Earlier this year we reported that CPAC was hosting two panels featuring three prominent white nationalists – Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire of VDARE and Bob Vandervoort, head of ProEnglish. Vandervoort appeared on an anti-immigration panel and even met with Rick Santorum alongside other conservative leaders.
While ProEnglish focuses on making English the official language of the U.S., the Institute on Research and Education on Human Rights points out that Vandervoort was in charge of a white nationalist organization before heading up ProEnglish.
During that period Vandervoort was at the center of much of the white nationalist activity in the region. While he was in charge, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance often held joint meetings with the local chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens. He also made appearances at white nationalist events outside Illinois, for instance participating in the 2009 Preserving Western Civilization Conference.
Vandervoort’s prized newsletter – American Renaissance – warned about, among other things, the increasing number of “non-whites living in the country.”
Started as a modest newsletter in 1990, American Renaissance has grown into an important vehicle for white nationalist ideas. American Renaissance first described itself as a “literate, undeceived journal of race, immigration and the decline of civility.” It claimed that “White people” had lost their voice and that the United States was in danger of losing its “national and cultural core.” Capturing the centrality of nativism to white nationalism, American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor wrote in a 2001 AR piece that,
Undoubtedly the greatest threat to whites today comes from immigration. Racial preferences, guilt-mongering, anti-Western education, even anti-white violence are manageable problems compared to a process that is displacing whites and reducing them to a minority. With a change in thinking at the right levels, anti-white policies and double standards could be done away with practically overnight, but that would still leave us with nearly 100 million non-whites living in the country.
But his background as a white nationalist organizer wasn’t a problem for the conservative Washington Times, which gave him a platform to discuss the recent vote in Puerto Rico in favor of statehood.
The commonwealth is predominantly Spanish-speaking. If or when the issue of Puerto Rican statehood goes before Congress in 2013, these task force recommendations need to be considered so Puerto Ricans realize there would be strict English requirements as a condition for admission to statehood. At a minimum, a large majority of Puerto Ricans — who are U.S. citizens — must become fluent in English for statehood to even be considered.
…
With Puerto Rico’s legislature next year changing over to one that favors the status quo, there will be a new dynamic. It will be up to Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress to offer some sort of statehood legislation, and then the debate could get messy. The spotlight would no doubt shine on how expensive it would be to U.S. taxpayers to admit an economically depressed state to the union.
