durant, leah PFIR prog

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</div><div>...In 1994, Tanton interviewed Stein for FAIR's oral history project, which is composed of transcribed audio interviews with about a dozen FAIR principals. In that interview, Stein again expressed his disgust for the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. He told Tanton that those who supported the 1965 reform wanted to "retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance" and that this "revengism" against whites had created a policy that is causing "chaos and will continue to create chaos."</div>Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR received around $1.2 million in grants from the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/pioneer-fund" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">Pioneer Fund</a>. The Pioneer Fund is a eugenicist organization that was started in 1937 by men close to the Nazi regime who wanted to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic lines of American whites. Now led by race scientist <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2005/winter/into-the-mainstream" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">J. Philippe Rushton</a>, the fund continues to back studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities to whites.FAIR stopped receiving Pioneer Fund grants in 1994 due to bad publicity it received when the grants were made public. At the time, FAIR was backing California's punishing anti-immigrant Proposition 187, which would have denied education and health care to the children of undocumented immigrants in that state if it had not died as the result of court challenges. Stein and Tanton had led FAIR's efforts to win funding from Pioneer, and Stein said in 1993, before Pioneer's extremism was made public, that his "job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer's money."After the bad publicity, FAIR denied that the Pioneer Fund money had any influence on its work or in any way influenced its programs. To manage the fallout, on March 16, 1994, Stein wrote a letter to Harry Weyher, then the president of the Pioneer Fund. Stein attached a draft of a document that he wanted Weyher to endorse and send out, titled "Why the Pioneer Fund Supports the Immigration Reform Movement." Stein wrote the piece as though Weyher had written it himself. One part read, "We are pleased and proud that through financial support, we've made FAIR's important work possible." Though FAIR stopped receiving grants from the fund, which require public disclosure, it continued to receive private financial support from Pioneer's leaders for several years. In early 1997, Tanton organized a gathering at the New York Racquet and Tennis Club, where three members of FAIR's board — Henry Buhl, Sharon Barnes and Alan Weeden — met with Harry Weyher. In the late 1990s, Tanton also vacationed with Pioneer Fund board member John Trevor Jr., who also provided private financial support to FAIR.FAIR also has produced controversial media programming. In 1996, FAIR started a television program called "Borderline." The show lasted for about a year and featured a number of prominent white nationalists, including Sam Francis and Jared Taylor. "Borderline" often advanced ideas popular in white nationalist circles; particularly popular was the idea that immigrants are destroying American culture or displacing Western civilization with degenerate, Third World ways.Lawrence Auster, a white nationalist who spoke in 1996 to a conference put on by American Renaissance and whose website "A View from the Right" is listed as a hate site by the SPLC, appeared on the show on April 1, 1996, making the argument that if the U.S. loses its white majority, it will be destroyed. The topic that day, according to host Dan Stein, was to "take a politically incorrect look at American culture and Western Civilization." Stein added, "America, love it or lose it." Auster argued that because of an "invasion," "America is in the process of dissolving as a nation." Supposedly drawing on history, Auster warned that as demographic change occurs and "the majority is threatened in its position," the result could be "civil war." Auster's particular concern that day was the loss of "the historic European Anglo American culture." Stein certainly seemed to agree with his guest's worries. "How can we preserve America if it becomes 50% Latin American?" he asked. Stein also said that Anglos were leaving Los Angeles because it had become "a foreign country to them."Another prominent white nationalist who appeared on "Borderline" was naturalized English immigrant <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/peter-brimelow" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">Peter Brimelow</a>, who in 1999 would go on to found the anti-immigrant hate site <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/vdare" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">VDARE.com</a>. Brimelow authored Alien Nation, a book that argues America should remain white-dominated. In a discussion about Alien Nation on Aug. 5, 1996, Stein asked