Last month, Nation contributor Max Blumenthal smacked Sen. George Allen (R-VA) for having “personally initiated an association” with one of the nation’s largest white supremacist groups in a bid to firm up his retro-conservative credentials.
By posing for this 1996 photo with the leaders of the Council of Conservative Citizens, Allen enhanced his image with southern bigots, Blumenthal found, and helped the CCC pick up some street cred in Washington. “It helped us as much as it helped him,” Gordon Lee Baum, CEO of the group (center of picture), told Blumenthal. “We got our bona fides.”
Now that Sen. George Allen (R-VA) has abruptly “discovered” his Jewish roots, I wondered: what does the CCC — which claims, among other things, that it owns the world’s largest Confederate flag — think of him now?
I reached Mr. Baum at the CCC headquarters in St. Louis, Mo. Has your organization rethought its position on Sen. Allen? I asked him.
Our conversation, after the jump.
“We don’t have a position on anybody’s candidacy. We’re a 501c4 [nonprofit]. We don’t endorse candidates,” Baum told me. However, “We’ve got three chapters in Virginia, and I’ve never heard any of them speak too fondly of Mr. Allen,” he said. “Currently our biggest issue is immigration, and I think he’s more in Georgie Bush’s camp than ours. . . . He’s not on our side.”
What about that fateful 10-year-old picture with you and Allen? Did you support him then? “To be quite frank with you. . . we didn’t know him and he didn’t know us, and we had the picture run in our newspaper,” Baum replied. “Our folks have never supported him.”
(Allen’s camp has returned the cold shoulder: “I am unaware of the group you mention or their agenda and because we have no record of the Senator having involvement with them I cannot offer you any opinion on them,” a spokesman emailed the Nation‘s Blumenthal.)
In general, however, Baum said the issue of Allen’s Jewishness “confused” him. “Are they saying he’s losing votes because he’s part-Jewish?” I averred that I didn’t know. He was disdainful. “All these white Southern Baptists in Virginia are going to vote for a liberal Democrat because [Allen] says he’s Jewish? I don’t think so.”
What I didn’t understand, Baum said, was that anti-Semitism isn’t as strong as it is in the North (“until you get to Miami,” he qualified). His group in particular isn’t anti-Semitic. “We have Jewish members. They’re just like any other Southerners,” said Baum. The CCC even counts one rabbi in its number, Baum said, although he wouldn’t tell me his name.
In general, Southerners get a “bum rap” as “haters,” Baum explained. “The only thing that makes people in the South quote-haters-unquote is the race issue,” he said. “It’s not true, that’s just how they’re painted. Just because people in the South are white separatists. . . why would that have any religious connotations?”
“To us, whether somebody’s Jewish, es macht nichts,” Baum told me.
“That means ‘it doesn’t make any difference’ in German,” he explained. Explained the CCC leader: “My grandpa” — who was, like Baum, a “Pennsylvania Dutchman” — “used to use that term all the time.”
Yes, his organization has all kinds of members, he told me. “We have two American Indian chiefs who belong to the organization.”
So. . . are they, like the CCC, pro-white? How does that work?
“We’re not pro-white,” Baum objected. “Well, I guess one could say that. We don’t phrase it like that.”
In any case, he said, the CCC has no beef with the Jews. “I don’t know a single person who thinks we’re going to become a Jewish nation,” he said. “We have no fears of the Jews taking over the Christians [in America], because the Jews don’t prosyletize.” But the Muslims — that’s a different story.
“It’s the Muslims in this regard — as the Pope just said, ‘the Muslims prosyletize with the sword.'”
