The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a report today exhaustively exploring the links between FAIR, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA.
And not just their relationships with one another, either, but their associations with racist hardliners and political extremists.
The evidence is damning.
These so-called “rational experts” on immigration are unequivocally promoting a sneakily codified racist ideology. The more we learn, the more disturbing these anti-immigrant associations become.
For years the real truth about these groups has been floating near the surface of public consciousness. All the while the founder of these groups, John Tanton, has been steering them deeper into mainstream acceptance. It looks as if the charade is finally up, though.
SPLC’s report states:
“[FAIR] hired as key officials men who also joined white supremacist groups. It has board members who regularly write for hate publications. It promotes racist conspiracy theories about Latinos. And it has produced television programming featuring white nationalists.”
An interactive website and video was launched by America’s Voice today, as well. The video calls out Tanton, Dan Stein, Mark Krikorian, and Roy Beck as the leadership behind an extremist anti-immigrant network, calling them “wolves in sheep’s clothing” for passing themselves off as the heads of harmless advocacy organizations.
On the website you can vote on which of the anti-immigrant leaders is the “top wolf.”
My vote’s for Roy Beck, head of NumbersUSA. While John Tanton may be the mastermind, Roy Beck, Tanton’s long-time employee and understudy, has surpassed his mentor, gaining inroads into mainstream media regarding migration issues. Unsurprisingly, the mounting condemnations against Tanton are threatening Beck’s mainstream success.
According to SPLC:
“John Tanton, it seems, is undermining Roy Beck’s respectability. ‘It is amazing that Beck has attained the mainstream status he has, considering where he comes from’, concludes Henry Fernandez, a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. ‘His extremely close and decades-long relationship with Tanton should give pause to anyone who deals with NumbersUSA‘.”
With FAIR taking the heat for associations with white-supremacists, holocaust deniers, and white nationalists, it appears that NumbersUSA and Beck may be attempting to pick up the torch and propel this bigoted anti-immigrant network from its helm.
On the bright side, Republicans got a public bashing in a New York Times editorial on Saturday. The article took them to task over the well-hidden racial extremism that has maintained a strangle-hold on the party for several years, warning of increased outbreaks of racist sentiments in times of economic uncertainty:
“It is easy to mock white-supremacist views as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out. The country has, of course, made considerable progress since the days of Know-Nothings and the Klan. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away, no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for vigilance.”