04/20/2011
By Peter Brimelow, Editor, VDARE.com
Now is the Spring of our Discontent. Help VDARE.com turn it into summer.
Yes, I know William Shakespeare really said "Winter". (Richard the Third, Act 1: scene 1, 1-4). (And you know that Shakespeare is a dead white male much studied in America’s schools in the days before "diversity").
But, still, it’s been a sour and sad spring for immigration patriots.
So, in this letter to you, I need to say four things:
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The momentum of patriotic immigration has slowed. That’s partly because- |
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Repression is intensifying, as the Treason Lobby struggles with increasing desperation to get the immigration debate under control. |
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I am personally confident, as a battle-scarred veteran of the immigration wars, that the issue will get moving again soon. |
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BUT-VDARE.com needs YOUR help to play its part. Specifically, this Spring fundraiser MUST raise $30,000. I MUST keep the site closed until we make real progress toward that goal. |
"Three months ago, Americans who support patriotic immigration reform looked ahead to 2011 and saw themselves on the cusp of huge new victories at the state level-maybe even a decisive blow that would finally turn the tide against the pro-amnesty opposition …
"But it turned out that the Establishment was far more powerful and enduring than the optimists had imagined.
"The states are now almost halfway through the 2011 legislative session. The last state legislatures in session are set to wrap up business in July.
"But as things stand today, the Republican Party hasn’t delivered a single major legislative accomplishment for restrictionists at the state level that has been signed into law by a Republican governor. This hasn’t stopped Democrats and Republican-controlled committees in several states from killing dozens restrictionist proposals though."
Houston did say that "big victories are still possible". But he also coined a telling term for the coalition of opportunists, ideologues, subversives and short-sighted selfish business hogs that came together to block patriotic immigration reform on such a scale: "The Slave Power"-the name that Americans in the nineteenth century gave to the equally determined coalition supporting-and, it was widely believed, scheming to extend-slavery.
Will the arrogant intransigence of new "Slave Power" provoke a second Civil War?
In some sense, it already is doing just that.
But don’t get me wrong. I’m disgusted by this spring’s slump-and also by the failure of House Republicans and the continuing legal harassment of Arizona’s SB1070, both of which VDARE.com has chronicled carefully.
However, I’m not dismayed-or even particularly surprised.
Remember that after the 2008 election, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the Detroit Free Press that " on immigration, there’s been an agreement between [President-elect Barack] Obama and [Arizona Republican Senator John] McCain to move forward on that. … We've got McCain and we've got a few others. I don’t expect much of a fight at all."
Well, Reid did get a fight-and in the end he didn’t even dare bring amnesty up, even though he had a veto-proof majority for much of 2009.
Amnesty was stopped, to the amazement of everyone in Washington, by a spontaneous, leaderless, tsunami of resistance from out there in Americaland.
Which is exactly what stopped the Bush Amnesty attempts of 2006 and 2007-exactly what drives the Tea Parties and the Republican rebound (not that they deserved it, apparently) in 2010. And of course-as we've chronicled since VDARE.com began in 1999-it’s exactly what has badly shaken the elite-imposed War On Christmas, a tsunami that turned out to be a real sign of things to come.
VDARE.com can help create the next tsunami-but only if you give generously.
What’s happening here is profoundly important. These patriot tsunamis are signs that the American political class is losing control of the debate.
It’s now all too clear that the patriotic immigration reform cause did not gain traction, and cannot not be kick-started, from inside the Beltway. What gets it moving are ordinary Americans, armed with facts and arguments, bombarding their local Main Stream Media outlets, their political leaders.
At VDARE.com, we aim to provide those facts and arguments.
To me, the classic vindication of VDARE.COM’s grassroots strategy came after Bush’s last amnesty was defeated — in the words of a pro-amnesty newspaper editor, who wrote ruefully
"The opponents of the bill prevailed and they did so in a grand manner that I had to respect. It was democracy at its best-and an instructive lesson for anyone interested in politics. Countless times a day, I received messages from a variety of groups that had Freedom or American or Liberty as part of their title.
"The discipline of these groups was a sight to behold. Someone created a set of talking points that declared opponents need only focus on one word-amnesty-to denounce the legislation. And every group that came out against it did precisely that."
Note that this pro-amnesty editor was getting "messages" i.e. email-and that he had obviously never heard of the groups he was getting messages from, i.e., they were grass-roots organizations.
At VDARE.COM, our role is to create those "talking points", and the sophisticated arguments behind them, and make them available to patriots.
