James W. von Brunn: From Bigot To Birther

Of course, the first thing certain conservatives asked after the shooting at the Holocaust Museum was whether the shooter was Muslim.  The white supremacists at Stormfront hoped it was a Muslim.  But James W. von Brunn is the white founder of a website (now offline, it appears) called Holy Western Empire.

Von Brunn is being described as a member of the high IQ society Mensa who served time for attempting a citizens arrest (also called a kidnapping) of Federal Reserve Board members in 1981.  He was arrested at the Federal Reserve on December 7 of that year with a revolver, a hunting knife, and a sawed-off shotgun in his possession.  He wanted to take his prey hostage to protest high interest rates.

“I intended to bind their hands, and persuade them to appear on Television,” von Brunn wrote on his site, www.holywesternempire.org. “There, on camera, I intended to read to the American public my indictment of these treasonous liars. If I survived I expected to be arrested, then stand trial before a jury of my peers.”

He served 6 1/2 years of an 11 year sentence and referred to himself as a “political prisoner.”

According to the autobiography on his Web site, von Brunn served on a PT boat during the Second World War and was based on Corsica, an island off the southeast coast of France. He wrote of recovering a Nazi flag from an enemy boat and keeping it until it was “destroyed” after his “house was torched in 1977.”

In 2002, von Brunn published on his Web site a book that detailed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, with chapters such as “the Holocaust Hoax” and “the Negro.” The book was mostly anti-Semitic but also attacked all non-white ethnicities.

“We are witnessing today on the world stage a tragedy of enormous proportions: the calculated destruction of the White Race,” he wrote.

He threatened to take action against minority races, writing “we will offer a plan to remove the cancer from our cultural organism.”

Von Brunn also decried “the browning of America” and wrote of a Jewish conspiracy “to destroy the White gene-pool.”  He posted to various right-wing websites, including Free Republic, where this cached thread (the original was taken down) contains anti-Obama rants. As such, he was also part of the birther movement claiming there is no valid birth certificate for President Obama. The sad part about this is that we have elected officials trying to give this craziness credibility.  Congressman Bill Posey of Florida introduced a bill that would require presidential candidates to file copies of birth certificates, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia is a co-sponsor.  Interesting company they keep.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.