Politicians, Lawyers and Military Officials Found to Be Members of Neo-Confederate Groups. In Other News, Water Is Still Wet

 One thing that has become incredibly apparent in recent years is that a certain portion of the population seems to be sincerely shocked to find out that white supremacists have decent paying jobs. Considering that we just had a white nationalist president only two seconds ago, it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that the online database for a neo-Confederate group revealed that its members included elected officials, professors, and service members.

Please, hold your shocked gasps.

According to the Guardian, an anonymous hacktivist took advantage of a security exploit in the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) website and found that of the 59,000 former and current members, 74 registered with emails associated with various branches of the armed forces, and 91 used emails associated with government agencies.

Just who are the SCV? They’re the folks who filed a lawsuit to have a Confederate statue restored in the predominantly Black city of Decatur,Ga., and flew a Confederate flag over a NASCAR race to protest their decision to ban the flag.

Their efforts to preserve Confederate iconography have become significantly harder following the extensive Black Lives Matter protests last year and the general number of white nationalist events that have left people dead.

The data also revealed there was significant overlap between members of the SCV and more violent, extremist groups such as League of the South. The LOS is a secessionist group that explicitly wants to create a white supremacist ethno-state. A significant number of LOS members marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., that left one person dead and numerous others injured, all over the removal of their glorified participation trophy.

So basically we’re dealing with a group of fragile, racist assholes all around. How else does one explain being this pressed about a cause that was lost more than a century ago?

From the Guardian:

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.

Danny W Davis, a professor and program director at Texas A&M University and training consultant to the U.S Army Reserve, was also found to be one of the members. He’s taught courses with titles like “Domestic Terrorism: The Internal Threat to America,” so the irony is DEEP.

IDavis confirmed to Guardian his membership in the group and said he joined because he had “three great grandfathers” serve in the Confederacy. I really don’t understand that logic. “My great grandparents were trash, so dammit, I’m gonna be trash too.”

Davis told the Guardian he was surprised to learn about the extremist elements in the group as he’s mainly encountered “re-enactors,” “people like me who are interested in history,” and “military veterans.” I guess he just hadn’t been paying attention to who, exactly, has been waving Confederate flags these days.