George Zimmerman’s De Facto Spokesman Launches a White-Power Podcast
Yesterday, after George Zimmerman was taken into custody for allegedly threatening his estranged wife with a gun, HLN turned to a familiar source for commentary: Zimmerman’s neighbor and de facto media emissary, Frank Taaffe. In an interview with HLNTV.com reporter Graham Winch, Taaffe argued that Zimmerman was distraught because his wife, Shellie, was trying to take his Rottweiler. “Now, that’s pretty vindictive,” Taaffe said.
Ever since Zimmerman gained notoriety by fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, Taaffe has been his most visible and outspoken defender. As Mother Jones has reported, Taaffe also happens to be a fire-breathing racist. And he now has a new forum to air his inflammatory views.
Shortly after Zimmerman’s July acquittal on murder charges, Taaffe appeared on two episodes of the white-separatist podcast, The White Voice, and unleashed a string of racist diatribes. At the time, he claimed that he had gone on the show in response to a routine interview request. “I was invited,” he told Mother Jones. “End of story.” But in mid-August Taaffe teamed up with The White Voice’s cohost Joe Adams, a white-power activist who has authored racist screeds such as the Save the White People Handbook, to launch a new weekly white-power podcast called Standing Our Ground.
The program, which bills itself as a show for “THE SUPPRESSED MASSES,” features news and pop-culture commentary with a white-separatist slant. (Taaffe embraces this label, which he sees as less derogatory than others. As he told listeners recently, “We might be white separatists but we are not supremacists.”) From this platform, Taaffe also weighs in on other racially charged cases, including that of Michael Dunn, a Jacksonville man who fatally shot an unarmed black 17-year-old after an argument that began over loud music.
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