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SDSU Nursing Student Peddling Old Fascist Tomes Online

If Governor Kristi Noem can ever find a poet laureate suited to her ideological tastes (hmm, what rhymes with fascism?), perhaps she can grant an exclusive contract to publish the poet laureate’s inaugural volume of odes to apartheid to this Brookings-based Freedom-seeker:

The Guardian has identified a trainee nurse and reported US air force reservist called Bailey Ross as the proprietor of a white nationalist publisher in South Dakota.

Ross was also a paid-up member of a white nationalist organization that marched at Charlottesville while enlisted in the United States Coast Guard.

…Bailey Ross registered Agartha Publishing LLC on 1 January 2022, according to South Dakota company records. The company’s website first went live a few months earlier on 17 October 2021, according to the site’s WhoIs records and internet archives.

…Agartha republishes pro-fascist and anti-communist works whose copyright has expired, adding eye-catching cover designs.

They include two books by James Strachey Barnes. Barnes was a British fascist who wrote in praise of Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany in the years before the second world war. During the war, which he spent in Italy, he recorded hundreds of propaganda broadcasts promoting the Axis powers and criticizing the Allies.

Barnes’s book The Universal Aspects of Fascism promoted the adoption of fascism as a political system beyond Germany and Italy; Agartha publishes Half a Life, and Half a Life Left, which encompass pro-fascist accounts of Italy’s invasions of Albania and Ethiopia [Jason Wilson, “US Publisher of Pro-Fascist Books Revealed as Military Veteran,” The Guardian, 2023.08.15].

In September 2021, South Dakota State University featured Coast Guard veteran turned nursing student Bailey Ross on its Facebook page and its website:

South Dakota State University, FB post featuring student Bailey Ross, 2021.09.24.
South Dakota State University, FB post featuring student Bailey Ross (left) receiving a quilt of valor from VFW Auxiliary National President jean Hamil (center) at SDSU’s Medal of Honor Park, ceremony 2021.09.03; SDSU post 2021.09.24.

SDSU may not be pleased with whatever success Ross is finding as a peddler of old fascist reprints: The Ross profile linked on the above FB post now does not load on SDSU’s website, but the Internet Archive Wayback Machine captured the most recent version of that page on October 25, 2021:

Bailey Ross did not follow a traditional path to South Dakota State University and its College of Nursing.

A native of Salem, Oregon, Ross entered the U.S. Coast Guard after high school. His service took him to other parts of the United States—New Jersey, Wisconsin, Virginia and then to Washington—but he was not sure where he wanted to go following his four enlisted years. He then entered a community college to become licensed as an emergency medical technician. While working as an EMT, Ross thought nursing might be a better path.

“I got out of the Coast Guard in 2018 because I wanted to go to college,” said Ross, who is majoring in nursing. “I was looking around in the Midwest for nursing programs. I’m a small-town kind of guy and didn’t feel I was going to be able to focus on studies back home. I wanted a rural campus, more of a small town.”

“I knew I wanted nursing and South Dakota State ranked pretty high,” he continued. “It’s a pretty good fit; I really like Brookings” [SDSU News, “Coast Guard Veteran Finds Success at SDSU,” posted 2021.09.21; 2021.10.25 version retrieved from Internet Archive Wayback Machine 2023.08.15].

SDSU may excise Bailey Ross from its marketing materials, and it may wish it could revamp its old slogan and tell him, “You can go anywhere but here.” But you can’t really expel a student for making a living by recycling old fascist ideas any more than they can revoke his fellow Jackrabbit Kristi Noem’s diploma for doing the same.

9 Comments

  1. Arlo Blundt 2023-08-15 21:25

    SDSU as a fascist hotbed?? The student body has always been known as a right of center in politics bunch, with a very active College Republicans chapter that always seems to support the most conservative candidate. It’s fertile ground for Mr. Ross and he is likely very comfortable there. His avocation, as a publisher who releases copyright expired, public domain publications is an interesting one, and one that must be Constitutionally protected. I am unaware if Goebblel’s Diary is in the public domain. It is in three volumes and is fascinating in its’ banality. It sounds like Kristi Noem wrote it.

  2. P. Aitch 2023-08-15 23:16

    This fellow brought his side hustle to South Dakota because your Governor recruits people like him and other like-minded individuals. You okay with that? SD majority is.
    But this student is legally exercising his free speech rights.
    Donald Trump, however, tweeting that the election he lost was rigged and that people need to use “whatever it takes” to “take back the steal”, isn’t exercising his free speech rights, alone.
    Trump’s tweets are also “overt acts” that are evidence of his involvement in a felonious conspiracy to overthrow a USA election.
    #LockHimUp
    PS – Hillary said today she wasn’t happy about Trumps legal troubles. She’s profoundly saddened by the entire situation.

  3. All Mammal 2023-08-15 23:32

    I am curious if he’s ever been punched in the face… doubtful. I believe in certain instances where violence with fists is a beautiful thing. The only proven way to keep fascism stymied is to throw the first move and run them back down the hole they came out of.

    I wish peace and education worked against them…

    you let them get enough confidence to march in your town and get away with it, you will wind up with an all out nazi infestation. Best to not let them. They are weenies and will run if you come correct from the get. If you don’t let them start nothin, there won’t be nothin.

    My philosophy is not to be confused with Jason Aldean’s Try That In A Small Town sad boy threats. Our intolerances are completely opposite.

  4. leslie 2023-08-16 02:15

    Driving through the mountains for five hours tonight, i listened to a Pop-Country Cheyenne station for five hours and there was not a single song that didn’t have stupid lyrics and zero melody, with the words “ain’t got”, “gurl”, “drinkin’ thinkin’” ryhmes, “Mamma” or “Daddy”, and “home”, but the grossest of all of the tunes was Aldean’s coarse, insulting, violent advocation of his SMALL TOWN. Nashville country pop music is really for morons.

  5. Nick Nemec 2023-08-16 07:13

    If Mr. Ross is in fact a member of the Air Force Reserve I urge his commanding officers to keep an eye on him and to report his legal but odious activities on any fitness reports. If he ever applies to actually become a commissioned officer (which all flight nurses are) the Air Force officials that decide who gets an Air Force commission need to have a comlete picture.

  6. Bonnie B Fairbank 2023-08-16 08:29

    Leslie: Nashville country pop music IS and stands for morons. If you are brave enough to tell them that, you’ll be called an “elite effin n****r like that effin Obama” or, my personal favorite, a “stupid effin c*nt bunny n****r lover.” My crime? I said, out loud, in ’15 or ’16, if I never heard “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” again, it would be too soon. I’ve no idea why these morons dragged race into this verbal beatdown.

    Try that in a small town. Just lucky I didn’t get assaulted, because South Duhkoduhns are a notoriously tolerant bunch.

  7. Nick Nemec 2023-08-16 08:31

    Prior to reporting to Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in 1980 the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) did a background check on me. Prior to being granted a Top Secret clearance a few years later a much more thorough background check was completed.

  8. JO 2023-08-16 22:18

    It wasn’t like this at all when I received my BSN from. SDSU in 1977. Could it possibly be due to our state being overrun by GOP dumb asses?

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