American Renaissance, group rumored to share ties with Jared Loughner, to hold meeting in Charlotte

Fox News reported Sunday that based on information from the Department of Homeland Security, local authorities in Arizona were pursuing possible ties between Jared Loughner, the accused shooter of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and the white supremacist group American Renaissance. That assertion was later amended by Fox, and, as a Department of Homeland Security official told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent Monday, the agency has yet to link American Renaissance to Loughner.

American Renaissance has been classified as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The organization is scheduled to hold their annual meeting in Charlotte on February 4-6.

“The conference will be at a first-class venue in Charlotte, North Carolina,” is the only available information on American Renaissance’s website regarding the location in Charlotte for the conference. One member of the “White Nationalist community” promoting the event wrote, “To ensure security, the exact location of the conference venue will not be disclosed until 48 hours before the conference begins, so it is essential that they have your e-mail address and telephone number.”

The SPLC gives this background on the group:

“Founded by Jared Taylor in 1990, the New Century Foundation is a self-styled think tank that promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites — although in hifalutin language that avoids open racial slurs and attempts to portray itself as serious scholarship.”

Taylor, in an article for American Renaissance magazine in 2005, wrote, “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”

On Sunday, Taylor condemned violent acts in light of the shooting and denied any kind of connection to Loughner:

This is so hopelessly wrong that it is hard to believe it is a genuine government document. No one by the name of Loughner has ever been a subscriber to American Renaissance or has ever registered for an American Renaissance conference. We have no evidence that he has even visited the AR website.

American Renaissance condemns violence in the strongest possible terms, and nothing that has ever appeared in it pages could be interpreted as countenancing it.

[...]

I telephoned DHS today to try to get the bottom of this nonsense, but apparently there is no homeland security on Sundays. The person who answered the phone said no one is there and that I should call back on Monday morning.

Fortunately, some of the media organizations that have been reporting this story have contacted me, and have reported my assertion that American Renaissance knows nothing at all about Jared Loughner, that we condemn all violence, and that we cannot possibly be described as anti-Semitic.

On the group’s website, the conference schedule is introduced with this passage:

Ours is an era of fear and self-censorship. Virtually no whites are willing to break taboos about racial differences in IQ, the costs of “diversity,” or the challenges of non-white immigration. We are different. We believe these are vital questions.

At this conference you will hear some of the most courageous academics, journalists, and political figures of our time discuss the forces that will determine our future. This will be a remarkable group of speakers and guests—undeceived, outspoken, and committed to the defense of Western Civilization.

American Renaissance’s annual conference in 2010 was cancelled when hotels in the Washington, D.C.-area, nixed reservations after pressure from protesters of the group.