PETER BRIMELOW ENDS EMERGENCY APPEAL, WRITES TO READERS ABOUT VDARE.COM's FUTURE

Peter Brimelow writes: I find I am reluctant to end our Emergency Fund Raising Drive, not simply because of the gravity our financial crisis but because I find the loyalty shown by our readers so deeply encouraging—many write heart-warming personal notes with their donations, some even responded to the news that we were approaching our $50,000 goal with second and even third donations.

We did make our goal—we currently have about $53,000 and checks continue to snail in. VDARE.COM will continue posting for the immediate future, although we will have to do some hard rethinking and reformulating. Of course, we should not be in this parlous situation and I will be writing more on this matter in the future.

I can't think of another issue like immigration, where the American people feel so overwhelming one way, but the American elites so hysterically and intolerantly the other. It is now nineteen years since I wrote my Time To Rethink Immigration?  cover story for National Review, which became my 1995 book Alien Nation. I have to admit that I never thought the reasonable arguments I presented would be met with such unscrupulous and sustained savagery—or that so many putative allies would quail and flee.

I still believe that the historic American nation will regain control of its destiny. But I find myself remembering the last words of the harbinger of an earlier great convulsive national struggle: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."

I don't think America's post-1965 immigration disaster will end in violence (although of course there is constant under-reported violence on the Mexican border and elsewhere). But I do now believe that achieving patriotic immigration reform will leave American politics and culture transformed much more radically, and painfully, than anyone now imagines.