April 10, 2004

Sierra Club Stalinists Plan To Purge VDARE.COM’s Brenda Walker

By Brenda Walker

The Sierra Club board election, as lovingly reported on VDARE.COM, is now underway. And the desperation of the Sierra staff and their Old Guard board member cronies to stave off the insurgent candidates and suppress all debate on immigration appears to be increasing. Amazingly, Sierra executive director Carl Pope and President Larry Fahn have both proclaimed that your humble correspondent is to be purged from the Club, of which I have been a member for 20 years, because of an article I wrote on VDARE.COM, subsequently quoted in the New York Times.  Disgracefully, I learned about this through the press. (Hmong, Sierra Club hold peace talk: Group Meet in Fresno to discuss immigration policy, ‘hateful’ remark, by Diana Marcum, The Fresno Bee, April 7 2004).

I’ve no doubt that my coverage of the Sierra Wars has irritated the Sierra staff, which is accustomed to a mouthpiece media. (Hooray for the internet!) But my article, Hmore Hmong? Polygamous Hmong?, had nothing whatever to do with the Sierra Club. It dealt with the tax-funded importation of Hmong refugees, members of a Laotian tribe that fought a guerrilla war against the Communists during the Vietnam War.

The Hmong were hmiffed.  And they are notorious bullies, sending scores of emails in an effort to get my VDARE.COM colleague Joe Guzzardi fired after he noted innocently noted their Neanderthal attitude to women, as revealed in his English as a Second Language class.

You might think that problems like global warming and the biggest mass extinction since the dinosaurs would keep the Sierra Club busy. But when the phone rang in San Francisco, the top brass sprang into action. If feelings were hurt in Fresno over an imaginary ethnic slight (publicized by Old Guard machinations, as it happens), then fire up the hybrid fuel vehicle for a personal hand-holding expedition and any publicity that might follow! CEO Carl Pope and President Larry Fahn were ready for their close-ups. (Sierra Club, Hmong to meet over comments, by Mark Grossi, The Fresno Bee, April 3, 2003).

Of course, it is beyond ridiculous that Sierra honchos should take responsibility for anything that I, one mere member out of 750,000, should write on a subject having nothing to do with the organization or even the environment. As a precedent, it's not a bright move. Furthermore, they have no business sticking their noses into what I write when it has nothing to do with them. Their attitude is frankly totalitarian.

The Sierra Old Guard's attention has focused my rhetorical question, "So will thousands of drug-addicted polygamists be welcomed into America?"

Please note I did not say that all Hmong are drug-addicted polygamists, because that statement would not be true. But I did argue that those Hmong who are drug-addicted or polygamous should not be brought into the U.S. as refugees on the taxpayer's tab because smoking opium and having multiple wives are against American law.

It seems a no-brainer that the government shouldn't be spending money we don't have to import people whose personal arrangements or habits are illegal, does it not?

Laws can be so inconvenient for the multiculturally-inclined.

But the phrase "drug-addicted polygamist" has been a real windfall for the Old Guard, such as Larry Fahn who recently emailed a Sierra Club listserve group, that "SUSPS activist Brenda Walker referred to Hmong immigrants as 'thousands of drug-addicted polygamists.'"

Not true, as mentioned above, but useful for the Sierra staff smear machine, in its struggle to stop the insurgent candidates through guilt by association.

Carl Pope has used my website LimitsToGrowth.org as a political correctness Rorschach test. He has demanded that people see it as "hate-filled," because I don't partake of the speak-no-evil diversity cult that the loony left worships.

Telling the truth about women's oppression in many Third-World cultures makes me "hateful." Talk about killing the messenger!

Here's more from Carl:

"I am quite stunned that during this entire debate, not a single person on the SUSPS side has expressed any detectable outrage about the writings and statements of Brenda Walker, Tim Aaronson, Fred Elbel, Joe Guzzardi, and Peter Brimelow. Does it bother no one to read the Hmong's, a group who didn't even want to come here, but were airlifted out of their villages by the CIA because we abandoned them after they fought our dirty war, [VDARE.com note: Pope spent the Vietnam War in the Peace Corps] demeaned by Brenda Walker as ‘drug addicted polygamists’? (Brenda's extensive media files on her web site do not include any of the very interesting materials that have appeared in the last several years about polygamy among lightly pigmented Mormons.)"

