TOM TANCREDO TO SPEAK AT COUNCIL OF CONSERVATIVE CITIZENS CONFERENCE IN JULY

Hey, it wasn’t like he was fooling anyone with his racist trash talk and associations, but Tom Tancredo can’t hide it anymore. If he is speaking at the Council of Conservative Citizens conference in Nashville next month, now he needs to explain to everyone why we should still take him seriously. Bad enough we did in the first place.

One People’s Project

NASHVILLE, TN – The Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group that has long been known to have strong ties with elected officials, has announced that former Congressman Tom Tancredo is to be among the speakers at their 2012 National Conference next month.

Tancredo, who served as a Republican member of Congress from 1999 to 2009, and ran as a third party candidate for Colorado governor and came in second, is being heralded as the conference’s luncheon speaker in the CCC’s newsletter the Council Reporter. The theme of the conference is “Multiculturalism – The Death of America,” and in addition to Tancredo also features as speakers, neo-Nazis Don and Derek Black from the website Stormfront, segregationist attorney Sam Dickson, and Canadian fascist Paul Fromm.

This is not the first time Tancredo has spoken before or has been associated with white supremacist groups, but each time he has pleaded ignorance to the nature of the groups. In 2006, he spoke at a barbeque sponsored by an organization called itself Americans Have Had Enough! The group is actually an anti-immigration project of the white supremacist neo-Confederate organization League of the South. A Tancredo spokesperson denied the LOS had anything to do with the event, despite the fact they were the one promoting the event and one of its member was the event’s contact person. In an article, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted that the person who rented out the room for the event was a Council of Conservative Citizens member.

Tancredo is also an honorary chairman of Youth for Western Civilization, a white supremacist organization whose members also have ties to the Leadership Institute, which helps right-wing students organize on college campuses. In 2009 Tancredo was chased off the University of North Carolina campus by angry protestors outraged that the YWC chapter there invited him to speak, and the Providence (RI) College chapter was barred not only from bringing Tancredo on campus but even from being recognized as an official student organization.

In 2010, Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC) went into a public row with Tancredo who was scheduled to speak at an anti-immigration rally in Phoenix, Arizona organized by Pennsylvania activist Dan Smeriglio, who had ties to neo-Nazis in his state. Tancredo told the newspaper Westword that he had only spoke on the phone with Smeriglio when he was asked to speak at the rally, but never met him. A video from an anti-immigration press conference in Newark, NJ on Aug. 20, 2007 shows an entirely different story, however, with Tancredo speaking at the podium with Smeriglio standing behind him.

Tancredo’s racist statements and associations have been long documented. TalkingPointsMemo.com even published an article listing a dozen examples of his racism, among them calling then Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a member of the “Latino KKK” while ironically employing as the executive director of his Team America PAC Marcus Epstein, who was arrested in 2007 for attacking a black woman in a drunken stupor calling her the N-Word.

The Council of Conservative Citizens Conference is being held at the GuestHouse Inn and Suites in Nashville, TN on July 6, 7.