Too subtle?
It's not that Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler, Republican, didn't
know that a well known pro-secession, pro-segregation, anti-Semitic, anti-interracial-marriage, pro-Confederate hate group is, in fact, a well-known hate group when he gave a speech at one of their meetings, it seems. He
just doesn't care.
A Republican state official in Alabama has come under fire in recent weeks for speaking to a neo-Confederate group about his efforts to return portraits of segregationist former Govs. George and Lurleen Wallace to the state Capitol rotunda.
But in a Tuesday phone interview with TPM, state Auditor Jim Zeigler (R) flatly dismissed criticism of the neo-Confederate League of the South as a hate group—and said he'd be happy to speak before the group again. [...]
Asked if he agreed with the League of the South's secessionist views, Zeigler responded: "I don't know anything about that."
It is very damn unlikely that Jim Ziegler does not know anything about that. Even one of the top elected Republicans in the state somehow managed to have gone through the last decade ignorant of the designated hate group and its rhetoric, it's easy to look these things up. For example, here's one of this year's events, albeit one that State Auditor Jim Ziegler
didn't speak at.
On April 11, 2015, the LOS hosted an event celebrating the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Organized by the vice chairman of the Maryland-Virginia chapter of the League, Shane Long, the event “commemorate[d] the actions of Mr. John Wilkes Booth of Maryland who, motivated by the tyranny his Southern people faced, answered his calling with courage and fortitude.” The LOS’s main Facebook page put it even more bluntly: “Join us in April to celebrate the great accomplishment of John Wilkes Booth. He knew a man who needed killing when he saw him!”
Ziegler, however, tells TPM that he'll be happy to speak to the group again—even after the League's status as a hate group has been pointed out to him. So I think we have to call bull on the claim that he didn't "know anything" about the League's ideas to begin with.
Again, Republicans, where do you find these people? And, more importantly, why?