Wellesley Paper Repeats SPLC "Polluting Of America" Lie About VDARE.com
09/28/2017
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The Wellesley News has a story about some PC harassment of a Muslim lecturer at the libertarian Wellesley Freedom project—he asked “Is Islam Compatible with Freedom?” and I think his answer was "yes"—but they didn’t want him to even ask.
[Freedom Project Senior Visiting Fellow Mustafa] Akyol defended the Freedom Project’s choice to bring controversial speakers to campus and believes that college students need to be confronted with viewpoints with which they disagree.

“Hearing viewpoints that you disagree with is the beginning of intellectual maturation. Consider those views and check why you disagree with them. This will make you articulate your views better, and also maybe learn something from the other side,” he said.

Akyol is no stranger to speaking with people of differing viewpoints. He has spoken at such events as the Property and Freedom Society’s annual meeting, which he describes as libertarian or ‘anarcho-capitalist.’ The event has boasted speakers such as Richard Spencer, who led groups of white supremacists and Neo-Nazis in protest in Charlottesville over the summer, and Peter Brimelow, the president of the VDARE Foundation, defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a nonprofit that warns against the polluting of America by non-whites, Catholics, and Spanish-speaking immigrants.” [Emphasis added]

Akyol stated that he doesn’t have a strong memory of who the Property and Freedom Society are and that he doesn’t associate himself with the message of the organization or its other speakers. Furthermore, Akyol said that he will engage with any group that’s willing to listen.

Students reflect on freedom project’s role on campus in light of Akyol lecture s lecture, By Jacqueline Sanchez, September 27, 2017

The phrase “a nonprofit that warns against the polluting of America by non-whites, Catholics, and Spanish-speaking immigrants” appears at 147 places on the web besides the Wellesley News—Media Matters, The Independent, etc.

It's not true, and its source is the SPLC's Peter Brimelow page,  which is full of unsourced and unlinked quotes. Naturally, the part about the "polluting of America" isn't sourced or linked, because Peter Brimelow never said it. As far as I can tell, it's based on a 14 year old attack on VDARE.com on the SPLC's own website: Into The Mainstream, Intelligence Report, August 14, 2003. It's by Left-wing crank and conspiracy theorist Chip Berlet.

In it, Berlet wrote:

Long-time anti-immigrant activist and author Peter Brimelow is the president of the Center for American Unity, a Virginia nonprofit foundation "dedicated to preserving our historical unity as Americans into the 21st Century." On the surface, the center is concerned with promoting English as a common language, but a bit of digging reveals concerns that non-white, Catholic, and Spanish-speaking immigrants are polluting America.

This is most obvious in the foundation's VDARE project, which is named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World in 1587. Brimelow says that he once planned to bestow Dare's name upon "the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation [his anti-immigration book], about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles."

Reviving a favorite theme of early nativists and the Ku Klux Klan, Brimelow attacks 19th-century Catholic immigrants for being supposedly subservient to popes and monarchs, and thus incompatible with democratic self-rule. [Links in original, none of them to VDARE.com]

Where did Berlet get that idea? I think it's because we posted Thomas E. Blackburn's review of Alien Nation. [National Catholic Reporter, July 28, 1995] Blackburn was outraged that a discussion of the  history of immigration to America should contain anything negative about immigrants, or anything positive about Americans.

VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow answered another repetition of this smear in 2016 by saying

Note that even the Southern Poverty Law Center does not pretend this is a direct quote. It is just a lying paraphrase. I defy Foley, or anyone else, to show where I said this.

For what it is worth (nothing, because facts don’t matter to the Left), both my late wife and my second wife, and my three youngest daughters, are Catholics.

As for poor, harassed Mustafa Akyol, he's being tied to us because he's a Turkish libertarian, which is why he spoke at PFS.  Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Property And Freedom Society's meetings are held in Bodrum, Turkey, that being a convenient place for Hoppe, in his capitalist way, to practice property and freedom. (Easier than Charlottesville, in any case.)

So the PC police are not only engaging in weird Guilt By Association, but probably in National Origin Discrimination, as well.

 

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