On Wednesday October 25, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach spoke at a meeting of the Social Contract Press. That fact is not in dispute. Social Contract Press is a publishing house central to the anti-immigrant movement. That fact is also not in dispute.
On November 4, Edward M. Eveld wrote an article about that fact for the Kansas City Star daily. Mr. Evald apparently called the Southern Poverty Law Center for comment, and Heidi Beirich, their director of intelligence, described the Social Contract Press as racially motivated. She said, in quotes, “The Social Contract Press has published white nationalists and racists for years.” That statement is in dispute, apparently. Kris Kobach called such a description “outrageous.” The SPLC, Kobach said, “They’re unethical smear artists.”
Mr. Kobach tries to deflect from the facts of the case by smearing the Southern Poverty Law Center, so that he can escape behind a fog of ink.
As a matter of fact, the Social Contract Press is mentioned in my book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. So is Wayne Charles Lutton, the editor at Social Contract Press. He is described in detail on pages 377 to 379. Here, Lutton’s relationship to the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) is described in detail. He spoke at an IHR conference. He wrote reviews and articles for its journal. And Lutton is described as an “ardent revisionist” by the editor of IHR’s Journal of Historical Review. At the IHR they used the word “revisionist” instead of Holocaust denier, the term everybody else uses.
So, the fact is that the Social Contract Press editor is an anti-Semite and a “revisionist.” Mr. Kobach, that fact is certainly beyond dispute.
Lutton is also something of a racist. Speaking at the self-described white nationalist American Renaissance’s conference in 1996, Lutton said “demography is destiny” and other such nonsense.
Wayne Lutton: White Nationalist
Now the publisher of Social Contract Press, John Tanton, has his own racist record. That has been well documented by multiple reporters and book authors over the decades. There is more, much more, to the racism of the Social Contract Press and its personnel.
The facts are in. Mr. Kobach’s description of the Southern Poverty Law Center is patently wrong. But Mr. Kobach is wrong and the SPLC is right. Social Contract Press should be out of bounds for anyone elected to be Secretary of State for Kansas. Period.
Mr. Kobach should apologize.
That is not likely to happen.
In 2013, Mr. Kobach was a panelist at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. On the panel with him was Bob Vandervoort, founder of the white nationalist group, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance. At that gathering, Mr. Kobach shook hands with Mr. Vandervoort, instead of treating him like the off-limits white nationalist he is. When we pointed this fact out in 2013, Mr. Kobach acted like it did not happen. Indeed, it is beyond dispute.
