LAST
TAX-DEDUCTIBLE GIVING DAY IN 2009! It’s New Year’s Eve—last chance in fiscal 2009 to help VDARE.COM through its 11th year!
Peter debating immigration with the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Jacob G. Hornberger at the Heartland Institute’s 24th Anniversary Dinner, Chicago
By Peter Brimelow,
Editor, VDARE.COM
There are now two (2)
ONE
tax-deductible giving days left in 2009. It’s an
intensely worrying time for us at VDARE.COM. We are a free site
and depend absolutely on support from you, our readers.
And the great bulk of our online donations come between
Thanksgiving and New Year. We have
big bills due in January—particularly for our long-awaited
redesign, which so many of you have been urging us to get on
with! (VDARE.COM just had its tenth birthday, an age in terms if
the internet).
Right now, we must have more help in
order to meet those bills.
I want to thank VDARE.COM readers who have already rallied to
our year-end appeal. It’s extremely heartening to see old
friends, and new friends, supporting us so loyally.
We need your affirmation and kind words. They make a huge
difference to us.
But it’s not enough. Please help us now, before the
fiscal year ends.
We need help from all of you—especially those of you who have
capital gains in 2009 and are in a position to shelter them by
giving larger sums. (See details in red text below). I hate doing it,
but I have to close VDARE.COM tonight. Nothing else seems to
work. What would life be
like if I had to closer VDARE.COM permanently?
Below, I will explain why I am particularly worried about
immigration politics in 2009.
But first, my theory of what’s happening in the immigration
debate: the American nation is reformulating itself, abandoning
corrupt and degenerate institutions that have betrayed it, and
developing new ones.
Every new reader that VDARE.COM gets—every time readers use our
email-a-friend feature to introduce our articles to other
like-minded Americans—every time a readers mentions our work on
a Main Stream Media comment thread—above all every time somebody
donates (tax-deductibly!) to the VDARE Foundation—the patriotic
immigration reform network, the fabric of the American nation,
strengthens and deepens.
2009 has been a very difficult year in the economy. I
particularly want to commiserate with the increasingly
significant number of VDARE.COM donors who have written to say
they have lost their jobs, due to outsourcing, immigration and
what we at VDARE.COM have identified (you won’t get this in the
Establishment Media) as the “Diversity Recession”—driven
by the “Minority Mortgage Meltdown”.
Our fight is truly your fight. That’s why we have been
campaigning for an immigration moratorium to counter the
unemployment crisis, an obvious answer something none of the
Washington elite’s showy
“jobs summits” mentioned—as
we loudly pointed out.
I didn’t want to be running a foundation, or even editing. I’d
rather write.
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 are too cowardly
to 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.
Of course, we don’t get any credit for this—as some of you are
kind enough to note, beginning when the immigration issue was
getting nation-wide publicity because of President Bush’s
illegal alien amnesty drive in 2006 and 2007. (He didn’t get
it!—because the patriotic immigration reform movement is now
highly organized, thanks in good measure to VDARE.COM’s
leadership role.)
But I don’t think we should care about credit. 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, now underway,
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, we began to observe a different pattern. As our blogger
Patrick Cleburne showed, the Mainstream Media has suddenly began
to parrot with eerie unanimity the line that there was no
War Against Christmas (according to one count, there were 106
major newspaper articles denying the War Against Christmas
articles and only 18 acknowledging it). At the same time, the
MSM began quite obviously simply suppressing 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 were on the run. They
are quite rightly shaken by the American backlash.
They put 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.
In 2008, the Christophobes experimented with a new tactic. They
claimed that the whole War Against Christmas backlash was
invented by a secret cabal of extremists, namely…VDARE.COM!
This idea (if that’s what it can be called) suddenly appeared in
The Daily Beast, on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC rant, in TIME
magazine.
In 2009, again with eerie unanimity, Christophobe columns
appeared announcing that the War On Christmas was now
“over”. (Just like the Wall
Street Journal announced the immigration debate was
“over” back in 1996!) The evidence: fewer mentions in the MSM—which
they themselves control!
But it is working, up to a point. Have the TV Christmas
crusaders been so vocal this year? Have they even noticed what
is going on?
But VDARE.COM has noticed. And we will keep up the pressure, and
providing the evidence, whether resistance to the War Against
Christmas is fashionable or not, whether we are ridiculed or
not, until America’s Christmas is restored.
And this is what’s going to happen with the immigration
issue—grassroots revolt will overwhelm the elites. It’s what
happened already in 2009, with the Tea Party movement and the
Town Hall turbulence.
Eventually, politicians will decide that American opinion can no
longer be ignored.
But this will only happen with your help.
Here’s what I’m particularly worried
about in 2010: This time
last year, there was widespread apprehension among patriotic
immigration reformers that the Obama Administration would ram
through an amnesty. They had the votes, didn’t they? Our Joe
Guzzardi was among the few who predicted it wasn’t going to
happen. He thought the political cost would be too high, and
that the Obamans would fear the ferocious patriotic backlash to
George W. Bush’s amnesty efforts. Joe still
thinks that. And his views are now more widely shared. But my
antennae are twanging, for four reasons:
Let me
finish on a really disturbing note. During this Christmas
fundraising appeal, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in readers
giving or asking how they can give anonymously. (You
send a money order,
using our PO Box as the return address).
Americans are afraid.
And I don’t blame them. This year, the Obama Administration
passed a “Hate Crimes
Bill” that will certainly be used to attack speech—opposed
by VDARE.COM, but with essentially no help from the
Establishment Right, because the bill was supported by
notoriously vicious lobbies. Anyone who
has been in college knows how intolerant the political left is
when it is in power. And it’s in power in Washington now. Give to
VDARE.COM—while you can! Please help us now. I, and all of us
at VDARE.COM, and I believe future generations of Americans,
will be profoundly grateful.
Peter Brimelow
NOTE: VDARE.COM is no longer associated with the Center For American Unity, which plans to focus on litigation. We are grateful for their past help and wish them well in future. Our sponsor is now the VDARE Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.
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