Pearce apologizes for e-mailing white separatist article
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 10, 2006 01:35 PM Amanda J. Crawford

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1010pearce-ON.html

A week after Rep. Russell Pearce drew fire for immigration remarks many called racially insensitive, the Mesa Republican sent an e-mail to supporters in which he copied an article from a white separatist group and a link to that group's Web site.

Pearce says he immediately sent two apologies to supporters after sending out the e-mail, claiming that he did not know what the group was and had not read the entire article before copying it into his e-mail.

"My heart is really hurt to think something like that would go out under my name," Pearce told The Republic today. "I was very embarrassed I didn't have better diligence and read the whole article."

The article from the National Alliance's Web site was pasted on the bottom of an e-mail Pearce sent to supporters slamming The Arizona Republic for its articles about his comments on the radio last month about a 1950s federal deportation program called "Operation Wetback."

Titled "Who Rules America? The Alien Grip on Our News and Entertainment Media Must Be Broken," the article criticized the media for promoting multiculturalism and racial equality, for portraying "any racially conscious White Person" as a bigot and for presenting the Jewish Holocaust as fact.

The media presents a "single view of the world - a world in which every voice proclaims the equality of the races, the inerrant nature of the Jewish 'Holocaust' tale, the wickedness of attempting to halt the flood of non-White aliens pouring across our borders, the danger of permitting citizens to keep and bear arms, the moral equivalence of all sexual orientations, and the desirability of a 'pluralistic,' cosmopolitan society rather than a homogeneous, White one," the article says.

Pearce said he sent the e-mail and the article to a few dozen supporters in his Mesa legislative district. The subject line of the e-mail implored supporters to put out yard signs and get people they know out to vote.

He insists that he does not agree with the sentiments in the article, but that the title and the first paragraphs about media bias appealed to him. He said the article had been forwarded to him by someone else and he would not have sent it if he had read it in its entirety.

"It was one of those quick reactions and you wish you could dive in there and get it back," he said of the e-mail.

In his apology to supporters, he implores them to delete the original e-mail and not to forward it to anyone else.

"Ugly the words contained in it really are," he wrote in one of his apologies. "They are not mine and I disavow them completely. Worse still, the website links to a group whose politics are the ugliest imaginable. I am saddened and embarrassed that this went out with my name on it and I am also saddened at the loss of the friend who sent this to me. His heart is dark and I am unable to get him to see that what drives him is ugly and evil at its core."