Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid devoted his January 9 column to defending the publication American Renaissance from accusations made about it in a law enforcement memo cited by Fox News regarding Arizona shooting suspect Jared Loughner. According to Kincaid, American Renaissance is merely a “conservative” group that is “politically incorrect because of its criticism of racial preference and 'diversity' programs and immigration policies that weaken the strength of a country.” Kincaid added that “there is no evidence that American Renaissance by any objective standard is a racist organization. It does deal with racial issues. But so does the Congressional Black Caucus.”

The Anti-Defamation League calls American Renaissance a “white supremacist journal” that “promotes pseudoscientific studies that attempt to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies.” As we've documented, American Renaissance and its editor, Jared Taylor, are very much obsessed with race. Taylor has declared that we don't “need more Hispanics” and attacked Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for not “pronouncing her name the way an American would.”

While calling itself an advocate for “race realism,” American Renaissance has made clear that it claims to speak for whites, writing in its inaugural 1991 issue introducing the publication that “Fifty years ago, the United States had an unmistakable national and cultural core. In another half century, if whites continue to cooperate in their own dispossession, this nation will have no core and no identity.” The publication added, “We cannot expect Mexican immigrants, Vietnamese refugees, or militant blacks to care if Shakespeare disappears from our schools or if the Jefferson Memorial falls into decay.” It also stated that “blacks and Hispanics are, compared to whites, far more likely to be poor, illiterate, on welfare, or in jail; they are far more likely to have illegitimate children, be addicted to drugs, or have AIDS. By no definition of international competitiveness can the presence of these populations be anything but a disadvantage.”

Further, Taylor is on the editorial advisory board of the Citizens Informer, published by the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor to the White Citizens Councils of the segregationist South. The Council states on its website that they “oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called 'affirmative action' and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”

In his defense of American Renaissance, Kincaid also noted its upcoming conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. Here are some of the scheduled conference speakers:

• Sam G. Dickson is, like Taylor, on the editorial advisory board of the Citizens Informer. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Dickson is “tied to numerous extremist groups and movements in the U.S. and around the world, from major Holocaust denial organizations to the Ku Klux Klan he frequently represented in court.”

• David Yeagley presents himself as “the great-great-grandson of Comanche leader Bad Eagle” (in fact, the connection is through a stepmother, not a direct relation). In a recent blog post, Yeagley ranted about “oedipal white liberals and hysterical blacks” complaining about the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution and called President Obama “Barry Soetoro” (he has previously called Obama “the lying black African Communist/Muslim traitor”). He went on to write, “Emotionalism, which is a kind of Freudian sexual displacement, continues to rule the Negro race, and it is continually taken advantage of by oedipal white liberals intent on destorying [sic] the country.”

• Dan Roodt is a pro-Afrikaaner South African who decries “the ignominy of being dominated by a rapacious, anti-white, racist clique” and warns that "[o]ur struggle here is of enormous importance for white, Western peoples world-wide." He was featured in a Daily Show segment in which correspondent John Oliver called his soft-spoken “vintage bigotry” -- Roodt says that how black men have “20 percent more testosterone” than whites and commit “99.9 percent of all crime, warns of efforts to promote interbreeding ”to make us all become colored" and insists that everyone was better off under apartheid -- “a heady bouquet of racial hatred with an aftertaste of lingering bitterness.”

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has attended previous conferences, as has Don Black, who runs the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront.

Kincaid wants you to think that all of this falls short of an “objective standard” that American Renaissance is racist. One has to wonder what Kincaid's definition of “objective” is. And “racist.”