From Radio Free Northwest, March 25th, 2010

Greetings from the Northwest Homeland, comrades. It’s March 25th, 2010 , I’m Harold Covington, and this is Radio Free Northwest.

I’m going to begin this week’s show with a subject I’m very reluctant to broach. I spent most of this weekend debating with myself over whether or not to speak of this in public at all. I know a number of my associates and our Party supporters will disagree with my decision to do so, and I can understand their viewpoint. This is about the fifth time I have re-worked this part of the show so as to convey to you folks to the best of my ability, exactly what it is I want to say without simply adding to the confusion by going off into long pointless digressions about things that happened 20 and 30 years ago where the majority of you won’t have a clue as to what in hell I’m talking about.

I refer to a systematic and growing campaign of defamation, slander, harassment, and abuse which has been conducted against me personally and against the Northwest Migration concept on the internet for quite some time. Not by the Jews and not by the left and not by the government or the SPLC, but by people who claim to be White Nationalists who more or less believe as we do. In my view the validity of that claim to be one of us is open to serious question, but when you come across this happy horse dung, which I am sure you will eventually, judge for yourself. I call this hysterical campaign of abuse and vilification by several names in my own writings, GUBU, Space Madness, but most often I call it the Goat Dance.

I chose that name because one of the so-called White groups I criticized in the past that started all this taradiddle used to have a kind of ritual involving virtually nude young men wearing only jock straps with green leafy things stuffed in them, while the leader of the group presided over the festivities wearing a kind of robe or toga made out of a bedsheet, kind of a racist John Belushi. They called this the Goat Dance, and since this took place on a rural estate, yes, there was a live goat involved. Don’t ask.

I understand why a lot of you feel I should be maintaining public silence on this mess. I have been told that I need to "take the high road," that I should be a big man and rise above it all, that I shouldn’t dignify this defamatory drivel with an answer, and I get all that. I also understand also that by responding I am to a large degree giving these people what they want. Like all stalkers, what they want most of all is for the object of their weird desires to respond to them, acknowledge their existence. They don’t want this to be about the Northwest Migration, the Northwest Republic, or even about Harold Covington. They want it to be all about them. They’re some pretty sick puppies.

The reason that after much reflection I decided to include this segment in our podcast this week is because the fact is, the decision has been taken out of my hands. The things I am going be talking about are already being discussed in public, by which I mean on the internet, although perhaps bellowed and howled and cackled in public would be a better term for it. It’s already out there whether we like it or not, and to new people who don’t know what the hell’s going on and have nothing to guide them, it’s weird and confusing, and they are coming to me wanting answers.

At least once a week, I get an e-mail from somebody asking me the question “Harold, why does everybody in the Movement talk bad about you and the Northwest Migration?” The first thing I do when I get these questions is I fire back another e-mail in response saying “define everybody.” Because the fact is that no, “everybody” does not bad-mouth me and the Northwest Migration. This bird-brained and pathological behavior is confined to five or six specific individuals who have made a career out of it. Their identities are known to me, including most of the false e-mail addresses and internet sock puppets they employ.

I regret to say that one of these individuals is my own brother, but in his case his motivations are personal, financial and family-related and have nothing to do with White Nationalism or anything racial. So not counting my brother, roughly 80 to 90 percent of the toxic waste which is circulating about me on Movement internet boards and whatnot comes from about half a dozen specific, known individuals, none of whom are acting out of any legitimate racial and political motive.

The rest of it is just mindless repetition by silly people who don’t know any better but who just like gossip and scandal. They hear this stuff and they shoot it all over the internet just for shits and giggles. Someone once said that great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and little minds talk about people. We have an awful lot of little minds in the Movement. The internet really facilitates this kind of childish tantrum. I mean, look at Lindsay Lohan and Twitter.

One of the odd things I have noticed about this phenomenon down through the years is that any time I try to speak of White character in general terms, everyone nods sagely and agrees with me, but when I cite and analyze specific examples, by name, a lot of people jam their fingers in their ears and shout "LA LA LA LA I’m not listening…." In our rather eccentric collective mindset, it seems to be okay to discuss our many moral and personal failings so long as one does it in very broad terms, so whoever’s listening can convince themselves that Harold isn’t really talking about them. 

But the minute I start naming names and citing specific examples of disgraceful and counterproductive behavior, especially on the part of those who claim to be our leaders, all of a sudden I am “fighting a feud.” This is very much a shoot the messenger kind of thing. So don’t worry, I won’t upset anyone by naming names here. In any case, I am really not comfortable with perpetuating the names of these assholes in any connection at all to what I view as a sacred and holy cause.

