Kobach defends speech to group labeled as ‘white nationalists’

Secretary of State Kris Kobach confirmed Tuesday that he recently spoke at a writers conference sponsored by The Social Contract Press. But he vehemently rejected the Southern Poverty Law Center’s claim that the group and its publication are an outlet for “white nationalists.”

“The SPLC puts that crap out whenever I speak, calling me a racist,” Kobach said in a phone interview Tuesday. “It’s their standard way of smearing people.”

The Social Contract Press is an organization that publishes a quarterly journal, The Social Contract, whose articles focus on U.S. immigration policy. It was founded by John Tanton who also founded an anti-illegal immigration group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, an organization that Kobach has represented as an attorney.

Kobach said he spoke to the publication’s writers workshop Oct. 25 in Alexandria, Va., on the subject of U.S. immigration law.

Many of the articles in recent issues of the journal express strident views on immigration.

In 2010, for example, writer K.C. McAlpin compared Muslim immigrants to the fabled Trojan Horse and suggested they would destroy America if their immigration into this country isn’t stopped.

“In the 1940s and 1950s, when U.S. leaders still knew how to defend Western culture and democratic institutions from totalitarian ideologies, the U.S. banned Nazis and Communists from immigrating to the U.S.,” he wrote. “The U.S. must treat Islam the same and impose a total ban on Muslim immigration. If immigration quotas must be filled, there are millions of Christians and members of other oppressed faiths living in Muslim countries who would be happy to replace Muslims.”

McAlpin now heads U.S. Inc., the foundation Tanton established that operates The Social Contract Press.

SPLC also points to articles such as one in the Summer 1998 edition by Samuel Francis, titled “Whose Future?” as evidence that it supports white nationalists.

The ethnic identity that is emerging
among Hispanic immigrants as well as
among black Americans is not the same
sort of identity that leads
Irish-Americans to celebrate St.
Patrick’s Day or Polish-Americans to
dance polkas. It is not merely an
enthusiasm for ethnic roots and the
observance of traditional customs, but
rather a militant and all-encompassing
identity that excludes and conflicts
with traditional American allegiances,
institutions, and values and
explicitly identifies whites as a
racially alien enemy, an oppressor,
whose institutions are to be taken
over and whose race is to be expelled
from territories that whites stole in
the Mexican-American War.

But Kobach said the workshop included writers of many races and faiths, including Maria Espinoza, a contributing writer and director of the Remembrance Project.

“We advocate for the families of victims who have been killed by illegal aliens, people who shouldn’t have been in the country in the first place,” Espinoza said in a phone interview from her home in Houston.

Espinoza is also involved in a group called America First Latinos, an organization of Hispanic and Latino Americans who oppose illegal immigration.

“When I got into this, I heard Hispanics and Latinos are not being heard in the media,” she said. “The media has told the public that because you’re Latino, you’re supposed to line up with illegal immigrants, and we don’t.”

SPLC describes The Social Contract as a journal that “puts an academic veneer of legitimacy over what are essentially racist arguments about the inferiority of today’s immigrants.”

But Kobach gave a different description.

“The workshops they host are people who are leading thinkers, political thinkers, writers on the subject of illegal immigration,” he said. “It’s absurd for (SPLC) to complain that they are white nationalists.”