OK? What about the 94 million Americans that doesn't have a job? Or the 90-plus million is on food stamps? All that's in the 90s. You know what's dumb now? What Obama's doin'? Now he's saying, 'Well, you can't take up too much sugar'… talkin' about even going against Coca-Cola and all these soft drinks because he says Americans are gettin' too obese." It's more against the federal government. "All this basically boils down to is states' rights. "We are not affiliated with skinheads, and we are not affiliated with the KKK," Smith told me. I could never confirm exactly why it was at a Southern secessionist rally, though I had my theories. "It's part of maybe, like, one of the Christian flags." I later learned that it was the Liberian flag. Streaming over his head was a wind-blown flag with a field of thirteen stripes, with only one large star, not 50 small ones, in the blue corner. Beneath a salty cowboy hat, he wore a dirt-red shirt, a brass-and-steel buckle larger than my toddler son's head, and jeans that might judge you if you called them something other than "dungarees." An ex-paratrooper, Vietnam and Panama vet, he could have been 70, or 55 if the years were hard. Within a minute, I was enlisted in my first awkward conversation of the day, with a demonstrator I'll call Snuffy Smith. I mingled clumsily with the crowd, recognizing only one face-that of Michael Cushman, "the Palmetto Patriot," founder of the Southern Nationalist Network, who has called the American flag "the symbol of a government which promotes multiculturalism, abortion, interracial and homosexual marriage, Third World immigration, affirmative action and wars to spread democracy." He looks like a young Hunter Thompson, eyes always sunglassed and lips always pursed, the kind of guy who couldn't take you in a bar fight but looks serious enough that you wouldn't start one with him. A young white man in a Honda Civic followed suit, then a darkly tinted Chrysler with a familiar sign in the rear passenger window: "BABY ON BOARD."
#Adam weinstein gawker license
"MARCO RUBIO wants to replace us," the signs said, referring to the popular Republican senator who betrayed his tea party supporters by backing immigration reform.Īt its peak, the Florida secessionist crowd numbered about 40.Īt 10:24, the group got its first validation, an approving honk from an elderly white Hawaiian-shirted man in a minivan with no license plate. The group formed up up at 10 a.m., falling into ranks on the statehouse mall, pointing picket signs and Bonny Blue flags and Florida state flags toward the parkway traffic. The League's Tallahassee billboard, just up the road from the Capitol. Four women, including the club photographer maybe two or three under 30 one teen, in an aqua American Eagle polo.
#Adam weinstein gawker free
Two hundred copies of the Free Magnolia, the League's samizdat newsletter.Īll together, forty or so souls. One leather jacket, accompanied by double-clutch boots and a clanking chain wallet. A breeze picked up as I surveyed the army's assembled assets: five blue blazers. The long-absent birds were shaking off their silence on the statehouse grounds. Now, with the crud-crusted Florida winter broken at last, it was time for the demonstration. "We basically are dictated to by people from other parts of the country whose worldview is completely different from ours." "We just think that there needs to be a representative voice for all those common hard-working Southern folks out there that don't have a voice," the group's founder, Dr. The event's Facebook page announced: "100 is our magic number… 100 Southern nationalists in Tallahassee. The League hoped for its biggest coup yet, double the size of any of its previous demonstrations. It was the work of the League of the South-long labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center-which had planned to build media buzz with the billboard, leading to a rally on the Capitol steps to protest illegal immigrants. Most of the sign was taken up by six big black letters on a white background: SECEDE.Ī League of the South activist in the group's signature black shirt. Months ago it appeared on the parkway in Tallahassee, just east of the Capitol, positioned so you could see it and the edifice of Florida government side-by-side, the sun popping off both of them together at daybreak. The opening shot, the Fort Sumter of the newest campaign to take back Dixie, was a billboard.
0 kommentar(er)
