The G.O.P.’s Ties to Extremism Go Beyond the Confederate Flag (The New Yorker)
JUNE 23, 2015
BY JOHN CASSIDY
... On Tuesday, South Carolina lawmakers voted to debate hauling down the flag, and State Senator Paul Thurmond, son of the segregationist Strom Thurmond, indicated he favored such a course. But it wasn’t immediately clear when this vote will take place. On Wednesday, when the body of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a widely respected state senator who was also the pastor of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, is brought to the Capitol to lie in state, the flag may well still be flying nearby.
Even if common decency prevails, however, and it is taken down before Pinckney’s coffin arrives, Republicans will still have some explaining to do. The furor over the flag has distracted attention from another disturbing element of the story in Charleston: apparently, Dylann Roof, the accused shooter, picked up some of his racist ideology from a right-wing hate group that has had extensive ties with the Republican Party, and whose leader has donated more than thirteen thousand dollars to four G.O.P. Presidential candidates ...
The Council of Conservative Citizens, which is based in Missouri, is not well known nationally, but it is a familiar presence in right-wing circles. Over the weekend, the Guardian’s Jon Swaine reported that its leader, Earl Holt III, has donated more than ten thousand dollars to the Presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum. And in a follow-up story, Swaine revealed that another twenty Republican politicians also received money from Holt. They include Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, one of the front-runners in the 2016 race; U.S. senators Joni Ernst, of Iowa; Thom Tillis, of North Carolina; Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana; and Tom Cotton, of Arkansas; and Congressman Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin. All told, according to Swaine, Holt has in recent years donated seventy-four thousand dollars to G.O.P. candidates.
Founded in 1985, the C.C.C.’s Web site says that it is dedicated to preserving “liberty, justice, and national safety.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing groups, the C.C.C. “has evolved into a crudely white supremacist group whose website has run pictures comparing the late pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape and referred to black people as ‘a retrograde species of humanity.’ ” Holt apparently became the C.C.C.’s president earlier this year, following the death of its longtime leader, Gordon Baum. Less is known about Holt than about Baum, but Holt appears to have posted semi-regular comments on articles published by The Blaze, a conservative news site, including one comment claiming that blacks have “murdered about 200,000 whites in America since the mid-1960s” ...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-g-o-p-s-extremism-problem-goes-beyond-the-confederate-flag