weatherman: a lanky, friendly sort in blue jeans who wanted to chat about the media. "Does your Jewish editor, Ken Edelstein, approve of you being at a meeting like this?" Weatherman inquired.
"Yeah, yeah," Dickson replied. "He married a Jewish woman, but he's with us on most things. I'll go over and talk to him. It'll be OK."
The picture now should be coming into focus. This was not a Rotary Club confab, although if you muted the sound and ignored a literature table, that's what the gathering resembled. This was an informal gathering of ... well, some would call them racists and white supremacists. And much of what they have to say justifies the description -- but it's also a message that is often indistinguishable from the language of Ann Coulter, Neal Boortz or Lou Dobbs.
But there were unvarnished attitudes festering not far below the surface. Fields, the ex-Kluxer chiropractor, talked about "not wanting Americans to die in Iraq for the Jews." One of Fields' more famous statements, published in a newspaper he runs (at one time called the Thunderbolt, now dubbed The Truth at Last), was: "Every Jew who holds a position of power or authority must be removed from that position. If this does not work, then we must establish [the] Final Solution!!!"
Yeah, I'd call that "not far" below the surface...
I asked Fromm – who is widely reported to have participated in a celebration of Hitler's birthday – if he is a neo-Nazi. "No," he said. "I am not a follower of Adolf Hitler." I queried if he was a Holocaust denier, to which he replied, "I am skeptical about the official version of World War II."
Fromm's message – which easily could have passed for talk-radio demagoguery – is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are part of a plot hatched by Communists in the 1920s in Frankfurt, Germany. "These are symbols being shoved down your throat," he said, "symbols of your dispossession. ... The goal is to achieve widespread acceptance of a radical feminist and a crypto-Moslem of mixed parentage."
Sort of sounds like Sean Hannity, doesn't he?
Go read. Save yourself some time and put your fist through the wall first.
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