It's hard to fathom that a small journal like the OccidentalQuarterly, which publishes articles defending the science of eugenics, claiming that "neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement," contending that Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist pressured into "an unnecessary war," and saying that the United States made a grave error in declaring war on Nazi Germany, could have had much of an impact on American politics.
Yet as the premier voice of the white-nationalistmovement, the Occidental Quarterly acts as a roundtable for some of the far right's most influential figures. And with election day only eight weeks away, many of the activists and intellectuals on the Quarterly's board are campaigning -- from Western swing states to backrooms at the Republican national convention -- to reshape the Republican Party in their ideological mold.
Sitting on the Occidental's advisory board is a who's who of the national anti-immigration movement, including Virginia Abernathy, a Vanderbilt University professor and self-avowed "separationist" who is directing a contentious anti-immigrant Arizona ballot measure, Protect Arizona Now. Also on the board is Brent Nelson of the American Immigration Control Foundation. He's working with a coalition of anti-immigrant groups to support the congressional campaigns of Republican candidates who have opposed more lenient immigration policies. The Occidental's publisher is William Regnery II, a white nationalist and heir to the fortune of Regnery Publishing Inc., which recently published Unfit for Command: Swift BoatVeterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.
The anti-immigrant activists on the Occidental board have united behind Representative Tom Tancredo, a virulently anti-immigrant Republican from Littleton, Colorado (home of Columbine High School). As the Republican convention opens with the Republican National Committee endorsing George W. Bush's guest-worker proposal for undocumented immigrants, Tancredo is working behind the scenes to make sure that the convention plank supports his anti-immigrant politics. He's vowing "to raise hell" if he's thwarted.
Tancredo's frustration is echoed by Jared Taylor,Occidental Quarterly board member and editor of American Renaissance, a magazine that he says approaches issues of race and culture "from a white perspective."
Says Taylor: "The amazing thing about Republicans isthey keep saying, 'If we could only get 12 percentinstead of 2 percent of Hispanics to vote for us, we'dbe in fat city.' All they need to do is raise theirpercentage of the white vote one-half a percent andthat would make much more difference than all of thisfutile pandering to minorities. Clearly Bush is goingto have sacrificed votes all over the country,although how many is hard to say."
According to Devin Burghart, director of the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based group that monitors the far right, rising anger against the Bush administration's immigration policy within the GOP could provide a prime opportunity for the white nationalist and anti-immigrant movements to incorporate their ideologies into the party.
"There is a huge backlash right now, and, quitefrankly, if Bush loses, there's going to be quite a bloodletting within the GOP,” Burghart says. “If the anti-immigrant folks can demonstrate that ‘compassionate conservatism' was somehow responsible for turning away the Republican base and losing the election, they can move their politics from the fringes into the mainstream.”
The Regnery family has hovered over the country'sconservative movement for three generations. In 1941,William Regnery I helped found the isolationistAmerica First Committee to oppose U.S. involvement inWorld War II. As the war progressed, the group'srhetoric came to closely mirror Nazi propaganda andits membership roll was filled by former members ofdefunct American fascist organizations covertly fundedby the Nazis throughout the 1930s.
In 1947, William's son, Henry Regnery, launched theRegnery publishing house and published suchconservative classics as William F. Buckley's God andMan at Yale, Whittaker Chambers' Witness, and BarryGoldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. In 1986,Henry's grandson, Alfred, took over the family publishingbusiness. In the 1990s, he spawned a cottage industryof conspiratorial, salacious exposés that spun talesportraying the Clintons as drug runners,double-dealers, and sex maniacs. One of the mostnotorious titles in Regnery's anti-Clinton series wasex-FBI agent Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access, which painted images of Hillary Clinton hanging crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree and claimed to expose lesbian affairs in the White House basement.
While Alfred Regnery has confined himself to theparameters of the Republican Party, his brotherWilliam II seems to have inherited his grandfather'sultra-rightist bent. According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (and as reported on August 9 in Newsweek's “Periscope” column), William II is seeking investors to start a dating service for "heterosexual whites of Christian cultural heritage" and hoping to establish summer schools, conferences, and a speaker's bureau to promote his view that the white race is headed toward extinction. William II's views on race dovetail with those of Jared Taylor, his close associate.
According to Taylor, "It's a perfectly legitimate ideafor people who live in what is an effectively Europeansociety to want that society to continue. It's anatural, normal feeling, and when people move in fromdifferent cultures and different religions, thingschange, and nobody likes that. America and Europe arethe only societies in the world who are being toldthat committing to that kind of change is somehowvirtuous. … Suddenly we're trying to institute somekind of kibbutz policy where we're supposed to rearchildren collectively."
And while the Occidental Quarterly's anti-Semitic views are well-documented, both in its pages and elsewhere, the attention that board members have paid to immigration policy is not widely known. In short, they view Bush's immigration policy as a dire problem and as a potential wedge issue that they can use to bolster their influence on the GOP.
