Youth movement
by digby
Never let it be said that the right doesn’t have any up and comers:
That was filmed at this year’s CPAC convention, the preeminent gathering of the wingnut tribe. So, who is this guy?
It seemed to begin with resentment towards women.
A decade ago, in 2001, Kevin DeAnna started at the College of William & Mary, a well-regarded school in Williamsburg, Va., where he joined the staff of a right-wing campus newspaper, The Remnant. He was soon joined there by Marcus Epstein, who six years later would be arrested for his attack on a black woman. By 2003, DeAnna was managing editor and Epstein was editor-in-chief. The next year, DeAnna replaced Epstein, who had gone to New Orleans for a semester to study Austrian (libertarian) economics and became the paper’s “Editor in Exile.”
During these years, The Remnant became known for its sneering attitude toward women. It railed on about a campus art exhibit of nude females, aged birth to 100, saying the people depicted “were simply disgusting and not appealing” and the entire exhibit was “filth.” It claimed that the wage gap between men and women was due to women’s “different work habits” and “occupational preferences,” rather than any kind of discrimination. But most notably, The Remnant in this period seemed to delight in attacking alleged rape victims, saying in 2003 that “feminist lies about supposed rape designed to demonize all men should be exposed.”
In 2004, DeAnna wrote a long article demanding an apology from a 16-year-old girl after prosecutors dropped charges against a student she had accused of raping her at a fraternity party. The next year, after a rash of reported sexual assaults on students, The Remnant again attacked an alleged rape victim, saying she had lied, that she was a “wannabe victim” and “con artist,” and that she should be criminally charged. In 2006, after DeAnna’s 2005 graduation, the girl who was 16 in 2004 sued DeAnna, Epstein, and three other Remnant staffers for defamation. The lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed for reasons that are not clear from the court record.
The paper had other interests as well. In a section titled “Rebel Yell,” a reference to the Confederate battle cry, it argued that the Civil War was not fought over slavery — a claim that virtually no serious historian agrees with. It approvingly quoted the late Sam Francis while he was the chief editor of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group that opposes interracial marriage and has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.”
He’s a lovely young fellow, much more palatable than those allegedly scruffy young people in the Occupy Movement. I’m sure he has a big future.