You can always count on the racist wing of the conservative caucus to stir up trouble anyway they can. And if Rep Steve King (R-batshit) is thrown into the mix it’s guaranteed to be even funnier and nuttier. But the growing ties between the GOP and white nationalists are anything but funny:
TPM— A Republican witness at today’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on legislation making English the official language of the United States is from an organization with ties to racism.Dr. Rosalie Porter, chairwoman of the board of ProEnglish, is testifying in support of the “English Language Unity Act of 2011” before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on Thursday morning.
ProEnglish is headed by executive director Robert Vandervoort, who came under fire for hosting a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this year featuring Peter Brimelow of the website VDARE, an organization labeled as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The panel also featured a speech from then-National Review editor John Derbyshire, who would later be fired from the magazine for writing a racist article in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
Porter also spoke on the CPAC panel, where the immigrant and former bilingual teacher called bilingual education an “insane idea.”
Not sure what qualifies as “palling around with terrorists,” but I bet that comes close. Nevertheless, take heart conservatives! If traditional DC media has taught me anything over the last few days, it’s that electing a teaparty scam artist with the last name of Cruz down in Texas resolved every problem with future Latino demographics and the unbridled racism afflicting the modern GOP.
Let me get this straight:
The woman who testified in support of the Republican policy is chair of a group, and that group’s executive director hosted a panel that included a white nationalist and a racist.
To be honest, I think that making conclusions about that “relationship” is not appropriate. Sure, criticize the group’s executive director for hosting that panel, but the connection to the chair of the group is too indirect. It’s no better than what the conservatives try to do all too often.
I’m sort of with Jordan Genso on this, that the connection is a little in the tenuous side. It’s not quite as bad as all that, since it’s a pretty safe bet these jokers agree on pretty much everything… but this is not the connection I’d be making hay about. There are stronger connections between head GOP figures and white supremacists, after all!
I read a live blog of the Florida Republican presidential debate, and the blogger was watching it with some young Latin@s there. It was heartbreaking to me the way that they seemed surprised and disappointed when, inevitably, all of the candidate threw immigrants under the bus. It’s very sad the extent to which tribal politics and playing to social issues can make people vote against their own interests and the interests of their own community :(
If I read that correctly, Porter herself was also on that panel which included a white nationalist and a racist, and she happily agreed with them on the issues.
I’ll probably never have this problem, but if I ever were to publicly agree with the positions of known racists (and even racists might sometimes be right by accident), I’d make damn sure not to share a panel with them so as not to lend them credibility.
I expect that the relationship here, however strong or tenuous, is being pointed out because English First And Only! is a nationalist, bigoted thing in the first place. It sort of makes the connections worth mentioning. Also, regardless as to the level of relationship, it is one more illustration of R-hypocrisy (vis-a-vis saying such things as “Obama palled around with terrorists).
What grabs me is that the gov even wastes its (our) time and resources on this crap. If the conservatives want to whine about gov intrusion and spending, they can fucking knock off this sort of bullshit first.
Yes, bilingualism (or, god forbid, multilingualism) is batguano-insane. Large swaths of the human population are off their fucking rockers. E.g., Europeans – which I choose because the R-Cons can relate to white people better.
The upshot of this, is that any non-English-speaking person in the US should let English-speakers know (through one of those vile, disgusting translators, of course) that they are nuts to imagine anyone should have to learn English as a second language, because fuck that noise.
I’m surprised that the group isn’t promoting American as the official language of the US. After all, the Revolunary War was fought to gain freedom from England and included the language.