LYDIA BRIMELOW: Many thanks to Tucker Carlson!
Mass immigration is completely destroying our country. Why is no one doing anything about it? Because they’re afraid of ending up like Lydia Brimelow. pic.twitter.com/B5B0bh6t5O
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 20, 2024
Transcript
Tucker [00:00:00] Illegal immigration into the United States is at its highest levels ever. Tens of millions of people have come here illegally over the past 15 years, and none of them will ever leave. Mostly they come from the poorest countries on the planet. We don't know anything about them, really. We don't know if they're pro-America. We don't know if they're hostile to the people who already live here. We don't know, in the case of the recent arrivals, what they're going to do for a living as robotics eliminate low skilled jobs. So what's happening right now at the border that what's often mentioned on TV is really undersold as a story. This is changing America forever, and almost certainly for the worse as we're watching it. And no one is doing anything about it.
The governor of Texas occasionally makes noises about it—it's over his border that this human wave is flowing, and yet he's taken no real steps to stop it. There are some media outlets that let you know that it's happening in general terms, but they don't seem particularly outraged by it. We're sitting here as our country is destroyed and no one's responding, and at some point you have to ask why? Are the majority of Americans in favor of this? Of course not. In fact, no one's in favor of this. No one will defend this in public. No one will explain why we need it. Why it's a good idea. How it's going to help this country. How your grandchildren will live in a better place because of it. People are just silent, like it's not even happening. And again, you have to ask why. And the answer, of course, is really simple because they're afraid, they know they'll be punished if they say anything about it.
The story of Peter and Lydia Brimelow explains why they're afraid. Peter Brimelow has been a journalist for 50 years. Worked at a whole bunch of what are now called mainstream publications. Was an editor—Barron's, Forbes, National Review, Dow Jones, a legitimate old school journalist. And in the late 90s, he began to ask questions about our immigration scheme. Is this really good idea, is it helping America? And of course, no one could answer those questions because the answer is obvious. No, it's destroying America; as it destroyed California, so it will destroy your state. That's certain. But for asking that question, he was fired from his jobs and shunted off into what we call the fringes. But he didn't stop. He started a website called VDARE. He runs it now with his wife, Lydia.
And for the crime in the supposedly free country of opposing the immigration system currently in place—not the official system, but the actual system—where anyone from the poorest parts of America [sic] with no skills whatsoever can come here and immediately go on welfare. That's our current system. For saying that that's a bad idea, powerful forces have just tried, to destroy their lives, not just their lives, the lives of their family, using the justice system to do it. And needless to say, you probably guessed, using something called the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is nothing to [do with] the South or poverty. It has to do with shutting down free speech in this country. They have descended on the Brimelows and have really kind of tried to destroy them. That's not an overstatement, but you judge for yourself because Lydia Brimelow, who helps run VDARE, joins us now to explain what's happened to her. Lydia, thanks so much for coming on.
Lydia Brimelow [00:03:13] Thank you so much, Tucker. It'll be very nice to have our story told.
Tucker [00:03:18] So I have known your husband, sort of, since he was not a controversial figure at all. And he became a controversial figure when he began to say things like, hey, why are we doing this? And he was immediately called a white nationalist, a white supremacist. And I remember very well his response, which is, no, I'm not. And if I was, I'd say so. But that kept up and he wound up publishing with you, VDARE online. That would seem not a particularly controversial thing to do in a free country. But for your family, it's been, a very risky thing to do. So I hope that you would explain to us what the government, we'll start with the government, is trying to do to you for daring to oppose the immigration system.
Lydia Brimelow [00:04:03] Yeah, absolutely. So it's hard to believe everybody who hears the story says it's completely incredible. Peter founded VDARE Foundation, which has [as] its main project VDARE.com, back in the late 90s. As you said, we're in our 25th year now, and I joined about ten years ago. I do the fundraising and the back office work, and he handles everything that goes up on the website VDARE.com. We're a nonprofit journalism enterprise. So everything that we do, all of our people are paid through generous donations from individuals. I can tell you we don't get any government grants or big foundation grants either. It's all just grassroots. And we're veterans of cancel culture at this point. So we've been kicked off a lot of mainstream services that most people use to distribute the media that they produce. And that is nothing compared to what we're facing right now, which started about two years ago, originating out of the hate crimes division in the state of New York. A series of subpoenas were issued by Letitia James first, to Facebook, which I can explain a little bit in a minute. And then to us and our board members, at VDARE Foundation, with no clear trigger, they have refused to tell us what they're investigating. It's been two years of us just being crushed under this burden of investigation. The subpoenas were, like, 47 points each.
They want us to turn over essentially every document that we have interacted with, since 2016. And for a small organization, you know, at our peak, we had four full time employees. Right now we have two. That's Peter and myself. This has just been an absolutely crushing burden. And I will say the Facebook subpoena was interesting because we had actually been kicked off of Facebook, years previous. So we had not even been on Facebook to interact with Facebook in many years, and they were asking for all of the data that VDARE had ever accumulated, created, while we were on Facebook, which we had incidentally, also requested. VDARE was kicked off of Facebook the same day that every one of the people involved in our organization was kicked off, including myself. I had never posted anything political online, at all, but they took all my baby pictures. The video of my daughter's first steps, which was not saved anywhere else. Facebook still has that. They have, in fact, told my lawyers that we are too dangerous to get our data back, including my daughter taking her first steps. So that was the first subpoena that Letitia James's hate crimes division issues.
Tucker [00:06:43] May I ask you to pause for one moment and just clarify something. So Facebook is calling you too dangerous to possess your own baby pictures? Has VDARE ever committed violence? Is there something we're missing? Terrorism? Insurrection. Killing people?
Lydia Brimelow [00:06:59] Never.
Tucker [00:07:00] Okay, okay. Sorry. I just want to clarify that.
Lydia Brimelow [00:06:59] We've never even been accused of doing that, right? I mean, people use these scare smear words all the time, white nationalists, white supremacists, racist, xenophobe, whatever the flavor of the day is.
So we get accused of being those things all the time, which we would argue we are not. But violence is something we have never been associated with. We're even careful to talk about the national divorce because of what implications that might have. I mean, we're living in a very high-tension environment right now politically. And I think it's important that people choose their words very carefully and choose their actions very carefully. I think it's entirely justified that a large portion of the American population feels drawn to activism right now, but it needs to be chosen very carefully. And once you destroy something, you can't take it back. And our enemies should remember that too. Once they destroy us, what are they going to do then?
But to go back to the subpoenas, we have our mainstream, you know, when I say mainstream, what I mean is like in normal times when VDARE is just surviving cancel culture and putting out this message that demography is destiny and that America is legitimate and real, that we're a true culture and we have a national identity that's worth defending, and that immigration has massive negative effects that nobody's talking about.
Our operation is about $800,000 a year. In the last 12 months, about, we've had to spend half a million dollars just complying with the subpoenas...
(FULL 37 MINUTE VERSION AVAILABLE AT https://tuckercarlson.com/uncensored-lydia-brimelow/]
