[PETER BRIMELOW writes: In the next few days, I have to force myself to write a comprehensive update on what’s happened since New York Attorney General Letitita James’ lawfare batterered us into suspending the VDARE.com website more than two years ago. Gearing up, I came across this incisive summary of the issues involved, which I missed because it was posted long before Greg Johnson persuaded me to resurface on substack. Two of the point it makes are rarely noted. (1) We fought James’ flagrantly excessive subpoena demands because we wanted to protect the identities of our writers (and donors), which we had every reason to believe she would leak. I still find it incredible that no judge has recognized the obvious First Amendment issue. (2) James was able to inflict the $1 million-plus “investigation” costs that forced us to suspend even before actually suing us. This, of course, is the type of prosecutorial abuse about which I interviewed Paul Craig Roberts in FORBES Magazine over 25 years ago. I didn’t need to experience it first-hand.

Subsequently we have indeed been sued as the VDARE Foundation and also personally. The legal action is accelerating. More later, alas.

VDARE goes down with the ship rather than give up their writers

(First published on Bennett’s Phylactery, April 9, 2024)

The selective prosecution of political enemies is nothing new, but they used to maintain at least the performance of objectivity.

In 2018, New York Attorney General Letitia James publicly campaigned on a promise to target her political enemies, and got puff pieces from NPR and the Washington Post.

Now, she is threatening anti-immigration nonprofit VDARE with bankruptcy unless they divulge the identities of their anonymous writers as part of a subpoena regarding the Berkeley Springs Castle in West Virginia.

Obviously the identities of those writers has nothing to do with the provenance of their property, any more than a New York Attorney General has anything to do with a real estate purchase in West Virginia — but unfortunately VDARE incorporated their nonprofit in New York (back in 1999, when that wasn’t an obviously crazy thing to do), which puts them in Letitia James’ jurisdiction.

Without ever explicitly charging them with any wrongdoing, James has succeeded in bleeding VDARE for over a million dollars. The process is the punishment.

VDARE could, of course, hand over the names of their writers (who would certainly become unemployable in any corporate setting) — but the Brimelows have made the courageous decision to defy the order, and close up shop rather than roll on their people.

Two important lessons from this fiasco:

1. Nonprofit status is dangerous for anyone with unauthorized opinions.

Nothing the Brimelows did was out of the ordinary or at odds with the wishes of their donors — but the accounting and reporting requirements imposed by 501(c)(3) status are onerous, and defending your actions against a hostile and determined State is probably not worth the tax breaks.

Of course, this amounts to a massive subsidy for leftist action in the US through tax-advantaged NGOs — but not much can be done about that until red-state AGs are willing to respond in kind.

2. Minimize your professional and investment exposure to blue jurisdictions.

Incorporating in Delaware was a $55 billion mistake for Elon Musk. Douglass Mackey got a kangaroo court in Brooklyn (despite posting from Manhattan) because the prosecution argued that the data passed through Brooklyn on its way to Georgia and California. Donald Trump’s real estate holdings in New York created the justification for a $454 million penalty (for perspective, his 2016 campaign cost $600 million).

These are high-profile lawfare cases, but even basic property rights are increasingly at risk. Squatting laws have made ownership of real estate — especially rental properties, but in some cases even personal homes — a very dicey proposition in Atlanta, New York, Seattle, and other leftist-controlled cities.

You should get out if you can.

Keith Woods speaking at the Berkeley Springs Castle. We never succeeded in getting Ann Coulter there. But maybe if we can start conferences again…

I’ve been tied up with Discovery resulting from New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ lawfare against us, Land Of The Free. But yesterday I was distracted by a reader’s comment into a displacement-activity exchange that I’ve decided to immortalize here.

Irish internet phenom Keith Woods (his speech to the 2024 VDARE conference is here) recently Noted this on his substack:

Keith Woods 18h @keithwoodspub

Liberals could fatally undermine the “far right” and solve 90% of the problems of immigration by just selecting immigrants from other European countries. It’s the ultimate “solve everything” switch.

The random stabbings, rapes, ethnic ghettos, grievance narratives against natives, elevated crime rates, they all come from importing large non-White populations.

Even Ireland’s former Taoiseach, when he didn’t know he was being recorded, admitted he didn’t have a problem with immigration so much as Africans and Islam. Even if you ignore race, that’s the common sense position of anyone who just looks at the outcomes of immigration policy, but it’s impossible to imagine him ever saying that openly in public life.

But modern liberalism begins from the premise that it is evil to make political judgements on the basis of group identity, so we are permanently trapped in this political dialectic between infinity immigration and secondary arguments about services and integration. Conor’s messaging is much better – import the third world, become the third world!

106 Likes, 12 Replies, 8 Restacks Jun 10 at 6:24 AM

Of course, as Keith knows perfectly well, Western governments would never flip that “solve everything” switch and ban Third World immigration because they HATE the nations (= ethnocultural entities) that they rule and want to deracinate them. But nevertheless I helpfully restacked his idea with a comment:

The much-vilified but unimpeachably sensible 1924 immigration cutoff was based on the assumption that ethnicity matters. And, whatever else you can say about it (a lot), the post-1965 Hart-Cellar immigration inflow has now incontrovertibly confirmed that ethnicity does matter (a lot).

My reader said:

I replied:

But then I realized my reader was actually referring to an Ann Coulter Post in which she had hilariously tortured Google about the absence of straight white Protestant men in the Biden White House that I had also just helpfully Restacked with a comment. They both (this is my excuse) dealt with currently-unmentionable ethnic patterns.

So I followed up with my reader:

Kevin MacDonald’s 2011 article here (for the record, he was brought up an Irish/ German Catholic, just like Lydia) is a very funny account of the DAILY SHOW’s flying him from California to New York to discuss the final disappearance of White Protestants from the U.S. Supreme Court—and the subsequent arbitrary suppression of the interview. Probably the producers genuinely became afraid that WASPS would rise in rebellion with pitchforks and torches if the remarkable fact was publicly Noticed.

So it’s not just Google that doesn’t want to mention the mysterious vanishing Protestants

Of course, they don’t seem to want to mention it themselves.

Race is even more unmentionable. VDARE.com first analyzed the increasingly bipolar racial distribution of the Republican and Democratic parties in 2018. The GOP is de facto the White Party; the Democrats are the party of POCs, Jews, homosxuals.

This means that what amounts to two nations are warring in the bosom of a single state. (A reference to Canadian history, which I think everyone ought to know, dammit).

And this, of course, explains the increasingly zero-sum nature of American politics. One pole of the bipolar electorate might well think it has the chance to conquer the other—and/ or that it can’t afford to lose.

I think this is an interesting development. But I don’t see it discussed.

My final word to my reader:

Meaghan Bowler came all the way from Australia to marry Jesse Jones. He stabbed her multiple times

Kenn Gividen’s computer broke down recently (before VDARE.com’s mugging by NYAG Letitia James, we would simply have bought him a new one), so his April 2026 roundup of America’s ongoing black-on-white homicide Holocaust™ wasn’t published until May 21. Which means his May 2026 survey will appear next week—he’s relentless.

But then, so is America’s black-on-white Holocaust™.

Before VDARE.com was mugged by Letitia James, we used to report Kenn’s roundup of black-on-white homicides under the running head “A Month In The Death Of White America”—example here. It was one of our most popular features. Maybe that’s why James mugged us. But thanks to her lawfare, VDARE.com can no longer pay Kenn. So I urge you subscribe to his substack AbateHate.com—it covers a lot more than black crime— here!

Since the mugging of VDARE.com, I have begun to analyze Kenn’s results separately from his own roundup e.g. my March analysis here. My analysis usually differs somewhat from Kenn’s, partly because of subsequent developments e.g. I’ve found a couple more immigrants this month; and partly because of methodology. Thus I include all of the black-on-white homicides that Kenn discovers in any given month, whereas in May he broke out the older killings that he had found separately (and there are generally a lot of them, only slowly surfacing). So he reports an April total of 43; my total is 53.

My philosophy: it all come out in the wash. Kenn reports Grok says there are 40-50 black-on-white homicides each month, comporting with FBI figures, which means he always misses 10-20. But the intense Regime Media suppression of Politically Incorrect racial hate facts sometimes lessens after the initial furor, e.g. in trials that no-one is monitoring.

Except for us.

The other difference between Kenn and myself: I look for overall themes in the American black-on-white Holocaust™, whereas he lets the appalling truth just speak for itself.

Not for the first time, the theme that leaps out from the April data:

• The absolutely extraordinary number of white women regularly killed by Black Significant Others (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here).

Thus my featured image, above,

is of Meaghan Bowler, who came all the way from Australia to marry Jesse Nichols Jones, also pictured, who then proceeded to stab her multiple times (this is a recurrent aspect of Black Significant Other killings) despite having two children with her.

In other words, even apparently stable Black Significant Other relationships can end in savage homicide.

In contrast, it is vanishingly rare to see the opposite: black women killed by White Significant Others. Kenn found no examples at all in April.

• A related theme: Black Significant Other Collateral Damage, e.g, a white brother trying to protect his sister from a black ex-boyfriend (examples here, here).

To put Black Significant Other killings in perspective: in the 1970s, feminist scholars began whooping up the concept of “femicide,” the killing of women. They never agreed whether this meant all killings of women, or just killings of women for being women. But where is the discussion of Black Significant Other femicide of White domestic partners?

• And if “femicide” does mean the apparently-motiveless black killing of white women, April examples are here, here, here.

Where are the feminist scholars on this?

Other consistent themes:

• Crossfire. Innocent whites die in crossfire between black shooters every month, here, here, here, here.

• White deaths in robberies, here, here, here, here.

• White deaths in illegal drug transactions (bad idea!), here, here.

• Black impulsivity here, here, here.

• Black stupidity as in how could he have possibly expected to get away with this? Here

• Vehicular homicide. Kenn includes these, although it bothers liberal me because they could be genuine accidents. But some of these are indeed plainly criminally reckless here, here,

• Home invasion here.

• Immigrant/ immigrant stock homicides. The Regime Media represses the immigration status of criminals even more sternly than their race. But the recent surge of immigrants is so great that it can be detected because some don’t even have Americanized names— here, here, here, here.

Kenn counted just five white-on-black homicides in April. Obviously this is tellingly disproportionate, given that the white population is (still) so much larger than the black.

One white-on-black homicide was a road rage incident in which the perp has a typically Puerto Rican/ Ashkenazi Jewish name. Another appears to be a confrontation between white and black teenagers.

But we don’t know the details—because local media coverage has ignominiously collapsed, often relying entirely on law enforcement press releases.

This is particularly unfortunate because local media would often report race when the national media was working hard to repress it. But no more.

So please send Kenn Gividen tips by DMing him on his substack Chat, or email him at Abatehate@usa.com.

Blacks, POCs, now majority of $PLC Board

[PETER BRIMELOW writes: Patrick Cleburne was one of VDARE.com’s most valued contributors (his archive here). I particularly liked his analyses of the SPLC’s finances—he was the first to discover that it had an offshore bank account—but he refused to update them because he got bored by its apparent invincibility. Now he has been inspired to return. Sign up for his free substack, where he is Free At Last from my inhibiting editorial hand, here].

PATRICK CLEBURNE: Why VDARE called Southern Poverty Law Center the “$PLC”

We at VDARE always followed the lead of our old friend Paul Craig Roberts in believing that the bank fraud legislation that Congress cooked up 1989-90 supposedly because of the War On Drugs, subsequently enhanced during the War On Terror, is a major infringement of liberty and a big step towards an American Police State.

