07/16/2020
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See also: The Sin Of SULLIVAN: Why Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard and I Are Suing For Libel
It’s been just over four months since I published my detailed explanation of why I, as Editor of tiny VDARE.com, am taking the fraught step of suing the mighty New York Times for libel. In the interim, the world has gone mad — and The New York Times even madder. This, in my humble opinion, has made Brimelow vs. New York Times even more important.
For example, in a truly weird development, The New York Times management capitulated to a crazed staff revolt over its publication of an Op-Ed by a sitting U.S. Senator, discussing the entirely legitimate possibility that President Donald J. Trump might exercise his legal option to invoke the Insurrection Act against Black Lives Matter rioters.
And it threw its Editorial Page Editor James Bennet, a certified liberal Bigfoot and himself the brother of a U.S. Senator and the son of a Holocaust survivor, under the 8th Avenue subway car.
BREAKING: even weirder, Bari Weiss, right, an NYT Op-Ed editor and columnist, just posted on her website [July 15, 2020] a scathing letter of resignation from the NYT, saying
…the lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] election — lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society — have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
Weiss even alleged that, although she’s a Jewish bisexual,
[m]y own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist
It really looks like the inmates have taken over the asylum at The New York Times.
So it might seem the NYT has more important problems than the fact that it violated its own guidelines by refusing to acknowledge it stealth-edited a reference to me to remove its smear that I am an “open white nationalist,” or that it has subsequently escalated its libels of me — incredibly, even after being warned we proposed legal action — to include anti-Semitism and white supremacism.
But in fact it has no more important problems. Precisely because the NYT, like the rest of the Main Stream Media, have increasingly interpreted the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous 1964 Sullivan decision as a license to lie, and not just about apparently powerless Politically Incorrect groups like my VDARE.com, political debate in the U.S. has come unmoored from any consideration of truth and increasingly spun out of control. The ironic result: The New York Times itself, and the Establishment Left in general, are now being consumed by Woke golems and dybbuks that they themselves have enabled.
As the poet W.B. Yeats put it, reproaching himself for the savagery of the Irish Civil War:
We had fed the heart on fantasies
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
On May 26, we filed our final amended complaint. You can read it here. On June 18 the New York Times, asked U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla to dismiss the case. You can read its motion here. We must respond by July 21 — next Tuesday. [UPDATE: Extended to July 28, the week after. ] The New York Times gets to reply, by August 4. Judge Failla will then rule sometime after that.
I invite comments from readers on these arguments, especially our lawyer readers.(Email me here, our lawyer Frederick C. Kelly here.) In the past, such comments have proved very useful and we’ve been very grateful for them.
VDARE.com does not, to put it mildly, have the resources of The New York Times. But the miracle of the internet makes patriotic Open Source litigation possible — for as long as we can stay online (see below).
Our amended complaint adds The New York Times’ latest smear — on May 5 it published an article (Facebook Says It Dismantles Disinformation Network Tied to Iran’s State Media, Reuters, May 5, 2020, archived on archive.org May 10, now disappeared from the NYT site) blithely escalating its smears of VDARE.com by describing us as “white supremacist.”
As I said in my earlier Sin Of Sullivan article, it was hammered into me throughout my 40 years in the Main Stream Media that continuing an editorial campaign against someone who has already warned you of a pending libel action — let alone intensifying the campaign — could be considered evidence of “malice.”
Evidently this is not a lesson now inculcated in the New York Times’ Woke newsroom.
But, needless to say, the added part in our final complaint that personally delights me addresses the interesting fact (which I had earlier modestly failed to bring to our lawyer’s attention) that in 1995 The New York Times had, not once but twice, respectfully reviewed my book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, from which my website VDARE.com is directly descended. Our lawyer writes:
Plaintiff has had a long and distinguished career as a writer and journalist. He was a business writer and editor at the “Financial Post,” “Maclean’s,” “Barron’s,” “Fortune,” “Forbes” (where he attained the position of senior editor), and “National Review”; and his book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster was a bestseller.
Indeed, Defendant had implicitly acknowledged the important contribution Brimelow had made to public debate in America with said Alien Nation when Defendant chose to review Alien Nation not once, but twice within the same week, a practice which Defendant usually reserves only for works it considers especially noteworthy.
Specifically, Defendant reviewed Alien Nation not once, but twice within the same week, between April 16, 1995 and April 19, 1995: Nicholas Lemann, Too Many Foreigners, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, April 16, 1995, at 3, section 7; and Richard Bernstein, The Immigration Wave: A Plea to Hold Back, NEW YORK TIMES, April 19, 1995, at 17, section C.
Neither review detected any kind of race hatred or what the Defendant has lately claimed as "White Nationalism."
