http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060410&s=blumenthal
>...Though Taylor scrubbed all traces of explicit anti-Semitism from
the conference's official program, there were signs of it elsewhere.
Besides the ubiquitous Duke, whom Taylor permitted to register for the
first time in his conference's history ("Jesse Jackson can come if he
pays his fee," Taylor grumbled), anti-Semitic literature was in ample
supply at the display tables in the back. As I passed them, a goateed
twentysomething named Matt Buehl handed me a recent edition of the
pseudo-academic journal Occidental Quarterly. (William Regnery III,
the nephew of conservative publishing mogul Henry Regnery, is the
publisher of OQ.) The journal contained Long Beach State University
evolutionary psychology professor Kevin MacDonald's article
"Understanding Jewish Influence: A Study in Ethnic Activism", which
contends that Jews have special psychological traits that allow them
to out-compete white Gentiles for resources and power. The 2004 tract
has turned MacDonald into a celebrity within white nationalist and
neo-Nazi circles. Buehl eagerly volunteered his opinion of MacDonald's
thesis: "It is absolutely irrefutable and astronomical in its
implications.
<SNIP>
Republicanizing the Race Card
by MAX BLUMENTHAL
[posted online on March 23, 2006]
It would have been like any ordinary Saturday afternoon at the Dulles
Hyatt. Inside the lobby of the sterile suburban Northern Virginia
hotel, a gray-haired man busied himself at a baby grand piano, filling
the room with the sound of schmaltzy jazz standards. Traveling
businessmen sat around chatting, puffing cigars, drinking cocktails
and chortling at one another's quips. In the corner a woman cradled a
sleeping baby. It would have been like any Saturday at the Hyatt,
except for the obvious plainclothes cops guarding the hotel's
entrances, the employees forbidden by management from speaking to
lurking reporters and the presence, in a hallway, of the beaming white
supremacist David Duke, surrounded by a gaggle of admirers.
"The Jewish supremacists not only want to control Israel, they want to
control America, Europe and the whole world," Duke announced to a
dozen men who crowded around to hear his every word. "The best thing
we can do is expose Jewish influence. Then one day the world will rise
up, people will fill the streets and call general strikes--just like
in Europe."
Duke had arrived at the American Renaissance conference spry and
apparently untouched by the ravages of age. After several rounds of
plastic surgery and with enough rouge on his cheeks to make Tammy Faye
Bakker blush, he is the neo-Nazi answer to Dorian Gray. Though Duke's
vanity distinguished him from his fellow "white nationalists" who
converged for the two-day conference, he was not alone in his struggle
to remain relevant and distinctive in a complex political climate
where most of the ultra-right's signature issues have been co-opted by
pseudo-populist media personalities and Republican politicians.
In 2003 Duke was sentenced to fifteen months in a Texas prison for tax
and mail fraud--bilking his supporters out of thousands of dollars,
much of which he is rumored to have spent on liquor-sodden nights at
casinos and strip clubs. With most of his credibility (such as it was)
destroyed by the time of his release, Duke has repositioned himself as
a crusader against the "Jewish supremacist" money-power. While
explicit anti-Semitism did little to restore his audience in the
United States, it has proved to be a hit overseas.
Duke's book, Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question,
is selling like cheap vodka on the streets of Moscow. In 2005
Ukraine's largest private university, the Interregional Academy of
Personnel Management (MAUP), awarded Duke an honorary doctorate for
his thesis, "Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism." Today, he
claims to teach an international relations and history course at the
50,000-student school, which, until recently, included President
Viktor Yuschenko on its board of directors. Duke has also been
airlifted by a Muslim charity to lecture in Bahrain and appeared in
Damascus, Syria, to deliver a public address blaming the "Zionist
media" for hyping the war in Iraq. While even many American white
nationalists remain suspicious of Duke's motives, he is an
international sensation.
