Last year the hate group American Freedom Alliance (AFA) hosted a conference featuring a who’s who of the anti-Muslim movement at the upscale Luxe Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. This year its “From Gold To Dust: The Destruction of California” conference in the same venue focused on blaming immigrants for most of California’s woes.
The August 20 conference began with AFA president Dr. Karen Siegemund and the 150 or so attendees gleefully celebrating the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center listed her group as an anti-Muslim hate group, in part due to the vile Muslim-bashing that took place at last year’s gig.
While this year’s event attracted more mainstream figures, including politicians and at least two people running for Governor of California in 2018, the speakers predictably attacked transgender people, the Black Lives Matter movement and California’s immigrant population.
Siegemund thanked the crowd for coming out in support of a hate group and defended AFA’s anti-Muslim views stating that AFA is an “organization that speaks out against those who muzzle women, that throw homosexuals off of towers, and all sorts of violence that they do against each other and to us.” Also in the crowd was anti-Muslim activist Nonie Darwish who stated at last year’s conference that, “lying and slander is an obligation in Islam,” and “In Islam, seizing wealth from others is a value.”
The first panel, focusing on California’s public school system, featured Peter Wood, head of the National Association of Scholars. Wood talked about falsehoods promoted by the left, including the Black Lives Matter movement, which he described as, “a false narrative about the United States being organized around the idea of oppressing blacks and nothing else.”
Another speaker on the panel, Lance Izumi, of the Pacific Research Institute named the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in his speech, which was met with a chorus of boos from the crowd. Izumi took issue with the San Diego school board for working with CAIR on an anti-bullying measure as well as increased education about Islam in the public school system.
This prompted audience members to bring up Truth in Textbooks, an operation run by Roy White, a former leader of the San Antonio chapter of ACT for America, the largest anti-Muslim group in the country. White attended and spoke at last year’s AFA conference where he descried his Truth in Textbooks project in detail, as an effort to effectively purge textbooks that he and others deem too favorable to Islam. These efforts are underway in Texas and California and were resoundingly endorsed by this year’s panelists.
The next panel focused on the environment, where the notorious right-wing conspiracy theory of Agenda 21 was discussed at length. Agenda 21 is a nonbinding sustainability plan developed by the United Nations and signed by 178 countries including the United States in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. It lays out steps countries should take to help increase sustainability. Right-wing organizations and politicians have lambasted the plan as a move toward the takeover of the United States by the tyrannical United Nations.
One right-wing organization that has pushed this conspiracy theory for decades is the John Birch Society (JBS) and sure enough, the JBS’s Southern California coordinator, Joe Panzarello, was at the conference passing out literature warning that California “is on the verge of becoming a socialist state,” due to the Democrats. Mike Munzing, an Aliso Viejo City Councilman, used his time on the environment panel to rail against the “horrors” of Agenda 21, stating, “That’s the mother ship, that’s the big overall globalist mother ship of the UN, and that’s what I was fighting.”
Michael D. Antonovich, a longtime member of the LA County Board of Supervisors, took to the stage next where he attacked Democrats, and called the Ku Klux Klan the, “military arm of the Democratic Party,” a line that also received a warm round of applause from the crowd.
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