White Supremacists Crawl Out

Via the Guardian, "The prospect of an African-American president is bringing white supremacist subculture in the US out of the shadows." This article is a follow to the report yesterday that Obama was that target of an assassination plot.

Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman, the two Tennessee neo-Nazis arrested for plotting to kill 102 African-American schoolchildren and then assassinate Barack Obama, clearly drew inspiration from a violent white nationalist group called the Order.

In the 1980s, members of the Order carried out a crime spree that included several high-profile murders.The connection to the Order is evident in the numbers the two men scrawled on their car on Saturday shortly before they were arrested: 14 and 88. The so-called Fourteen Words is a slogan - "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" - coined by Order member David Lane, who also wrote an essay called 88 Precepts. In white supremacist circles, 14-88 is a shorthand expression of allegiance to the beliefs put forth by Lane and the Order, who wanted to found a white homeland where they could preserve the "Aryan race" from being polluted by non-whites and enslaved by the "Zionist-occupied government" of the US.

After reading this, I couldn't help but think of the TED video from yesterday discussing the human urge toward tribalism.

The full article and a video interview with a white supremacist leader over at the Guardian.