Brimelow whether "America's social and economic elites seem to be writing off the whole idea of the nation-state." He added: "If they shift their loyalty from the nation-state, what are they loyal to?" Brimelow argued that these same elites are creating the "greatest transformation of any independent state in history" by bringing in "new minority groups that did not exist before." Brimelow considered these elites to be "treasonous," people who "hate our traditional culture and they see immigration as a weapon to help destroy it." "Are they really patriots?" Brimelow asked.Stein asked Brimelow to talk more about his statement "race is destiny in American politics." Brimelow did, saying, "you really alter the texture of the country by bringing in different ethnic groups." Endorsing the invasion theory, Brimelow told one caller, "you have areas of South Texas and so on that have essentially gone back to Mexico." Stein later asked Brimelow whether this all meant "the end of the United States?" Brimelow's answer: "Sure."In 1998, various nativists and nativist groups attempted to get the Sierra Club to take an anti-immigration stance. The effort culminated in a 1998 vote in which Sierra Club members determined whether the group would support immigration restrictions. FAIR was one of the groups that helped to put the measure on the Sierra Club ballot, and Dan Stein teamed up with then-CNN Crossfire host Pat Buchanan to advocate for it. Members ultimately chose to retain the Sierra Club's neutral stance on immigration policy in a 60%-40% vote. The Sierra Club was an important target for FAIR because it was considered a liberal group, and Tanton, who held leadership positions there in the 1970s and still had many allies, expressed in his WITAN memos that he thought that the Sierra Club would be less vulnerable to charges of racism when advocating against immigration.In April 1999, FAIR attacked U.S. Senator Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.) for supporting more visas for foreigners with technology skills. It ran a newspaper ad that placed a picture of Abraham, an Arab-American, alongside a picture of Osama bin Laden. It asked, "Why Is a U.S. Senator Trying to Make It Easier for Osama bin Laden to Export Terrorism to the U.S.?" FAIR's ads were widely condemned and caused former Senator Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) to resign from FAIR's advisory board. FAIR has also run other extremely controversial political advertisements, including one in 2000 in Iowa that was rejected by a TV station as "borderline racist."Several FAIR officials have links to white supremacist <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20171004/frequently-asked-questions-about-hate-groups#hate%20group" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">hate groups</a>. Rick Oltman, who for much of the 1990s was FAIR's western regional coordinator, spoke as part of a 1997 immigration panel sponsored by the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/council-of-conservative-citizens" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">Council of Conservative Citizens</a>, a racist group that has described black people as a "retrograde species of humanity." Council publications at the time listed Oltman as a member. Jim Staudenraus, FAIR's eastern regional coordinator, participated in an anti-immigration conference in 2002 with white nationalist Jared Taylor. In 2007, a senior FAIR official met with leaders of Vlaams Belang, a Belgian political party that officials in that country outlawed in a previous incarnation (Vlaams Blok) as a "criminal organization" because of its racist, anti-immigrant views.In late 2006, FAIR hired <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2005/winter/the-nativists-0?page=0,15" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">Joseph Turner</a> as its western field representative after Oltman departed. Turner was the founder of the Southern California group Save Our State, a now-defunct anti-immigrant hate group that was known for attracting neo-Nazis to its rallies. Turner was on record before joining FAIR as saying that being a white separatist did not imply a person was racist. Turner once accused Mexican immigrants of turning California into a "third world cesspool." He left FAIR in December 2007 shortly after the SPLC, in tandem with publishing an extensive report on the group's racism that included Turner's inflammatory comments, designated FAIR as a hate group. FAIR representatives did not comment as to the reason for Turner's departure.FAIR board members harbor extreme views and connections as well. Garrett Hardin, a now-deceased biologist, was a very close friend of Tanton's and an active board member of FAIR from the mid-1980s until around 1996. Like Tanton, he often expressed eugenicist views. Hardin was a longtime supporter of population control: In 1968, he wrote "The Tragedy of the Commons," in which he argued that "[the] freedom to breed is intolerable." In a 1992 interview with Omni magazine, he argued against sending food to starving Ethiopians, noting that doing so would only "encourage