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The online magazine for independent conservatives, edited by Taki Theodoracopulos

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The Southern Poverty Smearbund

The Smearbund is raging again; and as usual, its accusations against people whose views differ from its own tell more about the accuser than the targets of its defamation. On March 11, our college public relations office emailed me a feature story from the Las Vegas Journal, one that was receiving national online circulation. I, among others, was mentioned as someone who would be speaking at a conference to be held in Bodrun, Turkey in late May. This apparently was not a good idea, inasmuch as Heidi Beirich, deputy director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, was sure that “this looks like a very serious racist event.” All of the announced participants were generously tarred with a racist-fascist brush.  I myself was made to look especially suspicious since I was speaking on “the disease of equality,” a relatively esoteric topic that required the following explanation for morons: “Egalitarianism is the notion that all people should have equal economic, social and political rights.” I was also upbraided for having appeared at an American Renaissance Conference at some undisclosed point in the past, where I had delivered myself of an ominous-sounding stem-winder on “the Decline of WASPdom.”

Heidi filled her descriptions of the hated speakers, including a leading German demographer, Volkmar Weiss, with complaints about “academic racism,” a plague that would soon be reaching the eastern shores of the Aegean Sea. She was also upset that some of the speakers “promote the right to be able to discriminate in one’s personal and business relations.” The key organizer, a German-American economist (and disciple of Murray Rothbard) Hans-Hermann Hoppe was even alleged to have stated that “homosexuals tend to plan less for the future because they don’t have children.” Heidi was deeply concerned that we were looking at the beginning of a worldwide danger: “It sound like a pretty high-level gathering of high-level academic racists.”

For anyone who still clings to the belief in the Left’s cognitive superiority, this howl against the racist scourge should dispel any illusion. Another forthcoming speaker, Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, suffers abuse for having provided research evidence for “The Global Bell Curve.” For this and other research indiscretions, the author Lawrence Mower quotes a presumably impartial source, Cynthia Luria of the Nevada ADL, that “inviting Lynn and the others to speak is unacceptable.” One wonders how much of the misnamed Bell Curve Cynthia, Heidi, or Larry has actually read—or would be able to digest. On what ground does Cynthia find it “unacceptable” to invite me? Since my works never deal directly with IQ discrepancies or with the (demonstrable) connection between intelligence and heredity, why should I not be allowed to fly to Bodrun? Or perhaps these high-powered thinkers are protecting me against a “high-level gathering of high-level academic racists.” Although hardly associated with the right, my academic colleagues found these descriptions of dangerous thought to be ludicrous self-exhibitions coming from intellectual vulgarians. For me, however, this posturing is symptomatic of the “anti-fascist” hysteria that has already swept over Western and Central Europe. By now the current anti-fascist fury has resulted in the destruction of civil liberties and in the eradication of academic freedom, trends that far-sighted groups like the Vlaams Belang are trying to escape from, together with the unrestricted Third World immigration that has contributed to European civil unrest. For the record, our hostess in Bodrun, an educated, affluent Turkish lady, shares most of the same concerns as the other participants.

Another recent display of anti-fascist hysteria came from George Archibald, inveighing against his onetime superior, Washington Times morning editor Fran Coombs. On March 14, George who is no longer employed by the Times, expressed concern in his daily blog that his former boss might succeed the soon-to-retire editor-in-chief Wes Pruden. This possibility pains the apparently sensitive Archibald, since Fran is “a white supremacist racist” who may be running an important Republican publication. The evidence cited is that Fran’s wife Marian is associated, albeit in some non-specific way, with the “neo-Nazi American Renaissance magazine.” Moreover, the couple’s webmaster for their personal website is a “virulent white-supremacist,” George R. McDaniel. The proof provided for the charge against this resident of Raleigh North Carolina is that “he was a friend and ally of Sam Francis.” For those may have forgotten,” Sam Francis was someone “Pruden reluctantly fired as an editorial writer in 1995 because Sam Francis attended a pro-Nazi, white supremacist meeting and wrote propaganda causes promoting their cause.”

There is virtually nothing in this story that can withstand the test of honest examination. By the time he got around to the act, Pruden was looking for any excuse to dump his prize-winning journalist Dr. Francis. He did fire him but not for writing neo-Nazi “propaganda pieces.” Sam had gone after neocon sacred cows, while Pruden was knuckling under to neocon control. Sam had also shown the temerity to suggest that Christianity does not condemn slavery explicitly. Sam was then responding to a maudlin apology by the Southern Baptist Convention for the sins of their ancestors who had owned slaves. Nowhere did Sam, who was one of my closest friends in the world, defend racial or any other kind of slavery. He was simply reacting to what he and I understood as an exemplification of “the politics of guilt.” Moreover, as someone who occasionally reads American Renaissance, I have never found “neo-Nazi” propaganda on its pages. Its editor Jared Taylor takes a dim view of interracial relations, albeit no more pessimistic than the one expressed by Abraham Lincoln, who had hoped to send manumitted slaves to Africa. The magazine’s politics are not national socialist or fascist corporatist but anarchically libertarian, except for their concern about controlling more effectively our open borders to the South. About a third of the readership and some of the contributors, I have learned, are Jewish. One need not agree with the publication from beginning to end to recognize that its stress on voluntary racial separatism and political libertarianism does not equal Hitlerism. Since millions of people were murdered by the Communists on the dubious charge of being “Nazis” and “fascists,” this now routinely hurled accusation may be the most pernicious in human history.

Archibald’s charges against American Renaissance and its controversial editor are entirely unsubstantiated, but they do serve the purpose of slandering Mrs. Coombs and others whom Archibald is eager to settle scores with. During my period of association with the Washington Times Corporation in the late 1980s, I recall Archibald as a frenetic Republican loyalist from Britain, who had expensive tastes. He owned a horse farm in Virginia and though supposedly happily married, spent a lot of time flirting with (and dressing up for) women. Archibald never gave the impression of being personally interested in imitating Abe Foxman or Heidi Beirich. His major professional preoccupation then was exposing the sins of Democratic politicians.

What he has obviously learned is that one scores points with the liberal media by calling enemies on the right “anti-Semitic” or “racist.” The persistent use of this charge has helped the SPLC to come back from major revelations which have focused on the mendacity and misdeeds of its director Morris Dees. In Harpers (November 2000), contributing editor Ken Silverstein brought out a blistering indictment against this figure, who was shown as a someone who hyped hate crimes in order to extract huge sums from gullible contributors. The lesson that has come out is that if you call people “racists,” the media may well play along, even if your organization is badly damaged goods. In Archibald’s case, given his loss of a job, a disaster for which he blames Coombs, his talk about “white supremacists” and “neo-Nazis” may be aimed at professional recovery.

As a historian, I couldn’t help noticing the undemonstrated nature of the charges hurled at Mrs. Coombs. The string of citations from a letter she wrote in 2002 does not prove much of anything, save for the facts that the letter’s author is concerned about Mexican irredentists in the US and that she believes that Americans do not praise sufficiently the positive achievements of the West. Both positions seem eminently defensible, and both have been argued recently by Samuel Huntington, who describes himself as a “liberal Democrat.” Are these civics lessons quotations the most damning evidence that Archibald can find to use against the spouse of a former boss, someone from whom presumably he had parted in less than friendly circumstances? Perhaps the unemployed journalist and aging womanizer should take lessons about slandering from Heidi or some other critic of “The Global Bell Curve.”

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