This is VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow’s speech at the 2023 VDARE Castle Conference in June.

He was introduced by Lauren Witzke, who won the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate in Delaware on an immigration moratorium platform.

The speech can be seen on Bitchute below, or listened to in MP3.

Thank you, Lauren. Even if you didn’t take my advice to run for the House in 2022!

And thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen. I’m very glad to see you here—and I’m very glad to see you here. What I mean by that is we have old friends in this audience, but there are lots of new people we’ve not met before. And that’s a wonderful thing.

And I’m glad to be here, finally, in this completed conference space. We fought, and I should say Lydia fought, for this venue because we believe it’s absolutely essential for movement to be able to meet, as they say, IRL—”in real life.“

To give you an example of that: The year after Maggy, my first wife, died, I was invited to speak at the Philadelphia Society, which is a conservative affinity group, by Midge Decter, then the chairwoman and the wife of Norman Podhoretz. the great neoconservative intellectual—ironically!

And when I started speaking, right in the front row, there was Lydia! She was there because her father was a member.

And I won’t say the rest is history—but it’s certainly a castle! And it’s three daughters, blonde, brunette and redhead. Diversity is strength!

I’m very pleased that we have speakers here who I think all of you need to meet. I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to drag Steve Sailer out of his pajamas for the first time in years!

I’m not sure if I’m introducing Steve tomorrow night, so I’ll save all my glowing comments until then. But I am most grateful that he’s here.

But the other thing is: I’m very grateful for the people in this audience. Not just Lauren Witzke, who made a real breakthrough by getting the U.S. Senate nomination running on an immigration moratorium platform. But, for example, we have here Andrew Morrison, a former Border Patrol agent who’s the author of East Into The Sunset. I believe that book is available for signing downstairs.

Anne Wilson Smith isn’t here yet, she’s driving up from the Carolinas, she runs the Reckonin’ blog and Shotwell Publishing, which is a major Dissident Right publishing operation, and she’ll have with her the podcaster Dissident Mama.

I urge you to meet with all these people and many others here, you need to know each other, because this is the basis of any movement—personal contact and personal relationships. So—mingle!

I normally start off talks at the castle by saying that the only reason we’re here is because of Lydia. She got fed up with having our immigration conferences cancelled. She found the castle. She raised the money. She did the deal. She remodeled the conference room.

And I usually finish—I’m being glared at!—by saying that this obviously means I deserve a kiss. But she says I’ve got to stop saying that. So I won’t.

I will say that I have made some High Concept contributions to the Castle. This is my role! I think of interesting things that Lydia can do in her spare time. One of them is, I really want to have a flagpole on the main tower. I want to be able to fly the Confederate Battle Flag on January 4, which was the date in 1862 when Stonewall Jackson, who was of course born in what is now West Virginia, routed the federal troops here in Berkeley Springs and drove them down Sir John’s Run Road on the other side of Warm Springs Mountain right behind us, and across the Potomac.

Of course, I will fly it under the Stars and Stripes. I know the flag code, even if Joe Biden doesn’t.

Another High Concept contribution from me: We actually own a lot of land here. We have 55 acres. It goes right over the ridge, and also goes down to the corner. And I want to extend the parking lot all the way down to the corner, with a double entry. We could probably get another 30 or 40 cars in there. Then we’d be completely self-enclosed. Our security would be total.

We had an estimate that that would cost a mere $300,000. [The good news is that I was completely wrong about this. It’s closer to $30,000. To quote Lord Randolph Churchill, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer(!): “I never could make out what those damned dots meant.” This is why Lydia runs the business side of the VDARE Foundation. If you want VDARE to have an Antifa-proof parking lot, please donate here.]

Now that happens to be what we spent to date defending ourselves against New York Attorney General Letitia James. [$300,000—unfortunately, this is true.]

I think most of you know that James has jurisdiction over the VDARE Foundation, because it was registered in New York State over 20 years ago, at a much less fraught time, and we can’t get out. She’s not actually accused us of doing anything wrong, we could refute that. The Castle purchase transaction was overseen by an army of expensive lawyers. It’s absolutely bulletproof. She’s just trying to batter us to death with investigatory subpoenas.

Now we’re in federal court on this matter right now. And if we get lucky, the federal court will not let her do this. But she will probably then sue us for something or other, she’ll make it up. Because as long as she’s got the money, she can keep raising frivolous lawsuits in the hope that she can bleed us to death. I’m sure she’s astonished that we’ve not been bled to death already.

