Mark Krikorian, head of Center for Immigration Studies
As has been common in the past, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) again lifted its veil of legitimacy to expose some of the Tanton Network’s connections to some of its more unabashedly white nationalist cohorts. This past Friday, July 7, CIS sent out one of it mass emailings of prepared clusters of recent news articles and media. Always quite organized, one only needed to scan to article #20 of this particular email cluster, titled “Immigration Opinions,” to find a piece by Brenda Walker.
The very-first-word of Walker’s article — “Mexifornia” — speaks volumes about CIS’s and VDARE’s respective veneers of legitimacy. (Walker has an essay in the Spring 2012 issue of John Tanton’s white nationalist publication, The Social Contract Journal, “Mexico-Style Corruption Infests Texas.”)
Once upon a time, CIS regularly forwarded VDARE articles, though not so much as of late.
What’s especially damning about last Friday’s email is that the first 14 of the 26 listed articles were recently penned by CIS’s own writers, who have a history of turning up in bigoted publications. The first 6 pieces are from CIS’s executive director since 1995, Mark Krikorian (pictured right), who has previously been quoted with the following rather unsavory remarks:
- On April 27 2011, Mark Krikorian wrote an article on National Review where he called Muslims a “vicious people.”
- After the tragedy and horror of the earthquake in Haiti at the beginning of 2010, Krikorian stated, “my guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.”
- In 2009, Mark Krikorian lamented the pronunciation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s last name, stating, “While in the past there may well have been too much social pressure for what sociologists call Anglo-conformity, now there isn’t enough.”
Brenda Walker, for her part, is a long time contributor to VDARE.com, which was named for supposedly the first white child born on American soil, Virginia Dare. VDARE was started by Peter Brimelow, a white nationalist from England. Along with another VDARE contributor and fellow white nationalist John Derbyshire, Brimelow spoke this year on a panel hosted by Tanton Network group ProEnglish at CPAC 2012.
John Derbyshire was recently let go from the mainstream conservative publication National Review, where he worked for 12 years until his racist writings finally forced him out the door. In the article that resulted in his firing, “Derbyshire suggests white and Asian parents talk to their children about what makes black people different and the threats posed to their safety by black people.”
Derbyshire was a featured speaker at the 2012 national conference of Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), which refers to African Americans and Blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity.” Jared Taylor, another long time VDARE contributor, was also a featured speaker this year. Taylor runs American Renaissance, which is largely regarded as the intellectual “elite” of the racist right.
Robert Vandervoort, head of the Tanton Network’s ProEnglish, formerly ran the Chicago wing of American Renaissance.