Outside a Tea Party

Stranded in Columbia, South Carolina, on tax day, I went up to the state capitol to check out the local tea party. It was of moderate size, blazingly white. On the capitol steps, facing the Confederate flag on the grounds below, some anarchists sat with a prominent sign, “End the welfare-warfare state.” Otherwise, the scene was dominated by Republican politicians, hopefuls and their sign carriers, “Joe (JOBS) Wilson” and the like, raising glories to “free market capitalism” among some in the crowd who appeared to have fared quite nicely off the system, and more who looked as if they’d got the short end of the stick but had convinced themselves, at least for an afternoon, that the only thing that hindered every one of them from being job-creating small-business dynamos was the socialist tyranny of Barack Obama.

In the shade at the edge of the proceedings, I fell into conversation with a bandy, blue-eyed man who wore a cap that said “Gun Owners for Paul.” He had terrible teeth and a long white beard reminiscent of O, Brother, Where Art Thou? and said he was 65. He spoke in a high-pitched country drawl, a matter-of-fact style with a wild fringe of humor.

Mr. Stewart, as he later identified himself, exists at an angle to the tea party’s khaki-pants or pencil-skirt headliners, whose packaged vitriol and evasive, radioland-style racism have come to pass for normal. He chimed in with a number of other kibbitzers, all of them a little worn at the edges, just as I was finishing a conversation with a fellow called Tom Webb, “Rebel Poet,” who was carrying a Confederate flag and dressed in a Citadel cadet’s jacket modified to look like a rebel uniform. Webb had asked for an interview, saying he hoped we could find “common ground.” This exchange begins as Webb is about to make his exit.

JW: …I’m all for individual liberty, but I just don’t agree with you that this flag isn’t about slavery. It’s just too hard. The battle flag is a war flag, and the war, while about states’ rights and preservation of the union and all that, was ultimately about slavery.

Kibbitzer 1: This originally symbolized liberty, but since then it’s been twisted, especially by the KKK, which is a shame, and that is how it came to be a symbol of slavery.

JW: Okay, say, for the sake of argument, that the Nazi flag had started really nicely and then it ended up with Hitler.

Kibbitzer 2: Now what was the Nazi symbol?

JW: The swastika.

K2: And that means what?

JW: Well, I guess some Germans might say it’s their heritage, but—

K2: No ma’am, the swastika is a Norse symbol for good luck.

JW: Fine, yes, and you see it also in Native American art, and—

K2: And it’s been twisted.

JW: Well, has it been twisted? I mean, if Adolf Hitler made it his flag, doesn’t that sort of trump everything else?

Mr. Stewart: The media defines every social issue to suit their agenda. They don’t like the Confederate fight for independence; they change the meanin’ of the flag so that a fight for freedom becomes a fight for slavery.

JW: But freedom meant freedom to have slaves, freedom to deny a whole lot of other people freedom.

S: Under our Constitution we have rights. I hate slavery. I would have burned the first slave ship down myself, personally.

JW: Ok, right on brother, so—

S: But my ancestors fought for the Confederate flag not because they had slaves; they didn’t. They had families, they had farms, and they had a state that had a right to secede, and that did it. I do not approve of war. I blame it on the South, the hotheads that fired on federal troops on federal property. That was a declaration of war, so it’s all the fault of hotheads but not the farmers that died in that war.

JW: Absolutely, but the hotheads were the big slaveowners who—

Kibbitzer 3: Who is she?

S: I don’t know who she is, probably some—

JW: (laughing) Commie symp.

S: Some surreptitious what-is-it, they have that law against people who speak out against the war or somethin’, the Alien and Sedition Law. But you look like a good, solid girl to me!

K2: She’s my sister, and you’re my brother. That’s where we stand.

S: Well, this here is my brother. He comes from Scotland. I go by nation. I’m like the Nigroes and the Jews, I stick for my own.

JW: You’re Scots-Irish, is that right?

