Mark Krikorian

How Not To Prove Someone Is Not a Racist

[digg-reddit-me]Mark Krikorian has a post over at National Review’s The Corner defending the leader of an anti-illegal-immigration group called D.A. King and attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center in general, and specifically for labeling the Dustin Inman Society led by King a group that is spreading bigotry.

Now, King named the group after a clear victim of what he seems to call the “invasion” of “brown people” — a boy named Dustin Inman who was killed in a car crashed by an illegal immigrant. (Because legal residents don’t accidentally kill people in car accidents approximately 100 times a day.) A quick Google search reveals that King uses racialized language and seems uncomfortable with Hispanics — he said he said a pro-immigrant march seemed like some Mexican village — which is why his “first act on a safe return home was to take a shower;” and warned darkly of the “invasion” of the “brown people” and of “parasitic ethnic hustlers” who favored amnesty; and he did at least once apply the “illegal aliens” simply to all the Hispanics in various photos. I mean — that’s just what 5 minutes on Google and a few clicks around his own website show — maybe it represents his body of thought and maybe not.

But what I wanted to comment on was this Mark Krikorian post. But instead, let me just re-post a few portions of it, with all bolding done by me…

Just typing “Southern Poverty Law Center” makes me want to scrape off my shoes…

[T]he SPLC includes such targets (including, I’m proud to say, the Center for Immigration Studies) in lists of those “spreading bigotry,” or whatever,…

This happens all the time, but one example that came to my attention was the Dustin Inman Society, a mainstream (and quite effective) anti-illegal-immigration group in Georgia headed by D.A. King… The point is not whether D.A. is a hater (he’s not — I’m not even sure he’s a restrictionist, since he limits himself to illegal immigration, and I’ve never heard so much as an epithet from him, even in private, let alone any Zionist conspiracies or Trilateral Commissions or even longing for the Lost Cause)…

I’ve rarely heard a better defense of someone than Krikorian’s of King: “I haven’t heard the guy slur blacks or Hispanics as most people I know do! Even in private! Isn’t that incredible! And he doesn’t even long for the good old days when Mexicans were in Mexico and blacks were slaves! Or rail against Jews! The guy’s a saint practically!”

But it all makes you wonder a bit about the crowd that Krikorian hangs out with that these things are exceptional — and proof that someone isn’t a racist. And it certainly goes a long way to demonstrate why the Republican Party won’t be winning the Hispanic vote any time soon.

[Image by MikeSchinkel licensed under Creative Commons.]

Compare the reactions of Ramnesh Ponnuru and Mark Krikorian to the Washington Post‘s apparently positive profile of Bobby Jindal.

Neither can quite take the article at face value. Ponnuru wonders “if this sort of swooning is really going to be helpful to Gov. Jindal in the long run.”

Krikorian, on the other hand, takes offense at the suggestion that Jindal could be an Obama-like figure. Under the headline “Clueless” which he apparently means to refer to either the Washington Post or the American people, he explains that Obama was merely “a post-American political radical who’s never held a real job and was catapulted to political success because of his race.” So much resentment packed into a single sentence – and so much misinformation. Would a “post-American political radical” choose anything like the pragmatic foreign policy team that Obama has chosen? What exactly does Krikorian consider, “a real job”? Does Krikorian really consider race to be the primary factor in Obama’s rise – or was it one factor among many that had both negative and positive consequences? And how ridicilous is it for a guy whose career is based on whipping up xenophobia to declare race to be some kind of definate asset?

Krikorian makes clear that he doesn’t have a clue.

Ponnuru may find it hard to accept media praise for one of his guys – but Krikorian manages to turn praise into an insult. There’s something so counterproductive about it – these constantly stoked resentments.

Unfortunately, the National Review and the conservative movement at large has far too many Krikorian and far too few Ponnuru’s.