Michael Peroutka, a 62-year old attorney affiliated with the League of the South, won election to the Anne Arundel County Council, running as a Republican.
He campaigned on his opposition to the county’s stormwater fees, called a “rain tax” by Peroutka and other opponents. His District 5, a traditionally conservative part of Maryland, gave him almost 2,000 votes more than his Democratic opponent. His election is a direct victory for the League of the South, and its neo-Confederate secessionist policies.
In 2004, Peroutka ran for president for the Constitution Party, and he received a miniscule 150,000 votes. The Constitution Party was founded in 1991 as the U.S Taxpayers Party by Howard Phillips, once an administration official for President Richard Nixon. The party tended to attract Christian nationalists (Reconstructionists) and John Birch Society members, rather than explicit white nationalists. Peroutka, who opposes both any forms of gay marriage and abortion of any kind, was one of many who left the Constitution Party after a dispute in its ranks over abortion.
After receiving pressure from Republican cohorts, Peroutka told the Baltimore Sun on October 17 that he left the League of the South, but “doesn’t have any problem with the organization.”
The League of the South “asserts that Southern society is radically different from the society impressed upon it by an alien occupier.” And it advocates, the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.”
The League has state party contacts in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas and one office for Virginia and Maryland.
In recent months, the League of the South increased the tempo of its grass-roots activism, and it has eclipsed the Council of Conservative Citizens (former white Citizens Councils) in that regard. Peroutka’s victory, however small the office, enhances its cause.