population growth." In that interview, he lauded China for its "one-child policy" but lamented that the policy was not thorough enough. Former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, a longtime member of FAIR's board of advisors, once said that "new cultures" in America were "diluting what we are and who we are."Longtime FAIR board member Donald A. Collins writes frequently for the VDARE.com, an anti-immigrant hate site named after Virginia Dare, said to have been the first English child born in the New World. (VDARE is dedicated to bashing immigrants and has published the work of many white nationalists and anti-Semites.) Collins has been published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, a journal run by eugenicist Roger Pearson. Collins' articles have focused on attacking the Catholic Church for its liberal stance on immigration. One accused Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony of selling out his country "in exchange for more temporal power and glory." Another claimed bishops were "infiltrating and manipulating the American political process" to dismantle the separation of church and state — the classic calumny directed at American Catholics for decades by the Klan and others. Another person linked to VDARE is Joe Guzzardi, a member of FAIR's board of advisors who worked as an editor of the site.On Oct. 2, 2007, Julie Kirchner became FAIR's third executive director. Dan Stein had taken the position of FAIR president by that time. Stein retained his status as leader and public face of FAIR, while Kirchner managed the day-to-day operations.In the late 2000s, FAIR become much more active in pushing anti-immigrant laws at the state and local level. Attorney <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2008/spring/the-nativists?page=0,11" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">Kris Kobach</a>, who works for FAIR's legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, helped to write Arizona Senate Bill 1070. The bill, signed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, 2010, forces police officers to detain individuals who they suspect to be illegal immigrants and makes it a misdemeanor under state law for non-citizen immigrants to fail to carry their immigration papers. The law is currently caught up in the federal courts. Kobach earlier helped to pass anti-immigrant ordinances in Farmers Branch, Texas; Hazleton, Pa.; and other cities. These laws seek to punish those who aid and abet "illegal aliens." The laws have proven a massive financial burden to the towns that pass them and, in many cases, have sparked racial strife and economic disorder. The Hazleton ordinance, which was struck down by a federal appeals court in September, had left that community of about 20,000 on the hook for nearly $3 million in legal fees as of January 2011. The city is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.Another FAIR initiative to <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/01/04/legislators-work-with-anti-immigrant-hate-group-to-gut-14th-amendment/" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">end birthright citizenship provisions</a> of the 14th Amendment, a longtime goal of the group, was launched in January 2011. IRLI, FAIR's legal arm, working in partnership with State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), announced a plant to halt what they call "the misapplication of the 14th Amendment." The 14th Amendment ensures that children born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens. Birthright citizenship is how most Americans become citizens. SLLI is a coalition of about 70 legislators in 38 states dedicated to eliminating "economic attractions" for immigrants and their "unlawful invasion" of the U.S. The group is often described as the legislative arm of FAIR, which is apt given the group says on its website that it has a "working partnership" with FAIR. SLLI's legislators are the main instigators behind favored FAIR initiatives, including attempts at the state level to deny immigrants various rights through laws modeled on Arizona's S.B. 1070.SLLI has grown dormant in recent years, and the Supreme Court in 2012 <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2012/editorial-arizona-sb-1070-and-enablers-violence" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">struck down</a>most of SB 1070’s provisions as unconstitutional.The 2012 election saw a renewed push for immigration reform at the federal level, with a bipartisan bill passing the Senate before collapsing in the House. In an effort to stop reform legislation, anti-immigrant front groups first created with the help of FAIR in the mid-2000s were revived and rebranded. Groups like <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2006/whats-behind-black-anti-immigration-group" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">Choose Black America</a> and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2007/02/13/illinois-minuteman-project-founder-joins-you-dont-speak-me" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">You Don’t Think for Me</a> were replaced by