S: I’m a mixture. My ancestors have been here for a long time. Overall, there’s no pure race. I’m just part of a nation that happens to have a few other elements, even Hebrew, in it. Over thousands of years, you’re naturally gonna end up with genes mixed in. But, so far, I would be a typical white Southerner from South Carolina. My ancestors came from Ireland and Northern Europe. I don’t have any Nigro blood, but I do have Indian blood, I think, because most South Carolinians do. That’s my race, and I see what my race has done, in Europe, in South Carolina, in the United States and North America. They have more peace and prosperity until the government gets ’em into a war. Neighbors respect each other. They don’t rape, murder, steal to the same degree that they do in Africa and Latin America, which means it’s safe for us to invest in our homes and in our businesses. Our property is respected, unless we fall under Communist government. So the point is, we’re civilized because we come from that nation of people who had created civilization from the very beginning.

JW: Well, not the very beginning. And the Southern Europeans weren’t exactly slouches at civilization. The Romans, the Greeks?

S: Those people were originally blond, blue-eyed Aryan people, who had swastikas and all that as part of their religion, all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia, which is where they originally came from. These were the people who created civilization: the people of ancient Canaan; all the Hittites, which is the language we’re speaking right now, the Hittites’ language; the Amorites, blond, blue-eyed folks, if you read in the Bible. They established a civilization in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Sumeria—all Aryan people, not Semitic. All these were different nations before they were driven out of the Fertile Crescent, and they ended up in Europe about 4,000 years ago, when the mixed-race Hyksos came in and destroyed ancient Canaan.

So you had all these Aryans come into Northern Europe. They found new farms, and they had no racial mixture; therefore, civilization could continue. Now, in Southern Europe there was the Cro Magnon race. The Cro Magnons lived there before the Ice Age ended. They were heat adapted. They were not tall and thin; they were big, bulky guys, and they were not farmers. They had not been civilized. And when you have a population that hadn’t been bred to respect each other, they are just natural savages, like dogs were before they were bred from wolves.

When the Romans and the Greeks came in, they created great civilizations. The Romans had a good cheap work force around the world; they had great ideas to do great things, but they needed that work force. Then they made the mistake of marrying with these guys, and then they end up mulattoes, and you see how mulattoes live: go down to the jail here, and look who’s there. And those are Nigro juries, mulatto juries, that are lockin’ those people up.

So the Romans fell apart because when you mix a domesticated animal with a savage animal, like a wolf with a dog, you get a animal that is less civilized, less domesticated, more likely to behave like a savage, according to the survival instincts that god put in every creature.

What’s made our nation great is our security, but our security is based on the loss of our survival instincts.

JW: How have we—or you (I’m not sure whether we’re talking about Americans or white Southerners from Northern Europe)—lost our survival instincts?

S: They were bred out of us like you bred the survival instincts of a wolf out of a dog. A dog is eager to please, behaves just like white people, very compassionate, want to help Haitians, want to bring all the savages in the world here to have a better life. And when they get here what do they do? They devour us. They move into our neighborhoods, they rape, commit murder. White people move out. It’s called white flight.

Now, understand, every race in the world is racist, and they know who the aliens are. That’s the law of nature. That’s the survival instincts. Pass your genes on, survival of the fittest: that’s all a savage knows.

That’s been bred out of us. White people aren’t even havin’ kids anymore. And when we’re gone it’s just gonna be another copy of Africa or Latin America, where these people have no compassion, and live in poverty and crime, who will never have science or technology, who will never have a space shuttle. That’s what we, in our compassion, are doin’ to our civilization: we’re destroyin’ it.

We’re destroyin’ it because we don’t understand racism. There’ll always be Nigroes in Africa. There’ll always be Mongoloids in Asia. And I don’t blame the Mongoloids. Look, they got space shuttles too. If the white race dies out that’s my only hope for civilization. But Europeans—there won’t be any white people left within a generation or two. We still have a few women who want to be mothers. They still have a slight maternal instinct, but they aren’t havin’ enough kids! Like 1.3 per generation. In Kenya, in Zimbabwe, they’re havin’ 9 per generation. And people like you, compassionate liberals, are goin’ out there, sayin’, Let’s give em all our money; we don’t need kids, we don’t need money!

