NAT’L REVIEW FIRES WRITER WHO SPOKE AT AMERICAN RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE

It’s the rule that has played out before, and we keep trying to tell the AmRen folks this: Our way has always been that if the AmRen Conference doesn’t get shut down, we’ll just wait to see what happens when people find out that you attended. You can ask ex-New York prosecutor Michael Reagan, and now you can ask former National Review writer Robert Weissberg.

One People’s Project

For the second time in a week, the conservative publication National Review has fired a longtime writer for racist statements. This time, Robert Weissberg, who is also a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, was let go from the National Review blog Phi Beta Cons after his remarks at the American Renaissance Conference, which was held just outside Nashville, TN last month.

According to Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, the magazine had to take action after it was learned what Weisserg said at the conference. “Unbeknownst to us, occasional Phi Beta Cons contributor Robert Weissberg (whose book was published a few years ago by Transaction) participated in an American Renaissance conference where he delivered a noxious talk about the future of white nationalism,” he said in a statement. “He will no longer be posting here. Thanks to those who brought it to our attention.”

Weissburg was one of the featured speakers at the 2012 AmRen Conference, which was their first after two years of being canceled when venues shut their doors to the event in the Washington, DC and Charlotte, NC area after calls of outrage. There, he had promoted the ideas of preserving and defending those areas in the country that are exclusively white- which he called “Whiteopias” – in order to preserve the white race. “This approach to maintaining whiteness has the advantage that people can make a living catering to whites in their enclaves,” he said according to a recap of the conference on the AmRen website.

Weissberg has spoken at the American Conferences before. In 2000, at the AmRen Conference that year, which was attended by former Klansman David Duke and former National Alliance member Ron Doggett, he spoke on the relationship between Blacks and Jews, defending a Jewish racial slur towards blacks as not as bad as the n-word.

Earlier this week, a column posted by longtime National Review Online (NRO) writer John Derbyshire, which was a racist diatribe against African Americans, prompted calls for his ouster as well. Although the column was posted elsewhere, Lowry felt his association with National Review was causing problems for the publication, as even fellow NRO were critical of the piece. Like Weissberg, Derbyshire has been closely associated with American Renaissance for years, even participating in a 2006 white supremacist forum with AmRen publisher Jared Taylor that was organized by American Cause Executive Director Marcus Epstein and in which conservative propagandist James O’Keefe participated.

This is also not the first time the AmRen Conference has caused an attendee to lose his job when he retured home. In 2006, after protests organized against the conference brought media attention to the event, Michael Reagan, who was interviewed by the Washington Post when he attended, was fired from his position as a part-time Allegheny County, NY prosecutor. As a result, Taylor banned the press from the 2008 conference, who instead interviewed the protestors that gathered outside.

While the conference was able to be held this year, the turnout was much smaller than in past conferences, and it was held in a park in a remote location, for the first time away from a metropolitan area, making it harder to get to.