THE NATIVISTS ARE GETTING RECKLESS: LATEST CONSERVATIVE RANT AGAINST NEW YORK TIMES BACKFIRES

Well, of course right-wingers are going to cry if you call them racist. They never let that charge slide past without a response, unless they are not afraid to suffer the consequences of being a racist. It’s a regular thing: Conservatives will deflect the racist charge each and every time it is applied to white people. Period. Unless it’s that traitor Robert Byrd of course, then they have to talk about his Klan involvement from 60 years ago, even if he did later renounce the Klan and do a 180 on his politics in years since. So if the New York Times is going to call out a press conference such as the one put together by Pat Buchanan’s American Cause group as having engaged in their words “racialist extremism”, they are not going to do it without being able to back the charge up. That’s why whever the Paleoconservative crowd tries to play this “I am not a racist” game, one tends to ask why do they even bother. It went underreported, but last weekend a white supremacist conference was held in Baltimore. Speaking there was the man at the podium in the picture, Peter Brimelow. He didn’t like the Times calling him and others out for their racist BS at the American Cause conference, which by the way was geared towards encouraging the Republican Party to stop appealing to Hispanics and more to their white base. Gee, no racism there! Now in years past this crowd no matter how wrong they were would have seen the Times and other outlets backtrack and issue an apology, but this time, the newspaper did no such thing, and went after them even more – a week before Brimelow went to scream for white power in Baltimore. Trust us, this is only the beginning, but hopefully, it’s the beginning of the end of this stupid, stupid bunch.

One People’s Project

On January 28, a press conference was held at the National Press Club by the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) to draw attention to the hate speech and hate crimes on the airwaves and in the political scene by conservative figures focused on the immigration issue in the United States and activists and criminals on the street. A number of quotes from radio hosts Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson to bolster their points. Ironically, the NHMC only had to wait a day to drive it all the way home, because that was when Bay and Pat Buchanan’s organization the American Cause held a press conference to address a serious matter to them – how the Republican Party is “pandering” to Hispanics and, in their words “Whatever gains, if any, pandering to Hispanics gives is greatly outweighed by loss of the White Vote, which is more important.”

And when that Pandora ‘s Box was opened, conservative media went into defense mode.

The NHMC press conference went by unnoticed for the most part, but the American Cause was all the talk. That is because of a few reasons. For one, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) alerted its readers to the American Cause conference prior to it taking place, noting the association the participants have with those in white supremacist circles. They noted for example VDARE webmaster Peter Brimelow who publishes white supremacists regularly on his website and has lamented the possibility of his son growing up in a country where whites are not the majority. Fox News contributor Jim Pinkerton was also called out for endorsing a racist French novel titled Camp of the Saints and, in a column written for Pat Buchanan’s magazine the American Conservative, used it to frame a point about white Americans by quoting from the book where it suggests whites “are lacking a proper sense of national-racial consciousness, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest.” Then there is Marcus Epstein, who the SPLC notes is a fan of American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor, and attended AmRen conferences last year in Herndon, and invited Taylor to participate in forums he has put together. Epstein also writes op-ed pieces for websites like the racist and anti-Semitic LewRockwell.com or VDARE, where you can find scurrilous articles written by him attacking Martin Luther King as well as an articles paying tribute to the late Council of Conservative Citizens stalwart Sam Francis.

The other reason is the hissy fit by conservative pundits and activists that resulted from the New York Times responding to the conference with an editorial titled “The Nativists Are Getting Restless”. In it, the Times kind of agreed with the American Cause in saying that yes, Americans and particularly the GOP had either distanced themselves or flat out rejected the approach by the right-wing fringe groups that deal in “racialist extremism” in the past election year. They didn’t stop there. Like the SPLC, they named names and called out Brimelow, Pinkerton, Epstein, and also Bay Buchanan’s, who is the American Cause’s president and was a part of this conference. For good measure, the editorial also points to the Tennessee RNC chair hopeful that distributed a CD with racist songs like “Barack the Magic Negro” and “The Star Spanglish Banner,” as well as television commentator Bill O’Reilly lamenting of the loss of, in his words, “white, Christian male power structure.”

