I announced on Thursday, February 9, that VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow was speaking on "The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American identity" at a ProEnglish session at CPAC. I thought of announcing that he had already been denounced by People For The American Way (sic) in a press release headed GOP Presidential Candidates Should Denounce Bigotry of White Nationalist Featured at CPAC. There were a few other alerts like it, all by groups that hate us. They all hate us because they hate hate, you see.
Tom Lehrer said years ago that “I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that.”)
He really did, by the way—he was a raging leftist and Communist sympathizer—but it was funnier when he sang it.
Slate’s Dave Weigel has a brief, non-rabid report of the subsequent controversy, with an account of how Representative Steve King, having been slandered so much by the SPLC himself, refused back down or take the SPLC’s slanders seriously.
The Great Distractions of CPAC
By David Weigel
Situated across the hall, on the mezzenine floor of CPAC: Two panels. One, an unofficial session in a too-small rented room, is sponsored by Pro English; guests include the lion-maned VDare.com founder Peter Brimelow.
"Our first speaker, Serge Trifkovic, could not be here," explains ProEnglish's executive director Robert Vandervoort. "I'll read his speech. He apologizes in advance for not having read it; the world "Weltanschaung" trips him up, hard.
There is media here from the Washington Post, Mother Jones, TalkingPointsMemo, the American Prospect, and a few sources I probably missed. Why? Brimelow has been labeled a spewer of hate speech by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Who's going to show up and support him? As Rosie Gray finds out, it's Rep. Steve King.
"I've taken so much criticism on my life that has just been completely unjustified, you know, a fabrication of the hardcore left," King said. "I'd want to see whatever evidence that is before I comment on it."
When told that the white nationalist designation had come from the Southern Poverty Law Center, King laughed.
"I wouldn't take them seriously," he said. "No, not at all."
I suppose the reference to Weltanschauung is a dig at Vandervoort for not being intellectual enough, but most Americans would have trouble pronouncing Weltanschauung, and for that matter Trifkovic. (I was hoping to hear Trifkovic speak so I could find out how he pronounces it.)
You’ll notice, or perhaps you won’t, that Weigel has spelled Weltanschauung wrong above. He’s a bad speller, and repeatedly wrote about “Tuscon” after the Tucson shootings, and has furthermore misspelled “mezzanine,” (above). But we sympathize—we’re terrible proof-readers. At at least he’s not filled with hate.
Robert Stacy McCain, (The OTHER McCain) has a defence of Peter Brimelow. After a brief quotation from RightWingWatch: (whoever they are, I admit I haven’t been watching them) to explain what the kerfuffle is about, he writes
Shock! Horror! Because Brimelow and his Web site have been labeled a “hate group” by . . . the Southern Poverty Law Center! And if you know anything at all about SPLC, you’re laughing at the designation, because they have deployed the “hate” designation so promiscuously in the past 15 years as to destroy their own credibility.
Peter Brimelow is no more a hatemonger than I am, although we’ve both been smeared as such by SPLC, as have, inter alia, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The list of the defamed is long. In 2003, the SPLC published a report in which they named such respectable organizations and individuals as the American Enterprise Institute and David Horowitz as part of a right-wing conspiracy to “mainstream” extremist views.
Being denounced by the SPLC is like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for conservatives: You’re nobody in the movement until you’ve been labeled a dangerous extremist by those bozos.
CPAC 2012: Extremely Controversial! : The Other McCain February 9, 2012
Worth mentioning is Liberal group: Conservative political conference hosts white nationalists, By Alex Pappas, Daily Caller, February 9, 2012, because the headline attributes the idea that Peter Brimelow is a “white nationalist” to a “liberal group,” rather than just treating it as straight fact, sent down ex cathedra from SPLC Headquarters.
Also worthy of your time, because it has video clips of Peter Brimelow’s speech, is (VIDEO) Peter Brimelow brings controversy to CPAC for nationalist views, The American Independent, February 9, 2012.
I’ve embedded this, because the opinions Peter quotes—that's quotes—about Quebec in it will make Kathy Shaidle very, very, happy.
Double Standard Alert: The Root.com and NewsOne.com are explicitly black sites—Like Ebony and Jet magazines in print—much more so than VDARE.com is explicitly white. That is, they are much more black nationalists than VDARE.com writers are white nationalists. If the standards being applied to Peter Brimelow and Pat Buchanan were applied to them, they’d have to shut their doors:
See
Many VDARE.com writers think of themselves as American nationalists.
Triple Standard Alert—the man who most publicly attacked Peter Brimelow is Al Sharpton on CNN.
And there he is on TV with a guy named Michael Keegan, the white president of People For The American Way (sic) and a talk radio host who calls himself Joe Madison The Black Eagle. Joe Madison The Black Eagle is all for multiculturalism and scorns explicit appeals to race—by Republican politicians, anyhow.
But if he wants to be taken seriously on the subject of racial brotherhood, maybe he shouldn’t go around calling himself Joe Madison The Black Eagle.
Someone has uploaded a clip of it below:
So here’s Keegan, the President of PFAW, and he wants to go on CNN to complain about appeals to the white base, and politically incorrect racial appeals, and when he gets to the studio he doesn’t notice he’s talking to Al Freaking Sharpton, who is just the most notoriously inflammatory race-baiter and rabble-rouser in America?
I'd call on People For The American Way (sic) to condemn him, but they won’t. No one ever does. But of all the self-discrediting MSM attacks, an attack by Al Sharpton is the most automatically self-discrediting.