From White Supremacists to Baltimore Courtrooms

An interesting article that details the irony of how a method of defense (the flesh and blood defense) that was first concocted by Aryan supremacists is now being used by African American men on death row in Baltimore courts.

The fleshand- blood defense, they discovered, came from a place far from Baltimore, from people as different from Willie Mitchell as people could possibly be. Its antecedents stretched back decades, involving religious zealots, gun nuts, tax protestors, and violent separatists driven by theories that had fueled delusions of Aryan supremacy and race war in gun-loaded compounds in the wilds of Montana and Idaho. Although Mitchell and his peers didn’t know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves. It was the ideology that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the nation’s history, and now, a decade later, it had somehow sprouted in the crime-ridden ghettos of Baltimore.

I’m always fascinated by conspiracy theorists and often catch myself following a rabbit trail of a theory before giving my head a shake and realizing it can’t really be true. Plus, I’m still in the midst of season 4 of The Wire which is based in Baltimore.