Could L.A. Accidentally Elect a White Separatist?

Posted on May 18, 2008

Flickr / pingnews.com and PredatorsHockey

Not many people pay attention to judicial elections, especially one held in June, and it’s for that reason that some Angelenos are worried about the campaign of William Johnson. A white separatist, Johnson is apparently counting on a lack of attention and the support of Ron Paul’s local organization to help him to victory.

The story was first reported by the Los Angeles Metropolitan News-Enterprise, which revealed that Johnson had advocated a constitutional amendment limiting citizenship to whites of European extraction. The L.A. Times has produced a couple of blog posts and an editorial, but the election remains mostly ignored and unreported.

Here’s where Ron Paul comes in: According to the Times editorial, Johnson was active in Paul’s campaign for president. Indeed, Johnson’s candidacy is on the agenda for a June meeting of “The Los Angeles Ron Paul 2008 Meetup Group” to be held in the conference room of Johnson’s office. Judging by the comments on the L.A. Times Web site, it seems Johnson has been presented to voters (including Paul supporters) as Libertarian-leaning.

These are the kinds of elections, the Times points out, that sometimes turn on whether voters like a candidate’s name or their occupation.

Read the original Metropolitan News-Enterprise article.

Read the L.A. Times editorial.

The Times blog posts can be found here and here.

The June meeting of a Los Angeles Ron Paul group is described here.

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Los Angeles Times:

The candidate is Bill Johnson. Under the name James O. Pace, he wrote the racial exclusion as a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution and a 1985 book supporting it. Under the name Daniel Johnson, he ran a losing race for Congress in Wyoming in 1989 with a Ku Klux Klan organizer as his campaign manager. As William Johnson, he ran a losing race for Congress in Arizona in 2006. He now may have found a race he can win, unless voters here find out who he is.

The Times on April 21 endorsed Johnson’s opponent, Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner James Bianco, because Bianco is experienced and impressive and because Johnson was secretive about his past and about his role in a questionable campaign to remove six Latino judges from the court. Now the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, a newspaper that reports on courts and the legal community, has put together the rest of the pieces on Johnson.

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