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In
the midst of racial tensions and hatemongering raised from virtually
all circles on the right, a conference of politically connected
white-supremacist academics, politicians, and activists is about to be
held in the Washington D.C. area. It will be just in time for a
mainstream and well-attended conservative conference that also is
coming to town.
American
Renaissance (AmRen),
the white-supremacist newsletter edited by Jared Taylor, will sponsor a
conference on Feb 19-21, the same weekend that the Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.
The AmRen conference
was originally booked at the Dulles Airport Marriott but was disallowed
by the hotel administration after receiving calls from people who were
outraged it was to take place there. The conference then attempted to
move to the nearby Dulles Airport Westin hotel, but lost its booking
after the hotel management also received complaints.
The
white supremacists have reportedly now obtained another location for
their meeting, but this time the organizers will only tell attendees
its location 48 hours in advance. Meanwhile, opposition is growing.
The progressive
Mormon newspaper Mormon Worker made
a public call to oppose the conference. And Workers Uniting (a merger
of the United Steelworkers with the British trade union, Unite) put out
a press release against the conference that calls attention to the
scheduled appearance of Nick Griffin—head of the far-right, racist
British National Party (BNP)—as keynote speaker.
Griffin’s attendance at the
conference and in the U.S. is curious as he may be
facing charges in Britain for violating a court order
to open the membership of the BNP to non-whites. If Griffin indeed goes
to jail for this (he has until this month to comply), it will not be
the first time, having served a nine-month sentence in 1996 after being
found guilty of “publishing material likely to incite racial hatred.”
Griffin even had a connection with
James Von Brunn, the neo-Nazi terrorist who
shot and killed a security guard at the D.C. Holocaust Museum in June 2009. Von Brunn, who died in January, was a member of the
American Friends of the British National Party, and had been at events
where Griffin spoke.
Recently,
Griffin sparked controversy over his remarks
regarding the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, saying that more attention
should be paid to those that die during the winter in the United Kingdom. “While the Haiti earthquake is terrible, the
winter death toll in Britain will be similar,” he said
in a post to Twitter and Facebook. “No aid
here though.”
Others
scheduled to speak are Dan Roodt, the head of
a South African white-supremacist group called the Pro-Afrikaans Action
Group, who argues that Blacks are genetically programmed to commit
violent crime; lawyer Sam G. Dickson, who advocates white nationalism
and fights against non-white immigration, affirmative action,
interracial marriage, homosexuality, and school integration; University
of Delaware Professor Raymond Wolter, who
argues against school racial desegregation and believes that Blacks
have more natural IQ limitations than whites; and longtime
white-supremacist activist Wayne Lutton, who
is the director of a group that publishes the racist Occidental
Quarterly journal, and the
anti-Semitic Occidental
Observer magazine.
The
more mainstream CPAC conference will be starting a day earlier, on Feb.
18. This conference annually brings out a “Who’s Who” of the right, but
many of CPAC’s attendees, such as Frontpagemag’s David
Horowitz and VDARE’s Peter Brimelow, have associated themselves with Taylor and in many cases the
white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group of which Taylor is a board member.
The
group Youth for Western Civilization, which sponsored the Tom Tancredo
speaking engagement at the University of North Carolina that was disrupted by
protests, held its inaugural event at last year’s CPAC. YWC associate
Marcus Epstein, who along with Brimelow was
at the inaugural, is a co-thinker of Jared Taylor, and all three are
associated with Pat Buchanan, who had Jared Taylor on the stage with
him as he announced his run for president in 2000. This year, the John
Birch Society has been announced as a co-sponsor of CPAC, and that
alone has prompted a number of circles to voice concern over the
climate the right is trying to create.
The
right seems more determined to force their agenda down the throats of
people who have no desire for it, but progressives are just as
determined not to allow that to happen. Activists are planning protests
outside the AmRen conference.
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