I can tell you’re a liberal, but you’re actually a Republican I see there [from the elephant charm on my necklace]—

JW: Oh, no, I’m not a Republican. I just like elephants. They’re beautiful and they paint. But are you a Republican or more a libertarian, because I see your Ron Paul hat?

S: I love elephants too. And if you love elephants you gotta hate compassionate missionaries who go down to Africa and try to make those people like us, because the more numerous they become the less elephants there are gonna be. Cause what they do is they get hungry, and we give ’em all the weapons and technology they need, and they’ll go out there and kill every last livin’ thing, and we’ll end up with nothin’ but Nigroes that are starvin’ that have to come here, and we’ll move over and let ’em have our land.

Now, Ron Paul: I voted for him in the primaries because he stood for peace, which is what Americans wanted and why they voted for Obama. They did not want to redistribute the wealth. All they wanted was No War!

JW: So you’re against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

S: All right, now let me tell you somethin’ that’ll really blow the minds of whoever listens to this. We do not live in a democracy, even a representative democracy called a republic. We live in a mediacracy.

JW: Meaning M-E-D-I-A?

S: Right. Most people vote according to how they are influenced by the media. Ever since back in the fifties I could read the newspapers, I didn’t care who won the elections, I was not political, I never voted for thirty or forty years, but I could tell who was gonna win the elections. All I had to do was open the newspaper, The New York Times, and I’d say Well, look, they favor Johnson more than they do Goldwater; Johnson’s gotta win. I didn’t know why, but ever since then I have been thinkin’ about it. Finally I figured it out.

The people that own the media determine who’s gonna get elected because most of the idiots out here are just gonna turn on that TV; they don’t have the sense to turn on the Internet and find a different viewpoint. And the people that own the seven or eight big media conglomerates, they start at the primary level, so by the time you get to the national level—like Obama against McCain—they’ve already been vetted on both sides. It doesn’t matter which one wins, so in the end if we had voted for McCain, we’d have gotten the same war that we got from Obama.

I called up a radio station before Obama got elected, I said, “He’s not gonna end the war. I know who owns the media, and I know why they put him in there, and they want us in Iraq.”

If you look up Who Rules America at the natvan website, www dot natvan, forward slash, ‘who’ hyphen, ‘rules’ hyphen, ‘America’, you’ll see a web page that shows you the pictures and names those people who own the media. All of ’em but Murdoch are Jews.

Now, that’s the big shocker cause most Christians worship a Jew; they’re Zionists, and they love the war. So, then, you don’t trust this website cause it’s a pro-white website; you know, they’re evil people. So you take the names, and you look ’em up on Wikipedia. And you read that, yeah, they’re Jews. So almost all the media is owned by Jews. Now, if you know who owns somethin’, who’s writin’ somethin’, who they are, you can read b’tween the lines what they’re tryin’ to get across.

Yeah, I’m against the Iraq war cause my flesh and blood that fought every war this country ever had is dyin’ over there, fightin’ for Israel. Not for me. Not for civilization, but so Israel can do what they’re doin’ to the Palestinians: a dirty war that you never hear about what goes on, the torture, the genocide, because the Jews own the media.

JW: But the Christians, meaning those organized in churches that produce and elect politicians and are the base of the Republican Party, are probably the most rabid supporters of Israel. I met a big Christian in Kokomo who told me that if Obama ever did a single thing contrary to the will of Israel he’d know that the president is the Antichrist.

S: Exactly. The first Christians were Jews; they were not Aryans, they were Cro Magnons, different race, though white people don’t understand that. They converted all these civilized, domesticated animals called Celts, Germans, and all that. I was talkin’ earlier about the swastika that’s on their tombstones; it was a holy religious symbol. If you squint in the light you see a cross, and our ancient people when they wrote on stone they just had to be simple. A cross on stone is easy to make, or a circle. That was a symbol of god.

