SPLC: The Battle of New Orleans (That Wasn’t)
By Hunter Wallace
Sadly, I’m afraid the SPLC isn’t what it used to be:
“Last weekend, a motley crew of far-right groups assembled at New Orleans’ Lee Circle to protest the city’s removal of Confederate monuments. Bearing all manner of insignias, from the Confederate Battle Flag, Klan logos, Civil War kepis, Norse runes, the flag of “Kekistan,” the Gadsden flag, to U.S. flags, all were prepared for a brawl.
The highly touted “Battle of New Orleans” was by all accounts a disappointment. The flaggers’ desire to pre-emptively name a “battle” where one would not occur, and to nevertheless claim victory is evidence of a strategy at play by the far-right that emerged after “The Battle of Berkeley” last month. That same strategy is now in play with many along the racist right, including one of Sunday’s event attendees, Brad Griffin, who writes under the pen name Hunter Wallace. …”
Battle for New Orleans 2017
— AmericanFreedomParty (@American3rdP) May 7, 2017
A few points:
- The SPLC made mountains out of molehills about my relationship with Dr. Hill and the League of the South. I was simply saying that the League ought to be better at exploiting social media. As we saw in New Orleans and Pikeville, we have dramatically improved on that front since 2015.
- It is true that I was critical of the turn toward militias and militancy in the movement. It is also true that subsequent events later proved that I was wrong. I’m happy to admit that I was wrong. Several months of violent, rampaging antifa attacks all across the United States and Europe has proven that we need to be much more mindful of our security at public events.
- I’ve known Richard Spencer in real life since 2009. I have known other people who were involved with the Alt-Right and White Nationalism long before that. In fact, I knew all these people before I got involved with the League of the South in 2012. So what?
- Identitarianism is about White people reasserting their racial, cultural and ethnic identities. Obviously, Southern Nationalism is a type of identitarianism. The Confederate monuments which we are defending are literal expressions of our White Southern identity carved in granite and placed in prominent public spaces by previous generations as a tribute to the heroism of our fathers.
- In September, I drove all the way to Arkansas to give a speech to the Arkansas League of the South about how Trump would disappoint his followers and fail to Make America Great Again. I said that is why we should support Trump in the 2016 election and hope he wins because his followers would only continue to radicalize after their inevitable letdown. Since that is exactly what has happened, I would say I was right about that one. It was the best case scenario for us.
- Why wouldn’t I support and get involved with Identity Dixie? We believe the same things. We are pushing for more or less the same goals. We are holding joint events now.
- We never anticipated getting into a conflict with the Alt-Lite or Patriots in New Orleans. The scenario didn’t occur to us, was totally unexpected and came as a total surprise. In any case, the Cuck Knight has been disavowed by everyone including Baked Alaska and Kyle Chapman.
- The Antifas initiated the current street battles in Washington, DC and Berkeley in January and February. We are simply getting better organized to respond to their violence. The Antifas initiated the conflict in New Orleans as well, but since the SPLC is allied with these people they won’t point that out.
- I disagreed with Dr. Michael Hill on like two or three issues and the SPLC has made it out to be this massive row when it was nothing of the sort. I’m still a member of the League of the South. I will be speaking at the LOS national conference this summer. This will be my fifth conference.
- Black Rebel and the heritage crowd named it the “Battle of New Orleans.” The phrase was adopted by the Based Stickman group that was coming from California. I simply promoted the event.
- New Orleans Antifa announced they were standing down and taking the weekend off on Twitter. By that point, we had already made plans to come to New Orleans and intended to publicly oppose the Take Em Down NOLA event anyway.
- The League has never livestreamed its public events to thousands of people watching on social media before. Hopefully, we can do so now simultaneously on YouTube, Periscope and Facebook Live.
- There were New Black Panthers, Republic of New Afrika and Black Lives Matter attendees in the Take Em Down NOLA crowd which was led by the avowed communist Malcolm Suber. They hurled as many racial epithets as were thrown in their direction, had just as many black supremacist “extremists” in their ranks and were caught on video celebrating White Genocide.