Liaisons Corner - Jim Walters

Liaisons Corner

Interview with Jim Walters
Liaison for the States Rights Community • 10/27/05

• Liaisons Corner: Hi Jim, and welcome to the interviews at Liaisons Corner. We appreciate your taking the time to help the Free State Project participants get to know you better. Let's get started! Jim, Please tell us where you were born and raised and a bit about your early years and your family.

• Jim Walters: I was born in Montgomery, Alabama to a family of educators. My father was a Principal and Assistant Superintendent for over 38 years and my mother was a math teacher. Both my parents were from farm families and were the first ones in their family to get a college education. I'm especially proud of them because not only did they excel, my mother was the Valedictorian of her class at Auburn in 1938 and was Phi Beta Kappa. Both of them worked their way through school during the Depression. I graduated high school from a small school and had 27 in my graduating class. At our 10th Reunion, we found out that 17 of us had gone on to college. Not bad for a little country school!

• LC: Now let us know something about your high school and college years. Also your bio was rich in involvement in the Boy Scouts, please tell us about when you first joined the Scouts and how you have maintained involvement in the Scouting movement throughout the years.

• JW: I got a late start in Scouting, but all of us who were involved went at it with a vengeance! We were in the BSA's teenage Explorer program and four of us became Eagle Scouts together. I worked on camp staff and was inducted into Scouting's Honor Society, The Order of the Arrow, and later received the Vigil Honor. Later, I became an Assistant Scoutmaster and in the 1970's became a fulltime professional with the Boy Scouts in the New Orleans Area Council. 29 years later, I retired from the BSA's National Staff in Irving, Texas and am still active as a volunteer with my Explorer Post that I've been active with for the past 25 years. We specialize in War For Southern Independence Reenacting and are known as Co. K, 5th Louisiana Infantry. I since turned over command to one of my "kids" who joined the unit 25 years ago as a 12 year old courier. I'm pretty much the "Commander Emeritus".

• LC: Jim, somewhere along the line you have developed a deep sense of a love of freedom. Where did that all start?

• JW: My father was an avid reader and student of history and would tell me stories of how he used to listen to Huey Long on the radio and his involvement as a Marine in WWII in the Pacific. I think I inherited it from him. I was a voracious reader like he was and that made history come alive for me. History is full of struggles for freedom and full of stories of those who try to deny that basic human need to be free. The stories are about both the Patriots and the Tyrants. Being from the South, we have seen tyranny and destruction up close and it's not an abstraction. Freedom is given by God and not from a generous and benevolent ruler. Getting off my soapbox, I guess being the rebellious sort, I was born with an innate resistance to authority and always made a point to question it. That combined with a knowledge of the Patriots of history has given me a reverence for the dedication of freedom seekers all over the world.

• LC: Tell us how it all evolved to the point of your hearing about the Free State Project.

• JW: All my political activity, beliefs, religious beliefs, education, and experience came together with the FSP into a "perfect storm" that showed me a way to freedom, not just for the South, but for the country as a whole. The Free State Project is a perfect fit that offers a way for Liberty to happen for all of us. One of my favorite columnists is Dr. Walter Williams. He tagged the "Red State/Blue State'" thing when he said the country is divided right down the middle with half of the people wanting to be left alone by government and be allowed to live their lives, raise their children, and worship in the town square., while the other half is pathologically INCAPABLE of leaving them alone! So it appears we have a game of "It's My Turn To Be The Tyrant" going on.

  The FSP offered a magnificently simple solution and an alternative to the divisive society we are forced to live in. Maybe if we all became tolerant of each other and took the tool of coercive government off the table, then we might just get along fine! While I may personally disagree with a lot of groups in the FSP and will probably will denounce them in the town square as they will most certainly denounce me. Neither of us will have the brute force of government to inflict our agendas on the other.

• LC: You have been interested in or a member of the League of the South. Please tell the readers about the League of the South and how that may have influenced your views on life.

• JW: Over the years, I've become aware of the steady loss of our freedoms and the deterioration of our national ethic of desiring freedom and independence from an ever-growing Federal government. State sovereignty was a constitutional cornerstone of our republic. It ended at Appomattox when the forces of a centralized and concentrated Federal Government overcame on the battlefield what they could not win by peaceful means. Starting then, we have evolved into the "Nanny State" we are in now. Southerners are concerned by the anti-Southern bigotry and attempts to eradicate and cleanse Southern history by way of what some of us are calling "Reconstruction Part II". Quite a few of us are seeing the attacks on traditional values as an attack on Christianity by the Secular Humanists. We are on the side of freedom while those who oppose us are always collectivists and are never libertarian in nature.

  The purpose of the League of the South is to create a free and independent South where everyone is equal before God and the Law and that government is the servant of the people rather than the Master. Our position in the League is that we seek to accomplish this new independence by honorable means. I have been a member of the League of the South for about six years and I'm on the Board of Advisors of the Texas LoS. We are working to establish alternative institutions for ourselves such as our own credit union in Texas and support home schooling. Many of us are resources for home school associations. We also put on cultural events and conferences that are a lot of fun, but serve a dual purpose to bring Southerners together and to give us an opportunity to tell people who we are and what we believe. We have attracted the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who refers to us as a "Neo-Confederate Hate Group". First I bristled at that term, I'm more of a "Paleo-American". The same people refer to the Boy Scouts as a homophobic hate group and the religious right as a hate group, too. In other words, read what we are about at www.dixienet.org and decide for yourself.

