Former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, one of the country’s highest profile advocate for immigration reform – he ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2008 on the platform – said Sunday it’s the political left that has stoked the flames of “victim groups” for decades to win their support at the ballot box.

“It always causes unrest and resentment that no one, certainly not I, want[s],” he told Colorado Politics. “There is no willingness to minimize the danger of this kind of activity or rationalize it.

“It’s not good. It’s bad under any circumstance.”

Tancredo sponsored unsuccessful bills in Congress to get rid of the black and Hispanic caucuses, because, he said Sunday, it’s time to stop dividing up Americans based on race and mixing that with politics.

He is listed as a speaker at a Colorado Springs conference of the immigration reform group VDARE in  next April. Tancredo said he expected to be a guest, not a speaker, at the event.

In an announcement about the conference, VDARE said that its “experts have spent the last 20 years offending the mainstream by championing patriotic immigration, striving for a renewed American identity and challenging oppressive Cultural Marxism. What will they prophesy next?”

Tancredo told Colorado Politics VDARE isn’t a white supremacist organization, despite efforts by organizations such Media Matters and the Southern Poverty Law Center to characterize it that way.

“They’re wrong,” he said. “They’re absolutely wrong.”

VDARE took a side of its website Sunday:

“In Charlottesville, Virginia, the police department openly attacked a demonstration in defense of European-American heritage. They did these (sic) despite the Unite The Right rally having secured a permit (after legal action) and having every right to host its peaceful demonstration in defense of the Robert E. Lee statue.”

VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow did not return a message from Colorado Politics Sunday.

In a Saturday night blog post, VDARE blamed Antifa, an anti-fascist group reviled by Trump supporters, for the problems in Charlottesville:

“But it’s not Unite The Right that is “dividing” America. Whites who aren’t comfortable with being dispossessed in every single Western country, or with seeing the symbols of their heritage wiped out, gathered to protest peacefully.

And simply by speaking out against these perverse policies, they are accused of “division.” And for their trouble, they were attacked by an alliance of both law enforcement and Antifa.

Why should Unite The Right apologize for anything? Indeed, how can the “Far Right” be regarded as anything other than an incredibly moderate protest movement against a deliberate campaign of genocide?

Tancredo doesn’t expect the VDARE conference at Cheyenne Mountain Resort next spring to attract either white supremacists or protesters.

“I’m sure something could happen, but how can you say for certain it won’t?” Tracredo said.

Colorado Politics writer Ernest Luning contributed to this story.