In October, we posted a blog on the 35th Writers Workshop for The Social Contract Press (TSCP); new materials on that event warrant an update.
To recap, TSCP is a white nationalist publishing house established by John Tanton, the man credited as the architect of the contemporary anti-immigrant movement. The constellation of organizations that he founded and funded—organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)—have built a mainstream façade over the extremism generally associated with such nativist positions.
The Social Contract Press, however, is Tanton’s project that flaunts its far right origins, publishing unapologetically white nationalist literature and a notorious quarterly journal, The Social Contract. The latter has long offered a more radical outlet for the dissembled restraint of the anti-immigrant movement, publishing the less inhibited positions of its personnel—and often alongside those of career racists like Sam Francis and Marcus Epstein.
TSCP has recently released video of its most recent Writers Workshop, a regular social event for nativist luminaries; from it, new personages and epithets have surfaced. Among some of the highlights:
- During a presentation entitled “What Americans Need to Know About Islam,” conservative writer William J. Federer stated that “multiculturalism is the AIDS virus of western civilization,” then claiming that Muslim religious parctices should be harshly policed. This is but one extreme example of a mounting Islamophobic tendency within white nationalist circles and the anti-immigrant movement.
- KC McAlpin, the event’s emcee and current president of TSCP’s parent company, U.S., Inc., announced that Tanton, though unable to attend, was honored the night before at another event held by FAIR. McAlpin went on to proclaim an “enormous gratitude” owed to Tanton, a renowned white nationalist, from the attendees. While the anti-immigrant movement continually disavows any connections to racism, such remarks seem to burden its constituent organizations with the task of rationalizing such overt connections to Tanton’s and TSCP’s contentious politics.
- Speaking of Tanton’s ilk, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) was well represented at the event. Steven Camarota, its director of research, was on one of the panels, and James Hoffmeier, author of a recent CIS report, spoke on the Biblical basis for his nativism. For an organization that obsessively emphasizes its “non-partisan” approach, CIS sits curiously well among white nationalists.
- Phil Kent, recent appointee to Georgia’s new immigration board, was also in attendance. Kent has been credited as a “founding member” of the neo-Confederate League of the South, an organization that has referred to slavery as “God ordained” and claimed that “the Negroes are better off today because of it.”
Once again, TSCP has demonstrated the proximity of the self-proclaimed “non-partisans” to fanatics and, in the process, revealed itself to be a white nationalist shill for the anti-immigrant movement. When organizations like CIS and FAIR—organizations that rely on their mainstream veneer—deny any such bias to their project, one need only remember their presence at the Writers Workshop.