July 24, 2006

Is VDARE.COM “White Nationalist”?

[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]

By Peter Brimelow

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 350^th 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)