But then the Christians came in, they took the cross and they put a dead Jew on it, and said, He’s god. Well, they did the same thing with our Winter Solstice; they took that and named it Christmas. They converted every holiday we had as pagans, which means “peasants,” into a Jewish holiday called Christian. And ever since our kings converted, they took away our religion and gave us a Jew-worship religion, and they have been brainwashin’ us ever since.

I have ancestors that’ve been rabid Christians, crazy Christians, cause there’s no other kind, cause they been lied to, and you can’t be lied to all your life without bein’ insane. It’s just garbage in, garbage out.

So we are a lied-to people. We are an insane people that believe in all kind of things that aren’t supported by evidence, by facts, by anything, because the Jews had the wisdom—you know, Paul nearly fell off his horse when he was ridin’ around tryin’ to kill the Christian Jews; he said, My god, they will send money to Jerusalem if we can just convert these people! Big stroke of genius, and they’ve been doin’ it ever since!

Yeah, I understand why we’re fightin’ in Iraq, cause Israel wants to bomb all those people back to the Stone Age. The reason terrorists are over here is because they are being colonized, the same way that the American Indians fought my ancestors cause they were takin’ their land. It makes sense. But the Jewish media talks about terrorism, says it ain’t got nothin’ to do with Palestine. It’s cause they hate our freedom, all kind of lies, and the American people: Yuh, yuh, the Jews are right. Yuh, gotta protect Israel, preacher said so, God’s chosen people, hallelujah Israel. I wanna go to heaven, and when the Messiah comes along, I gonna be his man.

JW: So are you a pagan?

S: I worship god, the same god that my ancestors worshiped for 40,-50,000 years, and my god is life. Every child comes into the world worshipin’ life. They love life; they hate to see anything, a bird or anything, suffer. That’s my religion. It’s not some hocus pocus, some Jew that died 3,000 years ago; it’s life, that’s your heart, that bleeds and that pumps blood throughout your body. It’s the flesh and blood; that’s my god. It’s the grass; it’s everything that lives. I don’t know whether that’s Christianity or not, because they say they worship life, but I don’t see it. And to me they’re worshipin’ an idol.

Okay, go back to the slavery issue. My ancestors were Christianized, and they’d been taught that the Bible says slavery’s okay. The Israelites had slaves. God says you gonna have slaves. So you got brainwashed civilized people tellin’ em to enslave these people, it’s god’s will, this is the Promised Land, kill all the savages if they don’t bow down and worship Christ. You know, kill ’em, like the Spanish conquistadors did. So my ancestors were just as brainwashed as people today. They enslaved people, they killed the Indians, you know, but that’s not in their heart; they’re civilized.

JW: If they did all that, how can you say they were civilized?

S: Well, see, there are two kinds of civilized people. There are two versions of you. There is the version that believes lies, that is insane. They go to church, they’re taught lies, they’re taught that they’re the most evil people on earth until they worship a Jew as lord and savior. So these people go insane; they try to behave like god told ’em to do, and they end up screwed up, like our ancestors and like people today worshipin’ a Jew on a cross, a corpse.

JW: And you don’t worship death.

S: You got it! Can I hug you, honey! Oh, lordy, I ain’t held a woman in too long.

JW: Now, can I ask you where you’re from originally, what you do?

S: My ancestors have been in South Carolina since before the American Revolution. Some of them were in Virginia back in the 1600s, the first settlers. As I say, I think I got some Indian blood—

JW: How about we start with your father—

S: My name is Stewart. I am a Stewart, and my ancestors—

JW: What’s your first name?

S: I ain’t gonna tell you that. But my genes say I am kin to the same family as the Stewart kings of Scotland. On the side of the Martins, that’s my mother’s side, they came from the Baron de Martins, who lived in one thousand-twenty-somethin’ and invaded England with William the Conqueror. So my ancestors were like the guys that conquered England, the Vikings that conquered Normandy, and then they moved in and conquered the Britons. Most of them that I have traced so far through the DNA have all been Viking-Normans or Scottish, you know the two haplogroups mixed. You have Haplogroup I and Haplogroup R1B1B2.

