Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Race and Conservatism: Where's Waldo Edition

Picture this if you will: It’s August 2006. You’ve made the drive down to Richmond to catch a forum entitled "Race and Conservatism," a fascinating topic to be sure. Let’s take a look at the featured speaker and some of the guests present for this panel discussion:

-Jared Taylor, a white supremacist conservative thinker praised by David “former leader of the Ku Klux Klan” Duke and defended by Stormfront after demonstrators prevented him from delivering a speech in Canada.

-Marcus Epstein. Yep, that Marcus Epstein, the one who “encountered an African American woman on the street after a night of drinking, struck her on the head, and uttered the word "nigger" before fleeing.” Here are a series of interviews he conducted on the behalf of VDARE, an organization which has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

-Willis Carto, prominent anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Sample Carto money quote: “How could the West [have] been so blind. It was the Jews and their lies that blinded the West as to what Germany was doing. Hitler's defeat was the defeat of Europe and America.” In his spare time Carto ran a third party called the Populist Party, which was “little more than an electoral vehicle for current and former Ku Klux Klan and Christian Identity members,” as Wikipedia puts it.

-Michael Hart, who advised a panel organized by white supremacist magazine “American Renaissance” that racial partitioning is the only hope for our future. He arranged a conference in Baltimore last year which elaborated on the need “to defend America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and European identity from immigrants, Muslims, and African Americans.”

Wow, cool stuff! With these guys behind the wheel I’m sure that conservatism will finally have its big breakthrough on race any moment now. By the way, “I don’t understand why minorities don’t vote Republican” is actually a thing that Freepers unironically ponder quite frequently.

But if you were there on that warm summer night you would have recognized another face among the crowd of forty or so people. A representative from One People’s Project was there and took a fateful picture, documenting the presence of someone we’ve seen on the news a few times over the last few months:



James O’Keefe! Apparently we can conclude that as early as 2004 James O’Keefe was already really fuckin’ stupid. It does make you take a second look at his recent accomplishments, too- O’Keefe pulled off a ridiculous smear job on ACORN, a group which delivers a lot of assistance to African-American communities? Interesting. O’Keefe attacked Planned Parenthood by purporting to be a donor who wanted his gift to specifically fund minority abortions because "the less black kids out there the better"? Intriguing. I’m not a scientist or anything, but I’m starting to notice a common thread through a lot of his work.

Oh and by the way, 31 House Republicans passed a resolution honoring him. Just saying.

4 comments:

  1. That's an all star cast of racists they've assembled there.

    Also I feel like Pat Buchanan spoke a one of these things. The fact that these things don't make more news is a bit disconcerting. You really shouldn't be able to hold a white supremacist conference in 2010 without everyone attending being blacklisted from doing anything ever again.

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  2. The Photographer who was there2/2/10, 12:52 PM

    Hey JJ,

    Nice article, but, I don't believe Carto was there. I could be mistaken, but I don't remember seeing him there. There were most likely some of his crowd from American Free Press might have been.

    Also, I believe this event was tied into the Leadership Institute, even though they deny it. Luke Pelican was there with James O'Keefe and both were working at LI at the time.

    It was a debate with Jared Taylor and John Derbyshire ganging up on the black conservative activist Kevin Martin.

    Martin was asked to be there by Epstein, who also asked Martin to dress casual for the event.

    When Martin showed up he was dressed down and the two white men he was debating were dressed up in suits and ties.

    Martin and I discussed after the event if Epstein did this on purpose, to make Martin look less "professional".

    Martin was the only black person there. He and I are not on the same page politically, but I know him well from from covering other events and like him very much as a person.
    He had no idea what he was walking into when he excepted doing that debate and he was faced with a room full of people who obviously did not like black people.

    I stayed for the whole event, because someone in that room had to be in Martin's corner.

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  3. Whoa! Hi, thanks for takin' the time to comment over here. Re: Carto, I based that on this sentence from the One People article:

    "Approximately 40 persons attended this forum, the majority of whom, among them veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto and professor Michael Hart, were well-known in white supremacist circles."

    Did that refer to the other Leadership Institute forum?

    That's interesting about Kevin Martin, seems like there are lots of strange dynamics at play considering how many crazy racists were there, and how particular each of their racial theories are.

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  4. In other hilarious news, I went to high school with Marcus Epstein. Very confused kid.

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