[Peter
Brimelow writes: This is the full version of the
Op Ed reply (Speakout:
VDare.com is no `white nationalist Web site,
July 23, 2006) that the
Rocky Mountain News
kindly allowed me to make to an
attack published the
previous weekend. It reflects my current thinking on
this smear, made against us not merely by the left, but
also by the "
Respectable
Right", which
should—and does—know better]
Notoriously, the modern definition of
"racist" is somebody who is winning an argument
with a liberal…or with a country-club Republican
battling
servant problems. So, as a veteran of the
immigration reform movement, I wasn`t surprised to see
the anti-illegal immigration initiative Defend Colorado
Now smeared in a recent RMN article (
Funding
questioned: Critics say some Defend Colorado
money tainted, by Kevin Flynn, July 15 2006).
Actually, as smears go, I didn`t
think Flynn`s article was so bad. (But I`m pretty
brutalized!) It largely just recycled various
guilt-by-association conspiracy theories spun by the
Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which,
despite that noble-sounding name, has been pretty
thoroughly discredited as a
left-wing shakedown scam preying on the elderly,
Holocaust-haunted rich. (See, for example,
Ken Silverstein`s expose in the November 2000
Harper`s Magazine.)
If the same paranoid logic were
applied to the
opposition to Defend Colorado Now,
we would learn that it includes Hispanic pressure groups
like
La Raza, which are
essentially the creation of the Ford Foundation,
founded by the notorious
anti-Semite Henry Ford, and assorted
Marxist revolutionary wannabes. (Except that this
would be true.)
At least Flynn acknowledged that
John Tanton, in many ways the Godfather of the
immigration reform movement, really is a liberal
environmentalist who worries about
population pressures. I came to the immigration
issue from the right—as a journalist writing for
Forbes,
National Review, even (say it ain`t so!) the
immigration-crazed
Wall Street Journal—and it was a revelation to
me to learn that there are
environmentalists who are not just refugee
socialists looking for a
new excuse to push people around, but who genuinely
care about trees.
I like to think that some of my new
liberal friends learned that some conservatives are
sincere patriots—not just hoofed and horned apologists
for Big Business.
But Flynn does go seriously wrong
in his mischaracterization of the immigration reform
webzine I edit,
VDARE.COM, as
"white nationalist." This is
important, not because we have actually have any links
to Defend Colorado Now—a great cause, but one which I`m
sorry to say we`ve never really written
much about—but because it`s an example of the way in
which immigration enthusiasts want to
shut down a debate that they know they cannot win.
VDARE.COM is named after
Virginia Dare, the first English child—not
"white
child,
" as Flynn evocatively puts it—born in the New
World, in 1587. (The first white child was probably a
Viking,
Snorri Porfinnsson. It doesn`t have the same ring.)
At a time when Americans were not made to feel guilty
about their heritage, every school kid knew who she was.
Franklin D. Roosevelt participated in the
350th anniversary celebrations of her
birth.
VDARE.COM flowed out of a
best-selling book I wrote back in 1995 (!),
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America`s Immigration
Disaster (It was the subject of a long interview
in that well-known white nationalist rag, the
Rocky
Mountain News—
Immigrant`s
Book Helping Reshape Immigration Debate, June
18, 1995). Like the immigration reform movement in
general, it is a coalition, agreed only on the need for
immigration reduction. We have published writers of all
races, and most political tendencies—including
self-identified
"progressives." Much of VDARE.COM is devoted to
technical analyses of immigration`s economic impact—for
example
Edwin S. Rubenstein`s demonstration that jobs in the
post-2002 recovery have gone
disproportionately to immigrants, while black
unemployment has actually risen. (See
The Employment Bus: Immigrants Drive, Blacks Sit in the
Back, June 22, 2006) We are certainly
politically incorrect—but the merest glance would show
that we are not
"white nationalist."OK?
Now I will
boldly go etc. We also publish on VDARE.COM a few
writers, for example
Jared Taylor, whom I would regard as
"white
nationalist,
" in the sense that they aim to defend
the interests of American whites. They are not white
supremacists. They do not advocate violence. They are
rational and civil. They brush their teeth. But they
unashamedly work for their people—exactly as
La Raza works for Latinos and the
Anti-Defamation League works for Jews.
Get used to it. As immigration
policy drives whites into a minority, this type of
interest-group
"white nationalism" will
inexorably increase.
You read it first on VDARE.COM—and
if you don`t like it, let`s have an immigration
moratorium now.
Peter Brimelow is editor of
VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America`s Immigration
Disaster (Random House -
1995) and
The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003)