11/23/2023
Earlier: VDARE.com LAWFARE CRISIS INTENSIFIES — Federal Court Judge Frederick J. Scullin Dodges Protecting Our (And Our Writers’) 1A Rights From “Hyperpoliticized” NYAG Letitia James and VDARE.com FACING MORTAL THREAT! — NY Attorney General Letitia James Mugs Us (As Well As Donald Trump, NRA etc.)
By James Fulford writes: This is a transcript, with many links, of Peter and Lydia Brimelow’s discussion of NYAG Letitia James’s attack on us, and its threat to VDARE.com’s very survival. It includes an appeal for funds, so let me put the link to our donation page here at the top:
VDARE Publisher (and President of the VDARE Foundation) Lydia Brimelow and VDARE Editor Peter Brimelow talk about New York State Attorney General Letitia James lawfare attack on VDARE. pic.twitter.com/NAbwsuWJZA
— VDARE (@vdare) November 22, 2023
Peter Brimelow: I said in the spring that VDARE was under mortal threat because of this lawfare from this rogue Attorney General Letitia James in New York State.
And I’m afraid to say it’s only intensified since then.
Lydia Brimelow: The issue at stake between VDARE Foundation and the Attorney General is fundamentally one of freedom of speech.
And we made a good faith effort for a long time and through many thousands of pages of documents to play along because she has broad regulatory authority to make sure that charities in the state of New York are using donor money in an appropriate and legal way, which we are. So once Letitia James got as far as she could with the VDARE Foundation proper, that is to say once we had produced as many documents as we possibly could without violating the freedom of speech rights of our pseudonymous writers, she decided to expand the harassment and subpoena our directors themselves.
She’s asking them for documents that I have already turned over, such as minutes to board meetings and any information about payments they might have received from the VDARE Foundation, which by the way are none because these are volunteers. So what we’re facing now is just an expansion and amplification of the harassment that VDARE has already been enduring for the last 18 months.
Peter Brimelow: Most of 501c3 charities are pretty loosely run. They’re constantly in technical violation of all kinds of rules and so on. But we weren’t because we knew that Letitia James was lurking out there. We’ve been registered in New York for more than 20 years and we’ve been watching as the situation has gotten steadily more hostile to free speech there.
I’m sure they were appalled to find that in fact we were in compliance with everything and there was no easy way to trip us up. So they just continued to hammer away at these massive fishing expeditions, which are obviously designed to bleed us to death and make us run out of money.
Lydia Brimelow: There are a number of aspects of this dynamic between the VDARE Foundation and Letitia James that have come as a surprise to our lawyers, although they’re very experienced in their own fields, because Letitia James and her office are determined to be so unethical in their engagement with us and what should be a standard and unremarkable regulatory inquiry is actually extremely hostile. So for example, we’re in this ludicrous position of fighting the same issues in different courts at the same time.
By that I mean once VDARE had in good faith complied with the subpoenas as much as we could without going into the violation of freedom of speech of our pseudonymous writers and ourselves, we filed in federal court for relief saying to the judge, essentially, we’ve done as much as we can, we have complied as much as we possibly can, please protect us now from having to go further into what would be a violation.
And what we were advised and what everyone expected because it’s the tradition and the custom of the court is that once someone files a question in federal court, another party or the same party can’t go into a separate court and file over the same questions. But in fact, Letitia James, a few days later after we had already filed in federal court and she already got notice of it, did file in state court a motion to compel. So we had filed a motion for relief. She filed a motion to compel. They’re addressing fundamentally the same questions, at which point the state judge, Sabrina Kraus, should have said, “I see that you have filed this, but it’s already been being addressed in federal court. So we will hold off on any progress or decisions until we see what happens in federal court. And if there are any remaining questions, we may pick this up or we may not.” But she declined to do that. She allowed the filing to go forward. And at that point, the federal judge, Judge Scullin, should have issued an emergency injunction saying, “No, I am now saying the state action cannot proceed because there is a federal action. And until the federal action is resolved, which was filed first, then the state action should not proceed.” He actually declined to do that as well. So we are now facing the same questions in separate courts that may at some point result in conflicting decisions at the same time. How is that supposed to resolve?
Peter Brimelow: I mean, it’s a long established principle in American politics that people are allowed to write pseudonymously. And back of course to the Federalist Papers, which are all under pseudonyms. And it’s never been more important than it [is] now because of this incredible reign of terror that’s swept across the country where people have been doxxed and forced out of jobs and losing their careers because of harassment from Leftists if they’re discovered to have said the wrong thing. So that’s why we’re fighting here. We have people who are federal employees writing for us, whistleblowers. We have people working very sensitive jobs writing for us.
I may say these writers are really profoundly alarmed about what’s going on.
Lydia Brimelow: We’re concerned on two levels. One is for these names to get into the hands of Letitia James and whoever else is in her office is bad enough because that’s a very hostile environment. And who knows what action they can take against those people once they see them. I think we all remember when the IRS decided to target Tea Party Movement for pure political persecution. But on top of that, Letitia James’ Attorney General’s office has a record of leaking to the public private names. They did this with Nikki Haley’s donors.