So it was actually with (somewhat) mixed feelings I heard the news that our tormentors at the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] being indicted for

• 6 counts of wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343)

• 4 counts of false statements to a federally insured bank (18 U.S.C. § 1014)

• 1 count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering (18 U.S.C. § 1956(h))

(Not primarly for paying monies to questionable groups, as often misrepresented, including, alarmingly, by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at the DOJ Press Conference.)

These charges will be extremely difficult to defeat, as chillingly laid out in the early part of Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud (Bits about Money May 1^st, 2026.)

There is also the intriguing question of discovery. As Lydia Brimelow says in It’s All Happening For The SPLC!

Discovery will be a bear for them (I know!). And it could find evidence of tortious interference.

Tortious interference is when A and B have a contractual relationship and C comes along and blows it up, causing damage. Like, to choose an example at random, if VDARE had a conference scheduled at the Cheyenne Mountain Lodge in Colorado Springs, CO, with deposits fully paid up and tickets sold, and the SPLC or their minions intentionally disrupted that conference, causing the Lodge to pay out liquidated damages and VDARE to lose its conference. If that happened, the SPLC could be prosecuted for tortious interference.

Despite these exciting developments, I think it important to remember the first evidence that persuaded some alert members of the general public (its victims and, apparently, some of its employees already knew) that the SPLC was morally depraved. This was the organization’s extremely peculiar handling of its finances, specifically the obsessive squirreling away of a remarkable money mountain.

For three years, in 2009, 2010, and 2011, I posted on VDARE exhaustive analyses of the Financial Reports and Form 990s of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which for obvious reasons I lovingly nicknamed the $PLC. (Form 990 is an extremely intrusive questionnaire which tax-exempt charities (“501(c)(3)s”) have to submit to the Federal Government.)

These articles were:

[A] The Good News: SPLC loses $50 Million. Bad news: $PLC can afford it 04/08/2009

[B] Will The Southern Poverty Law (And Investing) Center Return Its Madoff Money? 05/20/2010

[C] Is The Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) The Next Financial Bubble? 06/01/2011

I followed up in 2017 with a summary and partial update -

[D] Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) Handling Its Loot Even More Strangely 08/31/2017

In this article, for convenience’s sake, I will refer to each below by letter.

The salient fact which emerged from these inspections: the Southern Poverty Law Center was extremely wealthy. Even in the year ending 10-31-2008 dealt with in [A], some $32.4 million was raised from the public and combined assets totaled $191.8 Mm.

A peculiar feature was a $156.2 Mm “Endowment Fund”. As I discussed in [A], almost all of this was (and is) not an Endowment Fund in the legal sense usually meant in the charity world, with only limited and specific disbursements allowed. Instead the pool was entirely at the discretion of the $PLC management, who had chosen to separate it from the operating business for unpersuasive reasons.

The intervening years have been kind to the $PLC. The latest reports, for the year ending 10-31-2024, show “Contributions” of $129.1 Mm, and “Total Assets” of $829.2 Mm including “Endowment Assets” of $738.4 Mm.

I noted in [A] that, even in the financially stressful year of 2008, the $PLC had managed to squirrel away another $4Mm from operating revenue into its “Endowment Fund”—12.3 cents of every dollar contributed. Also, it had committed to pay $8.3Mm to “limited partnerships and LLCs”—apparently held in the “Endowment Fund”—i.e. more than the $8 million it spent on “Legal Services” in 2008!

This by a ”Law Center” mainly famous at the time for politically-motivated lawfare.

No donations were made to help any other Leftist 501(c)(3), although many were hard hit that year.

The “Poverty Palace”—the SPLC’s purpose-built HQ in Montgomery AL

Of course, several writers whom I cite in [A] had already been repelled by the $PLC’s money-grubbing. My favorite is Joan Wypijewski’s scathing advice to her liberal readers in The Nation: (You Can’t Get There From Here, February 26, 2001):

What is the Poverty Law Center doing…? Mainly making money…the center doesn’t devote all of its resources to any kind of fight….A few years ago the American Institute of Philanthropy gave the SPLC an F for ‘excessive’ reserves. [VDARE.com note: as it still does in its December 2008 Rating Guide] So readers, rip up those pledges to the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

(Per Grok, the SPLC still got an F in 2025)

An extraordinary aspect of the $PLC’s squirreling away of assets: the extreme aggressiveness with which the portfolio is managed.

When I looked at their accounts for the year ended 10-31-2009 discussed in [B], I fully expected to find they had sustained losses in the Madoff Ponzi fraud, which collapsed in December 2008. Many charities and endowments did, because the Madoff marketing pitch, extremely stable but adequate returns with a long track record, had great attractions for conservative fiduciaries.

But there were no losses. For the $PLC, what was jokingly called the “Jewish T-Bill” was apparently not what they were looking for.

This was vividly illustrated in the accounts for that year. For the first time, the $PLC disclosed in in its 990 that it had an offshore bank account, in the tax-haven of the Cayman Islands.

Why a tax-exempt entity like the $PLC needs a bank relationship in a tax haven is a mystery. The $PLC is, after all, tax-exempt. And even quite small Hedge Funds groups have mirror on- and off-shore funds which offer the same strategy. Any suggestion that it was necessary to go offshore for a particular management style is implausible.

In [D], I noted a quote reported an excellent article by Joe Schoffstall in the Washington Free Beacon (Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities August 31, 2017)

“I’ve never known a US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services to have any foreign bank accounts,” said Amy Sterling Casil, CEO of Pacific Human Capital, a California-based nonprofit consulting firm… I am stunned to learn of transfers of millions to offshore bank accounts. It is a huge red flag and would have been completely unacceptable to any wealthy, responsible, experienced board member who was committed to a charitable mission who I ever worked with.”

“It is unethical for any US-based charity to invest large sums of money overseas,” said Casil. “I know of no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money in overseas, unregulated bank accounts.”

Fast-forward to the present: in the 990 dealing with the year ending 10-31-2024, the $PLC again admits to having a foreign bank account but curiously fails to answer the follow-up question about location. However, in the section disclosing “Activities Outside The United States” it does report having “Investments” of $30.7 Mm in the “Central America and the Caribbean” region. Maybe not answering the account location question was a clerical error.

By the time I wrote [C] in 2011, I was able to report what the SPLC was doing with these enormous liquid resources.

It was making them illiquid and non-transparent—by moving them into “alternative investments,” investment partnerships of various types. In 2009 75.4% of the investment portfolio was so deployed, up from 49% in 2008—by 2010 the proportion was up to 87% —i.e. substantially all of it.

This policy has been maintained. The latest $PLC Financial Statement, for the year ending 10-31-2024, indicates the proportion described as ‘long-term investments’ was 94.5%.

Why the $PLC has chosen to tie its capital up in this illiquid way is a puzzle to me. In fact, why it has chosen to amass so much money at all is also a mystery. Personal enrichment seems, I think, to be ruled out by the extremely rigorous nature of the 990 (assuming there is not outright misrepresentation). And it has to be said that the salaries paid to senior executives, while high perhaps for inexpensive Montgomery AL, are not huge by non-profit standards. Margaret Huang, President and CEO during the latest reporting period, was paid a total of just $522,740. And the directors have never been paid fees. Far more egregious cases exist in the world of charities.

Perhaps Morris Dees, the founder of the $PLC, and J Richard Cohen, the long-time President, the architects of this strange organization, enjoyed being money managers and effectively Fund-of Fund executives? It is certainly a pleasant life.

A little more than 20 years ago, the $PLC began an important shift in targeting. Their key fundraising base, which Peter Brimelow has described as “the elderly Holocaust-haunted rich” were dying off. And more or less every White man in the South was aware that anyone purporting to be a recruiter for any Ku Klux Klan outfit was probably an FBI agent provocateur. The low hanging fruit had been harvested.

So the $PLC took up immigration, targeting even the most timid and professionally ineffectual immigration patriot outfits. Thus after it had existed for 29 years, the $PLC finally named the biggest, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a “Hate Group” (VDARE.com was proud to accept this accolade after only 4 years!). I discussed this event and FAIR’s characteristically inept reply in FAIR On The SPLC: Nice Guys Get Smeared Some More 09-14-2009.

Immigrants themselves, of course, were useless as a fundraising field. But the Democrat Nomenklatura had woken up to the point made in Peter Brimelow’s 1995 book Alien Nation—that American immigration policy was “Electing a New People” with them the primary beneficiaries. By the middle of the next decade, Democrat Party policy had reached the current ‘No Borders’ stance. Many of the Democratic plutocrats, driven anyway as they usually are by anti-Historic American animus, were happy to pay the $PLC to protect this trend.

The $PLC was a particularly valuable hire in this respect because of the role it fallaciously claimed to have played in the sacred “Civil Rights” movement. The Main Stream Media effectively accorded its pronouncements something like Papal Infallibility. Being declared a Hate Group in the ensuing reign of terror/ Cancel Culture years meant journalists were afraid to quote such a source. Increasingly, a whole range of normal commercial services would be denied. Even supposedly conservative outfits like Human Events shamefully drank the Kool-Aid.

In 2011 in [C] I said

the $PLC is in effect a modest public interest law firm and fundraising operation, linked to a very large, wildly aggressive investment pool. It’s really the Southern Poverty Law and Investing Center!

But the ensuing years made clear I should have said Southern Poverty Law, Investing & Political Police Center.

Recently, however, the tide has turned against the $PLC. From about 2010 with the American Family Council (AFA) and the Family Research Council (FRC) it started naming various Christian organizations “Hate Groups” for their views on sexuality and abortion—transparently in a quest for homosexual money. This puzzled and offended many Normies. Then in In June 2018, the $PLC issued an apology and paid $3.375 Mm to UK citizen Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation for accusing him of being an anti- Muslim extremist.

Finally, in 2019, disaster really struck. To quote the current Wikipedia page on the Southern Poverty Law Center:

In March 2019, the SPLC fired founder Morris Dees for undisclosed reasons and removed his profile from the SPLC website… Following the dismissal, a letter signed by two dozen SPLC employees was sent to management, expressing concern that “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism threaten the moral authority of this organization and our integrity along with it.”

A week later, President Richard Cohen and legal director Rhonda Brownstein announced their resignations…The associate legal director Meredith Horton quit, alleging concerns regarding workplace culture.

Since Dees had been canonized by the Left as a secular Saint, with some idiots actually making a movie about him, this was a massive blow. The $PLC staffers were certainly right to say it threatened “the moral authority of this organization and our integrity”

$PLC co-founder Morris Dees

In his resignation statement, Cohen spoke reverentially of an upcoming “audit of the organization’s practices” by Tina Tchen, former Chief of Staff to Michelle Obama. But if completed, this report has never been made public.

SPLC President J. Richard Cohen

Such was the revulsion on the Left that The New Yorker was emboldened to publish The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center by Bob Moser (March 21 2019). This is a macabre account of the pervasive atmosphere of financial and sexual exploitation at the $PLC’s “Poverty Palace” headquarters in Montgomery AL.

Needless to say, it would have been better for America if Moser and a publication like The New Yorker had possessed the moral fiber to publish this expose back when Moser left the outfit in 2004. But that would have destroyed Moser’s career and been politically inconvenient.

Human failings are one thing, political embarrassments are quite another. Margaret Huang, imported in April 2020 as President and CEO, supplied these in plenty.

