New Definition Of "Racist": Winning An Argument With The New York Times

My title of "Executive Director" at the American Cause might be a little inflated. We have a pretty small staff, so there are not too many people to direct. When I put together my analysis "Immigration and the 2008 Republican Defeat" [PDF] and a corresponding press conference featuring Bay Buchanan, Jim Pinkerton, Peter Brimelow and myself, the person responsible for the P.R. and arrangements was…me.

Things didn't go as planned. I tried to write the press release to send to P.R. Newswire late at night two days before the conference, but I managed to lock my keys and wallet inside my office and was stuck waiting at a 7-Eleven until 5 in the morning when the locksmith came. The release that should have gone out at 8:00 AM on Wednesday did not get out until 2:00 PM the day before the conference.

Much to my disappointment, I got a phone call from a New York Times reporter who said he wanted to come, but with the late notice and the bad weather could not make it. He asked for a copy of the report and any information on the proceedings of the press conference, which I did not get a chance to send to them.

All the panelists gave excellent talks, and the press conference was a success, though I had hoped that it would have been better attended. But the conference and report got more attention than I could have ever imagined when the New York Times made it the subject of its lead editorial in the Sunday Week in Review. I didn't realize that they do not need to actually attend a press conference to attack it.

According to the editorial, The Nativists are Restless, the conference I put together promoted "racialist extremism". The report is "nonsense, of course", and when what I wrote wasn't nonsense, it was promoting "white supremacist" views.

What exactly did I do to earn this dubious distinction?

My analysis made very modest claims. I merely reported, in their own words, the stated positions on immigration of the Republican and Democratic candidates in each seat the GOP lost.  

So what makes this finding "nonsense"? Well the New York Times simply says, "In House and Senate races in 2008 and 2006, 'anti- amnesty' hard-liners consistently lost to candidates who proposed comprehensive reform solutions."

In other words; I debunk their argument, they respond by simply repeating the argument I debunked.

But at the end of the day, the editorial wasn't about what my report said. According to the NYT, "perhaps notable than the report itself was the team that delivered it".

What's wrong with this team? Bay Buchanan is chairman of an immigration control PAC, a political analyst at CNN, advised Mitt Romney this election, and held a senior level position in a winning Republican presidential campaign.

Similarly, Jim Pinkerton is a widely respected political analyst not only for Fox News, but also for center and left outlets like the New America Foundation and Huffington Post. He advised Mike Huckabee this election, and helped craft George H.W. Bush's successful presidential campaign. Surely they know something about Republican politics and immigration. And they definitely care more about it than the New York Times.

Peter Brimelow may not be quite as "respectable", but he did write the bestseller Alien Nation that both sides generally acknowledge is the most influential book on immigration of the 1990s, if not the last 20 years. And he wrote, with Ed Rubenstein, the National Review cover piece "Electing a New People" in 1997 that predicted the current mess the Republicans are in today.

At the age of 25, I'm more than a few steps lower on the totem pole than my co-panelists. But working at Team America, which is far and away the largest immigration control Political Action Committee, has taught me a thing or two about how the GOP handles immigration.

So what makes us all "racial extremists"? Well Bay Buchanan is Pat Buchanan's sister and worked with Congressman Tom Tancredo. Jim Pinkerton "took credit" for George H.W. Bush's successful Willie Horton ad. (Actually, as Steve Sailer has pointed out, Pinkerton always gives credit to Al Gore.)

"So far, so foul", according to the NYT, but it gets worse. Peter Brimelow edits VDARE.COM, which publishes Pat Buchanan and even worse… me. But in my nearly 100 items on immigration, the worst they could find is me saying that diversity is only good insofar as it does not "overwhelm the dominant culture".

I'm of course talking about culture, not race, but this according to the New York Times qualifies as "white supremacist views" that we might be tempted to mock "as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out".

The New York Times concludes by making allusions to the Ku Klux Klan and the supposed spate of anti-immigrant hate crimes, and demanding "perpetual vigilance" against racists like me.

Frankly, I take an attack by the New York Times as a badge of honor. But like the New York Times, I want to close with a similar call for "vigilance".

With near-record unemployment an unprecedented border violence, old arguments like "immigrants do the jobs Americans won't" ring   hollower than ever. Reports from VDARE.COM's Steve Sailer, James Gimpel of the Center for Immigration Studies, and—to be immodest—my own, put to bed the nonsense about the Hispanic Vote.

The Open Borders Lobby knows it can't win a debate. The New York Times and other failing print newspapers have lost their monopoly on the news, so they cannot hide the facts.

Their last resort is to try to silence the opponents by calling them racists and implying that if anyone considers their views, they'll be supporting violence against immigrants.

The New York Times has certainly proved Peter Brimelow right when he said the new definition of a "racist" is "anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal."

(See also James Fulford and Patrick Cleburne on the NYT's follow-up blog.)

Marcus Epstein [send him mail] is the founder of the Robert A Taft Club and the executive director of the The American Cause and Team America PAC. A selection of his articles can be seen here. The views he expresses are his own.