Ann Coulter told her readers at World Net Daily the other day that Americans should be more afraid of immigrants than of the Islamic State:
“ISIS is not at our doorstep. Illegal immigrants are not only at our doorstep, but millions of them are already through the door, murdering far more Americans than ISIS ever will.”
The rhetoric from this year’s CPAC seems to be in agreement with this frenzied analysis.
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The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), like the State of Iowa, always brings out the worst in Republicans, and never more so where the forces of ethnic nationalism are concerned. The Republican Party seems particularly prone to falling into line with white nationalist rhetoric that has been especially noticeable at the Tea Party level.
As Right Wing Watch reports, CPAC is in part sponsored by a White Nationalist organization, ProEnglish, “led by Bob Vandervoort, an activist with a history as a white nationalist organizer. This year, CPAC once again allowed ProEnglish to host a booth in the event’s exhibit hall, which entails a $4,000 sponsorship.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) tells us that,
ProEnglish is the creation of John Tanton, the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement. Tanton has made his white nationalist views clear, writing that he believes that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” In a memo Tanton prepared for the leadership of the Washington anti-immigrant lobbying group Federation for American Immigration Reform, Tanton questioned the “educability” of Latinos and warned of a coming “Latin onslaught.” Tanton serves on ProEnglish’s board with Kent, and Tanton’s foundation, U.S. Inc., funds the organization.
According to ProEnglish, their mission is,
ProEnglish is the nation’s leading advocate of official English. We work through the courts and in the court of public opinion to defend English’s historic role as America’s common, unifying language, and to persuade lawmakers to adopt English as the official language at all levels of government.
But they are up to a bit more than just making English our official language. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) refers to them as an “anti-immigrant group,” and during 2012’s CPAC reported that Peter Brimelow, who runs the racist Web site VDARE,
[A]lleged that kids cannot get a job at MacDonald’s because they can’t speak Spanish – a trend he described as a “ferocious attack on living standards of the American working class…just as immigration policy in general is.”
The ADL’s profile of board member Phil Kent, whom, as the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in 2011, was appointed by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal “to serve on a new state panel charged with enforcing the state’s harsh new immigration law,” is revealing in this regard:
Phil Kent is a longtime anti-immigrant activist based in Georgia who once suggested that citzens should be wary of multiculturalism, stating, “What will be the values and ideas of a multicultural America? What will it mean to be white after ‘whiteness’ no longer defines the cultural main-stream?” Kent also spoke at the 2009 Social Contract Press Writers Workshop, a group founded by Tan-ton. The workshop is held annually and often features racist speakers, including Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigrant website VDARE.
No, these are not nice people, despite Kent’s objection that one of the groups he is affiliated with, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) has been “targeted for demonization by the political leadership of the Left and its media allies.”
Because nothing says wholesome like the idea that only white people are…well, people.
The idea that multiculturalism is destroying the country is an interesting one, if only because multiculturalism has been an essential part of the rich tapestry that is American society from its very earliest colonial days.
From the very beginning, people from different nations came to America to start new lives. Even if in the beginning the majority of European immigrants were English, there were also many Scots and Irish, as well as Dutch, Germans, and others. Not to mention many African Americans, brought here as slaves, and, of course, an equally diverse collection of Native American cultures.
After the American Revolution, the pace of immigration picked up, and U.S. Census figures tell the tale: The first U.S. Census was taken in 1790, three years after the drafting of the United States Constitution, and revealed that fully one-fifth of the 3.9 million-strong population was African American, even though each African American was only 3/5 of a human being according to that Constitution (this first census did not include Native Americans).
If you look at specific Mid-Atlantic and Southern states, you see that a high percentage of the population of each was actually enslaved:
South Carolina – 42 percent
Virginia – 39 percent
Georgia – 35 percent
Maryland – 32 percent
North Carolina – 26 percent
Looks pretty multicultural to me. Just sayin’. And these people, need it be remembered, had not asked to be here.
While much of the data has been lost, we know that most of the rest (1.3 million) were English, Scots (180,000), and Germans (156,000), with Dutch (54,000), Irish (44,000) and French (13,000). Obviously, the new country was populated with more than just English speakers. And if English colonists were a majority, they were not an overwhelming majority. Three-fifths is 60 percent, and 60 percent is just enough to override a presidential veto.
If you examine the census records, you find that in 1850, 9.7 percent of Americans were foreign-born, in 1860, 13.2 percent, in 1870, 14.4 percent and so on, not dropping below 10 percent again until 1940. To see just how diverse America’s population is, it is instructive to take a look at the Census Bureau’s Region and Country or Area of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population: 1960 to 1990 (1999)
The census also tells you were immigrants were coming from in different periods of U.S. history. In 1870, Chinese were added to the census as a category to include all East Asian people, and in 1890, the category of “Japanese” was added. Hindu, Korean, and Filipino were added in 1920. Mexicans were included in 1930 but in 1940 Mexicans turned into white people, a no doubt inexplicable decision to Republicans today. There have always been, among these various categories, gays and lesbians, atheists and Muslims and people of various other religions.
Though Kent’s CCC believes “mixing the races is rebelliousness against God,” Thomas Jefferson felt it necessary to make this point in relation to his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786), writing in his autobiography (1821) that,
[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom … was finally passed, … a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.
In over two centuries, multiculturalism has not destroyed the United States. It has changed it, certainly (and if the America of 2015 is not the America of 1945, neither was the America of 1815 the America of 1745) but not destroyed it.
What is really being said here at CPAC is that “icky brown people” are destroying the United States. Multiculturalism, used this way, is simply a code word for “people who aren’t like us – i.e. not white.” And they’re not even really trying very hard to disguise that fact.
Image: Map from Daily Mail showing where America came from
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
