For decades the left made common cause with the Zero Population Growth crowd.
Only liberals could get away with bashing the incoming Trump administration for its alleged ties to white nationalists while simultaneously backing a former supporter of black nationalist Louis Farrakhan for head of the Democratic National Committee.
Chuck Schumer, the next Democratic Senate leader, has called past statements by Donald Trump’s senior counselor, Stephen Bannon, “dangerous and bigoted.” This would be the same Chuck Schumer who has endorsed Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison to be the next chairman of the DNC. According to CNN, Mr. Ellison was affiliated with Mr. Farrakhan’s openly racist Nation of Islam in the 1980s and 1990s and regularly defended the group’s leadership. In 2006, while running for Congress, he finally disavowed the organization, though apparently not all of its anti-Semitic views. In a 2010 recording, Mr. Ellison can be heard telling an audience that Israel controls the U.S. government. “The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people.”
“The reality is that Democrats... promote racial and ethnic tribal politics. If the left doesn’t want others playing this game, it should try leading by example.”
Liberals are still trying to persuade voters that alt-right bigots are responsible for Mr. Trump’s victory last month, even though the evidence is overwhelming that he won on the strength of voters who had previously supported President Obama. Regardless, Republicans should know better by now than to be taking outrage cues from today’s Democrats. Liberals have a problem with identity politics only when non-liberals practice it. What is Black Lives Matter if not the flip side of white nationalism?
Yet leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has advocated violence against police officers, have been welcomed in the Obama White House, and one such leader was even appointed to the president’s task force on policing. The president, along with former Attorney General Eric Holder, has long had high praise for Al Sharpton, another frequent White House guest with a lengthy history of well-documented racist, sexist and homophobic utterances. The reality is that Democrats in general and the current Oval Office occupant in particular promote racial and ethnic tribal politics. If the left doesn’t want others playing this game, it should try leading by example.
There’s also the matter of the overlapping agendas of progressives and the alt-right fringe. John Tanton, a retired eye doctor from northern Michigan, isn’t a household name, but he’s directly or indirectly behind an extensive network of organizations that’s been working for decades to curb U.S. immigration. He’s also happens to be man of the political far left.
Mr. Tanton is a radical environmentalist whose opposition to immigrants is rooted in the belief that population growth is detrimental to nature. He is a longtime supporter of the Audubon Society and Sierra Club who turned his attention to population control in the 1960s after becoming familiar with the writings of antinatal biologist Paul Ehrlich and the late ecologist Garrett Hardin, who argued that sending food to starving Ethiopians will just “encourage population growth” and that mankind’s “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.”
Doing his part to save us from ruin, Mr. Tanton organized one of Michigan’s first Planned Parenthood associations in 1965 and later became head of an outfit called Zero Population Growth. In the 1970s he began focusing on greater immigration restriction—population control by other means—and founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform. More than a half-dozen spinoff groups, including the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA, would follow.
Early Tanton supporters included Democrat Richard Lamm, a former governor of Colorado, as well as liberal luminaries like Warren Buffett,Eugene McCarthy and Barbara Jordan. Some backers soured on FAIR after revelations that it had received more than $1.5 million from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation dedicated to racial purity through eugenics. Still, Tanton-linked groups have published books and papers in support of China’s one-child policy, the sterilization of Third World women and wider use of abortion drugs. Mr. Tanton’s organizations welcome green zealots as readily as race-obsessed cranks.
Republicans began finding common cause with arch environmentalists on immigration in the 1990s, and these pages urged GOP restrictionists to be wary of their new bedfellows. Republicans, in the main, wanted to reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S., while their new allies wanted to reduce the number of humans on the planet. Mr. Tanton’s organizations are now regularly categorized as politically conservative notwithstanding their liberal origins and ultimate population-control objectives. The media want to focus on conservatism and the alt-right, but the mainstream left has long flirted with the same fringe. That’s one reason Keith Ellison and Democrats are getting a pass that would never be given to Stephen Bannon and Republicans.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal