This was made manifestly clear by the ardent following that Trump immediately developed for his “anti-PC” style of campaigning: instead of plummeting in the polls, as many expected after Trump’s wildly controversial opening speech, his approval ratings climbed. And climbed. And climbed.
Longtime nativists soon perceived in Trump a bandwagon they could jump on. Among the friends and admirers Trump acquired who were movement conservatives was one of their leading mavens, the syndicated columnist Ann Coulter. Coulter had long complained that immigration was an issue that Republicans kept overlooking and botching in national elections—because they hadn’t gone far enough to the right.
In fact, Coulter had made that very argument in a book that came out on June 1, 2015, Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole. She had been making the rounds of all the right-wing TV talk shows to promote it—and a few mainstream programs as well.
Coulter has a long history of citing far-right extremists and white nationalists in her work, and this one was no different. Retailing a hodgepodge of recycled nativist talking points, the book cited a number of white supremacist sources, and repeated the assertion of Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, that “immigration is a proxy war against America.” She also claimed in the book that Latinos sustained a “culture of misogyny.”
Coulter also credited another well-known white nationalist figure named Peter Brimelow—the founder of an openly racist website called VDare (named for Virginia Dare, the first white child born in North America)—for her anti-immigrant politics. These views were seconded by another well-known “academic racist,” Jared Taylor, who declared that with her book Coulter “has established herself as the foremost advocate for immigration sanity in America—if not the world.”
Meanwhile, on TV and elsewhere, Coulter did what she does best—serve up sound bites of outrageous commentary that stir up condemnation from mainstream liberals and that warm the hearts of her fellow conservatives. This time out, though, Coulter had grown beyond outrageous and become genuinely vicious, warning Americans they “better get used to having your little girls get raped” as a result of immigration and that “Americans should fear immigrants more than ISIS,” and sneering that Mexican culture “is obviously deficient.” She denied that there was anything bigoted about this: “Hispanics are not black,” she countered, “so drop the racism crap.”
Coulter, who had been an ardent Romney supporter, had begun to turn in Trump’s direction, telling one interviewer that a Trump-Romney ticket would stop “foreigners” from outvoting “white Americans.” It was apparently a mutual-admiration society: Coulter told a reporter that Trump had “asked for, and received, an advance copy of my book, and he told me … that he’s read the book cover to cover.” Trump tweeted out that Coulter’s book was “a great read. Good job!”
One of the solutions to immigration from south of the border was to build an effective wall along the Mexican border. “Contrary to repeated assertions that fences don’t work,” Coulter asserted, “… after Israel completed a fence along its border in 2013, the number of illegal aliens entering the country dropped to zero.”
When Trump announced his plans to run for president on June 15, he made the wall idea the centerpiece of his attack on Mexican immigration: “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
That was just the opening act.
Another ardent Trump admirer that weekend was a South Carolina man named Kyle Rogers, the thirty-something webmaster of the St. Louis–based Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). A reincarnation of the white-supremacist Citizens Councils of the 1950s, Rogers’s new council has been designated a white-supremacist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Rogers was active in South Carolina Republican politics, although his presence was mostly seen as an embarrassment by party officials, who tried to exclude him as much as possible. He’d served as a delegate to the Charleston County Republican Convention in 2007, and in 2013 GOP officials in Dorchester County confirmed that he was a member of that county’s Republican Executive Committee. They expressed chagrin about Rogers’s participation, saying they had asked him to resign but were unable legally to eject him.
The CCC enjoyed influence even in the halls of South Carolina state government. A CCC national board member, Roan Garcia-Quintana, had run as a Republican nominee for a state senate seat in 2008, and sat on Governor Nikki Haley’s reelection campaign steering committee until his CCC membership was exposed and he was asked to resign.
The CCC had suffered a major blow when its founder and longtime leader, Gordon Baum, died in March 2015, and younger members like Kyle Rogers were increasingly seen as the face of its future. Promoting fake statistics about black crime is one of Rogers’s specialties. He maintains a section on the CCC website titled “The Color of Crime,” devoted to claims that black criminals disproportionately target white victims.
Rogers seemed to make at least some of his living by selling things online, including flags at Patriotic-Flags.com, which is directly linked at the CCC site he manages. Among the flags he sells is one from the government of Rhodesia, which no longer exists; its banner is still widely considered a symbol of white-supremacist rule in Africa, similar to the Confederate flag in the United States. And he sold T-shirts. On June 16, the day after Donald Trump’s announcement, Rogers posted to his Twitter account a link to the “Donald Trump 2016” shirts he was selling to his 40,000 Twitter followers.
But Rogers deleted his entire Twitter account later that same day—the day Dylann Roof went to Charleston.
Dylann Roof was a twenty-one-year-old resident of Columbia, South Carolina, who ran a website called “The Last Rhodesian,” devoted to white nationalism. He liked to wear Rhodesian flag patches and posed on his Facebook page wearing one while waving a Confederate flag.
Roof was an ardent member of the South Carolina branch of the CCC, although it is not clear to what extent he had associated with Rogers or other CCC leaders. In the days before he walked into a Charleston church with a gun, he had put together his manifesto, which made clear that the CCC had informed and ultimately inspired his actions that day. “I was not raised in a racist home or environment,” Roof wrote.
Living in the South, almost every White person has a small amount of racial awareness, simply because of the numbers of negroes in this part of the country. But it is a superficial awareness. Growing up, in school, the White and black kids would make racial jokes toward each other, but all they were were jokes. Me and White friends would sometimes watch things that would make us think that “blacks were the real racists” and other elementary thoughts like this, but there was no real understanding behind it.
The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. 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 remainder of the manifesto—which does not mention Donald Trump or any other politician—appears to be more or less a distillation of CCC and other white-nationalist talking points. Roof defends the history of slaveholding, adopting talking points drawn from neo-Confederate organizations such as the League of the South and the pseudo-historians