White Supremacist Brings Racist Filmmaker to Texas A&M

In recent years, globetrotting white supremacist financier and organizer Preston Wiginton has appeared at racist skinhead gatherings (he won a “strongest skinhead” contest at Hammerfest in 2005); co-sponsored lectures with hate groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom; rallied racist skinheads in Russia (where he lives part of the year in an apartment rented from ex-Klan boss David Duke); and been denied entry to the UK to address a festival put on by the neo-fascist British National Party.

He’s a busy guy on the white supremacist circuit, so it’s no surprise that he’s organized yet another event. This time, Wiginton has called in racist filmmaker Craig Bodeker to show his film, A Conversation about Race, on the Texas A&M campus on March 20.

Bodeker is no slouch in white nationalist circles, either. His film, released as a DVD in 2008, is a 58-minute attempt to prove the thesis that racism is a bogus concept invented to oppress whites. To do that, he interviewed people he found through a Craigslist ad (ambiguously titled “Ending Racism Now”) and on a street corner in Denver, where he lives. When the people he interviews claim they see racism every day but don’t cite strong examples, Bodeker thus feels he can claim that racism doesn’t exist. He also asserts in the film that Latinos are deliberately taking away whites’ majority status, and he attempts to get his subjects to admit that black people commit more crime than white.

In spite of that, Bodeker continues to claim he’s not the one who’s racist, even though he has attended white nationalist events and given interviews to white nationalist media outlets, including The Political Cesspool, whose guests have included David Duke, neo-Nazi April Gaede, white nationalist Jared Taylor and anti-Semitic professor Kevin MacDonald.

Bodeker’s latest project is a group called the National Citizens League (NCL), apparently launched in 2012. The flyer for his upcoming Texas A&M appearance calls him the group’s founder. The NCL’s mission statement claims that its purpose is to increase public awareness about the efforts of “established media” and “bad government” to act against “our national interests” and how citizens can use visual media to “fight back.” The site serves as a platform for Bodeker’s film (you can watch it there), but nothing new has been posted since June of last year, according to the site archive.

The site also includes a video of Bodeker introducing the group in his affable way and some postings of videos of Bodeker’s “Race Report.” A visit to the NCL’s Facebook page reveals a lot more. There, you’ll see recent posts defending members of the Towson White Student Union (listed as a hate group by SPLC) who openly advocated segregation and defended slavery at the CPAC conference, a premier gathering of conservatives each year, with this description: “Governmedia in Panic – Someone Let A White American Address OUR INTERESTS AT CPAC!”

Other Facebook posts by the currently unknown NCL administrator include some that call non-white immigrants “invaders.” Another wants “Governmedia” to “Tell The Truth About ‘Diversity’” (it’s bad). Another asks “Why are Republicans so afraid of ‘appreciating’ AMERICA’S MAJORITY, that’s, well you, know, WHITE…?” Still another seems to suggest that there’s some kind of “ethnic cleansing” of whites from America and another asks anyone to name one benefit that Muslims bring to white countries. In another anti-Muslim post, the NCL administrator says that “Swedes Are Now Realizing They Were Wrong To Allow Muslim Immigration – When Will the Rest of the West...?” Preston Wiginton posted a response to that one, asking why Swedish men weren’t standing up for their women.

That’s par for Bodeker’s course: He has also posted offensive and inflammatory slurs on videos that other users have uploaded to YouTube. As user “Craigbe,” he has referred to black people as “monkeys,” used the anti-gay slur “f--,” and suggested that resigned black White House adviser Van Jones should be lynched.

For a man who claims not to be racist, he spends a lot of time proving otherwise. This week at Texas A&M will no doubt be more of the same.