However, the second review published by Defendant was especially complimentary. Mr. Brimelow’s writing was declared "powerful and elegant.” Far from denigrating Alien Nation as "White Nationalist" and "Racist and Divisive," Defendant’s review was lavish in its praise of Brimelow’s work, stating inter alia:
- "Mr. Brimelow’s personality also comes through, and it is entirely engaging."
- " … Mr. Brimelow has made a highly cogent presentation of what is going to be the benchmark case against immigration as it is currently taking place. Those who think that the system needs no fixing cannot responsibly hold to that position any longer unless they take Mr. Brimelow’s urgent appeal for change into account."
- "The strong racial element in current immigration has made it more than ever before a delicate subject. It is to Mr. Brimelow’s credit that he attacks it head on, unapologetically."
[Paragraph numbering omitted, emphasis and links added]
“Mr. Brimelow’s personality also comes through, and it is entirely engaging"! To quote Winnie the Pooh — “that sort of bear”!
What has changed since 1995, of course: the immigration debate, at that point dormant for some thirty years, has since come back to life with a vengeance. And the American Left — which emphatically includes The New York Times — has bet everything on repressing this debate until the post-1965 immigration disaster succeeds in Electing A New People.
That, and only that, is the reason I’m no longer considered “entirely engaging.”
Sigh.
We will comment on the New York Times’ Motion To Dismiss when we file our full response. (I will say, however, that it relies on the “license to lie” argument mentioned above and discussed below in the context of OAN’s suit against Rachel Maddow).
Other developments since my April 3 announcement of our suit against The New York Times have further proved our contention in our brief that allegations of “white nationalism,” “white supremacy,” etc. etc. are not mere harmless joshing, but in today’s Woke world have devastating real-world consequences.
More importantly to us, Facebook also terminated my wife Lydia’s personal account, which she began when she was a student at Loyola University in Chicago and which was completely non-political, containing graduation pictures, wedding pictures, baby pictures, baby vignettes and conversations with personal friends dating back to grade school — exactly the kinds of things Facebook wants on their platform.
This is the last-ever Facebook post Lydia made, a picture of our daughter Victoria Beauregard:
The caption was this quote from Bo: "Old people are the fanciest, because their hair gets all sparkly and they have ruffles on their skin!"
(Reassuring, actually).
Facebook was a moderately effective way for VDARE.com to exercise our First Amendment rights to communicate with our fellow citizens.
But I will not disguise the fact that it is the destruction of Lydia’s personal data that has caused us the most personal distress. The hope of retrieving her data has caused us to delay publicizing this atrocity, or from taking legal action while other, informal, approaches appeared practicable.
For the record, Lydia wrote a personal appeal to an appropriate Facebook contact point on May 4. She received no reply.
Facebook’s refusal to respond to a young mother’s anguished appeal strikes me as irrefutable proof that these people want us in Gulags.
In other words, the Alt Right comedian Sam Hyde (now effectively purged from the internet) was right to say
Facebook’s stated reason for destroying our Facebook accounts: we were operating a “botfarm” — posting automatically to several satellite accounts, something Facebook calls “Co-ordinated Inauthentic Behavior.”
This is simply a lie. VDARE.com had no satellite accounts. We posted to nothing automatically.
And it can be seen to be a lie because, even if we had operated a bot farm, this does not explain why Facebook now prevents readers who, subsequently and quite independently, have found articles on our website that they want to share with their Facebook friends, from doing so.
The only rational explanation for this: flagrant political censorship. Facebook announced last year that it was no longer going to make basic logical distinctions between “white nationalism,” “white separatism” and “white supremacy” (which was already banned) [Standing Against Hate, About.fb.com, March 27, 2019]. The New York Times’ wild use of these terms in regard to us gave Facebook an excuse. Facebook’s management, like the rest of our Ruling Class including the New York Times, simply wants to suppress the immigration debate — until the Left has succeeded in Electing A New People.
This disgraceful development is, of course, an order of magnitude more serious than Woke corporations like Amazon, PayPal, Constant Contact etc. discriminating against us by refusing to sell us their services. It means that Cultural Marxism has invaded the basic architecture of the internet. Basically, it’s as if the phone company refused to let us have a phone number, or the U.S. Mail refused to deliver letters. It shows that America is moving rapidly into an era of Chinese Communist-style Social Credit Scores.
VDARE.com has now migrated to a new domain registrar. But the threat to our internet presence continues (and we urge you to prepare for it).
Network Solutions has not, of course, deigned to explain exactly why it has done this to us. However, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a Washington D.C. Leftist vigilante group headed by Kristen Clarke, a black lady lawyer, is reportedly claiming credit for our banning. Among other things, it instanced our daring to discuss an article in Haaretz, a leftist Israeli newspaper, about Israeli rules of engagement on their own border, which permit using trained snipers to shoot illegal border crossers in the leg. Surprisingly, however, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is not attempting to extirpate Haaretz from the internet.