Our archived articles are all online-and we don’t charge!
And I’m happy to say we ran an article discussing the critical importance of the word "amnesty" way back in 2004.
One of my happiest moments recently was being on Chuck Wilder’s Los Angeles-based TalkBack radio show and having a caller from Indianapolis spontaneously tell us that he was printing off VDARE.COM articles to distribute at meetings of his local Tea Party group. Since then, other Tea Partiers have told me the same thing.
One example of how this new politics works: last year South Carolina Senator Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, no friend to patriotic immigration reform, raised the issue of "birthright citizenship"-the erroneous interpretation of the 14th Amendment by which the children of illegal aliens born in the U.S. are technically citizens, making them immediately eligible for taxpayer-funded benefits and their parents, for practical purposes, impossible to deport.
Amazingly Graham told a reporter that he had not been aware of the issue until it was raised by a woman in a Town hall meeting. (n.b. Graham is a lawyer! But law students don’t study the constitution anymore).
Again, I am happy to say that VDARE.com published its first in-depth critique of the Birthright Citizenship scandal back in 2001-almost exactly ten years ago.
Graham was certainly surprised by the firestorm that his raising the Birthright Citizenship issue caused-from well-informed citizens like his constituent at the Town Hall meeting, and by Treason Lobbyists enraged at this threat to their plot to abolish America. (VDARE.com’s Patrick Cleburne has just reported on a Rollins College FL a freshman who was actually denounced by faculty members in a Mao-style mass meeting for daring to write an article criticizing birthright citizenship.)
Unfortunately, Congressional Republicans have flinched from taking up the Birthright Citizenship issue-for now.
But next year is an election year. Politicians from all parties will meet many other patriots out there on the campaign trail, equally well-armed from reading the internet.
And, for what’s worth, VDARE.com’s Ed Rubenstein has done what seems to be the only estimate of the political impact of ending birthright citizenship: it would almost halve the GOP’s immigration-impelled drift to demographic disaster.
And then there’s repression.
It’s getting really serious. VDARE.com just posted a survey by a veteran public relations man, documenting how talk radio has gotten much less receptive to Politically Correct ideas (and immigration reform is almost the ultimate Politically Incorrect idea) over the last fifteen years.
Just after Christmas, I was able to publish an email exchange in which Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center privately threatened an official of the Federalist Society in Dallas Texas because he had invited me to debate the issue of Birthright Citizenship.
He stood firm-but many do not. Unfortunately, this includes the comfort-loving program officers typical at Establishment foundations. That is why we have come to depend increasingly on individual donations over our eleven years. It’s why we need your help-now.
There’s never been anything like this epidemic of Political Correctness in American history. The much-touted McCarthy Terror was never as intense and didn’t last as long-apart from all other considerations. (I've just assigned an article on this comparison.)
As I said during the (completely groundless) witch-hunt that followed the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords:
"American politics now is profoundly unstable. In effect, the Obama Administration is (to put it brutally) a Minority Occupation Government. At all costs, the Left must keep the historic American nation from uniting-which it nevertheless began to do (no thanks to the GOP leadership) in the 2010 election … . The question is whether they can cow the historic American nation into accepting its subjugation."
I expect this Political Correctness to become more intense as the Left nears its goal of Electing A New People through immigration. But I also expect the historic American nation to rebel.
The potential costs of this Political Correctness are very high. One of those comfort-loving foundation executives told me last year that his organization could no longer support VDARE.com because we publish Steve Sailer-our Sunday night columnist and regular blogger.
Steve Sailer is the pre-eminent American journalist covering the science of human differences and their political and social implications. Right now, it’s one of the hottest areas of intellectual inquiry.
But only among scholars. In the Main Stream Media (and apparently inside the Beltway) many of the issues that Steve Sailer raises, regardless of how thoughtful and well researched his treatment, cannot be discussed at all.
