White nationalists among us

A Look at the Forces Behind the Anti-Immigrant MovementNow, a point I want to make about this movement is that their ideas did not come from a vacuum, and they're not necessarily a rational response to a crisis. They come from the white nationalist movement, a movement that seeks to maintain what they consider the white character of the United States. You know, in 2005 I attended the largest white nationalist conference, the American Renaissance Conference. After passing through an FBI cordon, I met in the lobby with David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, who, you know, for all his flaws, is a master of PR. And we talked about his days in the late ’70s trying to, you know, refine the image of the Ku Klux Klan. And he said, “You know, people called me crazy then for what I said about immigration, but I sound like every Republican today, and a lot of Democrats, and no one gives me any credit for that. And not only that, I conducted the first civilian border patrol.” Indeed, in 1979 David Duke drove around in a car marked “Klan Border Watch” looking for undocumented immigrants on the border, and he was pursued by about forty reporters.

This was an enormous PR coup for the Ku Klux Klan, and it’s been copied by grassroots pressure groups like the Minutemen, who--they're adopting specifically a white nationalist strategy from the Ku Klux Klan, and they're working closely with these think tanks which I just mentioned and the politicians who I just mentioned, and they have moved from the border to towns nearby, like Hempstead, and what they're doing is carrying out protests and vigilante action against day laborers. And this movement is growing more extreme at the grassroots, at the same time more influential in the mainstream.Comment:  These are the same people who advocate English-only policies and oppose tribal sovereignty.