The Republican Confederate Party celebration of Confederate History Month seems to need some help getting the word out. It seems that folks are just not coming out to celebrate the Confederacy and all it represents.
So Virginny Governor Bob the Reb must have been thrilled to learn that this truck was out and about helping to show folks what the Confederacy was all about:
This truck is a great advertisement for the Republican Confederate Party. What jumps out at you is the tailgate with its exploitation of 9/11 to brand all Muslims as terrorists. Tacky and ill-informed, yes–but that is just the start.
Of course the back window is covered with a large “Stars n’ Bars”, so we know the driver want everybody to make the connection from his tailgate to the Lost Cause. But it is the driver’s license plate that makes the point of this hate mobile clear.
The plate reads 14CV88, and it turns out that it is a white supremacist dog whistle.
The truck rambling around Old Dominion was spotted by CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and they wrote a letter to the Virginia DMV about the plate. It turns out that each of number or letter pairs was code for something.
Who can guess what “CV” might stand for?
If you answered “Confederate Veteran” give yourself a gold star.
Lets turn to Mother Jones for help decoding the plate:
Turns out it’s laden with white supremacist code. The “88” you might know: That’s a popular way among yahoos of subtly saying “Heil Hitler,” since “H” is the 8th letter of the alphabet. (Apologies to all you well-intending NASCAR fans of Jarrett, Junior and Geoff.) The “CV” means “confederate veteran”, which is consistent with the plate’s tiny confederate battle flag denoting the licensee as a Sons of Confederate Veterans member. Best of all, though, is the lesser-known “14,” which is a reference to the “14 Words,” a white supremacist manifesto first coined by The Order member David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Turns out the driver of this mystery machine isn’t just a racist lunatic; he’s a joiner.
The rebel flag is all over this truck. In addition to the license plate there are at least four bumper stickers with the flag pasted over the larger flag on the back window. The image quality of the many stickers on the back window is too poor to read. That is a shame. It would be great to be able to read them and know which other threads of wingnut thought the driver is promoting. I would not be surprised to see a birther sticker or a “speak English” sticker or any manner of anti-government stickers.
This truck is a rolling advertisement for the merging of extreme hate groups in America that the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote about in their new report on hate groups: Rage on the Right:
As the movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream. While in the 1990s, the movement got good reviews from a few lawmakers and talk-radio hosts, some of its central ideas today are being plugged by people with far larger audiences like FOX News’ Glenn Beck and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn). Beck, for instance, re-popularized a key Patriot conspiracy theory — the charge that FEMA is secretly running concentration camps — before finally “debunking” it.
Last year also experienced levels of cross-pollination between different sectors of the radical right not seen in years. Nativist activists increasingly adopted the ideas of the Patriots; racist rants against Obama and others coursed through the Patriot movement; and conspiracy theories involving the government appeared in all kinds of right-wing venues. A good example is the upcoming Second Amendment March in Washington, D.C. The website promoting the march is topped by a picture of a colonial militiaman, and key supporters include Larry Pratt, a long-time militia enthusiast with connections to white supremacists, and Richard Mack, a conspiracy-mongering former sheriff associated with the Patriot group Oath Keepers.
This truck is another example of how the rhetoric and grievance myths of the right are merging. And the Republican Confederate Party’s celebration of Confederate History Month is yet another example of the same.
It is all about mainstreaming the myths and ideologies of hate.
And with all due respect to a certain fat bastard out of Mississippi, this is about a bit more than just didling a nit.
Cheers
Confederate History Month: Truck AdvertisingPost + Comments (94)