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Above, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow and Joseph R. Cotto of the San Francisco Review Of Books talk about the Two Minutes Hate following the revelation that Brimelow attended Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow's 71st birthday party and the Reign of Terror of which it is part. This follows the firing of Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie for speaking at a conference at which Brimelow also spoke. There's a lot about this in the MSM.
Editor Brimelow just replied to Newsweek:
'When asked if he expects his friendship with Kudlow to continue, Brimelow told Newsweek: "Sure, I expect to resume seeing Larry in 2025, unless he takes a post with the [Kris] Kobach administration."' Glad I got that line in! https://t.co/qH3EYD3aPn
Text below is adapted from that interview:
Cotto: When news broke that Larry Kudlow had invited you to his birthday party the reaction from him was pretty swift.
I think he said that he had no idea about your views, he only knew you pretty much as a financial journalist. Did you find his answer to be honest, serious, or however you should like to call it?
Peter Brimelow: Well, look, Joseph, I’ve known Larry for very nearly 40 years. As a matter of fact, he offered me a job when he went into the White House after Reagan was elected. That would have been probably very early 1981, maybe very late 1980. He's been he's been very kind to me personally. He knew my first wife, who died, and he met my second wife, Lydia, and started to invite us to these big summer dinners that he has down in southern Connecticut. He's been very sweet to us and I don't want to get him into [more!] trouble.
I mean, after John O’Sullivan and I were purged from National Review, a lot of people simply stopped talking to us—because they're cowards and swine. Larry didn't do that.
Of course, he was at National Review when I wrote my cover story on immigration in 1992, which subsequently grew into Alien Nation. He never liked it. We just agreed to disagree.
I think Larry handled it wrong tactically—he should just have said what I said: that we were friends for 40 years and we agreed to disagree on immigration. But he was obviously rattled. I feel sorry for him.
And I feel sorry for us. Because what it shows us is that Conservativism Inc still simply cannot handle race-oriented attacks. They just go pieces immediately. And until that's resolved, we're just not going get anywhere.
For example, in the room, there were like 50-60 people, and one was the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Connecticut, Bob Stefanowski, who had just won the primary—we didn't vote for him because we thought his opponent sounded better on immigration. He was immediately jumped on by the local press who said “were you in this room with this white nationalist?” What he said was: “I didn’t know anything about it, I disavow, I disavow, I disavow”! [ Bob Stefanowski Says He Didn't Know White Nationalist Promoter Was At Larry Kudlow Party, By Neil Vigdor, Hartford Courant, August 22, 2018]. What he could have said was: I don't know anything about it, I’ll find out. But what he should have said was: he's a friend of Larry's, this is a personal dinner, a birthday party, I’m simply not going to extend the totalitarian reach of Political Correctness into birthday parties.
Of course what he ultimately ought to have said was: Brimelow is right on immigration because he's supporting Trump's line, Trump is right on immigration, Connecticut should not be a Sanctuary State, we're going fight on this question, and that's what's we’re going to make the gubernatorial race about. But as a Conservative Incer, he's simply too stupid to do that. And that's why he’s going to lose.
Joseph Cotto: Do you think that the media was going after you and using Kudlow as a means to do that?
PB: Oh, it’s nothing to do with me. I'm completely irrelevant. The only reason this has become important—and I should say we've been going to these Kudlow summer dinner parties for 10, 11 years—is simply and solely as a way of hurting Trump.
And it's also a way of trying to demonize the idea that immigration policy is not set in stone, it could be reformed, immigration could be reduced. The Ruling Class does not want that to happen. They want immigration to continue at these massive levels in order to Elect A New People.
JC: How do you think the Trump Administration should have dealt with this?
PB: You’re talking specifically now about the firing of the speechwriter Darren Beattie, who was a tenure-track academic at Duke and resigned that post to join the White House. They did treat him very, very badly. The only reason he was fired was that he showed up at Paul Gottfried’s H.L. Mencken Club in 2016—before the election— and gave an entirely unexceptionable speech (but then it was an entirely unexceptionable conference) and Main Stream Media just ramped one of these Two Minute Hates about it. Of course, the White House was stupid to fire him, and they paid for it with this subsequent week of publicity where Larry Kudlow was attacked. You know this guy Robert Costa of the Washington Post actually put out a tweet saying, okay, if Brimelow is the bright line who else has talked to Brimelow?
And who else, if anyone, in the Trump administration has associated with Peter Brimelow in last 2 years? If a 2016 panel with Brimelow is a bridge too far for this speechwriter, Beattie, then it's worth asking if Brimelow has had meetings or chats w/ others in the admin.
— Robert Costa (@costareports) August 19, 2018
I mean, I’m 70 years old, I know vast numbers of these people, I’ve been in financial journalism for more than 40 years. So, of course, there’s all kinds of people they could out as having once had coffee with me or something. The White House should simply have cut it off at the pass by saying: “What Darren Beattie did was unexceptionable—bugger off!”