the African American Leadership Council (AALC), a name replaced quickly by the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/african-american-coalition-provides-cover-nativist-lobby" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">Black American Leadership Alliance</a> (BALA), and Alliance for Immigration Justice (AIJ). These groups, which ostensibly opposed reform because it would damage job prospects for minorities and hurt taxpayers, were made up of African Americans and Latinos. Many of them – such as <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20100701/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-hypocrisy-hate" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">Leah Durant</a>, a former staffer at IRLI (FAIR’s legal arm), and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/sierra-club-rejects-anti-immigration-candidates" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">Frank Morris</a>, a longtime FAIR board member – had close ties to nativist organizations. BALA did manage to organize a rally in Washington – the “<a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/sierra-club-rejects-anti-immigration-candidates" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">DC March for Jobs</a>” – that brought together a few thousand activists, including some nativist extremists like <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2006/nativists" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">D.A. King</a> of Georgia.Following the failure of reform legislation, FAIR found a new focus. As the number of children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua spiked in the summer of 2014, FAIR and its allies began to target organizations aiding these unaccompanied minors. FAIR published a map on its website with the title, “Is the Border Crisis Coming to a Town Near You?” It named locales where minors were being resettled and the organizations helping in that effort. Protests organized by anti-immigrant activists took place in a number of locations, most infamously in <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2014/back-border-0" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">Murrieta</a>, California, where activists blocked a bus full of women and children on their way to an immigration-processing center. In Michigan, anti-Muslim activist <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2014/back-border" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">Tamyra Murray</a>, a state adviser for FAIR, organized a protest against the relocation of minors in Vassar....---refGreenwash:no lnxExecutive SummaryThe Hypocrisy of Hate: Nativists and EnvironmentalismAn Early Battle: Defending the Sierra ClubThe Foundations: Funding the GreenwashersThe Greening of Hate: An Environmentalist's EssayNativists and Environmentalists: A TimelineKey Groups and IndividualsThis report describes how right-wing nativists are targeting the mainstream environmental movement with advertisements, websites and even a newly formed "progressive" organization that purports to represent liberals who believe immigration must be radically curtailed to preserve the environment.
Want to read this in PDF form? Click here. 
Executive SummaryA quarter of a century ago, John Tanton, a white nationalist who would go on to almost single-handedly construct the contemporary, hard-line anti-immigration movement, wrote about his secret desire to bring the Sierra Club, the nation's largest environmental organization, into the nativist fold. He spelled out his motive clearly: Using an organization perceived by the public as part of the liberal left would insulate nativists from charges of racism — charges that, given the explicitly pro-"European-American" advocacy of Tanton and many of his allies over the years, would likely otherwise stick.
In the ensuing decades, nativist forces followed Tanton's script, making several attempts to win over the Sierra Club and its hundreds of thousands of members. That effort culminated in 2004, when nativists mounted a serious effort to take over the Sierra Club's board of directors, an attempt that was beaten back only after a strenuous campaign by Sierra Club members and groups including the Southern Poverty Law Center. The attempt was a classic case of "greenwashing" — a cynical effort by nativist activists to seduce environmentalists to join their cause for purely strategic reasons.
Now, the greenwashers are back. In the last few years, right-wing groups have paid to run expensive advertisements in liberal publications that explicitly call on environmentalists and other "progressives" to join their anti-immigration cause. They've created an organization called Progressives for Immigration Reform that purports to represent liberals who believe immigration must be radically curtailed in order to preserve the American environment. They've constructed websites accusing immigrants of being responsible for urban sprawl, traffic congestion, overconsumption and a host of other environmental evils. Time and again, they have suggested that immigration is the most important issue for conservationists.
