We're working to complete a couple of freelance assignments. Until we return with more original posts, check out two stories in which we make an appearance.
At the Star Tribune, John Reinen--who in the past has written about the misadventures of the Asatru Folk Assembly--reports in White heritage religious group takes root in Minnesota:
MURDOCK, MINN. – A Nordic heritage group that religious scholars have identified as a white supremacist organization is sinking permanent roots into this Swift County town. For $45,000, the Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA) bought an abandoned Lutheran church and is creating its third “Hof,” or gathering hall, joining others the group operates in California and North Carolina. Organizers said the hall is intended to serve believers throughout the Midwest.
The move has come as a surprise to many in this town of 275 residents some 115 miles northwest of the Twin Cities. Word of the deal spread in the past week after the political blog Bluestem Prairie reported it. There’s been a lot of chatter about the church on social media, said Brianna Watkins, who lives four miles outside town. . . .
Read the article at the Star Tribune.
Update: At Pharyngula, P.Z Myers looks at the church in There goes the neighborhood. Myers observes:
For completeness sake, here’s a link to their website. I don’t recommend reading it, because it was designed to kill you. ALL-CAPS white text on a background photograph of light green grass and grey-white stones? OMG, that alone convinced me to embrace cultural marxism. My ancestral forebears apparently had no design sense at all.
We were interviewed back in May by The Intercept's Mara Hvistendahl for an article published Friday, Masks Off: How the Brothers Who Fueled the Reopen Protests Built a Volatile Far-Right Network. She reports:
The emails played to fear. “Entire police departments are being overwhelmed by mobs of criminals bent on violence, robbery, arson, and more,” read one sent in June, as demonstrations against police brutality rocked the country. “Minnesotans have seen our peaceful streets turn violent overnight with riotous mobs,” read another, sent not long after the burning of Minneapolis’s Third Precinct. “Radical leftists … are looting in our streets, lighting buildings on fire, terrifying citizens, and murdering cops,” intoned a third. Antifa is in the streets, coming for your guns, and did you know that Nickelodeon is removing the police dog character from the hit toddler show “Paw Patrol?” (It isn’t.)
For right-wing fringe activist Ben Dorr, who sent the emails, outrage about Black Lives Matter was an easy pivot from another cause he’d been promoting. With his brothers Aaron, Chris, and Matthew, Ben Dorr helped launch protests to reopen states across the country shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic this spring. Alone or together, the four Dorr brothers started a slew of Facebook groups, joined by hundreds of thousands of members, that have helped to fuel skepticism about health precautions and pushed for states to open prematurely. In a country where the simple act of wearing a mask has become a political statement, the people who organize against masks are worth watching. . . .
Take a look at the Intercept.
Related posts:
- AFA gothar coordinator's life changed from police shoot-out & prison to serving old Gods
- Baldurshof: Third Hof of the Asatru Folk Assembly setting up in Murdock, Minnesota
- GOP candidate tied to notorious Dorr family taking on Rep. Paul Torkelson (Minnesota Reformer)
- MPR, Unicorn Riot scrutinize Dorr Brothers, Liberate Minnesota rally co-hosts
- Dorr family expands brand: adds scaring abortion foes about GOP to gun rights stories
- Sixteen pro-Second Amendment MN House members disavow Minnesota Gun Rights
Photo: The former Lutheran Church, now zoned residential, in Murdock, Minnesota, that's being converted for use by the Asatru Folk Assembly. Via the AFA.
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