"...The Indispensable Website, VDARE.COM..." - Patrick J. Buchanan

VDARE.COM Needs Your Christmas Gift—NOW!

By Peter Brimelow

(more obvious signs of decay airbrushed out)

We started our last appeal on “Black Friday”, which apparently is what retailers now call the big shopping day immediately after Thanksgiving.

A few days later, a kind reader wrote:

“I love your website.  VDARE.COM is in my top three for sources of information... I recently donated $400 to VDARE (I made the donation even before you started asking your readers to contribute).  Your website is so important that I'm almost afraid to ask how the fundraising is going.... but, how's it going?”

Frankly, I found it difficult to answer.

But before I tell you what I had to tell him, let me pause to say: all of us at VDARE.COM are profoundly grateful to our donors—especially to those of you, like my correspondent, who give without being asked.

And above all we are grateful to those of you who have chosen to give monthly, using the feature we set up last year.  (Click here for details.)

Even small amounts add up. It’s the sort of affirmation that keeps writers writing. And the slowly-gathering flow of dependable income is becoming critical to our planning.

So thank you, from the bottom of our hearts. You know who you are!

Now my answer.

There is simply no nice way to say this.

Our Christmas Appeal is going much more slowly than we hoped.

It happens. People are distracted at this time of year. And there are so many worthy causes.

We saw the same pattern in 2006. And, eventually, readers rallied round—including some last-minute large donors, bless them.

But it’s a serious problem. The great bulk of our online donations come in the last month of the year. (That’s partly for a good reason: until December 31, it’s the season for giving stock to avoid capital gains tax legally—see below).

I hate asking for money.

(My advisors say I’m not supposed to say this. But it’s true.)

I don’t really even like running a webzine. I’d prefer to write. I occasionally look wistfully at my half-finished proposal for a sequel to my 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. Heck, I’d even settle for writing the occasional column!

But I created VDARE.COM—we put out our first mass email on Christmas Eve 1999—to meet an imperative need. There was at that time simply nowhere else to publish facts and analysis exposing this American disaster.

We’ve come a long way since then. We’ve even shamed some of the Establishment media into covering immigration, albeit in a half-hearted way.

We’ve seen stories we’ve broken appear on Mainstream Media outlets like Fox, CNN, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, plus of course nominally “conservative” journals like National Review and City Journal.

And the movement for patriotic immigration reform has come a long way too. It has now developed a number of different institutions, often internet-based, that focus on different but mutually supporting areas—litigation, lobbying, scholarship, education, border security etc. At VDARE.COM we support them all and link to them all when legally possible for a charity (even when they won’t link back to us!). Our object is to be a forum, and an honest broker, for the patriotic immigration reform movement.

Only a perennial shortage of resources prevents us from doing this on a larger scale.

I believe that VDARE.COM plays a particularly vital role even among all these patriotic immigration reform groups. We operate at the high end of the intellectual food chain. Our articles are carefully researched and written. They break news and introduce new concepts. They are of the highest professional quality and could appear anywhere in the Mainstream Media—except for the epidemic curse of Political Correctness.

And except for epidemic media cowardice.

We exist to take risks and push the envelope in a way that most professional (i.e. housetrained) journalists and columnists will not.

Our theory is that, when an idea has been sufficiently ventilated and tested, it will filter down to the more cautious, to the less imaginative and to the mass-media popularizers.

We see this happening all the time.

For example, our Letters Editor, Joe Guzzardi, keeps a list of how many times an issue broached on VDARE.COM appears within a few days on a popular TV show whose host, more power to him, has decided to break the MSM taboo and cover the immigration issue. When I last asked Joe, he’d counted more than a score of such instances.

Of course, we don’t get any credit for this—as some of you were kind enough to note when the immigration issue was getting nation-wide publicity because of President Bush’s illegal alien amnesty drive in the summer of 2007. (He didn’t get it!—because the patriotic immigration reform movement is now highly organized, thanks in some part to VDARE.COM’s leadership role.)

But I don’t think we should care about credit. (Which is why I don’t ask Joe about his list very often!) Our purpose is to change the debate—and to keep the pressure on until it become easier for politicians to be with us rather than against us.

Our annual War Against Christmas competition, about to start, tells the whole story in a nutshell.

As I relate every year, the War Against Christmas (in the form of a leaked memo from the Clinton Administration’s HUD) was almost the first thing that VDARE.COM covered when it went live in 1999. Our annual competitions now provide the best compendium of anti-Christmas atrocities on the web.

It’s fun, but it’s also serious: the people who want to abolish Christmas also want to abolish America.

In 2005, the War Against Christmas went mainstream. Several organizations, and famous television personalities, took up the cause. It was great! And it definitely got the Christophobes worried.

In 2006, however, we observed a different pattern. As our blogger Patrick Cleburne showed, the Mainstream Media suddenly began to parrot with eerie unanimity the line that there was no War Against Christmas. According to one count this time last year, there were 106 major newspaper articles denying the War Against Christmas articles and only 18 acknowledging it—a five to one ratio of War Against Christmas denial.

At the same time, the Mainstream Media was quite obviously simply suppressing news of new anti-Christmas atrocities. For example, the peculiar episode where a California high school choir was ordered to stop singing carols at a Christmas show for fear of offending Olympic figure skater Sasha Cohen (who said she wasn’t offended) took days to make it into the national media, and then only in a minor way.

This is what I mean by changing the debate—and keeping on changing it. Obviously, the Christophobes are on the run. They are, quite rightly, shaken by the American backlash when anti-Christmas atrocities do get national attention—as in 2006, for example, when Christmas trees were removed from Seattle airport, which through the miracle of the internet, VDARE.COM was able to report within a couple of hours. They are putting out a smokescreen of War Against Christmas denial to cover their withdrawal while attempting to salvage their cultural power by ridiculing those who dare draw attention to it.

And it works.

Will the TV Christmas crusaders be so vocal this year? Have they even noticed what is going on?

But VDARE.COM has noticed. And we will keep up the pressure, whether resistance to the War Against Christmas is fashionable or not, whether we are ridiculed or not, until America’s Christmas is restored.

I keep a file of Christmas atrocities that readers send as the season approaches. Here are a few: