Educating South Carolina

South Carolina, meet your newest member to the state Board of Education, Ron Wilson:

Wilson once sold textbooks to parents who home-school their children. The books included “Barbarians Inside the Gates,” which touted a discredited theory that Jews are working toward world domination.

He praised the book — which the SPLC called “a viciously anti-Semitic tome” — on his personal Web site.

As a member of the state board, Wilson will help determine which textbooks are used in S.C. schools.

Here is the kind of person that supported Ron Wilson's run for Senate:

One Wilson contributor is Lexington County restaurant owner Maurice Bessinger, who gave Wilson $1,000. Several years ago, major food chains yanked Bessinger’s barbecue sauce from their stores when it was revealed that Bessinger distributed pamphlets at his stores saying that slavery was God’s will for blacks and that blacks were happier being slaves in America than free in Africa.

Here's a man who supported him as head of the Sons of Confederate Veterans:

Among Wilson's closest allies is Black Mountain lightning rod Kirk Lyons, the neo-Confederates' legal eagle. Two years ago, Lyons, who now specializes in "Southern heritage defense" cases, narrowly lost an election for a top SCV leadership post after months of news reports had detailed his history of associations with some of the country's most virulent racists.

A man seemingly dedicated to controversy, Lyons has represented a notorious KKK leader in court, attended Klan rallies, protested the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and spoken to a German neofascist group in Berlin. He's shared the stage with the likes of David Duke at ultranationalist rallies. And in 1990, Lyons married the daughter of Aryan Nations leader Charles Tate at the group's Idaho compound in a ceremony officiated by Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler. Standing beside Lyons was his best man, former Texas Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Louis Beam.

Yet Lyons steadfastly denies that he's a racist. "I'm a Christian, un-reconstructed Southerner from Texas," he says. "That's all I've ever claimed to be." But he admits to separatist sentiments and does not apologize for making common cause with fringe figures.

And here is the type of guy Wilson supported in the SCV, so much so that he would not throw him out of the organization:

Wilson's maneuver hit a serious snag when an anonymous letter was mailed out by a "G.W. Lee," urging camps to reject the special convention. "Lee" enclosed a copy of an Intelligence Report story (see Dirty Tricks) about Wilson's Florida ally and state leader, John Walker Adams, who signed up Intelligence Report staff writer Heidi Beirich for Internet porn sites and then bragged about it to the SCV board.

Sound like the type of guy you want setting school agendas for your children, South Carolina?

*UPDATE* More from Atrios regarding "Barbarians Inside the Gates":

At the same time, Wilson runs a business called Atlantic Bullion and Coin Inc. But that's not all. Until he pulled down its Web site last year, he also operated from his Easley home a firm he called International Commerce Corp., "specializing in books & videos for the family & home schoolers."

One book his company sold, Barbarians Inside the Gates by 1960s Defense Department official Donn de Grand Pré, is a viciously anti-Semitic tome that approvingly quotes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous Czarist forgery that purports to reveal a Jewish plot to take over the world.

The squib advertising the book on Wilson's Web site included these words: "The author reveals concealed codes and goals that might be extracted from the Protocols of Zion. Once again our publisher asks 'can you handle the truth??' ... I thought long and hard about handling this book. [But] I will not back away from the truth in this book. You MUST READ THIS BOOK for yourself."