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VIDEO: "IT IS FINISHED"—Peter And Lydia Brimelow's Update On VDARE's Crucifixion By NYAG Letitia James—And What Happens Next.
— VDARE (@vdare) April 7, 2024
"The truth is that we're not dying of mismanagement. We're not dying of fraud or any kind of poor use of donor funds. We're not dying of scandal, and… pic.twitter.com/PMhXvoxWMd
TRANSCRIPT
Earlier: “IT IS FINISHED”—NYAG Letitia James Crucifies VDARE.com
[PETER] Hello everyone, I’m Peter Brimelow, I’m the editor of VDARE.com, and this is my wife Lydia, who is the publisher and general putter out of fires. And one of the fires we have to deal with right now is that last Wednesday, Sabrina Kraus, the New York state judge, held us in contempt for not complying with the massive and intrusive subpoenas, even though we’re fighting them, and even though she herself has modified the subpoena to protect up to a point our pseudonymous writers, who she was previously trying to get us to dox. So we’re currently paying $250 a day for this, and we’re just basically running out of money here. We can’t afford to fight on the state front and the federal front very much longer. So I wrote on Good Friday that Letitia James has crucified VDARE.com. The subpoena demands that we’ve been hit with, even though we’ve been charged with nothing, are simply destroying the organization, consuming all of its activity, all of its energies, and crucially all of its money. We’ve slowed down publication very dramatically. VDARE is sort of on life support at the moment, editorially. But it is going to end. It can’t go on. We can’t go on like this very much longer.
[LYDIA] Since we first got the original subpoenas, we have been fighting tooth and nail. Every creative idea that we can come up with to protect our information and protect our First Amendment rights. And that’s just been very, very expensive. We don’t have a tally right now for how much money we’ve spent as a result of this abusive regulatory action from the Charities Bureau. But we know that it’s approaching a million dollars. Every dollar that we’re spending in order to protect these First Amendment rights was donated to the VDARE Foundation to help us fulfill our mission, to educate people on the negative effects of mass immigration, and to defend the American national identity. And paying lawyers and fending off Attorney General Letitia James is not why people donated money to us.
[PETER] We’re not fighting this just for the sake of fighting. We’re fighting because we are really trying to protect our donors and our pseudonymous writers.
[LYDIA] To that end, we do have a modicum of good news, which is in the order that we got. Most recently, there was a change that allows us to redact the names of our pseudonymous writers. We wanted it to be more broad. We wanted to be able to redact the names of our vendors and to generally be more careful with our communications. We did not get those things, but we do have permission now to redact the names of our pseudonymous writers. And we will do that. But that does introduce additional costs. If we did not go through and carefully review every individual document before we turned it over, if we just handed it over without redactions, that would be a lot less costly than having our lawyers, the lawyers that represent VDARE Foundation, go through and make sure that if it’s not required to be turned over, then we’re not going to accidentally turn it over. And that’s what’s going to be so expensive because lawyers charge by the hour and they get paid regardless of the outcome.
[PETER] We’ve not been charged anything. This entire massive punishment and, in fact, lethal attack on us is without us being charged anything or having a chance to defend ourselves against anything. The Attorney General has hinted, in fact, lied to the court about our purchase of the VDARE Castle, which we did because we absolutely need to have a conference venue. That castle transaction was carefully lawyered and is absolutely bulletproof.
[LYDIA] After VDARE bought the Berkeley Springs Castle, it became evident that keeping and maintaining an historic property is a totally different line of work from being the voice of the Historic American Nation online. And VDARE gave control of the castle to the Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation, which operates just as a community foundation to maintain and preserve this historic building. And so the Berkeley Springs Castle will be here regardless of VDARE’s future. And Peter and I are committed to the mission regardless of VDARE’s future. And so it’s our hope that we’ll continue to have very interesting activities and meetings and conferences here at the castle well into the future. It’s just unclear what name they’ll be under.
[PETER] Well, we’re really looking forward to this conference. It’s April 26th to 28th. We’ve got Keith Woods coming from Ireland, Steve Sailer is coming to talk about his new book, Noticing and other things. John Derbyshire will be here. Jared Taylor will be here. John Lott, the economist who is an expert on why gun control doesn’t work is going to come. But who else have we got?
[LYDIA] We’ll have Anthony Cumia and Amanda Milius. And Owen Shroyer will be doing a live show from here. And giving one of the keynotes, I think he’ll be on Friday night. We have Dan Lyman, did I already say him? [PETER] From Border Hawk. [LYDIA] From Border Hawk. We have a lot of great guests coming. We may even have others join at the last minute. There are a few invitations that are still floating around out there. People say they want to come but they haven’t been able to confirm yet.