The hypocrisy of these come-ons can be astounding. The group headed by Roy Beck, one of the key activists leading the efforts, has given close to half a million dollars to a far-right news service that has described global warming as a hoax. Tanton's wife, who works hand in glove with her husband, runs an anti-immigration political action committee (PAC) that funds candidates with abysmal environmental voting records. The congressional allies of John Tanton, Beck and the other greenwashers are organized into an anti-immigration caucus whose members have even worse environmental voting records than the beneficiaries of Mary Lou Tanton's PAC. John Tanton's U.S. Inc., a foundation set up to fund nativist groups, spent about $150,000 on a highly conservative fundraising agency whose client list includes several major anti-environmental organizations.This new wave of greenwashing attempts, in particular the formation of Progressives for Immigration Reform as a purported group of “liberals,” is only the latest attempt by nativist forces to appear as something they are not. The white-dominated Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most important of the groups founded by Tanton, has been behind the creation of three other front groups that supposedly represented African Americans (Choose Black America), Latino Americans (You Don’t Speak for Me!) and labor (Coalition for the Future American Worker). In fact, FAIR had its own white spokesman double as a press representative for the first two organizations. Another group unrelated to FAIR, Vietnamese for Fair Immigration, turned out to be led by a white man who used a fake Vietnamese surname and whose only connection to that country was that he liked the food....In the last few years, key nativist groups have increasingly been taking up this strategy. They have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to run full-page advertisements appealing to liberals in an array of publications and have started a new group, Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR). They've built a series of websites aimed at "progressive" environmentalists — and many of those sites are run by people who are also principals of right-wing nativist groups.Time and again, the hypocrisy of their claims comes to the surface. PFIR was originally registered by a Republican activist who was also involved in efforts to denounce overly liberal professors — hardly a "progressive" position. Its leader is a former attorney for one of the country's leading nativist organizations and agreed to be interviewed for a cover story in a far-right nativist journal. A nativist political action committee controlled by Mary Lou Tanton, who is married to the primary architect of the strategy of appealing to environmentalists, has given money to an array of politicians whose environmental voting records are miserable."The nativist movement is clearly attempting to split the environmental movement in order to advance its own white nationalist agenda," said the Rev. David Ostendorf, who heads the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based interfaith group dedicated to "building community, justice and equality." "The greening of hate is not about the environment, conservation or population. It is about preserving the dominance of European Americans."Early Efforts Nativists have been working <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-the-hypocrisy-of-hate/greenwashing-a-timeline" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">since the late 1960s</a> to enlist environmentalists as allies in their struggle to drastically limit or end immigration. And, in fact, a great many early environmental leaders, including the powerhouse Sierra Club, did endorse the argument that population had to be stabilized and that immigration had to be reduced. Following that logic, some who started on the environmental left went even further, becoming critical not only of the numbers of immigrants but also of their impact on a "European" culture. A handful, including former Democratic Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, ended up attacking multiculturalism.That began to change in the 1990s, largely because new evidence was making clear that the population explosion of prior decades was ending — that fertility declines dramatically as societies develop, meaning that the fear of an endlessly expanding population "bomb" was not a realistic one. At the same time, more and more environmentalists concluded that immigrants did not contribute in significant ways to such problems as urban sprawl, overconsumption of resources and traffic congestion. Many also worried about the white nationalism that seemed to be at the core of many restrictionist groups. The Sierra Club, in particular, abandoned its anti-immigration stance in 1996. Similarly, Paul Ehrlich, the author whose influential 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted a "race to oblivion" if population wasn't brought under control, eventually renounced the immigration-restrictionist position he had explicitly endorsed, instead describing fighting global poverty as the key to slowing population growth.But <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/john-tanton" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s;">John Tanton</a>, Mary