A week before Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke privately to a reputed hate group in Orange County, an Orange County congressman participated in a different gathering put on by a different organization that civil rights groups consider a hate group.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), whose congressional district stretches into South Orange County, was at the annual Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) Hold Their Feet to the Fire event in Washington, D.C. on June 28. The congressman has received a 100 percent rating from FAIR, but critics say the group has extensive ties to white nationalism and the race science known as eugenics.
John Tanton, who founded FAIR, once said, “I have come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist, it requires an European-American majority and a clear one at that.” Current president Dan Stein recently told The New York Times that Americans would “be perfectly fine if we didn’t have another immigrant for 50 years.”
Foes claim that since its founding, FAIR has advocated for extreme population control measures, including forced sterilization, and currently favors mass roundups of the undocumented, dismantling birthright citizenship, rescinding the Dream Act, banning immigration from Muslim-majority countries, restricting refugee entry and dramatically reducing the volume of legal entries into the United States.
Issa, Stein and Donald Trump find common ground in supporting a merit-based immigration system that only allows into the country the best and brightest from foreign lands. Sessions took this a step further while in the Senate, calling for the exclusion of the meritorious who would compete directly with natural born American workers.
Right after right-wing radio host Bret Winterble talked live to Jihad Watch activist and Muslim basher Robert Spencer at the FAIR event on June 28, Issa was the guest.
“I think the voters need to understand the most important change occurred on January 20th,” Issa told the host, “because beginning on January 20th when Secretary Kelly … former General John Kelly, when he took over, what he did is that he started enforcing the law. And that’s why when people hear that criminal aliens are being picked up at their sentencing (inaudible) sanctuary cities and then they forget that the enforcement that going on, that what this administration doing is grabbing and deporting criminal aliens in order to make our communities safer.”
Issa was joined at Hold Their Feet to the Fire by Reps. Lou Barletta (R-Pennsyvania), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Steve King (R-Iowa), Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka and author and sometimes Orange County Register columnist Michelle Malkin.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.