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.

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.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, known nationally for his anti-immigrant activism, is scheduled to share the stage with a long-time white nationalist leader Saturday at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Kobach is on a panel entitled "High Fences, Wide Gates: States vs. the Feds, the Rule of Law & American Identity" alongside Robert "Bob" Vandervoort. The organizational affiliation listed for Vandevoort at CPAC is executive director of ProEnglish. What Vandervoort left out of his bio is that during his time in Illinois he was also the organizer of the white nationalist group Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance.

The National Policy Institute opened its Washington D.C. September conference with a direct invocation of Enoch Powell's infamous Rivers of Blood speech. Using video of recent riots in England with tape of Powell's 1968 speech, Richard Spencer, NPI's executive director, talked of the catastrophe that Latin, Asian and African immigrants have brought the white race. It is an avenue of thought that is well-trod in white nationalist circles. Nevertheless, the new prominence of National Policy Institute (NPI) is one more blot in a changing white nationalist landscape.

A Michigan university got quite a shock when they requested a speaker from an upstate anti-immigration group.