John Taylor Bowles: Nazi for President

Last week my girlfriend and I were walking back from the post office to her place when I found a folded flyer on the sidewalk. It was a modest black and white photocopy that read "VOTE JOHN TAYLOR BOWLES FOR U.S. PRESIDENT 2008," and then beneath that carried the slogan "A Third Choice for a Second Direction." At the bottom was a mailing address for the campaign, a post office box in South Carolina, along with a website address. I picked it up and brought it home, figuring it might make a decent topic for an article. I figured I might even get lucky and the guy'd turn out to be a crazy white supremacist!

It must be my lucky day. I just gave the Bowles 2008 website a good once-over and it turns out that, yeah, he is a crazy white supremacist! How much of a crazy white supremacist? You're welcome to visit his website on your own (Bowlesforpresident.com, naturally), but if you'd rather not, I think I can give you a fair impression. For starters, his slogan (not the "A third choice . . . second direction" thing - the slogan he uses to appeal to his base, if you know what I'm saying) is "The White People's Candidate." If that's too subtle for you, there's also the picture of the candidate to the left, from his website's "About Me" page.

When Bowles claims to represent "white people," I guess he isn't including the 180,000+ white men who died in the European theater of World War II to protect civilization from men who shared his fashion sense, not to mention his psychotic bigotry. I suggest he narrow his target constituency a bit, from the rather broad "white people" to something more suited to his platform. How does "The Sheeplike, Self-Made-Victim, Persecuted-in-Their-Own-Minds-Only, Ineffectual, Impotent White People's Candidate" grab you?

Since I mentioned his platform, let me expand on that a bit. Here it is, as far as I can tell: he's a white guy. A bit minimal. But it's a bold gambit that just might pay off. I mean think about it, this is the 2008 election - isn't it time we voted a white man President of the United States? Bowles has really captured something here. He does get a bit more specific (on his website at least; the YouTube campaign video embedded on his home page makes the promos produced by the Democrats and Republicans look informative and deeply insightful by comparison, and Bowles's skills as an orator have me wondering if perhaps I owe George W. Bush an apology - only for saying he's a poor public speaker, not for saying that he's gotten tens of thousands of people killed in an arbitrary war he has no idea how to win or that he's the worst president ever).[1] Here are some highlights(?) of the brave and visionary Bowles Plan for a Better America:

All White families in the USA (husband, wife and minor children) shall be provided with zero interest mortgage loans to buy homes fitted with all necessary household gadgets like fridge, TV, computers, etc. This will be achieved by the National Socialist Movement with hard work, honesty of purpose, and intelligent and innovative policies.

Energy prices will be reduced.

A new Energy Policy to safeguard national interests and make our industries and services globally competitive as [sic] also to prevent the fleecing of customers will be formulated.

Personal Income Tax rate of 5% maximum. All other taxes will be eliminated.

Needy White citizens shall be given cash assistance directly into their bank accounts and all useless schemes shall be closed down as they have become vehicles of commissions and bogus purchases. . . . All public assistant [sic] recipients will be regularly drug-tested.

All useless government departments and outfits like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will be immediately closed down. All surplus government employees will be made border patrol officers or retired.

Government will be totally computerized to achieve maximum efficiency, transparency, and speed of implementation. Government will not only define policies and framework but shall actively work to achieve the goals of prosperity and progress of all the White citizens.

Jobs to all, free college education to all to achieve a highly qualified work force, and fair distribution of national wealth among its White citizens shall be the guiding principles of the government . . . A system will be created where it is easier to do business and be productive but ethics will have to be maintained by the business.

All loans of farmers will be written off and they will be provided with fresh grants (not loans) to start their agricultural operations anew. All credit card debt will be written off and White citizens will be provided with a fresh financial start.

And if all that wasn't enough for you, try this one on:

The whole system will be changed to cut government expenditure, eradicate red-tape, and remove the undesirable complications of administration. The government will be demystified and simplified.[2]

I swear to God I'm not making this up. Don't you love how he declares he'll cut personal income taxes to 5% and eliminate all other taxes, then goes on and on about how white citizens will have cash pumped into their bank accounts and farmers will have all their government loans and credit card debts erased and given new grants? Where's all that money gonna come from - Hitler's secret gold?

John Taylor Bowles is a member of the National Socialist Movement, whose website he has linked (though not prominently, which I suspect is not a snub on his part but rather evidence that he is a hideously maladroit web designer) to his own.[3] The National Socialists, who prominently display not only swastikas but also glamorous images of Adolf Hitler on their website, have their own platform, "25 Points of American National Socialism," which I assume Bowles endorses and probably helped to write. Among the 25 points are the demand to create an official all-white nation; "land and territory" to feed and settle surplus white population, with no mention of where the land is supposed to come from or how it is to be acquired; the demand that the rights of citizenship, including voting rights, be reserved only for those of "pure White blood" - meaning about seven people in the whole country - and be explicitly denied to Jews and homosexuals (and also, I assume, to blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, etc.); the prevention of non-White immigration; the total exclusion of all non-Whites from the press and the media, and the suppression of all art, literature and culture not "conducive to the national welfare"; and oh yes, by the way, it's the primary duty of the State to provide a livelihood for its citizens.

I'm trying to imagine a more pathetic, immoral, self-serving set of ideals(?), but I'm coming up blank. Thank God our culture has progressed to the point where the John Taylor Bowleses of the world are relegated to passing out Xeroxed flyers in small towns and begging for donations on their shitty-ass little websites. Even so, it's sobering to encounter something like this, especially when it's unexpected. I take comfort in the fact that these are the smallest, most pitiful and powerless of men, and in the knowledge that their freedom to practice and disseminate even their loathsome and valueless beliefs is necessary in a free society and one of the things that makes this a great country. But to see grown men in America in 2007 proudly strutting about in Nazi uniforms with swastikas banded around their arms, giving the stiff-armed salute and shouting "Sieg Heil!" to one another, is disappointing; to see men - white, American men, who run the world and who have never experienced discrimination or disenfranchisement in their lives to even compare to that experienced by blacks, women, gays, Hispanics, Jews, and a dozen other groups of human beings whose greatest misfortune in life was being born the wrong color, sex or orientation, or into the wrong culture, religion or country - blame all their struggles, shortcomings and failures on supposedly inferior people, is depressing, but unfortunately not all that surprising.

So if you're tired of being forced to choose between the Democrats and the Republicans, if you'd rather vote for a pudgy, wretched jelly of a man who has rejected every meaningful value of his own country in favor of ranting about representation for the neglected, voiceless white people of the United States, and blowing smoke up his own ass with a vain and hopeless - not to mention fascist and racist - presidential candidacy, consider John Taylor Bowles.