Head of Trump Favored Anti-Immigration Group Confronted Over Promoting ‘White Nationalist’ Website

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller is in the news again this week for a Fox News Sunday interview in which he was grilled by anchor Chris Wallace over Trump’s national emergency declaration on immigration in order to obtain border wall funding.

Miller is the resident immigration hawk in a very hawkish administration. Many of Donald Trump‘s signature policies – notably the travel ban and family separations – as well as immigration speeches and portions of speeches, are attributable to Miller’s design. And for that design, and in defense of it, among many sources Miller frequently references is a small think tank in D.C.

The inoffensively named Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is a Washington think tank that focuses on limiting or halting both illegal and legal immigration. It is, as noted above, a favored resource for both data and policy rationale in the Trump administration. The head of that group is Mark Krikorian.

Both Miller and President Trump have repeatedly cited, referenced, or used as source material, information obtained from the Center for Immigration Studies. Trump has even mentioned them on Twitter.

“According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the $18 billion wall will pay for itself by curbing the importation of crime, drugs and illegal immigrants who tend to go on the federal dole…” https://t.co/NdLC6jZwWE

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018

CIS was even cited in the Trump campaign’s very first national general election TV ad.

Executive Director Krikorian contributes to National Review in addition to running the organization, and last week he appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to talk about immigration, the border deal, the shutdown, and all the latest on the issue.

One of the many call-in questions during the show dealt not with whether or how the White House cites the Center for Immigration Studies, but rather how the center cites other groups in a weekly newsletter. Identifying as an independent, the caller asked Krikorian about VDARE.

“I was just wondering,” she said. “I get your newsletter, I was wondering why you continue to have VDARE, a white nationalists and anti-Semitic website on your newsletter that you circulate?”

Krikorian replied by offering, as an example of balance, that while they do include some potentially objectionable content, they also, they also include the New York Times.

“We send out a weekly roundup of immigration commentary from all sides, including people we don’t agree with,” said Krikorian. “I mean I include the New York Times, and their editorials on immigration are usually things we completely disagree with, and we include a pretty broad range, including some sites that publish other material that frankly I find kind of objectionable.”

“But if they are important sites of immigration news, we include them because the whole point is, see the broad spectrum of views and judge for yourself,” he said.

Mediaite asked some follow-up questions of Mr. Krikorian, and his answers are below.

First, though, here are some examples from the newsletter referenced in the C-SPAN segment.

Each newsletter opens with a disclaimer.

The newsletter from which that header image was taken included several examples of what the caller is referring to. For example, this story from VDARE.

There is also this, from “immigration-reduction organization” NumbersUSA, which is another group closely associated with the anti-immigration movement and VDARE, and tied to CIS.

Here’s an example from one of the newsletters on a different date. In this one from May 27, 2018, there were three VDARE stories.

As Krikorian said, they also include articles from sources to their left, including this example from Time, which attacks VDARE, Numbers USA, and CIS itself.

This is not limited to the newsletter, though. In April, RedState’s Neil Stevens covered the story of VDARE appearing on the CIS website.

Stevens offered an example from a VDARE article that was shared by the Center for Immigration studies, in which the author wrote that “trying to talk to [people in Taiwan] about human rights, freedom, and democracy was like talking to monkeys.” The author of that article also published it at Unz.com, a virulently racist and anti-Semitic website.

Stevens explained.

Unz.com which, uh, is openly publishing anti-Semitic rhetoric, claiming it’s “Probably true” that “Jews have too much power in the business world,” “Jews are more loyal to Israel than the countries they live in,” “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust,” “Jews have too much control over the United States government,” and “Jews think they are better than other people.”. Also note the “Jews have too much control over the global media” bit, complete with anti-Semitic cartoon.

So which site was CIS reading to get this article by this completely unknown writer? The racist Vdare, or the anti-Semitic Unz.com? Which site does CIS use to inform its donors?

VDARE is run by alt-right figure Peter Brimelow, and counts among its contributors white supremacist Richard Spencer and famous nativist Pat Buchanan (who is also a contributor to CIS itself). Yet even after the RedState article, and similar articles from other conservative publications, Krikorian’s newsletter continues to cite them, and he defended doing so on C-SPAN last week.

That defense coming, by the way, while Krikorian was speaking out strongly against accepting the deal offered by Democrats last week, as The Resurgent noted.

It also came just a few weeks after Krikorian participated in a roundtable at the White House. A pool report January 23 reported “President Donald J. Trump with host a roundtable with conservative leaders to discuss the security and humanitarian crisis at the southern border.”