Before Huang arrived, the organization had, somewhat paradoxicaly for a Leftist outfit, indicated that it was determined to prevent its staff unionizing. But discontent was such that management’s effort failed. Then, after the October 7 2023 Gaza offensive, there was apparently a huge surge of pro-Palestinian sentiment among the (naturally highly politicized) staff. Huang responded in June 2024 by firing a quarter of them and shutting down some flagship programs. With money so plentiful, cost was not plausibly the reason. More likely these programs had particularly anti-Zionist staff.

I dealt with these important events in

The $PLC Massacre—Purging Pro-Palestinians? 06-14-2024

and

NOW I See Why $PLC Dumped Classroom Propaganda Program. Left’s Palestinian Purge Problem Just Beginning. 06-18-2024

and

SPLC Union Strikes Another Shattering Blow At $PLC. But Is This A Labor Or A Political Dispute? 06-20-2024

From X account of SPLC union— challenging management’s account

In fact this was an early sign of the epochal split between the senior Democratic Pols and their Zionist Donors on the one hand, and the Hard Left and younger zealots on the other. We are going to hear a great deal more about this.

In July 2025, Huang abruptly resigned. Bryan Fair, a Black University of Alabama Law professor, was appointed Interim CEO. He has explicitly said he is acting as a figurehead. As of May 2026 no permanent CEO has been appointed.

Bryan Fair, Interim President and CEO, Southern Poverty Law Center

So where does this leave the $PLC, with its financial and corporate governance under serious question, its liberal credentials badly damaged, its Federal indictment for bank and wire fraud (and, probably as an automatic consequence of the indictments, Donor-Advised Funds refusing to allow donations)?

Basically it leaves it in the hands of Blacks—at least ostensibly.

What might be called a Black Curtain of secrecy has come down over the SPLC website. It has been simplified, with all information on and pictures of directors and senior officers removed and financial information now buried in a sidebar. In the “Annual Report” and “Impact Statement,” (both of which have always been just sales brochures), almost all pictures are of Blacks alone, with only one showing Whites (in a street scene). This is a big departure from the traditionally carefully diverse illustrations of the past. Judging from a screenshot from March 29 2024, posted above, only four of the 13 Board Members are White (at least three apparently Jewish) and Blacks are in a majority.

In contrast, as recently as 2018, there only three Black members out of 13 and at least eight members appeared to be Jewish

Interestingly, the $PLC logo has been changed. The new one, appropriately, is Black and White.

Probably this tells us the ultimate fate of the $PLC. Footnote 13 of the 2024 Consolidated Financial Statements reports

During the year ended October 31, 2020, the Board of Directors approved $30 million from the Endowment Fund for the Vote Your Voice initiative…the Board of Directors approved a $100 million investment from the Endowment Fund over the next decade to support voter outreach…The commitment…marks a more-than-threefold increase…pledged in 2020.

The total Vote Your Voice expense for the year ended October 31, 2024 was $14,068,100 (total $41,964,614 for four years).

This does not directly state when the increase was voted.

I do not believe that any distributions from the “Endowment Fund” were ever allowed when Morris Dees was in control (ended 2019).

Vote Your Voice is a $PLC initiative to boost the Black & Brown vote in the South.

Of course it is axiomatic, and has been underlined by the recent Somali and BLM funding scandals (see here and here and here), that showering money on Black-controlled outfits just enables fraud.

So maybe the obsessive money-grubbing of Morris Dees will finally improve the fortunes of at least some in the Black community!

Lydia moderating a debate at West Virginia’s Berkeley Springs Castle, bought because the SPLC kept bullying hotels into cancelling VDARE.com conferences.

Peter Brimelow writes: James Edwards, host of The Political Cesspool radio show, recently had Lydia on to discuss the Southern Poverty Law Center indictments (they’re serious!), Michael Edison Hayden’s crazy book about VDARE, and NYAG Letitia James’ lawfare against us. Edwards also writes for the American Free Press, and he asked Lydia to contribute to a panel discussion about the SPLC indictments. It’s not yet available on the AFP site, but Kevin MacDonald has posted the whole thing on his Occidental Observer. Here’s what Lydia had to say:

American Free Press Panel Discussion on the SPLC Indictment

Lydia Brimelow, President of the Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation and half of the husband-wife team that ran VDare: My only question about the SPLC indictment is, what does this mean for the Historic American Nation? There are several facets of the answer that particularly interest me.

1. Does it damage the SPLC? Undeniably. Even if a large portion of their donors rally around and they drum up support to defend themselves against “persecution,” a flaw has been revealed. It will have repercussions. Not only will some portion of their donors lose enthusiasm, but the ability for our enemies to use the SPLC as their weapon of choice in Cancel Culture battles has been profoundly handicapped. And who knows, some of them might even go to jail. A girl can dream!

2. Does it benefit the SPLC or any of the Leftist with whom they are in league? They were hiding these transactions for a reason. If they thought the exposure would help their cause it would have been in their public communications. Even in the worst case for us – they beat the charges – great! It’s still an ugly clean-up job. The more resources they waste the better. Best case scenario for us…could be historic.

3. Does it damage the Historic American Nation? Not directly. It is extremely annoying that some influential voices of the mainstream Right are using the SPLC indictments to falsely claim that Unite the Right was a hoax, and it is worth correcting them. On the one hand, it shows how profoundly uninvested in our people they are. On the other hand, the distance (however inappropriate given the facts) that Fake News creates between the massive smear job that Charlottesville turned out to be, may permit some normal Americans to reconsider their fear in associating with right wing activism. Scapegoats have a purpose after all, and they do important psychological work. There is obviously the question of the paid informants and the people who were informed on, but I have to assume that if any juicy tidbit was shared, the SPLC has already cashed in on it. It’s all from years ago. The damage there is most likely already done.

4. Does it benefit the Historic American Nation? Yes. We should take any and all opportunities to celebrate, unconditionally. A federal indictment that will precipitate massive discovery against our enemies is an objective good, even if the SPLC manages to throw it off. In the best-case scenario – and I’m just talking about logical possibilities here, not realistic ones – the SPLC gets shut down.

Hope is a dangerous thing because disappointment is so painful. I have seen months lead to years when there are no victories. In that interminable desert, keeping the faith takes real effort. And, ultimately, God’s time is not our time – we may never see victory. But we’re called to fight, and we’re called to rally, and victory comes one win at a time.

So, pop some champagne and take this win, patriots! We’re joining you in a toast at Berkeley Springs Castle.

The indicted Southern Poverty Law Center’s favorite picture of Charles Murray. Maybe they were hoping he was about to give a Nazi salute

Recently, Charles (“The Bell Curve”) Murray tweeted/ Xed

In other words, my book ALIEN NATION: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, which came out in 1995, a year after The Bell Curve, made no impression on Charles, although we knew each other well.

I had already sort of intuited that.

I responded:

Charles, to his credit, replied:

This exchange inspired the following comment, heartwarming to me personally (thanks Matt!):

Gone but not forgotten!

Of all the factions I encountered during Alien Nation’s brief but intense moment in the MSM spotlight, Libertarians were by far the most bone-headed.

This was a mild sorrow to me because I had been deeply influenced by my encounter with libertarianism after coming to the U.S. from England to study at Stanford in 1970. (Libertarianism simply did not exist at the University of Sussex back then). I spent a lot of time working through the relationship between libertarianism with immigration patriotism—in fact, with any kind of patriotism—as Greg Johnson recently discussed in his review of Quinn Slobodian’s 2025 Hayek’s Bastards, a book which paradoxically is the closest thing to an intellectual biography I’m ever likely to get. (Greg’s parallel podcast interview with me is here).

Of course, by then I’d realized that many Libertarians, seeking for a once-size-fits-all explanation of the world, were psychologically similar to the dogmatic Student Marxists who had so brightened up my undergraduate days (and who now rule Britain). Although, of course, the Libertarians’ one-size-fits-all panacea was immeasurably superior.

But there was one exception to this: the “Paleolibertarians,” a factional split led by the brilliant (and famously factional) economist Murray Rothbard. Paleolibertarians were enthusiastically willing to consider what the new issue of post-1965 mass, non-traditional, immigration meant to libertarianism, partly because it so irritated what Rothbard gleefully termed The Kochtopus e.g. the Cato Institute.

And they did so until Rothbard’s untimely death in 1995, at what now seems to me to be the early age of 68. Thereafter their chief internet forum LewRockwell.com, edited by Mises Institute founder Lew Rockwell, regressed to left-Libertarianism, probably following its donors, and the Paleolibertarian faction was eclipsed.

But not completely. Rothbard’s most prominent student, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who has been described as “The Last Paleolibertarian, ” founded the Property and Freedom Society in 2006 and sustained the tradition. (I am sorry to learn that Hoppe’s long relationship with the Mises Institute has recently, abruptly, been Cancelled).

I spoke to his PFS conference in 2008.

The issue hasn’t gone away. (Sigh again)

"Immigration Is The Viagra Of The State"—A Libertarian Case Against Immigration

First published on VDARE.com, 06/04/2008

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I want to start off by thanking Hans [-Hermann Hoppe] and Guelchin [Imre, his wife and owner of the equally beautiful Karia Princess Hotel] for hosting this conference and in particular for inviting me to speak here today.

We’re at a peculiar moment in the history of liberty. It’s been almost seventeen years since the Soviet Union collapsed. (I’m acutely aware of this because my son was born that day, making him, as I like to think, the very first post-Communist baby!) At that time, even a life-long American academic socialist like Robert Heilbroner was compelled to confess, in a celebrated essay in the New Yorker magazine, [The Triumph Of Capitalism, January 23, 1989] that the century-old battle between capitalism and socialism is over and capitalism has won.

Yet in the US it’s very probable that the party of free markets—perhaps I should say the alleged party of free markets—is going to be annihilated in this year’s election and that the party of statism may be in power for a generation.

There are obviously a number of reasons for this reversal. But one of them, I think, is that (at least in the US) libertarianism rested on its laurels and simply did not address the next generation of problems that came to the fore amid the wreckage of socialism. One of those is problems is immigration and, ultimately, the role of the national community, the nation-state. As I understand it, the role of the Property and Freedom Society is to address those problems and to rearticulate the libertarian vision.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe did address the problem of immigration, in his own writings and by arranging for a special issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, the summer 1998 issue [Volume 13, Number 2] guest edited by Ralph Raico, which was devoted to the subject. It’s a seminal volume of essays, revealing for example that the dean of American libertarian philosophers, John Hospers, who actually received one electoral college vote when he ran for President as the Libertarian Party candidate in 1972, rejected Open Borders and the notion that if you support free trade, you have to support free immigration. [A Libertarian Argument Against Opening Borders(PDF). ]I don’t think the debate among libertarians has moved much further forward, greatly to the discredit of the Libertarian Establishment. Hans should really be giving this talk today. But I guess he believes in the Division Of Labor!

So my topic today is “A Libertarian Case Against Immigration”. I am myself an immigrant (or an emigrant, depending how you look at it) from Britain to the U.S. with some years in Canada. So I’m not saying that immigration is absolutely a bad thing. But I am saying that it can be a bad thing, and that in the US today—and also Europe—it is a bad thing. In the U.S., we’re constantly told by immigration enthusiasts, a distinct subspecies among American intellectuals, that immigrants do dirty jobs Americans won’t do. And, I tell them, here I am!

I’m going to make this case with special reference to the example of the U.S., partly because that’s where I’ve lived for nearly forty years and partly because I’m a financial journalist, not a philosopher, and I find the presence of actual facts, as opposed to pure theory, kind of comforting. I will say, however, that the problems of America are the problems of the West.

