"The young host of a hate-filled radio show is carefully positioning himself to become the next David Duke, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. James Edwards, 27, is the co-founder of "The Political Cesspool," a shamelessly white nationalist talk show that is broadcast for two hours every weeknight from a studio near Memphis, Tenn., where Edwards grew up and still lives.

"The Political Cesspool" in the past two years has become the primary radio nexus of hate in America. Its sponsors include the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist hate group, and the Institute for Historical Review, a leading Holocaust denial organization. The show's guest roster for 2007 reads like a "Who's Who" of the radical racist right. Former Klan leader and neo-Nazi David Duke, the show's most frequent celebrity racist guest, has logged three appearances.

"I have known Dr. Duke for a number of years and have found him to be a Christian man above reproach," Edwards states on the "Cesspool" website. "Time and again, he has gone out of his way to help me, asking for nothing in return."

Haters' golden boy
When the CCC held its annual national conference earlier this year in Greenville, S.C., James Edwards was the golden boy of the hate group's proceedings. He sat with his wife at a table near the back of the conference hall, engaging in conversation with a nearly constant stream of admirers. They congratulated him not only on the success of "Political Cesspool," but also his recent triumphs in smoothly injecting white nationalist ideology into national mainstream media discussions of race relations and crime in America.

Edwards arrived at the hate group's June conference just three days after his third primetime appearance on CNN in the previous two months. "Crime and violence follow African-Americans wherever they go," he said in his April 4 CNN debut, a panel debate on "self-segregation" hosted by Paula Zahn.

Zahn, who initially identified Edwards to CNN viewers as merely a "radio talk show host" from Memphis, invited him back on May 21.

"Why not celebrate the diversity?" Zahn asked him in one exchange.

"My primary interest is to protect and safeguard my family," Edwards replied. "Whites are in for the fight of their lives. ... We are being robbed of having a future in the very nation our ancestors carved from the wilderness."

A favorite of David Duke
David Duke, who calls Edwards his "favorite radio patriot," gave the "Cesspool" host's CNN appearances a glowing online review: "He delivered a powerful performance, stuck to his guns and didn't back down as he articulated an unapologetically conservative viewpoint regarding race relations."

Edwards clearly idolizes Duke. At the CCC conference, he repeatedly quoted "Dr. Duke" in conversation. But as much as he admires Duke, Edwards has also learned from his mentor's early mistakes. He does not appear at any hate group events where he knows swastikas and other white supremacist symbols will be photographed or filmed.

Well-educated, articulate and charming, Edwards is a rising star of the white nationalist movement who is equally at ease in a television studio, behind a radio microphone or standing in front of a crowd. While he allies himself with hate group leaders who routinely use crude racial epithets, Edwards speaks in the more or less polished code of a suit-and-tie racist, calling blacks "heathen savages," "subhumans" and "black animals," exclusively in the context of discussing violent black-on-white crime.

When the Mid-South Patriot asked Edwards in February about the accusations that he's a racist, he replied: "The horrible defamations we must endure are little compared to the physical battles of blood and bone that so many of our ancestors had to endure so that we could be here now."

Edwards works hard to maintain a professional appearance and demeanor. He wears suits, not Klan robes. But he's doing more than anyone else in the white nationalist movement at this point to promote the views of neo-Nazis, Klan sympathizers, Holocaust deniers, academic racists and anti-Semites.

His stated mission is "[f]ight-ing to advance a nationalist agenda based upon the Christian world view" and turning back the clock in America to the pre-civil rights era, "back when America had a strong moral compass," as he put it during his May 17 show. "You had cultural and racial integrity in those days. ... What's been taken away from us, we can take back."" (SPLC Report, Fall 2007)