Lou Tanton's spouse and the main builder of today's nativist movement, did not move with the environmental mainstream. Instead, he continued to see immigration as a root cause of environmental degradation.A Michigan ophthalmologist who headed the Sierra Club's Population Committee in the early 1970s, Tanton kept moving to the right, eventually coming to embrace an array of eugenicists, white nationalists and race scientists as he increasingly viewed "European-American" society as under threat. More and more, he worried about a "Latin onslaught," writing to colleagues about the necessity of maintaining "a European-American majority" in America and complaining that Latinos were less "educable" than other races. But through it all, Tanton never lost interest in wrestling the Sierra Club around to his point of view.In 1986, Tanton wrote a private memo to staff members at the<a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/federation-for-american-immigration-reform-fair" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s;"> Federation for American Immigration Reform</a> (FAIR), which he had founded in 1979 (and where he remains a board member today) and U.S. English, an English-only group he then headed. In addition to denigrating Latinos, the memo explicitly laid out the idea that, in order to avoid the appearance of racism, nativists needed to win over "liberal" groups like the Sierra Club. "[T]he issues we're touching on here must be broached by liberals," Tanton wrote. "The conservatives simply cannot do it without tainting the whole subject" by attracting charges of racism.And then he got to the punch line: "The Sierra Club may not want to touch the immigration issue, but the immigration issue is going to touch the Sierra Club!"But even then, a decade before their 1996 decision to move to a neutral stance on immigration, the views of the club's leadership were changing. By 1998, when nativists made their first concerted attempt to reverse the club's position, there were enough members opposed to reject their anti-immigration ballot proposal by a 3-to-2 margin. <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-the-hypocrisy-of-hate/an-early-battle-defending-the-sierra" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">That was not the end of it, however</a>. The extensive and hard-fought battle for control of the Sierra Club would continue right through 2005, when the last nativist attempt was beaten back decisively.Now, with immigration reform back as a major national issue, a whole series of new nativist efforts to appeal to environmentalists has been launched by many of the same people who were behind the attempted "hostile takeover" of the Sierra Club. But the mainstream of the environmental movement, meanwhile, has gone in the other direction. Today, most environmentalists see blaming immigrants for environmental degradation as <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-the-hypocrisy-of-hate/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-the-hypocrisy-of-hate/the-greening-of-hate-an-essay" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">too simplistic</a>....<h2 style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0.83em 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">‘Progressives' for Reform</h2>At around the same time that the ALT ads were appearing, Roy Beck began circulating a letter in search of an executive director to head a new group to be called Progressives for Immigration Reform. PFIR seemed to emerge directly from the ashes of the attempt to take over the Sierra Club in 2004 board elections; the three men making up that year's nativist slate — Dick Lamm, former Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Executive Director Frank Morris and Cornell University entomology professor David Pimentel —joined PFIR's boards at the start. By the time it opened its doors in 2009, PFIR had landed funding from the $400-million-plus<a href="http://www.splcenter.org/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-the-hypocrisy-of-hate/funding-the-greenwashers" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;"> Colcom Foundation</a>, whose vice president of philanthropy is Tanton's close friend, fawning biographer and former U.S. Inc. staff member John Rohe.PFIR's site describes the organization as dedicated to exposing the threat of "mass migration" and seeking "population stabilization." A PFIR official last year told SPLC that current immigration policies are "unsustainable with regard to energy consumption, availability of fresh water and preservation of wilderness."The executive director who was finally selected to head PFIR was, in many ways, hardly a surprise. She was Leah Durant, an African-American lawyer who had earlier worked at FAIR's legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute.Durant, a former Department of Justice staffer who defended government civil immigration cases, had given FAIR cover on the "diversity" front before. She was a speaker at a 2006 press conference held to announce the creation of Choose Black America (CBA), ostensibly an anti-illegal immigration group composed of concerned African Americans. In fact, as the SPLC pointed out at the time, CBA was a front group whose black "members" were selected, flown to the press