NEW YORK TIMES: 1992 Brimelow Immigration Article Key To Trump. So What About His More Recent Articles?
09/29/2016
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I'm cited, courtesy of the heroic Ann Coulter, in How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War Within the Right-Wing Media (by Robert Draper, New York Times Magazine, September 29, 2016):
But what really sold Coulter on Trump, she told me, was his hard line on immigration. Coulter told me that she had never given the issue much thought during her childhood in New Canaan, Conn., and her student days at Cornell. Then in 1992, the British-American journalist Peter Brimelow wrote a 14,000-word essay for National Review titled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” which would later become a sort of ur-text for today’s alt-right, the ascendant white-nationalist movement that has found its champion in Trump. Brimelow cast the current wave of American immigrants in dismal terms: less skilled, less European, less assimilated, less law-abiding and less Republican than the previous newcomers. Coulter, who was 31 and a law clerk at the time, remembers reading it and thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been completely lied to!”
Link in original. "Ur-text" means "a primitive, seminal, or prototypical example of an artistic genre or the basis of an ideological movement." ("Primitive"?)

Usually Main Stream Media links produce little traffic—MSM readers seem to be an incurious lot—but this is an exception.

Of course I have various quibbles about Draper's formulation. For example, I don't think Trump is championing "white nationalism"—I think he's championing American nationalism.

But it is kind of nice to see this apostolic succession (Me-Coulter-Trump!) acknowledged by America's newspaper of record.

However, I have a humble question: if an article I wrote 24 years ago is now an "ur-text" for the most remarkable political insurgency in modern America history, what about my more recent articles?

For example, this spring's “It Will Only Take One Election”—The Trump Tsunami vs. Clinton’s Coming Merkel-Style Immigration Surge?

 

 

 

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