Joe Wilson’s Strange Friends

Clowngressman Joe Wilson (SC)

By Max Blumenthal/The Daily Beast—
The controversial congressman has been a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans. Max Blumenthal, author of the just-published Republican Gomorrah, asks: Did he remain so even after it became a hate group?

Since Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina bellowed at President Barack Obama, “You lie!” during the president’s nationally televised speech on health care, the fourth-term backbencher has emerged as a hero for the conservative grassroots. One of the most enthusiastic endorsements of Wilson’s histrionics came from the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a group that Wilson has belonged to according to his own biographical materials.

“Mr. Wilson, never apologize for allowing your love of truth to overrun your desire to be polite,” the SCV Tea Party declared on its website. “It is the liar who must apologize, not the one who identifies the liar!”

SCV leader Kirk Lyons harbored dream of creating a seemingly benign front group for a more sophisticated version of the Ku Klux Klan.

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal

Who are the SCV? A once-proud organization of Confederate history buffs and Civil War re-enactors that traditionally spent its money to restore battlefields and Confederate cemeteries. By 2006, however, the SCV had been substantially taken over by an organized cadre of white supremacists (read here for more background) who sought to turn the nation’s oldest Southern historical society into what the veteran white supremacy activist Kirk Lyons called “a modern, 21st century Christian war machine capable of uniting the Confederate community and leading it to ultimate victory,” had seized much of the SCV’s leadership positions, the Southern Poverty Law Center released an extensive list of SCV officials who belonged to “hate groups.”

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