Neo-Confederate Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) has members who are serving military officers, elected officials, public employees, and a particular national security expert with “Department of Defense Secret Security Clearance.”
These members are also associated with participants of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and some members overlap with other
violent neo-Confederate groups such as the League of the South (LoS),
The Guardian reported.
As
Changing America previously reported, the presence of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is growing in population thanks in part to their aggressive stance on preserving statues, namesakes and memorials of Confederate soldiers in public settings, as is the case in the relocation of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Tenn.
The group’s leader in North Carolina, Kevin Stone, someone who was described as recruiting associated with extremists, co-founded the SCV Mechanized Cavalry, a motorcycle gang affiliated with the SCV. Reportedly, members of the biker gang pushed out members of the main SCV for not having far enough right values.
In a data leak to The Guardian, the current members of the SCV is equal or greater than 59,000 going by the registered phones and emails associated to one’s membership.
This also includes 91 phone and email addresses that belong to government agencies and 74 addresses that are in various branches of the armed forces.
According to The Guardian, current members also include information from educational institutions and non-government organizations as well.
Some of the high profiles named in the data leak: Duane AJ Probst, a former coroner of Osage county, Missouri who was elected in 2020; Scott Wyatt, delegate of the 97th district in Virginia’s house; and professor Danny W Davis of Texas A&M University and the school’s program director. He is also a training consultant to the US army reserve with security clearance.
Probst told The Guardian SCV is
“a friendly organization that doesn’t advocate white supremacy,” and that he primarily participated in lectures and dinners. He said he hadn’t encountered any extremists in SCV but said,
“There are militant members of every organization.”