Fascist tool (and I mean that literally): William Johnson of the white supremacist American Third Position
If you haven't heard of the California-based American Third Position party, or A3P as it's otherwise referred to, consider this a heads up. The racist, white nationalist organization would like to get on the Arizona ballot as an official party, joining the Democrats, the GOP, the Greens and the Libertarians, though it's not going to achieve this feat any time in the near future.
See, according to the Arizona Secretary of State's office, A3P would need to garner the signatures of 20,449 registered voters, have each of them verified by a county recorder, and submit them by the stated deadlines. For the upcoming elections, those dates have already passed.
But maybe the white power puddin'heads are looking for a jump start on 2012. One of A3P's supporters, a local fella by the name of Ralph A. Brandt, has been writing letters to small papers and Web portals in Arizona, telling white folk that there's a new party in town, and all you Caucasians are invited.
Versions of Brandt's letter have appeared in editions of the White Mountain Independent, the Kingman Daily Miner, and TriValleyCentral.com. In them, Brandt makes no bones about the party's "objective," which he says is "to protect the ethnic interests of white people."
Mr. White Pride miscalculates the number of signatures he needs, misinterpreting the statute governing these things as meaning he needs to pull one and one-third percent of the total votes cast for the governor who won in the last election.
Actually he needs one and one-third of all votes cast for governor, not just for the candidate who won.
So instead of 12,766 signatures, A3P would've needed to get the above stated 20,449. As Brandt's letters are dated early May, he apparently didn't know the deadline for the signatures had lapsed.
Still, he concedes, "This is a tall order. The party's national Web site does not yet have a thousand Facebook hits."
Brandt puts his hope in the economic downturn to convince more whites to turn racist, noting that since "many people have either lost their jobs or their homes," white people may have "nothing to lose" as a result.
Readers unfamiliar with Brandt and A3P should not be deceived. The Anti-Defamation League has published an excellent and telling backgrounder on the party, tracing its roots to previous white supremacist efforts such as the Golden State Party and Freedom 14, which had formed from Internet postings on the racist message board Stormfront.org.
In fact, the phrase "third position" itself echoes the old idea of fascism offering a "third way" between capitalism and communism.
A3P's Chairman William Johnson, who oddly had a failed bid for Congress in Arizona in 2006 as a Democrat, pretty much lays out the party's preppy, pseudo-intellectual racism in a video on A3P's site, stating,
"We of the third position look to the future and embrace principles that will secure the existence of our people and a future for our children."
That's a paraphrase of the white power oath devised by neo-Nazi David Lane, a member of the murderous supremacist group The Order. Lane's so-called "14 words" are memorized by every racist skinhead, and are symbolized by the shorthand "14/88," with the 88 standing for HH, or "Heil, Hitler."
As for Brandt, he's well-known in Sand Land supremacist circles, and is associated with the local chapter of the neo-Nazi Nationalist Coalition. He even penned an editorial for the Nationalist Coalition Web site way back criticizing an editorial I wrote, misspelling my name in the process.
But hey, who said spelling and math were the strong points of supposedly superior crackers such as Brandt? So much for the freakin' master race.
On Brandt's Facebook page, he offers up links to the pages of Sarah Palin, American Third Position, and the racist publication Occidental Quarterly Online. His "friends" include local neo-Nazis J.T. Ready and Harry Hughes.
To some degree, people like Brandt are little more than kooks. Their trick is to try and rope in disaffected whites who might be fooled by A3P.
Though who could be fooled by a spokesman such as Johnson, who offers his videotaped chats in front of a banner that reads, "for race and nation," is an open question.
