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NEW ORLEANS -- They came from near and far, gathering inside the ritzy St. Louis Hotel for their 14th annual meeting.

There was Srdja Trifkovic, who says he is a "Byzantine man," not a Renaissance man, and who thinks that total economic collapse would be a good thing for white people. Former bank CEO David Hartman came to say that Social Security and Medicare should be halted so that whites will have more children to take care of them in their old age.

Sam Francis was there, too, comparing non-white immigrants to "foreign colonizers, like space aliens."

And then there was Peter Brimelow. Some might have expected the well-heeled financial commentator, book author and influential nativist intellectual to feel somewhat out of his element at this gathering of the very far right.

But these were very much Brimelow's people.

They call themselves paleoconservatives — but a more accurate term, and one that is actually used by many of those who attended the New Orleans meeting of the Rockford Institute's John Randolph Club, might be racial nationalists.

The club used to include libertarians and others with a variety of political views but, as chronicled in an important article by James Lubinskas, that has changed. The club has shrunk, become more politically isolated, and focused in on issues related to race.

Peter Brimelow exemplifies that change. In 1995, he published the bestselling Alien Nation, a book that argued that America is historically white-dominated and should stay that way — but that was also written in a genial style and was careful to treat black Americans as part of the polity.

By 1997, he was warning that by 2008 the GOP would no longer be able to compete in presidential elections because the racial makeup of the electorate would be changed by non-white immigration.

Today, the former senior editor at Forbes magazine edits an anti-immigration Web page that carries an array of frankly white supremacist and anti-Semitic essays.

The Role of Race
Brimelow's political evolution might have been predicted. Although his Alien Nation was well reviewed in many places, it included strong veins of racism and xenophobia.

He described the role of race as "elemental, absolute, fundamental." He said that white Americans should demand that U.S. immigration quotas be changed to allow in mostly whites. He argued that spending tax dollars on anything related to multiculturalism was "subversive." He called foreign immigrants "weird aliens with dubious habits."

He worried repeatedly that his son, with his "blue eyes" and "blond hair," would grow up in an America in which whites had lost the majority.

At one point, he wrote that if one enters an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, just like entering the New York subways, "you find yourself in an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored."

Even earlier, in 1993, Brimelow, who is himself an immigrant from England, lauded a book by Jared Taylor, who now oversees the racist American Renaissance magazine.

In his review, he said that racism is "undetectable" in opinion polls and "does not seem" to affect blacks' economic status. He said tax money spent to help blacks and the poor "has done little good and much ill." And he said that "policemen of all races are, if anything, more lenient with criminals of a different race."

In 1999, Brimelow started the Center for American Unity, where he remains president today. The center's most important project was a Web page called VDARE, named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World in 1587.

Brimelow has written that he once planned to bestow Dare's name on "the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles." He was, he said, "dissuaded."

Back to the Future
Fast forward to 2003. Once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page, VDARE has now become a meeting place for many on the radical right.

One essay complains about how the government encourages "the garbage of Africa" to come to the United States. The same writer says once the "Mexican invasion" engulfs the country, "high teenage birthrates, poverty, ignorance and disease will be what remains."

Another says that Hispanics have a "significantly higher level of social pathology than American whites. ... In other words, some immigrants are better than others." Yet another complains that a Jewish immigrant rights group is helping "African Muslim refugees" come to America.

Brimelow's site carries archives of columns from men like Sam Francis, who is the editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group whose Web page recently described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity."

It has run articles by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine, which specializes in dubious race and IQ studies and eugenics, the "science" of "race betterment" through selective breeding.

Recently, VDARE has even begun to publish the writings of Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State-Long Beach. MacDonald accuses Jews of "dominating" the "movement to change the ethnic balance of the United States by allowing mass, non-traditional [i.e., non-white] immigration."

He writes that Jews, believing "the masses ha[ve] to be deceived," frame their appeals in universalistic language. But behind that are "the Jewish agendas" of the deceivers. MacDonald also mentions "the famously heavy Jewish role" in television news.

Marching With the Confederacy
Brimelow has some remarkable things to say in his own essays. Among them, he describes the Pioneer Fund — a racist foundation that funds research like that favored by American Renaissance — as "a perfectly respectable institution."

No wonder. Brimelow also runs articles by the Pioneer Fund's new president, Jean-Phillippe Rushton, another British expatriate who teaches at the University of Western Ontario and who has been investigated for violations of Canadian hate speech laws.

Among other things, Rushton has theorized about a supposed inverse relationship between penis and brain size (meaning, in his construction, that blacks on average are more promiscuous and less intelligent than whites and Asians).

In New Orleans, Brimelow joined about 80 people who paid $250 for the two-day session to discuss "America: A European Nation." Unfortunately for him, Sam Francis was the penultimate speaker, discussing how today's immigrants "don't even know how to flush a toilet, the flushing toilet, a European invention, being a marker of civilization."

Francis went on to say that the governors of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas should be tried for treason for meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox. By the time he was done, Brimelow had eight minutes.

Brimelow raced through his usual speech on immigration, suggesting that Third World immigration had "changed the character of America" and calling for a cap on legal immigration and deportation of all illegals.

Meanwhile, in the atrium outside the conference room where the meeting was held, a band was playing pop hits by black artists for a wedding party. As the music came pounding through the wall, Brimelow denounced it as "crap."

And what would the advocate of a whiter America rather be listening to? A 19th-century Confederate marching tune, he said.

Editor's note: Based on evidence compiled by the Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center is adding VDARE to its list of hate sites on the Web.