In her new book, does Ann Coulter actually defend a white supremacist hate group, claiming they’ve been unfairly branded as “racist?”

Unfortunately, she really does. I’m not taking the Southern Poverty Law Center’s word for it, either; I have the book and I’ve confirmed that everything they say in this article is accurate.

Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which The New York Times had described as a “thinly veiled white supremacist organization.” Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is “a conservative group” that has unfairly been branded as racist “because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group.” “There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” she says. “Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes — the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media — there is little on the CCC website suggesting” that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is “containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier.”

Coulter could hardly be more wrong. And even if she can’t find time to read beyond a page of the CCC’s website, she really ought to know — after all, the organization where she frequently speaks, the Conservative Political Action Committee, has publicly banned the CCC from its annual gathering because it is racist. Also in the late 1990s, Jim Nicholson, then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, asked GOP members to stay away from the CCC because of its “racist and nationalist views.”

How could conservative Republicans be inspired to say such ugly things? Let us count the ways.

The CCC’s columnists have written that black people are “a retrograde species of humanity,” and that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a “slimy brown mass of glop.” Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes “forced integration” and decries racial intermarriage. It has lambasted black people as “genetically inferior,” complained about “Jewish power brokers,” called gay people “perverted sodomites,” and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.”

This is completely beyond the pale.

I won’t link to the CCC website, but it takes about two seconds of looking at their front page to see that it’s a white supremacist site; prominently displayed as I write is an advertisement for “White Pride T-shirts,” apparently run by the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, and a host of articles with a blatantly racist slant—including one that touts the Eurofascist groups (Vlaams Belang, BNP, National Front) that have been the subject of many LGF posts. It stretches credulity to the breaking point to think that Coulter simply missed all of it.