Coulter and the haters

Fresh from besseching skinheads to act out on her behalf, Ann Coulter is now citing the leader of a hate group as a thoughtful authority on immigration:

Also, someone must have finally told Bush that the point about America being a "nation of immigrants" is moronic. All nations are "nations of immigrants" — as Peter Brimelow pointed out brilliantly in his 1992 article in National Review on immigration, which left nothing for anyone else to say (Time to Rethink Immigration? ).

Of the "nation of immigrants" locution, Brimelow says:

"No discussion of U.S. immigration policy gets far without someone making this helpful remark. As an immigrant myself, I always pause respectfully. You never know. Maybe this is what they're taught to chant in schools nowadays, a sort of multicultural Pledge of Allegiance. ... Do they really think other nations sprouted up out of the ground?"

Brimelow then ran through the Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman-French, Welsh and Celtic immigrant influences in Britain alone.

Instead of a moratorium on new immigration, I'd settle for a moratorium on the use of the expression "We're a nation of immigrants." Throw in a ban on "Diversity is our strength" and you've got my vote for life.

Over at Huffington Post, Alex Koppelman lowered the boom:

The skinhead in question is one Peter Brimelow, who runs VDARE.com. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists VDARE as a hate group, and, as I've written here before, the SPLC has good reason to do so.

Reasons like Jared Taylor, a "white nationalist" who Brimelow has praised as "perhaps the most brilliant and accomplished figure among White Nationalists." Taylor runs a magazine called the American Renaissance, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as promoting "'genteel' racism: pseudoscientific, questionably researched and argued articles that validate the genetic and moral inferiority of nonwhites and the need for racial 'purity.'"

One of Taylor's articles posted on VDARE contains these lovely little sentiments:

"The reason blacks and whites do not enjoy similar outcomes despite similar treatment by society is that the black and white populations are not equivalent. ... Our government has permitted a huge influx of non-white immigrants who threaten to reduce whites to a minority by the middle of this century. In their bones, whites know this will not be a good thing. They know that an increasingly Third-World America will slip into Third-World habits of corruption, poverty, and violence."

In an e-mail exchange with Koppelman, I pointed out to him that while calling Brimelow a "skinhead" makes a valid point rhetorically, it's probably best not to confuse what a guy like Brimelow does with what skinheads do.

Skinheads are the embodiment of the thuggery latent in the extremist right; guys like Brimelow provide them with pseudo-intellectual rhetorical cover. Basically, they take the turds of racial bigotry that are the extremist right's stock-in-trade and put a nice shine on them. Then the skinheads go out and fling them.

Koppelman followed up along these lines at Dragonfire:

I've spent the past couple weeks arguing with a friend of mine who, despite the fact that his father is Hispanic, and an immigrant, swallows and passes along the racist message passed along by O'Reilly, Gibson, Malkin and their ilk. And though he acknowledged that my previous column had proved Malkin's white supremacist ties, he's still accusing me of doing what all us crazy liberals are apparently guilty of -- playing the old race card. That's where this country is in our discussion on race today: we assume that if someone isn't wearing a hood and burning a cross, they and their rhetoric can't possibly be racist. But that's what today's cuter, cuddlier racists are counting on. Dress up the racism, make it sound nice and friendly, drop racist cartoons of dirty brown people huddling under sombreros in favor of a nice, complimentary message that the Hispanics simply are doing more than their fair share and we should lift a little of the burden, and you can put it on Fox News. Hide a hateful white supremacist inside an attractive Filipina, and she can be the country's most popular conservative blogger.

I think the bottom line is that conservatives are steadily pounding out the drumbeat that racism is dead.

Sure it is. Ann Coulter is, after all, an authority on the subject.