And this goes to the first point I really want to make tonight:

What is going on here is a communist coup—very like what happened in Russia after the fall of the Tsar. And I’m afraid its driven to a considerable extent by the same people, namely secular Jews, who of course dominate the Biden Administration.

.@SecondGentleman met with Jewish White House staff in celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month.

Our Administration is proud to recognize the Jewish staffers who help carry our nation forward each day and are helping create a more inclusive tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/QxH0rIDC3e

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 16, 2023

Now, people think, well, communism, they have to believe in the Labor Theory of Value and stuff like that. But that’s not true at all. Communism predates The Communist Manifesto. And the Communist Manifesto was written before Das Kapital. Communism is much older than Marx. It goes back to the Jacobins. It’s Left Totalitarianism.

Actually, the form of communism that’s developing here, technically, is fascism, because it’s co-opting various compliant corporations. But it’s doing it in the interests of the Left. It’s anti-national, it’s anti-Identity, and it’s complete. It’s extremely serious.

What’s going on is very like, in some ways, the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe in the late 1940s. The Communists didn’t immediately get control of a lot of these Eastern European countries. They did it by degrees, they did it through by getting control of the Justice Departments and bringing all kinds of specious suits against their enemies. And they did it by using a smear—they would accuse their enemies of being involved with the Nazis. Which in some cases was actually true, depending on what the national situation was. For example, you know, Ukrainians—amazing to think now when for some reason it’s been forgotten—there were Ukrainians who co-operated with the Nazis, because they wanted to be independent of the Russians. It’s just a question of an accident of history.

These Garland Raids and this Garland Gulag that we now have, I don’t see any precedent for it in American history—keeping people in prison this long without charges. And the FBI has clearly emerged as a political police.

We have a Marxist legal system. It’s a Who-Whom system, it depends on who benefits. We have a Two-Tier justice system. You compare the treatment of the January 6 demonstrators with that of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, who actually did burn down the country in an insurrection, but hardly any of whom were arrested and who are certainly not being investigated like this.

So this is very serious. It’s impossible to exaggerate. Most normal people don’t realize how far this has gone, how it’s swept through our institutions. VDARE.com’s conference cancellation problems between 2016 and 2019—we were just really the leading edge.

One of the ways in which it’s manifesting itself: it’s very hard for Dissidents in general, and us in particular, to get professional representation. I was very pleased to see that Alan Dershowitz just recently wrote something about this, saying that the idea that lawyers won’t represent controversial people is quite new in American history [Alan Dershowitz says lawyers are telling him they won’t defend Trump because they don’t want to be ostracized or ’canceled,’, by Cheryl Teh, Business Insider, August 30, 2022]. The American legal profession used to pride itself on John Adams representing the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre and so on. That’s all gone by the board now. Because it’s no longer a liberal system, it’s a totalitarian system.

Some of you may have had trouble being invited to this conference, because VDARE.com has been progressively deplatformed from the major bulk email tools, and the ones we’re forced onto have problems. Lydia is fighting every day to get to the bottom of them. That’s the kind of thing that’s happening. It’s a communist revolution.

Now, the second point I want to make;

This is ultimately an immigration problem. There’s a famous report in Canadian history, the British were trying to figure out what to do with Quebec, Upper and Lower Canada as they called them then, the Durham Report—not the Durham Report we’ve been hearing about recently!—and Lord Durham said that he’d found in Canada two nations warring in the bosom of a single state—two ethnocultural communities contained in one polity. That causes problems and there are things you have to do about it.

That’s what we have here now. At VDARE.com, we refer to it as America vs. Anti-America. Anti-America is what Steve Sailer calls the Coalition of the Fringes—the Democratic Party. It consists basically of People of Color and assorted other minorities, Jews and homosexuals, who basically do run the party. The Republican Party is overwhelmingly white. It’s essentially the American Party. So that’s America versus Anti-America.

I call the Republican Party not the GOP but the GAP—the Generic American Party. It represents America without actually having to do anything, without actually deserving it in any way, or representing the Historic American Nation’s interests in any particular way. It just represents it by virtue of not being Democrats.

Now, this is quite new—really extraordinarily new. In 1964, which I actually remember, only about 12.5 percent of the Democrat presidential vote was non-white. 1964 was actually the last year when the Democrats got a majority of the white vote.

