Lawrence Auster (born 1949) is an American traditionalist conservative blogger and essayist.
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Auster grew up in New Jersey. He attended Columbia University for two years, later finishing a B.A. in English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He moved to Manhattan in 1978, and still resides there.[1] He is not, as has been claimed, a lawyer.[2]
Born Jewish, Auster converted to Christianity as an adult and became a member of the Episcopal Church, a church he prefers "in the historical rather than the present tense", because the Church's ordination of openly practicing homosexuals means "it has ceased being a Christian church".[3]
Auster is unmarried.[4] He is a cousin of the novelist Paul Auster.[5]
Auster is the author of several works on immigration and multiculturalism, most notably The Path to National Suicide, originally published by the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF) in 1990. The Path to National Suicide is regarded, along with Peter Brimelow's, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, as a foundational text in the modern immigration restriction movement.
In The Path to National Suicide, Auster argues that the dramatic changes in America's ethnic and racial composition brought about by the 1965 Immigration Act have led to the weakening and delegitimization of America's historic culture and national identity, and that this loss of identity, combined with fears of seeming "racist," have kept the white American majority from resisting their country's ongoing transformation.
According to Auster:
The very manner in which the [immigration] issue is framed—as a matter of equal rights and the blessings of diversity on one side, versus “racism” on the other—tends to cut off all rational discourse on the subject. One can only wonder what would happen if the proponents of open immigration allowed the issue to be discussed, not as a moralistic dichotomy, but in terms of its real consequences. Instead of saying: “We believe in the equal and unlimited right of all people to immigrate to the U.S. and enrich our land with their diversity,” what if they said: “We believe in an immigration policy which must result in a staggering increase in our population, a revolution in our culture and way of life, and the gradual submergence of our current population by Hispanic and Caribbean and Asian peoples.” Such frankness would open up an honest debate between those who favor a radical change in America’s ethnic and cultural identity and those who think this nation should preserve its way of life and its predominant, European-American character. That is the actual choice—as distinct from the theoretical choice between “equality” and “racism”—that our nation faces.
Auster’s subsequent booklets on immigration have been Huddled Clichés: Exposing the Fraudulent Arguments that Have Opened America’s Borders to the World, and Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation, both published by the AICF.
Auster's articles have appeared in such publications as FrontPage Magazine, NewsMax, New York Newsday, the Council of Conservative Citizens' Citizens Informer, American Renaissance, The Social Contract Press, National Review, Human Events, Arizona Republic, The Occidental Quarterly, WorldNetDaily, The Miami Herald, and Insight on the News.
Auster hosts a daily blog, View from the Right (VFR), which includes commentary on current events, politics, society, and culture from a traditionalist U.S. conservative, anti-Islamic, anti-liberal, and immigration-restrictionist viewpoint.
Auster has been critical of both neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. His main targets on the right are the neocons who, he claims, are able to identify the problem of radical Islam but refuse to do anything substantial about it such as reducing or eliminating Islamic immigration. Instead, according to Auster, neoconservatives advocate nation building abroad, and fail to recognize the religion of Islam itself as the cause of Islamic radicalism. He also criticizes paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan for their criticism of Israel and what Auster sees as barely disguised anti-Semitism.
Auster has written, "I have always called myself a racialist, which to me means two things. First, as a general proposition, I think that race matters in all kinds of ways. Second, I care about the white race. It is the source of and is inseparable from everything we are, everything we have, and everything our civilization has achieved."[6] However, he denies being a white nationalist[7] and, as a tactical matter, accepts the conventional definition of racism as morally bad and links it with oppression and hatred.[8] He also is concerned about what he says is the racism of the black power movement as well as the far left.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) implied that Auster was a racist because he spoke at an American Renaissance conference.[9] He was one of 10 speakers to speak at the first conference in 1994, but has not spoken there since. He criticized Jared Taylor for his tolerating the former Klansman David Duke and Stormfront moderator Jamie Kelso who attended the conference and asked questions. Auster still is supportive of Taylor's personal views as well as those of the late Samuel T. Francis, another frequent speaker for the conferences. Robert Locke, a New York City friend of Auster and fellow columnist at FrontPageMag defended Auster against the charges of the SPLC.[10]
Despite his controversial status, Auster is often cited by "mainstream" advocates of immigration restriction and cultural conservatism (including people he has criticized such as Patrick Buchanan), to support their arguments. Buchanan has cited Auster's monograph, The Path to National Suicide, as one of the sources for his own book, State of Emergency, The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.
On May 4, 2007 Auster was expelled from FrontPage Magazine, because of the controversy over an article he wrote in which he complained that "[e]ach story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern" and that "white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists."[11][12]
In recent times, Auster has been both lauded and criticized for his writings on John Derbyshire's ideas. In a 2007 VFR post titled "Derbism Unveiled", he accused the conservative writer of having "descen(ded) into liberal nihilism".[13] Other recent targets of Auster's criticism have included Robert Spencer, Taki Theodoracopulos, founder of Taki's Magazine, and Richard Spencer and Paul Gottfried of Alternative Right.[14]