Hate on Campus - The tale of MSU-YAF

[ck4829]

Preston Wiginton is one busy neo-Nazi.

In October 2005, he won the "Strongest Skinhead" contest at Hammerfest, a racist skinhead festival in Draketown, Ga., where he announced that he was organizing secret paramilitary training in preparation for the coming race war. In the following days, Wiginton posted more than 300 messages to the white nationalist online forum Stormfront, writing in one that "beating down a mud," or non-white, is a "righteous act of collective preservation."

Since then, Wiginton has continued to appear at white supremacist events across the United States — and abroad, too. Just this Nov. 4, Wiginton spoke to a crowd of 5,000 Russian ultranationalists at a Moscow rally against non-white immigration that included calls for Serbian-style ethnic cleansing. Waving his black cowboy hat, the Victoria, Texas, resident said, "I'm taking my hat off as a sign of respect for your strong identity in ethnicity, nation and race." The audience responded with Nazi salutes and chants of "White power!" in English.

But Wiginton, ever the activist, has not neglected smaller venues. A mere 10 days before the Moscow rally, Wiginton served as master of ceremonies at an appearance in East Lansing, Mich., by British Holocaust denier Nick Griffin, the national chairman of the white supremacist British National Party.

This time, Wiginton's venue was not a skinhead keg party, backwoods cross burning or neo-Nazi rally on foreign soil. It was a lecture hall on the campus of Michigan State University.

Wiginton, 43, is not a Michigan State University student. He's not an alumnus or a faculty member, either. But he is chummy with MSU junior Kyle Bristow, the 21-year-old chairman of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, or MSU-YAF — the only university student organization in the country listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Acting in collusion with elder white supremacists like Wiginton, and with the financial and logistical support of a major conservative foundation, Bristow and a handful of cronies have roiled their campus and the surrounding community by hosting speakers like Griffin, issuing vicious homophobic and racist insults, and staging publicity stunts masked as political demonstrations that seem inspired in equal parts by the movie "Animal House" and the Hitler Youth.

"He's become a divisive force," former MSU-YAF member Kari Lynn Jaksa, an MSU junior who describes herself as a Republican with strong libertarian leanings, says of Bristow. "Frankly, he's embarrassing."

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=869


Here's one brave MSU-YAF commando for you all to see, he's obviously been victorious in the mighty Battle of Photoshop Land.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. Maybe he could get a job writing for Lou Dobbs.

[Locrian]

2. wow

Yeah he's one brave wuss. Sounds like he went a little nuts in freshman year. Auto-contrarian is an easy way to behave if you are weak at defining yourself - you just are "against" whatever everyone else is.

Sounds like a major asshat - almost feel sorry for him. Bet he gets his ass kicked.

[I work for workers]

3. THAT guy won "strongest skinhead"?

I assume it wasn't the test of physical strength I'd imagined it to be...