Another Racist Leader Revealed in South Carolina GOP
For the second time in a month, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens’ (CCC) entanglement with elements of the South Carolina GOP has come to light in a deeply embarrassing moment for the Republican Party.
In a video recorded during the annual CCC national conference held June 7-8 in Winston-Salem, N.C., CCC webmaster Kyle Rogers boasted (around 2:45 minutes into the video) that he was a member of the Dorchester County GOP’s Executive Committee. A call to Executive Committee Chairman Jordan Bryngelson confirmed Rogers’ membership. “Yes,” Bryngelson told Hatewatch, “embarrassingly, Rogers is a member of the Executive Committee.” Bryngelson asked Rogers to resign, but according to the party’s bylaws, there is no way to force Rogers out unless he breaks certain party rules.
The request to Rogers to resign followed by a month the resignation of Roan Garcia-Quintana from S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley’s 2014 re-election campaign steering committee (of which Bryngelson is also a member). Garcia-Quintana quit the committee after Hatewatch revealed that he was a former board director and lifetime member of the CCC, a racist group directly descended from the old White Citizens Councils that angrily battled school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.
Bryngelson said he had looked up Rogers’ history and contacted him about it. Rogers replied that he was being “unfairly judged,” according to Bryngelson, who added that he returned Rogers’ $25 membership fee and asked him to resign. He said that Rogers had not attended any committee meetings since the party elected new leaders, including Rogers, in April. Bryngelson called the election “unfortunate” but said it was hard to vet all candidates. Still, he added, “I need to get in front of this. … If the GOP wants the minority vote, it has to weed out these types of people.”