This week in Wausau, Wisconsin, organizers of a tea party rally had to cancel the appearance of a speaker from Alabama when it came to light that he had a history of speaking at white supremacist events.

Attorney John Eidsmoe agreed to withdraw after another tea party speaker complained. Eidsmoe has spoken before the neo-Confederate group League of the South, and at meetings of the Council of Conservative Citizens — an organization descended from the old White Citizens’ Councils set up in the 50s and 60s to resist the anti-segregation movement after Brown v. Board of Education.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a report on one of the CCC meetings addressed by Eidsmoe, at which the featured speaker was George Wallace Jr.

In the audience listening to Wallace were a number of leading white supremacists. They included Don Black, proprietor of Stormfront.org, the most influential hate site on the Internet, and former Alabama grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; Jamie Kelso, right-hand man and Louisiana roommate of former Klan leader David Duke; Jared Taylor, editor of the neo-eugenicist American Renaissance magazine; Ed Fields, an aging white supremacist leader from Georgia; Alabama CCC leader Leonard “Flagpole” Wilson, who got his nickname shouting “Keep Bama white!” from atop a flagpole during University of Alabama race riots in 1956; and the CCC’s national leader, St. Louis personal injury lawyer Gordon Lee Baum. …

Also speaking at the most recent convention was John Eidsmoe, a former law school professor and close friend and one-time legal adviser to Roy Moore, the Alabama chief justice ejected from his post for defying federal court orders to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the Supreme Court rotunda. Like Moore, Eidsmoe has suggested that the government “may not act contrary to God’s laws.”

Some people will say “good for the organizers for showing him the door,” but why was Eidsmoe ever invited in the first place?