Tea Party Links to White Separatist Blog to Claim That Lewis Reed is "Using Race"

No, I'm not making this up. The St. Louis Tea Party today promoted a blog post claiming that Lewis Reed, President of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, was "striking out" at the tea party to "hide his corruption."

The post, written by St. Louis tea partier Jim Durbin, was full of their usual discredited conspiracy theories about yachts and ballrooms that were debunked during the Carnahan/Ed Martin contest. However, a vindictive comment at the end took Durbin's post over the edge. Durbin wrote, addressing Reed:

One thing is for sure. The use of race to divide an electorate is in your bag of tricks. But this time, we're watching. And recording.

Curious to see what Durbin was talking about, I followed the link. It took me to a web page proudly proclaiming a "St. Louis CofCC Blog Exclusive."

What is the significance of the "St. Louis C of CC", you ask? I'll let the Anti-Defamation League explain:

The St. Louis-based Council of Conservative Citizens traces its roots directly to the racist, anti-integrationist White Citizens' Councils of the 1950s and 1960s. Its current leader, attorney Gordon Lee Baum, was an organizer for the WCC and built the Council of Conservative Citizens in part from the old group's mailing lists. Like its predecessor, the CCC inflames fears and resentments, particularly among Southern whites, with regard to black-on-white crime, nonwhite immigration, attacks on the Confederate flag and other issues related to "traditional" Southern culture. Although the group claims not to be racist, its leaders traffic with other white supremacist groups and its publications, Web sites and meetings all promote the purportedly innate superiority of whites.

The article continues:

Both on its national and chapter Web sites and in its primary publication, The Citizens Informer, CCC's belief in white superiority and its derision of nonwhites, particularly African Americans, are delineated without apology....

The ideology of The Citizens Informer's editors is echoed in the publication's pages, although in a somewhat muted form. Many articles consist of either tributes to the superiority of the white race or diatribes about black violence or Hispanic immigration. As Robert Patterson, the publication's past editor, has written in a column, "...any effort to destroy the race by a mixture of black blood is an effort to destroy Western civilization itself." Columnist H. Millard has offered a similar observation and a morek visceral anxiety about intermarriage when he argued that minorities are turning the United States population into a "slimy brown mass of glop." Other essays in the publication lament the victimization of whites at the hands of minorities and the liberal "elite."

Other contributing writers to The Citizens Informer have included Jared Taylor, publisher of American Renaissance, which argues that African Americans are genetically inferior; Indianapolis Baptist Temple Pastor Greg Dixon, who believes that churches are not bound by human laws or regulations; and psychology professor Glayde Whitney, who wrote the preface to David Duke's racist and anti-Semitic "autobiographical thesis" My Awakening ("Completely separately from David Duke," Whitney wrote, "my inquiries led to essentially the same places and some of the same conclusions that he spells out in this book.")

Or, if you prefer, you can read the history of the C of CC at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which echoes the ADL site:

The Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) is the modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South. Created in 1985 from the mailing lists of its predecessor organization, the CCC, which initially tried to project a "mainstream" image, has evolved into a crudely white supremacist group whose website has run pictures comparing pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape and referred to blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity." The group's newspaper, Citizens Informer, regularly publishes articles condemning "race mixing," decrying the evils of illegal immigration, and lamenting the decline of white, European civilization.

Both the ADL and SPLC sites have much more about the history full of disgusting details, so click through if you want to get the full flavor of the group.

Linking to a white supremacist web site to justify the claim that Lewis Reed "uses race to divide an electorate," is extremely bad, but maybe you could argue that Jim Durbin had his head in the sand for most of his adult life and didn't realize who the group was. In fact, there is a quite a bit of evidence that Durbin has his head in the sand most of the time. However, that would not explain how he could feel free to justify his statement about Reed with the absurd logic spouted in the Council of Conservative Citizens blog post.

Here's how the white separatist post sets up their "issue" with Lewis Reed

Mr. Reed has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and no doubt his math education has taught him that if he expects to win this election, he is going to have to get enough white votes from south city. While south city is becoming more and more non-white (especially black), still the vast majority of voters in south city are white.

However, Mr. Reed has some competition for that white vote, and that being the white incumbent he is challenging.

The post then goes on to mention that Reed, in his election contest against Shrewsbury, sent out a mailer suggesting that Shrewsbury bore some responsibility for the high rates of crime in the city. I have no idea if that was true or not, but either way it sounds like a pretty standard attack mailer. But check out what the Council of Conservative Citizen's blogger takes issue with:

After seeing all that, a white voter in south city might be tempted to want to get rid of Shrewsbury now, and vote for that other guy.

What other guy?

There isn’t anything in this ad about the “other guy.”

Except if you look way at the bottom of the yellow, underneath the red stripe. If you can’t see it, then go to the full resolution version and scroll to the bottom.

In tiny white letters, very unreadable on the yellow background, and very easy to miss, are these words:

“Paid for by Committe [sic] to Elect Lewis Reed Thomas Shepard, Treasurer”

Okay. Is Lewis Reed Thomas Shepard running for City Treasurer? If you didn’t know that Mr. Reed was the opposition on March 6, you would think so. But if you know, you also know that, by accident or design, no punctuation mark exists between “Reed” and “Thomas” to indicate that Lewis Reed was running for Aldermanic President, and that Thomas Shepard was his campaign treasurer.

Okay, brass tacks time.

Lewis Reed needs white south city votes. But he can’t get those in the numbers he needs if the average white person knows he is black. So his strategy here is to whoop up hostility toward Shrewsbury among whites on a white concern, (black) crime, and get people not to vote for Shrewsbury or to vote for his opponent, and not indicate who is opponent is, and certainly not show a picture of his opponent. In other words, trick the dummies.

Got that? This blogger is complaining about the fact that Lewis Reed, a black man, sent out an attack ad focused on crime without indicating that he is black. In fact, the blogger claimed that Reed was "tricking" voters by not including a picture of himself! He is, in effect, claiming that whenever black politicians send out a mailer about crime, they are obligated to inform the recipients that they are black! Blatant racist garbage!

And Durbin links to this to claim that Reed "uses race to divide an electorate." The evidence? That Lewis Reed did not tell people he was black when he sent out a flier about crime. This is beyond despicable, and is a new low even for Durbin.

Back in 2007, Bill Hennessy apologized for linking to the Council of Conservative Citizens web site. Let's hope the tea party does so again. But this is more than just a bad link: Durbin was suggesting that Lewis Reed needs to include photos of himself in mailers about crime. Without some really good explanation that I currently can't imagine, I'm not sure how anyone could justify promoting Durbin's garbage after this.