[PETER] And one of the great things about these conferences is people get to talk to the writers and they get to talk to each other. And it helps a movement to develop a critical mass, which of course is why they’re so determined to stamp it out, why we weren’t able to have conferences until Lydia bought the castle. But we’re also live streaming. The conference is sold out, but we are live streaming.
[LYDIA] Yeah, we’re live streaming. We also have Scott Greer. I forgot to say Scott Greer. So the in-person tickets are sold out except for a couple of sponsorship spots that remain available. And you can buy a live-stream ticket to watch all the all the public access proceedings at www.vdare.com/events/livestream2024
[PETER] We got a lot of traffic on Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called now, after this announcement on Good Friday. I must say it’s always very heartwarming, It’s extremely heartwarming. But it is frustrating to see how many people... don’t understand what’s going on. And they will ask questions such as, why were you registered in New York in the first place? The answer is because our pro bono lawyer was admitted to the bar in New York in 1999 and nobody had ever heard of lawfare then. George Pataki was the Republican governor. All of the questions that I’ve seen people ask on Twitter or X or whatever it is again, I have already answered them in this admittedly 8,000 word piece. There’s a shorter TL;DR version. The issue is intricate, but it’s not complicated. It has a number of aspects to it that I had to explain carefully. And I did explain them carefully. So I do urge people interested to go back and read all that, to read it there.
[LYDIA] Having people contact me and say how much VDARE has meant to them and how they will support us no matter what the future holds, it really does make a difference in the way that we view the future itself. One of the most dangerous things that our opponents do to us is to make us feel isolated and to make us feel demoralized. And the only way that you can combat isolation and demoralization is through your community. And that’s why we work so hard to have in-person events. And that’s why Peter and I visit all of you that we can when we’re traveling the country. And that one of my greatest joys is putting people together who have something in common. And so I want to say thank you to everybody who has shared a kind word. And we’ll continue to fight as long as we possibly can.
[PETER] VDARE has developed, I think, a unique voice. When I started VDARE.com and we launched on Christmas Eve of 1999, because of [William F.] Buckley’s purge of National Review there was essentially no place to get facts analysis about immigration easily. But I think there was a certain type of argument that we were making that was unique.
[LYDIA] VDARE does have a unique voice. And we’re still hoping for a miracle. What we would have done in a landscape uninhibited by this aggression from Letitia James would be expand our offerings. We had picked up new podcasts recently. We had our print magazine. We had new features that we were developing, new ways of presenting, such as ”Another Month in the Death of White America,” and ”National Data,” which followed the jobs that the immigrants were capturing. In the context of the aggression from Letitia James, none of that is possible right now. If something drastic changes, I would be happy to pick up all of those pieces from where they’ve been scattered and start building things back together with the team that I have, which is still just as talented as it was before and just as dedicated to the issues as it was before. But there’s been destruction. We don’t know yet if the hurricane is over or if it will ever be over. And so we have to plan for VDARE as it is now.
[PETER] If we had all the money in the world, the obvious course would be to appeal this thing all the way up through the New York state court. It’s not impossible on its face that we can get justice at some point because the case is so strong. If that fails it would then go to the Supreme Court. And it’s a pretty straightforward First Amendment issue. God only knows if it would take it up.
[LYDIA] You know, I mean, I think about all the big plans that I had. We were going to have a legal defense fund that was going to help people that had been in difficult legal situations. I was going to develop a consulting series for organizations that were experiencing cancel culture because I’ve been— I’ve seen it all. I thought I’d seen it all in terms of keeping a business afloat and keeping your audience in the loop when everybody’s cutting you off. We were talking about starting a PAC. There were a lot of good ideas.
[PETER] I mean the fact of the matter is that VDARE was a perfectly viable business. We built a very good donor base. We had a great year in 2019 and you know we suffered through COVID like all charities did but we were in very great very good shape. Our move to West Virginia, it’s been a huge success. The community here is extremely supportive and of course entirely due to Lydia we bought this castle and every conference we’ve had here has been sold out. Pent-up demand for immigration patriots and patriots generally to meet is absolutely enormous. It is great that we’re only two hours from the U.S. Capitol. You know we can bring people in from D.C. very, very easily. So we were poised to make major steps forward and that’s what the SPLC said when it attacked us in 2020 for buying the castle.
