Jim Hoft Continues To Promote Racism At His Site

Is Jim "Gateway Pundit" Hoft a racist? I have no idea. But at this point there can be no doubt that Hoft allows, encourages, and even promotes racist material on his blog in order to drive up traffic and stir up white resentment for political reasons.

In just the past two weeks, Talking Points Memo described a completely fabricated Hoft attack on the President as a "fact free racist conspiracy" and a Los Angeles Times columnist called out a different story by Hoft as "baldly racist." Hoft's comments on those stories have been cesspools of openly racist comments.

But before going into more detail about the recent examples, let's review some of the history:

Hoft had earlier been criticized by a conservative blogger for linking to the white supremacist blog for the Council of Conservative Citizens, which he has done multiple times. Here's my previous description:

In 2009, Hoft linked to a video that claimed, without any evidence, that a white child had been beaten up by black kids on a school bus. Though it was true that the boy had been beaten, the race of the attackers was never mentioned in any of the news reports (this is not to be confused with a different incident in which there was video of a bus assault). Hoft had gotten his account from the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization based in St. Louis, and he originally linked directly to them in his post. This was not the first time Hoft had linked to white supremacist organization Council of Conservative Citizens.

After being criticized in the comments by fellow conservatives, Hoft moved the link to the Council of Conservative Citizens blog to a new location but still kept it on the blog (see update #2; note that this is from the blog of a conservative blogger). He finally removed even that link but kept up his link to the misleading video from the youtube page of KillTheCensors.

Though Hoft removed that particular link, to this day he still has links on his site to the Council of Conservative Citizens blog, despite being alerted to their presence:


You can see the link at the bottom of Hoft's web page. The St. Louis Council of Conservative Citizens moved their blog to a new place, so the link doesn't work from his page, but you can still find it on the wayback machine. As you can see, "Official Webblog of the St. Louis Metropolitan Area Council of Conservative Citizens" is clearly spelled out on the front page:


The Council of Conservative Citizens is a remnant of the White Citizens Councils and has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (read much more here). What kinds of things did the St. Louis area C of CC blog write about? Here's an example of their work, with the group attacking George Bush as "useless' because Bush came out against public noose displays in a post titled "Blacks Say Jump. Bush Says How High?" (click to photo for a larger version):


In 2007, Bill Hennessy (who later became the founder of the St. Louis Tea Party) apologized for linking to the Council of Conservative Citizens after recognizing their racism. When I caught a different tea party linking to a post on the new St. Louis C of CC blog, they removed the link with a short explanation. Yet Jim Hoft has never apologized for linking to an openly racist group, and still keeps a link up to their website to this day.

Furthermore, the Council of Conservative Citizens is not the only racist source Hoft uses. Hoft was called out by myself and by our local Village Voice owned alternative weekly, the Riverfront Times, for using a video from the openly racist website "Diversity is Crap." Here's an example of the type of comment that post from Hoft attracted:

I teach my children to stay as far clear of non-Whites as is practically possible. Our girls are being groomed by the Media to be their whores, or if unwilling, their rape victims, and our boys are being taught that to speak without a ghetto patois is to be eternally, fatally uncool. Both are factors in the destruction of our society.

Despite being criticized for openly racist comments on his site (click here for more examples), Hoft has left them up on his blog to this day. He will, however, remove comments that criticize himself.

So fast forward to the present. A couple weeks ago Talking Points Memo called out the Right's latest race-based conspiracy theory. The post was centered around Trump tweeting a link to Jim Hoft's story. Here's what TPM wrote:

On Wednesday, Trump tweeted his endorsement of the latest bit of holiday cheer from the extremist ant-Obama right. As the story goes on more than one conservative blog this week, Obama declined to offer an official statement marking Christmas, but made sure to get one out celebrating Kwanzaa.

This tale is as blatantly racial as it is demonstrably false, and it comes in the grand tradition of accusing Obama of supporting Ramadan over Easter and the old Trump favorite that Obama got into the Ivy League because he’s not white, not because he’s smart.

The trouble with the story about Christmas and Kwanzaa is that it’s 100% untrue. Here’s Obama using his taxpayer-funded weekly video address to wish Americans “a Merry Christmas” this past weekend
...

Hoft still hasn't updated his post with the truth.

And earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times took issue with a racist image Hoft used in one of his posts:

A baldly racist depiction of First Lady Michelle Obama that appeared Tuesday on a right-wing website is based on a 1775 portrait of Marie Antoinette by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty (1740-1786). The full-length painting hangs outside Paris in the Palace of Versailles.

The Internet image grafts Obama's face onto Gautier-Dagoty's lavish depiction of the French queen, dressed in full regalia. It also replaces the draped left arm of the young monarch, then barely 20, with a muscular black arm and shifts the position of the right hand to place it in front of a world globe.

The caricature of Obama as a profligate queen relies on the racist stereotype of an "uppity Negro," which emerged among slave masters in an earlier American era. Obama, born into a working-class Chicago family whose roots are traced to the pre-Civil War South, graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, prior to holding several high-level positions in the academic and private sectors.

The racist image appeared Tuesday on the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit; the slur was later called out by Media Matters for America. A post by Gateway blogger Jim Hoft paired the picture with a clip of the first lady's guest appearance on a forthcoming episode of "iCarly," a Nickelodeon sit-com. In the script, Obama commends the cast for their support of military families. Responding to a cast member who mistakenly addresses her as "your excellency," the script has Obama jokingly reply, "I kinda like it."

Hoft hasn't changed the posts in response to the criticisms, and in fact continues to allow racist comments to fester. Despite being called out by Eric Boehlert at Media Matters, Hoft left up a comment on his post attacking Michelle Obama that called her "the queen of the crackheads."

And a more recent post includes a commenter who refers to her as the "First Negress:"


Whether done out of intentional malice or pure sloppiness, this disgusting promotion of racism should be intolerable for any modern, decent human beings. Yet not only do Republican politicians like Peter Kinder and Ann Wagner fail to call out people like Hoft, they openly pander to him and beg for his support.

St. Louis should be better than this.