Peter Brimelow Interview With Thom Hartmann
WAR AGAINST CHRISTMAS COMPETITION 2008: [blog] [I] [II] [III] [IV] [V] [VI] [VII][VIII][IX][X][XI][XII][XIII]- See also: War Against Christmas 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999
Report all attempts to abolish Christmas to christmas@vdare.com. A copy of Steve Sailer's AMERICA'S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE to the most outrageous!
[Peter Brimelow was interviewed by Thom Hartmann, [Contact him]the left-wing or progressive host of a popular Air America talk radio show on December 16, 2008. This is the transcript, with our replies to some of his points, and links.]
[Listen to the show in MP3]
Thom Hartman: Bill O'Reilly bloviating about the War on Christmas—the War on Christmas, an ongoing theme. O'Reilly is really the guy that brought it to national prominence, but it didn't start with Bill O'Reilly. It really started with Peter Brimelow. He's the author of Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster.. He's the founder of a website called VDare.com, and Peter Brimelow, welcome to the show.
Peter Brimelow: Thanks for having me, Thom, and I do agree with you about Bush. We've been calling for his impeachment.
HARTMANN: Yeah. Well, you know, from Right to Left—
PETER BRIMELOW: That may put you off from impeaching Bush, of course, but nevertheless we agree on it.
HARTMANN: Yeah, I've changed my screensaver now given the realities of the day, from "impeach Bush" to "convict Bush." But, Peter—
PETER BRIMELOW: I don't know what the Democrats are waiting for.
HARTMANN: Yeah, indeed. Peter, V. Dare was the name of the first British citizen of the United States. Do I have that right, where you got the name from?
PETER BRIMELOW: No, it's the name of the first English child that was born in the United States. She was born in the Lost Colony, and of course, subsequently was lost—vanished completely, when the Lost Colony was lost.
HARTMANN: Right. Which would be the first natural born, I guess, American citizen.
PETER BRIMELOW: I'm sorry?
HARTMANN: You know, if you use the definitions of the 14th Amendment—but we're splitting hairs.
[VDARE.com comment: Interesting. The intelligent Left (which obviously includes Thom Hartmann) is clearly gearing up to defend the stupid and catastrophic 14th Amendment misinterpretation. This outrage is the main legal/political reason why America as a nation is teetering on the brink of oblivion—while Switzerland, with very similar native/immigrant demographics—continues serenely to be Switzerland.]
PETER BRIMELOW: Well, you see the thing is, the reason—she was once very well known and Franklin D. Roosevelt went down to celebrate her 400th anniversary—whatever it was—was that it was the beginning of America as we know it, you know, as an English-speaking power based on—a big country based on the Common Law and all that kind of thing. That all came from England.
HARTMANN: Right. Now, the winner of your 2001 War on Christmas Competition, Tom Piatak, if I'm pronouncing that right, said that those behind the assault on Christmas evidently prefer Hanukkah, which he called the Jewish Kwanzaa, a phony holiday—a faux holiday.
PETER BRIMELOW: Oh, you're reading Max Blumenthal's article.
HARTMANN: I am. Yeah.
PETER BRIMELOW: But you know, as Tom has said on our website, he didn't say that. That first of all, the Jewish Kwanzaa thing actually came from a writer called Schwarz, I believe, who was writing in the American Heritage and he was arguing that, you know, that Hanukkah is not a serious Jewish festival.
HARTMANN: Okay. Well, I go over to VDare.com, your website, and you know, there's the normal, "hey, help us out financially" stuff there and you say, "On our second thank you gift, we'll send you a free copy of the Social Contract Special Issue for every donation of $100; and if you send $250, not only will you get that, you'll also get a copy of America's Half-Blood Prince." Who is America's—
[VDARE.com comment: Listening to the audio version of this is very revealing at this point. Hartmann gets emotional. Any reference to "blood" seemingly gets the Adrenaline pumping. As Peter Brimelow has said, Hitler's Revenge…]
PETER BRIMELOW: That's a book that was just published by Steve Sailer. It's based on a very careful analysis of Obama's own book, you know, whatever it's called [Dreams from My Father: A Story Of Race And Inheritance] and his autobiography.
HARTMANN: Why does it matter that—
PETER BRIMELOW: Steve comes to the conclusion that on the one hand Obama is not a transcendent candidate. He's motivated by his own scars—psychological scars—from—abandoned by his father and his racial heritage and so on. But on the other hand, he comes to the conclusion that Obama is going to be a moderate in his first term because he is intensely cautious personally.
