Posted on December 9, 2011

Newt Gingrich: The White Party’s Candidate?

Henry Wolff, American Renaissance, December 9, 2011

Newt Gingrich 2012

Newt Gingrich is the most anti-white candidate in the GOP presidential field. In fact, he may be one of the most anti-white Republicans ever. It is true that 81 percent of the jobs Rick Perry says he brought to Texas went to newly arrived immigrants (93 percent of whom were illegals), and he says that denying in-state tuition to illegals is heartless, but Newt Gingrich makes the him look like Tom Tancredo by comparison.

In the 2010 midterm elections, nearly 90 percent of votes for Republicans were cast by whites. John McCain’s presidential support was of an identical complexion. Writing for The New York Times, Thomas Edsall, like Steve Sailer and Pat Buchanan before him, has dubbed the GOP “The White Party.” But rather than consolidating his proven white base and welcoming white working class voters who are increasingly defecting to the GOP, Newt Gingrich seems determined to dispossess that base while mollycoddling groups that will never vote for his party in significant numbers.

Immigration

On immigration, the former House Speaker is liberal. In a recent primary debate, Mr. Gingrich set up a restrictionist straw man so he could attack it with pure sentiment:

If you’ve been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don’t think we’re going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out. I don’t see how the party that says it’s the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century.

Of course, most mainstream restrictionists do not call for mass deportation, but for attrition through enforcement. Those who do favor deportation would happily send the kids and grandkids home with their family so as to keep it together. Mr. Gingrich went on to say he’s “prepared to take the heat for saying let’s be humane” toward illegal immigrants. Sadly, Mr. Gingrich did not take the “Perry Plunge“–a precipitous polling drop following maudlin immigration remarks. This is probably because other candidates in the field seem to be self-destructing and Herman Cain has finally “suspended” his campaign.

In 1986, Mr. Gingrich voted for the Simpson-Mazzoli bill that granted citizenship to three million illegal immigrants, a move he later said he regretted. Today, he supports a “path to legality,” but not citizenship, for illegal immigrants who have “deep ties” in the United States, and repatriation for those who do not. “Citizen juries” made up of ordinary citizens from local communities would be responsible for making millions of individual rulings on who stays and who goes. Even David Frum finds this proposal ridiculous, but Bill Clinton <href=”#.TtejbniFSd4.facebook”>approves, so you know it’s conservative. The Pew Hispanic Center released a report last week suggesting that millions of immigrants would receive permanent residency under Mr. Gingrich’s plan.

Mr. Gingrich has also voiced support for the provision of the DREAM Act that would grant citizenship to illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors and who serve in the military.

To temper his pro-immigrant rhetoric, Mr. Gingrich has proposed defunding self-declared “sanctuary cities,” but once Mr. Gingrich’s qualified amnesty is enacted, only those unfortunate souls who couldn’t forge convincing evidence of “deep ties” would need sanctuary.

The former House Speaker wants America to have a “robust” and “attractive” program of legal immigration, with an expanded guest worker program that would give businesses the low-wage labor they crave.

On his election website, Mr. Gingrich explains the rationale for his immigration policies by spreading the myth that America is a “proposition nation”:

At the core of being American is a thorough understanding of American exceptionalism. We are a nation not defined by place or ethnic heritage, but by the collective understanding that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

There are good reasons why Numbers USA gives Mr. Gingrich a D- rating on immigration.

Racial Preferences

Peter Bradley has an excellent piece at VDARE detailing Newt Gingrich’s wavering positions on racial preferences. He was once a staunch opponent: “I want to promise here tonight that we are going to pursue an all out effort to end affirmative racism in America,” Mr. Gingrich declared at the 1995 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Just over a year later, Mr. Gingrich was joining forces with black conservative celebrity J.C. Watts to frustrate Ward Connerly’s push for nationwide legislation based on California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. Mr. Gingrich was also instrumental in killing the Civil Rights Act of 1997–another initiative against racial preferences–while Speaker of the House.

Mr. Bradley says that “more than any other person, Newt Gingrich is responsible for the continuation of anti-white racial preferences in America.”

Pandering to Hispanics

Newt Gingrich takes Hispandering to a level that would make John McCain and George W. Bush blush, and is as eager as Karl Rove to brown the GOP. Politico says that “of the top Republican prospects for 2012, Gingrich leads in Latino outreach.”

While in office, one of Speaker Gingrich’s “pet projects” was a bill that would allow Puerto Ricans to hold a referendum to decide the fate of their island: whether it would become the 51st state, a sovereign nation, or continue as a US territory. The plebiscite would be held once every ten years until a majority chose either statehood or independence. As James Lubinskas <href=”#cover”>wrote at the time, if the bill passed and Puerto Ricans opted for statehood, the US would be “importing AIDS, crime, poverty and other Third-World problems. Four million Spanish-speakers who don’t even consider themselves Americans would gain political representation at the expense of current citizens.” The bill passed the Speaker’s House by just one vote, but was never taken up in the Senate. Last year, Mr. Gingrich interviewed Puerto Rico’s governor and voiced his continued support for a referendum.

Granting hundreds of thousands of Hispanics permanent residence in the US would be nothing new for Mr. Gingrich. According to Politico, during his time as House Speaker, Mr. Gingrich was “instrumental in passing legislation that allowed hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees [to] become legal permanent residents of the United States.” The legislation was the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act which Numbers USA says increased the U.S. population by 966,480 in the decade after its passage.

In 2009, Mr. Gingrich founded The Americano–a bilingual “conservative” webzine that “celebrates the richness of Hispanic Heritage”–as part of Gingrich Productions, which he runs with his third wife. Mr. Gingrich may be able to read the site en Español since he has been taking Spanish lessons for the past few years.

Mr. Gingrich put his Spanish skills to the test in 2007 when he recorded a YouTube video apologizing to Hispanics for <href=”#.TsGl_3LIurg”>having said, “We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.” He recorded the entire apology in the language of living in a ghetto:

Mr. Gingrich may have been a precipitating factor in what Steve Sailer has called the “minority mortgage meltdown.” For much of the past decade, mortgage giant Freddie Mac hired Mr. Gingrich through his Gingrich Group at between $25,000 and $30,000 per month. According to Bloomberg, between 1999 and 2002, Mr. Gingrich “consulted with Freddie Mac executives on a program to expand home ownership, an idea [Freddie Mac’s chief lobbyist Mitchell] Delk said he pitched to President George W. Bush‘s White House.” Mr. Delk said he had a long discussion with Mr. Gingrich about the idea, including “what the benefits are to communities, what the benefits could be for Republicans and particularly their relationship with Hispanics.”

Since Ronald Reagan’s second term, Mr. Gingrich has been a proponent of the “Opportunity Society” platform that encourages property ownership. This was the prototype for President George W. Bush’s “Ownership Society,” which, in practice, meant lower mortgage standards for minorities, with an eye to winning Hispanic support.

Mr. Gingrich’s pandering is not limited to Hispanics. In 1997, when J.C. Watts called Jesse Jackson and then D.C. mayor Marion Barry “race hustling poverty pimps,” then-Speaker Gingrich apologized to Mr. Jackson on behalf of Congressman Watts, and invited him to sit in the Speaker’s gallery with his (second) wife during the State of the Union speech. In 2009, Mr. Gingrich teamed up with Al Sharpton for a five-city education tour “aimed at bridging the achievement gap for minorities in schools.”

Presidential candidates are fond of saying “my record speaks for itself.” In the case of Newt Gingrich, this is certainly true, and whites would do well to study his record closely before pulling the lever next year.