Miss Scarlett, the “Southern Avenger” has surrendered.

On Sunday, Jack Hunter, a close aide to U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, announced he had resigned from the Kentucky Republican’s Washington staff after a storm of controversy erupted July 9 surrounding Hunter’s past neo-Confederate statements and views, such as toasting the birthday every year of President Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

The resignation came despite Paul’s outspoken defense of his aide, in which the senator claimed that there was “no evidence” that Hunter had exhibited any bigoted beliefs or behavior. ( continue to full post… )

White nationalists, learning yesterday of activist Derek Black’s renouncing of the movement, reacted with disbelief, conspiracy theories and unbridled fury. But it was the fact that Black, son of the former Alabama Klan leader who now runs the largest racist Web forum in the world, made his comments to the Southern Poverty Law Center that seemed to be the single factor that most rankled the racist world.

The reaction that may have been the most noticed came from Don Black, who expressed his shock about his son’s comments on his Stormfront blog. “Derek was here all weekend, helping us build and replace old windows” at the family home in West Palm Beach, Fla., the elder Black wrote. “He’s made it annoyingly obvious over the past few months he was no longer interested in WN [white nationalist] activism, but he always said he was still WN. I knew the Jews at the Poverty Palace [SPLC] were working hard, since he would be such a big prize for them.

“But he didn’t give us a clue as to what he planned today.” ( continue to full post… )

Derek Black, son of the former Alabama Klan leader who now runs the largest racist Web forum in the world, has renounced white nationalism, saying that he has been through “a gradual awakening process” and apologizing for his past activism.

In an E-mail (pdf) to the editor of this blog earlier this week, Black, 24, wrote that he had come to see the arguments of white nationalism as “principally flawed,” adding that he had realized that American society is marked by an “overwhelming disparity between white power and that of everyone else” and that white nationalism was really about “an entrenched desire to preserve white power at the expense of others.” ( continue to full post… )

The U.S. Army is not commenting on its decision to suspend with pay one of its chemical and biological research engineers while he is investigated for his reported close ties to two racist groups espousing white nationalist views.

John Stortstrom, a mechanical engineer who worked for the Army at its Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC) in Maryland, was suspended May 28 after published reports disclosed he was among 150 white nationalists who attended the American Renaissance conference in early April in Tennessee. American Renaissance is a journal dedicated to race and intelligence, with a heavy focus on the “psychopathology” of black people. Its editor has written that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization. ( continue to full post… )

For the second time in a month, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens’ (CCC) entanglement with elements of the South Carolina GOP has come to light in a deeply embarrassing moment for the Republican Party.

In a video recorded during the annual CCC national conference held June 7-8 in Winston-Salem, N.C., CCC webmaster Kyle Rogers boasted (around 2:45 minutes into the video) that he was a member of the Dorchester County GOP’s Executive Committee. A call to Executive Committee Chairman Jordan Bryngelson confirmed Rogers’ membership. “Yes,” Bryngelson told Hatewatch, “embarrassingly, Rogers is a member of the Executive Committee.” Bryngelson asked Rogers to resign, but according to the party’s bylaws, there is no way to force Rogers out unless he breaks certain party rules.

The request to Rogers to resign followed by a month the resignation of Roan Garcia-Quintana from S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley’s 2014 re-election campaign steering committee (of which Bryngelson is also a member). Garcia-Quintana quit the committee after Hatewatch revealed that he was a former board director and lifetime member of the CCC, a racist group directly descended from the old White Citizens Councils that angrily battled school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. ( continue to full post… )

Roan Garcia-Quintana is a board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which opposes “all efforts to mix the races of mankind.”

At 62, Roan Garcia-Quintana is a worldly, retired college professor and longtime South Carolina political operative with deep roots in the Republican Party. That’s why what he recently told the Charleston City Paper sounds like such a bizarre story. You know: BS.

In an interview with the paper, he was trying to explain himself after he was forced to resign from Gov. Nikki Haley’s 2014 re-election campaign steering committee last month shortly after Hatewatch revealed that Garcia-Quintana is a lifetime member and current board member of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).

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“The only people who can be trusted to be in charge are white people.” Keith Alexander at CCC Conference, 2013

What do you call a weekend spent immigrant-bashing, democracy-dissing, race-baiting, Holocaust-death-toll-denying, pistol-packing, and calling for “bigots to come together?”

If you guessed two days at the nearest funny farm, you weren’t far off.

The correct answer, however, is the 2013 national conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) held last Friday and Saturday at a downtown hotel in Winston-Salem, N.C. About 75 people attended, some of whom carried pistols strapped to their hips.

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A young research engineer at the U.S. Army’s elite chemical and biological research laboratory in Maryland has close ties to two racist groups espousing white nationalist views, one of which has called for a homeland for white people.

John Stortstrom, a mechanical engineer who works for the Army at its Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC), was among 150 white nationalists, many of them young, who attended the American Renaissance conference held in early April in Tennessee. American Renaissance is a journal dedicated to race and intelligence, with a heavy focus on the “psychopathology” of black people. Its editor has written that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization. ( continue to full post… )

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants and just the third person of color to be elected governor of a Southern state.

So, one might think she would want nothing to do with racists and anti-immigrant extremists. Not so, apparently.

In anticipation of her 2014 re-election campaign, the Tea Party darling has put together a 164-member steering committee comprising folks from all 46 of her state’s counties. And on that list is one “Republican leader” and Tea Party activist named Roan Garcia-Quintana of Greenville.

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Yet another organization with a white supremacist agenda — this one packaged as a “white nationalist think tank” — has moved its operations to northwestern Montana, leaving Georgia to join a rag-tag collection of some of the country’s leading racists and extremists.

The National Policy Institute (NPI), which enjoys tax-exempt status, now lists a post office box in Whitefish, Mont., where, public records show, its new director Richard Bertroud Spencer lives in a $3 million home. Spencer moved NPI to Montana after the late 2011 death of chairman Louis R. Andrews, documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service reveal. ( continue to full post… )