Relaxing in the Hyatt lobby, Duke reminisced about his glory days. "I
was the first candidate who ran against affirmative action. And I
predated Clinton on welfare reform," Duke told me. He rehashed his
controversial term as a Louisiana state representative and his losing
1990 Republican gubernatorial candidacy, in which he captured more
than 60 percent of the white vote. He happily recalled his 1977 Klan
Border Watch, when he and seven other Klansmen drove a few sedans in
circles along the California-Mexico border, waving a shotgun in the
moonlight while dozens of reporters in tow tried not to crash their
cars into one another.
Back in those good old times, in 1982, explaining the Klan's
anti-immigrant advocacy, Duke said, "Every new immigrant adds to our
crime problems, our welfare rolls and unemployment of American
citizens.... We are being invaded in the southwest as if a foreign
army were coming over the border.... They're going to take more and
more hard-earned money from the productive middle class in the form of
taxes and social programs." And Duke called for the deportation of all
undocumented immigrants and harsh penalties for businesses that employ
them. "I'd make the Mexican-American border almost like a Maginot
line," he said, referring to the militarized barrier France
constructed between itself, Italy and Germany after World War I.
At the time, Duke was widely dismissed as little more than a
turbo-charged version of the paranoid style--"the Klan's answer to
Robert Redford," as reporter Patty Sims described him in 1978. But
today his anti-immigration rhetoric sounds not so remote from one of
top-rated CNN host Lou Dobbs's fulminations during his daily "Broken
Borders" segment. Duke's Klan Border Watch, meanwhile, served as the
forerunner and inspiration of the Dobbs-touted Minutemen groups that
have proliferated from the Mexico border to Herndon, Virginia, the
city that hosted the American Renaissance conference, where
disgruntled locals hold regular protests outside a day-labor center.
Under pressure from Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, chair of the
House Immigration Reform Caucus, and with sponsorship from House
Judiciary Committee chair James Sensenbrenner (tough-talking heir to
the Kotex fortune), the Republican-dominated House has approved a bill
that makes it a felony to be in the United States illegally, mandates
punishment for providing aid or shelter to undocumented immigrants and
allocates millions for the construction of an iron wall between the
United States and Mexico. Duke may have fallen short on the national
stage, but his old notions have gained a new life through new
political figures.
"Tancredo, he's pretty good. I would probably vote for him for
President," Duke told me.
For self-proclaimed white nationalists, however, the mainstreaming of
some of their ideas has created new challenges. "Immigration was the
white nationalist movement's hot issue, but it's really left beyond
them," said Devin Burghart, director of the Building Democracy
Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil
rights group. "They've gone through this before, where they've had to
reinvent themselves. Now, they're searching for a new issue to take
them forward."
Duke, for his part, hammers on the so-called Jewish question in
countries where anti-Semitism is commonplace, and he is treated as
intellectually respectable. For white nationalists seeking a wider
audience in the United States, like American Renaissance Magazine
founder Jared Taylor, mainstream co-optation by the right wing seems
an inescapable quandary. Taylor is a courtly Ivy League graduate and
self-described former liberal who has spent the past decade working to
lend an air of respectability to the white nationalist cause. He
requires all attendees of his conferences to wear jackets and
ties--even those neo-Nazi worshipers of the ancient Teutonic sky god
Wotan who inevitably turn up every year. And he stresses left-right
alliances as a means of movement building, wishfully thinking aloud
that "at least some liberals are going to have to join us."
According to Taylor's strategy, advancing the cause of "white
self-preservation" necessitates collaboration with Jews. "Jews are now
realizing they are going to have a much more precarious existence in a
black mish-mash kind of place than in a white Christian nation. For
one, because whites are more fair-minded," Taylor told me. (He spoke
seated at the front of the Hyatt's conference hall while a dozen black
and Latino hotel employees rolled out tables for the evening banquet
to be addressed by Canadian eugenicist J. Phillippe Rushton.) Taylor
insisted that at least half of the conference's attendees were Jewish.
