Billy Roper, White Nationalism 1.0 and #UniteTheRight

Editor’s Note: The following is a response to this video and Billy Roper’s ongoing smear campaign against the #UniteTheRight rally.

I didn’t want to have to do this.

I’ve tried for years now to avoid White Nationalist soap operas. I stayed out of the recent drama between AltRight.com and Counter Currents. In the past, I have made fun of the silly beefs which have periodically erupted within the White Nationalist movement.

It was Billy Roper who started this drama over the #UniteTheRight event. I first became aware of it when he started attacking Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch and Based Stickman on Twitter. He kept bringing his vendetta against Richard Spencer into my personal Twitter timeline. Initially, I chose to ignore it in the hope that it would go away, but the purity spiraling soon expanded to include attacks on Augustus Invictus, Matt Heimbach, Christopher Cantwell, Wife With a Purpose, Pax Dickinson and Jason Kessler. He has also been attacking Andrew Anglin for many of the same reasons.

By the time I started to respond to Billy Roper, he was attacking 10 other people across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Stormfront. He was doing it at all times of the day, every single day and was trying his hardest to disrupt our event. Notably, he wasn’t attacking Dr. Michael Hill and the League of the South even though the League was participating in the #UniteTheRight event. Just a few weeks before, the Arkansas League of the South had held a joint rally with Billy Roper and the Shieldwall Network in Harrison, Arkansas, which I had written positively about on this website.

When the League of the South was in New Orleans, I had informed my friend RG Miller that Mountain Home Redneck Revolt was planning to hold a demonstration in Harrison at the end of May. It was Billy Roper who brought this to my attention. I thought at the time that we ought to be putting our divisions aside and working together to advance common goals. That’s why I personally encouraged the League of the South to work with the Shieldwall Network and the Knights Party. In fact, I promoted several of Billy Roper’s events in Arkansas including the one in Batesville.

It’s true that I support the big tent approach. In the span of three weeks, I supported Richard Spencer in Auburn, Matt Heimbach and the Nationalist Front in Pikeville and a group of Confederate flaggers in New Orleans after they came under attack by Antifa. In spite of his past in the White Nationalist movement, we had even tried to include Billy Roper in that big tent. Jason Kessler reached out and invited him to come to the #UniteTheRight event in Charlottesville. In return, Roper began to accuse Kessler of having a black roommate in college and spread the rumor that he was a homosexual.

I could have stayed out of this. No one else responded so strongly to his attacks. I will explain why I chose to do so, but first I want respond to his latest round of smears:

Brad Griffin Is a Liberal

Billy Roper has accused me of voting for Al Gore.

This is a typical example of one of his smears. He mixes a cocktail of half truths with a big lie. It is true that I voted for Al Gore and John Kerry, but I did so because I hated George W. Bush. I voted for Gore and Kerry because I hated Conservatism, Inc. and saw it as the real obstacle to our cause.

I’m not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. I made that clear in my last post. I attack liberal democracy every single day on Twitter. I’ve spent years here outlining my philosophical objections to liberalism. The purpose of the Alternative South is to create a discursive space outside of liberalism and to stimulate a dialogue about how we can move beyond liberalism.

At the same time, I am willing to grant that there are aspects of the liberal tradition which I admire. Unlike some people, I don’t believe in exterminating other racial groups. I’m not a fan of gratitutious violence. I believe there are aspects of the American Republic which we ought to preserve like the Bill of Rights. I object to the accusation that I am a bigot. I’m not intolerant and have always enjoyed interacting with people who do not share my political views. I’m not really a hateful person.

Compared to some people, I am definitely a moderate. I’m far more practical and less rhetorically extreme than Billy Roper. This doesn’t make me a liberal though.

Brad Griffin Has a Multiracial Family

I’m not in the least bit surprised by this smear.