And Nikki Haley is not nearly as politically incorrect as the VDARE Foundation. Not only do we not want Letitia to know who they are, but we certainly don’t want the general public, i.e., Antifa and anyone else who decides to make a big deal about it to know who some of these people are. The doxxing question is very serious for a lot of people.
Most people who are in the dissident right do not live publicly the way that Peter and I do. Most people are much more vulnerable. They have jobs that are not resilient to political persecution. They have bosses and they have corporations that they have to answer to. Their families are sensitive. Their children are in public schools where they can’t be confident that their children will be protected.
The Left knows this and our enemies know this and they use it as a wedge against us. They use it as a silencing mechanism. For example, with the federal whistleblower, he has written extensively about what he has seen and his analysis of what’s going on. What are the chances in the context of the Biden administration that if his name gets leaked that he won’t be punished?
He has a family to support and even aside from a family to support, I know people that have gone through horrific things after having been doxxed, including being threatened by armed militants in their homes and their driveways, up to staking out their apartment complexes, losing their homes, having HOA’s turn against them, having it come up in divorce proceedings, having Child Protective Services called to interrogate their children without the parents present. I mean, this is a real horror story for some people.
Some people do express relief once they’ve been doxxed that they can live out loud, but it’s an enormous sacrifice. You know, they say things like, “Sure, now we live in a trailer in a rural area when we used to have a white collar job inside the Beltway, but at least we know who our friends are.” Well, that’s a very honorable attitude, but that’s not what we expected to be asking of them when we asked them to write a few thousand words on VDARE.com about how to save the historic American nation, and that is what Letitia James is making of it.
Peter Brimelow: This comes with a very high cost to us editorially. For example, I have writers who I’ve been talking to about doing articles for us, and they now say that they can’t because they’re terrified of having their identities revealed.
And that’s a classic example of a chilling effect.
Lydia Brimelow: I want to emphasize that we have not been asked for our donors’ names. I think that that at this point is a bridge too far even for Letitia James, but part of what makes the compliance with the subpoena so onerous is that I have to go through every single document as it comes through and come through it to make sure that no donors’ names are accidentally turned over. Everything has to be redacted, has to be combed through very carefully. And I don’t have a team of office help that can go in and do it for me.
We’re working on limited resources because we are a small organization. That’s how it is.
Peter Brimelow: The idea that the process is a punishment is something that’s actually been discussed in the academic literature, technical literature, because the burden of prosecution now, or in this case, regulatory enforcement, is so great for most people. It’s unsustainable. That’s why you see all these plea bargains, and that’s why most people don’t go to court. You see that with the J-6 defendants. These people are not able to raise the money to defend themselves.
Lydia Brimelow: We’ve had to spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point in first complying with the subpoenas and now defending ourselves in court over the First Amendment protections. That’s money that was all donated to us with the idea that it would be spent on the website and on amplifying the voice of the Historic American Nation.
So Letitia James knows that not only can she tie us up in terms of our time and in terms of distress, but if they continue to bleed us of money, then ultimately we may hit a wall and not be able to continue anymore.
Peter Brimelow: I think the purchase of the castle, the Berkeley Springs Castle here in West Virginia, seems to have really annoyed them. It certainly annoyed the enforcers like the Southern Poverty Law Center and so on, who repeatedly could come into town and try to cause trouble for us. And I think it’s not simply because the castle’s a beautiful and charismatic property, and it was a great deal. We only paid 1.5 million for three cottages, one castle, 55 acres.
Lydia Brimelow: It was actually 1.4 million that we bought it for. It’s a better deal than you just told people it was.
Peter Brimelow: When I wrote the first article on the subject in the spring, I went and looked at Washington Real Estate, and I found that for 1.5 million, we could have bought a two bedroom condominium in Foggy Bottom.
Lydia Brimelow: It wouldn’t accommodate many speakers or guests at a conference though.
Peter Brimelow: And of course, if you can’t have a conference and you can’t have in real life meetings, the movement is materially damaged. It’s unable to fructify.
And I think that’s a very conscious decision that they made, that they simply don’t want us to put our head over the parapet and start building our networks and so on. And I think it actually alarms them — according to the SPLC — that Berkeley Springs is so close to Washington, D.C. They know that we’re going to be able to develop greater influence over people inside the Beltway and allies there in Congress and congressional staffers and so on. They simply don’t want that to happen.
Lydia Brimelow: There’s a non-zero chance that Letitia James will manage to get in a kill shot against the VDARE Foundation.
