Hate group that inspired Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof pays no taxes by registering as non-profit

By THOMAS BURROWS FOR MAILONLINE

The far right group that inspired Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof is subsided by the US taxpayer, it has been revealed.

The Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization whose members oppose ‘all effort to mix the races of mankind’, pays no federal taxes.

This is because it is listed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as a non-profit organization that ‘promotes social welfare’.

Tax-exempt social welfare groups are supposed to ‘primarily promote the common good and general welfare of the people of the community as a whole,’ according to IRS documents.

The radical hate group has had tax exemption since 1985, the Daily Beast reported.

In its most recent tax filing in 2013, the group reported revenues of $67,000.

Marcus Owens, who ran the IRS’s exempt organizations division in the 1990s, told the Daily Beast the small amount of money may put off the IRS from taking action.

‘The ability of the IRS to deal with organizations that are not a significant revenue drain is very limited these days,’ he said.

Last week, Dylann Roof allegedly gunned down nine parishioners at a historical black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In his manifesto Roof, 21, claimed he was ‘never the same’ after logging onto the Council of Conservative Citizens website where he saw ‘pages upon pages of black on white murders’.

Roof claimed that at that point in 2012 he realized that ‘something was very wrong’ and began three years of Internet research of racist websites.

He is accused of telling the group of black worshippers he was doing it because they had ‘raped our women and are taking over our country’.

The controversial group was founded in 1958 in St Louis, Missouri as the segregationist White Citizens Council.

In the past its members have called Michael Jackson an ‘ape’ and said black people are a ‘retrograde species of humanity’.

Roof had been aggravated by the Trayvon Martin shooting as he felt neighbourhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman, who was tried and cleared over the death, did nothing wrong.

Roof wrote that in 2012 he began searching for answers on the Internet and he put the words ‘black on white crime’ into Google.

He wrote: ‘The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens.

‘There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on white murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.

‘From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief’.

Roof named the website where he uploaded his manifesto ‘The Last Rhodesian’, after the white-rule era name for modern-day Zimbabwe.

Elsewhere this week, it emerged that Earl Holt III, the president of the CCC, donated large sums of money to conservative Republican candidates such as Senator Ted Cruz

It was revealed by The Guardian that Holt donated $65,000 to conservative politicians, including three current presidential candidates, while spewing racism on Internet message boards.

The donations include contributions to the campaigns of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum among others.

Holt, who for years hosted a program called Right at Night on AM radio, donated $8,500 to Cruz, $1,750 to Paul and $1,500 to Santorum.

He also gave $2,000 to the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign as well as $3,200 to Michele Bachmann, the former congresswoman and presidential candidate.

In some of the FEC filings Holt’s occupation was listed as ‘slumlord’.

The Cruz campaign said they were refunding the money from the far right leader.

Since the nine murders, the right wing group has tried to distance itself from Roof saying it ‘utterly condemned the despicable killings’.

However, Holt, 62, did not back away from the extreme views found on his organization’s website.

In a statement, he wrote: ‘The CofCC is one of perhaps three websites in the world that accurately and honestly report black-on-white violent crime, and in particular, the seemingly endless incidents involving black-on-white murder.

‘The CofCC website exists because media either ”spike” such stories, or intentionally obscure the race of black offenders.

‘The CofCC is hardly responsible for the actions of this deranged individual merely because he gleaned accurate information from our website.