Pegler

Others, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, skipped the niceties and went straight to accusing their fellow citizens of being enemy saboteurs.

“The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over,” Pegler wrote.

Stephen Pegler, 68, said sorting the items was “not a big deal”, but added: “There are so many rumours about recycling, because we see them unloading… ������ annoys me is we are going to the bother of sorting it and then they’re just all going in the same place.”

Pegler argued, “A racist is a person who approves his own race and prefers the society of his own people.”

One example of this was the conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler’s 1955 piece, later reprinted in the Citizens’ Council, on how the word “racist” had become a “smear word.”