Is becoming the party of white supremacists the best way for the Republican Party to attract new members? Pat Buchanan seems to think so, but the result was not just dripping with irony, it was positively drowning in it.
Last Saturday, Buchanan hosted a conference — optimistically entitled “Building the New Majority” — on how to reverse the trend that has put Republican Party membership numbers in the toilet (in a Washington Post poll released today, only 22% of Americans now identify themselves as Republicans).
Of course, appealing only to whites is a stupid way to try to build a new majority, since according to US Census Bureau projections, whites themselves will become a minority in the USA by 2042 (and overtly racist whites will become a minority long before that, if they aren’t already).
Of particular interest was a panel session that discussed “English only” laws that are popular with the anti-immigrant crowd. Of course, Buchanan can’t resist taking a cheap shot at Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court:
Judge Sotomayor is up there at school in New York, she gets a scholarship to Princeton … What’s she doing there in the summer? They said her adviser told her to read children’s classics so she can learn English better. How do you graduate number one in Princeton if you’re in the summer and you’re reading Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White? [laughter]
The truth is that Sotomayor read classic children’s books that she missed growing up in a Spanish-speaking home, such as “Huckleberry Finn” and “Pride and Prejudice”, not fairy tales like Snow White.
Also on the panel was white supremacist Peter Brimelow, editor of vdare.com (who prefers to call his position “white nationalist”). Brimelow announced that it would be “suicidal” for any white man to vote for Obama. Brimelow also said that the language issue was good for Republicans because it “polls better than immigration and affirmative action”.
But the most ironic thing? Notice this photo of Buchanan and Brimelow at the conference. How can you claim to be promoting the English language under a banner containing the non-word “Conferenece”?
[Think Progress has audio from the panel session.]
Incidentally, a frequent attendee in the past, but missing from this year’s conference, was the director of Buchannan’s anti-immigrant organization “The American Cause”, Marcus Epstein, who is scheduled to be sentenced on assault charges on July 8. According to court records, Epstein was drunkenly walking down a street in DC making rude comments about non-whites, and “decided to express himself more dramatically” by calling a black woman who was passing by a “nigger” and attempting to karate chop her in the head.
10 Comments
I think the conference banner says it all.
Hey, the said “English only”, not “correct English only”.
That must be why they made fun of Sotomayor working so hard to learn correct English.
Oh, and “the said”? Sammy, you are so ironic. 🙂
You are right about that. And we know that Buchanan is all about the technicalities.
Nice! Typo while making fun of illiteracy.
You all are quite funny. I haven’t even had a glass of wine and I’m chuckling myself silly.
Only wine, Starluna?
I may love the stuff, but sometimes I would much rather Scotch. Though the chuckles from these comments are even better.
Thanks all.
We went to Scotland for the first time last August and tried what is reportedly the best scotch in the world. We learned that we are not scotch drinkers. We’ll stick to what we know best: wine, rum, and gin.
The Scots make an awesome gin called Hendrick’s. It’s infused with cucumbers, of all things. And it’s extremely mellow and, well, cool as a…
We’ve seen how closely the New Age RepubliKlan Party resembles the Ku Klux Klan of the last century: it’s roots and slogans deeply grounded in White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, the “party of true Christianity,” “Real Americans Support the Klan,” “Goals In Good,” “Christian in Right – Moral in Political Purpose,” “Patriotic Purpose,” “True Christians Vote White,” “real Christians aren’t Catholics” etc…
Very close in similarity to the voices of the extreme right RepubliKlan TEA Party supporters today like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Rand Paul, et al…
While cloaking their hatreds and bigotries against others behind the American flag, the Klansmen of the last century claimed that if you didn’t think as they dictated, you were “communists,” “socialists,” agents of Satan and the “anti-Christ”: all that was evil and wrong with America.
Sound familiar?
They hated ‘papists,’ (Catholics aren’t ‘real Christians’), Jews, trade unionists, lawyers, teachers, blacks, black lovers (read: N—er lovers), browns, Orientals, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists…their list of hatred included everyone but themselves.
Of course, that list of the Republican Right has grown to add even more layers to their targets of hatred: homosexuals, lesbians, CNN, NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC, PBR, the New York Times, major universities, public education, unions (which comprise those horrible socialist police, fire, telecommunications, pilots, et al), naturalists, agnostics, professors…
We have been seeing this New Age Klan mindset unveiled in various parts of the country, not just limited to the Bible Belt South’s RepubliKlan Party politics.
Out West, in the “let’s get everyone to hate people of brown color” state of Arizona, we are seeing a new era of RepubliKlan Party apartheid against those of Spanish descent.
They are easy targets because…well, those evil brown criminals keep coming across the border to steal our jobs and livelihoods and exploding the levels of crime. Actually, the crime numbers in Arizona are the lowest they’ve been in some 30 years, and illegals coming across the border are the lowest in 10 years, so that whole fallacious argument is a RepubliKlan Party deceit from the get-go.
But hey, since most Spanish-speaking people are Catholics, they aren’t “real” Christians anyway, so that makes them an even easier target for the RepubliKlan Evangelical Party’s agenda of Arizona Apartheid. Not only is it okay to look at all people of brown skin differently than – say – those of white skin, now the State Superintendent of Education (who, shocker!, is also running for State Attorney General) is pushing for ethnic cleansing against people of color in the school curriculum. It appears that it isn’t ethnically purist to be teaching those of color – brown, black and Asian – that they had positive contributions to American societal evolution. No, we can only have white European slant in the textbooks.
In Apartheid Arizona, having classes devoted to anything other than the white Anglo-Saxon version of American history is somehow ‘divisive’ and illuminates too much upon the oppression by the white supremacists against people of color in US History.
Yes, folks, the Ku Klux Klan has re-risen. Oh, they aren’t wearing the white dunce caps and sheets of yesteryear. And they aren’t burning crosses in your front yards.
Instead, the RepubliKlan Party is engaged in ethnic cleansing through the burning of books in the school curriculums in a newly energized RepubliKlan Party in the state of Apartheid Arizona.
But they aren’t limiting their ethnic and religiously supremacist cleansing to just Arizona. The RepubliKlanists are doing it in Texas, too with their corruption of the curriculum to mentally and emotionally abuse the public school students through the forced indoctrination of mythology under “Creationism” and through the deletion of science and reason from the curriculum.
As Bill Murray said in the movie “Stripes”: “That’s a fact, JacKKK!”
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