The list of participants included the President, Vice President, Jared Kushner, Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, and Stephen Miller from the White House. And among “conservative leaders” like Matt Schlapp of the ACU, Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots, and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, was Mark Krikorian of CIS.

Mediaite followed-up on the question that the C-SPAN caller asked. In his response to the caller, Krikorian said first that he include links to many sources, including those with which they may disagree or that he finds “objectionable.” We asked if that reply was meant to suggest VDARE was one of the objectionable sources.

Mr. Krikorian said that VDARE “publishes lots of stuff on immigration by many different authors and is widely read, which is why we’d be doing our own readers a disservice by deliberately barring anything it ever publishes from our catch-all roundup of immigration commentary.”

“Some of what VDare publishes is sensible, some of it is not, and some of it is downright scurrilous,” said Krikorian. “Kind of like the New York Times.”

We also asked, if his reply to the caller was meant to include VDARE as objectionable, whether it is the white supremacist content specifically that prompted him to classify them that way.

‘VDare does publish articles that make a case for, or presuppose, a white-nationalist or white-identity perspective (though there are other articles that do not hold that view),” said Krikorian. “I personally, and CIS institutionally, reject all flavors of identity politics as post-American and corrosive of national unity. White nationalism, black nationalism, Latino nationalism, etc. are incompatible with American nationalism.”

And finally, in the interest of clarity, we asked if he would agree with the caller that VDARE is white nationalist or anti-Semitic, to which he referred us back to his first response.

To reiterate, there are dozens of examples of VDARE, Numbers USA, and FAIR in materials from the Center for Immigration Studies. One potential reason for that overlap, rather than simply sharing the breadth of opinion on the topic of immigration, is having a common purpose as well as origin.

Krikorian clarified in his email that the VDARE website is “not a group,” but rather a website. His answer suggests an agglomeration and aggregation site. However, the website does have to be operated, and the group that operates it is the VDARE Foundation. This is from the VDARE.com “About” page:

VDARE.com is a non-profit journalistic enterprise, the main project of the VDARE Foundation. We publish data, analysis, and editorial commentary in a variety of formats. We inform the fight to keep America American.

It carries on in that vein, describing a site that writes and exists for a singular purpose, and all of which is in support of that purpose. That means the anti-Semitic, white supremacist content is of a piece with what Krikorian described as “other articles that do not hold that view.”

In the newsletters Mediaite has obtained, white supremacist Richard Spencer is not among the linked authors, though he is a contributor to VDARE (and a popular topic for the other authors). But one of the editors at VDARE, James Kirkpatrick, is among the authors linked by CIS. Kirkpatrick took heat some years ago for his article about the death of Nelson Mandela, in which he wrote that “the legacy of Nelson Mandela is slow motion white genocide and the ruin of a once great country.” VDARE’s other Mandela obituary referred to him as a “monster.”

CIS, like Numbers USA and Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which are both frequent sources for CIS blog posts and newsletter links, were funded by the same person, a man whose name comes up a lot in the anti-immigration movement: John Tanton.

Tanton is a pro-eugenics, population control and anti-immigration former ophthalmologist. In addition to his massive immigration activism, Tanton has been active in a variety of leftist causes as well, including founding the Northern Michigan chapter of Planned Parenthood, organizing for the Sierra Club, and even serving as president of the extreme environmental group formerly known as “Zero Population Growth” (ZPG), now called Population Connection.

There are many rabbit holes to go down in the connections between these groups, between the organizers and editors of the groups, and their funding. There are many, many overlaps.

There are also ample examples of Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White House referencing, quoting, relying on, and favoring CIS, just as there are countless instances of CIS relying on VDARE, Numbers USA, FAIR, and other such sites.

Mark Krikorian says it would be a “disservice” to exclude VDARE from the content CIS provides to its readers, though he finds some of what they publish “scurrilous.” Krikorian acknowledges that VDARE “does publish articles that make a case for, or presuppose, a white-nationalist or white-identity perspective,” but does not say they would exclude those articles from his newsletter. He says they oppose white nationalism at CIS, but also says his newsletter includes things they oppose. And he did not characterize any of the articles as racist or anti-Semitic, given the opportunity to do so in both the C-SPAN clip and the questions asked by Mediaite.

Krikorian chose not to make the case that his organization would actively exclude racist, white supremacist, or anti-Semitic content. The next question, perhaps for Stephen Miller, is whether the White House would exclude it from their own rationale and research. With the lines between these organizations so blurry, it’s hard to imagine how they could.