I’m an old hand at this; I have been subjected to this kind of gossip and abuse for well over 30 years now, dating back to the pre-internet days when we put our smears and slanders in little single-sheet newsletters run off on mimeograph machines in garages.

Another one of my old Movement mentors, Major William Gaedtke, the last head of the old America First committee, once warned me about this. He told me, quote, “Harold, the problem is these people who are spreading lies and rumors about you are basically mediocrities. We are so used to mediocrity and incompetence in the Movement that anything else makes us suspicious. These people who slander you simply can’t understand why anyone with your education and talent would devote themselves to this dinky little Movement of ours instead of using your abilities to make all kinds of money, because that’s what they would do themselves if they had your chops.” End quote. Or words to that effect.

So yeah, they started laying this crap on me long ago, back in the days of yore. I have some real favorites from those days, especially the rumors where I was supposed to have magical powers kind of like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series. I was supposed to have sacrificed my cat in a Satanic ritual in the Nazi headquarters on North Street in Raleigh, and I am also supposed to have sent poltergeists to haunt Michael Hoffman the Second. Wait, that’s naming a name, isn’t it? Screw it. I was also supposed to be an alcoholic Indian.

Plus of course the usual big three: Jew, Fed, and queer. I still get called a Jew, with of course no documentary proof at all. In point of fact my family line has been traced back to 1727 when a Scotch-Irish immigrant named John Covington landed in Charleston. That was actually done by the Raleigh News and Observer newspaper editor, a liberal named Claude Sitton, who hired a genealogist in 1980 to try and find Jewish ancestry in my family tree, but he came up dry. Nope, nothing but Germans and UIstermen. I get called a fed all the time as well, of course, again without one shred of evidence for the past 38 years. Queer I’m glad to say they’ve pretty much left alone; it would be kind of hard since I’m the guy who got Frank Collin put away for seven years on a buggery rap.

Everyone who has ever been prominent in the racial right has been subjected to this to one degree or another; this kind of dysfunctional behavior seems to be part and parcel of the kind of personalities that are attracted to the Movement.

Some people say that if you just ignore this nutty personal stuff it goes away. Unfortunately, in my experience that’s not true. If you just ignore it, people assume you don’t answer it because you can’t answer it. My policy when one of these moronic allegations pops up has always been to make one definitive statement per rumor or accusation and afterwards refer anyone who inquires back to that statement as a kind of “canned answer.” I haven’t bothered to do that for many years now, and that may be one reason why all the toxic waste has been building up, so this podcast is going to have to constitute my “canned answer” for a while.

Now, as to why they do this nonsense? Lordy, lordy, where to begin, where to begin?

First off, I am sure it is no news to most of you that our movement has a lot of people associated with it who have no business within a hundred miles of any kind of alternative politics. We have serious character issues, and since those character issues are largely what have been preventing us over the past 50 years from mounting an effective resistance to the crisis in our civilization, I have in the past refused to be polite and look the other way. I tend to say out loud what has to be said and let the chips fall where they may. I hold up mirrors, and a lot of people don’t like what they see. So that’s one reason some of these people are giving me all this crap on the internet. In the past I caught them with their fingers in the cookie jar or I caught them with their pants down, in one case quite literally, and I let everybody know it.

Secondly, as the late Dr. William L. Pierce once put it to me in the last civil letter he ever addressed to me, “The problem is, Harold, that we are all chasing the same buck.” Bluntly put, a lot of the anti-Covington mess originates either directly or indirectly from certain Fearless Leaders who don’t appreciate even my limited competition for that same buck. I think a little research will reveal that a large part of the somewhat misnamed Movement “in-fighting” over the past 50 years between all manner of personalities and groups on the right has its roots in competition for the donation dollar. We have been afflicted for many years with so-called leaders who view this sacred and holy cause as a business, and who use gangster-like tactics to steal supporters for themselves and undermine the support of other groups and so-called leaders. This kind of thing has been standard in the Movement since Colonel Simms and the Second Empire Klan in the 1920s.

Third, a lot of these people who are doing this are simply insane. The internet has allowed too many people to get in touch with their Inner Nut, and when some of us sit down behind the computer keyboard we get a visit from Mr. Hyde. I know because I am susceptible to this myself, and I concede there have been times when I have let the badger loose to howl at the moon, if you will pardon my mixed metaphors, so I know whereof I speak.

