Last month, I penned what can now be considered a mightily prescient article, White Nationalism: The Reason the Right Will Lose on Amnesty. Now we have irrefragable proof that a white nationalist, Jason Richwine, contributed to a key anti-immigration policy paper at the supposedly mainstream conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation. Richwine wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard on IQ and Hispanics where he suggested that Hispanics are genetically inferior to whites — and this genetic inferiority is “effectively permanent.”
Watch the video of Rachel Maddow, a woman who I completely disagree with ideologically, delivering a truthful and hard-hitting segment on the topic.
My main query is why does it have to be a hardcore leftist to do this exposure? Why aren’t there any conservatives confidently stepping away from the crowd to say, “This racist nonsense does not represent me or my conservative views”?
More than the issue of amnesty for illegal immigrants, white nationalism becoming ensconced in the Republican Party is what poses the real existential threat to the GOP. It is possible to convince Hispanics who receive amnesty to vote Republican; however, it is impossible toconvince any self-respecting minority to endorse white nationalism. It’s never going to happen.
White right-wing racists are in love with the book The Bell Curve. Charles Murray, the co-author of that nonsensical book, is the mentor of Jason Richwine. The celebrated black economist Dr. Thomas Sowell politely shredded the book in an essay filled with arguments so unassailable that Murray is still incapable of refuting them. (Read the affable intellectual smackdown here). It must sting Murray a little that a genius black economist congenially destroyed his book containing arguments about the genetic insufficiency of black IQ. How many of the cretins who hold Murray’s work up as the Gospel Truth have read Sowell’s refutation of it? Maybe if they did, they’d be comfortable sleeping without having copies of The Bell Curve and The Turner Diaries under their pillows. (Mein Kampf probably sits snugly on their nightstands, too.)
Indeed, despite all the intellectual pretension, white nationalism is one of the most philosophically flimsy ideologies on the planet today. Adherence to such a nonsensical philosophy requires profound intellectual dishonesty, which is the only force that could enable one to selectively dismiss and lie about hundreds of years of history the way white nationalists laughably do. White nationalists understand that their ideology cannot survive as its own brand, so they try to hide under the banner of the philosophically superior ideology of conservatism, which apparently is working if The Heritage Foundation doesn’t mind hiring one to write about immigration…
Now do you get the point of my last article on immigration and white nationalism? Now do you see why I say that, for some, this has nothing to do with the rule of law and everything to do with xenophobic hatred birthed from white supremacy?
Recently, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has been in the news after becoming a victim of a racist attack. South Carolina Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian said that he wants to send Nikki Haley, a woman of Indian heritage, “back to wherever the hell she came from.” Political observers of various ideological stripes have correctly denounced this racist remark. However, while the attack is unquestionably racist, it is not overtly racist. Harpootlian vehemently denies that he meant that she should go back to India. Every person with a fully functioning brain understands that his comment was clearly a shot at her ethnicity—even though he didn’t explicitly mention her Indian heritage.
Before I continue, I must state that I am no fan of Nikki Haley. I lost all respect for her when it came to light that she self-identifies as a white woman on documents, despite the fact that she is Indian. This is clear evidence of self-hate. I do not endorse self-hating conservatives inasmuch as they make it hard for those of us ethnic minorities who are proudly conservative, proudly American, and proud of our respective heritages. People like Nikki Haley are why conservative Republicans who belong to ethnic minority groups have the reputation of being self-haters who wish they were born WASPs. People like Haley should not be representative of what it means to be a conservative who belongs to an ethnic minority group.
In any event, given that Harpootlian did not explicitly mention Haley’s Indian heritage, his racism falls into the category of dog-whistle politics. It’s funny how many of the conservatives who spent the entire 2012 election cycle denying the existence of dog-whistle politics have absolutely no problem grasping the concept when a Republican is on the receiving end of a dog-whistle attack. Conservatives can’t have it both ways. It’s either dog-whistle politics exists or it doesn’t. People who lie about dog-whistle politics to protect its use on their side, but scream about it when it is used against their own are complete hypocrites.
When Mitt Romney during the 2012 election cycle said, to cheers from a largely white audience, that nobody is going to ask where his birth certificate is because they know he was born in Michigan—which was clearly a birther shot at “Kenyan-born” Obama—lying morons on the right denied that there was any dog-whistling in that remark. When Mitt Romney’s campaign went to England and said that Romney would do a better job of improving “Anglo Saxon” relations, which Obama cannot do because he’s black, the same people denied the existence of dog-whistle politics there, too.
Now a Democrat makes an indirect, racist reference to a Republican governor’s Indian heritage (without ever mentioning India), and suddenly, Republicans miraculously flip-flop on dog-whistling!
The fundamental reason why serious conservatives oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants to the United States is because (a) we believe in the rule of law, and (b) we understand the threat it poses to our national security. However, it is becoming increasingly rare to hear this commonsensical viewpoint represented by popular conservatives in the media. Rather, “Amnesty will mean the death of the Republican Party!” seems to be the principal argument articulated by anti-amnesty commentators. This talking point, as I will explain, has more to do with white nationalism than it does conservatism.
