Pat Buchanan

Given the recent insulting and offensive statements made by Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, coupled with the recent revelations about Marcus Epstein, executive director of The American Cause, you'd think that other right-wing activists would be doing everything in their power to disassociate themselves from this group of toxic bigots.

Of course, you'd be wrong, as people like Phyllis Schlafly and Ken Blackwell are still happily participating in a conference hosted by The American Cause and featuring Buchanan and Tancredo this weekend:

When: June 20 8:30 AM-6:00 PM
Where: The Ritz Carlton * 1700 Tysons Boulevard * McLean, VA 22102
Admission: $75 per person * $35 students * $1,000 co-sponsor

Speakers Include:

* Patrick Buchanan
* Tony Blankley
* Tom Tancredo
* Phyllis Schlafly
* Terry Jeffrey
* Ward Connerly
* John Hostettler
* Ken Blackwell
* Christopher Horner
* Richard Scott
* Lou Barletta
* Peter Brimelow

People like Buchanan, Tancredo, Schlafly, Connerly, Blackwell, and Barletta are relatively well-known, but the Southern Poverty Law Center provides some good background on Brimelow, founder of "the white nationalist hate website Vdare.com":

[Brimelow] described the role of race as "elemental, absolute, fundamental." He said that white Americans should demand that U.S. immigration quotas be changed to allow in mostly whites. He argued that spending tax dollars on anything related to multiculturalism was "subversive." He called foreign immigrants "weird aliens with dubious habits."

He worried repeatedly that his son, with his "blue eyes" and "blond hair," would grow up in an America in which whites had lost the majority.

...

Once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page, VDARE has now become a meeting place for many on the radical right.

One essay complains about how the government encourages "the garbage of Africa" to come to the United States. The same writer says once the "Mexican invasion" engulfs the country, "high teenage birthrates, poverty, ignorance and disease will be what remains."

Another says that Hispanics have a "significantly higher level of social pathology than American whites. ... In other words, some immigrants are better than others." Yet another complains that a Jewish immigrant rights group is helping "African Muslim refugees" come to America.

Brimelow's site carries archives of columns from men like Sam Francis, who is the editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group whose Web page recently described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity."

Generally speaking, rational people immediately decline an invitation to share the stage with people like Tancredo and Buchanan at an event being hosted by an organization run by a man who, not too long ago, pled guilty to attacking a black woman and calling her "nigger." 

But then again, rational people also don't claim that women can't be raped by their husbands or equate gays with arsonists and kleptomaniacs, so I guess it is really not surprising that Schalfly and Blackwell would see nothing wrong with attending this gathering. 

A few voices on the Right have expressed partial praise for Barack Obama’s speech on race, but by and large, right-wing commentators have stuck to the script, picking over the parts where Obama mentioned the country’s racial wounds, excoriating him for failing to disavow affirmative action or liberal economic policies, and generally promoting the idea that Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate who secretly hates both America and white people.

But if Obama hoped to start a national conversation about race, he succeeded, in a way. Many right-wing commentators have proved willing to redirect their attacks on Obama to a discussion of their views on African Americans in general. Cal Thomas opined that “black people should be listening to” Bill Cosby, not Rev. Wright. Ann Coulter announced that she had had enough of blacks talking about racism:

But the "post-racial candidate" thinks we need to talk yet more about race. How much more? I had had my fill by around 1974. How long must we all marinate in the angry resentment of black people? …

We treat blacks like children, constantly talking about their temper tantrums right in front of them with airy phrases about black anger. I will not pat blacks on the head and say, "Isn't that cute?" As a post-racial American, I do not believe "the legacy of slavery" gives black people the right to be permanently ill-mannered.

Unfortunately, the online videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church appear to be the first exposure some on the Right have had to blacks or the African American church. Human Events reporter Ericka Anderson admitted as much: “Those of us outside the black community lack any deep knowledge of black churches. The only black minister we are very familiar with was Martin Luther King, Jr.” Anderson added, “He never damned America.”

George Neumayr, editor of the Catholic World Report, was apparently scandalized by what he described as the “feverish” church-goers in the videos “hopping up and down like hyperactive children” as they follow their “buffoonish[],” “sashaying” pastor.

Perhaps we should leave the final word to Pat Buchanan, who has made a career out of claiming that “white America” is under constant threat from other ethnicities. Before Obama’s speech, Buchanan pined for the “Negroes” of the 1950s:

That Wright is a revered preacher in black America also tells us that, far from coming together, we Americans are further apart than we were in the 1950s, when Negroes could be described as Christian, conservative and patriotic. Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad did not speak for black America then. Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young and Dr. Martin Luther King did. But Jeremiah Wright makes Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown sound like the Mills Brothers.

After the speech, Buchanan was more blunt, writing that “Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.”

What is wrong with Barack's prognosis and Barack's cure?

Only this. It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, "everybody but the rioters themselves."

Was "white racism" really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities, as Otto Kerner said -- that liberal icon until the feds put him away for bribery.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard.

As a number of right-wing activists—and presidential candidates—have pounced upon a tragic multiple-homicide in Newark as a rallying point for mobilizing anti-immigrant sentiment and pushing a mandate for local police to vigorously enforce immigration status violations, it’s no surprise to see Pat Buchanan join in denouncing so-called “sanctuary cities.” Buchanan, a host and frequent commentator on MSNBC, writes that the incident “has the makings of a Willie Horton issue in 2008”—a reference to an infamous racially-tinged attack ad used against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election.

At this point, one would expect Buchanan to launch into a diatribe against Hispanic immigration, which he has blamed in part for “The Death of the West,” the title of his most recent book. But surprisingly, Buchanan takes a different turn: Jumping to a Washington Post article on a study showing that nearly half of murder victims are black, he complains that “[u]tterly absent” are “white victims.”

The real repository of racism in America -- manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder -- is to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.

“If you continue to believe that the illegal alien invasion is the biggest threat to America, you will never understand that there is something far more dangerous to our country called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” said Daneen Peterson at a small rally in Washington, D.C. last Friday. Peterson explained that “the overwhelming human tsunami of illegal aliens and MS-13 gang members” will cause “complete anarchy,” which in turn will “allow the shadow government to step forward and visibly take over this country. They will use martial law to install a fascist One World Order, dictatorial government in plain sight instead of operating clandestinely as they do now."

Peterson’s warning is familiar to a significant faction of the anti-immigrant movement, who believe that President Bush, an obscure college professor, and the Council on Foreign Relations are secretly plotting to create a European Union-style government in North America. While the supposedly well-advanced march to a “North American Union,” featuring a new flag and a unified “Amero” currency, has not been taken seriously outside of far-right and nativist web sites and news sources, the theory has had major backing from “Swift Vet” co-author Jerome Corsi, CNN host Lou Dobbs, Phyllis Schlafly, Judicial Watch, Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid, right-wing news site WorldNetDaily.com, long-shot Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, and the grandfather of right-wing conspiracy-mongering, the John Birch Society.

And while Peterson called the immigration debate a “diversion” from the “North American Union” scheme, many activists see them as of a piece: Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Virginia), who has introduced a resolution to oppose the vaporous plot, has also stated that immigration reform is just the first step: “It will lead us on a path to likely have a North American currency, will further break down the borders between our countries, and it really undermines the concept of the United States of America in favor of something called North America.”