Hate group Council of Conservative Citizens conference in Nashville cancelled
Just two days before the聽Council of Conservative Citizens聽(CCC) was scheduled to hold its annual gathering at the Guesthouse Inn in Nashville, Tenn., the conference was cancelled.
According to a Facebook post by Renee Griffin, daughter of the CCC鈥檚 late CEO and founder Gordon Baum, the hotel was receiving threats and protesters were showing up after Hatewatch reported on the event earlier this week. 鈥淪o the hotel caved and cancelled us last minute,鈥� Griffin said in the Facebook post. 鈥淭his is very upsetting because it was the conference to discuss our future.鈥� Griffin is married to Brad Griffin, who sits on the CCC鈥檚 board and is the founder of the white nationalist site Occidental Dissent.
The conference was scheduled to start Friday, August 21, just a couple of months after the horrific occurrence at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., where nine African Americans were shot to death. The alleged killer, 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof, cited the CCC鈥檚 website as his gateway into racial extremism in a manifesto he put online before the shooting.
The CCC apparently did not want to draw attention to this weekend鈥檚 gathering, which was not announced on the CCC website or on major racist forums like VNN or Stormfront. Speakers were to have included Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, who had been tapped for the keynote address. Taylor is one of the most influential white nationalists in the country, and following the Charleston shootings, he was appointed CCC spokesperson to deal with the barrage of media requests.
Current president Earl Holt was supposed to have addressed the conference on Saturday. In recent comments, Holt has advocated for the lynching of black people, referred to 鈥渘igros鈥� with their 鈥渦nder-evolved Frontal Lobes,鈥� and just three days before the murders in Charleston, suggested taking a gun into the black community to 鈥渕itigate鈥� black crime.
UPDATE:
Brad Griffin (writing as Hunter Wallace) posted a blog at Occidental Dissent today confirming the conference had been cancelled. Griffin said it was because 鈥淪JWs harassed the hotel.鈥� SJW is an acronym for 鈥渟ocial justice warriors,鈥� which is used as a most often to describe online activists who don鈥檛 necessarily believe what they say. In the wake of the attention to the conference, the hotel decided to cancel the conference鈥檚 reservations. Griffin that, 鈥淲e can鈥檛 reserve a hotel conference room without groups organizing out there to make death threats to cancel the conference, certain protests and stuff. One after another, these private hotels fold.鈥� Griffin said that CCC had anticipated about 100 people would attend the conference and he vowed on the blog that, 鈥淭here are several ways we can hold a conference in the future and avoid this problem. It won鈥檛 happen again.鈥�
