John Tanton, creator of anti-immigrant movement, is dead

[sinkingfeeling]

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/07/18/john-tantons-legacy

Tanton created groups that billed themselves as fact-based think tanks and lobbyists. Instead, those groups spread propaganda targeting immigrants that has become central to President Trump’s immigration policy.

Tanton, 85, died Tuesday in Petoskey, Michigan. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an SPLC-designated hate group that Tanton launched in 1979, announced his death in a press release.

Tanton’s anti-immigrant influence goes far beyond FAIR. He founded or funded 13 anti-immigrant organizations, including three of the most influential anti-immigrant groups in the United States – FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA – known as the “Big Three.”

In early 2017, Stephen Miller, a senior advisor in the White House, cited a CIS study in defending Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. “First of all, 72 individuals, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, have been implicated in terroristic activity in the United States who hail from those seven nations, point one,” Miller said on NBC’s “Meet the Press." Fact-checkers at The Washington Post debunked this talking point.

Tanton’s legacy is difficult to overstate. Other groups within the network also are experiencing mainstream success. ProEnglish, an anti-immigrant hate group that lobbies for English only legislation and policies across the country, met with Trump and aides to Vice President Mike Pence multiple times in 2018 and as recently as July 11 of this year. Executive director Stephen Guschov recounted the last meeting in a blog post. He said it was about, "official English legislation and to continue to advocate for President Trump to sign a new Executive Order to effectively repeal and replace former President Clinton’s onerous Executive Order 13166 that requires foreign language translations and interpretations for all federally funded agencies and contractors.” ProEnglish’s former executive director is Robert “Bob” Vandervoort, who is also the former head of the white nationalist group Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance. That group is a satellite for white nationalist hate group American Renaissance.

[Takket]

1. Good riddance

[Captain Zero]

2. Only speak good of the dead.

He's dead. Good.

[lunasun]

3. Adios MF

[MontanaMama]

6. +1

[Wounded Bear]

4. I hope it was a painful and extended death...

[awesomerwb1]

5. Unfortunately his minions

are just as bad but very professional since becoming normalized by the media.

Rarely ever will you read an immigration related article without quotes from someone from CIS ("Center for Immigration Studies" *cough* bullsh*t*) FAIR or NumbersUSA.

[VOX]

7. Soylent Industries must refuse his corpse for inclusion into its food sources.

They haven’t yet perfected a blend for “Soylent Redneck.”

[underpants]

8. CIS has been made into a reputable source on the right

[bullwinkle428]

9. The perfect "O. Henry story-ending" to his life would have been him refusing

a blood transfusion from an immigrant that would have saved his life.

[dalton99a]

10. It is a racist organization:

In its own words

"As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?"
— FAIR founder and board member John Tanton, Oct. 10, 1986

“I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
— John Tanton, letter to eugenicist and ecology professor Garrett Hardin (now deceased), Dec. 10, 1993

“I blame ninety-eight percent of responsibility for this country’s immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his political allies, who decided some time back in 1958, earlier perhaps, that immigration was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it’s a form of revengism, or revenge, that these forces continue to push the immigration policy that they know full well are [sic] creating chaos and will continue to create chaos down the line.”
— FAIR President Dan Stein, "Oral History of the Federation for American Immigration Reform," interview of Dan Stein by John Tanton, August 1994.

“Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?”
— John Tanton, letter to eugenicist Robert K. Graham (now deceased), Sept. 18, 1996.

“Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.”
— FAIR President Dan Stein, interviewed by Tucker Carlson, Oct. 2, 1997.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/federation-american-immigration-reform

[gratuitous]

11. Only 85?

I can't wait for the conspiracy theory nutjobs to begin squirting dark surmises about Tanton's untimely death, like they did for Scalia. A corpulent 78-year-old smoker with a sedentary lifestyle just keels over dead? Nobody's ever heard of that happening before! An 85-year-old crank, long since consumed by his own bile sudden dies? Deep state!