Bill O'Reilly was mad at the media Monday night. A former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, had attacked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and no one in the media had mentioned McGovern's "far-left credentials."
"He's just off the chart," O'Reilly said. "He's a far-left dedicated zealot, and the press, after he does it, just says, 'Oh, he's just a CIA analyst,' like he's got some credibility. Come on!"
And, of course, this was just more evidence of the media's insidious liberal bias.
"If this McGovern guy had ties to the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch society," O'Reilly said, "don't you think that would have been in the headline? ... If this guy had been a right-wing nut instead of a left-wing nut, number one, he never would have got on television, and number two, they would have slaughtered him."
And then O'Reilly had Michelle Malkin on.
Oh well -- it was a nice strawman while it lasted, Bill.
See, Malkin, a conservative columnist, blogger (the most popular conservative blogger, according to Technorati and Truth Laid Bear) and Fox News contributor, has some affiliations of her own, some skeletons in the closet O'Reilly never bothered to mention -- skeletons like VDARE.com.
Named for Virginia Dare, the first white person born in the New World, the site has been named by the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. And for good reason: as I noted in a previous column over at Dragonfire, the site is dedicated to pushing the kind of pseudo-science the Nazis could have only dreamed of using to support their racial fantasies. Forget phrenology: VDARE spends its time flogging books that purport to prove that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is 67 -- below the accepted standard criteria for a diagnosis of mental retardation. (The Anti-Defamation League notes that the author of the linked review, J. Philippe Rushton, has been less than subtle about his racism. "During [a] 1996 conference... Rushton lectured at length about the sexual differences among various races, arguing that blacks, while possessing smaller brains, reproduce at a faster rate due to the larger size of their sex organs. 'Not to reinforce stereotypes,' he has said elsewhere, 'but it's a trade-off: more brain or more penis, you can't have everything.' ... He has also stated that Nazi Germany's military prowess was due in part to the purity of their gene pool.")
Malkin's ties to the site are legion: it regularly prints her column, while she employs one of its writers, Juan Mann, as the principal writer of her "Immigration Blog" and lists the site on her blogroll. And it's not as if Malkin isn't well aware of the criticism, both of the site and her ties to it -- in a post on her blog in September 2004, she noted that "my friend Peter Brimelow [the founder of VDARE] observes that some people apparently think linking to VDARE is tantamount to a hate crime."
Malkin isn't the only prominent person to be writing for VDARE. There's also Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed "white nationalist" who edits the American Renaissance journal and is president of the journal's parent, the New Century Foundation, an organization notable among other reasons for its 1999 report, "The Color of Crime," which in its conclusion stated, "Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous." That report was only one of Taylor's attempts to provide pseudo-scientific justifications for his racism.
"The New Century Foundation -- known primarily by the name of its publication, American Renaissance -- promotes 'genteel' racism," the Anti-Defamation League has noted: "pseudoscientific, questionably researched and argued articles that validate the genetic and moral inferiority of nonwhites and the need for racial 'purity.'"
In an article on VDARE, preceded by a preface from site founder and friend of Malkin Brimelow, in which Brimelow called Taylor "perhaps the most brilliant and accomplished figure among White Nationalists," Taylor defended his beliefs by in separate instances calling both African Americans and non-white immigrants inferior to whites, writing:
"The reason blacks and whites do not enjoy similar outcomes despite similar treatment by society is that the black and white populations are not equivalent. ... Our government has permitted a huge influx of non-white immigrants who threaten to reduce whites to a minority by the middle of this century. In their bones, whites know this will not be a good thing. They know that an increasingly Third-World America will slip into Third-World habits of corruption, poverty, and violence."
VDARE also publishes writers like the late Sam Francis, a former columnist for the Washington Times, fired for saying at the American Renaissance's 1994 annual meeting that: "The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."
According to Brimelow, Francis "played a quiet but effective role in putting together the principals of VDARE.COM."
When Francis died in 2005, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke eulogized him on his website, saying:
"I have known Sam Francis for almost two decades. When many political pundits were afraid of associating with the 'former KKK'er turned elected official' Sam wasn't. ... I remember well the dinner we had that night in the Orleans restaurant in Arlington when we shared each other's views of the world and each found a true brother in the Cause. Many times Sam Francis defended me in his newspaper columns and dared to stand up against the anti-White racists and the Jewish supremacists.
"So the loss of Sam Francis is both a great loss for me personally and a terrible loss for the Movement as a whole. We will all miss his wit, his passion for our principles, his love for our people, and yes, his courage. ...
"The best way we can remember Sam is to rededicate ourselves to the Cause that he lived his life for."
And no wonder, given what Francis has written, especially for VDARE. Like a criticism of a Monday Night Football ad showing, in Francis' words, "blonde white sexpot Nicolette Sheridan of the steamy 'Desperate Housewives' series smooching up to black football star Terrell Owens in the locker room of the Philadelphia Eagles." The ad, Francis said, "was an intentional act of moral subversion. ... The point was not just to hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste but also of white racial and cultural identity. The message of the ad was that white women are eager to have sex with black men, that they should be eager, and that black men should take them up on it. ... [T]he ad's message also was that interracial sex is normal and legitimate, a fairly radical concept for both the dominant media as well as its audience." (That piece got Francis' column dropped by the last mainstream publication printing it, the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.)
There's much more. And Malkin, though she and O'Reilly won't advertise this, is implicitly endorsing it by her numerous associations with the site and its founder, her "friend" Peter Brimelow. O'Reilly's right to note that people from the John Birch society and the KKK shouldn't be taken seriously, but the real white supremacist threat doesn't come from the obvious hard cases anymore. It's cloaked in pseudo-science, dressed up in a suit instead of a white robe, and given an attractive, non-white, face by Malkin. And O'Reilly, whether he knows it or not -- and he should -- is giving these heirs of the Klan a legitimate platform. For shame.
This column originally appeared in the online magazine Dragonfire.