But how did he know that? "Well, have you looked at everyone's faces?"
he replied.
There were, in fact, a handful of self-identified Jews at the
conference at Taylor's invitation. Robert Weissberg, a former
political science professor from the University of Illinois-Champaign
(subsidized by the conservative Earhart Foundation while there),
delivered a speech at the 2000 American Renaissance gathering titled
"Jews and Blacks: Everything the Goyim Wanted to Know But Were Afraid
to Ask." In it he argued that Jews and whites should unite against
racial minorities and sort out their own differences later. Taylor
told me Weissberg was invited to speak again this year but that he
declined, fearing the inevitably Judeophobic crowd would receive him
at least as negatively as it did the first time he spoke.
Though Taylor scrubbed all traces of explicit anti-Semitism from the
conference's official program, there were signs of it elsewhere.
Besides the ubiquitous Duke, whom Taylor permitted to register for the
first time in his conference's history ("Jesse Jackson can come if he
pays his fee," Taylor grumbled), anti-Semitic literature was in ample
supply at the display tables in the back. As I passed them, a goateed
twentysomething named Matt Buehl handed me a recent edition of the
pseudo-academic journal Occidental Quarterly. (William Regnery III,
the nephew of conservative publishing mogul Henry Regnery, is the
publisher of OQ.) The journal contained Long Beach State University
evolutionary psychology professor Kevin MacDonald's article
"Understanding Jewish Influence: A Study in Ethnic Activism", which
contends that Jews have special psychological traits that allow them
to out-compete white Gentiles for resources and power. The 2004 tract
has turned MacDonald into a celebrity within white nationalist and
neo-Nazi circles. Buehl eagerly volunteered his opinion of MacDonald's
thesis: "It is absolutely irrefutable and astronomical in its
implications."
Many attendees of the American Renaissance conference were so fixated
on the "Jewish question," they seemed deaf to the latest tactics
promoted by the conference's European speakers. Nick Griffin, recently
acquitted by a British court on two counts of "inciting racial
hatred," has revitalized the marginal British National Party by
adopting an explicitly Islamophobic "Euro-nationalism" in place of his
party's traditional anti-Semitism. The BNP will contest more than 100
seats in Britain's upcoming general election. In February Griffin
organized the distribution of leaflets in targeted working-class
districts featuring the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that
sparked violent worldwide protests. Ian McCartney, chair of the
British Labour Party, denounced Griffin's ploy as "straight out of the
Nazi textbook."
Speaking on the conference's first day, Griffin suggested his move
away from anti-Semitism was purely tactical. "The proper enemy to any
political movement isn't necessarily the most evil and the worst," he
advised. "The proper enemy is the one we can most easily defeat."
In France, far-right writer Guillaume Faye's predictions of impending
race war between white Europeans and Muslim immigrants are gaining
currency beyond his far-right intellectual hothouse--especially in the
wake of last year's youth riots in poor, Muslim-dominated suburbs. But
Faye proved a poor judge of his audience at American Renaissance.
During a speech larded with his usual invocations of barbarian hordes
bearing down on the gates of the West, Faye digressed to warn, "Israel
might not survive to see its 100th birthday." To his apparent
surprise, sustained applause immediately burst from the crowd.
The inability (and possible unwillingness) of leading American white
nationalists to purge anti-Semites from their ranks is not the only
reason they seem permanently shunted to the margins. They must also
contend with well-financed, incendiary conservative elements that make
Europe's far-right look like a tailgate party at the Lilith Fair. Ann
Coulter's declaration in January at the annual Conservative Political
Action Conference in Washington before 2,000 cheering college
Republicans that "post-9/11, our philosophy should be, 'Raghead talks
tough? Raghead faces consequences,' " was arguably more inflammatory
than the comments that landed Griffin in a London courtroom: "Islam is
a vicious, wicked faith." An accusation a month later by Tony Perkins,
president of the Family Research Council, Washington's largest
Christian-right interest group, that the failure of US newspapers to
reprint the Danish anti-Muslim cartoon was "a form of negotiating with
terrorists," was hardly less provocative than Griffin's promotion of
those cartoons.