"My magazine [American Renaissance] has frequently been accused of being a tool for the Jews because we're far more interested in the question of the demographic future of the country," Taylor said. "The idea of the problems of immigration being solved, then moving on to something else -- that would be very pleasant if we had that opportunity, but the immigration problem won't be solved for a long time."
America's leading organization pushing a eugenics-cum-biological-determinist agenda, The Pioneer Fund, has apparently arrived at a similar conclusion. Its founders openly sympathized with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, and in the 1980s, it shifted its focus toward supporting the anti-immigrant movement. Between 1988 and 1994, The Pioneer Fund granted $1.3 million to America's premier anti-immigrant pressure group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and from 2000 to 2002, it granted a total of $25,000 to Project USA, an anti-immigrant group that works closely with FAIR.
FAIR is now focusing the bulk of its efforts inArizona, a flash point of the immigration conflict.According to the Center for New Community, FAIR spentnearly $500,000 this year on its successful effort toget Protect Arizona Now, a draconian anti-immigrantinitiative that would restrict public services toundocumented immigrants, on Arizona's November ballot.A citizens' volunteer group that initiated ProtectArizona Now has appointed Occidental board member Abernathy to direct the campaign. Abernathy did not mince words when she explained the motive behind Protect Arizona Now to The Arizona Republic on August 7. "We're not saying anything about supremacy,” she said. “Not at all. We're saying that each ethnic group is often happier with its own kind."
If Protect Arizona Now passes -- and if polls are to believed, that looks likely -- the anti-immigrant movement is likely to translate its momentum into more initiatives nationwide.
"Protect Arizona Now is being used by theanti-immigrant groups as a bellwether," explainedBurghart. "If it succeeds in Arizona, that will send amessage to the national Republican Party that theyneed to push more anti-immigrant politics at thefederal level. There's so much riding on this for the anti-immigrant groups because, if they're successful, it will put more pressure on the GOP to follow its base."
Meanwhile, FAIR, Project USA, and an assortment ofallied groups are backing the campaigns of nine neophyte anti-immigrant candidates running against incumbents with liberal immigration policies. Most prominent among these anti-immigrant candidates is Kris Kobach, a former general counsel in John Ashcroft's Justice Department who's running to unseat Democrat Dennis Moore in Kansas' 3rd District. Through its political action committee, FAIR has helped fill Kobach's campaign coffers; Project USA and Occidental Quarterly board member Brent Nelson's Americans for Immigration Control, meanwhile, has pitched in with a direct-mail campaign on the candidate's behalf.
What's more, Kobach's legal services have beenretained by FAIR to argue before a federal court that undocumented students in Kansas should be denied in-state tuition, an effort that earned him ringing endorsements from Tancredo and Alfred Regnery's weekly newspaper, HumanEvents.
The anti-immigrant movement is not the only politicalforce propelling Kobach's campaign. He's been endorsedby the Christian Coalition, James Dobson's FOCUS ONTHE FAMILY, and Vice President Dick Cheney. LastApril, he and right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin wereinvited to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration. He also spoke at the Republican national convention on Monday -- despite the fact that his stance on immigration doesn't exactly mirror the president's. Yet somehow this detail seems to have eluded the national press corps.
"I would have thought that President Bush would havebeen horrified to have a [immigration] restrictionisttake the platform," Taylor said. "That's going to makehis outreach to the Hispanic brothers seem a littleodd. But maybe Karl Rove and some of his boys aretaking some private soundings of Republicans onimmigration."
Meanwhile, Tancredo has not been invited toparticipate in the debate over the plank. As a result,he's had to assert his influence through phoneconversations with right-wing activist PhyllisSchlafly, who will be present.
"I have this feeling ... that anybody who says, 'Idon't agree with the president's views on immigration'is not going to get [into the convention planksubcommittee]. They are really taking great pains tohush [dissent]," Tancredo told the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Even if Tancredo's agenda is rejected, as it iscertain to be, he is determined that he will be heardthis week in New York City. He's planned a midtownpress conference to denounce Bush's immigration agendaand has created a Website to promote that press conference. While Tancredo's plans might seem to some like self-promotion, they are consistent with a career marked by PRstunts calculated to keep the immigration debate on the table and the anti-immigrant movement energized. Tancredo knows that the bills he routinely introduces to curtail the rights of immigrants in the United States and to increase border security (through extreme measures like deploying the U.S. Army) will never make it out of committee; yet with every effort, his image as an authentic voice of the anti-immigrant movement in federal government is burnished, propelling him onto the national stage and galvanizing his followers, who, led by Abernathy, have initiated a "Tancredo for President" write-in campaign.
Tancredo's career may be a barometer for theanti-immigrant movement. "The anti-immigrant folkshave definitely lost a lot of battles. But theyhaven't lost the war," says Burghart. "They're gainingsupport within the GOP and they just keep coming backfor more."
Max Blumenthal is a freelance writer based in LosAngele.
