Texas Secession, White Rights, Jewish Emancipation: VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow On The Alan Colmes Show

05/28/2015

By Peter Brimelow writes: Almost a month after I spoke at Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance Conference in Tennessee, news apparently reached the Cultural Marxosphere. People for the American Way’s vigilante site Right Wing Watch posted Peter Brimelow: States Like Texas Must Consider Secession To Protect 'White Rights,' by Mikala Bean, and this was credulously repeated by Charles Johnson on Little Green Footballs (who described me as a “racist icon”!), Democratic Underground, etc.

And of course, it’s completely untrue. All too obviously, neither Bean, Johnson etc. nor any of their comment thread groupies had bothered to check the videos of my talk that they themselves reposted to their sites.

I have indeed said, as far back as 1995 in Alien Nation, that the divisiveness imported by immigration policy may well eventually cause the Union to break up. But what I was talking about at the American Renaissance Conference was Texas’ little-known right to subdivide itself into five states within the Union. The subdivision of states, cities etc., the better to represent the various communities that have grown up within them, is a long-standing interest here at VDARE.com, but it is an interest we share with other Americans across the political spectrum.

The internet is a great blessing, in that has allowed Dissident Right sites like VDARE.com to break the Main Stream Media opinion cartel. But it has also allowed much tighter Political Correctness policing, exemplified by the Journolist scandal a few years back. And it has resulted in a curious form of the childhood game Telephone, where alleged quotations are echo-chambered from one Leftist site to another, getting ever more distorted because of the essentially hysterical nature of Leftists, until something utterly bizarre is irretrievably embedded in the public record.

Right now, for example, my Wikipedia entry says of my 2012 appearance on a CPAC panel:

During the panel discussion, Brimelow and other panelists said "immigration is polluting America."

Needless to say, neither I nor anyone else on the panel said anything of the sort — and, again, there is a video and a transcript to prove it. The error apparently arose because one Leftist website made an inaccurate paraphrase, and another converted it into a direct quote. Plus, of course, it’s what the swine want to believe.

I fully expect that a future iteration of Wikipedia — which is notoriously uneducable — will report that I have called for Texas to secede

(For the record, Wikipedia wrongly gives me the middle name of “Laws” — the maiden name of my late first wife).

Still, this Cultural Marxist cacophony did result in Alan Colmes kindly inviting me on his show. I appreciate his fairness. Alas, his show’s blog reported the interview under the heading Brimelow: ‘Society Will Cease To Exist’ Without A White Majority, whereas the transcript shows I said “the historic American society as we know it will simply cease to exist,” which seems to me quite different. But maybe I’m too sensitive.

Alan Colmes: Welcome, Welcome, Peter Brimelow, Editor of VDare.com. Peter, you know, we have Derb on here a lot, John Derbyshire.

Brimelow: Oh, great.

Colmes: Does our show quite a bit. He and I don’t agree either! Nevertheless, thank you for coming on tonight.

What’s this about you saying that Texas should secede? Or consider secession to protect white rights in America?

Brimelow: Alan, I’m afraid this is an example of what you get for relying on Left Wing Enforcer sites like Little Green FootBalls and RightWingWatch. What I actually said — I mean, it’s right there in the video — is that the state of Texas, when it joined the Union, came with the provision that it can split into five different states anytime it wants. And I think it should consider doing that, because —

Colmes: It should consider secession.

Brimelow: Well, it’s not seceding from the Union, it’s breaking the state up within the Union. And that’s not an uncommon thing. In California recently, there has been debate about it. These different states have gotten too big. Their population has gotten too big and too diverse.

Colmes: Are you saying the whole state should secede, or parts of the state?

Brimelow: I’m saying the state should break up within the union. It has the right to do that.

Colmes: In other words, Texas would stay in the union —

Brimelow: Right.

Colmes: I just want to be clear, Peter. Please help me understand here. You’re saying the state should stay in the union but should break into smaller states.