All of which is further proof of my contention in The Sin Of Sullivan:
Especially since Trump’s election in 2016, VDARE.com, immigration patriots and the Dissident Right generally, are in what the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu called “Death Ground” — we have to sue or be driven entirely out of the public square.
Meanwhile, there have been developments in some of the parallel libel actions challenging the Main Stream Media’s license to lie and, by implication, the Sullivan decision:
The ludicrous issue at stake here is well stated by OAN lawyer Amnon Siegel:
The words– “that OAN is really literally paid Russian propaganda” — do not convey an opinion. This is a blatant defamatory falsehood.
As I said in The Sin Of Sullivan, it’s not generally realized that defendants in libel actions brought by “public figures” now habitually make no effort to defend the truth of what they’ve said. They just assert it’s an expression of their opinion — i.e. that they have a license to lie.
This is exactly what Rachel Maddow and her lawyers did in this case. Of course, this claim has devastating implications for the credibility of her show. As Mike Cernovich commented mordantly: “Maddow’s win is America’s gain. No one can credibly claim that Maddow’s show is real news” [Maddow’s “I’m Not a Real Journalist” Defense Prevails in Court, Cernovich.com, May 25, 2020].
And RedState.com’s Brad Slager wrote:
[I]n a manner OAN has won a victory.
It managed to get Rachael Maddow to declare in court records that she is a fabulist whose reporting does not need to be taken as the least bit accurate. It is not to be taken lightly when a major name in the media universe has gone on the record to declare what she traffics in on the air is fake news.
[A Judge Rules Rachel Maddow is a Fake News Fabulist and Not a Journalist, May 25, 2020].
But of course Maddow’s concession is indeed “taken lightly” — because, outside of the conservative catacomb, this subtle point was barely reported.
Over time, dawning realization that this sort of thing is going on certainly has contributed to the growing public disenchantment with the Main Stream Media [Americans' Trust in Mass Media Edges Down to 41% by Megan Brenan, Gallup, September 26, 2019]. But in the short run, MSM arrogance and aggression has become utterly unrestrained.
Personally, I was very sorry to see the winsome Gabbard withdraw. It struck me that she might be the sort of “sympathetic litigant” that lawyers prefer to front a difficult legal argument — such as persuading the courts to revisit the Sullivan disaster unquestionably must be.
But Gabbard has no personal wealth, forfeited her Congressional seat to make her presidential run and may be hoping to rebuild her relationship with the Democratic Establishment. (On leaving the Presidential race, she disappointed some supporters by endorsing Joe Biden rather Sanders, despite having endorsed Sanders in 2016). Her folding is hardly surprising.
Typically, however, the Clinton camp greeted Gabbard’s withdrawal with graceless vindictive gloating. Clinton’s lawyer even added "good riddance" in Russian — i.e. he compounded the original libel, further illustrating how Sullivan has severed political debate from any consideration of decency, let alone truth.
In conclusion, I’m going to quote again from the powerful article that Powerline’s John Hinderaker, whom I’ve never met, wrote on our case when it was first reported:
[L]awsuits like this one are an important contribution to freedom. Corrupt institutions like the New York Times and the Southern Poverty Law Center need to be attacked whenever possible, and popular support needs to be mobilized behind the idea that newspapers and partisan organizations should not be given carte blanche to lie with impunity about their political opponents.
[Sue the New York Times? They deserve it, January 10, 2020. Emphasis added].
Of course, I just don’t know if Brimelow vs. New York Times will be the case that breaks through and reverses the Sullivan disaster.
But I do know that someone will eventually prevail. The current regime of unbridled lies is too unstable. People still too often believe what they read and passions get too inflamed.
It will come to blood — indeed, it is already coming to blood
This road will be long and hard. But we have no choice.
However, as evidence that the gravity of this situation is finally being recognized even in the most complacent and conventional quarters, I find to my amazement that I can actually now quote from National Review:
Conservatives in general, and Trump supporters in particular, are already being squeezed out of social media…But what if half the country begins to feel — with justice — that the other half is eager to deprive them of their rights, has set them beyond the pale, wants to see them crushed? What then?
Abandoning Liberalism Will Destroy Social Peace, by Stanley Kurtz, June 11, 2020.
“What then?” indeed.
Of course, this road will not just be long and hard — it will also be expensive. We are entirely dependent on you, our readers, to sustain this fight.
Please give generously. (Click the “earmark” box to give specifically to our New York Times litigation).
Not just to defend freedom for all Americans, but to help ensure that the cause of immigration patriotism is not driven entirely out of public debate.
I and my family will be most grateful — and so, I sincerely believe, will be those who the Founders referred to in the Preamble to The Constitution, as “ourselves and our posterity.”
Sincerely,
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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.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.