Excuse me, I'm not supposed to swear on this podcast! And that’s English swearing, it’s not even American swearing!
But they didn't do that because they have no courage. And that's entirely typical of these RINOs and Conservative Incers who infest the Trump White House.
I don’t believe the President knew anything about it because the President does not believe in retreating. If confronted with this, he would have fought. But I'm sure he knew nothing about it.
JC: That's my perspective as well. I just can't imagine that the president has enough time to even be aware of something like this.
PB: He could have been. Lyndon Johnson would have been. But that's not how he operates. I’m extremely sorry for Beattie because, as I say, he not only sacrificed a tenure-track position, but he's never going get back into the academic world because of the way those swine operate.
John Derbyshire keeps saying that what we're looking with American academe right now is similar to what Henry VIII looked at with the monasteries in Britain. He decided the whole damn system has to be torn to ground, the monasteries dissolved, the monks expelled, and start from scratch. That's we have to do here with these universities. We have to tear them to the ground and start from scratch. They're totally politically corrupt and they cost a huge amount of money.
That that's kind of a digression, Joseph, go ahead!
JC: Some thought the White House would let Kudlow go—
PB: This again raises the point, is the president involved? The President does know Larry Kudlow. He's known him for many years as a TV talking head. So they can’t get rid of Larry without telling the President. I can't believe he would let that happen. I think I think Larry's safe
And I’m happy about that because I like Larry personally. I don't think he handled himself very well, but, you know, in a situation like that, unless you’re really trained and unless you really know the whole race debate, which these Conservatism Incers don’t, you can easily get rattled.
JC: That POLITICO article about the Claremont email list featuring Charles Johnson’s statement—do you think that served to fan the flames?[Trump speechwriter’s ouster sparks racially charged debate | The Claremont Institute shuttered an email list after an exchange over white nationalism blew up, By Eliana Johnson, POLITICO, August 23, 2018]
PB: Yeah, we just posted a blog about this article. It's by Eliana Johnson, who turns out to be the daughter of Scott Johnson at PowerLine, greatly to both of their discredits. It's just the usual disgraceful rubbish. Charles Johnson in his comment on the Claremont list said specifically that “neither [John] Derbyshire nor Brimelow are white nationalists” and she cut that out. Similarly, she edited what I'd said. They just want to make things as inflammatory as possible. It's just part of the war. The Ruling Class, the Main Stream Media, want to establish the point that you cannot oppose the current immigration policy respectably and legitimately. Anyone who opposes immigration policy is a neo-Nazi.
You know, the president, bless him, tweeted out last night that he wanted [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo to look into the question of the South African farm expropriations and farm murders. And this is caused the most enormous hysteria in the Main Stream Media and the New York Times actually said “Mr. Trump echoed a talking point among white supremacists." [Trump’s South Africa Tweet Seems to Embrace Racist Narrative on Land Dispute, By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Norimitsu Onishi, August 23, 2018]
Now the talking point in question is: do you like white South African farmers being murdered? So this now is the new definition of white supremacy: not liking whites being murdered. So they're moving the debate along to the point where it's simply not possible to discuss immigration policy or its demographic impacts.
JC: The Charles Johnson quote was very misleadingly edited, if you read his longer statement which he uploaded to his Facebook page.
PB: This woman should be ashamed of herself. But on the other hand, she's trying to make a career in the Main Stream Media and smearing patriots is part of that.
JC: The White Nationalist/ White Supremacist label is applied in an ever-increasingly broad fashion to the point where these very specific things no longer seem to have a clear-cut meaning. Why?
PB: I think the critical issue is that the Left is desperate to prevent American whites—who of course until the 1965 Immigration Act would have been called Americans, because they were the overwhelming majority of the population—from realizing what's been done to them by immigration policy until it's too late. The Left wants to Elect A New People—they want to bring in Hispanics and Asians and African blacks and so on with the intention of outvoting the Historic American Nation. And they’re desperate that whites not realize that this is going on until it's too late. And so they demonize any signs of even implicit white consciousness, by calling it White Nationalist and White Supremacist and of course they elide the two, they treat the two as if they're the same.
Trump's victory in this election was quite clearly an implicit white vote, in the sense that whites gravitated to Trump without him actually saying very much to attract them. He was just visibly not a Democrat and not a not a multiculturalist and that was enough.
And that's driven the Left absolutely crazy, because they know that their current plan to take over America by Electing A New People could be frustrated very simply through legislative action, or even executive action.
JC: As the Kudlow-related media onslaught crashed down on you, how did you handle that? Was there any strategy you had ahead of time?
