Revealed: neoConfederate group includes military officers and politicians
Leaked membership data from the neo-Confederate Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) organization has revealed that the organization’s members include serving military officers, elected officials, public employees, and a national security expert whose CV boasts of “Department of Defense Secret Security Clearance”.
But alongside these members are others who participated in and committed acts of violence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and others who hold overlapping membership in violent neo-Confederate groups such as the League of the South (LOS).
The group, which is organized as a federation of state chapters, has recently made news for increasingly aggressive campaigns against the removal of Confederate monuments. This has included legal action against states and cities, the flying of giant Confederate battle flags near public roadways, and Confederate flag flyovers at Nascar races.
Last Monday, the Georgia division of SCV commenced legal action against the majority-black city of Decatur with the aim of restoring a Confederate memorial obelisk which was removed in
June 2020, and later replaced with a statue of the late congressman and civil rights activist, John Lewis.
Last year, in a widely criticized move, the University of North Carolina’s board of governors proposed creating a $2.5m charitable trust which would pay the state’s SCV organization to maintain a Confederate “Silent Sam” statue which had been removed from the campus.
That deal fell apart in recent weeks. But critics – including former members – alleged that the SCV commander for the state, Kevin Stone, associated with extremists and other “scary” individuals who had been recruited to the group.
Stone, who who also co-founded the SCV Mechanized Cavalry, a motorcycle club associated with the SCV, reportedly led a takeover of the branch which pushed out anti-racist members.
College of Charleston historian, Adam Domby, whose book, The False Cause, details the history of the neo-Confederate movement, said in a telephone conversation that “throughout its history, the SCV has been linked with white supremacist groups, and historically it has avowedly supported white supremacist groups”.
Jalane Schmidt, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has been active in the campaign to remove the statues that the Unite the Right rally sought to defend in 2017, and is working on a book about the history of neo-Confederate groups including SCV in Virginia.
In a telephone conversation, she pointed to an 1 April ruling of the Virginia supreme court which reversed lower court rulings in favor of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and The Monument Fund in their quest to ensure Charlottesville’s monuments stayed in place.
“According to the Supreme Court, the SCV and the Monument Fund were wrong all along, and we could have taken down our statues in 2017”, she said.
Instead, the statues were still standing when Unite the Right was organized. As a result of the rally, Schmidt added, “people are dead”.
SCV’s attempts to preserve Confederate monuments have become more difficult in the face of intensifying demands for their removal since the rise of the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement, and the neo-Confederate-inspired mass murder of Black churchgoers by Dylann Roof in South Carolina in 2015.
SCV last year rededicated removed statues of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford at its National Confederate Museum in Columbia, Tennessee.
The data
The national membership data was provided to the Guardian by a self-described hacktivist whose identity has been withheld for their safety.
The data reveals the names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses of almost 59,000 past and present members of the organization, including 91 who used addresses associated with government agencies for their contact email, and 74 who used addresses associated with various branches of the armed forces.
They noticed that the organization’s website had been misconfigured, allowing access to membership rolls, recruiting data, and other information about the internal workings of the group. The website has had the security issue for a number of years, according to the hacktivist.
The membership data shows members’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, whether they are active or not, and their email addresses.
The Guardian identified members who were listed as active, and whose contact information included addresses associated with government agencies, the armed forces, educational institutions, and non-government organizations.
There was some previous reporting on an earlier version of the membership database, made public by Atlanta Antifa, which noted the presence of Georgia state legislators in the group’s data.
But the Guardian has found additional legislators, and active members who are in positions of influence and responsibility that stretch far beyond the walls of state legislatures.
High-profile members
One member listed as active in the data is Scott Wyatt, who represents the 97th district in Virginia’s house of delegates, which comprises rural counties north of Richmond, which served as the Confederate capital for much of the civil war.
Duane AJ Probst, who was elected coroner of Osage county, Missouri in 2020, after reaching the rank of Lt Col in the US Army National Guard, is also listed as an active member of the group.
In a telephone conversation, Probst confirmed his membership, saying that he had joined in the last “four or five years” after he discovered a relative had fought for the Confederacy, had attended meetings until around two years ago when he became too busy for regular attendance.
He said that in his experience of the local group in Missouri, it was “a friendly organization that doesn’t advocate white supremacy”, and the main activities he had been involved in were dinners and lectures.
On the question of statues, Probst said that “the men who forged the country were flawed”, and that “I don’t know that taking down a statue is going to ameliorate any issues”, adding that he was not opposed to adding plaques to monuments since “perspectives change as time goes on”.
On the presence of extremists in SCV, Probst said he had never encountered any, but that “it doesn’t surprise me. There are militant members of every organization.”
