Is Santorum 'palling around' with white nationalists?

An activist who critics call a "white nationalist" claims to have had dinner with Rick Santorum as part of the festivities surrounding the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference, according to Talking Points Memo.

Bob Vandervoort is director of ProEnglish, an advocacy group that hopes to outlaw U.S. classes or legislative sessions in any language other than English. It is his connection to a group called Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance, however, that liberal critics claim marks out Vandervoort as a dangerous right wing radical.

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights calls the Chicago group a white supremacist organization. The IREHR alleges that Vandervoort was "at the center of much of the white nationalist activity" in Illinois in the years he lived there.

Vandervoort, who boasted in his Twitter feed on Friday night that he was dining with former Pennsylvania Senator Santorum, denies that he has ever been involved with "any group that promotes hate or violence." He claims that the notion that he is a white nationalist is a "distortion" made up by "left-wing groups."

Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance describes itself as a "racial realist" group. TPM reports that the site is currently promoting a book on "racial genealogy" that says, "orientals fall at one end of the spectrum, blacks at the other end, and whites in between."

The Santorum campaign, for its part, played down the meeting between the Senator and Vandervoort, claiming that the ProEnglish director was merely one of several attendees at the Friday event, which took place at the same hotel as CPAC.

(image by Patrick Gensel via Flickr Commons)