Times discovers immigration restrictionists

What is amazing in this New York Times editorial is not its content,—it is an utterly typical diatribe against extremist right wing haters—but its specific targets: a report on immigration by Marcus Epstein of The American Cause, and a National Press Club conference in D.C. featuring Patrick Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, and James Pinkerton. As I said to Marcus Epstein in an e-mail, I never would have imagined in a million years that a member of the paleocon, immigration-restrictionist right like himself would be attacked by name in a New York Times editorial. Usually the Times is content to label ordinary Republicans and conservatives as extreme rightwingers and haters, while paleocons are completely off the Times’ map.

The Times editorial is even more astonishing in light of the fact that the audience, as I’ve heard from someone who was there, consisted of about 12 people. Of course there are talks and press conferences going on all the time at the National Press Club and they are not a big deal. Further, as Epstein reports in an article at Vdare I just read, the Times reporter he had invited didn’t even attend the meeting. The entire editorial was based on the press release.

I don’t know what to make of it.

The Times’ level of vituperation is beyond analysis, which may be the reason why Steve Sailer at his blog doesn’t exactly say anything about the editorial, but simply quotes it while emitting scornful noises, Michelle Malkin-like. Also, his photo of the half Jewish, half Korean Epstein with the title, “They’re just not making white supremacists like they used to,” is amusing.

Here is the editorial.

February 1, 2009
Editorial
The Nativists Are Restless

The relentlessly harsh Republican campaign against immigrants has always hidden a streak of racialist extremism. Now after several high-water years, the Republican tide has gone out, leaving exposed the nativism of fringe right-wingers clinging to what they hope will be a wedge issue.

Last week at the National Press Club in Washington, a group seeking to speak for the future of the Republican Party declared that its November defeats in Congressional races stemmed not from having been too hard on foreigners, but too soft.

The group, the American Cause, released a report arguing that anti-immigration absolutism was still the solution for the party’s deep electoral woes, actual voting results notwithstanding. Rather than “pander to pro-amnesty Hispanics and swing voters,” as President Bush and Karl Rove once tried to do, the report’s author, Marcus Epstein, urged Republicans to double down on their efforts to run on schemes to seal the border and drive immigrants out.

This is nonsense, of course. For years Americans have rejected the cruelty of enforcement-only regimes and Latino-bashing, in opinion surveys and at the polls. In House and Senate races in 2008 and 2006, “anti- amnesty” hard-liners consistently lost to candidates who proposed comprehensive reform solutions. The wedge did not work for single-issue xenophobes like Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, Pa., or the former Arizona Congressman J. D. Hayworth. Nor did it help any of the Republican presidential candidates trying to defeat the party’s best-known voice of immigration moderation, John McCain, for the nomination.

Americans want immigration solved, and they realize that mass deportations will not do that. When you add the unprecedented engagement of growing numbers of Latino voters in 2008, it becomes clear that the nativist path is the path to permanent political irrelevance. Unless you can find a way to get rid of all the Latinos.

What was perhaps more notable than the report itself was the team that delivered it. It included Bay Buchanan, former adviser to Representative Tom Tancredo and sister of Pat, who founded the American Cause and wrote “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.” She was joined by James Pinkerton, an essayist and Fox News contributor who, as an aide to the first President Bush, took credit for the racist Willie Horton ads run against Michael Dukakis.

So far, so foul. But even more telling was the presence of Peter Brimelow, a former Forbes editor and founder of Vdare.com, an extremist anti-immigration Web site. It is named for Virginia Dare, the first white baby born in the English colonies, which tells you most of what you need to know. The site is worth a visit. There you can read Mr. Brimelow’s and Mr. Buchanan’s musings about racial dilution and the perils facing white people, and gems like this from Mr. Epstein:

“Diversity can be good in moderation—if what is being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers—as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture.”

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 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.

It is all around us. Much was made of the Republican mailing of the parody song “Barack the Magic Negro,” but the same notorious CD included “The Star Spanglish Banner,” a puerile bit of Latino-baiting. It is easily found on YouTube. Google the words “Bill O’Reilly” and “white, Christian male power structure” for another YouTube taste of the Fox News host assailing the immigration views of “the far left” (including The Times) as racially traitorous.