This isn’t an attack on me. It is an attack on my sister-in-law and by extension on my wife and son. It is based on the half truth that my sister-in-law once though she was a Cherokee princess. Virtually everyone in the South has a family member who subscribes to this myth. It is a meme which everyone from Fauxcahontas Elizabeth Warren to Johnny Cash has bought into.

This never occurred to me when I was responding to Billy Roper. My sister-in-law took the AncestryDNA test. She is 100% European and has no Native American history. My father-in-law, mother-in-law and wife have all taken the test. They have no Indian ancestry either. I’ve taken the test and have no Indian ancestry. This is interesting because even siblings inherit different genes from their parents:

My sister-in-law’s DNA test results:

58% British
30% Irish
11% German-French
1% Eastern European

My wife’s DNA test results:

61% German-French
30% Irish
8% British
1% Eastern European

My DNA test results:

67% British
11% Irish
8% Italian/Greek
8% German-French
3% Scandinavian
3% Eastern European

This is a new chart which shows my genetic similarity to other Whites:

My son is mixed race in the sense his father’s ancestors hail from Georgia and Florida and his mother’s ancestors are from West Tennessee. What is Billy Roper’s ancestry?

Brad Griffin Is a Paid Shill For Richard Spencer

I don’t work for Richard Spencer.

I haven’t even talked with Richard Spencer about Billy Roper’s attacks. It’s true that I helped Richard Spencer set up the AltRight.com website. In recent months, I haven’t been active there because I have to make a living. I wish that Richard Spencer had the money to pay me to do this full time. It would certainly make my life much easier. Please donate if you support my work.

No, I helped Richard Spencer set up AltRight.com because we need to build institutions. We needed to chase off the Alt-Lite which was attempting to hijack the brand. We also needed to start building our own platform. Lately, I have been helping Richard Spencer with activism. I have been a team player and a good soldier. In this respect, I have been the exact opposite of Billy Roper.

If I was just attacking all of Richard Spencer’s enemies, why didn’t I get embroiled in the feud between Arktos and Counter Currents? The answer is that I try to avoid drama.

Brad Griffin Was Friends With Glenn Miller

This is a simply a lie.

It’s true that I knew who Glenn Miller was in the White Nationalist movement. He was an active poster on VNN Forum for 10 years. I interacted with him on countless occasions.

My view of Glenn Miller was always that he was a clown and a blowhard. I spent years poking fun at Glenn Miller when he posted on forums asking for donations to support The Aryan Alternative. I found an online copy of his Declaration of War in which he vowed to go out in a blaze of gunfire. He said he wanted to be buried with the sword in his hand while giving a sieg hiel only to surrender piss drunk in a trailer without firing a shot. I found the letter he wrote to a judge in which he begged for leniency. He said that he had told the government everything he knew including things he was never asked.

The only thing I ever agreed with Glenn Miller on was street activism. It’s true that he supported the League of the South demonstrations. He encouraged some White Nationalist activists like Ron Doggett to attend our demonstrations. Many years ago, I ran a free speech forum while I was in college, and I allowed Glenn Miller to fight it out with his nemesis Pastor Martin Lindstedt.

I never met Glenn Miller. I didn’t take him seriously. I was horrified when he murdered a 14-year-old Methodist Eagle Scout and his grandfather in Overland Park. It was something that I spent years warning Alex Linder would happen because of his exterminationist rhetoric.

Brad Griffin Is Trying To Hijack The CofCC and League of the South

This is absurd.

The real reason why I joined the Council of Conservative Citizens in 2010 and the League of the South in 2012 is because 9 years of anonymous internet posting was enough for me. I was ready to move beyond that. Instead of starting my own group and becoming another ridiculous micro-führer, I joined the two established organizations in my region which were pro-White, pro-South and pro-Christian. I had no desire to be a leader of anything. I wanted to find and network with other people in my area who shared my beliefs and help be a part of the solution.

The Real Reason Why I Responded So Harshly To Billy Roper

I’ve explained why I responded so harshly to Billy Roper.

