On November 15, Frank Brehm, a longtime nativist activist with Oregonians for Immigration Reform wrote to IREHR regarding our November 13 article, “Dissecting the Nativist Victory in Oregon.” Below you will find our reply. His original email follows.

 

Dear Mr. Brehm:

Thank you for taking the time to contact the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights about our article, “Dissecting the Nativist Victory in Oregon.” We appreciate the feedback.

Thank you, also, for being up-front about your relationship with New Nation News. Unlike your OFIR colleagues who have repeatedly tried to duck the issue, you state clearly that you “had been given a free platform at the time, on a platform called NewNation.org” and that you took it.  

Perhaps you’d care to elaborate on how this arrangement came to be? How were you given this “free platform?” How did you find New Nation News in the first place? Unlike many free website hosting services during this period, like Tripod and Geocities (where you could have hosted your site without cost or stigma), New Nation News didn’t have a “sign-up for free hosting” option on their website, so did someone from New Nation News approach you to host OIR, or did you approach them?

Just to be clear, you’re now confirming that you did, in fact, host your group’s website, Oregonians for Immigration Reform on a host that you knew was a white nationalist site that regularly featured the use of terms like “vile jew,” “ni***r,” “Mexiroach,” “illegal mud,” “beaner,” and more?

Even the quickest of glances at the New Nation News site finds multiple instances of hardcore bigoted material. What organization seeking credibility with the public about a “real issue” would think this would be an acceptable place to be?

In case you choose to fall back to the position that you were completely unaware of who you worked with for several years, the white nationalist behind New Nation News is Mark Siporen. He has been called “the unsung hero of the White Movement,” over at the original white nationalist website, Stormfront. The Aryan Street blog encapsulated what Siporen means by “New Nation,” noting that “his thesis is that from the fires of hellish multiculturalism, the New (White) Nation is being formed.”

The OIR website you ran not only took advantage of that “free platform,” you reciprocally promoted the racist New Nation News site on the OIR website. As you can see from the screenshot below, you included New Nation News on your “Links” page, under the “Non-Mainstream Media” category, alongside a link to the racist and anti-Semitic tabloid, The Spotlight, and the John Birch Society’s magazine, The New American.

From the "Links" Page of the OIR website.

Your link page also contained links to white nationalist Virginia Abernethy’s group, the Carrying Capacity Network, racist Glenn Spencer’s Voice of Citizens Together, and the Central Michigan Regional Militia, 15th Brigade, Kent County.

A look around the rest of the old OIR website also finds other problematic material. Your bibliography page, for instance, also includes publications by white nationalists Wayne Lutton, Lawrence Auster, and Peter Brimelow. Your site even featured several reprints from the white nationalist publication Middle American News.

Perhaps all of this helps explain why, on May 26, 1999, your host wrote a post at New Nation News matter-of-factly “acknowledging link to Oregonians for Immigration Reform from Oregon Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” Your host didn’t express concern about the link from the Oregon Knights of the KKK, instead he acknowledged it and providing a return link to the Oregon Klan group’s website.

You then write that, “If any organization, offers me an opportunity to write upon the subject of the need for reduced immigration, I am glad to discourse on the subject.” Let’s be clear, establishing a relationship with a white nationalist so he can host your nativist website is not the same as discoursing on a subject. You weren’t just posting some comments on a random website.

IREHR would agree that from a biological and genetic point of view, races do not exist among humans.  The concept and practice of race is socially constructed by actions, thought, and culture.  It is racists who originally created the white race, to separate whites from Americans of African descent.  See, for instance, Theodore W. Allen’s, two volume work, The Invention of the White Race, for a further examination of the idea of race as a social construct.

It is important to note that several of the organizations close to OFIR have played a role in perpetuating the false construct of race that you now express concern about.
Have you written to the Protect Oregon Driver Licenses chief petitioner and fellow OFIR board member, Richard F. LaMountain, to let him know about your stance on race?  As a writer for white nationalist publications, like Middle American News, VDARE, and even American Free Press, LaMountain might gain from your insight.

Have you written to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) about returning that $1.2 million they received from a foundation created in the 1930s to promote Hitlerian notions eugenics and “race science.” After all, FAIR is featured repeatedly on the OIR website, OFIR is listed as one of FAIR’s local groups, and FAIR contributed $3500 to the Protect Oregon Driver Licenses committee. Since you’re tight, maybe they’ll listen to you.

While you’re at it, you might want to ask them to remove their founder, John Tanton, from their board of directors. Tanton has written that “"I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that." He’s also written, “Can homo contraceptivus compete with homo progenitiva if borders aren’t controlled? Or is advice to limit one’s family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?” And even “The situation then is that the people who have been the carriers of Western Civilization are well on the way toward resigning their commission to carry the culture into the future. When this decline in numbers is coupled with an aging of the core population…it begins to look as if the chances of Western Civilization passing into the history books are very good indeed.”

Somehow, we doubt it.

We are especially concerned when your argument veers from the point that “race” is an invalid construct to assert that “racism is a false construct,” and add that you “have never believed in the ‘bogeyman’ of racism.”

Are you arguing that racism doesn’t exist? That the racism that undergirded the horrors of slavery wasn’t real? That racism that supported Jim Crow segregation was a myth?

Here we disagree. While we wholeheartedly agree with you that race is a socially constructed, racism is very real ideology, with real impacts on society. In fact, racism is prejudice and discrimination based in those very false constructs of race.  It often takes the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently.
Believing that racism is a false construct may have made it difficult for you to see the problematic nature of hosting your organization’s website on a host where headlines like “vile jew,” “ni***r,” “Mexiroach,” “illegal mud,” “beaner,” and more are used regularly.

Moreover, your attempts to conflate a respected organization like (the National Council of) La Raza with vile racists like New Nation News suggests that your words are disingenuous. The numerous attacks on Mexican-American and Latino groups on the OIR website also highlights the speciousness of your claim that you were advocating “for an immigration system that was color, and creed free.”

If that were true, perhaps you’d care to explain why the OIR website featured an article in the “Truthful Media” category entitled, “’MULTIRACIALISM’ MAY MEAN END OF AMERICAN HERITAGE.” The article was written by the late Sam Francis, a white nationalist who worked with the Council of Conservative Citizens and American Renaissance. The article was published in the white nationalist tabloid, Middle American News. Then there is the piece, “Losing America in the multicultural mix: In their hearts, many of these ‘multiculturalists’ loathe the old America we grew up in and loved,” by Pat Buchanan.

Lastly, you wrote that “I notice that your site is filled with constant reminders of the ‘racist’ construct in print.  Since race has no scientific basis, the ongoing reference to the construct seems akin to a modern plant biologist ranting about the false concept of LaMarckian biology.”

What a sad logical fallacy. Actually, in your analogy, IREHR would be an organization akin to a group of modern plant biologists writing about those individuals and organizations still clinging to outdated and disproven science and trying to change modern plant biology to meet their prejudices.

We at IREHR will continue to expose racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry as long as they exist.  We look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

The staff at IREHR

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