Maryland, man. You might assume blue state Republicans are less likely to be crazy racist MAGA types. But you’d be wrong.
Meet neo-Confederate Michael Peroutka:
In a 2014 blog post, Peroutka described the separation of church and state as the “great lie.” That same year he argued for dismantling public education, which he denounced as “the 10th plank in the Communist Manifesto.”
And in 2002, according to Vice, Peroutka gave a speech to a racist organization called the League of the South, in which he said he was “still angry” that Maryland did not secede from the Union during the Civil War.
Peroutka served on the board of the League of the South — which believes that today’s Southern states should secede from the U.S. — from 2012 to 2014.
Once, at a group conference in 2012, Peroutka sang “Dixie,” a song with origins in minstrel performances that was the anthem of the Confederacy during the Civil War. That same year, Michael Hill, president of the League of the South, wrote that “the cold facts of history tell us that blacks have never created anything approximating a civilization in the Western sense of the term.”
Hill had previously written that the League of the South supported “a return to a political and social system based on kith and kin rather than an impersonal state wedded to the idea of the universal rights of man. At its core is a European population.”
[Peroutaka] has refused to disavow the League of the South ― even after Hill pledged in 2016 to be a “white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a xenophobe, an Islamophobe, and any other sort of ’phobe that benefits my people, so help me God,” and even after the group’s involvement in the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Indeed, Peroutka wouldn’t even denounce the group during his latest bid for Maryland attorney general.
We are in nothing less than a battle for the soul of this country in the upcoming 2022 and 2024 elections.
You can read the rest of the HuffPost article by Christopher Mathias here.