How many of you are Americans? Any Canadians? Europeans? Brits? (I distinguish between Britain and Europe!). [PB: Mostly Europeans, a few Americans and Brits, one Australian on walkabout, no Canadians.]

I am going to start off by reviewing the facts of the US example. Then I’m going to analyze those facts from what appears to me to be a libertarian perspective, looking at practical problems and then theoretical problems. I’ll conclude by suggesting what this suggests about immigration—and about libertarianism itself.

Americans are taught to believe that they are “a nation of immigrants.” Of course, all nations are nations of immigrants. There is no known case where people grew out of the ground. What’s different about America is the speed with which it was put together. Unfortunately, it can be unput together just as quickly. And that, in essence, is what’s happening.

So these are the facts:

• For almost 50 years in the middle of the twentieth century, from the early 1920s to about 1970, there was pause during which there was almost no immigration into the US at all.

There have been many such pauses in American immigration history, stretching right back into the colonial period, and they have been essential to the process of assimilation. During that period, no-one, not even the great Austrian economists like Mises or Hayek (and certainly not the influential Objectivist novelist Ayn Rand, remarkable though she was), really thought much about immigration.

• The 1965 Immigration Act, plus a simultaneous decision to stop enforcing the law against illegal immigration, unleashed a new influx. (The decision to stop enforcing the law is very obvious in the date, most glaringly in the 98 percent collapse in workplace prosecutions during the Bush Administration, unmistakably a precursor to the planned integration of North American workforces as in the European Union). About 1 million legal immigrants and some 3-500,000 net illegal immigrants now enter the US every a year.

• For technical reasons—basically the emphasis on so-called family reunification, which is not family reunification at all but chain migration—immigration has been skewed away from Europe and toward the Third World.

• As a result, although Americans are stabilizing their population at around 300 million, the government is in effect second-guessing the people on population size, which because of immigration could be 400 million by 2050. One third will be post-1970 immigrants and their descendants. Because these are overwhelmingly non-white, the U.S., 90% white as recently as 1960, will be majority non-white sometime after 2050.

This is a transformation without precedent in the history of the world. To adapt Brecht, the government is dissolving the people and electing a new one

• Amazingly, the consensus among labor economists, confirmed by the 1997 National Research Council report The New Americans, is that there is no significant net aggregate economic benefit to native-born Americans. There is an increase in Gross Domestic Product, but virtually all of that is captured by the immigrants themselves in the form of wages. If transfer payments factored in, there is a small but significant nation-wide loss.

In other words, Americans are not merely being transformed for nothing, but they are actually paying to be transformed.

Of course, individual Americans benefit, notably employers of cheap labor, and they lobby hard for the privilege (not something libertarians of which would normally approve). But other Americans, notably workers, lose. And they lose a lot—basically government policy is redistributing about 2 percent of GDP from labor to capital.

So here’s something that is having enormous consequences, inflicting enormous expense, operating quite contrary to what was anticipated.

Obviously, it’s a government policy!

And that’s the bottom line to this review of the US situation, which I really want to stress. The point is that the status quo is statist.

We don’t have open immigration in the US or any Western country. We have an extremely complex and intrusive government policy. Government determines, by commission and omission, how many immigrants come in, what race they are, and what skill levels they have. (In the U.S. the post-1965 influx has been significantly less skilled than before, basically of the emphasis on “family reunification”, which is not family reunification at all but chain migration). Doing nothing about immigration as it exists right now is not a libertarian option. It’s a statist option.

Conversely, arguing that the US should restrict immigration, should in fact have a simple moratorium, with no net immigration, could paradoxically represent a diminution of the government’s role, in its powers and its opportunity to exercise them. We’ve all heard of the night watchman state. What libertarians also should want, it seems to me, is a gatekeeper state.

So that’s the situation in our case study, the US. Now I’m going to analyze it from a libertarian perspective. It seems to me that it presents two types of problems—practical and theoretical.

Practical

The Americans have had mass immigration before—notably the so-called Great Wave of immigration from about 1880 through the 1920s, when it was cut off by legislation. And they’ve had a welfare state before, roughly since the New Deal in the 1930s. But they’ve never had both together. And they just don’t work.

At one stage, when I worked at Forbes, I used to interview Milton Friedman every year, until we got a new editor and he stopped it on the curious grounds that Friedman was too old. In one of these interviews, Friedman said something that has been much quoted. He criticized the Wall Street Journal, which has a major and negative role in this and other American debates and said “They’ve just got an idée fixe“ about immigration: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.“

But it’s not obvious to many libertarians, who continue to think about immigration as if it was still 100 years ago and the government was taking just 5 percent of GDP, instead of 30-40%. Yet the welfare state has visibly altered the incentive structure for immigrants. One of the ways it shows up is that, in the last Great Wave, somewhere up to 40% of all immigrants ended up going home. If they failed in the workforce, there was no safety net. Now there is. And net immigration is 90% of gross immigration.

Now the Libertarian response to this is often to say, well, let’s just abolish welfare. Obviously, despite the reforms of the 1990s, the US has failed to do that. But it’s also important to note that we’re not just talking about “welfare“, strictly defined. We’re talking about transfer payments of all kinds. One of the most important is public education, which currently represents a subsidy from the taxpayer to the student of some $8000 a year. And because of a Supreme Court ruling called Plyler vs. Doe, American school districts have to educate the children of illegal immigrants. So what rational immigrant is going to go home when his child is getting an education worth, or at least costing, two or three times the per capita GDP of his country of origin?

Of course some Libertarians say, let’s abolish public schools too. And I agree—I’ve actually written a book advocating wholesale privatization of public education. But let me put it this way: at the very least, abolishing public education is going to take even longer than abolishing welfare. Meanwhile, immigration continues at a million and a half a year.

And the government is even trickier than this. It’s invented subsidies to immigrants that don’t pass through its books at all. For example, it’s required of all hospitals to treat patients for free if they can’t pay. This is how many immigrants get their health care. Private hospitals have to find the money from somewhere, so they pass the cost on to Americans with health insurance.

And then we get into the whole area of race-based “affirmative action”—in other words quotas, which the government has succeeded in imposing throughout public and private sector in America in the teeth of the letter of the law, with very little debate. They’re not trivial. Fifteen years ago in Forbes, I used standard techniques to estimate that they retard American economic growth by up to a percentage point.

The original rationale for quotas was that they compensated American blacks for the lingering effects of slavery and segregation. But all immigrants who belong to the so-called “protected classes“—basically non-whites—are eligible for affirmative action preferences, even though they by definition were not in the country to suffer any wrongs.

One of the interesting points about quotas is that they force you to think about race. The single most denounced passage in my immigration book Alien Nation was my reference to the fact that my son, Alexander, has blue eyes and blond hair. American intellectuals get hysterical about this sort of thing. Yet I was making an unimpeachable point: quotas are a zero-sum game. So if you import more members of the “protected classes”, you disadvantage Americans who are not members of the “protected classes“, as Alexander manifestly is not.

For this reason alone, when the government monkeys with the racial balance through immigration, it matters

Further practical problems with immigration arise in the area of freedom of speech. For example, in Britain there is a Race Relations Act and under it, people have been jailed for saying things, like blacks are disproportionately involved in crime, which are actually true. But truth is not a defense. The leader of the British National Party has been prosecuted for critical things he said about Islamic immigration in a private meeting—a prosecution conveniently launched on the eve of an election. Obviously this is an abomination. And it would not have come about if the government had not created through immigration policy racial minorities to whom the British (completely white until after World War II) were required to “Relate”.

There are similar atrocities in Canada, where the celebrated journalist Mark Steyn is currently running afoul of the quasi-judicial “Human Rights Commissions”. It hasn’t quite happened in the US because of the inconvenient fact of the First Amendment. But that problem is being worked on, with hate speech codes. As a practical matter, public debate is narrowing, as we saw in the reaction to the Ron Paul Letters.

Randolph Bourne famously said that war is the health of the state. That the perceived need to combat an external enemy requires and permits government to assume increased powers that, of course, it never lets go. And we’re learning that again to our cost in the US, with the so-called War Against Terror.

But what I would suggest here is that the immigration influx of the late twentieth century into the US and the West in general has been the Viagra Of The State. It has reinvigorated the state, when it was otherwise losing its powers because of collapse of socialism and the triumph of classical liberalism. It’s an aspect of what should be called neosocialism—the statists’ argument for government control of society, not in the interests of efficiency—not because government can prevent another Great Depression etc.—but in the interests of equity, rooting out discrimination, racism and so on.

Immigrants, above all immigrants who are racially and culturally distinct from the host population, are walking advertisements for social workers and government programs and the regulation of political speech—that is to say, the repression of the entirely natural objections of the host population.

So these are the practical objections to the current situation from a Libertarian perspective. Let’s look at things from the point of view of theory.

Theoretical

The most obviously troubling problem from a Libertarian perspective is the notion that support for free trade necessitates support for free immigration.

Some of the answer to this is clear from the preceding section. Imported goods are not people. Their arrival in a society is not subsidized by the taxpayer. Imported goods do not have implications for future transfer payments, much less freedom of speech. And, of course, imported goods don’t vote.

Also, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has pointed out, imported goods differ from immigrants in that they are imported by someone who wants them. Both buyers and sellers volunteer for the transaction. But immigration is a unilateral decision by the immigrant. He arrives even if the host community does not want him. Arguably, he is trespassing. Government immigration policy amounts to what Hoppe calls “forced integration.”

Of course, you can have situations where an employer wants to import labor, usually cheaper labor, but his neighbors or the community at large don’t want him to. In the end, this raises the question of the legitimacy of collective action, which I’ll discuss later.

But there is also a practical point. The way immigration works in the welfare/transfer state like the US is that employers are privatizing profits from imported labor and socializing costs, such as education, health care etc. Obviously, this is indefensible for Libertarians—but you don’t hear many American Libertarians talking about it.

Libertarians would presumably agree that in a regime where property was completely private, property owners could exclude whomever they chose. This is actually what happened to Friedrich von Hayek. He was refused permission [PDF] to buy land in the Tyrolese village where he had spent his summers for many years on the grounds that the community did not want to sell to foreigners. Hayek thought this was perfectly reasonable—evidence that he, at least, had some sense of collective action.

(I say “Libertarians would presumably agree” because private property in the U.S. is trammeled by public policy. For example, you can’t place a restrictive covenant on who your property can be sold to, part of the general assault on freedom of association that came with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Again, because of the general US hysteria about “racism“, this isn’t something that most American Libertarians want to talk about, although from a theoretical point of view, it’s indefensible.)

What about property that is owned by the government i.e. most of the country? There is a Libertarian argument that no-one, even foreigners, can be forbidden access to that. But Hans-Hermann Hoppe has countered that these public goods are actually held in common by taxpaying citizens, hence a species of private property.

To my mind, this is conclusive. Last year, Walter Block and Anthony Gregory published a response in the Journal of Libertarian Studies [PDF], which struck me as ineffective. But I will quote a footnote from it because it illustrates another problem with libertarian theory and immigration:

“Another anomaly for the Hoppe position surfaces when we consider migration between cities and states within the US. If migration from, say, Norway or Brazil to the U.S. constitutes an unwarranted ‘forced Integration‘, then why does not movement of people from, say, Texas to Ohio fall under this rubric too?“

The answer, of course, is that Texans and Ohioans are Americans. But Walter, like many Libertarians, simply does not recognize the reality, and the necessity, of the national community.

