While many young conservatives waited in long lines to hear Ron Paul speak in the main ballroom of yesterday’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), another event, ‘Will Immigration Kill the GOP,’ was drawing a crowd of its own.
The seminar was sponsored by Youth for Western Civilization, a group that debuted at CPAC in 2009 and aims to defend western culture on college campuses. The group invited former Congressman Virgil Goode, anti-immigrant activist Bay Buchannan and anti-immigrant former Congressman Tom Tancredo to speak on its panel. A special guest who joined later was newly elected Pennsylvania Congressman Lou Barletta, famous for an anti-immigrant ordinance he passed in the town of Hazleton, PA.
Barletta was even presented with an award by one of the attendees. None other than Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen Project. Jim Gilchrist was closely tied to Shawna Forde right up to her arrest for murder in 2009.
More disturbing than the actual lineup of anti-immigrant activists was the white nationalists that the event attracted.
Sitting on one side of the room was William Johnson, chairman of the white nationalist political party American Third Position (A3P). The mission statement of A3P reads: “The American Third Position exists to represent the political interests of White Americans.”
Johnson wrote of American immigration, “No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race. … Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.”
Sitting across the aisle from Johnson was Jared Taylor, the white nationalist founder of American Renaissance, a magazine which routinely writes about the inferiority of non-whites. Taylor’s 2011 American Renaissance conference was shut down last week in Charlotte after a city councilman convinced city hotels not to provide a venue for the event.
Other attendees included Youth for Western Civilization members who have attended Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) conferences in the past. The CofCC is a blatantly white supremacist organization that has called blacks a “retrograde species of humanity.”
Another member of Youth for Western Civilization in attendance was Tim Dionisopoulos, a member of the anti-immigrant group Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement, a group listed on the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s website as a state contact group. Dionisopoulos spoke last October at an anti-immigrant event in Rhode Island where he quoted Sam Francis, a now deceased white nationalist and former editor of the CofCC’s newsletter.
Youth for Western Civilization’s booth at CPAC was distributing free copies of the Social Contract, a journal published by white nationalist John Tanton, the founder of the modern day anti-immigrant movement. Ironically, in the booth right next to Youth for Western Civilization was the anti-immigrant organization ProEnglish, founded by Tanton, who still sits on the organization’s board of directors.
Youth for Western Civilization claims that it is not a racist group, but its ties to the CofCC and the fact that it has attracted some of the most famous white nationalists in the country to its panel cannot be overlooked.