(If you can’t see the MP4 video above, click the following link…)

Byron York interviews Jason Richwine, who resigned from the Heritage Foundation when his ties to white nationalists and racist writings surfaced, and it will serve very nicely as an example of how deeply entrenched this kind of racism is in the Republican Party: A Talk With Jason Richwine: ‘I Do Not Apologize for Any of My Work’.

Of course he doesn’t apologize; that’s the standard posture when right wing racists are exposed. They always double down and insist they were just “telling un-PC truths.”

But Richwine’s excuses for publishing articles at the white nationalist website AlternativeRight.com are simply amazing.

Richwine, the Harvard intellectual, thought he could discuss perhaps the most radioactive subject in America — a mixture of race, ethnicity, and group intelligence — in the context of another highly controversial topic — immigration — and act as if it were all a matter of scholarly inquiry. In addition, he made what was at best a careless mistake — why post anything at AlternativeRight? - and further damaged himself by making tone-deaf remarks during a public discussion in Washington. Given the intensity of the immigration fight now raging in Washington, that was more than enough to do him in.

“At best a careless mistake?” Right.

“Oops! I published racist articles at a white nationalist site? How in the world did that happen?”

Here’s Richwine’s excuse — he had no idea the site was run by the Ku Klux Klan in $300 suits. He thought it was just, you know, a “paleo-conservative” site. Because after all, John Derbyshire was writing for it, too.

Yes, that’s the John Derbyshire who was fired from the National Review for his overtly racist views.

Richwine published the rebuttal in a relatively new website, AlternativeRight. Why there? For several reasons, Richwine told me. First, The American Conservative declined to publish the response on its own site, which left Richwine looking for a place to post. Second, he had met AlternativeRight’s founder Richard Spencer at an AEI event. And third, Spencer asked Richwine to write for him. “There was a new website called AlternativeRight,” Spencer recalled. “I thought it would be like a paleo-conservative website. I had seen that [former National Review writer] John Derbyshire had also published something there … Later on, it took on a more extreme version.”

Absolutely stunning. They’re so immersed in reactionary racism, they don’t even see it any more.

By the way, Richwine’s claim that AlternativeRight.com only became “extreme” later on, after he wrote for them, is pure, unvarnished bullshit. But you probably already knew that.

Oh… and of course, in the comments for York’s article at the Washington Examiner, here come the racists to defend Richwine. As they always do. These views are an integral part of today’s right wing.

Our ancestors charged cannon fire and muskets to overthrow tyrannical rule and take charge of their own destiny. Today we cower in fear of being called “racist.”

[…]

I feel bad for Richwine. People do what they have to do and say what they have to say in order to stay employed and “feed their families.” This is an example of how the conservative movement has come to resemble the former Soviet Union. Others like Derbyshire and Sam Francis have been purged. I encourage people to go to Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute website and watch his video response to these events. Many of the readers of this site will find his comments apt.

The accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life,” he says. “Once that word is out there, it’s very difficult to recover from it, even when it is completely untrue.”

But saying there is a connection between race and IQ is clearly “racist.” The fact is that the universe is “racist” because it gave different innate attributes on average to different races. Mainstream conservatives make a mistake when they say it is wrong to be “racist” because when they do that they are cutting themselves off from the truth that supports their side.

Mainstream conservatives have internalized the politically correct ground rules of the left, and in doing so they have fatally weakened their own cause. When they say it is wrong to be “racist” they are also saying that it would be wrong for whites to look out for their own group interests.

Meanwhile, whites are the only race or ethnic group that doesn’t have group identity politics to represent its interests in the political mainstream. The GOP takes white votes while doing nothing to look out for white interests fundamentally. Whites are becoming a minority in this country as a result of immigration (both legal and illegal), and the GOP has done nothing to stop it. Whites are officially discriminated against by their own government, but the GOP avoids this issue in the hope that it can win over a few more black and Hispanic votes. Someone has to stand up for whites explicitly in the mainstream. If the GOP and the conservative movement don’t start doing this, then hopefully they will meet the same fate as the former Soviet Union, and it will be sooner rather than later.

[…]

Richwine learned the hard way as did Charles Murray did when he wrote “The Bell Curve.” You do NOT touch this subject. No matter how objective your analysis may be, if the conclusions don’t support politically correct assumptions, you publish at your peril.

I take no offense in learning Asian-Americans perform better on standardized tests or qualify for loans at a higher rate than whites. I also don’t find it troubling that blacks or Hispanics perform/qualify lower/less often than whites. In fact, any finding to the contrary would be surprising indeed. Why then does data which comes from an objective, controlled study offend so many people?

