Blood and Politics (91 page)

A few opinion makers at the center of the conservative movement articulated what seemed like the emerging mainstream consensus: they regarded the ten years between the end of the Cold War and September 11 as an interregnum, a short historical hiccup before a new geopolitical alignment took shape. In this short decade the United States had become the only remaining superpower, and its hegemony had been unquestioned. Now “radical Islam” was challenging the power of the United States, and past antagonists such as Russia and India were lining up in mutual opposition to Islamic terror. The notion seemed unquestioned that the world was divided into competing “civilizations,” and that Western Civilization and Muslim Civilization were now locked in a struggle similar to the past Cold War, when capitalist states in the West battled communist states in the East.
²⁶

President Bush launched a war in Afghanistan, toppling the Taliban government, and put the major figure behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, on the run. He also invaded Iraq, taking up where the first president Bush had left off. American military forces quickly removed Saddam Hussein, but the goal of creating a stable new regime remained undone. As the first decade of the twenty-first century progressed, however, a growing body of evidence undermined the notion that everything had changed.

Cracks and fissures along lines of race, ethnicity, and religion reappeared at pre-9/11 levels. On the simple question of military service, for example, a Pew poll in 2003 showed that 55 percent of white people believed that everyone has an obligation to fight, even when the United States is wrong. By contrast, only 30 percent of black people held a similar opinion, contravening the idea that one unified American people
stood boldly against foreign enemies. The electorate divided into partisan camps, defined largely by demography and race. The Republican Party cemented its hold on white Protestant evangelicals, while the Democratic Party remained the home for black people and Jews. On questions of foreign policy, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to favor international cooperation and less likely to support go-it-alone measures.
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As the war in Iraq ground on, a significant spike occurred in what the Pew Research Center called “isolationist” sentiment, most tellingly, at “levels not seen since [the] post–Cold War 1990s and the post-Vietnam 1970s.” After Hurricane Katrina destroyed the Gulf Coast and much of New Orleans, images of homeless black people left stranded by government inaction competed for public attention with the memory of the burning World Trade Center. For black people in particular, Katrina became
the
disaster—man-made or natural.
²⁸
Further eroding the popular social consensus, a series of scandals and missteps undermined favorable views of the federal government, slashing it to pre-9/11 levels at 44 percent. Although individual opinion polls go up and down over time, this change in the gestalt of vernacular thought signaled an end to the consensus once wrought by the events in September 2001.

The war against terrorism increasingly looked like a partisan endeavor. The clash of civilizations thesis looked more like a narrow piece of intellectual property and less like a wide plank in the American psyche. Within a few short years it appeared that much of the political environment immediately after 9/11 had been eroded. Like prophecies that the turn of the millennial clock would produce apocalyptic violence and Y2K mayhem, those who predicted that “everything had changed” were simply proved wrong.

Paleoconservatives opposed President Bush’s “war against terrorism” abroad and the draconian assault on civil liberties at home with the same vigor that they had opposed the First Persian Gulf War.
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Neither Council of Conservative Citizens activists nor National Alliance cadres signed up to protect President Bush’s version of Western Civilization. And Sam Francis articulated the white nationalist opposition to the new national security state with the same precision that he had once used to argue an interventionist view at the Heritage Foundation.

Francis argued that both before and after September 11, President Bush & Company favored low-wage brown-skinned immigration as a necessary fact of economic life. Further, he wrote, “in the minds of the ruling class, there is little practical and virtually no moral difference between American militias [like Trochmann’s Montana Militia] . . . and the Islamic mass murderers of Al Qaeda.” Francis contended that the
“rhetorical and analytical fog” promoted by those arguing that everything had changed after September 11 was intended to “assist in the legitimatization and consolidation of ruling class hegemony and the global regime it is constructing.”
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Francis’s unadorned call for opposition to the status quo, couched in the analytical language of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, was the clearest statement of its kind from any political quarter.

The white nationalist genie was not going back into the Cold War–style interventionist bottle. White power skinheads were not going to start playing Barry Statler songs at their concerts. Neo-Confederates would still wave the Stars and Bars, even as black soldiers bled and died in Afghanistan and Iraq. Renaissancers and councillors, mainstreamers and vanguardists, militiamen and Aryanists—none was willing to give back the gains won in the 1990s. They knew that the next thirty years would be more important to their cause than the last thirty. It wasn’t Osama bin Laden who would render white people a minority in the supposed land of their forefathers.