It’s not clear to me at all what that is since we’re completely innocent of everything, but incredibly terrible things are happening in the justice system right now. This is not being served. And so we would be irresponsible if we didn’t consider the possibility that the VDARE Foundation may not survive this. That’s why Peter says it’s a mortal threat. That said, just because the VDARE Foundation may not survive does not mean the mission won’t go on. Peter and I are blessed to work very well together. Our team is very cohesive and we’re all mission-oriented people. We work here not because it’s in the Beltway, because it’s not, not because it’s incredibly lucrative because it’s not, but because we actually believe in it and this is what our life calling is. And so if the VDARE Foundation doesn’t make it, if Letitia James is able to stifle us, well, she’s not able to stifle us individually or as a team. So there will be a future for our work after it, whether we’re absorbed into another organization, whether we regroup and create something, something different, whether we change our M.O. or our branding or whatever. Keeping in mind that Peter and I and the board and our lawyers are going to fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening. But if it does happen, that’s still not the end of the story. We’re going to continue this fight regardless of what she tries to do to us. We can only ask that our readers and our supporters and our donors stick with us faithfully at this point as we fight it out. And if the time comes that they make the jump with us and follow us onto whatever the next project may be if we have to create one.
Peter Brimelow: But I think, and I think that they think, our opponents think, the cause of immigration patriotism is on the verge of breaking through. If you look at that, I think why Biden administration has just basically opened the borders. They think they only have a limited amount of time to Elect A New People, which is what they want to do. They want to bring as many people as possible, as many Third World people as possible, have them vote Democratic, which they believe they will do. They’ve taken this extremely reckless step, which is clearly impeachable, of not enforcing the law that requires them to remove illegals because they want them here. And they think we only have a limited amount of time to do it because they’re absolutely scared to death by Trump’s election. The sort of Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush wing of the Republican Party is virtually extinct at the popular level, but you don’t see people advocating for amnesty anymore, which is not the case even as late as 2016.
So from that point of view, we’re on the verge of breakthrough, and I think that’s why they’re so desperate to stop us. It’s not just us, it’s what they’re doing to Trump. It’s clearly extraordinary. It’s obviously a reckless attempt to … it’s a coup, actually. It’s a communist coup.
Lydia Brimelow: The America First movement feels new to a lot of people because that term has only become popular in the last few years. Immigration was not even a part of the conversation, part of the national conversation until Trump started his campaign. But VDARE .com has been focusing on these issues for 24 years. And while other people have sort of burned brightly and then burned out, VDARE .com has been publishing every day, multiple times a day, on the question of what is American national identity and how does mass immigration affect it? And the answer is negatively.
Peter Brimelow: You know, a funny thing about the immigration issue, when I first got involved in it and I wrote this NATIONAL REVIEW cover story “Time To Rethink Immigration” in 1992, it was astonishing to me to find that even quite well informed people, even politically conscious people, had no idea that there was an immigration issue, even though the numbers have been very high for a long time, have been rising. They thought it was like weather. Immigrants just arrive, or they don’t arrive, [one of] the things that comes and goes. It isn’t. It’s a government policy. It was triggered by the 1965 Immigration Act. And of course, that’s good news in a way because it means it can be untriggered. We could pass, say, for example, a 2026 immigration moratorium, no net immigration, and put that in place for the next 50 years to undo the damage of the last 50 years.
Lydia Brimelow: You see Turning Point having Steve Sailer on, Candace Owens comments on Tucker Carlson, things that Elon Musk is saying, Trump’s almost — you could even, by VDARE standards, call [them] — radical immigration positions, talking about mass deportations on a scale no one has ever seen. And these are the things that VDARE has been advocating for almost a quarter century, just waiting for them to come to fruition. And there’s, I suppose, a chance that as those things actually do become accomplished, VDARE itself does not survive.
But at the end of the day, we are a charity. What we do is nonprofit work because we really believe that it’s going to save the country. And we’re going to do everything we can in our power to make sure that we survive this wave of progress in these areas to ensure that they go from just being ideas and slogans to actually being delivered in terms of policy and mass understanding of their importance. But we can only do that with the support of our readers, with the donations that we get from the grassroots. And so with that, I appeal to you in this Christmas season and beyond to please help us as generously as you can.
Peter Brimelow: Now obviously, Letitia James is a huge pain in the neck for us, but we have, you know, continued to publish. We publish every day, sometimes several times a day. We get into new areas all the time and explore new issues like repatriation, all of which are not going to appear in the Establishment conservative press.
And the castle’s really taken off.
Lydia Brimelow: We have had two very successful conferences. We are planning a third in the spring. There is a twinkle of an idea that we might have a fourth actually in the summer. We’ve also continued with the VQ Quarterly Magazine. We have the Book Club Podcast, which is very popular. We have the 1620 Society, which is a group of donors that have decided to step forward in a material way and donate $100 a month on a recurring basis. They are a special club that gets to have first alerts for all of the in-person events that we have and the different opportunities.
And those things are absolutely flourishing. So in a way, you know, we have our little catacomb here that we continue to feed and it continues to develop and we’re developing wonderful friendships and networks with people which are growing every time we get together. It’s just a question of whether the scary monster from New York can try to pop our bubble. And so far, she has not been able to. And if we have anything to do with it, she will not be able to.
Peter Brimelow: I’ve written regularly on the site that miracles happen quite often in politics and nobody expected the Soviet Union to collapse. And nobody at the moment can see how this communist coup that we’re undergoing in America is going to end, but it can. That this is a season of miracles and I guess we all have to pray for the best.
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 the Publisher of VDARE.com, and President of the VDARE Foundation 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.