Probst, who ran for coroner as a Republican, added that: “I am a member of a political faction in this country. There are members of that faction who are loony in my opinion. That doesn’t mean I have to walk away from the organization. Instead I fight for the values I think it represents.”
Another member of the group who is listed as active, Dr Danny W Davis, is both a professor and program director at Texas A & M University and a training consultant to the US army reserve. His membership data includes a US army contact email address
Davis states on his publicly available CV that he has “Department of Defense Secret Security Clearance”, that he is a “Training Consultant to US Army Reserve, San Antonio, Texas”, and the “Director, Certificate in Homeland Security Program”.
Davis’s CV includes details of courses Davis has taught and developed, including “Domestic Terrorism: The Internal Threat to America”, which is described as “a comprehensive survey of domestic terrorism”. The CV also points to Davis’s 20 year military career which ended in 1997 with Davis a Lt Col.
In a telephone conversation, Davis confirmed his active membership in the group, saying that he had joined because he had “three great grandfathers” who had fought for the Confederate army.
On the question of statues he said that “when we start taking down monuments, I think that’s wrong”, and that to him they “represent men who were fighting for something they believed in”.
Davis said that those beliefs “included slavery, but not only slavery”, adding, “do I think the right outcome came out of the civil war? Yes.”
Davis said “I am not a white supremacist” and said he was surprised to hear about the overlap between the group and extremist organizations, saying that members were mostly “reenactors”, “people like me who are interested in history”, and “military veterans”.
He said that he includes rightwing extremists in his graduate courses on domestic terrorism, and that he is currently revising a course to include the 6 January assault on the US Capitol, as well as the activities of “Antifa and BLM in the Northwest”.
A number of members listed as active members use email addresses associated with The Citadel, a public military academy located in Charleston, South Carolina.
A total of 13 members using Citadel or Citadel alumni email addresses appear in the membership database, with six listed as active members.
One of those active members is retired National Guard Brig Gen Roger Clifton Poole, who has twice served as interim president of the college, and remains a professor in The Citadel’s School of Business.
Wyatt and Poole did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Radical neo-Confederates
Alongside these SCV members, however, are others who have overlapping membership in more explicitly racist or violent groups, or who have been involved in political violence at events like Unite the Right, the event where Heather Heyer was murdered by white supremacist James Fields in 2017.
They include North Carolina lawyer, Harold Crews, who is listed as an active member of the SCV. Crews is also a member of the League of the South, and marched with the group at Unite the Right in 2017.
Crews was involved in scuffles with counter-protesters on the day. Later, backed by a disinformation campaign pushed by white nationalist blogger, Brad Griffin, who was then LOS’s public relations officer, Crews persuaded a judge to issue a warrant for the arrest of DeAndre Harris, who Crews and who was badly beaten in a parking garage by six Unite the Right attendees.
While the public positions of SCV emphasize the preservation of Confederate “heritage”, LOS is an openly secessionist group which seeks to separate the states which joined the confederacy as a new white supremacist state. Crews served as the North Carolina chair of LOS, and hosted a podcast called Southern Nationalist Radio, where his guests included LOS founder, Michael Hill.
Other active members who attended Unite the Right include Virginian, George Randall, and North Carolina based James Shillinglaw. On the day of the rally, Shillinglaw was captured on video beating a counter-protester with a flagpole.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Randall and Shillinglaw are also LOS members.
Also on the membership rolls, but listed as currently inactive, is long time Georgia-based far-right activist Chester Doles. Doles, a former Klansman and member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance who marched at Unite The Right with the Hammerskins white power gang, was pictured in 2013 wearing the insignia of the SCV Motorized Cavalry, a motorcycle club made up of members of SCV.
Doles was apparently a member of the group long after he was imprisoned first in Maryland in 1993 for beating a black man, and later for weapons charges in Georgia.
Crews, Doles, Randall, and Shillinglaw did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
New South Wales is now facing an outbreak of the Delta variant.
We don’t know much about the Kappa variant, but it appears to be at least as transmissible as the Alpha variant that emerged in the United Kingdom, and probably has a small transmission advantage over it. In contrast, the Delta variant appears to be at least 40% more contagious than the Alpha variant, and at least 80% more likely to put people in hospital.
In simple terms, this means the average person infected with the Delta variant is likely to transmit it to about six other people. That compares with about four for the Alpha variant, and roughly 2.5 for the original strain of the virus. It’s important to remember these figures are averages. A key feature of Covid-19 is super-spreading. Most people infected with the virus don’t seem to pass it on.
Unfortunately, the remainder can infect anywhere from a single person to dozens of people.
