Combating Hate: Domestic Extremism & Terrorism

Racist Gathering Planned for Late October in Maryland

From October 30 - November 1, 2009, the H.L. Mencken Club, a far-right group, will sponsor a conference near Baltimore, Maryland. The two-day event will bring together racist and anti-immigrant figures from around the country.  This will be the group's second conference; its previous gathering in November 2008 also featured racist and anti-immigrant speakers.

The theme of this year's meeting is "The West – Is it Dead Yet?" Several racist and anti-immigrant figures and groups take up the survival of Western culture as a rallying cry, attempting to veil their bigotry in a seemingly benign call for preserving the West (i.e., white European culture). Often, this vision translates to a West free of non-white immigrants.

The upcoming conference's speakers include:

• Patrick Buchanan, who has repeatedly advanced anti-Semitic and racist views and openly affiliated with white supremacists. Although serves as a political commentator for the mainstream media, Buchanan has views similar to those of self-declared "white nationalists." Among his frequent claims is that the sovereignty of the United States is being undermined by Israeli control and Mexican incursion, a belief which he disseminates on mainstream cable and network television and in his prolific writings.

• Peter Brimelow, who edits VDare, an, anti-immigrant Web site and blog that also features the work of racists and anti-Semites. In 2009, Brimelow delivered a speech at "Preserving Western Civilization," a racist conference (see below). He argued that the influx of "non-traditional" immigration is a problem all over the Western world and that the loss of control over the country by "white Protestants" will mean a collapse of the American political system. He urged that whites respond by creating an explicitly white nationalist political party.

• John Derbyshire, a novelist and columnist for National Review Online. Derbyshire has been interviewed on a blog saying, "I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going." He has repeated the "homophobe" assertion in the National Review Online. Derbyshire has also been a guest on the Political Cesspool, a white supremacist radio show.

Also scheduled to speak are Paul Gottfried, who has been a speaker for the white supremacist American Renaissance conferences; and Kevin DeAnna, a leader with Youth for Western Civilization, a student-led anti-immigrant group with a presence on several American college campuses.

The Baltimore area was home to another racist conference this year, when a group of racist academics, conservative pundits and anti-immigrant activists held their debut conference, dubbed "Preserving Western Civilization," (PWC) just outside of the city. Around 70 people attended the event, at which presenters railed at the alleged threat that multiculturalism poses to the United States and other Western countries.

Anti-Semites and racists are discussing the H.L. Mencken Club meeting. The Occidental Dissent, an anti-Semitic and racist blog, devoted an October 19 post to discussing the meeting and the importance of building similar "institutions" like the white supremacist American Renaissance group and racist Occidental Quarterly publication. Participants on VNN, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic Internet forum, have discussed the meeting as well. Neo-Nazi Alex Linder, who runs the forum, actually voiced disgust, claiming that the meeting would not be anti-Semitic enough. He argued, "It's disgusting that Mencken's name is besmirched by association with these Semitically Correct clowns."