If you will peruse some of these internet attacks on me, you’ll notice that most of them read like they were written by Beavis and Butthead or the characters on South Park, but they weren’t. Believe it or not, the overwhelming majority of this childish twaddle is written and circulated by middle-aged men in their 40s and 50s, whom you would think should by now have outgrown adolescent toilet humor and "nyaah nyaah nyaah." It always astounds me, the sheer childishness of some of this stuff, and the fact that it comes from men with gray hair in their heads. You’d think these men would be able at least to show a little bit of dignity while they were lying about me, but apparently for them the internet seems to serve as a kind of sick Fountain of Youth, or perhaps I should say Fountain of Childishness.

You have to bear in mind that most of these specific teapot tempests are decades old, lies and misrepresentation about crap going back to things I said and did and wrote in the late 1970s in some cases. I have often wondered why none of it ever seems to die down, why someone always seems to go to great effort stirring it up again every couple of years, especially whenever it looks like the Northwest idea is starting to gain momentum and we’re starting to get some people in and get some things done. Like now, for instance.

One thing I will address specifically is that I allegedly wrote this history of the White Nationalist movement that has all manner of unkind things to say about certain individuals in our past. The document referred to has been floating around the internet for something like four years now, and I believe there are also hard copies in circulation that people have run off on their printers as well. It is a roughly 30,000-word monograph or pamphlet entitled A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement.

In point of fact, no, I did not write the Brief History. At least not all of it, and not for that specific purpose. What happened is that somebody came along and plagiarized, collected, and collated a number of articles and bits and pieces from the past 50 years on Movement internal matters and melded them all together into a single report or long article. Some of that “borrowed” material is mine, yes, such as the Huey Long segment, the bulk of the section on Glenn Miller and a good bit of the material on Benny Klassen. And there I go naming names again. Oops!

But the Brief History also contains sections which were either written or paraphrased from works by Bill White, Louis Beam, the late Rick Cooper, Dr. Edward Fields, the late David McCalden, the writer known as “Maguire” and a number of other writers and commentators.

However, I will say this: whoever wrote the Brief History, they know their Movement beeswax. While to be sure, some of it is opinion and editorializing, I have been able to find only one single factual inaccuracy anywhere in the report. (They refer to "the late [Revisionist] Bradley Smith when Smith is in fact still alive.) I think that’s another thing that’s driving the Goat Dancers nuts—they can’t refute anything in the report factually, so they scream “HAC wrote it! HAC wrote it!” in order to make it all about me and to distract people from what the document actually says.

The irony of it is, the Brief History is not in fact all that pro-Covington or pro-Northwest. The author makes clear that he is not a supporter of the Northwest Migration and that he thinks I’m foolishly wasting my time.

Sometimes people ask me, “how do we know who to believe?” Look at my work, look at my life, look at the people who are saying these things, look at the world around you, and wonder why we have gotten nowhere in our efforts to resist. What can I tell you? If you’ve read my novels, everything I have to say is in there. That’s it, people, that’s me.

Now, after this podcast hits the site, there will probably be some responses to the effect that except for the Brief History document I did not answer specific charges, and that’s quite correct, I didn’t, and I have no intention of doing so and wallowing in the mud with these people. I didn’t answer them, for one thing, because when I do they simply ignore it and bring more deranged accusations. They keep moving the goal posts, because serious discussion of fact is not their true agenda. I also usually don't bother because most of their specific charges against me are simply deranged nonsense, and if I were to repeat them in order to refute them, then I would be perpetuating them.

Many of you guys listening to this still probably have no idea what on earth I’m talking about, and that’s good. You’re not missing anything, believe me. Chances are you will eventually run across this excrement on the internet on your own, and when you do just remember what I said here.

However, in order to refute the charge that I am only presenting one side of the story here, I have decided that I will give my critics and my enemies some brief time of their own on this podcast, so that you can hear their case against me in their own words, and from their own lips.

[Music break - They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha! by Napoleon the Fourteenth]

(Laugh) People, I’m sorry. So much for my comments about middle-aged men showing dignity, but that was just too much to resist. I’ve been looking for an excuse to play that one since these podcasts started and the Goat Dancers finally gave me an excuse.

But you see what I mean about the internet making us childish? It’s just so much fun to play with these machines every now and then. But at least I understand the fact when I am yielding to my inner child or whatever on here. These other idiots honestly don’t seem to realize how what they’re doing looks to other people. They have no sense of shame.

Anyway, enough of that. [Program goes on.]