• LC: Jim, as our States Rights Liaison Leader, I have heard you talk very passionately about state's rights. Please tell us about your views on state's rights, then tell us how you might envision how we might bring New Hampshire in line with those views.

• JW: You are right on the passionate part! State sovereignty, in my opinion, is the only hope we have in remaining a free country. Our country is way too diverse to please some and force a one size fits all solution to problems. Mississippi is not like San Francisco and New Hampshire is different from Minnesota. Why is different necessarily bad? There is a dangerous mindset that I call a "Zero Sum" mindset. Boiled down, it says that if any one is prosperous, then they must have stolen or exploited another to get it. If one group is free, then they must oppress or deny another group their freedom. It goes in polar opposite of a lot of our people's traditional faith.

  I see New Hampshire being 90% in line with our Southern Nationalist views. That's why I voted for NH in the selection of the Free State. I really don't think that there is a lot more to do to bring NH into our way of thinking. I chose NH because they were already pretty much in line already. I've always loved the "Live Free or Die" state motto. Jefferson Davis made it clear when he said that the point of southern Independence was, "All we want is to be left alone". Sadly, "those people" that Dr. Walter Williams defined in his 2000 election analysis, were incapable of leaving the South alone!

• LC: Jim, you are a southern boy through and through (War Eagle). How do you feel about a southern boy from Alabama going to a New England state to see it become a truly free state, is that not a little upsidedown from what folks might have thought in 1865?

• JW: Over my life, I've met only a handful of people from New Hampshire and have liked them and their attitudes. I asked them why in the WORLD do they want to be considered Yankees! They are more like Southerners! It's the independent spirit that attracts me to New Hampshire and the opportunity to help them win their freedom from the Federal giant. I'm trying to recruit a Confederate Expeditionary Brigade to come with me. Southerners, by nature, are bound to their homes and are not culturally nomads. It's hard to talk with them about leaving their homes and families to move to a new and somewhat different place. My answer to them is that you are being asked to help New Hampshire win its freedom. Your ancestors left home and marched and fought for four years for the Confederacy to win their freedom. The sacrifice was horrendous, not only the loss of some 650,000 Americans, but included some 50,000 Southern civilians, and the ravaging of the countryside itself. So, they ask me, why go to New Hampshire? My answer is that I believe that the road to Southern freedom leads straight through New Hampshire and that the cause of the South is the cause of New Hampshire. New Hampshire has not had a campaign of over 140 years of demonization that the South has had to endure. The worst I've heard anyone say about NH was that they are "colorful". So, as the great general, Nathan Bedford Forrest said, "Hit 'em where they ain't!" Well, they ain't in New Hampshire!

• LC: You have a strong Scottish background, do you not? Has your Scots blood played any part in your love of freedom?

• JW: Both sides of my family came to America from Scotland in the early 1700's. My mother's family to Georgia and my father's South Carolina. I actually think it's genetically disposed! In fact, my second career after the Boy Scouts is my own Scottish food business. It's grown out of my involvement in Scottish Clan societies, the Royal Museum of Scotland, as well as my interest in Scottish history. One of my favorite books, "Cracker Culture, Celtic Ways of the Old South", by Dr. Grady MacWhinney makes the point that at the time of the War Between the States or The War to Prevent Southern Independence, as I like to put it, that the South was 75% Celtic while the North was nearly the flip side Anglo-Saxon English, hence New England! Their mercantile culture goes back to the beginning and our cultural differences come about honestly. BTW, New Hampshire is a hotbed of Scottish activity that I'm looking forward to being a part of. I tell my native Scot friends that the English kicked the more rowdy of us out first and that a Texan is nothing but a Scot on steroids!.

• LC: Jim, as you know we do not know the future, however, I am going to ask you as I ask all Liaison Leaders in these interviews, how do you envision what the state of New Hampshire might look like in say 10 years from now?

• JW: As the great Southerner, Dr. Martin Luther King said, "I have a dream". That dream is the restoration of our constitutional republic of sovereign states. New Hampshire is the cornerstone of that new republic and will be a shinning light to show how a free society operates in reality as well as a free economy. The remaining 10% of what needs to be done in the Free State would include the development of free foreign trade, making the state as business friendly as we can make it, and to watch our borders! I see a group of highly diverse people actually getting along and not at each others throats as we see in our country now. I've never heard of a Libertarian Revolution that forced freedom and liberty on anyone! Sadly, it is always the opposite. Freedom and liberty are extinguished by tyrants. I've noticed that there's a bad habit of Yankees to become violent when you threaten their revenues! I just hope Abraham Lincoln isn't President of the USA when the time comes to renegotiate New Hampshire's relationship with Washington!

• LC: Thanks, Jim, for taking the time for us to get to know you better.

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