“I honestly pray to God that some n*gger f*cks, kills and eats you and everyone you claim to love!” – Earl Holt III, President of the Council of Conservative Citizens, in a 2004 email
In the wake of The Guardian’s report yesterday that a conservative group, Council of Conservative Citizens – labeled a white nationalist organization by the SPLC – was linked not only to alleged killer Dylann Roof, but to numerous Republican politicians, presidential candidate Ted Cruz told the paper that he would ‘be making a full refund.’
According to Fox News this morning, Cruz has made good on his promise, “in a statement obtained by Fox News that it was returning money donated by Earl Holt III, the head of the Council of Conservative Citizens – some $8,500 since 2012 – “according to The Guardian and The New York Times.”
Cruz’s statement assures us that “Senator Cruz believes that there is no place for racism in society. Upon learning about Mr. Holt’s background and his contributions to the campaign, he immediately instructed that all of those donations be returned.”
Cruz had good reason to act quickly. According to the SPLC,
Founded in 1985 by Gordon Baum, a worker’s compensation attorney and longtime racist activist, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) rose from the ashes of the Citizens Councils of America (CCA), commonly called “White Citizens Councils,” a coalition of white-supremacist groups and individuals formed throughout the South to defend school segregation after the Supreme Court outlawed the policy in 1954 in Brown vs. Board of Education.
According to The Guardian,
Earl Holt has given $65,000 to Republican campaign funds in recent years while inflammatory remarks – including that black people were “the laziest, stupidest and most criminally-inclined race in the history of the world” – were posted online in his name.
It almost doesn’t require saying, but Ann Coulter is a past defender of and apologist for the CofCC, arguing in her 2009 book “Guilty” that,
There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation. Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes — the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media — there is little on the CCC website suggesting” [that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is] containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier.
Holt, characterized as a “St. Louis hate group leader” by the SPLC, and a frequent racist commenter on The Blaze, said in a statement that “The C of CC unequivocally condemns Roof’s murderous actions,” and that while he acknowledged the “legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed,” it is “hardly responsible for the actions of this deranged individual merely because he gleaned accurate information from our website.”
Republicans think they can embrace their racist base with utter impunity. And usually they can. It takes a monstrous act of violence like the Charleston church shooting, to shed light enough to cause the cockroaches to scramble. The mainstream media studiously ignores the GOP’s racist ties, and will continue to do so.
As the TV show X-Files put it, “The truth is somewhere out there.” It’s just that the mainstream media does not want to find it. And when it is pointed out to them, studiously avoids looking at it.
Speaking of which, Rand Paul ($1,750) and former Sen. Rick Santorum ($1,500) were also recipients of Holt’s money, as was Mitt Romney in 2012 ($2,000).
Paul, of course, has well-known neo-Confederate sympathies.
CofCC is proud of its activities, bragging in their “Why you should join” section that,
The Council of Conservative Citizens, the no longer silent majority, — is a genuinely active national organization — effectively organizing and winning!
The C of CC was organized by conservative leaders from throughout the nation, who met in Atlanta, Georgia to build an updated organization in which the “silent majority” could participate at the local, state, and national levels.
We’re organizing conservative activists, developing unity, and successfully building a network of chapters and supporters at the grass-roots level nationwide to serve as a responsible, effective voice and active advocate for the no-longer silent conservative majority. This is a unification movement that is desperately needed and long overdue.
They might brag that conservatives leaders love them, but for now, at least, conservative leaders are distancing themselves from such outward displays of racism, if only because they are watching the last few percentage points of the black demographic slip away from them just in time for Election Day 2016.
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