conference in Washington, D.C., and lodged there by FAIR. Its spokesman was a white FAIR official, and it fell apart soon afterward.PFIR's claim to being "progressive" — at least in the way most people understand that word — is dubious at best. It was originally registered as an organization in Colorado in 2007 by Ryan Richard Call, a man who confirmed to the SPLC that he was a former Republican college activist who later held several "Colorado GOP positions." More importantly, Call had been a member of the far-right Students for Academic Freedom, which argued that America's college professors are too liberal and aimed "to end political abuse of the university."A search of federal and state records turned up just one donation by Durant to a political candidate — a 2007 gift to Republican James O'Brien, who was making a bid for a Virginia state senate seat. In his campaign that year, O'Brien attacked his opponent for wanting "to teach children to accept the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Lifestyle." He also highlighted his perfect record in opposing abortion rights and supporting the National Rifle Association.In summer 2009, after taking the helm of PFIR, Durant agreed to be interviewed by Tanton's racist journal The Social Contract, which had earlier run special editions on such topics as "Europhobia." It's unclear how much she knew about the journal, but it was certainly well known in the circles she and other FAIR lawyers traveled in. Peter Gemma conducted the cover story question-and-answer interview with Durant. Although Durant may not have known it, Gemma was for many years the "media coordinator" for the Capital Region of the <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/council-of-conservative-citizens" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">Council of Conservative Citizens</a> (CCC), a white supremacist hate group that has described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity," once compared the late pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape, and, as part of its basic platform, has long "oppose[d] all efforts to mix the races of mankind." The CCC also has long railed against the immigration of non-whites to America.Durant did not respond to repeated phone and E-mail requests for comment this spring. A year earlier, however, she seemed concerned to distance PFIR from Tanton, who founded FAIR, the organization she once worked for. "PFIR has no connection with FAIR, and John Tanton is neither a board member nor founder," she wrote the SPLC, adding, "Also, as an African American, I take offense at being called racist." Apparently, the offense was a slight one. A few months after writing those words, Durant attended Tanton's 33rd annual "Writers Workshop," where she posed for a photo with Gemma and racist Social Contract editor <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/wayne-lutton" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s; background: transparent;">Wayne Lutton</a>.<h2 style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0.83em 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Hypocrisy of Hate</h2>The hypocrisy of nativists seeking to pose as environmentalist liberals can be stunning. Roy Beck — whose NumbersUSA is, together with FAIR, leading the current attempt to recruit liberals — paid some $444,150 in 2006 and 2007 to NewsMax Media, a far-right online publication that has run articles mocking the idea of global warming and arguing that "there is not a shred of evidence that DDT poses the least kind of threat to the health of the planet's people." Unsurprisingly, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the 1962 book that called DDT into question, is described by NewsMax as "based on myth." In fact, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane was banned in the United States in 1972 due to the harm it caused, and it was later banned worldwide for agricultural use.Mary Lou Tanton, whose husband first conceived the idea of taking over the Sierra Club, runs the US Immigration Reform PAC. The political action committee has donated to 69 candidates who were ultimately elected. Taken together, these politicians' average environmental voting score, as compiled and graded by the League of Conservation Voters, is a miserable 14%. One of them, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), has called global warming "the biggest hoax ever." Another, nativist hardliner and former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, received a paltry 3% score. Tanton's PAC also supported Michael Peroutka, a member of the neo-secessionist League of the South, a hate group that opposes racial intermarriage and says slavery was "God-ordained." As 2004 presidential candidate for the far-right Constitution Party, Peroutka gave an interview to "The Political Cesspool," an infamous radio show that has hosted an array of racists and anti-Semites.For his part, John Tanton, through his U.S. Inc., spent about $150,000 with a direct-mail fundraising agency called Eberle Associates. Eberle is hardly liberal — it describes itself as the place where "for more than 30 years conservative leaders from around the nation have turned … [to] realize their dreams." Among its other clients are The Conservative Caucus, Americans for Tax