Yet there are no laws in the US forbidding Coulter from spouting what
can fairly be deemed incitement of racial hatred. And no Democratic
Party spokesperson felt compelled to denounce Perkins--let alone
compare him to a Nazi--as the Labour Party did in the case of Griffin.
Instead, Coulter remains the ringer in Fox News's stable of pundits,
while Perkins juggles his schedule to accommodate cable face-time in
between lobbying sessions on Capitol Hill. In a political climate
where the reactionary has become routine, white nationalism has lost
the shock effect it commanded during David Duke's Bayou days. As
Taylor acknowledged, "To the extent that white racial consciousness
has an impact today, it is masked."
Taylor pointed to the anti-immigration movement as the best example of
white nationalism operating under the guise of mainstream
conservatism. "If you want to control immigration," he explained, "a
racial argument would not be as effective as one about carrying
capacity and resources." Anti-immigration interest groups in
Washington, like the Federation for American Immigration Reform and
the Center for Immigration Studies, a self-proclaimed "Pro-immigrant,
low immigration" think tank, Taylor continued, "are doing an excellent
job of this by arguing that poor people with exotic diseases are not
people we should welcome. Their work tends to assist the survival of
the white man."
Taylor reserved his highest praise for the Congressman from Columbine,
Colorado: "Tom Tancredo is wonderful. If I was a politician, I would
want to be him."
Tancredo, of course, has claimed that his anti-immigration stances
have "nothing to do with ethnicity or race." Yet his proximity to his
white nationalist admirers is closer than he publicly concedes.
Perched in the rear of the Dulles Hyatt conference hall sipping a Diet
Coke, Gordon Lee Baum, the leader of America's largest white
nationalist organization, the Council of Conservative Citizens, told
me, "Tancredo's pretty good. We've had him down a few times to meet
with us." Though Baum didn't elaborate, another CCC member,
California-based anti-immigrant doyenne Barbara Coe, spoke alongside
Tancredo at a February 8 rally at the US Capitol in support of the
Minutemen.
(To the chagrin of its planners, the rally was attended by two
brown-shirted neo-Nazis from the National Socialist Movement who
distributed fliers declaring, "Immigration is a race issue" until they
were removed by Capitol Police.)
In the midterm election year of 2006 and looking forward to the
presidential election of 2008, Tancredo has laid down his marker. If
establishment GOP candidates stray from his line, he has threatened to
enter the Republican presidential race himself to "force [illegal
immigration] into the debate." Just last month, Tancredo tested the
waters (or made clear his threat) with a series of stump speeches in
New Hampshire.
Already, a surprising array of Republican presidential contenders are
emulating Tancredo. Senator George Allen of Virginia met privately
with Tancredo in September to seek his blessing and advice. Tancredo
said he came away mildly encouraged. In February, Republican Senate
majority leader Bill Frist called for "physical or electronic barriers
covering every inch of our 1,951-mile-long border with Mexico--a
virtual fence." And Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, who
infamously called decorated Vietnam vet Representative John Murtha a
"coward" on the House floor, recently removed a claim from her
campaign website that Tancredo had endorsed her after Tancredo's
office said it was false.
While the virulent but minuscule white nationalist movement struggles
to find its bearings, certain conservative Republicans are adapting a
nativist appeal to gain a broader following. They are applying Nick
Griffin's advice to attack "the enemy we can most easily defeat,"
leaving overt anti-Semitism to the likes of David Duke. Meanwhile,
they stoke fears of nonwhite immigrants, who Tancredo has said are
"coming here to kill you and kill me and our families." The far right
has figured out its post-9/11, post-Bush strategy, and the Republican
hopefuls of 2008 are already gravitating toward it.