I don’t have anything against him personally. Recently, I had encouraged close friends of mine to work with him in Arkansas, and we invited him to come our event. Obviously, the real reason is that I was fed up with Billy Roper’s smears against other people, which I believe are grossly counterproductive for our movement. #UniteTheRight is going to be the biggest rally in over 25 years. It is exactly the sort of catalyst we need to finally move beyond this era of anonymous shitposting on the internet.

Unlike most of the speakers at #UniteTheRight, I have been involved in this scene for the last 16 years. I don’t need Billy Roper to explain to me the history of the White Nationalist movement. As he well knows, it is precisely because of that history that I reacted so negatively to him. Although hardly anyone remembers him today, Billy Roper was much more well known when I first got started in this. He was one of the most prominent figures in the White Nationalist movement in the 2000s.

What does Billy Roper have to show for 25 years in the movement? That’s the real question. He was involved with the National Alliance which collapsed. He started his own group called White Revolution. It failed as a membership organization. He started his own political party called the Nationalist Party of America. It too failed. Then he joined Pastor Thom Robb’s group The Knights Party. Although I am unclear on this, I think he left that group to join a group called Divine Truth Ministries.

More recently, Billy Roper attempted to organize the Rock Stone Mountain rally in Georgia. This was a purely White Nationalist event. It had nothing to do with the Alt-Right. For whatever reason, he dropped out of that rally as well. In short, Billy Roper has a long history of not being able to work with other people in the movement. The SPLC notes that Roper “does not appear to have been even slightly successful in building any coalition, let alone a unified “Aryan” movement.”

I’ve seen the term “White Nationalism 1.0” bandied about for years. I have always associated it with the White Nationalist movement in the 2000s. I remember it as a time when the movement was dominated by shitposting anonymous messages on vBulletin messageboards, micro-führers like Billy Roper viciously competing with each other over the same small pool of followers and the disorganization and chaos that followed the collapse of the National Alliance in 2002. It was the age of VNN Forum.

White Nationalism 1.0 was the pre-Richard Spencer, pre-Alt-Right, pre-social media era. It was the age of Billy Roper, Alex Linder and Erich Gliebe. It was the age of the vBulletin forum. It was White Nationalism before the smartphone and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Well, it would be more accurate to say it was a branch of White Nationalism. Although I didn’t know them at the time, there was another group of men who were active in those years. They built institutions which advanced the White Movement movement and have left a positive legacy.

Billy Roper was a fixture of the first group.

I’ve always associated Roper with the White Nationalist movement at its lowest point in the 2000s. I remember the time he held a rally outside the SPLC in Montgomery. At the time, I was a college student at Auburn University. My impression was that it didn’t look like a group that I wanted to join. He continued to hold events like the one in Topeka, Kansas where he was joined by Pastor Martin Lindstedt, Alex Linder and Craig Cobb. It is a reminder of how little was going on in those days:

The most notable thing that happened in that time period was the Christmas Coup of 2004 in which Billy Roper seized control of VNN Forum in an e-version of a White Revolution. It was a time when every micro-führer in the White Nationalist movement had his own vBulletin messageboard. They spent all their time fighting with each other online, never accomplishing anything and black-pilling while entertaining their audience with their buffoonish escapades. I’ve compared it to midget wrestling. It is depressing to read through the VNN Forum archives and see all the banned and deleted members and be reminded that is all these people have to show for those wasted years.

Here’s a trip down memory lane of White Nationalism 1.0:

The Alt-Right has brought a new generation of Millennials into the White Nationalist movement. They don’t remember Billy Roper or his peers like Von Bluvens, Alex Linder, Glenn Miller, Craig Cobb, Harold Covington, Erich Gliebe, John de Nugent and Commander Bill White like the rest of us do. I’m not going to dwell on this except to say that the less that is said about all these people the better. Years ago, the public face of the movement used to be equal parts stupid, vicious, crazy and ugly:

The final straw for me was the time Harold Covington wrote a 976 page novel called Freedom’s Sons in which I was cast as the President of the United States, a Cass Sunstein disinformation agent and a sexual pervert who was assassinated in the Oval Office by my mistress. If you are wondering, this was Harold’s revenge for being banned on Occidental Dissent for using multiple sockpuppets:

“How much do you know about the President of the United States, Hunter Wallace?” asked Randall.