JW: What’s a haplogroup?

S: A haplogroup, when you have your DNA tested they can look at your genes and tell you from which nation you come. Like the Nigroes belong to a certain haplogroup The Jews belong to a certain haplogroup. Of course there’s been a lot of distribution and confusion. But you can look at maps that show the distribution of those haplogroups. My ancestors were Aryan people: Celts, Germans, no Slavs, all were Northwestern European—

JW: I’m a Slav.

S: Okay, but you look very Germanic, too, you’re probably a mixture.

JW: I’m Polish.

S: Okay, but a lot of Germans went into Poland.

JW: Oh, did they ever.

S: Well, you’ve probably got German blood. But all those races are Aryans.

JW: Hitler didn’t think the Poles were Aryans.

S: I can’t apologize for Hitler. I’ve only heard what the Jews have to say about Hitler, and I’d rather see on both sides of the coin before I judge it. I think he probably chose Poland for propaganda purposes as a justification for German expansion. Poles were next door, and he had to kind of put ’em down, and possibly because the Poles for some reason were not as what he considered civilized, in the sense of technologically advanced and whatever. The Germans were great, man, they developed everything you need to build a space shuttle and all of that.

JW: That’s the ultimate thing, right? If you have a space shuttle, or, with the Germans, rockets, you’re right up there, civilized, no matter—

S: You’re civilized if you have compassion for people. And you cannot have great technology and science unless you have compassionate scientists who devote their lives to serving humanity. Excuse me for spitting.

JW: No, no, I was just scratching my eye. But—

S: Well, when people talk they do spread germs, but anyway, yeah, the Germans were great people. Slavs, that’s R1-something, it’s just a little, slightly different, but that’s the same race of people. They all came from ancient Canaan. You see, in ancient Canaan you had about twelve tribes of Canaanites. And you have twelve tribes of Indo-Europeans. You have the Slavic, the Germanic; you have the Tolkerian, which is the people that settled out in China; you have Armenian, Kurdish, all different branches of our language, which is the Indo-European language, or Indo-Hittite. Those were the Hittites; they belonged to the Hamidic race, which is the ones that built ancient Egypt. And the Berbers. Did you know that 40 percent of the Berber population has blue eyes? Maybe not all Berbers, but that’s despite being conquered by Semitic Arabs back about a thousand years ago.

JW: Why did you learn all this?

S: Because I have the instinct, I was born—

JW: Where?

S: I was born here in South Carolina. Out in a rural place—

JW: Called?

S: I hate to give all my stuff away, because they could trace me down. I don’t want to become a hated symbol of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. But I was born in the same county where my ancestors settled in 1767, north of Columbia.

JW: Was your father a farmer?

S: Yeah, all my people been farmers ever since they came from Scotland. I grew most everything I ate, or hunted, up until a few years ago. Gettin’ kind of old for a hard work-out. Out there diggin’ in the soil by yourself is just hard. I do need a wife, someone to take care of an old man.

JW: Are you looking for a wife?

S: Oh, I’d love to have a wife.

JW: Is it hard to find a wife?

S: Well, it was hard when I was young cause I was too good for the rest of them. Now I’m too—none of ’em want me. I never was fit to be married anyway.

JW: Well, you’re sort of ornery. You got a smile on your face, though.

S: The people of my family, the Stewarts, are all paranoid. It’s part of, I guess, survival as a king in Scotland, cause most of ’em were blown up or somethin’. I’m the only one in my family who’s been willing to give out his DNA.

JW: So you actually had your DNA tested. What do you do, give a drop of blood?

S: Family Tree DNA. They give you a little brush, and you brush the inside of your cheek, stick it in a little vial, send it off and then two or three months later you get your DNA report.

