radical extremism underlying domestic terrorism in the u.s.

splc |  In 2013, Josh Doggrell took the stage at the national conference for the neo-Confederate League of the South(LOS). In a non-descript suit-and-tie, he spoke about gun rights, county supremacy, the state of law enforcement in Alabama and his loyalty to the League.

“It’s wonderful to be around sanity,” the founder and chairman of the League’s John C. Calhoun chapter in a video of the event posted to YouTube.

It was a common speech for a League conference. But Doggrell wasn’t quite a common southern nationalist. He was a police officer, a lieutenant in the Anniston Police Department, and he wasn’t the only one. A second officer from his department, Lieutenant Wayne Brown, joined Doggrell at the convention, and they had come with good news –– good news for any self-respecting southern nationalist at least.

“The vast majority of men in uniform are aware that they’re southerners,” Doggrell said, touching on gun rights and the perennial fear among extremist groups that the Second Amendment is under attack. “And kith and kin comes before illegal national mandates.”

Doggrell knows a little bit about kith and kin. He joined the LOS in 1995 after meeting its presidentMichael Hill at the University of Alabama while Doggrell was a student, serving as the secretary vice chairman and chairman of the school’s LOS chapter before founding his own chapter in 2009.

Kith and kin is part of an explicitly racist ideology called “kinism” that Hill has long promoted through the LOS. The Kinist Institute, an organization that promotes kinism, has called for laws against racial intermarriage, an end to non-white immigration, expelling all “aliens” (“to include all Jews and Arabs”), and restricting the right to vote to white, landholding men over the age of 21. In the past, LOS websites have referred to kinism as “a biblical solution for all races” that will save the South by preventing “white genocide.”

It was an odd thing for a police officer to say, especially one from Anniston. Fifty years earlier, Klansmen firebombed several buses carrying civil rights workers, known as Freedom Riders, coming to the South to test a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering that buses be desegregated. On May 14, 1961, in Anniston, a mob of Klansmen, some reportedly still wearing their Sunday church clothes, attacked and firebombed the riders. Police did nothing.

But Doggrell has never hidden his extremist ties, not from his family – in 2013, his two-year-old was already a League member – and definitely not from his employer. As Doggrell boasts elsewhere in the video, his superiors are well aware of his associations.

“It’s always wonderful to go back and show my bosses all the radicals that I cavort with on the weekends,” he boasts.

The video was posted on YouTube two years ago by the Southern Nationalist Network and has only recently came to the attention of Hatewatch, which immediately sought to bring Doggrell’s associations to the city’s attention.