And this is my final point about Libertarian theory on immigration.

Any libertarian must recognize the importance of the “metamarket“, the institutional framework without which markets cannot function. The most obvious example is that you cannot have a functioning market economy without property rights, a law of property.

But it’s equally clear that you can’t have a functioning market without some degree of cultural coherence. And that probably ultimately means ethnic coherence too.

In the US, public policy is breaking down that coherence by importing immigrant groups with vastly different cultural traditions. For example, somewhere over a quarter of the current influx is Mexican, an unusual if not unprecedented concentration. The Mexican elite is openly following a policy of dumping its poor on the US welfare system, resulting in an astonishing mass movement sometimes called the “Mexodus.“

The result of this is that American border towns that were Anglo a generation ago are now Mexican—and now have Mexican characteristics, such as crime, corruption, poverty etc. Mexicans are also bringing with them a predilection for labor unions, socialism and the repression of free speech—the major Mexican organization in the US has unblushingly begun a campaign to lobby the major American media to prevent them quoting or featuring immigration critics on the grounds that criticism of immigration is “hate“.

Walter Block says that it was contemplating this phenomenon of one ethnic group swamping another, specifically the Russians swamping the Baltic Republics, that caused Murray Rothbard to rethink his previously uncritical libertarianism on immigration.

Americans are taught that “Diversity is our strength.” But diversity is not strength. It is weakness, for a wide range of reasons. America, notably including its Libertarians, has not thought through the implications of the post-Communist break-up into their component nations of the syncretic states that sought to base themselves on ideology or creed, as the US is now being encouraged to—the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Hayek had an interesting quasi-sociobiological explanation for the apparently immortal appeal of socialism. He argued that for essentially all of human history, we lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. Face-to-face relationships are much more intuitively comprehensible to us than impersonal ones. So a rent increase provokes the urge to bash the greedy landlords with rent controls, despite all the evidence that this reaction leads merely to shortages and inequity.

To extend Hayek’s point, it’s much easier to demonize a landlord if his features—language, religion—appear alien.

Conclusion

There is a reason there are no families in Ayn Rand’s novels. It’s because Libertarianism is too often an incomplete philosophy. It takes little or no account of the non-atomistic aspect of the human experience, of human groups, their dynamics and differences.

It was to supply that lack that Rothbard and others tried to bring into existence a refinement of Libertarianism, which incidentally accepted the need to control immigration: paleolibertarianism.

It’s tragic that this attempt has stalled since Murray’s death. I salute Hans, and all of you here, for seeking to revive it.

In conclusion, I’m going to cite, as I often do, and not least because Yuri [Maltsev] has already discussed him, Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s I970 Nobel Prize speech—a speech which I think is all the more remarkable because it marks Solzhenitsyn’s break with the ideology under which he grew up, which, very like modal libertarianism today, also denied the importance and legitimacy of national communities. Solzhenitsyn said:

“The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made like, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors, and embodies a particular facet of God’s design.“

I believe that America, and the historic nations of the West, represent a “particular facet of God’s design”.

Part of that design is liberty. Without the historic nations of the West, it will not survive.

The rockslide seen from WV Route 9. The ridged roof was built as part of the remodelling of the Berkeley Springs Castle to provide conference space after the VDARE Foundation’s purchase in 2020.

Peter Brimelow writes: VDARE.com was unconstitutionally lawfared into suspension by New York State’s rogue Attorney General Letitia James in 2024, but Lydia and I continue to be involved with the Berkeley Springs Castle. It’s now owned by a separate West Virginia foundation and entirely run by local volunteers, including Lydia, who serves as its president. It hosts many non-political community events but also continues to offer a Free Speech haven to persecuted patriots—including, one day, hopefully, resumed VDARE Conferences. However, the Castle does keep trying to fall down. This is its most serious attempt yet.

Emergency Repair Fund: Save Berkeley Springs Castle!

By Lydia Brimelow

In August of 2024, a catastrophic rock slide tore through our hillside, collapsing part of the Berkeley Springs Castle’s driveway onto Route 9.

For months, we waited as officials at the West Virginia Department of Highways evaluated repairs. We were told initially that DOH would handle the delicate and dangerous work themselves—only to learn more recently that the project now falls to us and the quote from the DOH contractor was $330,000.

Donate

The damage is only a few yards from the Castle foundations and with each new rainstorm the chances of further damage increase.

Not only do we fear for our beloved landmark—which is on the National Registry of Historic Places—but we are also very aware of potential harm caused to travelers on the road below as boulders come loose.

With winter approaching, we have just 6 months to stabilize the slope before further damage occurs.

While we continue to pursue government aid, we’re launching this emergency fund to bridge the gap—every dollar ensures the Castle survives for future generations.

We need your help to raise $100,000 and save this historic treasure!

With gratitude,

Lydia Brimelow

PS: All donations are fully tax deductible. Any amount you can spare will help keep the Castle intact.

Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation Inc

See also: LYDIA BRIMELOW ON THOSE SPLC INDICTMENTS: There’s Never Just One Cockroach

My husband Peter and I stayed with family friends recently while on a business trip. As our hostess serenely prepared a homecooked meal over the heads of her half-dozen energetic children she admitted to me, “I’m pretty solidly on team ‘Nothing Ever Happens’.”

Since that dinner, President Trump survived his third assassination attempt and the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] was caught passing money to the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

We’re So Back

As I continue to mull the DOJ’s indictment against the SPLC, I keep coming back to my feelings of eager anticipation of details unearthed in the forthcoming discovery.

Non-combatants in modern lawfare may not be familiar with legal discovery, but, having been forced to comply with subpoena demands so onerous that the expense and labor involved shuttered my main project, VDARE.com, I am very aware.

So far, the DOJ has done what is sometimes referred to as a “snapshot investigation,” or, just enough investigation of the SPLC to earn an indictment. Real discovery, presumably launching in earnest this summer, will be ongoing in real time. If the indictment investigation was a screenshot, real discovery will be a livestream.

Assuming the case goes forward, the SPLC will start to gather any evidence it has for its own defense. It is required to share that evidence with the DOJ whether it hurts or harms their case. As the DOJ receives those materials, it is required to share with the SPLC what of it they plan to use for the prosecution, thus making it public on a rolling basis.

Included:

• Internal memos, emails, and financial records to which the prosecutors didn’t have access during the initial probe.

• Witness lists and expert reports, likely revealing new individuals or documents.

• The outcomes of private investigations, which may uncover transactions or communications unknown to federal agents.

  
  Whatever happened to that private investigation the SPLC promised when founder Morris Dees was fired?

  

• Statements by the defense, like depositions etc

• Physical evidence, office equipment, personal effects. Notebooks, paycards, cell phones, burner phones, hard drives, stolen property, etc.

The prospect of these details becoming public are almost too delicious. The trail, including all pretrial motions and discovery disputes will be overseen by Judge Emily Marks, a white Catholic Alabaman Trump appointee who specialized in labor disputes and civil rights litigation while in private practice.

Just as there is never just one cockroach, it’s impossible to believe that employees of the SPLC who were comfortable engaging in fraud and money laundering for what is one of the world’s nastiest organizations didn’t also feel comfortable bending and breaking other rules.

I am particularly interested in evidence of “tortious interference. “

Tortious interference is when A and B have a contractual relationship and C comes along and blows it up, causing damage. Like, to choose an example at random, if VDARE had a conference scheduled at the Cheyenne Mountain Lodge in Colorado Springs, CO, with deposits fully paid up and tickets sold, and the SPLC or their minions intentionally disrupted that conference, causing the Lodge to pay out liquidated damages and VDARE to lose its conference. If that happened, the SPLC could be prosecuted for tortious interference.

Successful litigation against tortious interference happens all the time.

Although the SPLC is perhaps the biggest player in the Cancel Culture game, lawsuits against tortious interference filed by D.A. King and Gavin McInnes/Proud Boys haven’t gotten any traction in the courts. The SPLC has successfully claimed that their “Hate Map” and malicious labeling are “rhetorical hyperbole,” purely subjective in nature, and protected by the First Amendment.

But if the DOJ were to discover direct communications between the SPLC and a bank, platform, venue or other contractual partner where the SPLC specifically mentioned one of their victims, that could be a game changer. Or even if internal documents were discovered that discuss an SPLC policy to intentionally trigger cancellations, it could break things open.

It’s So Over

Of course, there is the terrible possibility that the SPLC’s crimes may skitter away into the walls just as Letitia James’s have (so far). In my experience, Leftists have gotten shockingly arrogant about what they can get away with, crime-wise, because they pretty much do always get away with it.

The justice system in most of the United States is broken and even where it isn’t exactly broken, it is slow. According to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the SPLC investigation was started years before Trump but was put on ice by the Biden Administration. If things drag on, yet another change in leadership could turn down the heat again.

The SPLC, never one to let a good crisis go to waste, will likely raise a ton of money to defend themselves against what they are already framing as a political persecution. They have between 200-500 employees and some number of those employees are actually lawyers. The American Civil Liberties Union is politically sympathetic, as are any number of enormous NGOs that could decide to circle the wagons in their defense.

Already, the SPLC has filed a motion requesting the transcripts of the grand jury testimony, because

“…the indictment suffers from obvious legal infirmities— including the omission of essential elements of intent and a failure to reconcile the charges with recent Supreme Court precedent. These particularized irregularities suggest that the grand jury was not merely misled by the government’s presentation of the law, but likely that it was actively weaponized to facilitate such charges.”

Grand jury proceedings are typically secret, so it will be interesting to see what happens there. But we can already see that they’re planning to argue the DOJ lied to the grand jury. They haven’t presented anything yet about their First Amendment rights, but they characterized their actions as “tradecraft” and Trump’s attitude toward the prosecution as a “naked display of politicization and partisanship.” Their next step will likely be a motion to dismiss the charges entirely. Maybe it will be granted, who knows?

Judge Marks, the world is watching!

There are doomers and naysayers on our side, too. The charges are flimsy, some say. The DOJ is pulling punches and will be guarded about outing their own. They are, in short, not sending their best.

It’s All Happening!

The time Peter and I spend fighting for the Historic American Nation is often a grind. Losses hit hard. It’s tempting to want our troubles to resolve in a flash of drama.

But I’m reminded of a character in Flannery O’Connor’s Temple of the Holy Spirit, who “could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”

I’m not impatient for martyrdom. Like in the development of virtue, or raising a family, or building an institution, the nature of the commitment is the on-and-on-ness of it.

That’s why it is important to celebrate the wins when they come, and to celebrate them unconditionally.

This indictment is a WIN. Are you celebrating?

Lydia Brimelow, former publisher of VDARE.com

On April 21, the DOJ flipped on the light in the SPLC’s kitchen and spotted a scurrying cockroach called “wire fraud and money laundering.”

It is hard to say how I learned this news—I think my husband Peter was the first person to tell me—because I got a large number of texts and email messages from my friends and supporters almost immediately. This also happens any time the New York State Attorney General Letitia James is in hot water. It’s nice to be remembered.

Quoting from the DOJ Press Release:

“Donors gave their money believing they were supporting the fight against violent extremism,” said Acting United States Attorney Kevin Davidson. “As alleged, the SPLC instead diverted a portion of those funds to benefit individuals and groups they claimed to oppose. That kind of deception undermines public trust and social cohesion.”

