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PETER BRIMELOW: Why We’ve Suspended VDARE and I’ve Resigned After 25 Years pic.twitter.com/tnWSz3L0xs
— VDARE (@vdare) July 23, 2024
Someone I know recently lost his daughter. She was exactly the same age as my son Alexander, and in fact we have pictures of them together as babies.
Needless to say, losing VDARE.com is absolutely nothing compared to that.
But it still hurts.
Very soon, the VDARE.com website will be suspended. We are currently unsure for how long the archives will remain accessible, or even if they will be accessible at all.
(We do think that our social media, however, will still function.)
So my role here has been destroyed. After 25 years, I am resigning as Editor of VDARE.com and from the VDARE.com Foundation board.
My wife Lydia will continue for now as President of the VDARE Foundation, handling the administrative details of winding down—and, of course, paying lawyers.
One bright spot: The Berkeley Springs Castle, which is where we’re filming this, is owned by a separate foundation that is based in West Virginia. It will continue to host Dissident conferences as well as normie events like weddings and so on—if any of you want to get married and battle the Great Replacement.
VDARE.com was a highly successful operation—particularly after Lydia solved the problem of us getting our conferences cancelled by buying the Castle.
But it has been murdered by New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
It’s important to note that she’s not charged us with anything. But under James, New York State has become what liberal law professor Jonathan Turley has described as “The Land The Law Forgot.”
She has waged unprecedented, unethical, and unscrupulous lawfare against, for example, the National Rifle Association and, most notoriously, against President Donald J. Trump.
And, much lower down the food chain, against the VDARE Foundation.
We have been registered, alas, in New York State since 1999, before anyone had ever heard of lawfare. Or of Letitia James.
To repeat: James has not charged us with anything. She has simply battered us to death by a massive and intrusive “investigation” that bears no rational relationship to any conceivable offense. We estimate we’ve spent upwards of a million dollars on compliance, let alone hundreds of hours of work. All of these resources should have gone to our mission: advancing the cause of Patriotic Immigration Reform.
Letitia James is quite obviously aiming at suppressing our speech. But the New York State courts have completely declined to protect our First Amendment rights.
We can’t go on.
But there are three other interlocking issues that are also forcing us to suspend.
The first one is the extraordinary wave of Cancellation that we’ve experienced increasingly over the last several years.
It extends even to personal matters, for example our long-time personal financial advisor, who’s been with us 15 or 16 years, was forced to drop us recently.
Americans generally don’t understand what is actually going on here—how this de facto “Social Credit“ system, like the one the Chinese Communists have, is being used to suppress patriots.
Lydia’s going to post a very long discussion of our experience shortly, which is frankly I think a historic document, because nobody’s reporting this stuff.
If we had time and resources, we could continue to face down this Cancellation, even though it’s getting increasingly difficult.
But we don’t have the time. And we don’t have the money.
The second interlocking problem I mentioned is somewhat similar, and that’s our abrupt inability to accept online payments.
It hit us in the middle of our Year-End appeal in December, which is when we raise most of our money.
Now, in the past, when we’ve had credit card payment systems go down on us, we assume, for example with PayPal, that it’s the credit card processor that’s to blame.
But subsequently this year we’ve been working with GabPay, whom we know would not do that to us.
It turns out that the problem is the banks.
Even when the payment processor wants to work with us, the banks won’t.
And, in fact, we don’t even think it is the banks in the end.
We think it’s the federal regulators.
Federal regulators are bringing pressure on banks to suppress unwelcome speech, just as they’re bringing pressure on them to stop gun sales and so on.
Again, this is something that’s going to require legislation—to suppress this Viewpoint Discrimination and to allow freedom of speech to return to America.
So I urge President Trump and Vice President Vance to get onto this.
End Viewpoint Discrimination with federal legislation.
And the third interlocking problem is the weirdest of all: VDARE.com has been subject to extraordinary cyberattacks.
We can’t figure out where they’re coming from, but they’re extremely agile.
They were the things that knocked out our ability to accept e-checks.
Our techies are baffled. They say there’s obviously somebody behind it, there’s a human intelligence behind it, probably using AI.
But nevertheless, somebody’s working away on this.
Of course, in a sane world, we would go and complain to the FBI.
But they’re probably doing it!
Obviously, we don’t want to get involved with the FBI at all.
SO WHAT NOW?
There is still litigation in federal court, although the federal court has up to now dodged our First Amendment issue on technical grounds.
Quite how we got involved with litigation in federal court and state court simultaneously is a long and extremely depressing story.
But here we are.
Otherwise, we’re just waiting for Letitia James.
We’ve handed over all these documents she says she wants, at enormous expense.
What is she going to do?
We’ve done nothing wrong.
But, in New York State courts, maybe she’ll feel free to prosecute the Foundation anyway.
Maybe she’ll prosecute Lydia and myself personally anyway.
We just don’t know.
AND WHAT ABOUT ME?
Well, of course, I’m deeply sad.
And not really for me. The end of VDARE.com is like the collapse of a small civilization.
There’s a surprising number of people who have been working with me for a long time, in some cases 20 years, who are dependent on VDARE.com, who are never going to find work in the Main Stream Media.
I feel very bad for them.
And I feel, in some ways, even worse about this new generation of young immigration patriots that has suddenly sprung up. I was hoping to integrate them into the operation and ultimately to hand over to them a functioning and well-funded organization.
I guess that’s not going to happen now.
The irony is that the issue of immigration patriotism has never been hotter.
Opinion polls are out of control in favor of immigration restriction.
In fact, even mass deportation, which the Political Class absolutely doesn’t want to think about, is very popular among ordinary grassroots Americans.
I’d like to think that VDARE.com has played a part in that development.
But of course, I’d much rather continue to participate in urging it forward.
And personally—well, I’m looking at a very large VDARE.com-shaped hole.
I’ve worked on VDARE.com essentially every day for 25 years.
That’s a third of my life.
I don’t know what I’m going to do next.
And even if I did, I’m not sure what I could say about it in the current legal environment.
But I guess I won’t have any excuse not to take my daughters on the 4-H camping trip.
So I want to thank all of you who’ve been with us for so long.
And we hope to see you on the other side.
Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format.