We wrote about the Democrat vote in 2016 and I’ve not yet updated it, but we have the numbers. In 2020, the Democrat vote was 46.4% nonwhite, which was a record. And then you have to look at the Jewish vote. The Jewish vote was kind of odd, because it fell quite a lot in 2020, and I think there may be there may be some reporting problems there. But it’s about somewhere between 60 and 80% Democratic. And then we have the homosexual vote. Now, astoundingly, in 2020, about 7-8% of the electorate self-identified as LGTBQ, etc. That’s a huge jump from the previous 3-5% that there was until about 2018, for reasons which bear examination. But whatever the reasons are, the fact is that this group is overwhelmingly Democratic, somewhere between 64%-88% depending on what polls you use.

Now, of course, you have to avoid double counting. You have to figure out, well, how many how many of these people are both Jewish and homosexual? For some strange reason, the Pew Report says that Jews are about 50% more likely to identify as homosexual than non-Jews—very odd. About 9% of Jewish adults identify as LGBT versus 6% of all Americans. So adjusting for that, we find that somewhere about 7% of Biden’s vote is either Jewish or homosexual. Which in turn means that about 53.3% of the Democrat presidential vote was not straight white Gentiles. They were minorities of one type, or another.

So the party is tipping—like a housing project. It’s getting increasingly difficult for the Democrats to hold on to the white vote, just by virtue of who’s running the party, and whose interests they’re primarily representing.

And, of course, this has a number of implications for Democrats. First of all, they absolutely need the Great Replacement. They have to have immigration to keep their voting bloc growing, because they’re steadily losing their grip on the white vote. That’s why Biden is on the borders and brought in 6-7 million illegal immigrants, whom he proposes to at some point Amnesty.

Secondly, another aspect of this situation is that fundamentally these different components of the Democrat coalition don’t like each other. The constant clashes between the blacks and Hispanics, for example, if you look at high schools in California. The only way they can keep this coalition together is by attacking whites—focusing everybody on how awful the whites are. And that’s why you see this extraordinary emphasis by Biden on “White Supremacy”—an obsessive interest in “White Supremacy.” We all know this doesn’t exist. There’s no organization, certainly no terrorist movement, defending white interests in this country.

Thirdly, I think it also explains why there are so many geriatrics in the Democratic leadership. I mean, they’re older than I am, for goodness’ sake!

They need to present a white face to the country—so the country doesn’t realize quite how atypical they actually are. But the problem is that the upcoming non-white politicians don’t like—they want to be the leaders. So you see, ultimately Pelosi has had to give way to Hakeem Jeffries, who is somebody with a great deal of baggage of one type or another, and a problematic figure, I think, for most Americans and also of course for American Jews, because of his uncle’s theories about Sun People, Ice People and all this kind of thing—he was a black academic in New York.

So there’s this bipolar nature to American politics, America vs. Anti-America, which means that American policy is increasingly unstable.

So we’ve gone from 2016, when the Republicans had control of the executive branch and the legislative branch and could easily have enacted an immigration moratorium—and in fact Trump did cut back on immigration quite a lot through Executive Action. He eventually succeeded in getting the immigrant workforce population to decline quite sharply in his last years, with a result that wages for low-income workers started to rise for the first time in forever. But mysteriously, he didn’t campaign on it in 2020. But he did do it.

But after 2020, of course, the Democrats have just gone right off to the other side, they’ve opened the borders and are doing everything they can to shovel as many Third World people into the country as possible, because they want them to vote for them.

I think it’s hard to exaggerate how terrified the Democrats in particular, and the Ruling Class in general, were by the 2016 election. It was a profound and terrible shock to them.

 And that’s really why they’re taking such risks now. What Biden is doing at the southern border is clearly illegal. He is required by law, when people cross the border, to detain them. And he’s not doing that, on a massive scale. He should be impeached. It’s an impeachable offense. It is the fact that he’s dealing with Republicans, that’s the only reason why he’s not been impeached. But even they, I think, will get around to it eventually.

And of course, it’s also why you see this tremendous crackdown on all opposition. They’re doing their very best to make the idea of the Great Replacement unmentionable in polite society, even though it’s actually a fact—it’s actually happening. And of course, it’s why Letitia James is coming after our tiny organization—they don’t want any dissent at all.

Now, the third point I was going to make:

is a somewhat similar point about the white vote, or as we like to call it here the American vote: It’s shifting. It’s a slow seismic shift going on, and it’s got a long, long way to go.

