League Of The South Defends Man Who Inspired Charleston Killer Dylann Roof

Back in February supporters of the League Of The South demonstrated at an anti-gay marriage rally on the steps of the Alabama capitol. Yesterday Michael Hill, president of the League, defended the author of the website for the Council Of Conservative Citizens.  Warren Throckmorton has the statement:

The League of the South supports our friend and compatriot, Kyle Rogers, of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), who is being lambasted by the left-wing media for turning Dylann Roof, the young man arrested for the Charleston church shooting, into a “white nationalist.” From our point of view, all Mr. Rogers has done is diligently catalog the facts about the epidemic of black-on-white violent crime in America. We see this as a service that the mainstream US media refuses to provide to the public, thereby endangering the lives of many innocent people. The fact that young Mr. Roof chose to act on this information is no fault of Mr. Rogers or anyone else who tells the hard truths about race that the leftist media regularly sweeps under the rug. To attempt to blame Mr. Rogers, the CofCC, the Confederate battle flag, Southern culture, or the Easter Bunny for causing this murder is the sort of repulsive ideological persecution one used to find commonplace in the old USSR. It is, in a word, shameful.

PREVIOUSLY ON JMG: Michael Hill participates in JMG thread. The League Of The South celebrates 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Creationist Ken Ham headlines convention held by former League head Michael Peroutka. Right Wing Watch reports that Michael Peroutka bankrolled the return of Roy Moore to the Alabama Supreme Court. The SPLC reports that the membership rolls of the League and the Council of Conservative Citizens "overlap greatly." Tony Perkins speaks at 2001 meeting of the Council Of Conservative Citizens.

Ted Cruz To Return Donations From Leader Of Council Of Conservative Citizens

Via the Guardian:

The leader of a rightwing group that Dylann Roof allegedly credits with helping to radicalise him against black people before the Charleston church massacre has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republicans such as presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum. 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.

After being approached by the Guardian on Sunday, Cruz’s presidential campaign said it would be returning all money the senator had received from Holt. Holt, 62, is the president of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), a Missouri-based activist organisation cited by the author of a manifesto-style text that was posted on a website registered in Roof’s name along with photographs of the gunman. The FBI said on Saturday it was investigating the website. The manifesto’s author, who has been widely reported but not verified as Roof, recounted learning about “brutal black on white murders” from the CofCC website.

The CCC has issued a statement which condemns Dylann Roof but also defends his "legitimate grievances."

The C of CC unequivocally condemns Roof’s murderous actions. However, the council stands unshakably behind the facts on its website, and points out the dangers of denying the extent of black-on-white crime. Every year, there are about 500,000 violent , interracial crimes. Of these, about 85 percent are committed by blacks against whites. Every year, there are some 20,000 rapes of white women by blacks, but rapes by white men of black women are so unusual, they scarcely appear in crime statistics.

If these figures were reversed—if there were wide-spread white-on-black rape and violence—it would be constant national news. Instead, the true nature of interracial violence is ignored. This is dangerous. Our society’s silence about these crimes—despite enormous amounts of attention to “racially tinged” acts by whites—only increase the anger of people like Dylann Roof. This double standard *only makes acts of murderous frustration more likely*.

In his manifesto, Roof outlines other grievances felt by many whites. Again, we utterly condemn Roof’s despicable killings, but they do not detract in the slightest from the legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed. *Ignoring legitimate grievances is dangerous*.

Hit the Guardian link for many of the appalling statements attributed to Earl Holt, some of which were made in the comments sections of Glenn Beck's site The Blaze.

Charleston Mass Murderer Researched The Same White Supremacists Group Once Addressed By FRC President Tony Perkins

As I have mentioned here many times over the years, in 2001 then Louisiana state Rep. Tony Perkins addressed (photo above) the Council Of Conservative Citizens, an SPLC certified racist hate group with active chapters in more than a dozen states including South Carolina. Perkins' speech to the CCC (formerly the White Citizens Council) came only five years after he was fined by the Federal Elections Commission for lying about an $82K payment to Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Per its website, the CCC opposes "race mixing" and considers black people "a retrograde species of humanity."

Today we learn that another fan of the CCC is Charleston mass murderer Dylann Roof. The Inquisitr quotes from Roof's just-discovered manifesto:

"But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words 'black on White crime' into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”

The Inquisitr notes that the CCC's website has crashed today due to it now being linked to the Charleston massacre. The SPLC maintains a lengthy file on the CCC, here's an excerpt:

The danger of "race-mixing" has been a consistent theme for the group since the days of the White Citizens Councils. "God is the author of racism," said one story on the CCC's website in 2001. "God is the One who divided mankind into different types. ... Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God." After the NAACP declared its boycott of South Carolina in 1999 because the state continued to fly the Confederate battle flag over its Capitol dome, the CCC distributed a mock advertisement proclaiming, "South Carolina Now Has Whiter Beaches!" The Citizens Informer item urged whites to vacation in South Carolina and "enjoy a civil liberty that has been denied to them for many years at hotels, restaurants and beaches: the freedom to associate with just one's own people." Along with theological arguments, the Citizens Informer has published countless stories detailing "scientific" evidence for white people's inherent superiority.

According to the SPLC, the CCC calls LGBT Americans "perverted sodomites." The SPLC also notes that the membership rolls of the Council Of Conservative Citizens "overlap greatly" with those of the League Of The South, the racist group which recently distributed signs at an Alabama anti-gay marriage rally addressed by Roy Moore, whose return to the Alabama Supreme Court was bankrolled by the League's former president.

Tony Perkins and other hate group leaders regularly scream with outrage when the LGBT movement is compared to the black civil rights movement. Yet time after time after time after time we find that both movements share common enemies. The next time Perkins appears on cable news, we need to pressure every outlet to mention what HE has in common with confessed mass murderer Dylann Roof.