I would argue the SPLC’s very existence undermines public trust and social cohesion. I posted to social media:

A twitter user with the deeply charming name CatsWithoutBorders was right to correct me:

The chart pictured above was displayed in the office of Mark Potok, SPLC Editor in Chief of the Intelligence Report, tracking the end of white majorities in the US and Europe. It wasn’t all for money. It was also for hatred of white people. Greed and genocidal ideation are not mutually exclusive. For 25 years, VDARE.com fought against the SPLC and that chart they found so inspirational.

The fashionable reaction among online patriots has been to post their battle scars from the SPLC. VDARE.com has too many to count—but it’s an interesting phenomenon because it highlights just how greedy the SPLC became. Being named as an agent of hate by the SPLC was so common, it practically became a credential on the right—if you weren’t named you weren’t serious.

Every new pin on the SPLC’s Hate Map ginned up fears and opened wallets among the paranoid leftists. And yet it wasn’t enough! The SPLC ginned up hysteria about racism as a fundraising tool. It was extremely effective—so effective in fact, that the demand for racism outstripped the supply. Like an undertaker drumming up business, the SPLC ludicrously labeled Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Majiid Nawaz and other clearly mainstream people as extremists.

According to the DOJ, the SPLC was not content lining their pockets merely with the suffering of the innocent. They also allegedly paid cold hard cash to the scariest “extremists” on their lists.

The SPLC claims the money was not in fact subsidizing their boogey men but a program to pay informants (“field sources”). But even if that were the case, it’s likely not good enough to get them out of charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

From the indictment:

In order to covertly pay its field sources, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities. The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the field sources. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.

[snip]

After the accounts were opened, the SPLC, through Employee-1 [who went on to become Chief Financial Officer of the SPLC], among others, executed Sole Proprietorship Resolution of Authority documents with Bank-1. These documents contained false and misleading information regarding the ownership and control of the fictitious entities for which the bank accounts were opened. Employee-1, and others, signed these documents containing false and misleading statements for the benefit of the SPLC.

I’m going to interrupt for a second here and just marvel that the SPLC was able to do this at all. Why wasn’t it stopped at the bank level?

Among my ugliest battle scars from 20+ years of SPLC attacks is vast amounts of time on the phone or meeting with financial institutions begging them to keep our business. In my swan song for VDARE.com here I listed more than 50 cancelations we endured during this period. Nineteen of them were financial institutions. We never lied to any bank and had never been accused of any financial impropriety. We were denied services because of “reputational risk”—which meant that the SPLC had called us a Hate Group.

You’re telling me that an SPLC employee was able to walk into a bank and open five fraudulent bank accounts in one day with fake documents and fake EIN numbers? There’s got to be more to that story.

Now back to our regularly scheduled indictment:

The funds deposited…were then loaded onto pay cards issued to the [field sources] who were supposedly employees of the fictitious entity…the [field sources] pay cards were designed to still further conceal the true nature, source, ownership and control of the donated funds the SPLC was paying to the [field sources].

There are rumors that there are RICO possibilities here. I don’ t know the law behind RICO but I do know that it has a way of unzipping long lines of related people who are connected by money.

I can’t pretend to be sad that the SPLC might be facing such a pickle but I’m also curious—will it start unzipping these extremist groups too? Will we see Heidi Beirich and the Grand Wizard of the KKK perp-walked together? The memes write themselves.

(Except when they don’t: I asked ChatGPT to make a political cartoon of Heidi Beirich and a Grand Wizard of the KKK, each handcuffed, being walked into a courthouse together and it told me I had made an “inappropriate request.”)

Allegedly, once Bank-1 finally (after many years) started sniffing around the five fake bank accounts, the SPLC closed them and sent their right wing extremist informants ACH payments instead. From the indictment:

These ACH payments were masked with monikers such as “Rarebooks050”…designed to conceal the true nature, source, ownership and control of the of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the [field sources].

The charges are 6 counts of wire fraud, 4 counts of lying to a bank, 1 count of conspiracy to launder money.

Note that, contrary to widespread reporting, none of these crimes is actually called “defrauding donors.” All the charges are tied to actual bank transactions.

Is It Illegal to Have Paid Informants?

This is not a question I’ve ever had the opportunity to consider before, but as someone who is actively being bludgeoned into personal bankruptcy on trumped-up nonprofit fiduciary violations, I do have a morbid interest when others run into corporate trouble. Especially my enemies.

According to Grok (an AI bot, cheaper than a lawyer), if the SPLC had paid these sources openly rather than laundering the money, but still made the same alleged misrepresentations to donors (e.g. continued issuing fundraising material saying funds would only “fight” or “dismantle” extremism without disclosing the payment), the wire-fraud charges would remain, because wire fraud = lying to get money electronically.

The donor-deception element is the basis of the charges because that’s they lying part. The money laundering (fake accounts) is merely the concealment tactic used to cover the donor-deception fraud.

But the money-laundering charge is especially serious, because it could broaden the DOJ’s reach in terms of asset forfeiture. Here’s a juicy bit from the indictment:

Upon conviction…SPLC shall forfeit to the United States…any property, real or personal, which represents or is traceable to the gross receipts obtained, directly or indirectly, from the offenses…

The SPLC boasted an annual revenue of over $129 million in 2024, the most recent year reported, plus assets of $822 million including that offshore account. Can we earmark those assets for the border wall?

Or, better yet, reparations for the many victims of SPLC’s witch hunts—such as, to take a random example, the VDARE Foundation and my family?

Baby, Meet Bathwater: The SPLC May Be A Fraud But Right Wing Activism Isn’t

News of the indictment triggered a deluge of Hot Takes on X, and while many of them are entirely natural (if perhaps not charitable) there is one loud strain that is just plain Fake News:

Peter and I were not involved in Charlottesville. Peter was not invited to speak. We did not attend. We didn’t promote it and VDARE.com didn’t even cover it until it was all anyone in the U.S. would talk about and it became clear that a huge injustice was being done to the patriots who did attend.

In fact, I pled with friends to stay home. They didn’t, and their lives were ruined.

And VDARE was kicked off PayPal for our trouble.

Maybe you’ve forgotten what a dox once meant, because it doesn’t carry the weight now that it once did. But when I say it ruined their lives I’m not talking about people who took a hit and came back stronger. I’m talking about people who were physically injured by “counter-protestor” violence and have been permanently stripped of their livelihoods, their most precious relationships, their homes and futures.

Some have found peace in their circumstances. Some went off the deep end. Some of them are still rotting in jail. Some died alone.

I didn’t tell people to stay home because I thought it was a setup or a false flag. It’s because I knew Richard Spencer was a drunk, wife-beating egomaniac who would let innocent people be destroyed before he would let himself suffer. And I was right.

The SPLC paid one guy. The vast majority of demonstrators at Charlottesville were there to resist the very thing the SPLC stands for: the destruction of the Historic American Nation. They were not Nazis, and they weren’t violent. They were, in fact, fine people.

And, it’s clear now that Charlottesville was a dress rehearsal for the January 6 trap.

Look, at some point the Respectable Right will have to face the fact that reasonable white Americans don’t like watching their own destruction. That’s what Charlottesville was, a genuine response to the attack on themselves and their heritage. The allegations that the SPLC took it seriously enough to pay someone on the inside – and perhaps even encourage him to misbehave, we don’t know – while the Respectable Right ran for cover, just goes to show how shockingly uninvested in the Historic American Nation these media figures actually are.

The SPLC took Charlottesville more seriously than the Respectable Right does, even today.

SPLC Investigation vs. VDARE Investigation

It is worth pausing to compare how prosecutors have treated VDARE with how they have treated the SPLC.

VDARE

· Public investigation

· Burdensome subpoenas

· Years of discovery

· Legal bills drained the organization before any complaints filed,

SPLC:

· Silent investigation

· No subpoenas (as far as we know)

· Straight to criminal charges

· SPLC still has hundreds of millions of dollars and many lawyers on staff

One was a slow, public, financially ruinous process designed to bleed the us dry before any complaint was filed, let alone a verdict reached. The other was a quiet, efficient investigation leading directly to criminal accountability.

Why the difference?

I can think of a few possibilities. Maybe the New York Attorney General Letitia James knew we were innocent—and knew that a fair process would prove it, so she opted for “process as punishment” instead. Drag it out. Make it expensive. Bankrupt us so the truth never comes out and we can never be exonerated.

Maybe the U.S Department of Justice, by contrast, knew the SPLC was guilty. So it moved quietly, gathered evidence, and struck when it was ready—without warning, without giving the SPLC years to bulk up their resources crying persecution.

Or maybe it is simpler than that. Maybe the powerful get investigated with care and discretion and the powerless get investigated by a bullhorn and a lawyer’s bill.

I personally still find it difficult to think of us as powerless (despite our clear demise) because we were supposed to be protected by the First Amendment. Turns out, the first amendment isn’t a shield, it’s a lawsuit, and lawsuits cost money VDARE ultimately didn’t have.

The Constitution doesn’t bill by the hour, but lawyers do.

Secrecy of A Different Color

There is another difference, too, that I can’t get it out of my mind.

Both the SPLC investigation and the VDARE investigation hinge on the same thing: the protection of names.

In the SPLC’s case, according to the indictment, a future CFO hid names to defraud donors. Fake businesses. Shell accounts. Payments routed through “Rare Books Warehouse” so no one would know they were siphoning money to the very activists the SPLC claimed to oppose. They protected names because the truth was a scandal, and so they could keep making dat money.

In our case, we protected names because the truth would harm innocent people: our donors and pseudonymous writers. These people would lose their jobs, their reputations, their safety, if the malicious and leak-prone OAG got hold of their names.

One of us committed serious crimes and is now indicted. The other committed no crimes and is now belly-up.

(And the SPLC probably has Officers and Directors insurance, meaning the individuals involved likely won’t have to pay the legal bills to defend themselves, the SPLC donors will be covering it for them. Is that how they intended their charitable dollars to be spent?)

But Discovery Is Going To Be Awesome

Seriously. I cannot wait to see what the DOJ finds when discovery begins in earnest. They have an entire operation of lawyers and a ka-jillion dollars in mysterious offshore accounts, but they are fighting in Alabama and not NY so they likely won’t have any kind of political home field advantage.

What do we have to look forward to, you ask?

Where to even begin??

• What exactly is going on with that offshore money?

• What kind of soap opera struggle sessions unfolded when the younger staff decided the older staff were racists or sexist or when there was union strife, or when Morris Dees was caught peeping at his 16 year old stepdaughter through a bathroom window?

• How consciously do they overstate the threat of extremists? Have they truly drunk the kool-aid, or is it more cynical?

• Why was Michael E. Hayden fired? Is he the only one that’s been committed to a mental hospital? Or all they all like that?

• Who exactly were the paid informants? Did they give any juicy information?

• What other crimes might be revealed as the real investigation proceeds? You know what they say about finding one cockroach.

• What was the nature of their partnership with the FBI? Who at the FBI did they corrupt? Who needs to be purged?

• And of course, what did they say about VDARE and my family? Did they engage in tortious interference to get us canceled? How did they like it when Michael E Hayden was caught cornering my 8 year old daughter at a private party?

What, dear reader, do YOU hope to learn from the DOJ getting to read all of the SPLC’s emails, text messages, mailings, travel records, financial records and recorded calls?

Leave it in the comments!

(And if you can help my family pay the personal lawfare costs inflicted on us by the SPLC and its allies in New York State government, please do so by credit card here or by mail to PO Box 677, Berkeley Springs, WV 25411. Many thanks).

Lydia Brimelow is the former publisher of VDARE.com, now fighting political persecution while homeschooling three daughters and helping run the historic Berkeley Springs Castle in West Virginia.

