05/31/2023
Text adapted from VDARE.com video below — headline adapted from Dead White Male William Shakespeare’s King Lear ACT III, SCENE IV
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow: VDARE.com is facing an absolutely mortal threat — and we need your help to stave it off. We’ve been attacked by a black Soros prosecutor — Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York State — and she’s trying to beat us to death with endless subpoenas for documentation without actually making any allegation of wrongdoing that we can refute.
How I got myself in this mess? Obviously, I’m from England originally, so I’m an immigrant doing a dirty job that Americans won’t do — namely write about the post-1965 immigration disaster. I was a long-time financial journalist in New York, and I worked for Fortune and Forbes and Barron’s and at one point, incredibly, for the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. But in 1992 I wrote a cover story called “Time to Rethink Immigration” for National Review, which is sometimes credited with restarting the modern immigration debate. I turned that into a 1995 book called Alien Nation, which was kind of a cult hit. However, in 1997 Bill Buckley was prevailed upon by the donors and the Congressional Republican Party to purge immigration patriots from National Review. Fortunately for me, the internet came along, and we were able to launch VDARE.co, on Christmas Eve of 1999. And we’ve been at it ever since.
VDARE.com Publisher Lydia Brimelow: The role of VDARE.com in this environment is to inform the fight to keep America American. And what we mean by that is constantly, every day, posting multiple blogs and articles and videos that are aimed at the general public, but also at people who are in politics, or in a position of influence, to understand what is at stake in losing America to mass immigration, both legal and illegal. That it’s a serious risk that, we’re on the verge of having that happen and what a loss it would be. To lose VDARE.com would be to lose the voice of the Historic American Nation.
Peter: The lawyers say that “the process is the punishment.” What has happened here is that New York State Attorney General James launched a massive subpoena attack on us. There are things that she’s asking for that are completely irrelevant to any conceivable oversight. They’re just inflicting as much punishment on us as possible.
It’s quite obvious what Letitia James’ motives are. As in the Trump case, it’s nakedly political. And as with the NRA: she ran for Attorney General saying that she was going to prosecute Trump and the NRA. even though at that point she had no grounds for doing so. She had to dive into the documents and do thousands of pages of discovery, just like she’s doing with us, to try and find an excuse to prosecute him. It’s just a raw exercise of Totalitarian power.
Lydia: VDARE.com has not been accused of anything. Our lawyers have repeatedly, over and over, asked what it is they’re looking for, what it is that they’re concerned about, what it is that they’re investigating. And their response is: as the Charities Bureau of the State of New York, we have broad authority to investigate you for whatever we want.
At one point, they implied that there was some problem with the way that we did the paperwork on the purchase of this Castle venue, where we hope to have conferences and meetings. So our lawyers preemptively said: “Okay, we’re going to turn over that production first. We’re going to turn over all the paperwork that has to do with that.”
But they never acknowledged that we turned over that paperwork and they refused to have an in-person conference.
Two days after our lawyer requested the conference is when they threatened to file a motion to compel all of the items in the subpoena, regardless of any particular interest they have.
And that’s what triggered us to actually file for relief in federal court, which we still await.
Peter: When you operate a 501(c)(3), it is tricky to comply with the regulations. But fortunately, we have lawyers who tell us what to do. We rent cottages on the grounds of the castle, which is where we actually live now, but we pay rent for it and the rent is independently determined.
Lydia: We shifted some of the property to a for-profit corporation that is 100% owned by the VDARE Foundation. It’s not owned by an individual. It’s an LLC that is wholly owned by VDARE Foundation itself, which is very common. It’s not unusual.
Peter: The Attorney General has repeatedly implied that this for-profit corporation is owned by Lydia, which is flatly untrue.
Lydia: They play funny, because they don’t directly say it’s “owned” by me. They say it’s “controlled” by me. And the reason that they can get away with that is because I’m the president of the VDARE Foundation. I’m the one that signs the paperwork, so they get to say I “control” it. I suppose that I do, but as opposed to what?