PB: No. I mean, for one thing, these things are completely unpredictable. But on the other hand, they're also predictable, in the sense that anytime VDARE.com surfaces in the Main Stream Media, we're going be denounced in the most hysterical terms. We just go on refuting what’s been said and not backing down. Which is what the president does. He never backs down.
JC: Your website seems to be subject to increasingly strict scrutiny by YouTube. The San Francisco Review of Books has done interviews with you before, and those interviews have just had actions taken against them. I'll read what they said:
Regarding your account: San Francisco Review of Books
We have received a legal complaint regarding your video. After review, the following video: How much will Republicans need the white vote during years to come? Peter Brimelow explains. has been blocked from view on the following YouTube country site(s):
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, United Kingdom, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Martinique, Malta, New Caledonia, Netherlands, French Polynesia, Poland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Portugal, Reunion, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, French Southern Territories, Wallis and Futuna, Mayotte
YouTube blocks content where necessary to comply with local laws. Please review our help center article on legal complaints //support.google.com/youtube/answer/3001497?hl=en.
Sincerely,
The YouTube Team
Here’s the video:
[Formerly on YouTube, now on Alt-Censored]
I certainly didn't think there was anything even vaguely objectionable about this video, it's just talking about political demographics and how they relate to partisan control. This whole thing says to me is that people are using “white nationalism” and “white supremacy” outside of what the terms traditionally have meant, they're just applying them to views they don't like, and not just as a matter of shouting them down in the public square but having legal action taken against an innocuous video
PB: It seems to me extraordinary that there would be any legal issues in Europe triggered by discussing the demographics of the American election. What possible implication could that have for Europe?
Of course, we've known about this reflex for a while. We started looking at this question of the white vote after the 2000 election. Steve Sailer wrote an article pointing out that the fashionable view that GOP had to appeal to minorities was actually wrong, that they would be much better off maximizing their white vote, which was historically low, and that that would easily swamp any conceivable gains the GOP could get from the minority vote. And that's the point at which we were cut off by whatisname who runs Free Republic. He announced at that point that that no VDARE.com links would be allowed to be posted to Free Republic because we were obviously a racist site— although we were just discussing the arithmetic of the of the electoral situation in the U.S. and Free Republic is supposed to be a right-wing site, a conservative site, a Republican site!
Of course, the real problem there, I think, is that Free Republic is actually run on Republican money. And the Republican consultant class, and the Bushes and so on, simply did not want this question raised.
Well, 16 years later Trump wins precisely by appealing to the white vote. And of course it's also true that, in winning this election, he did no worse among Hispanics and blacks—in fact in some ways he did better—than Romney did, even though he spent absolutely nothing on Hispanic and black outreach.
So this seems to be some kind of a trigger point for the Political Class—just discussing the demographics of the vote, at all, is not allowed, even though the Democrats gloat about it all the time and gloat about the fact they're going to be able to win elections because they're Electing A New People.
It's very, very bad. But, Joseph, I noticed tonight that ALIPAC, Bill Gheen’s organization, has said it’s gotten Facebook to back down, so I really urge you to complain about this.
JC: Very encouraging news!
PB: I think there's a lot of erratic issues with these bannings. I think some of them are done by operatives living in India who just ban anything they don't like without any regard to what the standards of debate are in this country
JC: We did another You Tube interview about your perspective on what you call The War On Christmas, and that one got a complaint—YouTube didn't actually say the nature of the complaint—and it was banned in the same countries as the white vote video, and in Israel.
PB: I have to say I do think the Israelis are capable of handling a video discussing the War On Christmas in America without any particular distress. I don't think that it would cause them to keel over and drop dead if they heard this argument. So this is really a bizarre thing that YouTube is doing.
As you know, one of our one of our interests at VDARE.com is the attempt to drive Christmas out of the public square, which we think is closely related to immigration and the desire to remake the American population. But it's obviously absurd on its face that this is something that people shouldn't be allowed to listen to. If they don't like it then they can go away.
I saw in the New York Times this morning, Joseph, a story that Facebook is banning the Iranian and some other government, I forget which, because they've apparently started Facebook operations in the US to put to promote these governments’ point of view. Does this mean that the Voice Of America is going stop broadcasting to foreign countries? Does it mean that the BBC is going stop broadcasting overseas?
I mean, obviously governments try to put their point of view to a worldwide audience. Is this something that's wrong? They're just using Facebook to project the Iranian government's point of view? Americans are perfectly capable of handling this. And Trump said that in his tweet this morning.
And we have to assume that's the case if we're going to run democracy—unless we're going to have an elite that's deciding what people should think.
But of course that is what these people think. They want to be the ruling elite and they want to make sure that nobody has any contrary arguments
JC: There is a question of how this should be dealt with—should these social media organizations be regulated as public utilities, which is what Milo Yiannopoulos told me? I'm somewhat cool on that, because I don't like the expansion of government into the private sector. What do you think? Obviously, it's not going to be as easy as it was to disseminate heterodox ideas on immigration.