Peter Brimelow writes: VDARE.com veteran Steve Sailer recently posted to his substack (subscribe!) one of his witty fiskings, this time of J. Oliver Conroy’s April 11 2026 Guardian interview with Michael Edison Hayden about his new book about…us. My own fisking of Hayden’s portentous account of his heroic infiltration of a charity Christmas party held at the Berkeley Springs Castle (he bought a ticket!) is here.

Basically, Steve thinks Hayden’s book is funny. It unselfconsciously confirms Steve’s fellow VDARE.com contributor Ed Dutton’s thesis: Leftists are just nuts.

Steve spoke at VDARE’s 2023 conference at the Berkeley Springs Castle. I entitled my introduction “The Minstrel Boy”—Steve Sailer’s Lonely Struggle To Tell The Truth [Transcript and video of Steve’s talk].

Steve’s 2025 anthology Noticing includes many of his VDARE.com pieces.

I need to comment on a couple more points about Hayden’s interview and will do so…soon.

“Are We the Strangies?”A former SPLC enforcer writes a book about how he inflicted Brimelow Derangement Syndrome upon his own fragile mental health.

Posted on Steve Sailer.net, April 12

Here is an interview in The Guardian:

‘We feel this incredible tension at all times’: what happened to small-town USA when extremists moved in

J Oliver Conroy

In his new book, Michael Edison Hayden captures the bitter saga between the founders of far-right publication VDare and the residents of a West Virginia town

Sat 11 Apr 2026 11.00 EDT

In 2020, residents of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, learned that a mysterious couple from New York had bought a historic local building known as “the castle”, which the newcomers planned to use as a headquarters and conference space for their non-profit organization. A bitter saga followed – one that the journalist Michael Edison Hayden writes about in his new book, Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town.

The couple in question were Peter and Lydia Brimelow, whose online publication VDare was named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas. Critics have accused the anti-immigration publication of being the genteel face of a constellation of white nationalist groups and figures that Hayden refers to simply as “the movement”. (VDare and the Brimelows dispute that characterization; Brimelow has described himself as a “civic nationalist”.) Stephen Miller, the adviser to Donald Trump, is reportedly a fan of VDare’s writing.

Some residents of Berkeley Springs

How many?

were alarmed that their town might become publicly associated with the far right, and they invited Hayden, then a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), to come speak to them and report on what was happening. He befriended residents and documented what became a multiyear unraveling – of the town, where neighbor turned against neighbor; of VDare, whose existence came under increasing financial and legal pressure; and of the SPLC, where internal divisions about strategy and labor practices were boiling over. In the course of what became this book, Hayden also suffered a mental health crisis compounded by the strain of years of reporting on the far right.

Okay!

In other words, most of the unraveling happened inside the author’s head.

From Hayden’s book:

From The Hill:

The SPLC is biased — and extraordinarily wealthy

by Robert Stilson, opinion contributor - 09/04/25 3:00 PM ET

The Southern Poverty Law Center is perhaps most notorious for its “hate map,” which not only neglects to track extremist groups on the left, but also lumps mainstream conservative and religious organizations right alongside some of the most reprehensible neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the country.

For this, it has been regularly and rightly criticized.

The controversial activist group has also become phenomenally wealthy, with an endowment rivaling prominent universities and annual revenues exceeding some of the most well-known charities in the country …

Paywall here.

… The organization’s “urgent” pleas for an “emergency” cash infusion from small-dollar donors is puzzling, because the group literally appears to have more money than it knows what to do with. Its most recent Form 990 for the fiscal year ending in October 2024 disclosed an astonishing $786.7 million in net assets, much of which is parked in public and private equity funds. Its three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar endowment has more than doubled just since 2016.

For context, this makes the SPLC wealthier than many colleges and universities, including in the group’s home state of Alabama. Samford University, the largest private school in the state with over 6,000 enrolled students, reported just $547.8 million total net assets in 2024. Tuskegee University, which enrolled about 3,000 students, reported $550.6 million in net assets that same year.

… Like these groups, the SPLC is organized as a 501(c)(3) charity, incentivized by the American public with tax-exemption and the ability to accept tax-deductible contributions. Unlike them, its activities are highly controversial and divisive — two descriptors not generally associated with the word “charity.”

Of course, the SPLC is far from alone in making biased or spurious accusations of extremism. That is, regrettably, almost par for the course in our current overheated political environment. What truly sets the group apart is how phenomenally wealthy it has become in doing so.

Its co-founder was junk-mail genius Morris Dees who loved raising money more than spending it (at least on people other than his half-dozen or so wives). The semi-lovable rogue got forced out in 2019. Recently, Morris’s replacement Margaret Huang quit to spend more time with her family, and the new interim CEO is finally their first black boss.

Robert Stilson is a Senior Research Analyst at the Capital Research Center.

Back to The Guardian:

VDare’s arrival was flame to tinder in a town already navigating disagreements about the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter and Pride movements.

And that’s why the town burned to the ground!

Oh, wait, that didn’t happen.

In fact, literally nothing happened, outside of the hate-fevered minds of a few people who really, intensely hate “hate” with all the hate they can muster.

The reason VDARE bought a secure place in a calm town is because during Cancel Culture of the Great Awokening, it became impossible for VDARE to, say, have me speak in public. I last delivered a public talk, a rabble-rousing, spittle-flecked quantitative analysis of the demographics of the 2012 exit polls, in January 2013. I didn’t get to speak again in public until mid 2023 at the VDARE castle.

What kept happening was that I’d be invited to speak, but then the SPLC and Media Matters would hear about it and demand the hotel cancel the contract (you wouldn’t want The Guardian or Antifa to hear about it).

Finally, Peter and Lydia bought the Berkeley Springs site and VDARE could start holding conferences again without the SPLC’s or Antifa’s permission.

I spoke at conferences in 2023 and 2024, and a nice time was had by all.

Residents were divided over how, if at all, to react to the prospect of their town becoming an organizational nexus of the far right. Neighbors stopped speaking to neighbors, business partnerships fell apart, and people attacked each other on Facebook.

Unlike in the rest of America, where everybody spent recent years in utter concord.

In reality, this is probably one of the less politically divisive places in the country. It’s the county seat of Morgan County, WV. For example, here’s how Morgan County has voted, Republican vs. Democrat:

2012: 64-33

2016: 74-20

2020: 75-23

2024: 77-21

I spoke to Hayden about how the peaceful town of Berkeley Springs became a microcosm of the tensions defining an age of bitter polarization and an ascendant far right.

I spent about ten days in Berkeley Springs, half in 2023 and half in 2024 for conferences in the Castle.

It is a lovely place with very friendly residents. Of course, unlike the author, I wasn’t suffering a mental health crisis, so how could I possibly have noticed the roiling fear and loathing behind the deceptively calm smiles of the amiable locals?

People who pay to attend VDARE conferences to hear me speak tend to be doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs: nice company. We’d go down to the bar in the hotel on the main street of town every night, and all the visitors got along nicely with the residents.

I’m sorry Michael Edison Hayden was cracking up when he visited, but years of taking money to be an SPLC hysteria-monger will tend to do that to you.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I bet it has.

Q. What is VDare, and how does it relate to what you call “the movement”?

A. There have always been very determined activists and groups – the kinds that my previous employer, the SPLC, would have labeled white nationalist or neo-Nazi – working to bring the “great replacement” theory into the mainstream.

VDare has probably been most influential at spreading the idea. From its founding in 1999, Peter Brimelow did almost everything he could to draw attention to what people used to call “white genocide” – the idea that whites are being deliberately undermined by non-white immigration.

And he succeeded. At the Republican National Convention in 2024, people were holding signs calling for mass deportation. That is in part Brimelow’s legacy.

Q. Brimelow, who was born in Britain, doesn’t fit what the average American thinks of when they think of the far right. He’s not a hooded Klansman, or a neo-Nazi, or a militia man running around in the woods, right?

A. Brimelow has gone through a lot of different stages in his life. He was a financial journalist, writing for publications like Forbes, before he became the person that we know.

Over time he became relentless in his push to restrict immigration. In 1995, he published the book Alien Nation, which suggests that non-white immigration coming into the United States has a negative impact economically, among other things. He received support from John Tanton, the father of the anti-immigrant movement in the United States.

Tanton Derangement Syndrome was the original TDS. All the SPLC minions have always been just insane over the late Michigan opthamologist John Tanton, a Jefferson Smith-like public-spirited citizen. He drove them bonkers with his effectiveness as a citizen organizer.

Brimelow took the baton from Tanton and became himself the most important anti-immigrant figure in the US – which is interesting, given that Brimelow is an immigrant from the UK.

When Brimelow founded VDare, he was still a socially acceptable bad boy of conservatism – this guy who says some stuff that you’re not supposed to say, but there’s a place for him. Then people woke up to the amount of racism in his rhetoric – he has argued, for example, that Robert E Lee is more worthy of celebration than Martin Luther King – and he became taboo.

Over time, he became influential in the white nationalist movement. And when that movement became the “alt-right” movement – a slightly more socially acceptable version of white supremacy – around Trump’s first election, Brimelow returned to a point of attention in conservatism.

Q. This book is partly about VDare, partly about you, and partly about Berkeley Springs. You made an interesting decision to weave those together.

A. In bringing those storylines together I wanted to capture this political moment that we’re in – how everybody in the US feels this incredible tension at all times. …

When people feel like their neighbors could turn on them at anytime, it takes a tremendous toll on everyone’s mental health.

Q. You had a mental health crisis yourself, which you describe in honest terms.

I began to have really intense suicidal ideation. I think it’s impossible to say, “Oh, this one thing is what made that happen” – there’s such a confluence of factors. But I have been covering the movement for over 10 years, and it’s not just, like, sitting and researching and being subjected to occasional swastikas. There’s a moment in the book where I took my eight-year-old son to a batting cage and the FBI called about someone who wanted to assassinate me.

Dealing with that for years really caught up with me. And I think, in a less acute form, people are feeling that all over the country. We don’t really even have a conversation about what a decade of Trump is doing to our mental health. Yeah, Biden was briefly president, but it really feels like we’ve had three consecutive terms in which Trump was the main topic of our lives. …

Q. In reporting this book, what most surprised you?

A. Well, America is a wild place, and all things are possible. And just when you think you understand what West Virginia is – when you’ve typecast it – you meet someone like Lisa Marie. She’s one of the characters of the book.

Here is this trans woman who is living in a holler, that you can’t find with GPS, on a mushroom farm in West Virginia. She’s doing open carry in town, which is her right, and has a lot of fascinating things to say about the world. And she’s trolling Peter Brimelow on Twitter, using jokes in Appalachian dialect, to tell him he’s not a “towner” and should leave.

Sounds like a Reliable Source! If you can’t trust a gun-totin’ ex-man to give you and your damaged mind the straight story, who can you trust?

LYDIA BRIMELOW WRITES: We asked you to pray for a miracle and you did, thank you, but it just wasn’t God’s will.

New York State Judge Sabrina Krauss has denied our motion to dismiss New York State’s lawsuit against Peter and myself, separately from the VDARE Foundation. Now the case will also move forward against us personally. It only took her only one day to decide.

So, we enter the Discovery phase.

We’ve seen this before. Ultimately, it was the cost of compliance with Discovery demands that forced us to suspend the VDARE.com website, even before we were charged with anything. We couldn’t keep the writers and the lawyers both paid at the same time, and the lawyers weren’t—and aren’t—optional.