Reform, American Border Patrol (listed by SPLC as a hate group) and Pro English, a Tanton English-only group.Tanton's funders aren't much different. The Swensrud Foundation has long supported U.S. Inc., FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that began life as part of FAIR. (Two of Swensrud's trustees, Nancy S. Anthony and Steven B. Swensrud, now sit on FAIR's board.) It also backs three conservative groups that have ridiculed the idea of global warming: the Heritage Foundation, the Young America's Foundation, and the Washington Legal Foundation.The chief political allies of FAIR, NumbersUSA, and most of the country's other major nativist groups are found in the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, headed by U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.), a former FAIR lobbyist. The caucus' 95 members score an average 11% on the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scorecard. Similarly, Reclaim American Jobs, a new worker-friendly congressional caucus started by Beck, has 27 members with an average 8% LCV score.....June 23, 2009 PFIR's Durant appears on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" to discuss the group's April poll claiming that liberals are concerned about immigration levels.July 1, 2009 FAIR releases a report, "Immigration, Energy and the Environment," that blames immigrants for the rise in greenhouses gases.Aug. 25, 2009 CIS sponsors a panel at the National Press Club on "Immigration, Population, and the Environment: Experts to Debate Impact of Current Policies." The panel includes PFIR's Cafaro, Don Weeden of the Weeden Foundation, and Steven Camarota, director of research for CIS.October 2009 CIS publishes "Strategic Negligence: How the Sierra Club's Distortions on Border and Immigration Policy Are Undermining its Environmental Legacy," a report that attacks the SC and claims it has "undermined its environmental legacy."October 2009 Negative Population Growth, which receives funding from FAIR, runs an ad in E-The Environmental Magazine warning of a "population crisis" that may "destroy our future."Oct. 4, 2009 PFIR's Durant attends Tanton's 33rd Annual Writers Workshop. She is photographed there alongside Lutton, who has been active in several white supremacist groups and published in a Holocaust denial journal, and Gemma, the CCC official.Late October 2009 CAPS runs radio ads in California warning that "the real 'inconvenient truth'" is "the fact that population growth and environmental degradation are related" and "people drive cars, create sprawl, destroy forests and pollute." The ads suggest that "mass immigration" is driving population growth and thus destroying "natural treasures" through overpopulation.January 2010 Starlight Media, which is funded by Tanton's foundation U.S. Inc., announces it is nearly finished with a film, "Tomorrow's America." Featuring many leaders of Tanton-linked nativist groups, it focuses on "population growth and immigration" and is meant to "help citizens better understand the history of immigration in the U.S., the mythology that surrounds that history and the roots of current immigration policy in the immigration law of 1965 that led to the new 'great wave' of legal immigration in the 1990s." That narrative echoes Tanton ally Otis Graham, the CIS board member who has long argued that a "mythistory" was created during the civil rights movement that falsely depicted America as a "nation of immigrants."Jan. 21, 2010 NUSA's Beck, who describes himself as an environmentalist, speaks on a panel, "Perverse Incentives, Subsidies, and Tax Code Impediments to a Sustainable Economy," at The New Green Economy conference sponsored by the National Council for Science and the Environment.Feb. 26, 2010 Mixing environmental with "cultural" concerns, FAIR issues a revealing statement: "Immigration policy must be limited to conserve our environment, open space, and natural resources. It should enhance our national culture, not radically alter or Balkanize it."March 2010 PFIR releases "From Big to Bigger: How Mass Immigration and Population Growth Have Exacerbated America's Ecological Footprint," by Kolankiewicz, who now serves on PFIR's board of advisors. Kolankiewicz argues that "immigration is increasing America's Ecological Footprint, pushing our country deeper into ecological deficit," and laments environmentalists' scant interest in the issue. He writes that "the Environmental Establishment dropped its advocacy and retreated into uncomfortable silence and abject denial on U.S. population."April 1, 2010 Jerry Kammer, a former journalist now with CIS, presents an updated version of the CIS paper, "Strategic Negligence: How the Sierra Club's Distortion on Border and Immigration Policy Are Undermining Its Environmental Legacy," at the "Breaking Down the Walls" conference at Arizona State University.June 2010 FAIR issues an update of a 1999 report, "The Environmentalist's Guide to a Sensible Immigration Policy." The report, which is dated April 2010 despite its actual release date, claims that the "principal cause" of urban sprawl is "immigration-related population growth."June 23, 2010 Leah Durant of PFIR puts up her first blog post on the popular progressive website, Huffingtonpost.com. PFIR says it intends to post twice weekly on the site.===</div>