PB: Well, it was only in a brief period when we were able to do this. Prior to the advent of internet, these points of view were completely suppressed.
Basically, there are two ways of looking at economic activities like this—it’s all in The Tragedy Of The Commons. One answer is regulation and the other answer is property rights and the law of tort.
I think that the application of normal legal standards to these utilities would make a big difference. In other words, either they publish everybody, in which case they're a public forum and they're immune from libel law, or alternatively they start censoring us, in which case they’re immediately liable to libel claims because they’ve made editorial decisions. That's going be very difficult for them. I think they're going want to go back to being a public forum and not discriminating
So I think this stuff can be handled through the common law rather than through regulation. But we’ll just have to see. Obviously, there’s a real backlash against these Tech Totalitarians and they're going have to deal with it. Otherwise there will be legislation, and they're going find their position very much altered.
JC: Does VDARE.com have a contingency plan in case social media knocks you off?
PB: Well, we existed before Twitter and Facebook, and we'll go on. Jared Taylor's been knocked off Twitter and Facebook and American Renaissance is still functioning.
Of course, there are real nightmare scenarios when they'll start to get to the webhosting companies, or even the banks that handle the credit card processors. There are a number of different credit card processors but they all use the same small number of banks. I was horrified to see this morning that David Horowitz at the Freedom Center—what's he ever done?--but still a couple of the banks have cut him off from credit card processing. [They since backed down]. They’re just asking for massive legislative backlash, as long as Republicans control Congress.
God knows the Congresssional Republicans are extremely stupid and out of the loop and so on, but they are going to get the message that something has to be done, otherwise their supporters and people who advocate the same opinions that they advocate, or are supposed to advocate, are going be cut off
We reposted the other day the Forbes article I wrote about Andrea Millen Rich and Laissez Faire Books—are you old enough to remember them, Joseph? There was this bookstore in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s called Laissez Faire Books, a storefront operation that became a direct mail operation, basically getting libertarian books out to the audience. By the 90s it was a huge force, and then of course it was creatively destroyed by the rise of the internet and by Amazon.com, where it became possible for people to find books. That was the issue, you know, in the old days. If you lived in Cleveland, you could go into a bookstore try and find Human Action or any of the great libertarian classics, but you simply wouldn't find them, you'd have to order them, and you might not know about them. Well, what Andrea Rich did was she had a catalog which was like a magazine and discussed all these books and issues. People became very committed to it and she built a real business on that. We may have to go back to that—we may have to go back to direct mail
We’ve put a lot of effort into our magazine, The VDARE QUARTERLY (subscribe now!). I must say this was entirely against my better judgment, because I think dealing with treezines is a huge pain in the neck, after spending 40 years in treezine journalism. It's technically very difficult to produce a magazine. And I turned out to be completely wrong, because this may be the wave of the future
On the other hand, I have to say that when PayPal cut us off after Charlottesville, which we had absolutely nothing whatever to do with but they still cut us off, they destroyed our entire subscription list and we’ve still not built back from that. We're still working on getting back to where we were in early 2017.
So these people are swine. And, you know, they're sowing the wind and they'll reap the whirlwind—legislatively.
JC: Do you have any thoughts about what the Kudlow situation says about where the country is—about the present as well as the future?
PB: One, the Reign of Terror is getting ever more intense. And it's fundamentally focused on immigration issue. The Left is desperate that immigration not become a political issue. Their intention is to Elect A New People, they were right on the verge of doing that, and they want to prevent America from waking up and stopping it
Two, Conservatism Inc., among which I have to include my very dear friend Larry, is still completely out to lunch. They're incapable of defending themselves against attacks about “racism” and so on. And that’s a very bad thing after 2016. The President showed the thing to do is not back down. But he's unique. Very few people won't back down
Three, at least these issues are being discussed now. For most the time we’ve been doing VDARE.com, from 1999 onwards, it was really very much just whispered about in the catacombs. Conservatism Inc. was proceeding along talking about marginal tax rates and capital gains taxes and all this nonsense and just hoping for the best in elections. Because of the president, and also I think because the immigration issue is getting more acute, it can't be ignored anymore
I wish I wish I could say the same for Libertarianism Inc. As you know, Joseph, I was kind of a fellow traveller for libertarianism for a long time and the greatest disappointment I had when I wrote my book on immigration in 1995, Alien Nation, was that the libertarians were so bone-headed. They just simply wouldn't listen to reason about what the effects of immigration are on the prospects for a libertarian society. There are some who do, for example Hans-Herman Hoppe. But generally, they're not gotten the message.
And they're going have to if libertarianism and free societies are going to survive. It requires at least a stable, and probably a culturally specific ethnic base for a libertarian society to function.
JC: That was a very important discussion, Thank you!