“It is easy to mock white-supremacist views as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out,” the editorial read. “The country has, of course, made considerable progress since the days of Know-Nothings and the Klan. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away, no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for vigilance.”

In 2009, that vigilance means knowing how to deal with a decades-old-routine even among ardent racists to deflect the racist charge from any white person it is made against, no matter how applicable the charge may be. Immediately after the New York Times printed this editorial, the conservative media employed this routine, and blog, talk show hosts and writers, including Pat Buchanan defending his sister and their organization, assailed the paper for, as the website for the group Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC) put it, calling “Americans” nativists. And because Bill O’Reilly was mentioned in the editorial, O’Reilly made a big deal about it for several days on his television program. For many of those bloggers and commentators, the fact that Marcus Epstein, half Korean and half Jewish, was in the editorial was an easy out for them. But when your defense comes from eugenics-promoting writers Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire, who have been themselves criticized for their racist agendas, that defense rings hollow.

In the end, the records of those who attended the conference were enough for both the SPLC and the New York Times to make a fair assessment. And when they responded in another
editorial to those conservative arrows, they included not only links to past writings of the participants, but a video of an interview with Peter Brimelow from the conference, where he accused Republicans who do not follow his hard-line on immigration as committing “treason”, warned of a third party similar to the Nativist Party (a/k/a the Know-Nothings) of the 1840s and called for the age of open borders to be over “just as the frontier closed…was officially closed in the 1890s.” Ironically, this conference showed how miserably both the Know-Nothings and the attempt to close the western border failed. The Know-Nothings targeted Irish Catholics, the descendants of Bay Buchanan, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which by extension served to exclude Koreans, such as those who were descendants of Marcus Epstein.

The New York Times had a field day with this. “Many hard-liners want to shut the Golden Door because they believe the latest waves of immigration from Spanish-speaking countries pose a grave threat to America’s identity as a white, European country, the Times editorial read. “How do we know this? In their own words.”

Meanwhile Brimelow has not been doing himself any favors. Claiming in a Feb 4 VDARE column attempting to respond to that latest editorial that “(I)n American politics, race is destiny”, he also reiterates the VDARE stance that the GOP can only recoup its position of power by “making a more effective appeal to its base: white Americans”, and later in that same column makes a statement about the last election that recalls ALIPAC’s earlier invocation of the term “Americans”: “McCain easily won the white vote-what would until the 1960s would have been called the “American” vote-55%-43%.”

And where was Brimelow three days later? He was a featured speaker at something called the Conference on Preserving Western Civilization held at the Four Points Sheraton BWI Airport Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland. It was put together by Dr. Michael Hart, a self-styled “white separatist” who is also Jewish and wanted to organize a conference to advance that agenda without having to deal with the anti-Semites and neo-Nazis that normally come to such things. Brimelow was joined by Lawrence Auster, who has written for National Review, American Renaissance and David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine, British National Party member Pat Richardson and Pioneer Fund head Philippe Rushton.

So yes, this crowd was called out correctly. Not only that, both the NHMC press conference and New York Times came to the same tragic conclusion: all of this hate activity going unabated is directly responsible for the recent murders in Pennsylvania and New York of two Hispanic men, as well as other hate crimes throughout the country. No doubt the people that participated in both the American Cause and Michael Hart conferences will deny this charge, but VDARE had an article by Joe Guzzardi ridiculing the funeral of Marcelo Lucero, the Ecuadorian legal immigrant beaten to death on Long Island. That is why a line from the original editorial from the New York Times may be apt: “it becomes clear that the nativist path is the path to permanent political irrelevance.”

The Nativists Are Restless
The Nativists Are Restless, Continued (a rebuttal to the conservative tantrum over the first editorial)