The following article describes activities by Jared Taylor in France and England earlier this year.  Taylor is not unknown to regular readers of www.IREHR.org.  He is the founder of a scientific racist outfit known as American Renaissance, has been a leading figure in the ranks of the Council of Conservative Citizens and an editor for other white nationalist enterprises.  Leonard Zeskind’s book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, available from IREHR, includes the first and most comprehensive treatment of Taylor—including his friendship with Holocaust denier Mark Weber, his stint as the West Coast editor of PC magazine, and a description of American Renaissance’s first conferences.  The following is taken from an article in Searchlight magazine by Ray Mount.  IREHR congratulates Searchlight for nearly 50 years of monthly anti-fascist and anti-racist publication. Leonard Zeskind added to Ray Mount’s reporting, using material from other sources.

American Conservative Union (ACU) chairman Al Cardenas once said “CPAC is like an ‘All Star’ game for conservatives.” Watching it unfold, however, is less like a ball game and more like surveying the line-up at a Moscow May Day parade during the times of the Soviet Union, if you can push the political ideology out of the picture for a moment.  Or like monitoring a north Georgia Klan Labor Day Klan rally in the 1980s.  You see who is in and who is out.  In that regard, seeing the Tea Party emerge at CPAC 2013 is a little like watching the first time white power skinheads showed up at the Gainesville, Georgia Kluxer event in 1989.

On the eve of the most widely anticipated conservative event of the year, the group responsible for organizing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC 13) has chosen to feature the work of a controversial white nationalist professor on its website.

As of February 27, the American Conservative Union (ACU) website features an article by Dr. Robert Weissberg, a retired University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign political science professor with a second career as a white nationalist. Since the first CPAC conference in 1973, the American Conservative Union has been the principal sponsor of the gathering. ACU has a staff person, Vinh Nguyen, listed as a “CPAC producer.” And ACU’s executive director and chairman call the event to order and provide the initial welcoming remarks. Weissberg’s essay was found on the front page of the ACU’s site, just beneath a big banner advertising CPAC 13.

The article below ran in the January 2013 edition of Searchlight, an anti-racist, anti-fascist magazine published monthly in London with international distribution.  It analyzes Klan, neo-Nazi and Tea Party activity during 2012, and recounts some of the movement's most violent episodes.  At the end, please note the data that points towards problems in the future.

2012: A Year in Review

The year began with whimpers from white nationalists about the decay of their supposed civilization.  And it ended with a bang from gunners screaming about their rights after yet another mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. Election year events dominated the ebb and flow of the far right, the racists and the bigots.  In between, skinheads and assorted Aryan-types were arrested and convicted in multiple instances of horrific violence. 

It was May 1, 1988 in Paris, and I watched as Jean-Marie Le Pen, a young girl dressed as Joan d'Arc, a line of sash-wearing dignitaries, and 40,000 Front National supporters marched through the streets in a May Day parade. It was the moment that the Front National's racist nationalism broke into the middle of French politics, after years (decades) on the margins. Le Pen won 4.4 million votes, about 14.7% of the total, in the first round of the presidential elections that year. At the time, I was used to monitoring Klan rallies in the American South, which never approximated the size and power of the rally that day. The Front National's fortunes have waxed and waned over the next two-plus decades since. Now, with a stunning six million votes (17.9% of the total) in the in the first round of the French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen has re-established the Front National as a leading voice for racist, anti-immigrant politics in Continental Europe.

On Saturday, April 7, the conservative publication, the National Review, finally severed ties with controversial columnist John Derbyshire after his latest racist rant. Now the question remains as to whether they will maintain ties with another white nationalist they  publish.

That the American Renaissance 2012 conference took place at all was a cause for minor celebration by the participants. The scientific racists, academics, lawyers and assorted white nationalists who attend these events had been frustrated for the several years by the anti-racists who had successfully protested their events, rendering it nearly impossible for them to fool a private hotel in a big city into booking their confab. So, this time the so-called racial realists retreated to the Tennessee woods. Specifically, American Renaissancers had to drive almost an hour west of the Nashville airport before they got to Montgomery Bell State Park, where they parked over the 16-17 March weekend. They were all pleased with the results: A quiet affair amidst beautiful surroundings with little noise intruding from the outside.

Consumed recently by primary politics and internal squabbles, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) are going back to the beginning. Just when the vicious fight over health care seemed to be in the country's rear-view mirror, Tea Partiers are hoping to jumpstart their movement by returning to the battle they lost two years ago: the fight over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACT)—or what they've derisively labeled "Obamacare."

As the Supreme Court prepares to take up the issue next week, TPP will kick off a week of anti-health care protests in Washington DC with a rally on March 24. The "Road to Repeal" rally is billed as "the first stop on the road to repeal Obamacare," and is the first major event since co-founder Mark Meckler publically broke from the Tea Party Patriots.

ProEnglish executive director Robert Vandervoort’s inclusion on two panels was apparently not a matter of controversy inside the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference. Not one word questioning his participation was uttered publicly by any of his co-panelists, and one and all treated him with respect. Indeed, all of his co-panelists, including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Florida Representative David Rivera were glad to shake his hand.

Outside the conference was a different matter, however. After IREHR raised concerns because of Vandervoort’s white nationalist attachments, a significant discussion ensued. It was often coupled with an intersecting debate about the appearance of Peter Brimelow, after People for the American Way noted the author’s white nationalism. The Kansas City Star, the Wichita Eagle and Mother Jones were among the publications to take note of these events. American Spectator, a decidedly conservative periodical weighed in with the comment that “if Vandervoort indeed organized events for an American Renaissance affiliate … he should explicitly and publicly renounce his old associates; that is a crowd that no one should touch with a ten foot pole.”[1]

In the interest of answering these questions raised by American Spectator, among others, IREHR provides the following information about Vandervoort’s relationship to American Renaissance as well as his own re-articulation of white nationalist dogma.

Even before the recent controversy about the CPAC and the white nationalist directing the English-Only outfit ProEnglish, organizations pushing English-Only legislation have had a long history of employing bigots.