New York Times Editorial Takes Down 'Restless Nativists'
As Hatewatch first reported last November, the prevailing post-election wisdom in academic racist and white nationalist circles is that John McCain lost because he was soft on immigration, and that future Republican victories hinge not upon courting non-white and moderate-on-immigration swing voters, as mainstream GOP strategists like Karl Rove argue, but upon vilifying Latino immigrants and fanning the flames of racial tensions in America with renewed gusto.
The New York Times Editorial Board eloquently condemned such regressive thinking in last Sunday’s lead New York Times editorial, “The Nativists Are Restless.”
“The relentlessly harsh Republican campaign against immigration has always hidden a streak of racial extremism,” it began. “Now after several high-water years, the Republican tide has gone out, leaving exposed the nativism of fringe right-wingers clinging to what they hope will be a wedge issue.”
The editorial was published three days after America’s Voice, a pro-immigration reform advocacy group, put on a press conference for top-tier media outlets, including the New York Times. The press conference [MP3 here] relayed information from Hatewatch’s recent exposé of the racist and anti-immigrant extremist views and backgrounds of several panelists who participated in a symposium at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the American Cause, a far-right think tank. The event promoted a new American Cause report making the case that, as the New York Times editorial put it, “…anti-immigration absolutism was still the solution for the [Republican] party’s deep electoral woes, actual voting results notwithstanding.”
Those panelists included American Cause executive director Marcus Epstein, and Peter Brimelow, owner of the anti-immigration hate site Vdare.com.
“The site is worth a visit,” declared the NYT editorial. “There you can read…musings about racial dilution and the perils facing white people, and gems like this from Mr. Epstein:
‘Diversity can be good in moderation – if what is being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers – as long a these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture.’
“It is easy to mock white-supremacist views as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out,” the NYT editorial concluded. “The country has, of course, made considerable progress since the days of Know-Nothings and the Klan. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away, no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for vigilance.”
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
