Anti-Immigrant Hate Site Announces Pat Buchanan Think Tank To Host Leading White Nationalist

MSNBC commentator Pat Buchanan added to his decades-long history of racist activism by inviting a prominent white nationalist to speak at the upcoming national conference of Buchanan’s immigrant-bashing organization The American Cause (TAC), the white nationalist hate website Vdare.com announced earlier this week.

According to a bulletin on its homepage, Vdare.com owner Peter Brimelow is now scheduled to speak at The American’s Cause’s  “Building A New Majority Conference” in McLean, Va., on June 20.

The conference plans to ponder the question, “Has the culture, economy, and demographics of our country passed a tipping point where Conservatives can no longer rule with a mandate?”

Although Brimelow’s name does not appear on The American Cause’s website, the keynote speaker for the conference is not identified, and Brimelow was a panelist at a symposium hosted by TAC last January.

Other speakers scheduled to appear at the upcoming conference, according to TAC’s website, include Hazleton, Pa., Mayor Lou Barletta, who has worked closely with the legal arm of the hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform to enact anti-immigrant policies in a region suffering from escalating racial tensions and where a Latino immigrant was beaten to death last summer; and former Congressman Tom Tancredo, a longtime nativist firebrand who earlier this year argued in a speech at American University that Latinos and Muslims represent “problem cultures,” and that immigrants who fail to “become American” by adopting “white Anglo-Saxon culture” are a destructive force in America.

Conspicuously absent from the speaker list for the June conference is TAC Executive Director Marcus Epstein, a frequent speaker at the group’s events. Epstein may be keeping a lower profile this time around because he’s scheduled to be sentenced on July 8 for drunkenly calling an African-American passerby a “n-----” at a major intersection in Washington, D.C., before attempting to strike her with a karate chop.

Despite the hate crime assault conviction, it seems unlikely Buchanan will distance himself from Epstein. On June 7, Buchanan’s sister, Angela “Bay” Buchanan, defended Epstein on Vdare.com from what she termed an “Internet lynching” (Bay Buchanan, who has been a CNN commentator, helps her brother run TAC and another anti-immigrant outfit, Team America PAC, which also employs Epstein).

“I am telling his story because Marcus Epstein deserves to have his good name returned to him,” Bay Buchanan wrote.

According to her post, Epstein committed the assault after a night of heavy drinking in the midst of serious bouts of depression in 2007. She wrote that after he was released from jail, Epstein attempted to commit suicide by alcohol poisoning and was hospitalized for a week. Buchanan said he was allowed to keep his job at TAC because he sought professional help and is now sober.

“Marcus Epstein is one of the bravest young people I have ever known,” she wrote.

Epstein is himself a frequent Vdare.com contributor who has attended and hosted events featuring prominent white nationalists. “Diversity can be good in moderation — if what is being brought in is desirable,” Epstein wrote in one VDARE.com essay. “Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers — as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture.”

That sort of rhetoric marches in lockstep with Pat Buchanan’s oft-expressed white nationalist ideology.

Buchanan’s history of bigoted statements, dating back to his days in the Nixon administration, was detailed in a comprehensive June 8 Media Matters for America post. In the 1970s, Buchanan warned Nixon not to "fritter away his present high support in the nation for an ill-advised governmental effort to forcibly integrate races." In 1989, he defended Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial dating. And in 1990 he lamented the end of apartheid in South Africa.

And he’s still at it. Media Matters notes that Pat Buchanan appeared on the June 29, 2008, and September 14, 2006, editions of “The Political Cesspool,” a white nationalist radio show whose "Statement of Principles" asserts that it "represent[s] a philosophy that is pro-White." Buchanan’s appearance on the show last June was streamed live on Stormfront.org, a major white nationalist online forum popular with neo-Nazis, skinheads and other hard-core racists. Buchanan’s recent books have been filled with citations of white nationalists’ works and advance racist arguments about Latino immigrants, such as that they enter the U.S. to invade it (more on Buchanan’s recent racism can be found here and here).

Buchanan’s latest rants have focused on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who he claims believes “discrimination against white males is O.K.”

Buchanan's long and extensive racist track record caused Media Matters Senior Fellow Jamison Foser to pose the question, “What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC?” “Oddly, the more time goes by, and the further removed America is from the time when sentiments like those regularly expressed by Buchanan were widely accepted, the media increasingly give him a pass,” was Foser’s conclusion.