The answer is politics. The data may be perfectly valid but it must take a back seat to ideology and leftwing ideology refuses to accept ANY data which shows selected “victim groups” are “inferior” to others. Of course, the data in NO WAY shows racial superiority or inferiority. It simple demonstrates trends and correlates them to race. Liberals know this but admitting the data are true flies in the face of both their ideology and its agenda. So we hear screams of “social Darwinism” and “racism” and “xenophobia” rather than an intelligent, objective response. Richwine IS a bigot. Oppose gay “marriage?” You ARE a “homophobe.” Don’t want a Muslim cultural center near Ground Zero? You ARE an “Islamphobe.” Don’t think the federal government should pay for a woman’s birth control? How dare you? You ARE a misogynist. No discussion. No facts. End of story. You suffer from some liberal-attributed clinical malady. You ARE sick. Disagree? You’re not in the “party of science” and probably not worthy of even drawing further breath. If you’re allowed to do that, you’ll just hasten the looming climate catastrophe by expelling CO2. Who needs that or YOU?

[…]

And the guy is abandoned and left with people thinking that he’s a racist and that’s what motivates the study. Why is it that we never circle the wagons around our own and speak out to defend and protect them. The left will always protect their own, no matter what and they win the debates in public opinion. When are we going to learn that we have got to back up our folks and stand up the the race baiters? I’m so sick of thisl

Related:
About Richard Spencer and AlternativeRight.com

Jason Richwine, the Heritage Foundation analyst who published articles on a white nationalist website and was a co-author of Heritage’s recent study on the economic impact of immigration, has resigned. Richwine also suggested in his Harvard thesis that America should discourage immigration by non-whites because their IQs are lower. An all-around lovely fellow, and the perfect person to write a study on immigration — if you’re a wingnut.

BREAKING: Jason Richwine has resigned from The Heritage Foundation bit.ly/11YTQPM#.UY1QI…

— Conn Carroll (@conncarroll) May 10, 2013

He blew the cover so he’s gotta go, like John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg.

Andrew Kaczynski found another time the Heritage analyst said blacks and Hispanics have lower IQs.

The live video feed has concluded; we’ll post the official recorded video as soon as it’s available at YouTube. In the meantime, here’s an open thread to discuss…

An interesting point from Ezra Klein:

Kind of amazing: Even though the 2007 immigration bill failed, we’ve hit all the border security targets it set: washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog…

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) January 29, 2013

The New York Times has a Full Transcript of President Obama’s Remarks on Immigration Reform.

And here’s the official White House video:

As I watched this clip from religious right caveman Bryan Fischer’s latest bug-eyed loony rant, I realized I was going to run out of adjectives; blatantly racist, bigoted, ignorant, hateful, creepy, xenophobic, etc. etc.

Fischer’s premise here is that Latinos are “socialists by nature,” who want open borders so they can bring in their huge families to “plunder the wealth of the United States.” And that’s why we have to stop them from coming in and “clamp down on immigration,” because they’ll vote for Democrats.

You won’t believe it. This one’s nuts even by Fischer’s already very low standards.

After losing the presidential election, with 70% of the Latino vote going to Obama, Republicans are suddenly making noises about the need to be less anti-immigrant.

Or to be more precise, the need to appear to be less anti-immigrant.

Of course, if they’re serious about this, they should probably start by shunning people like Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), instead of putting him in charge of the House Judiciary Committee with primary jurisdiction on immigration matters: Likely House Judiciary Panel Chairman Is Strong Opponent of DREAM Act.

Hard-line immigration reform lawmaker Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) is expected to take the gavel of term-limited Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas). The panel has primary jurisdiction on immigration matters.

Goodlatte opposes efforts to create guest-worker programs, or grant amnesty to illegal aliens. He spoke out against the DREAM Act when the House voted on the measure in December of 2010, calling it “unfair” and “ripe for fraud.”

Goodlatte said that “the DREAM Act could mean mass amnesty for 2.1 million illegal immigrants…same thing occurred after the 1986 amnesty bill, the Immigration and Control Act, was enacted. Everyone said that was going to end illegal immigration. It opened the doors to more. This is going to do exactly the same thing.”

The Republican Party has been soul searching after Tuesday’s election, with 70 percent of the Latino vote going to President Obama. The DREAM Act is strongly supported by Obama and most congressional Democrats.

Boehner said as much at a press conference on Friday morning: “It’s clear that as a political party we’ve got some work to do…clearly conversations are underway and will continue.”

Given Goodlatte’s stances on immigration, it is difficult to envision how the Virginia Republican would compromise with Democrats.

This article at The Hill is actually soft-pedaling Goodlatte’s rabid right wing anti-immigrant extremism. He’s not simply opposed to the DREAM Act, he’s a full blown xenophobe.

Rep. Goodlatte is a supporter of the Minutemen, got a 100% rating from white nationalist anti-immigrant group FAIR, wants to pass a bill requiring hospitals to report undocumented immigrants, wants to declare English the official language of the US, and wants to end the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.

