By Michael Laris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 26, 2006; C05
The dress code at what participants called their European "preservation" meeting near Herndon yesterday was strict: "Gentlemen will wear jackets and ties to all conference events," organizers instructed.
There were at least two explanations for this.
"I don't want an event I sponsor to be characterized by slovenliness," said Jared Taylor, president of the Northern Virginia-based New Century Foundation. "In a society of considerable ugliness, that's one thing we can control."
But Tom Gomez, an activist who assailed the gathering as a gussied-up front for dangerous racists, said donning nice clothes is just a smarter tactic than wearing "your robes and your hoods."
"The way to play it is smooth, quiet -- the David Duke strategy," Gomez said.
And so it was that Taylor, former Ku Klux Klan leader Duke and more than 250 other attendees from across the country, all but two dozen of them men, gathered in the chandeliered Concord room at the Hyatt Dulles hotel yesterday wearing their Saturday best and listening to warnings about the dire straits of white people in the United States and around the world.
The Southern Poverty Law Center terms Taylor's organization, which produces a publication called American Renaissance, a hate group.
The Anti-Defamation League says the journal "promotes 'genteel' racism: pseudoscientific, questionably researched and argued articles that validate the genetic and moral inferiority of nonwhites."
Taylor told those gathered that a key problem in the United States is the prevalence of "anti-racists." Duke, who attended as a participant and was not a scheduled speaker, said during a break that whites are being "ethnically cleansed."
Outside the hotel, more than a dozen protesters wearing jeans, jackets and sometimes face masks held signs that read "Stop Racism" and "Change your name. You're still the KKK."
"They are attempting to be respectable and appear to be intelligent. The truth is, they are nothing but lowdown Nazis," said David Benzaquen, a demonstrator and student from the District.
The setting near Herndon was infused with meaning for those inside and outside the hotel. In the two years since the last time Taylor held his conference at that Hyatt, Herndon has become a symbol in a national debate about immigration policy. An offshoot of a national group calling itself the Minuteman Project has garnered media attention by photographing employers who pick up workers at a government-sanctioned day-laborer center in the town.
"I see nothing but hate, xenophobia and racism," said Marco Del Fuego of the Washington-based Olive Branch Community.
Conference participants said they had a range of reasons for making what was for many a long trip to Northern Virginia.
Robert Baldacci, who works in manufacturing quality control in Roanoke, said that this was the first time he had participated in such a meeting but that he had long had a nagging sense that white people should do more to protect their interests as a group. "It would be lazy if any group ignored itself," he said.
Asked if he views himself as a racist, he said: "I think it depends if you're saying racist in a negative way," adding that "in some definition of racist," his critics would "be correct, just like the Congressional Black Caucus" is racist, in his view. "I was in a lot of debates last night at the bar. I'm not as extreme as a lot of these folks," he said.
Conference participant Michael Regan, an assistant district attorney in New York's Allegany County, said U.S. policies on immigration, trade and "demographics" have put the country on the wrong path. "You can see European Christian Americans are an endangered species," he said, asserting that the accurate description of conference participants is "white preservationists" rather than "white supremacists."
Some in Herndon said they were horrified that their community had drawn such an event.
Tina Smith, an auditor at Raytheon Co., which is based nearby, went by the hotel yesterday to pick up a visitor for a day out. Instead, Smith, who is African American, said she found herself wondering about the safety of her friend, who is also African American.
"Sometimes, they cover up hate organizations by saying they are 'pro-white,' " Smith said. "Well, shoot, I'm pro-white. I'm pro-everybody, just as long as it's inclusive. It sounds like they are pro-white from an exclusive perspective."
Idalia Rivara was cleaning the men's room adjacent to the conference ballroom.
"It's no good," the hotel maid said of the conference. "The meeting for discrimination, no? I don't know how to explain it to you, but my country, El Salvador, is very good."