For the record, I also oppose admitting any paleface Mormon refugees who are polygamous and drug addicted.

This is not, however, a problem that the U.S. currently faces.

But Carl Pope's own writing includes the same elements that he condemns so harshly in mine.

"Status, women, and work do not easily mix in India. The traditions of Hindu patriarchy, Muslim purdah, and Victorian stuffiness insure that most men never deal with any woman as friend or equal." -- Sahib, An American Misadventure in India, by Carl Pope, 1972

 Judged by his own standards, then, CEO Pope is a “hate-filled” racist.

Pope complains that immigration is a divisive issue for the Sierra Club. But it is he and his commissars who have made it so. Their political decision to abandon the Club’s previous population-stabilization position puts the country's premier environmental organization increasingly at odds with the majority of the American people, who consistently show in polls that they want immigration to be legal, controlled and reduced. Pope could easily have used his bully pulpit to deal with the issue in a non-confrontational manner, one that accords with traditional Sierra values. But the Old Guard has moved away from conservation and into the far left world of shrill character assassination.

So the April 6 Fresno excursion was apparently seen by Sierra staff as an opportunity to bask in their smug self-righteous disapproval of "racists." They could have used the Hmong meeting for some gentle education about American environmental values, such as embracing responsible family size—since even monogamous Hmong still have some of the largest families in the country. But no, environmental responsibility was not on the agenda.

Instead, Fahn and Pope were apparently intimidated into submissively accepting a long list of demands presented by Hmong leaders. According to the Fresno Bee’s Marcum, they agreed to submit an article to the New York Times defending the Hmong community, co-host a major reception for the refugee Hmong arriving in Fresno in July, not to block housing developments for minorities (smart growth?) and "take action against Walker."

Get that last bit? “According to Pope, Sierra bylaws allow for members to be expelled for ‘serious misconduct’ and he expected that to happen.”

But the same bylaws also ban “Fraud, libel, defamation or illegal activity of any kind in the conduct of Sierra Club business.”

Yet the Old Guard make the most shocking statements with little reproach. Thus Dartmouth professor and former Board member Michael Dorsey [email him] recently in the LA Weekly:

"‘Dick Lamm is the David Duke of the environmental movement,’ Dorsey said. ‘This is not about immigration. This is about a threat to democracy, to humanity. These are proto-fascists. We know for a fact that they have ties to neo-Nazis. We know the neo-Nazis in this country are talking to neo-Nazis in Europe. The minute you start having conversations with fascists, you are completely outside the realm of political credibility.’ “(Invasion of the Elegant Trojons, by Susan Zakin, LA Weekly, April 2-8, 2004).

The Dick Lamm so outrageously maligned by Dorsey is the former three-term Democratic Governor of Colorado who once helped in founding the Berkeley campus NAACP. But he is currently running for a seat on the Sierra Board of Directors. So the Old Guard feels free to fling any calumny at him.

The neo-Nazi-Europe connection is more of the nutty conspiracy theory fomented by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Nazi smear was used by Carl Pope himself in Felicity Barringer’s New York Times March 16 hit in which I figured: "But, he [Pope] added, 'if somebody who isn't a Nazi is put on the ballot by the American Nazi party' it can be difficult to disentangle the candidate's views from those of the backers."

Will there be an actual Kangaroo Kourt? Or perhaps the most high mullahs will agree quietly among themselves: off with the head of the troublesome woman.

The bottom line is that Pope & Co. plan to excommunicate me from the Sierra Club because I stood up for women's rights and the fair application of law.

This is the sorry state that the Sierra Club has reached. Its controlling faction support a Stalinist purge of an individual member for engaging in free speech on issues that do not involve the organization. They are sending a message that all Sierra Club members must obey the leftist multicultural line—or else.

The late David Brower, in my opinion the greatest environmentalist of his time, resigned from the board in 2000 because the club leaders had lost all passion to save the earth. "The world is burning and all I hear from them is the music of violins," he said.

Now the Sierra Club is playing a multicultural tune, broadcast from Fresno, that has nothing to do with environmental preservation.

And even less with the preservation of America.

[Contact Sierra Club; email Carl Pope; email Larry Fahn]