White nationalism, north and south

A former elected official used the n-word several times during a public meeting, offending a black member of a Georgia city’s board of commissioners.

The tense exchange between the two men happened on the same day that the Atlanta suburb of Griffin, Ga., declared April as Confederate History Month. While speaking about the declaration during the public comments portion of the meeting, Larry Johnson, a former member of the board who is white, immediately turned his attention to Rodney McCord, who appears to be one of two black officials at the table.

What began as harmless reminiscing of their differences back when they were serving as city officials together quickly escalated when Johnson reminded McCord of a conversation he said they once had about race.

“I told you at that time that there were white folks, and there were black folks when I was growing up,” Johnson said, speaking to McCord from the podium. “There was white trash — my family — and there was n—–town. I lived next to n—–town.”

The comment immediately caught McCord off guard, while the other board members sat quietly.

“You lived next to what town?” he asked Johnson.

And Johnson’s matter-of-fact reply: “N—–town, son. I’m telling you son, now that changed. I’m no longer white trash … ”

“Hold on a second,” McCord interrupted.

In the next few minutes, as shown in a public video of the meeting, an agitated McCord tried to express his frustration, while the board’s chairman, Douglas Hollberg, stopped him so Johnson can keep talking.

“Mr. McCord, please let him get to the point so we can move on,” Hollberg said.

To which McCord, with his voice raised, said:

He can get to his point, but I’m not going to sit here … Maybe y’all are comfortable with it, I don’t know. I’m not going to sit here and let this man use that type of language. And if nobody else is offended, then I am. Now if y’all want to clap and think that that’s okay for this gentleman to stand, in 2018, and get here at the board of city commission meeting — 2018 — the Civil War is over and he is using the n-word not once, not twice — three times! And he just continues to say it with not one word about who it offends.

At that point, Hollberg asked Johnson to refrain from using the racial slur. Johnson then went on to talk about the Confederacy, why he supports the Confederate flag, the Civil War and his Scottish heritage.

“My skin is white, my neck is red, and I was born in Southern bed,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that. I hope that doesn’t offend anybody.”

He also apologized to McCord, and before leaving the podium, reiterated an earlier argument that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery...

Those who supported the proclamation said the objections were based on misinformation and argued that the Confederacy was about heritage, not about racism, slavery or hate. But many historians reject the notion that the war had nothing to do with slavery.

There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn’t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.

“He did this thing that people connected to organized white nationalism have not been able to do ― walk both sides of the extremist line in the sand,” said Keegan Hankes, a data intelligence expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Ricky Vaughn also played an important role in amplifying disinformation injected into American politics by the Russian government. HuffPost and a team of data scientists known as Susan Bourbaki Anthony that tracks online propaganda analyzed who was retweeting the now infamous Kremlin-controlled Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which consistently praised Trump, attacked Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and churned out a vile medley of racism, Islamophobia and “fake news.”

In the data set of significant accounts we looked at, Ricky Vaughn retweeted @TEN_GOP the most, by far. Although Twitter shut down his @Ricky_Vaughn99 handle in October 2016, another handle he used, @RapinBill, took over and retweeted @TEN_GOP at least 162 times between early March and late August 2017. (@RapinBill also retweeted @Pamela_Moore13, another Kremlin-controlled account, at least 37 times during this period.)

Curiously, @RapinBill, which is still active and followed by Donald Trump Jr., does not appear to have received a single reciprocal retweet from @TEN_GOP in this time period, perhaps indicating an attempt to conceal the connection. @RapinBill retweeted @TEN_GOP until the end. When Twitter finally shut down @TEN_GOP last August, after having ignored numerous complaints about the Russian account, Ricky Vaughn did not take it well. He groused that @TEN_GOP had been “banned for supporting our president.” Within hours, he was steering traffic to the Kremlin’s backup account.