U.S. Navy Suspends 'Radical Traditionalist Catholic'

Lt. Cmdr. John Sharpe Jr., the public affairs officer for the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, was temporarily relieved of duty and placed under investigation in early March for allegedly violating a rule that forbids all personnel in the U.S. Navy to "participate in any organization that espouses supremacist causes."

The anti-Semitic activities of the 1993 Naval Academy graduate were first revealed in an exposé in the Winter 2006 edition of the Intelligence Report that explored the "radical traditionalist Catholic" movement in the United States. Sharpe was suspended after a reporter for Port Folio Weekly of Norfolk, Va., where the Carl Vinson is based, asked military officials if Sharpe's activities were permitted.

The Report article detailed two of Sharpe's organizations, the Legion of St. Louis and IHS Press, both now listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups. The story also noted that Sharpe was a vendor at the 2006 conference of American Renaissance, a racist publication (Sharpe was at a table next to a man selling "White Power" T-shirts). And it reported he is on the board of the St. George Educational Trust, a radical British Catholic group whose trustees once included convicted Italian terrorist Roberto Fiore. The trust has been accused of helping fund a project by the anti-Semitic International Third Position (ITP), which sought in the late 1990s to create a radical Catholic community in Los Pedriches, Spain.

Sharpe is on administrative leave pending the outcome of the Navy investigation, but that hasn't stopped him from continuing his extremist activities. At press time, he was still slated to speak at an August conference of the anti-Semitic St. Benedict Center, a New Hampshire group also profiled in the Report article that believes "the Jewish race" is working to overthrow Christian society. And Sharpe's Legion of St. Louis was still selling an array of anti-Semitic books, including Hilaire Belloc's The Jews and Henry Ford's The International Jew, on its website.

Sharpe also co-published an anti-Iraq war two-volume set, Neo-Conned!, with "D. Liam O'Huallachain," who is really Derek Holland, a British extremist and former member of the racist National Front and ITP, which seeks a "third way" that is neither capitalism nor communism. Holland is also a director of IHS Press.

Another radical traditionalist profiled by the Report, hard-line anti-Semite E. Michael Jones, caused a ruckus during a March speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Jones joined other extremists at a conference held to promote the ideas of white nationalist columnist Sam Francis, who died in 2005. The meeting was organized by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, where Francis was a resident scholar. The foundation is headed by Fran Griffin, who runs a public relations firm, Griffin Communications, that also publishes Sobran's, a newsletter by columnist Joe Sobran. Sobran is an anti-Semite who has written for a Holocaust denial journal.

A red-faced and shouting Jones devoted a full hour to denouncing the "revolutionary Jew" who, he claimed, has been fighting the Catholic Church and Christianity in general for some 2,000 years. Among other things, Jones denounced the civil rights movement as "controlled by Jews" who used blacks as "pawns."

Jones' furious speech was not received well by most attendees, who had expected a more dignified gathering. Attendee Peter Brimelow — the man who runs Vdare.com, a white supremacist website named after Virginia Dare, who is said to be the first white born in the New World — even called Jones a "Catholic bigot" and mocked him as "a prize specimen even by the standards of my lifelong study of characters on the American right." Jones was so extreme that C-SPAN decided to cancel a planned broadcast of the event.