Brimelow: Yes, which it has the right to do. Most states don’t, and there’d be a huge fight for them, because it causes problems in the US Senate, about how to allocate the number of U.S. senators. But Texas does have the right. I mean, nobody’s looked at it or thought about it for a very long time. But as Texas gets bigger and more diverse — larger because of nontraditional immigration — the communities within it aren’t really well represented by this megastate.

Colmes:So let me be clear. Texas should stay in the Union, but should become several smaller states for the purpose of protecting white rights.

Brimelow: Well, it’s not simply white rights. For, example in South Texas, there’s probably going to be a Hispanic majority — a Mexican majority, actually — in the next few years. And then the question is: are they going to be represented by senator who is elected from the rest of the state? Maybe they would like to split off and have their own state. And then it could be like New Mexico and be officially bilingual and so on.

Colmes: So, you’d like —

Brimelow: It’s not just whites. And even within the white community, there are profound differences between the sections. And that was the genius of the Founders: they recognized federalism was necessary to protect the different communities. The problem is a lot of these states have gotten too big.

Colmes: Are you saying you want segregation?

Brimelow: No. No. Where did I say that?

Colmes: Wouldn’t that be the result. In other words put the Mexicans, the Mexican immigrants in this part of what used to be Texas. Put the other —

Brimelow: No, no, no. They happen to be there now. If they had their own state, they could elect a Mexican Senator, It’s just like DC statehood, actually. DC feels it’s not represented, so it wants to be a separate state. So separate parts of Texas could well want to be separate states.

Colmes: Now let me paraphrase. So you are saying let where most of the Mexican immigrants live, let’s make that one state, and where the white people are, let’s make that another state.

Brimelow: Well, you know, my wife’s from Texas, from Dallas. And another issue in Texas is that the people in Houston don’t like, by and large, the people in Dallas very much. They’re hostile to each other. But at the moment they’re lumped together in the same state. It’s not a racial issue, necessarily, it’s a sectional issue

Colmes: Hey, look, we had a big fight in New York between Brooklyn and Queens. And you know that doesn’t mean —

Brimelow: Of course, Staten Island was trying to secede

Colmes: Yeah, right, ha ha ha.

Brimelow: And there’s a reason for that — it’s a different community from New York, and it felt itself outvoted by the rest of the boroughs.

Colmes: So the point is what you're advocating would result in Hispanics living, as they already do, in one part of the state, but making it a different state. Whites will be in a different state. So it’s a kind of segregation —

Brimelow: It’s no more segregation than having different states in the federal union is now, to represent different communities. We could have a unitary state in the US, but we don’t, because we think the different communities need different representation. And that’s true, they are very different. It’s amazing that the federal union has held together.

Colmes: In this video — that, as you point out, RightWingWatch, you say, got wrong, because of their headline — you also said that whites have rights. Which, of course, is true — but, I mean, fighting for white rights!!!

Whites have always had rights in this country. Once they took it from the American Indian, whites had rights. Isn’t it an issue of those who haven’t had rights historically, where the fight must be?

Brimelow: No, I think what happens is that, as you drive the white community into a minority through public policy, which is what immigration policy is doing right now, at some point whites are going to start organizing themselves and defending their rights like every other ethnic group does.

One classic example of this is Affirmative Action. At the moment, if you come into the US and you belong to one of the protected classes, you are automatically eligible for Affirmative Action preferences over people who have been here for three hundred years — even though you have never been discriminated against. So that’s obviously an anomaly that whites are eventually going get fed up with.

That’s why you have this situation in California where at the University of California, because of the operation of quotas on the one hand and Asian immigration on the other, whites are actually a smaller proportion of classes at the University of California than they are in the population of the state. At some point, they are going to say, wait a moment, this is a zero sum game, we’ve got have some fairness here.

Colmes: We’re talking to Peter Brimelow of VDARE.com. Are you worried that by the year 2040 America will no longer be a white majority country?

Brimelow: Yes, of course I am.

Colmes: Why would that worry you?

Brimelow: Because I think at that point the historic American society as we know it will simply cease to exist —

Colmes: Why?