HARTMANN: He's going to be a moderate, he's saying?
PETER BRIMELOW: I'm sorry.
HARTMANN: A moderate?
PETER BRIMELOW: That seems to be borne out by—
HHARTMANN: But here's the question, you know, Keith Olbermann has talked about you guys. In fact, you've got his picture on your homepage at VDare.
PETER BRIMELOW: Yeah, he's good for us. You know, we can raise a lot of money against Olbermann.
HARTMANN: Well, no doubt. And you know, Max Blumenthal did this exposé piece on you guys, and basically what they suggest is that you guys are white supremacist; that in your 1995 book, Alien Nation, you talked about "weird aliens with dubious habits."
PETER BRIMELOW: Have you not read our refutation of that?
HARTMANN: I beg your pardon?
PETER BRIMELOW: Have you not read my—I mean, first of all, Max is wrong to say that we started this competition on VDare. I started it when I was at National Review in the mid-nineties. They dropped it when they had the purge and they fired John O'Sullivan and dropped the immigration line, but—
HARTMANN: Right. They brought in Rich Lowry, who's a little more moderate.
PETER BRIMELOW: Well, he's a Republican, isn't he. He's basically a Republican hack, whereas we're just an idea.
HARTMANN: Yeah, but here's the point: Why do you care what race a person is? It seems to me this is like just really toxic stuff.
[VDARE.com: Getting emotional again—listen!]
PETER BRIMELOW: Well, you know, the short answer is we don't. VDare.com is a forum site where we publish people who are critical of current immigration policy, and a lot of these people are not all conservatives.
HARTMANN: But the basis of that criticism tends to be cultural or religious or very often racial.
PETER BRIMELOW: No. A lot of the people who write for us are people who are environmentalists. We even have some progressives who are worried about the impact of immigration on the wages of the vast bulk of Americans. Wages in this country have stagnated for thirty years, you know.
HARTMANN: You're not going to find any disagreement with that here, but again, reading your site and you know, books—
PETER BRIMELOW: I'm sorry, Tom, you're breaking up. I didn't catch your answer.
HARTMANN: It very much sounds like what you're saying is—well, let me just ask right straight out: Do you believe that the white race is superior to other races?
PETER BRIMELOW: No. I think it is different though. I think there probably are racial differences. What I was going to say was—we publish a wide range of writers and there are some people who you could fairly describe as white nationalists.
HARTMANN: So you think that the color of a skin of a person, which is one set of genes and another set of genes for the color and type of hair they have, and another set of genes for the eye color; I mean we know now that there actually is no gene for race. You think that the color of a person's skin causes them to be different?
PETER BRIMELOW: Actually, no. [VDARE.com: I.E. No to "no gene for race" concept: But races do systematically exist.] I think you're probably wrong about that. But, I'm sorry. Finish your question.
HARTMANN: I'm just saying, are you suggesting that we should be dividing people by race for some particular reason?
[VDARE.com comment: This has to be heard to grasp the emotionalism. Those Holocaust movies work! Even if they are boringly repetitive.]
I mean if they're different, different how?
PETER BRIMELOW: Oh certainly you're going to divide people by race on medical grounds. I mean it is increasingly clear that different races respond to different medications differently.
HARTMANN: And there are a whole variety of inherited conditions.
PETER BRIMELOW: But let me answer you. Let me make a specific point here, Thom.
HARTMANN: Sure.
PETER BRIMELOW: If you look at the way Americans vote, that does differ systematically by race. And the voting patterns don't shift a great deal over time. They all sway one direction or they all sway another, but basically they differ enormously by race—
HARTMANN: By and large because we have a racist nation.
[VDARE.com comment: Truly fatuous remark. If there are multiple races, racial conflict is inevitable.]
PETER BRIMELOW:—So if you have a [cross-talk] of that, as we do at the moment, which is actually importing very large numbers of people, basically from Third World countries—and we all know that they are going to vote Democratic—you're basically shifting the country to the Left through public policy, and that is an irrefutable and completely logical argument. Why are we importing—
HARTMANN: Well, and the basis for that is the Republican party represents, and always has, or at least has since the 1880s, has represented the interests of large corporations and very wealthy people. And in a nation that is built on racism,