10/26/2020
I wrote recently that, since we filed our libel suit against The New York Times in January, “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.” (We expect a ruling in the next 3-4 months.)
Pretty much the same can be said about what’s happened since we filed VDARE Foundation vs. City Of Colorado Springs, John Suthers, also in Federal Court. The case stems from RINO Mayor John Suthers’ 2017 proclamation that he would not extend city services a.k.a. police protection to VDARE.com’s proposed conference at the Cheyenne Mountain Lodge. Not surprisingly, Cheyenne Mountain Lodge cancelled shortly afterwards. But there is very extensive federal case law establishing the principle that local governments must protect the First Amendment rights of even unpopular groups, regardless of cost. (Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance recently prevailed in court against a similar attempt to suppress its annual conference in Tennessee.) So we sued. My last update was here. The great Michelle Malkin, herself a resident of Colorado Springs, summarized this First Amendment atrocity here.
In the interim, Colorado too has gone mad. In Denver this summer, police obeyed an order to stand down and allowed Antifa to attack Michelle Malkin’s pro-police rally (shades of Charlottesville 2017). Subsequently, and not coincidentally, yet another Trump supporter was actually murdered at a patriot demonstration in what Malkin accurately describes as a Media-Political Assassination.
And in Colorado Springs itself this summer, the Suthers regime allowed Black Lives Matter vigilantes to launch a turba, a mass demonstration aimed at the home of a Colorado Springs police officer who had already been cleared in the cookie-cutter controversy ginned up after the police killing of black suspected felon De’Von Bailey.
Note that, presumably under orders from Mayor Suthers, the Colorado Springs police made no arrests at the turba — even in defense of their own.
It is simply axiomatic that if Mayor Suthers had defended VDARE.com’s First Amendment Rights in 2017 — our right to advocate a program that had in fact elected President Trump in 2016, and that carried Colorado Springs’ El Paso County 56%–34% — he would not now feel compelled to cede the city’s streets to a Communist gang.
Similarly, of course had the U.S Department of Justice followed through on the felony rioting charges it filed after Antifa attacks on President Trump’s Inauguration celebration, instead of allowing them to be sabotaged by federal Judge Lynn Leibovitz, we would not now be seeing similar Communist coups in cities across America.
More recent developments:
Under federal procedure, this ruling was not binding on the District Court and would not become final unless endorsed by the District Court. However…
Significantly, the District Court Judge could not bring herself to agree with the weak reasoning of her subordinate Magistrate. Instead, she invented reasons of her own, which our lawyers, Frederick C. Kelly III and Glen K. Allen, consider equally suspect.
They comment:
“The District Court in this case condoned flagrantly unconstitutional conduct by dismissing the VDARE Foundation’s detailed amended complaint. The court’s error-filled ruling, unless overturned, disregards and nullifies decades of Supreme Court and Tenth Circuit precedents, allowing the government to shut down speakers and associations it disagrees with simply by sending hostile messages and refusing to provide police protection it routinely provides to other persons. The District Court’s holding directly Supreme Court cases such as Forsyth County v. National Movement, 505 U.S. 123 (1992) (‘Speech cannot be financially burdened, anymore than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob.’”
Accordingly, on August 14, 2020, we appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. (See here — PDF.)
On October 14, 2020, the City of Colorado Springs responded. (See here — PDF.)
Our lawyers are now working on our reply brief, due November 4.
After that brief is filed, oral argument should be scheduled within a few months. After oral argument, a decision should be issued within six to nine months.
In the past, VDARE.com’s lawyer readers have made helpful suggestions on briefs and I invite them to continue: email Frederick C. Kelly III here; Glen K. Allen here.
When I announced VDARE.com’s Legal Defense Fund in February 2019, I wrote that
…the nightmare world of litigation, which VDARE.com has been compelled to enter because of the Totalitarian Left’s demonizing, deplatforming, defunding Reign of Terror, is arduous, expensive, time-consuming and unpredictable.
Litigation is indeed unpredictable — and it’s certainly expensive. I appeal to you to help us — click here. (Please note that you can specify which of our legal campaigns you wish to support.)
I said in my February 2019 announcement that “patriots have rights. They have just not organized to defend them — until now.”
At that point, a Reign of Terror was already sweeping America, as I described:
The Radical Left has hijacked America’s corporations and policy makers to such an extent that the very existence of patriotic movements is at risk.
A special target of their hate: any resistance to, or even discussion of, America’s immigration disaster. The elites on both the Left and Right have gambled everything on immigration-driven demographic change bringing them to power in America through cheap labor and cheap votes.
They are absolutely determined to prevent patriotic immigration reform, by whatever means necessary.
Their methods include shadow-banning; demonetization; deplatforming; denial of the right of free assembly; out-of-control vilification intended to intimidate and pathologize; and, in scores of incidents the Main Stream Media doesn’t dwell on, harassment and outright violence — extending all the way to the attempted murder of elected officials.
Now, nearly two years later, the reality of that Reign Of Terror is obvious even to ordinary, even apolitical Americans who know nothing about our tiny and beleaguered movement. Scores of cities have seen unchallenged riots, billions of dollars of damage have been done, but it is ordinary citizens who attempt to defend themselves that local officials have hit with extraordinarily vindictive prosecutions clearly designed to suppress all resistance to the Leftist agenda.
Samuel T. Francis, whose column VDARE.com carried until his premature death in 2005, coined the phrase “anarcho-tyranny” to describe the horrific situation when government will not protect citizens’ rights, but polices them intensely in other areas, above all if they attempt to defend their rights themselves — because it tacitly agrees with the anarchists’ goals.
In 2020, it is no longer possible to deny anarcho-tyranny has come to America.
I have no doubt that many people, probably including Mayor Suthers, would be happy if all public criticism of immigration were suppressed. Indeed, I expect that suppression to happen quickly if President Trump is not re-elected — and maybe if he is.
But right now, we do have the law, and the hope that justice will, eventually, be done — as it was in American Renaissance’s case (by a Clinton-appointed judge, let the record show).
I will post our reply brief when it becomes available. Meanwhile, again, I must ask you to please give generously to help us defend our rights, and yours — while we can.
I, and what the Founders described as “our posterity,” will be most grateful.
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.