I especially like Steve’s work on education and Affirmative Action, but these are the issues he’s pioneered on VDARE.COM that he thinks I should mention:
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The "Diversity Recession". Steve was able to demonstrate that the subprime mortgage meltdown that triggered Crash of 2008 and the deepest recession for a generation came about because of a relentless campaign, by both Republican and Democratic Administrations, to promote minority home ownership by forcing banks to make riskier loans than they would otherwise have done. (So much for the Beltway’s bipartisan judgment). And the Obama Administration has started doing it again. |
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"The Sailer Strategy". Steve has repeatedly proved that the real target of opportunity in American electoral politics is the white vote, not minorities or immigrants. (I don’t really understand why this is so controversial, since it’s just a matter of math, but I've been explicitly assured that it unmentionable inside the Beltway). |
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"Affordable Family Formation". Steve has shown statistically that the key determinant in how states vote is how costly it is to buy a home in a safe neighborhood with good schools. Current mass immigration makes both more difficult. |
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"America’s Half-Blood Prince". Steve was the first to point out, from his reading Barack Obama’s own autobiography, that the President is not the postracial transcender that his handlers sold to the rest of the media, but instead is profoundly motivated by race. |
If VDARE.COM fails, Steve Sailer will have no other outlets for his path-breaking work.
But that’s true for so many of our writers.
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Who else but VDARE.Com would publish Brenda Walker on the Mexican drug dealers' takeover of California’s parks? (Wasn’t there something in the Constitution about the federal government’s duty to protect the states against invasion?) |
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Who else but VDARE.Com would publish Patrick Cleburne’s devastating analysis of the finances of the Southern Poverty Law Center (Known to us as the $PLC), revealing that it’s basically a huge, aggressively managed investment pool to which a moderately-sized leftist public interest law firm is anomalously attached? |
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Who but VDARE.Com would publish our anonymous Washington Watcher’s analysis of why the congressional Republicans can’t advocate a moratorium or Birthright Citizenship reform-and which of them might do so? |
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Who but VDARE.Com would publish Ed Rubenstein’s meticulous documentation of what proportion of new jobs go to immigrants, not Americans-proof of worker displacement that should accompany every MSM discussion of unemployment but (guess what?) never does. |
We post every day at VDARE.COM, an enormous amount of material. There are just so many targets!
And what we post is prepared to the highest professional standards-I've not been working in the Mainstream Media for nearly 40 years for nothing. And we use hyperlinks, not the least of the advantages of this wonderful new medium, better than anyone else on the internet … at least, I think so. They help us document our case. Readers who are new to the cause of patriotic immigration reform find our hyperlinks particularly compelling. But the whole process is very labor-intensive.
Money is our secret weapon at VDARE.COM. Our fixed costs are very low, we operate entirely virtually. We don’t have to pay printing and postage (thank goodness!).
What this means: essentially everything you give goes to pay writers and editors.
Our writers and editors are not paid as much as I would like. But they do get something. This ability to pay our writers is what has distinguished VDARE.COM from a host of excellent but evanescent blogs which have come and gone.
Writers will often write for love-because they passionately believe in our cause. But in the long run, they need to be able to justify the time spent, to their families and to themselves.
At VDARE.COM, we are in this for the long haul. We are building an institution. We need money to do that. We can only do it with your help.
To me as a professional journalist, the quantity and quality of non-professional writing on the immigration issue that comes in over the e-transom has been a revelation. Many of these writers have full-time careers in other fields, some are students; I encourage these to write anonymously because of the very real reign of terror imposed by the curse of Political Correctness. Others are struggling, idealistic free-lancers; I shudder for them. All are patriots deprived of outlets because of the orthodoxy of the Mainstream Media.
The last ten years have convinced me that an issue like patriotic immigration reform can only be addressed from completely outside the political establishment. I already knew that the Main Stream Media, liberal and "conservative", would not carry facts and analysis about America’s immigration disaster. But I have been sorry to see that even fairly brave conventional funders can be intimidated by the terrible curse of Political Correctness.
Fortunately, the internet makes possible a wholly new type of journalism: one financed directly by its readers because they believe in the cause.
This strikes me as an entirely legitimate form of economic activity, like a church. And like a church, it’s tax-deductible!
But in answer to capitalist purists among our readers: We do have two conventional sources of income-advertizing, through the mysterious automatic mechanism of Google Ads (yes, I know some of the ads are weird-but they are helping us keep going); and sales of books, and a surprising range of other items, through Amazon.com.
So we are trying everything. But in the end, we depend on you, to give generously.
One final thought after tax week: President Obama has made it official: he wants to raise taxes. Does anyone want to bet that the Congressional Republicans won’t end up compromising? It’s not looking good for the "rich"-which Obama defines very broadly.
But your donations to VDARE.COM are tax-deductible. More and more, if you give money to us, Washington doesn’t get it.
It’s one bright spot in a bad fiscal situation!
Please help us now.
I, and all of us at VDARE.COM, believe future generations of Americans, will be profoundly grateful.
Peter Brimelow
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