“Uh, just what I read in the papers,” said Campbell. “The guy’s a scumbag white traitor, but that’s a given, as if any other kind of person could be elected to office in the United States . . . I think I read somewhere that Hunter Wallace started out on the internet back in the ‘teens, as a false-flag blogger and a black op under the old Cass Sunstein Cognitive Dissonance program. He gathered information for the regime and for the regimes NGOs like the Anti-Defamation League of Benai Brith and the Southern Poverty Law Center, for money. As a reward for his cyber-services he was given a staff job in D.C. on some liberal Congressman from Alabama’s payroll, and the rest, as they say, is particularly repulsive history.”

“Go on,” said Randall with a smile.

Campbell shrugged and complied. “Worked his way up to the point where he was actually able to steal the Alabama Congressman’s seat from him, and from then on Wallace never looked back . . . His rap is an interesting combination of liberalism, neo-conservatism, and Christian Zionism all rolled into one . . . Wallace’s one-note symphony for some years has been We Must Recover Amurrica’s Lost Jewels of the Northwest, punish wicked racism, and make everybody love and bugger one another under Old Glory regardless of race, creed, color, or species, all the while singing Kumbayah and praising Jesus. I know it’s a lot more complex than that, sir, but that’s what I hear.”

“Not bad,” said Randall with a nod. “Pretty much tells the tale, that does, but there are some things you don’t know. Hunter Wallace made a decision very early on in his life that he was going to make his fortune as a shabazz-goy, a Gentile gopher for the Jews . . . Now, what do you know about the illustrious Leader of the Free World’s, uh, practices I suppose you’d call them, with women?”

Robert frowned. “I know Wallace isn’t married, and part of his public persona is to be seen in public escorting all kinds of movie stars and female celebrities to political functions, public social events, concerts, baseball games, that kind of thing. Seems to me I read somewhere he actually charges money for his campaign committee and his private slush fund to escort somebody’s daughter or wife to a public do and get their picture in the media. Is that the kind of practices with women you mean, sir?”

“Uh, no,” said Randall carefully. ” . . . President Hunter Wallace has a medical problem. Has had since he was young, same problem a lot of white males of his generation have due to eating industrially produced and chemically enhanced food as a child and the general level of pollution and environmental contamination with every toxin under the sun that exists in the United States. Hunter Wallace suffers from what’s known as hypo-gonadism, which is a fancy way of saying his nuts are the size of pencil erasers, his sperm count is three or four on a good day, and it’s impossible for him to have normal sexual relations with a woman. And so he does what any rich and powerful American man does who can’t have normal sexual relations with a woman: he has abnormal ones. I won’t get into exactly what he does, since I just ate lunch. You will be briefed on that when the time comes.”

In the end, President Hunter Wallace has to beg Harold Covington to stop exterminating the Jews with his imaginary legions called the Northwest Volunteer Army.

By 2011, I had seen enough of this. It had been ten years and nothing was happening. White Nationalism 1.0 was stuck in a ditch and confined to vBulletin messageboards. It was still almost purely anonymous. Nothing was going on in the real world after a decade of this nonsense. I became a Southern Nationalist and joined the League of the South where I have remained to this day.

When Billy Roper started trashing the #UniteTheRight rally, it struck a nerve with me because these guys had their chance in the 2000s. They didn’t build stable organizations. They didn’t create their own platforms. They didn’t find common ground and work together. They didn’t have a palatable message or presentable aesthetics. Fundamentally, these throwbacks got us nowhere.

