Ex-Klansman Vows More Campus Tapes

Thomas L. Metzger, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who now heads a San Diego County-based group advocating worldwide separation of the races, said Thursday that he will continue making race-oriented cable-television tapes at Cal State Fullerton despite an uproar on campus this week about his programs.

“You wouldn’t think you would have this problem with a university,” Metzger said. “You would think a university would be a bastion of free speech.”

University officials, including President Jewell Plummer Cobb, have strongly criticized Metzger and his programs. But they have said that he is entitled to continue taping them under First Amendment freedoms, as well as federal laws governing the availability of public-access cable-television facilities.

For the past two years, Metzger, 47, of Fallbrook, has been recording his programs advocating separation of the races at the university’s Instructional Media Center. The center is a main production site for public-access programs of Group W Cable in northern Orange County.

By federal law, groups or individuals from wide ranges of viewpoints are supposed to be allowed access to cable TV. Metzger has been using Group W’s public-access Channel 38 and its Cal State Fullerton recording facility to tape and later broadcast his programs. Group W has about 22,000 subscribers in Fullerton and Placentia. Metzger said he also sends copies of the tape all over the nation for broadcast on public-access channels by scores of cable stations.

Metzger said that he functions as the moderator of the show and that guests give their views on various topics dealing with racial separation. “Not everyone who’s on the program agrees with our point of view,” he said. “We’ve had Muslims and blacks on it.”

His use of the university became an issue on campus Wednesday when the student newspaper, the Daily Titan, printed a story about him and the TV show. By coincidence, the news story broke the same day there was a student protest scheduled against apartheid in South Africa. The “Metzger issue” became a focal point of the anti-apartheid rally, said Joyce Garcia, managing editor of the Daily Titan.

“People were shocked” about the Metzger report, Garcia said. “They had no idea about this (the Metzger tapings) until the Daily Titan exposed it.”

No effort has been made to conceal Metzger’s use of Group W’s public-access recording site on campus, Cal State Fullerton officials said. According to a Group W official, the Metzger program has attracted few complaints from cable viewers and no controversy in the past two years despite its content.

“Group W does not support this kind of racist message,” said Judy Shane, public affairs director of Group W’s regional office in Encino. “But we do support the First Amendment. This is an example of how public access (to cable television) is open to any member of the public. The FCC (Federal Communication Commission) guidelines only say that there shouldn’t be obscenity or attempts to get people to violate the law.”

Cobb, the president of Cal State Fullerton, is black and active in anti-discrimination groups. She said that regardless of her distaste for Metzger’s programs, she defends his right to produce them. She said she has not seen the program.

Similarly, Edgar Trotter, chairman of Cal State Fullerton’s communications department, said that he thinks the Metzger programs are “despicable” but that public-access TV and free speech are not limited to non-controversial messages.

But the Orange County branch of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith said that it is formally asking Cal State Fullerton to end Metzger’s access to the television studio.

Steve Edelman, regional director for the group’s Orange County branch, said Metzger’s viewpoints are anti-Jewish and beyond the limits of free speech. “You cannot stand up in a crowded theater and yell fire,” he said.

Carl Jackson, chairman of Cal State Fullerton’s Afro-ethnic studies department, said he is “upset” about Metzger’s ability to tape his programs on the campus.

“To have the university used to produce that kind of garbage is outrageous,” Jackson said. “I think it should be stopped. The (university) president has an obligation to get to the bottom of this thing. There’s no room for the kinds of racial attacks that are in those programs.”

Metzger said in a telephone interview from Fallbrook on Thursday that he dropped out of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980 and that his new organization, White Aryan Resistance, is non-ideological.

“We want separation of groups by race and culture and self-determination for them,” he said. “That’s not only for the white working class in the United States. It’s for European Russians and other white people. We realized that nuclear war would be a war of annihilation for the northern hemispheres. We’re not pro- or anti- any country. We are concerned with white revolution.”

Metzger said it is wrong to call him either a “segregationist” or a “white supremacist,” although he advocates keeping other races from mingling with whites.

“I’m a separatist,” he said. Despite the WAR acronym of his organization and his frequent mentions of “revolution,” Metzger said he is not forming a clandestine army or advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. “We have no armies or tanks,” he said.

He said his organization has about 5,000 subscribers nationwide but that membership is largely based in the West. He said the tapes of his program “Race and Reason” are aired on cable TV in many states, including Illinois, Louisiana, Texas and Pennsylvania.

Metzger, who once claimed that he was grand dragon of the California Ku Klux Klan, became the focus of a major political storm in California when he won the Democratic nomination for Congress in a heavily Republican district in San Diego County. The state Democratic Party formally dissociated itself from Metzger’s candidacy, and the Republican incumbent, Clair Burgener, won by an 87% to 13% margin.

In his congressional campaign, Metzger referred to Jews as “parasites,” and he advocated that Mexicans be shot if they tried to cross the border illegally.