More info on this kook.

Good luck with that Latino outreach, Republicans.

In addition to being a hard core anti-Latino xenophobe, Rep. Goodlatte is also a Birther.

Gotta hand it to Samuel Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber” — he has no hesitation about expressing outright the xenophobic hatred many right wingers actually believe but are too afraid to say: Joe the Plumber Unfiltered: Build a ‘Damn Fence’ and ‘Start Shooting’.

Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher is not politically correct and he’s proud of it. And to prove it, the Ohio Republican congressional candidate told a crowd of about 125 supporters in Arizona that the government should “put a damn fence on the border going with Mexico and start shooting.”

“I’m running for Congress and that should be a bad thing to say,” Wurzelbacher said, as the Prescott eNews first reported. “You know what, that’s how I feel. I’m not going to hide it because I’m running for an office. I want my borders protected and I’m very, very adamant about that.”

It’s time to play, “Who Wrote That?”

Was it a member of the Minutemen militia, a sovereign citizen living in a cabin in Idaho, or… a member of the United States Supreme Court?

The answer: Justice Antonin Scalia Rages Against Obama on Immigration.

In his point-by-point defense of the Arizona legislation, the avowed law-and-order conservative surmised that the Obama administration “desperately wants to avoid upsetting foreign powers.” He accused federal officials of “willful blindness or deliberate inattention” to the presence of illegal immigrants in Arizona.

“[T]o say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind,” Scalia wrote. “If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State.”

The Reagan-appointed justice wrote:

It has become clear that federal enforcement priorities—in the sense of priorities based on the need to allocate “scarce enforcement resources”—is not the problem here. After this case was argued and while it was under consideration, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced a program exempting from immigration enforcement some 1.4 million illegal immigrants under the age of 30.

[For certain illegal immigrants] immigration officials have been directed to “defe[r] action” against such individual “for a period of two years, subject to renewal.” The husbanding of scarce enforcement resources can hardly be the justification for this, since the considerable administrative cost of conduct­ing as many as 1.4 million background checks, and ruling on the biennial requests for dispensation that the nonenforcement program envisions, will necessarily be deducted from immigration enforcement. The President said at a news conference that the new program is “the right thing to do” in light of Congress’s failure to pass the Administration’s proposed revision of the Immigration Act. Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so. But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind.

Scalia enlisted bubble-gum to make his point, before calling it an “assault on logic” to say “identifying a removable alien and holding him for federal determination” supersedes the federal government’s authority.

“We are not talking here about a federal law prohibiting the States from regulating bubble-gum advertising, or even the construction of nuclear plants,” he declared. “We are talking about a federal law going to the core of state sovereignty: the power to exclude.”

In case you missed my point, this is a highly disturbing, unprecedented intrusion of far right wing politics into the Supreme Court. These talking points are straight out of the Rush Limbaugh playbook.

At The Atlantic, James Fallows asks: How would you describe a democracy where power was being shifted that way?

Here’s a transcript of the court’s opinions, including Scalia’s.

The latest nationwide USA Today-Gallup poll of Latino voters shows that President Obama is absolutely crushing Mitt Romney in this key demographic.

WASHINGTON – President Obama has built an overwhelming lead among Latino voters, a nationwide USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of Hispanics finds, as Republican challenger Mitt Romney faces a difficult path ahead to make inroads among what has been the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group for a generation.

The president leads Romney 66%-25% among more than 1,000 Latino registered voters surveyed April 16 to May 31, matching his muscular showing in the 2008 election among Hispanics. Romney is in the weakest position among Latinos of any presidential contender since 1996 — and in those intervening 16 years their percentage of the electorate has doubled.

Since the poll was taken, Obama has fortified Hispanic enthusiasm by announcing he would block the deportation of an estimated 800,000 undocumented young Latinos who were brought to the United States as children. In a subsequent USA TODAY/Gallup survey, taken Wednesday-Saturday, more than eight in 10 Latinos approved of the president’s action, most of them strongly.

Today we have a graphic illustration of the blatant right wing bias of certain parts of the media, as the Supreme Court strikes down three of four provisions of Arizona’s draconian immigration law SB1070. The correct way to describe this is: Court Strikes Down Much of Arizona Immigration Law.

But if you click over to the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, you see this: Supreme Court Upholds Key Part of Arizona Law.

And if you click over to the Murdoch-owned Fox Nation, you see this: U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Controversial Part of Tough Arizona Immigration Law.

It’s almost funny to watch the right wing desperately denying the reality.

Note that the main author of Arizona’s immigration bill that was just gutted by the Supreme Court, Kris Kobach, is now Mitt Romney’s adviser on immigration issues.