Peter: They appear to be engaged in a massive fishing expedition. They’re trying to find something, anything, to pin on us.
Lydia: Probably the silliest thing that AG James has said to make us look guilty is that we did not declare on the Form 990 that we’re married. That’s, first of all, silly because we not only share the same last name and file joint taxes, but we put up pictures of our family regularly on the website and constantly refer to each other as husband and wife.
But further, if that mistake was made in one particular filing, and I don’t know that it has been, there was no benefit. So if you have no intent to deceive and there’s no benefit to a mistake, what’s the charge?
Peter: These complicated restructurings that we’ve been forced to do — why? It’s because we’ve been forced into the commercial real estate business because we want to hold conferences and we can’t hold conferences in hotels because they keep canceling us. So we have to own our own venue.
And it’s very expensive and difficult and not ideal. But that’s what the Reign Of Terror has forced us to do.
Lydia: I mean, they have these fantasies that they cook up. If they don’t like someone, then they just let their imaginations go wild about what those persons’ motivations are and then they attempt to prosecute them using the full brunt of the legal system.
But every single insinuation that they have floated has been answered by the documents that we have already handed them. So they have either not reviewed them and are speaking out of ignorance — or they have reviewed them and are lying on purpose.
Peter: I’m sure that Letitia James was disappointed to find that we’re in compliance with everything and she’s not going to be able to say, you know, you aren’t paying rent or something like that.
And I’m sure she’s absolutely astounded that we’ve been able to defend ourselves so long, at enormous expense.
The problem is that that she’ll just continue doing the same thing. She may never charge us with anything. She may just continue to demand documents and continue to harass us legally.
Lydia: Unlike Trump and the NRA, and probably even Project Veritas, we’re a very small organization. So typically our operating budget for running the website full time every year and the ancillary things is about $800,000.
But we’ve had to spend $300,000 so far in the last eleven months just to defend ourselves from the subpoena. So the proportionality is significant.
The other thing is this vulnerability with the exposure of donor, writer, and vendor names.
We’re making such a big deal about that because Nikki Haley’s donors were leaked by the N.Y. Attorney General’s Office. When the leaks were exposed, they had stamps from the Attorney General’s office right there.
And, you know, it’s one thing to be a donor to Nikki Haley. It’s a completely different thing to have your name leaked if you’re associated with immigration patriotism, which they view with even more hatred.
Peter: One of the astonishingly unethical things that Letitia James has done is that, in federal court, she’s saying that she doesn’t want the names of our writers. Most of our writers are now pseudonymous because of the Reign Of Terror. But in state court, she said exactly the opposite.
And there’s a doctrine called “Judicial Estoppel” which prohibits lawyers from doing this. But she’s gone ahead and done it anyway. And the New York judge went along with it.
If you’re in journalism, and even in politics to the extent that we are, you get used to people lying all the time. You take it for granted.
But the law is a different matter. Lawyers, and particularly public officials like the Attorney General of New York, are not supposed to lie to the court. They’re not supposed to make representations that they know are false and to deceive the judges.
And you can see why this is. It becomes impossible for the system to function if nobody can trust anything that anybody says.
But Letitia James is categorically lying and attempting to deceive the court repeatedly. And so that’s why we will move to sanction her.
Lydia: Despite this enormous battle that we are fighting, VDARE.com has every intention of continuing to post immigration patriotism, America First journalism, every day.
But we can only do it with your support.
So we ask that you go to www.VDARE.com/donate and provide whatever financial support you can afford. Every bit counts. If it’s a few dollars, it’s extremely welcome. If it’s larger amount, you have our profound thanks.
Peter: We’ll be profoundly grateful to you. And so will be our posterity — and your posterity — because this is the only way we can preserve the future, and preserve America, for them.
Peter Brimelow 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.
A native Texan, Lydia Brimelow graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 2006. She is fundraiser and office manager, lion tamer, fire extinguisher and miscellany handler at VDARE.com. She and Peter married in 2007 and have three daughters together.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.