Editor's note:This story contains racially charged language some readers are likely to find offensive.



As president of a white nationalist group linked with the murders of nine churchgoers in Charleston, S.C. on June 17, Earl P. Holt III is straddling the uneasy boundary between free speech and racial hatred. Once known only to watchdog groups that monitor extremist groups, Holt has suddenly become notorious for racial slurs splattered across the Internet and for writings on his group's web site that supposedly inspired Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston shooter, to carry out a massacre. Holt has become so toxic that Republican politicians who accepted campaign donations from him have returned the money or given it to charity.

But for most of his life, Holt never gave a dime to politicians. His donations didn't begin until 2010, when he wrote a few $250 checks to one Congressman from Arizona and another from Hawaii. The checks became more frequent and the amounts larger.



By 2015, Holt, 62, had made more than 150 political donations totaling nearly $70,000. All the money went to Republicans, including ultraconservatives such as Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, and Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. Holt also donated to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and to at least three 2016 presidential candidates: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.





What made Holt such a generous donor, seemingly overnight? Holt won’t say, and he refused to speak with Yahoo Finance for this story. But a Yahoo Finance investigation has found that one month before his political donations began, Holt married Katherine Ann Cook of Longview, Texas, whose husband Irving Falk had died one year earlier, leaving a sizable estate to his wife and other family members. Falk had been a successful Jewish businessman in Longview who eventually acquired dozens of oil and gas leases, several commercial real estate properties, at least two homes, and other assets. “It’s common knowledge he was extremely wealthy,” says Murray Moore, the former mayor of Longview.

Earl Holt may now be extremely wealthy, too, courtesy of Irving Falk’s industriousness.



The Dylann Roof connection





Holt’s campaign contributions -- and the apparent source of his money -- are causing consternation now because of hostility he has shown toward blacks and Jews. Holt is president of a nonprofit group called the Council of Conservative Citizens, based in St. Louis. The group says it supports politically conservative causes and doesn't encourage or condone racism. It does, however, routinely highlight crimes committed by blacks against whites, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, describes the council as “a virulently racist group whose website has referred to blacks as ‘a retrograde species of humanity.’” The Anti-Defamation League also considers the council extremist and says, “although the group claims not to be racist, its leaders traffic with other white supremacist groups.”

A number of news and interest-group web sites contain incendiary racial remarks under the name Earl P. Holt III. There are several references to blacks as “Africanus Criminalis” (and worse). On The Blaze (which has since taken down his posts), Holt said blacks are “the laziest, stupidest and most criminally-inclined race in the history of the world.” Holt attacks Jews less frequently, but no less aggressively. In 2012, on the web site Freedom Outpost, he said of attorney Gloria Allred, “Jewish women (like this kike-bitch) are the greatest enemy of Christianity, America and the West in world history.” The same year, on the web site for CBS New York, he complained about the “corrupt leftist Jews’ media.”

Holt became news after Roof, the 21-year-old alleged South Carolina shooter, wrote in a screed published on the web site Last Rhodesian that discovering the Council of Conservative Citizens web site alerted him to “brutal black on white murders.” “I was in disbelief," Roof wrote. "At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.”

On its own web site, the council said it was “deeply saddened” by the mass murder in Charleston, and it disavowed any connection to Roof. Yet the attention brought renewed scrutiny of Holt and other members of the group. The Guardian discovered that Holt had donated thousands of dollars to dozens of Republican politicians at the state and national level, prompting most of those still in office to return the money or give it to charity.



Yahoo Finance set out to answer one basic question: Where did Holt get the $70,000 or so he donated? He’s certainly not in the ranks of megadonors who pony up millions to political candidates, but in five years’ time Holt gave more money to politicians than the typical American family earns in a year. Did he earn the money, inherit it, get it from donors to his nonprofit group or raise it from some other source?



A 'brainwashed' widow









Story continues