It’s this dramatic increase in contagiousness that makes the Delta variant so dangerous. In just a couple of months, the Delta variant has become dominant in England and now accounts for 99% of new cases. In the US, the proportion of Delta cases has doubled every fortnight, reaching 20% this past week.
In Europe, it’s forecast that 90% of new infections will be Delta cases by the end of August. Even Israel, which some thought might have reached herd immunity after vaccinating 80% of adults, is facing a new outbreak of the Delta variant. The lessons are clear. High rates of vaccination in adults aren’t sufficient to contain the Delta variant.
We’ll likely need to vaccinate more than 80% of the entire population – including children and adolescents – before we’re safe from outbreaks. At the moment, only about 5% of Australia’s population is fully vaccinated.
Fortunately, vaccines continue to work against the Delta variant. Preliminary data from the UK suggest the Pfizer vaccine is 88% effective against symptomatic infection. The AstraZeneca vaccine offers 60% protection against symptoms.
However, both of these vaccines appear to offer more than 90% protection against hospitalisation, although the second dose is crucial for maximum protection.
We all need the protection that vaccination brings, because new variants – such as Delta – have changed who’s at risk. A person in their 20s or 30s who gets infected with a variant has a similar chance of ending up in hospital as someone in their 40s or 50s who got infected with the original strain.
We also know that about one in seven people who get infected will develop long Covid. The UK’s Office for National Statistics estimates that more than one million people are now living with the condition, and the National Health Service has had to set up 15 new clinics to treat long Covid in children.
These are outcomes we want to avoid in Australia, and we can – but only if we act decisively. We should require masks in public places at the first sign of an outbreak. It’s now compulsory to wear a face mask in Greater Sydney and surrounding regions, but this measure was introduced relatively late. Last week the NSW government recommended their use, but stopped short of mandating them. Unfortunately, we know that voluntary mask policies lead to insufficient compliance, and this puts the whole community at risk. We need to take rapid action to prevent the virus from spreading in the community. This is the best way to avoid a lockdown.
However, when mystery cases are detected in the community, short “circuit-breaker” lockdowns must be seriously considered. This gives contact tracers a much-needed chance to get ahead of the virus. The Delta variant spreads much quicker than previous strains, so we need to act faster than we have in the past. A little more than one week after the first case was detected, inner Sydney went into lockdown, with Greater Sydney following a day later. But experts, including the Australian Medical Association, had called for a tougher and more rapid response. There’s no margin for error with the Delta variant, and it’s better to risk overreacting than do too little.
Lockdowns deliver the best results when they are applied early, and when they are very stringent. Going “hard and fast” has the best chance of stamping out the virus quickly, and leads to a quicker economic recovery. Victoria learned the hard way that it takes a long time to get back to normal if the virus has built up momentum. We shouldn’t risk the chance of needing prolonged lockdowns by not doing enough in the early stages of an outbreak.
Although some may feel these measures are heavy-handed, Australia’s pandemic response has actually delivered better outcomes for health, the economy, and civil liberties than countries that have tolerated some transmission.
We also need to address the elephant in the room that’s led to the latest outbreaks.
Unless we take steps to prevent airborne transmission, we’re going to struggle to contain the Delta variant. The virus that causes Covid-19 is frequently spread by the airborne route. This means that it moves through the air like cigarette smoke, and can linger in an enclosed space after an infectious person has left. That’s why ventilation is key to reducing the risk of transmission.
To protect ourselves, we need to increase the amount of fresh air in indoor spaces and also equip our healthcare workers and quarantine staff with P2/N95 masks. Loose-fitting surgical masks won’t fully protect them from the Delta variant, and that places the rest of the community at risk too.
At least one in every 191 cases in hotel quarantine leads to infections in the community, which is an unacceptable level of risk given the consequences. But we could almost certainly prevent the majority of outbreaks if we followed recommendations recently published in the Medical Journal of Australia. We also need to step up precautions in our schools, which have been a common site of Delta outbreaks in the UK.
Australians should be proud of the way we’ve handled the pandemic so far. We’ve largely avoided the devastating surges that have battered nations overseas, and even Melbourne’s second wave was an important learning experience.
It showed how quickly the situation can deteriorate if we don’t act swiftly, but it also showed we can eliminate the virus if we try. The emergence of the Delta variant has made this task more difficult.
However, if we adjust our strategy to take airborne transmission into account, and plug the gaps in our quarantine system, that will buy us the time we need to vaccinate Australia, which is our ultimate ticket out of the pandemic.
• Zoë Hyde is an epidemiologist based at the University of Western Australia
We’ll likely need to vaccinate more than 80% of the entire population – including children