Town manager in Maine who wants separation of races hasn't been fired yet

The town manager in rural Jackman, Maine, wants separation of races, calls Islam “barbarism,” and is active on alt-right social media. But he still has a job, at least until Tuesday when town authorities are scheduled to meet to decide his fate.

Tom Kawczynski, 37, last year founded New Albion, a group that wants to keep New England’s white majority and keep out Muslims. His views were discovered by local media that ran across his website and posting on alt-right social media service Gab. He also set up a page for New Albion on Hatreon, a crowdfunding site used by people like Richard Spencer because it lacks hate-speech restrictions.

“I am not a white supremacist. I am not a racist,” Kawczynski told the Portland Press Herald. “What gets me in trouble sometimes is I am a white person who is not ashamed to be white.”

But Kawczynski, appointed to the job in June, says his "pro-white" views do not make him a racist.

“We are pro-white without being anti–other groups in terms of their racial identity,” he told the Bangor Daily News. That said, he says his group opposes “the idea of bringing people in from the outside that come from different cultures.”

His colleagues in the state, which Kawczynski moved to just last year from New Hampshire, where he was active on the Trump presidential campaign, aren’t buying his defense.

“Wow,” Zachary Heiden, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, told the Bangor Daily News. “That’s shockingly racist.”

The same goes for local leaders.

Kawczynski’s beliefs “do not reflect the beliefs of the townspeople in general,” Jackman town lawyer Warren Shay told the Associated Press on Sunday.

“We the business community of Jackman, would like to state that we do not condone the current view of Tom Kawczynski,” wrote Gary Hall, president of the Jackman-Moose River region Chamber of Commerce, in a statement. “We believe in American values of freedom, diversity, and inclusiveness.”

Kawczynski doesn’t seem to agree with those values, at least when it comes to Islam. He’s called it “the scourge of Western civilization.” On Gab, a popular social media platform for the alt-right, he’s praised Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, who’s called Muslim immigrants “scum” and wants to ban the Quran, for “speaking out honestly against Islam.”

He said these views don’t affect how he administers town services to Jackman’s 862 (almost entirely white) people. But he concedes he could soon be out of a job.

“I don’t know anything yet, but I strongly suspect that I’ll need to be doing something else soon,” Kawczynski told Bangor Daily News on Saturday.

Kawczynski, who says he’s being treated differently because of his beliefs, is planning to write a book about his experience. So far he’s raised a total of $98 on his group’s GoFundMe page.

Cover: Jackman, Maine, town manager Tom Kawczynski poses in front of a white nationalist flag on his GoFundMe page.