Speakout: VDare.com is no 'white nationalist Web site'

Peter Brimelow

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Notoriously, the modern definition of "racist" is somebody who is winning an argument with a liberal. So, as a veteran of the immigration reform movement, I wasn't surprised to see the anti-illegal immigration group Defend Colorado Now smeared in a recent Rocky Mountain News article ("Funding questioned/Critics say some Defend Colorado money tainted," July 15).

Actually, as smears go, I didn't think the article was so bad. (But I'm pretty brutalized!) It largely just recycled various guilt-by-association conspiracy theories spun by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center.

At least the News acknowledged that John Tanton, in many ways the godfather of the immigration reform movement, really is a liberal environmentalist who worries about population pressures. But where the News goes seriously wrong is in its mischaracterization of the immigration reform web- zine I edit, VDare.com, as "white nationalist."

This is important, not because we actually have any links to Defend Colorado Now (a great cause, but one which I'm sorry to say we've never really written much about), but because it's an example of the way in which immigration enthusiasts want to shut down a debate that they know they cannot win.

VDare.com is named after Virginia Dare, the first English child - not "white child," as the News evocatively puts it - born in the New World, in 1587. (The first white child was probably a Viking, Snorri Porfinnsson. It doesn't have the same ring.)

VDare.com flowed out of a best-selling book I wrote back in 1995, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster. (It was the subject of a long interview on June 18, 1995, in that well-known white nationalist rag, the Rocky Mountain News.) Like the immigration reform movement in general, VDare.com is a coalition, agreed only on the need for immigration reduction. We have published writers of all races, and most political tendencies, including self-identified "progressives." Much of VDare.com is devoted to technical analyses of immigration's economic impact. We are certainly politically incorrect. But the merest glance would show that we are not "white nationalist."

We also publish on VDare.com a few writers - for example, Jared Taylor - whom I would regard as "white nationalist," in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. They are not white supremacists. They do not advocate violence. They are rational and civil. They brush their teeth. But they unashamedly work for their people - exactly as La Raza works for Latinos and the Anti-Defamation League works for Jews.

Get used to it. As immigration policy drives whites into a minority, this type of interest-group "white nationalism" will inexorably increase.

You read it first on VDare.com - and if you don't like it, let's have an immigration moratorium now.

Peter Brimelow is the author of Alien Nation and the editor of VDare.com