Brimelow: — at least at the point where whites lose control of the government, in twenty more years.

Colmes: Why would society as we know it cease to exist just because peoples’ skin color is different?

Brimelow: Because people think differently and act differently. There’s a fine example from YouGov at the moment, a poll about peoples’ attitudes to freedom of speech. What it shows is that African American and Hispanics are much more inclined to want government restrictions on what people can say than whites are. It’s a systematic and enormous difference. And that concerns me, in terms of what’s going to happen when blacks and Hispanics form a majority.

Colmes: But you know the same arguments was made when Irish Catholics came here — “Irish Catholics need not apply.” They assimilated into society, the second generation normalized —

Brimelow: Oh, baloney. We’ve gone over this so many times, I wrote about this in Alien Nation twenty years ago —

Colmes: How is that baloney? How is that baloney?

Brimelow: What happened with the Irish: first of all it was fear of Catholicism coming into an overwhelmingly Protestant culture —

Colmes: Well, yeah, but that fear of Catholicism turned out to be unjustified —

Brimelow: Pius IX was against democracy, that was a real serious issue in those days —

Colmes: How was a democracy harmed?

Brimelow: — but what happened was, Irish immigration simply ceased. There was a great wave of it after the Potato Famine, then it dwindled to almost nothing. It continued at a low level, but it was nothing like the wave that came in the 1840s. And that has been the case with immigration generally. If you look at the history of American immigration, you see there have always been pauses that allow assimilation to take place. Usually by accident, but sometimes legislated. But right now there is no pause on the horizon.

Colmes: Where were you born?

Brimelow: Oh, I was born in the north of England.

Colmes: So you’re an immigrant.

Brimelow: Yes, that’s how I know so much about it.

Colmes: Isn’t ironic that you are anti-immigration?

Brimelow: I’m an immigrant doing a dirty job that Americans won’t do, I guess. I mean there are very few Americans —

Colmes: Well, you are not addressing what I just said. You’re anti-immigration, but you’re an immigrant.

Brimelow: Because I know something about it. Just because I am the last person on the lifeboat, am I not supposed to point out that it’s about to capsize?

Colmes: To be consistent, should you not go back to England?

Brimelow: I think Americans would have the right to say that, if they wanted to, but they are not doing that at the moment. So I am going to continue, as a citizen, to use my right to freedom of speech.

Colmes: Well, why can’t others come here and enjoy the same freedoms you do?

Brimelow: Because it’s a question, obviously, of what impact they have on society as a whole. The Democrats, obviously, count right now on having a permanent majority through immigration. Why should Americans put up with that?

Colmes: Why wouldn’t the impact be a positive as yours has been?

Brimelow: Well does it look like it’s been positive?

Colmes: Sure.

Brimelow: We’re building another underclass, an enormous amount of immigrants are coming in and going directly into poverty — the evidence is very clear, although it’s not discussed publicly, you won’t read it in the Wall Street Journal — .

Colmes: When you first come to this country, you are perhaps underclass, but that doesn’t mean your sons and your daughters. My father came here with nothing, my grandfather came here, they had nothing, he was an immigrant, as generations progress people develop skills, take part in the work force and assimilate into society.

Brimelow: The only group that has been dramatically true for is American Jews. They came in in poverty and moved up very quickly. But other than that, it is very clear that if you bring in poor immigrants, their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren, are more likely to be poor, poorer than the native-born average. There is a ton of technical literature on this.

Colmes: Why do you think the Jews were different?

Brimelow: Good God, I don’t know, do you? They have been very successful…

Colmes: But why do you think —

Brimelow: I think one way of looking is, it’s a question of emancipation. When they were in Eastern Europe, they were in premodern societies and when they came here they transferred into a modern society. It’s part of the general explosion of Jewish achievement you see throughout Europe.

Colmes: I am sorry I am out of time. Mr. Brimelow, I do appreciate you coming on the program.

Brimelow: Thank you, Alan

Colmes: Your site is VDARE.com. Thank you so much for your time.

Peter Brimelow is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format.

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