Sunday, December 31, 2006

Far-right lying liars

Seems that Peter Brimelow and his gang of nativists at VDare are trying to raise funds by smearing Eric Muller:
Earlier this year, I was on a radio show, "Brad and Britt in the Morning," with Brad Krantz and Britt Whitmire, WZTK-FM in Burlington, North Carolina. We were supposed to talk for forty minutes including questions. But instead, after a few minutes, Brad Krantz abruptly terminated the interview without explanation.

I was puzzled, because talk radio is usually supportive of patriotic immigration reform and always hungry for controversy. But I didn't put two and two together until the publicist who had arranged the interview told me what had happened. While I was on air, Krantz had received a call from a "friend" who was a law professor at the University of North Carolina. This "friend" had told him that VDare was a "hate" site. And Krantz had run away.

Naturally, we called and wrote Krantz, asking him for an opportunity to defend ourselves. But he never responded.

As Muller notes, however, this account is demonstrably false from start to finish: Krantz never cut Brimelow off and interviewed him at length. Muller did not contact Krantz by phone but by e-mail, and did so after the interview aired:
One morning back in June, I was listening to the Brad and Britt show on WZTK-FM out of Greensboro, NC, when they had Brimelow as a guest. They did not cut him off, or end the interview abruptly. He was on for what I remember as a long segment, during which he spoke without interruption (and without significant challenge) for much of the time.

After hearing the interview, I contacted Brad Krantz, one of the show's hosts, to ask whether he knew much about Brimelow's VDare site and some of its writers. Here's the text of the email that I sent him:

Brad,

Read this stuff, and check out some of the linked material.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brimelow: "Brimelow is a paleoconservative and maintains that America's culture and way of life is threatened by unrestricted immigration from Latin America and the Third World . "

It's all about maintaining white culture.

There's *lots* more if you dig.

--Eric

Nothing about VDare.com being a "hate site." No coded or conspiratorial transmissions from my supposed controllers at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Just links to Wikipedia entries, with an encouragement to Brad that he click through to VDare.com -- whose FAQ, incidentally, boasts that the site publishes the work of "white nationalists."

Muller wrote to Brimelow and asked for a correction and retraction. Instead, VDare decided to compound the problem by posting a piece by Patrick Cleburne characterizing Muller's response thus:
In a characteristically disingenuous, misrepresentation-festooned posting, the Is That Legal? blog has admitted what Peter Brimelow suspected: that it was the intervention of the blog's proprietor Eric Muller of UNC Law School that caused Brad Krantz of Burlington N.C's WZTK-FM to cut short a planned interview and call-in session last June...

... Muller advances one main reason for this act of repression: he quotes several writers posted on VDARE.COM . That is it. Apparently the fact that he disagrees with them is enough to give him the right to repress their publisher.

... In any case, Muller's own site is highly judeo-centric and much pre-occuped with scoring debating points against the founding culture. But, of course, different rules apply to Professor Muller and his friends.

As Muller points out in his update, this characterization of his post is 180 degrees removed from what he actually wrote. Once again, he's asked for a retraction.

I'm trusting, of course, that Muller is not holding his breath. After all, he need only consider the character of the people in question. (I've posted on VDare quite often here.)

There are, after all, many sound reasons that VDare was designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center:
[Brimelow, in his book Alien Nation] described the role of race as "elemental, absolute, fundamental." He said that white Americans should demand that U.S. immigration quotas be changed to allow in mostly whites. He argued that spending tax dollars on anything related to multiculturalism was "subversive." He called foreign immigrants "weird aliens with dubious habits."

He worried repeatedly that his son, with his "blue eyes" and "blond hair," would grow up in an America in which whites had lost the majority.

At one point, he wrote that if one enters an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, just like entering the New York subways, "you find yourself in an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored."

Even earlier, in 1993, Brimelow, who is himself an immigrant from England, lauded a book by Jared Taylor, who now oversees the racist American Renaissance magazine.

In his review, he said that racism is "undetectable" in opinion polls and "does not seem" to affect blacks' economic status. He said tax money spent to help blacks and the poor "has done little good and much ill." And he said that "policemen of all races are, if anything, more lenient with criminals of a different race."

Even more than Brimelow himself, you have to appreciate the kind of garbage that passes for discourse on VDare's pages:
Fast forward to 2003. Once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page, VDARE has now become a meeting place for many on the radical right.
One essay complains about how the government encourages "the garbage of Africa" to come to the United States. The same writer says once the "Mexican invasion" engulfs the country, "high teenage birthrates, poverty, ignorance and disease will be what remains."

Another says that Hispanics have a "significantly higher level of social pathology than American whites. ... In other words, some immigrants are better than others." Yet another complains that a Jewish immigrant rights group is helping "African Muslim refugees" come to America.

Brimelow's site carries archives of columns from men like Sam Francis, who is the editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group whose Web page recently described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity."

Here's another outtake from Francis, also from the pages of VDare:
The reason blacks and whites do not enjoy similar outcomes despite similar treatment by society is that the black and white populations are not equivalent. ... Our government has permitted a huge influx of non-white immigrants who threaten to reduce whites to a minority by the middle of this century. In their bones, whites know this will not be a good thing. They know that an increasingly Third-World America will slip into Third-World habits of corruption, poverty, and violence.

People on the far right are so far removed from reality, really, that the truth long ago became indistinguishable to them. They long ago abandoned truthfulness in the defense of their bigoted racial beliefs. We certainly shouldn't expect it now.

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