Billy Roper appeared at rallies with Alex Linder and Craig Cobb. He proclaimed that Anthony Pierpont, an adopted Mexican, was White. He shared the stage with John de Nugent who believes that the Fourth Reich is hiding in an underground base in Antarctica and is coming back with the assistance of Nordic Aliens. He worked with people like Bill White and Erich Gliebe in the National Alliance. Finally, he thought Erica Hardwick-Hoesch was good enough to be a member of White Revolution before she defected and gave all the information she had on them to One People’s Project.

Against Purity Spiraling

These fundamental reason that the Billy Ropers, Alex Linders and Harold Covingtons failed was because of their temperament and worldview. These guys were too individualistic to put their differences aside. Their message was too extreme to resonate. They also had unrealistic expectations.

Behind this feud, there is also a philosophical difference. The Alt-Right believes in trying to change our culture through education and direct action. Many of these White Nationalist 1.0s believe the only alternative to voting our way out of this is remaining pure and waiting for the inevitable collapse of civilization. We don’t believe either of these strategies are going to work.

We’re not the dominant culture. The majority of White Americans support gay marriage. They approve of miscegenation. There are strong taboos against “racism” and “anti-Semitism.” We are a dissident minority. Virtually everyone else in this country is to the left of us on race and culture. The job of a leader is to move them from where they are today to where we want them to go.

By engaging with the public, the Alt-Right trying to convert people to our ideas and build a new culture. Everyone who converts to our ideas is necessarily going to have a past. They are going to come from conservatism, libertarianism, the Alt-Lite or even the Left. These people have been miseducated their entire lives by their church, their schools and the mass media. They weren’t raised with our values and it is unrealistic to expect everyone to have conformed to them in the past.

Billy Roper was born into the Klan in Arkansas. Less than 0.1% of White Americans come from a similar background. He is acting like we are still the dominant culture and is trying to enforce taboos. I totally agree we should have standards, but our present circumstances call for pragmatism and forgiveness. After all, we’re all going to be dead one day and what ultimately matters is the culture we leave behind to our descendants. We’re going to have build that culture by converting millions of White Americans from the “mainstream” to our racial and cultural values.

The time to rigorously enforce those taboos will be when we have built the White nation that Billy Roper talks so much about. When we have overthrown liberalism and replaced it with a traditionalist social order, support for homosexuality and miscegenation will no longer be normative in our culture. It will be the task of another generation to tow a harder line. In the meantime, it is the task of our generation to work with the material available and start the long term process of building towards our ideal. We do this by converting people to our ideas, encouraging them to improve themselves, welcoming them into our moral community and pooling our resources toward advancing a common goal.

Maybe this sounds like liberal bullshit to Billy Roper. It is true I am advocating a more moderate approach. I believe in building social media platforms and real world social networks, fostering unity and cooperation within our movement, crafting a message that resonates with a disaffected audience, creating stable organizations, rebuilding trust and social capital through hosting events and engaging in public activism to assert our identity, generate publicity and undermine the dominant taboos. I believe in gradual change through doing what I can as an individual to make things a little bit better. I’m confident the #UniteTheRight rally will advance all of these goals.

The Billy Roper way is the road to nowhere. By making the perfect the enemy of the good, the inevitable result is the fragmentation and stagnation of organizations. It doesn’t bring us any closer to a White nation. We should have learned from experience that we don’t get anywhere by tearing down others and demoralizing our followers. That’s what Billy Roper & Co. did in the 2000s and we absolutely cannot afford yet another decade of anonymous shitposting on online forums.

We’re sorting ourselves out now though. #UniteTheRight is going to be our best chance in years to get out of this ditch and moving again on the open road.

Note: It goes without saying that we should have been doing this 15 years ago. The videos above should give you some insight into why that never happened. We can’t gloss over the fact that the 2000s were a lost decade because Billy Roper crashed the car.