Until last month, Thomas Achord was the principal of the Sequitur Classical Academy, a Baton Rouge school providing a “classical Christian education,” and a respected member of the increasingly noisy Christian nationalist movement. A married man and father to four children, he was also the co-host of a theocracy-promoting podcast with Stephen Wolfe, the author of a book released last month called The Case for Christian Nationalism.
In short, a respected man of position in the precincts of the “Christians rule, you drool” school of religious philosophy. A bigoted practice that is now openly and aggressively embraced by Constitution-be-damned Christian first amendment-deniers.
Then, shortly before Thanksgiving, as Will Sommer reported in The Daily Beast, Twitter detectives uncovered his alter-ego, ‘Tulius Aadland’, on the social media site. Through this avatar, Achord revealed himself to be racist, antisemitic, and a first-order sexist.
He referred to Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) as a “negress”, called a Black man “animalistic.” and characterized Black teenagers as “chimps.” He yearned for “race realist white nationalism.” And he expounded on his ideas about “Jewish satanism” and argued that Jewish people were tricking the United States into “Jew wars.”
In a 2020 tweet, he wrote, “White boys simp. Black boys chimp.”
In his tweets, Achord also talked about his desire to use “classical Christian education”—the Christian movement that his school, Sequitur Classical Academy, follows—to train white nationalists. In a 2020 series of tweets, Achord complained that Christian education wasn’t doing enough to support white nationalism. He wrote that he wanted to provide “resources for white advocates to take back the West for white peoples.”
Achord also indulged his weak-spined misogyny, writing that he would only defend any woman, including his wife, because she’s his “possession,” not because of any respect for her.
He made bizarre comments about Cuties, the 2020 Netflix movie criticized for sexualizing its 11-year-old actress. He did not object to the whiff of pedophilia. His issue was that these pre-pubescent girls were not “comely.”
“I hate to point this out but the ‘Cuties’ are ugly,” he tweeted. “This isn’t a sexual comment [which means it was]. They’re just not comely children. They have horse faces and donkey teeth.”
How often did he watch it to come to that conclusion?
Achord’s downfall came when Christian writer Alastair Roberts noted similarities between Achord’s public writings and the Aadland account. Most notably, Achord wrote a tweet under the Tulius handle in 2020 with a picture of a room reserved for a grief support group. Achord mocked the group, calling the idea of men sharing their grief “weakness” and “garbage”—but Roberts noticed that a placard with the room number carried Sequitur’s logo.
When the connection became obvious just before Thanksgiving, the school (to its credit) did not hesitate. It dismissed this miserable little man.
Predictably, Achord initially claimed he didn’t run the account. He insisted that an impersonator posing as him was trying to sabotage his career.
However, Robert’s evidence was voluminous and compelling. And Achord was forced to drop his deficient defense. Not that he offered a mea culpa and accepted the consequences of his small-minded, peevish rants. Hardly. Instead, he claimed he had forgotten he ever ran it in the first place.
In a Medium post, Achord wrote,
“After more thorough research with the help of trusted friends and advisors and a great deal of counsel and soul-searching, I have come to conclude that the Tulius Aadland twitter account is indeed an old alias account of mine.” That’s mighty white of him.
He adds, “After some deep reflection and consultation, I believe this period of my life was a spiritually dark time marked by pessimism and anger and strained relationships. The Twitter account reflects a despairing man angry with the whole world. I maintain that I have trouble recollecting tweets (and the entire account). (Bolding mine)
Achord’s attempt to suggest that Tulius Aadfrod was a separate identity that revealed himself while Achord was in some fugue state is laughable. This bayou bigot published, under his real name, a racist screed, “Who Is My Neighbor?: An Anthology In Natural Relations.” It is little more than a collection of quotes by fellow extremist travelers pining for a white America where non-entities can feel like they are somebody.
Some dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist Christians chastised Achord for his hate. Ultra-conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher, whose children attended Sequitur and whose wife taught there until Achord’s account was discovered, blasted Achord’s racism in a blog post.
“You were an online racist, anti-Semite, woman-hating creep who admitted on that account to wanting to use Classical Christian Education as a Trojan horse for white nationalism—and did this while you were the headmaster of a school that trusted you!”
But as Phillip Gorski, a Yale religious studies professor and co-author of a book on white Christian nationalism called The Flag and the Cross, the Achord controversy is another example of Christian nationalists being in “denial” about the racists within their movement.
“People are sort of surprised when the clerical collar comes off and it turns out there are ‘SS’ insignias underneath, but they shouldn’t be.
Christian nationalists are fascists — and profoundly unAmerican.