Over the weekend people gathered at West Virginia’s Berkeley Springs castle to attend a conference held by VDARE — a white nationalist hate group. Speakers at the event included well-known white nationalists and antisemites such as Jared Taylor, Steve Sailer, and Kevin DeAnna. It also included former Department of Justice official John Lott.

Lott is an economist whose discredited pro-gun research made him into a right-wing media fixture. Over the years he has promoted misinformation about gun violence, altered a post on his blog to falsely accuse a critic of misquoting him, and posed online as a young woman to defend his own research.

In late 2020, Politico revealed that Lott had accepted a job as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs, a division of the Department of Justice. According to Politico, the OJP “administers about $5 billion in grants each year to states, police departments and nonprofit groups” and conducts research on crime and criminal justice.

In Jan. 2021, The Trace reported that Lott had “left the position,” citing an email sent by the Crime Prevention Research Center — a nonprofit founded by Lott.

In 2024, Lott is apparently free to rub shoulders with the likes of VDARE founder Peter Brimelow, American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor — who once wrote “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears” — and self-described “raging antisemite” Keith O’Brien (a.k.a. “Keith Woods”).

At VDARE’s Spring 2024 Conference, Lott gave a speech titled “Immigration and the Collapse of Law Enforcement in the US.”

In his speech, Lott argued against the fact that, according to FBI data, violent crime has been decreasing, and claimed that, according to his own research, “illegal immigrants” have a “high rate of crime” compared to “Americans generally.” He also blamed the “collapse” of law enforcement on several factors, including the “defunding of police departments.”

During a Q&A segment an audience member asked Lott about his work at the DOJ and his opinion of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“John, that’s interesting that you worked for the Justice Department,” they said. “I’d like to know your opinion on Merrick Garland. … It seemed there, in 2021 at least, that the policy of the Biden administration was almost like a domestic war on terror, as far as focusing on the post-January 6 people, white people, hate crimes, hate groups and all this.”

Lott said he had “no direct contact” with Garland, and was “out the door before he came in there.” And while Lott said that “nobody wants to have racial animus on any side,” such as “white supremacists or any other group,” he downplayed the far-right ideology of white supremacist terrorists.

“You know, they’ll often talk about mass public shooters and try to emphasize that those are right-wingers,” Lott said. “And I’ve written on this a number of times. The thing is, basically, what the media and what the administration has done is that when somebody’s a racist, they’ll go and classify themselves as a conservative or a right-winger, even though that’s fairly clearly not the case.”

Lott referenced the white supremacists who gunned people down at a pair of Christchurch, New Zealand mosques in 2019, an El Paso Wal-Mart in 2019, and a Buffalo supermarket in 2022. And he falsely claimed that these mass murderers were not right-wing, and adopted white supremacist beliefs because they were fanatical environmentalists.

As Lott stated:

You take the Buffalo mass murderer from two years ago. That individual hated whites — er, hated Blacks. I’m sorry. And he was a obvious racist that nobody would wanna have as a friend. But the thing is, the reason he was a racist was because he was an environmentalist. This guy was worried about people having too many children. He thought that people having more children would damage the environment. And he thought that minorities, particularly Blacks were having too many kids. And so, he thought it was his job to go and kill them that were there.

And so — but you go and you read the New York Times or other places. They’ll very frequently — the New York Times I think had like seven editorials where he was like Exhibit A for white supremacists out there. And all the time kind of referring to him as a conservative, right-wing type. The guy referred to himself as a mild-mannered, left-wing authoritarian. He described himself as a socialist.

And you see the same things with the El Paso mass murderer and other ones — Cincinnati. So I don’t know. Maybe I live in a very cloistered life and don’t really hang around with most conservatives, but I don’t think there are a lot of conservatives that I know, at least, who are upset about people having too many kids. Or too many conservatives that I know of that call themselves socialists.

Or — I’ll give you an example. You know the New Zealand mosque murderer — I actually got blocked on Twitter and other social media because I just pointed out in his manifesto, this guy’s ideal form of government was communist China. I dunno, maybe. I dunno, Peter [Brimelow] can educate me on this I’m sure, but maybe there’s a lot of conservatives who really think we oughta model our government after communist China. Again, I guess I’m just isolated.

The Buffalo shooter was a self-described “white supremacist” and “fascist,” made no mention of environmentalism in his manifesto, and was concerned not only that Black people were having too many children but that white people were having too few. And while the Christchurch and El Paso shooters mentioned that non-whites were destroying the environment and using up resources, this was not their main motivation.

What connected all three of these terrorist attacks was a belief that majority-white countries were being “invaded” by non-white people, and that this was part of a sinister plot to “replace” white people within their own countries. This white nationalist conspiracy theory is known as the “Great Replacement,” and it was championed by the very people Lott was speaking to.

VDARE has repeatedly promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, and even defended the anti-immigrant sentiments of the El Paso shooter’s manifesto.

In fact, the speaker who preceded Lott — Dan Lyman of the anti-immigrant Border Hawk News — declared that the “Great Replacement” is “real” and fantasized about mass deportations. Lyman also warned that America is “being dragged under the waves, figuratively and literally, by relentless waves of humanity that won’t stop coming until someone or something makes them stop.”