And it takes only a cursory look at a worsening economic climate and grim national mood to realize that history is always threatening to repeat itself. Last week on Long Island, the authorities in Suffolk County unsealed new indictments against a group of teenage boys accused in a murderous attack against an Ecuadorean immigrant, Marcelo Lucero. Since that crime last year, many more victims have come forward with stories of assaults in or near the same town, Patchogue. The police in that suburb seem to have made a habit of ignoring a long and escalating trail of attacks against immigrant men, until the hatred rose up and spilled over one night, fatally.

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Howard Sutherland writes:

You are right to focus on the curious fact that the New York Times has looked to the right of its usual hated Rightists (Republicans) to vilify real right-wingers: those who really would control immigration. Twice, no less.

VDare reader Tim Brand wonders if there might be a new reason for the Times to begin hostile coverage of groups it has previously ignored. Carlos Slim, by some counts the world’s richest man and beyond doubt the world’s richest Mexican, has made a $250 million lifeboat investment in the Times, which is bleeding red ink as its economic and journalistic model is overtaken by the internet and popular disgust at its flagrant biases.

I think Brand may well be on to something. Slim is not above buying influence. That has been very much his modus operandi while rising to such preeminence in Mexico. In fact, it’s pretty much the Mexican M.O. for everybody down there (and, increasingly, up here). As has been exhaustively documented, there is nothing Mexico’s oligarchs want more keenly than for the United States’ border with Mexico to remain wide open, to slough off onto the stupid gringos all of Mexico’s excess population and as much as possible of its social costs.

The Mexican elite have not yet taken the measure of B. Hussein Obama. They probably think he is basically friendly (in the sense of not opposing mass immigration from Mexico, legal or not), but they know he does not have the same emotional preference for Mexicans that GW Bush had. I think it is very likely Slim will push the Times—which won’t need much pushing, anyway—to become even more of a megaphone for mass immigration, illegal alien amnesties and phony “guest-worker” programs than it already is, with a special emphasis on our dear neighbors, the Mexicans. Part of that agenda would be, with the willing assistance of propaganda pressure groups such as the SPLC, to drive restrictionist groups and websites beyond the pale in the public eye.

Of course, the mere fact of Slim’s taking a material stake in what is still considered America’s premier quality newspaper is yet another sign of the Mexicanization of America. It’s still reversible, but for how much longer? HRS

February 6

Howard Sutherland writes:

And perhaps it gets more interesting. Patrick Buchanan writes about the Times’s attacks (he is one of the targets, after all, as is his sister) in a column today, wondering if Mexico’s soiled-white knight, Slim, in riding to the Times’s rescue hasn’t made influence over the editorial page part of his price.

Concentrating on the Times itself rather than Slim, Nicholas Stix had a look at who makes up the Times’s editorial board. Stix thought he got a toxic whiff of SPLC propaganda in the Times’s hits on patriotic immigration reformers, and suspected there might be a middleman introducing SPLC talking points into Times editorials. He may be right. The NYT website says this of Adam Cohen, assistant editor and, naturally, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School: “Prior to entering journalism, he was an education-reform lawyer, and a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.” Manhattan-born and Harvard-bred Adam must have fit right in down there in Montgomery!

So does Morris Dees have a voice on the New York Times’s editorial board? I find it very easy to believe. If so, the combination of Slim’s agitating to keep our Mexican border open and Dees, through Cohen, lambasting “racist” immigration reformers, in both cases using the still-influential NYT editorial page, could make life more difficult for immigration reform patriots and people who are vocal about the National Question generally.

I’m very sorry to be missing this weekend’s conference, but I have paternal obligations at our son’s school this weekend that I cannot avoid. Break a leg, as the theater types say.

LA replies:

Speaking of SPLC, here is the latest SPLC report on nativism, CIS, and NumbersUSA. And John Tanton is still their focus. I can’t believe it that they are still obsessing on Tanton! He’s their icon! He’s their whole existence.

This is sort of the way they write:

Of course, the nativist racist hate organization NumbersUSA insists it’s not racist, but it once received funding from the nativist racist John Tanton and worked out of the offices of the Tanton founded racist nativist hate organization FAIR. In the mid 1990s, Roy Beck, the well known Christian nativist who heads NumbersUSA, had several conversations with the racist nativist Tanton on a special nativist racist telephone hotline accessible only to Tanton’s inner racist hate circle. During these conversations Beck sat in a racist nativist chair in a racist office looking out a nativist window….

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 04, 2009 03:48 PM | Send