It said we were going to be able to influence Washington and I have no doubt that that’s what Letitia James has in mind. I mean we just put ahead too far above the parapet which they are actually afraid that we were on the point of exerting even more influence. I’ve seen a number of people observe recently that you know VDARE has actually prevailed on the issues. There’s no constituency left in the Republican Party or for that matter in America at large, not that there ever was, for amnesty and open borders and the kind of things that Jeb Bush was talking about as late as 2016. So in that sense we feel very gratified. Of course just because we’ve won the intellectual argument doesn’t mean that the political argument is over. Even if Trump wins in 2024 or even if the Republicans get control of the legislative branch, which I think is not impossible, there’ll still be a protracted struggle going on for several years to implement, for example, birthright citizenship [reform].
Something we’ve been writing about right from the start which I noticed several of the candidates in the Republican presidential debates endorsed this year-- a major step forward. But to actually enact that is going to take hand to hand fighting at a number of different levels and of course we were expecting to be involved. So the fight will continue for a long time but I think that we’re on the downward slope here. It’s just a matter of time until immigration patriotism prevails.
[LYDIA] I think it’s important to reiterate that after two years of investigation the Attorney General has not charged VDARE with anything. So while we feel that we are being we’re in a death struggle right now. Like we’re close to the end and without a miracle we will not survive. The truth is we’re not dying of mismanagement. We’re not dying of fraud or any kind of poor use of donor funds. We’re not dying of scandal and we’re not dying of just a lack of money in general. We’re dying because the Attorney General has decided our time has come and she’s so much more powerful than we are that there’s nothing we can do about it. I had a lawyer say to me recently you’re innocent until proven broke and unfortunately that’s where it’s headed for us.
[PETER] The nature of lawfare is that things are not decided in a court of law. They’re decided because of the relentless piling up of costs that they do on the victim eventually forces people to capitulate and agree to things that they know are untrue. Just to stop this persecution and stop being driven into personal bankruptcy. This is a development which is relatively new. I mean frankly I think it’s come about because you can’t run a first world justice system with third world people is the problem, firstly. And secondly there’s a whole generation of completely compliant judges who will seem to be unwilling to defend the rights of unpopular defendants. And of course it turns out that all this stuff about John Adams and defending the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre even though he himself was a leading patriot because he thought they were entitled to legal defense. That’s all gone by the board now.
The American legal profession is afraid of defending unpopular clients or I should say more accurately politically incorrect clients because they know they’ll be attacked by their bar associations and the rest of the legal profession, which is in the hands of the communists. I sometimes think that this problem here goes beyond VDARE. I mean this last year we’ve see an enormous number, for example during our fundraising campaign, which goes from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, we found ourselves being under tremendous cyber attack.
We have a very sophisticated tech team and they were astonished how sophisticated these attacks were. Eventually we had to suspend the appeal because of them and then shortly after that Stripe, our long-term processor, suddenly kicked us off with no warning at all. And we were rescued by Gab Pay, a part of the heroic Andrew Torba empire, and we were briefly back online taking credit cards but then to Gab Pay’s great amazement all three of the banks they typically use backed out.
So right now we have a Gab Pay invented system called Green Money where you can use e-checks and of course you can also give money by GiveSendGo, if you really want to use a credit card. But of course it’s much more cumbersome than giving by credit card. The way in which these banks are behaving and we’ve thought this for some time now seems to reflect federal pressure. We’ve had banks tell friends confidentially that ”well we have to answer to the feds”; that’s why they can’t extend us merchant services. So I think there really is federal pressure on immigration patriots at the moment and it goes back to what happened in 2020. We were purged from YouTube and various other places in 2020. As it turned out that was part of a systematic campaign by the Democrat party to eliminate what they regard as pro-Trump voices and they actually openly admitted this in that famous article by Molly Ball in Time magazine about fortifying the election, how a cabal got together and fortified the election, i.e., cheated. They said they put pressure on all these social media groups to cut off dissident voices and I guess we were one of them. I wonder if that’s what’s shaping up here in which case of course it’s not just going to be VDARE that’s going to be blocked out it’s going to be a lot of other people.
[LYDIA] I guess I would urge people at this point to make an effort to stay in the loop. Things may be happening fairly quickly now.
[PETER] Sign up for our bulletins because even if VDARE were to go dark we would still be able to send out bulletins and we want to keep you informed. Well in closing I want to thank you for supporting us for so long, more than 25 years now, and you’ve seen me personally through a lot of ups and downs and I love you all and we’ll see you on the other side.
