Recently, after OC Weekly's Matt Coker described Martin H. Millard's essays as "racist rants" (see "Hatesville, USA," July 20), Millard sent us a letter saying we had smeared him. Turns out the longtime anti-immigrant activist, former Costa Mesa city committee member, and prolific contributor to neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites isn't a racist.
Illustration by Bob Aul
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Actually, he's a comedian. For yuks, Millard once humored anti-Semitic fans by pretending to be a Jew writing to another Jew in an online satirical essay titled "Why Hot WASPy Chicks (Pretend to) Love Jews, a Letter from the Learned Elders of Zion to Joel Stein." In it, he deftly dropped Yiddish phrases—"Waddya some kinda shmendrik or shmoe? Are you meshuganah?"—while praising Jews for not polluting the Aryan gene pool. "Why did we set it up so that you have to have a Jewish mother and not necessarily a Jewish father to be a Jew?" Millard wrote. "Because in the old days you couldn't tell who got a female pregnant. It might have been a Jew who used his shmekel to shtup her or it might have been a goy in the woodpile. You think maybe the Jewish princess would tell the truth about who shtupped her?"
Millard's also a vagina monologist. In his futuristic fantasy novel Roaming the Wastelands, which involves efforts by outnumbered white people to make contact with Nazis under the Antarctic ice sheet and breed white children with perpetually impregnated porn stars, one of Millard's characters posits a race-based classification of the vagina. "White girls don't have a distinct pussy," Millard theorized. "It's just sort of an absence of dick and balls . . . Japanese girls have a pronounced mons veneris and this seems to correlate . . . with thick ankles and unattractive calves . . . Black girls have way too much hair and of course it's kinky."
Few people would give Millard a second glance if not for his high-profile role in Costa Mesa. In 2002, the City Council voted to put him on a redevelopment committee determined to bulldoze the city's Latino Westside. When city officials asked Costa Mesa police last December to investigate the immigration status of jail inmates, many saw the invisible hand of Martin H. Millard.
Millard brings controversy to such controversies. When asked about his essays decrying racial mixing on the National Vanguard (a "beacon of hope for white men, women and children"), Millard said, "The National Vanguard website is just one of many that run some of my stuff." Indeed it is. Millard has also contributed to New Nation, which features such pages as "Darkest Africa" (devoted to news from the continent concerning cannibalism, rape and incest) and "Dark Crimes" (concerning horrific crimes committed by African-Americans).
Millard was hesitant to speak with us because, he says, the Weekly has mischaracterized his work as racist. ("I'm not a racist, because the term, in common usage, has come to mean one who hates others because of their race," he once wrote. "I don't hate anyone. Indifference is a better term.") The Weekly first profiled Millard in 1998, quoting from his essay "The Tan Everyman." In it, Millard predicts that immigration and racial intermarriage will destroy the white gene pool and create "just a slimy brown mass of glop."
Even Millard's defense against the charge of racism seems, well, racist. In a November 2005 essay for National Vanguard, he wrote, "Hate, as the term is usually used, seems misplaced when we talk about the struggle for White survival. Do we hate germs that would destroy us? Do we hate wild animals that would destroy us? Of course not."
In defending his one-man campaign to stop intermarriage, Millard employs two tactics: first, as we've seen, he declares he's not a racist. If that doesn't work, he declares that he's merely a private citizen and therefore not worthy of press scrutiny. Responding to Matt Coker's article on Costa Mesa, Millard ran through both options. As always, he refused to allow us to publish his letter unless we paid him. When we engaged him, Millard fired off an e-mail to Village Voice Media chief executive officer Jim Larkin objecting to our efforts to write about him. "I have not sought this publicity," he wrote. "I'm a private person and not a public figure and I cherish my privacy."
Millard frequently makes high-profile, high-octane remarks about race and then attempts to duck behind this privilege of privacy. But in addition to his voluminous contributions to websites and three books on Amazon.com (The Outsider, the aforementioned Roaming the Wastelands and Ourselves Alone & Homeless Jack's Religion, his thoughts on "post-American America"), Millard has a long record of involvement in city politics. In 2002, he was a regular contributor to the now-defunct bulletin board for Concerned Costa Mesa Citizens, whose fellow Internet posters included then-Councilman Alan Mansoor. (Mansoor didn't write his own stuff, but he did post numerous anti-homosexual essays written by others.) That year, Mansoor and fellow council members Eric Bever and Gary Monahan voted to include Millard on the city's redevelopment committee.
According to a recent story in the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, Mansoor "has been known to carpool to City Council meetings" with Millard. Neither Bever nor Mansoor responded to interview requests, but in 2002, Mansoor defended Millard's official involvement in city politics. "I don't agree with everything Martin says," Mansoor said. "But the issues he speaks about at City Council meetings have been Costa Mesa issues . . . If he wants the streets cleaned up, then I agree with him on that."
