Racist Group Plans to Run Candidates Nationwide

The co-founder of the American Third Position (ATP), white supremacist Los Angeles lawyer William Daniel Johnson, says his new California-based group plans to run as many candidates for political office around the country as it can muster.

In an interview with Hatewatch last week, Johnson said that he intended to qualify “high-level people,” meaning prominent white nationalists, for campaigns on the ATP ticket in a large number of states. He did not elaborate on what states or offices, or precisely when, but said that that would be decided in coming months.

ATP was created last October. It was reportedly brought together by members of Freedom 14, a racist skinhead group in Orange County, Calif., who initially formed a group called the Golden State Party to run candidates. But that group collapsed when reports surfaced about the criminal past of its leader, and so the Freedom 14 members decided to create a replacement group — the American Third Position.

Johnson told Hatewatch that he was invited by acquaintances to the October meeting, where he says he met for the first time the man who would join him in founding and leading the ATP — Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach who has become a darling of the radical right since penning an anti-Semitic trilogy of books. MacDonald, who did not respond to requests for comment, was named director, in effect co-leader with Johnson, of the ATP. That was quite a leap for MacDonald, who has hobnobbed with many racists but until accepting his new position had not moved into overt racist activism.

For his part, Johnson is a long-time racist activist. In 1985, he wrote a book under the pseudonym James O. Pace called Amendment to the Constitution. It proposed a constitutional amendment to repeal the 14th and 15th amendments (respectively, making freed slaves citizens, and prohibiting the denial of the right to vote based on race) and replace them with the “Pace Amendment.” That amendment would only have allowed whites “in whom there is no discernible trace of Negro blood” to be U.S. citizens. Hispanic whites, Johnson added in a generous moment, might also be granted citizenship, but only if their “appearance [is] indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is in the British Isles or Northwestern Europe.”

Johnson, saying he preferred being called “racially aware” to being labeled a “racist,” told Hatewatch that he knows movement heavyweight and former Klan boss David Duke. Johnson attended a 2005 function held by Duke’s European Unity and Rights Organization. (Duke is also linked to MacDonald. As revealed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Duke apparently lifted entire sections of his book Jewish Supremacism from MacDonald’s infamous trilogy.) But Johnson denied Internet rumors that he was a long-time member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, or even a major Alliance splinter group, National Vanguard. Johnson did say he had purchased books from the Alliance and knew people who were members.

MacDonald, in addition to taking on leadership of the ATP, has been becoming active in the white supremacist movement in other ways as well. He recently launched his own hate website, The Occidental Observer. And he has been making the rounds of hate radio, appearing on Jim Giles’ “Radio Free Mississippi” show in December and James Edwards’ “The Political Cesspool” last week.