JW: It’s kind of like sending your gold away to those melt-down houses, put it in a little envelope, drop it in the mail, into the blue. Did you ever think that maybe it got confused with someone else’s?

S: Well, no. When you have an old family that’s had a name for thousands of years, chances are you’re goin’ to find matches on the internet, whereas if you’ve got a family that took their name only 400 years ago, if that Polish name that you are, which I can’t pronounce—it’s got ‘jew’ in it, that’s all I know, see I pick up on certain things—

JW: You saw that right away, didn’t you?

S: If your patrilineal ancestor had taken your name a thousand years ago there’d probably be enough people that you’d have plenty of matches out there that’s already been tested. There are people like me; I got a lot of cousins with my name. You probably have as many cousins as I have, but since your family name isn’t as old, that’s goin’ to make a big difference. Now, you might find a match, or you might be the first one of your name to put it there for testing, and ten years later somebody with your name will come along and test his DNA and say, Hey, I belong to these people, and I got my genealogy back a thousand years, I’ll tell her. So that’ll be cheap. For $160 or somethin’ you’ll get your DNA analyzed and if you match somebody who’s got his genealogy, with that few hundred dollars, instead of goin’ to libraries and spending your life tryin’ to track down one more generation, you’ll have your genealogy back a thousand years, and it’ll be the most pure, verifiable genealogy in the world, because your genealogy doesn’t lie.

Everybody else can get it wrong—

JW: There might be secrets.

S: Right, there might have been a bastard in the family, and no one wanted to say. But the DNA does not lie.

JW: So what did you think of the rally today?

S: I didn’t listen, because I know that all those words aren’t gonna do a bit of good, cause everybody out here, whatever they do, their vote will be determined by who owns the media. And not one of those speakers, I bet my life, mentioned the word “Jew” or the media and why we have the government we have. And you can’t change anything until you get to the core of the problem.

JW: And on the health care bill, because it was important to this rally, do you think it was the beginning of socialism in America?

S: No, it’s not the beginning. Things started going downhill in this country when they passed the Voters Rights Act of 1965. Until that time, I think 92 percent of the people in this country were white; that includes the Jews and probably a lot of Hispanics. And then once they passed that immigration act in the 1960s, then the white race starts dyin’ out, you stop havin’ compassionate people.

JW: You think it’s wrong for black people to be citizens with full rights in this country, and vote and have basic liberties?

S: Well, let me use an expletive. Damn it! You know, the world’s a big place. There’s nothin’ immoral about white people wantin’ to live amongst white people, and Nigroes livin’ amongst Nigroes, and Jews livin’ amongst Jews. There’s nothin’ wrong with that, and there’s nothin’ wrong with us havin’ an all-white homeland.

JW: Wasn’t that dream busted by the first European ship that landed here, and how was it that black people came here in the first place?

S: They were enslaved by Christians, the same guys that exterminated my Indian ancestors! You know, I am a compassionate guy, just like you. I love Nigroes, I love Jews, I love everybody. But I do love civilization, and I realize that when America becomes like Mexico or Zimbabwe, and whites become a minority, it’s gonna be throat-slittin’ time.

JW: And did Obama’s election have anything to do with your thinking here?

S: Obama, I don’t blame him; I don’t give him any credit. He wanted to end the war; that was one of his campaign promises, but the Jews ain’t gonna let him do that. I predicted that.

I understand the truth. You can be just as smart as me, you won’t have to watch the media, you won’t have to read anything, once you know who’s writin’  all that stuff, you gonna know their spin on everything that happens in this world, because if it helps the Jews they’re for it. Doesn’t matter whether it’s the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, communism, capitalism. They’re racists! Just like Nigroes are racist, that’s why they all voted for Obama. I vote for white people cause I’m a racist. I don’t see anything wrong with racism; it’s a healthy survival instinct. I love my race. You’re my flesh and blood, let’s make some kids!

JW: What if I said I’ve been in love with a black man.