This state here, West Virginia, is a case study. West Virginia is about 93% white. It’s actually very close, amazingly, to what the US was in 1960, before the 1965 Immigration Act kicked in: about 90% white.

And West Virginia was overwhelmingly Democratic, because of the labor union history here and so on. And so recently that Carter, for example, beat Reagan here in 1980. And Clinton beat Bob Dole here in 1996.

And yet, in 2020, Trump beat Biden 68 to 29 points, nearly 40 points. The Democrats are extinct in West Virginia.

Now VDARE.com is not partisan. The Democrats could revive themselves by embracing immigration patriotism. But they won’t.

The question is: What did the West Virginia GOP actually do to deserve this? They actually did nothing. Except one thing: they weren’t Democrats.

All by themselves, the Democrats have successfully alienated West Virginia.

And this is a poor state. If you go around it, you’ll see people in trailer homes flying Battle Flags and flags that say very rude things about Joe Biden. Even though there are cars on blocks in the front yard and all that kind of thing. But they’re passionate—Trump’s got to them. He has a grip on these people.

Nevertheless, in 2020, Trump did okay with the white vote, but he only got 57% of it, he should have done much better.

And had he taken my advice and campaigned on his immigration record, and above all advocated an immigration moratorium, he would have done much better.

Ultimately, the Republicans are going find that the white vote is going to move even further to them.

One reason it hasn’t yet, I think, is the deep sectionalism in the U.S. There really is a division between the South and the North. And it is still there. The South now is overwhelmingly Republican. In 2022, for example, the West Virginia Republicans increased their supermajority, in the teeth of what was supposed to be a relatively disappointing election.

It’s the North that’s the problem. And there are all kinds of reasons for that.

I call it Greater New England—from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, that’s where they need to need to crack into. And that’s actually what Steve Sailer said when we were discussing the failure of Mitt Romney in 2013, he said the Rust Belt states were the target of opportunity for the GOP/GAP, and that’s exactly what happened. He didn’t get any credit for it, but he was right.

So what is the situation with immigration right now? Now, when I survey the scene and I look at Ann Coulter—Hell hath no fury like a Coulter scorned—she will not forgive Trump for not doing what she told him to do on immigration. Of course she’s right, he should have done it, and he behaved like the pig he is, quite frankly. But still, we don’t get embroiled in this.

Conversely, our Washington correspondent, Washington Watcher II, is much more forgiving of Trump.

But all of this is something I regard with serene indifference. I think it was Sophocles who said at the end of his life, when he was an old man, “At least I am free of a cruel and insane master.” He meant lust. I’m free of partisan commitments. I’m solely and only interested in who is going to put in Immigration Moratorium, who is going to end Birthright Citizenship, and who’s going to launch now, because of the Biden Rush, a program of mass deportation.

And right now, if you look at Trump and DeSantis, there are some good signs.

I’d kind of given up on Trump on immigration, because he obviously lost interest in reducing legal immigration toward the end of his presidency. And he still hasn’t said much about legal immigration, although he does occasionally talk about chain migration.

But DeSantis is interested in reducing legal immigration. In some respects he’s to the right of Trump on that. [See the DeSantis position paper, released after this speech.] On the other hand, Trump is excellent on the border. And he’s the only one who’s raised the idea of Mass Deportation, to get these illegals that Joe Biden’s imported out. He’s actually discussed that.

And of course above all, he’s raised the question of Birthright Citizenship.

Some people say “Well, he mentioned that when he ran in 2016 and he didn’t do anything about it.” But my position is: At least he’s mentioning it. As they say on Wall Street in takeover battles. he’s put the issue in play.

I’m very sorry to see that DeSantis hasn’t responded to it. [Again, after this speech, DeSantis did. See ANN COULTER: DeSantis’s Birthright Citizenship Reform Can Save America.] Ending Birthright Citizenship is the checkmate move, because it will destroy the Democrats' strategy of Electing A New People. Because if they’re in the country, but they won’t be able to vote, they will not enter the political community. That’s the critical point.

I will say also that you’re often surprised about the American government—it’s incredibly complicated, and nobody really understands all of it, or even much of it. For example, it turns out that there was a very good bill, in the Trump years in 2018, there was a very good bill in the House proposed by Congressman Goodlatte, who used to represent the Shenandoah Valley down here, which would have done a lot of very good things to reduce immigration. Unfortunately, I was barely aware of this thing, because the machinations inside the Congress are so complex. It was sabotaged by Paul Ryan. And there is now another a good bill, HR 2, which has been passed by the House, which would which basically end the Biden Rush at the border, basically by defining asylum much more strictly and stuff like that; and it would have E-Verify, which would mean you couldn’t employ illegal aliens, etc.