February 21, 2002.
Six months after September 11, the changing racial demographics in the United States stood at the center of white nationalists’ attention.
¹
At
American Renaissance
’s conference of 250 near Dulles Airport, President Bush’s war against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq was of less concern than the fight brewing on the border with Mexico. Here Pat Buchanan’s book
The Death of the West
was well received.
²
It predicted the end of civilization as the attendees had known it. Buchanan started his book with the claim that “[i]n half a lifetime, many Americans have seen their God dethroned, their heroes defiled, their culture polluted, their values assaulted, their country invaded, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans have held for generations.”
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Although Buchanan used terms such as “faith” and “values,” the gist of this book centered on the idea that population was destiny. The West, he wrote, was dying from low birthrates among white “European” peoples and higher levels of fertility by people of color, most particularly brown-skinned immigrants. In his talk that day, Sam Francis told the crowd that he had read a draft of the book when it was still called
The Death of Whitey
.
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That weekend Francis declaimed on the supposed national security dangers posed by immigration, thus connecting the administration’s war against terrorism to his battle against brown-skinned immigrants from south of the Rio Grande. To elaborate on this point,
American Renaissance
invited an anti-immigrant activist from California, Glenn Spencer, to make a presentation. Spencer had been active in the Proposition 187 campaign in 1994, and press reports credited him with personally collecting forty thousand signatures to help put that measure on the ballot. He was well known for rhetoric that denigrated Mexican people, and
that day he warned that Mexicans were setting out to demographically reconquer the Southwest, land that the United States had seized 160 years before in the war with Mexico. Spencer claimed to have evidence of this
reconquista
conspiracy procured from “secretly recorded” meetings of Mexican Americans.
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Regardless of its truth, the reconquista theory had become a staple idea among anti-immigrant groups. At that time a border fence in California pushed immigrants into crossing in the Arizona desert, and the focus of anti-immigrant organizing was shifting from California to Arizona. In August 2002, six months after his turn at the
American Renaissance
podium, Spencer moved to Arizona and set up an outfit he called American Border Patrol.
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A new set of activists got involved in a vigilante effort to curb “illegals.” They included militia-style organizations such as Ranch Rescue and Chris Simcox’s Civil Homeland Defense. Simcox was another transplant from California to Arizona, where he bought ownership of the tabloid
Tombstone Tumbleweed
, which he used to promote his anti-immigrant politics. At first, members of Simcox’s outfit were required to have permits to carry concealed weapons, and they trolled the area, weapons in hand, looking for “illegals.” Later they morphed into a national organization called the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.
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As Arizona became a flashpoint, a local organization called Protect Arizona Now (known by its acronym, PAN) collected signatures to put a referendum on the 2004 ballot. Modeled on California’s Prop 187 ten years before, Arizona’s Prop 200 required proof of citizenship for people registering to vote or seeking state services such as welfare.
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By design, the measure aimed at making life in the United States difficult for immigrants—with or without documents. The initial petition-gathering process stalled, however, during its first months. But the effort was saved by the D.C.-based Federation for Immigration Reform, which stepped in with six hundred thousand dollars in contributions to PAN.
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The money paid for professional signature gatherers, and enough names were submitted to guarantee the measure a place on the ballot.

During this campaign, PAN created a national advisory board and named as its chair Virginia Abernethy, a sixty-nine-year-old emeritus professor at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine. With a Ph.D. from Harvard and a publications list on topics connecting health, the environment, and population growth, she also chaired a D.C.-based nonprofit called Carrying Capacity Network that aimed at sharply reducing immigration into the United States. She was also a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens and one of the dozen Ph.D.s whom Sam Francis used to plump up the
Citizens Informer
’s editorial advisory board. She was a frequent speaker at council events in the
South, and her Carrying Capacity Network was one of the few regular advertisers in its tabloid’s pages.
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More, she sat on the editorial board of one of the white nationalist movement’s newest periodicals,
The Occidental Quarterly
, started in 2001. Among the
Quarterly
’s stated principles: “The European identity of the United States and its people should be maintained. Immigration into the United States should be restricted to selected people of European ancestry.” Its policy toward the descendants of Africans first brought to the Americas long before most Europeans was summed up in the statement that “equality . . . is not a legitimate political aspiration.”
¹¹

When reports of Abernethy’s affiliations first emerged during the Prop 200 campaign, it created a stir in the press. The Federation for American Immigration Reform described her views as “repugnant” and “divisive,” although the D.C. outfit did not mention the Council of Conservative Citizens members in its own ranks.
¹²
For its part, PAN’s leader described Abernethy as the “grand dame of the anti-illegal immigration movement.” When asked about her views, Abernethy denied that she was a racist. When questioned by Arizona newspapers, she replied: “I’m in favor of separatism . . .” She added, “We’re saying that each ethnic group is often happier with its own kind.”
¹³

During the 1960s there would have been no questions about such a view, and it would have been accurately described as “segregationist.” The Supreme Court’s decision in
Brown
that “separate . . . was inherently unequal” was still fresh in the public mind. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Abernethy’s disavowal did not shake her place in the white nationalist movement any more than David Duke’s assertion that he was simply a white civil rights activist or Randy Weaver’s claim of ideological innocence.

In any case, the vast majority of white voters remained unconcerned by this storm. They overwhelmingly passed Proposition 200, turning it into law. A postelection survey found that supporters of the measure were primarily motivated by “negative feelings towards illegal immigrants . . .” and that “nearly 60% of voters knew how they would vote when they first heard about it.” In fact, “most respondents did not link provisions in the initiative to their support or opposition . . .”
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They wanted to send a message, and Virginia Abernethy helped make it happen.

As the anti-immigrant phenomenon flared in Arizona, a cross-country movement stretched from the vigilantes on the border to policy makers in the states of the Midwest and Southeast to think tanks and political action committees in Washington, D.C. In this movement, differences between legal and illegal immigrants faded into a generalized belief that a brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking tidal wave was swamping the
white-skinned population of the United States. The attempt to stop undocumented workers at the borders morphed into a campaign to end immigration altogether and to save a supposedly white nation from demographic ruin. As Representative Tom Tancredo, a Republican from Colorado’s Sixth District, said, “if we don’t control immigration, legal and illegal, we will eventually reach the point where it won’t be what kind of a nation we are, balkanized or united; we will have to face the fact that we are no longer a nation at all . . .”
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Tancredo had been associated with the Christian right side of the Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s. In the twenty-first century he was chief of a congressional immigration reform caucus of more than ninety members that promoted legislation to reduce legal immigration, plug the borders, and, in its own words, “address the widespread problem of voting by illegal aliens.” It also promoted legislation denying citizenship to children born in the United States if their parents were undocumented residents. This goal is explicitly contradicted by the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which declares that any person born in the United States is a citizen. This is the same Fourteenth Amendment that has been under attack by white nationalists from the Posse Comitatus and Montana Freemen to Aryan Nations.
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