S: Well, you’d’a been destroyin’ our race. You may think this has nothin’ to do with anybody but you. Now, we’re all mixed a little bit, but the more you mix our race with others, in 100 years or 200 years, that Nigro blood you’ve got—and the man you’d been with, he ain’t black, he’s a mulatto, probably 80 percent black and 20 percent white, so he’s not black, he’s like Obama. And you may think he’s white because he’s got the same honesty and the same compassion as a white man, but he’s mixed. You don’t know what’s comin’ from where. Because you cannot mix a wolf with a domesticated dog and end up with a civilized animal.

JW: So only white people have compassion.

S: White people are the only race on earth that’s been bred to the extent it’s been bred to remove those survival instincts from it, and to, to—

JW: To be domesticated dogs.

S: To be so compassionate that they have no racism left. I think everybody should be proud of themselves: Nigro or part Nigro or whatever; be proud of yourself. But I’m sayin’ let’s keep civilization alive by keepin’ the race that created civilization as pure as possible, the same way you guard the purity of any breed of animal or plant. That’s what benefits civilization, the fact that we have all kinds of diversity of animals, of plants, and the only way you can preserve diversity is not mix the seed. I would rather that the Nigro race be preserved as pure as possible too. I believe all races should be preserved.

JW: But there is no pure nature, you said it yourself. Look at all the plants around here; none of those hostas there, those with the dark green and the bright green leaves, are pure breeds; that’s why they’re pretty like that.

S: See, you’re a woman. And I don’t blame a woman for wantin’ to marry a savage race, because they have survival instincts. Now, if I were a woman my strategy would be, Hell, these white people are dyin’ out; look at ’em, they’re like cattle. I want to get a male that’s a savage. I want to get a male that steals, that rapes, that murders, that passes his genes on at all costs because I want to pass my genes on forever, and I can see these white people ain’t gonna do that.

When I was a kid I didn’t know much of what I know today, and I actually had a beautiful Nigro girlfriend from—I met her in France, I think she was from Haiti or somewhere. Just a beautiful girl. She was white except for her skin color, but I almost vomited when I kissed her, so I figured I must be a racist. I think she realized it, because she didn’t want to have very much to do with me too long, either.

JW: What were you doing in France?

S: Oh, I traveled all over the world when I was young.

JW: How? Steamships?

S: Every way you can imagine. I was just a guy who didn’t care about makin’ a lot of money. You could live for almost nothing, travel for almost nothin’ back then. I worked on a ship once. I traveled from Egypt, Suez, I think. And I traveled all around the Horn of Africa, down to Mozambique. I went to Mombasa, Kenya; I went where those pirates are takin’ all the ships nowadays. I’m a very compassionate guy. I care about everybody, but I care about civilization too, and I don’t want to see the wolves destroy the sheep. That’s why I stand up for civilization, and for white people.

JW: Well, I see my battery’s about to run out.

S: Oh, I’m sorry I hugged you now. You done turn filthy on me.

JW: That’s a sad thing, Mr. Stewart.

S: I’m racist!

JW: You said you loved everybody, and loved everything about life, how can you burden yourself like that?

S: I do love ’em. It’s just certain things I don’t like.

*

Stewart offered a few more denunciations of religion as the root of slavery and the decline of the white race. Before I parted his company he told me I was okay anyway, a Pole, not as bad as some. “Just enjoy yourself,” he said. Then he gave me back the business card I’d given him. “You can take this back. There’s a word in there; I just can’t have that.” He paused a beat. “They’re probably expensive, these things, anyway; it’s just wasted on me.”

© JoAnn Wypijewski. An excerpt of this originally appeared in the CounterPunch newsletter.

JoAnn Wypijewski, a former senior editor of The Nation, is based in New York City. She has written for that magazine, as well as for Harper’s, CounterPunch, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian of London, and other publications. She is one of the founders and president of Kopkind, a summer project for radical journalists and organizers based in Guilford, Vermont, and dedicated to the memory of Andrew Kopkind.