Washington Post:
By Lindsey Bever
June 23, 2015
One
night in November 2003, a man named Earl Holt reportedly typed his own
name into an Internet search engine and got back a blog post calling him
a white supremacist.
At
the time, Holt was a high-ranking member in the Council of Conservative
Citizens, deemed a “supremacist group” by the Southern Poverty Law
Center, which claims it was
the “reincarnation” of the White Citizens Councils that fought
desegregation during the Civil Rights Movement. Holt also wrote for the
group’s racially charged tabloid “Citizens Informer” and co-hosted a
radio talk show with the group’s founder Gordon Baum.
Still, he reportedly disagreed with the blogger’s claim and, according to the blogger, sent an e-mail in response.
“Hey
Commie,” the note started, “Being the shallow, n—– -loving dilettante
that you are, you probably DO consider n—— to be your equal (who am I to
question this?). Yet,
unlike you and your allies, I have an I.Q. in excess of 130, which
grants me the ability to objectively evaluate the Great American Nigro
(Africanus Criminalis).”
The
e-mail proceeded to cite statistics claiming that African Americans,
despite the U.S. government’s best efforts, were still as “criminal,
surly, lazy , violent and
stupid as he/she ever was.”
“Some
day, you sanctimonious n—— -lovers will either have to live amongst
them (“nothing cures an enthusiasm for integration like a good dose of
n——”) or else defend yourselves
against them,” it stated.
The
blogger, Larry Handlin, who went by the “Arch Pundit” online, posted
the e-mail online. It was referenced in local news articles and by the
Southern Poverty Law Center’s
Intelligence Report, which tied Holt to the e-mail using his address
and claimed to interview Holt’s radio station about it. Neither Holt nor
his spokesperson were immediately available for comment.
More
than a decade later, Holt, who now heads the group, is again in a
spotlight. Authorities said over the weekend that Charleston mass murder
suspect Dylann Roof mentioned
Holt’s group in his racist manifesto, saying he learned about “brutal
black on white murders” from the group’s Web site. Holt said in a
statement that was “not surprising”: “The CofCC is one of perhaps three
websites in the world that accurately and honestly
report black-on-white violent crime, and in particular, the seemingly
endless incidents involving black-on-white murder,” he said.
“The
CofCC is hardly responsible for the actions of this deranged individual
merely because he gleaned accurate information from our website,” he
added.
News
came Monday that had Holt had donated about $65,000 over the years to
Republican campaign funds. He gave about $25,000 to Republican
candidates in 2012 including
former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Sen. Rand
Paul (Ky.) Most immediately distanced themselves from Holt, saying they
were unaware of his affiliation and would return the money.
But
despite Holt’s many donations to Republicans, he seemed none too
pleased with the party when the Republican National Committee announced
plans in 2013 to increase
its minority outreach. “Other than profoundly endanger many canvassers
by sending potential victims into increasingly dangerous ‘hoods’ and
barrios,” he wrote on the organization’s Web site, “this ridiculous
program will achieve nothing beyond perpetuating
the RNC’s established practice of squandering and misspending funds
donated in good faith by its party faithful.”
He
was also upset, he said, that “the current RNC leadership seem
particularly susceptible to what are often opportunistic and mercenary
blacks feigning allegiance to
GOP principles in order to benefit themselves in some manner.” That’s
why, he said, he and his wife, “refuse to contribute to the RNC.”
He
preferred, he said, “to contribute directly to conservative Republican
candidates, ONLY, because we do not trust the RNC to spend our money as
wisely as we would. Moreover,
if it occurs to us to mention it, we also indicate our preference for
Tea Party-endorsed candidates, to whom we have been quite generous the
last few election cycles.”
Holt
was particularly upset with the nomination of John McCain as the
party’s presidential candidate in 2008, calling him “clueless.”
“….I
never dreamed,” he wrote, “that even a nation of dolts, gamblers,
borrowers and personal injury plaintiffs would elect a phony nigro with
three Moslem names and a
Marxist agenda, no matter how much nigro voter fraud occurred on
Election Day.”
He
didn’t think much of the news media either, which he described as
“dominated by Zionists, nigroes [sic], communists, homosexuals,
feminists and idiots.”
Holt,
62, grew up in St. Louis, Mo., where he graduated from Washington
University, Riverfront Times reported in 2003. He stepped into the
public eye in 1989 when he ran
for a seat on the St. Louis school board, joining others who had ties
to the Council of Conservative Citizens in the fight against
court-ordered busing for school desegregation, according to St. Louis
Public Radio.
Amid a losing battle, Holt stepped down in 1993.
A spokesperson for the council confirmed to St. Louis Public Radio that Holt was on the school board but did not elaborate.
Aside
from a few comments on desegregation, Holt seldom made controversial
remarks during his time on the board, according to the radio station.
For the next several years,
he devoted his time to his late-night radio talk show called “Right at
Night.” He also spent time protesting immigration, among other issues,
at small rallies. “Our open border with Mexico has become a conduit for
drugs and unskilled workers who take jobs
[for less pay] and force incomes to ratchet downward,” he told the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch at an anti-immigration rally in St. Louis in 2003.
In 2003, the news came that Holt had spotted the Arch Pundit blog post calling him a white supremacist.
The e-mail to the writer included Holt’s full name and St. Louis address, which matches public records.
The
next night, the blogger reportedly called radio station WGNU (920 AM)
during Holt’s talk show and asked Holt about it, according to the 2003
article from Riverfront
Times.
“Earl
got kind of liquored up the other night,” he said, talking about
himself, according to the Riverfront Times. “I wrote [Handlin] a really
poignant e-mail and I probably
used the n-word about maybe twenty times too many. … And I was stupid
enough to put my home telephone number on there too. And I dared them to
put the letter on the Web page, which they apparently have.
“I didn’t pull any punches, baby. I guess you could say I called a spade a spade.”
But over the past few years, other such rhetoric has been attributed to Holt online.
An
Internet user with Holt’s full name — Earl P. Holt III — has posted
racist remarks on the news site the Blaze. “The REAL ENEMY is ‘Africanus
Criminalis,’ the laziest,
stupidest and most criminally-inclined race in the history of the
world,” the poster wrote in 2011. The user talked about getting his
concealed carry license so “[white skin privilege] doesn’t get me
murdered by those without [white skin privilege]” and warned
readers not to be the “kind of person who will be completely baffled
when they kill you, rape your entire family, and burn your house to the
ground.”
Jared
Taylor, who has been acting as Holt’s media spokesman this week told
the Guardian in an interview: “If there’s a statement that is ‘Earl P
Holt III’, he probably
made it.”
The
Council of Conservative Citizens, according to the Southern Poverty Law
Center, 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.'” Its tabloid, the
“Citizens Informer,” regularly runs articles condemning ‘race mixing.’
The
group’s founder and longtime leader Baum died in March. Holt, who now
lives in Longview, Tex., took over and now operates the Missouri-based
Council of Conservative
Citizens from there.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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