Skip to main content Accessibility
The Intelligence Report is the SPLC's award-winning magazine. Subscribe here for a print copy.

Neo-Confederate or Neo-Nazi? Sometimes, It's Hard to Tell

Neo-Confederate Wayne D. Carlson dabbles in neo-Nazi literature.

In a sign of the increasing radicalization of the neo-Confederate movement, one of its leading publications has printed an anti-Semitic review lauding "Who Rules America?" — a tract by the boss of America's leading neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance.

The August 2001 issue of the shoddily produced The Edgefield Journal (the "Confederate States Nationalist Newspaper") carries the review, "Media monopoly = thought control," written by Wayne D. Carlson, the secretary and treasurer of the Southwest Virginia Chapter of the League of the South. The League is a hate group that often tries to masquerade as a mainstream, if conservative, organization.

The piece is a straightforward anti-Semitic attack on supposed Jewish control and manipulation of the media. Carlson quotes the propaganda piece written by Alliance leader William Pierce favorably and at length. "Is it just an incredible coincidence," Carlson asks, "that virtually all of the media is controlled by Jews? ... This is but the tip of the iceberg."

Another revealing, if somewhat comedic, window into neo-Confederate thinking appeared recently on AlaReb, an E-mail discussion list maintained by David Allen, chairman of the Tuscaloosa chapter of the neo-Confederate League of the South and second in command of the Alabama Sons of Confederate Veterans.

A late December message posted on AlaReb argues with a straight face that "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," a popular animated television show from the 1960s, actually demonstrates the "Communist Infiltration of American Children's Christmas Programming."

The evidence? It's obvious: Santa is a "Lenin-like charismatic leader." The North Pole is a "worker's paradise despite ... slave-like working conditions." And that "abominable snowman" character is clearly meant to represent capitalism.

The message, which triggered a barrage of paranoid responses from other neo-Confederates, concludes darkly that "the [show's] symbolism is laughably obvious."