Of course, the Democrats won’t move it in the Senate. But the Republicans are maneuvering to try to get it attached to a spending bill or something to see if they can get it forward. So there are good things happening there.

But the Beltway Herbivores—the Beltway immigration patriot organizations, we call them herbivores because they’re so Politically Correct—they tell me that the problem is that the Republicans in Congress are still utterly terrified of being called RACIST. It just absolutely paralyzes them. They really take this seriously. And because of that, they’re extremely reluctant to talk about immigration at all.

I actually think that part of our role at VDARE.com is basically—I guess the term is the Overton Window—is to raise issues, to try and force people to think about these issues. Because we can’t expect professional politicians to do this. They will only move when it’s safe.

I once read that colonies of penguins, where they want to go swimming, they sit on the edge of an ice floe and then they jostle and they push one of the penguins to see if a leopard seal comes and eats it. And if no leopard seal comes and eats it, then they can all go in.

And I feel a bit like a penguin, I must say. We haven’t actually been eaten by a leopard seal, but we sure get gnawed by them a lot!

But if we don’t do it, this immigration issue is never going to get into politics—while our enemies have this lock, this mumbo jumbo word they can say to scare off debate, just as the Communists in Eastern Europe used the pro-Nazi smear to cripple their opponents.

So I guess we shouldn’t have a white deer as an emblem, we should have a penguin!

So, let me end here, where I began, about the need for community, to all get to know each other. I’ve been at this for a long time. It’s 31 years since I wrote the National Review cover story, Time To Rethink Immigration?, which is sometimes credited with starting the modern debate. And Ann Coulter very generously credited it with changing her mind on the subject, leading ultimately to her great book Adios America.

It’s a long time, 31 years. VDARE.com itself has only been in existence since Christmas Eve of 1999.

And on VDARE.com. I’ve started to run a list, on All Souls Day, of all the people who have died in the fight. I mean, for example, John Tanton, who founded U.S. Inc., and The Social Contract Magazine. He also founded FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies, a major intellectual and political entrepreneur from Petoskey. Michigan. He died a couple of years ago and U.S. Inc. has been closed down, with the exception, I’m happy to say, of Border Hawk, our speaker Dan Lyman’s organization, which was taken out of U.S. Inc. and is still flourishing.

I think of Linda Thom. She was one the very few Democrats who stuck with us. We used to have more Democrats, immigration used to be a Progressive cause, but they get scared. She was from the West, she was a data analyst for various California bureaucracies, and she was a tremendous number cruncher. We’d periodically get angry emails from her pointing out that we’ve made mistakes or said something that annoyed her as a Democrat. It was very refreshing. And, personally, she was a great support in regard to my children, and source of quilts, when Maggy died.

But two years ago, I got an email from her at Christmas saying: This is my last Christmas. And it turned out to be. Like Maggy, breast cancer.

And Barbara Coe. Our younger guests may not know of her, but she was very active at the time of Proposition 187 in 1994 in California. She was actually fired from the Anaheim police department for revealing information that they didn’t want revealed about immigration and crime. As I wrote in the American Conservative (!), in words that I believe were read out at her funeral:

Her life of obscure sacrifice is not one that appeals to many professional politicians, and even less to their media groupies. Nevertheless, it is the cumulative effect of many such lives that ultimately creates an irresistible political movement. Saint Petersburg, notoriously, is built on the bones of the thousands of serfs who labored to reclaim the land from swamp.

These are people who spent their lives in selfless activism. If you have candidates for my list, let me know.

Some of you, I’m sure, have seen Ron Maxwell’s movie Gettysburg. Maxwell, by the way, is an immigration patriot, he just lives down the road in the Shenandoah Valley. I think it’s very powerful.

There’s a scene directly before Pickett’s Charge, towards the end, when General Longstreet, who is played by Tom Berenger, says to his commanders, he’s got the charge all staged ready to go, he says 

“Gentlemen, I do believe this attack will decide the fate of our country. All the men who have died in the past are with you here today.”

Well, we’re a movement, a band of brothers, and the more so because we’re ruthlessly persecuted, and everyone who died, in this movement, is with us today.

Now, I guess Pickett’s Charge didn’t work out too well. But at least they fought.

Thank you.

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.