This time, the Discovery is aimed at our family as well.

Discovery means endlessly expensive invasive demands, endless document production, and endless legal bills. And that’s the point—this is the “process as punishment” that the NYAG’s own Rick Sawyer bragged about [2:13] to the Anti-Defamation League’s 2022 conference, He said that, although “Hate Speech” i.e. VDARE’s criticism of immigration policy is protected under the First Amendment, he could get around that because “it sucks to be sued, because it’s massively expensive, opening up one’s whole life to discovery, ruining one’s credit and inflicting huge opportunity costs.”

Still, we do not know what miracles might lie ahead. There are appeals pending on the VDARE side. The tide could turn.

But, regardless of our faith, we must prepare for the fight in front of us.

My husband and I are immigration patriots. We have committed no crime. For 25 years, Peter ran VDARE.com in the face of unwavering hostility, educating the public about the negative effects of mass immigration. He is a loving father

and grandfather

For more than 10 years I was the publisher of VDARE.com, raising money in spite of massive censorship and deplatforming and facing every challenge with creativity, resolve and more often than not, with joy. I am a wife, and a homeschooling mother of our three young children.

VDARE.com did not go down out of scandal or abuse, and definitely not from lack of support from our wonderful donors.

It was destroyed by lawfare from New York State Attorney General Letitia James. And I am standing here asking for personal help because the she is now trying to destroy my family and our beliefs.

What we need now is money.

Discovery is expensive. We have $38,500 raised through Givesendgo toward our $50,000 goal.

But so far, we have already paid out about $35,000 on our personal legal bills and the hard part hasn’t even started.

If you have already given: thank you. You have kept us in this fight.

If you can give again: please do. The hardest part is still ahead.

And please, keep praying. Miracles do happen. We just haven’t seen ours yet.

Sincerely,

Lydia Brimelow

Please donate by credit card here or by mail to PO Box 677, Berkeley Springs, WV 25411.

And—Thank You, and God Bless.

My long-time VDARE.com colleague Kenn Gividen began his recent monthly roundup of America’s ongoing black-on-white Holocaust [TM] (27 dead reported in March 2026) with the news that the gay mayor of Providence RI had forced the removal, on the grounds that it was “divisive” a.k.a. embarrassing to Democrats, of a mural of Iryna Zarutska, the 23-year-old Ukrainian blonde murdered by a black repeat offender in August 2025. (Since Kenn posted, North Carolina authorities have found the killer mentally “incapable” of standing trial. But the Trump DOJ, obviously skeptical of justice in the minority-dominated legal system of Charlotte NC, had taken the precaution of holding him on separate Federal charges).

However, my picture above is of a completely different blonde (blondes get killed a lot in the Integrated States of America): Anasty Raine Brown, 27, shot by Renotta Renee Seltzer, 45, (inset) in Brewton AL. Brown was pregnant at the time of her death. She is shown with her three-year-old daughter.

Before VDARE.com was mugged by New York Attorney General Letitia James, we used to report Kenn’s roundup under the running head “A Month In The Death Of White America”—example here. It was one of our most popular features. Maybe that’s why James mugged us. VDARE.com can no longer pay Kenn, so I urge you subscribe to his substack AbateHate.com—it covers a lot more than black crime— here!

And yes, I know that describing black-on-white crime as a “Holocaust”[TM] is jarring to some sensibilities. But Kenn and I have been documenting black-on-white homicides since 2020. And I see absolutely no sign whatever that this problem is getting increased recognition in the Regime Media—unless you count the obviously intensifying effort to hide the Politically Incorrect facts.

It’s getting really annoying. Drastic measures are necessary.

Since the mugging of VDARE.com, I have begun to analyze Kenn’s results separately from his own roundup. In this regard, Anasty Raine Brown’s killing is especially interesting, because it is an example of new category of black-on-white homicides that I’ve recently decided to break out: Significant Other Collateral Damage.

The killing of white women by black Significant Others (boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, husbands, ex-husbands) is of course the single most consistent theme in these monthly reports. (March examples here, here, here, here). The reverse, white Significant Others killing black partners, does happen, but it is very rare. There were none this month.

Remember, these are not random killings. These are couples who have known each other intimately, sometimes for years. But the relationships still end in white death.

This phenomenon is real. There ought to be Public Service Announcements aimed at warning young white women.

Anasty Raine Brown was living with her black boyfriend (obviously new, judging by her white daughter); alleged perp Renotta Renee Seltzer is the wife of the boyfriend’s brother; she and her husband had just begun to share a house with Brown and her boyfriend. No motive is given other than reported friction between the two women. So, while Brown was not actually killed by her boyfriend, she died because she was in an interracial situation—Black Significant Other Collateral Damage.

(Presumably this means that Brown’s unborn child was non-white; hence Kenn does not count it in the March total).

March 2026 saw one other case of Black Significant Other Collateral Damage here—Evan Hall, a white man living with a black woman in Guthrie KY, killed by her black husband, Jerrell Edmonds, in a dispute over access to the married couple’s child.

Nevertheless, as always, the bulk of white victims are just innocent casualties of life in the Integrated States Of America. They fall into discernable categories:

• Crossfire. Whites are often literally caught in crossfire between black perps, e.g. in March here.

• Sudden Jihad Syndrome/ Immigrant Mass Murder. Here and here. Ndiaga Diagne, a Muslim naturalized U.S. citizen from Senegal, opened fire on a bar in Austin TX on March 1, killing two whites. There was a third, non-white, victim, Savitha Shanmugasundaram, perhaps emblematic of Governor Greg Abbott’s Texas:

VDARE.com wrote for many years about the phenomenon of Sudden Jihad Syndrome, the peculiar propensity of otherwise apparently peaceable Muslim immigrants to start suddenly killing their infidel neighbors in the name of their faith.

We also tracked the phenomenon of Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome—what seems to be the disproportionate propensity of immigrants to go berserk and also start killing people.

Ndiaga Diagne, of course, is both an immigrant and a Muslim. From our point of view, he’s a twofer.

• Good Samaritan/ Home Invasion Another twofer: the murders of Kenneth Craig Lanier, 68, and his wife Rhonda Frost Lanier, 64, in Pembroke GA. Details here

This appalling saga begins with a Good Samaritan disregarding John Derbyshire’s explicit advice in his epochal The Talk (rule 10h) by stopping to help a stranded black driver, who promptly stole his truck.

Then the black driver, Anthony Andrea Forney, invaded the Laniers’ home—they were apparently unknown to him—killed them, and stole their car.

Kenn and I watch home invasions closely because they could be sign that black ghetto crime is encroaching on the white suburbs. And here it is.

Note that Forney ultimately killed himself. This is a common ending to black-on white homicides, suggesting an underlying problem: lack of impulse control.

• Carjacking. March case here.

• Immigrants. The Regime Media is even more reluctant to report immigration status than race, but occasionally the truth leaks out. The Austin Immigrant Mass Murderer, Ndiaga Diagne, was LEGALLY present (sort of—he overstayed a tourist but got permanent residency by marrying a U.S. citizen, whom he then divorced). In contrast, Yefry Archaga-Elvir, charged along with an American black in the killing of Miles Young, 15, was an ILLEGAL immigrant from Honduras, released into the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor by the Obama Administration. Young was reportedly killed because he was to testify in a murder trial. Details here.

  Of course it’s entirely possible that others of the perps found by Kenn are immigrants, but the Regime Media just didn’t ask.

• Disgruntled Employees. Christine A. Jones, a Madison WI hotel housekeeping supervisor, shot in the back by Diamond Wallace, who had been reportedly harassing her after being terminated. Details here.

  This case got some attention on the Right because Wallace told police she was partly motivated by Jones’ being a Trump supporter. But no mention of it appeared in the New York Times.

• Lethal escalation of trivial arguments. Examples here, here, here. The unheroic Derbyshiresque moral seems to be: walk away from any argument with a black. You just don’t know.

• Inexplicable random killings. Sometimes blacks just up and kill people. Example here.

Not all white victims are without agency. Drug dealing in particular is a high-risk profession. Examples here, and here (probably), and here.

That last is particularly instructive because of its sheer stupidity. A white drug dealer was killed by black perps, presumably customers, who were known to him and his family and had picked him up at his home. They then killed him and tried to burn his corpse in a car that one of them owned. They were apprehended because their cellphones were tracked, wearing items stolen from the white dealer. How could they possibly have expected to escape?

It’s chilling, because this type of stupidity is impossible to anticipate or defend against.

Similarly, one case in March allegedly involved prostitution (here). And the several cases of white men being killed in their homes by younger black men may possibly be Drugs Deals Gone Wrong—or even homosexual trysts.

Kenn found five white-on-black homicides in March, as always much lower than the number of black-on-white homicides, even without adjusting for population size.

Two deaths were occasioned by a very weird case of a white reacting to a parking dispute (here). One was a dispute among (integrated) acquaintances about a stolen gun (here). One was a Drug Deal Gone Wrong, which the four perps (integrated) survived. One was one of those trivial arguments, which in this case the white perp survived (here).

And one was apparently an honor killing in a Detroit liquor store: a white man killed the black victim after he got into an altercation with the white man’s black girlfriend. She handed him the murder weapon—a broken glass bottle. Details here.

Kenn concludes his March 2026 roundup with his usual summary of government data demonstrating that blacks are vastly more homicidal that whites. It’s boring to have to keep repeating this, but it’s necessary because of the false consciousness induced among normies by the Regime Media.

Kenn notes that FBI data suggests there may be an average of as many as 47 black-on-white killings a month, which means we’re missing a lot.

So please send Kenn tips by DMing him on his substack Chat, or email him at Abatehate@usa.com.

PETER BRIMELOW WRITES: Influencers on the Right report that doomerism is what sells nowadays, but it’s frankly hard to be all that that black-pilled on Trump’s immigration performance. Above is a chart from How Trump Purged Immigration Judges to Speed Up Deportations, By Nicholas Nehamas, Allison McCann, Steven Rich, Jazmine Ulloa and Hamed Aleaziz, New York Times, April 9, 2026. Basically—albeit through reversible administrative measures as usual—Trump has closed the asylum loophole.

I had a similar reaction this morning when a reader kindly wrote me:

I found your article from 2015 which was really cutting and tight. I think you should republish it on your Substack.

I had forgotten the article (A Guilty Elite: Immigration Beyond Economics, Chronicles Magazine, January 2015). Rereading it, I agree!

I made a number of arguments that are still valid (although completely ignored, of course, by American, Canadian and British elites, all of whom connived over immense post-Covid immigration rushes ostensibly because they believed this would spur economic growth).

But what really strikes me now is how much the immigration debate, and the GOP elite, has changed since early 2015—B.T. (Before Trump), when it was universally assumed that Jeb Bush would be the GOP nominee and that the Donorist-Conservatism Inc. immigration-good-more-immigration-better dogma would forever reign supreme.

Now we have the New Yorker Magazine quoting an estimate that seventy-five percent of Gen Z staffers working in Republican politics in Washington D.C. are anti-immigration Groypers (How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics: Inside the battle for the post-MAGA G.O.P., by Antonia Hitchens, April 6, 2026. I make a cameo appearance in the article for having been invited to a Nick Fuentes rally and for calling immigration to the West “Hitler’s Revenge”).

And we have this:

The White House

@WhiteHouse

“‘If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!’— AND THAT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AS LONG AS I AM PRESIDENT.” - President DONALD J. TRUMP

3:10 PM · Apr 4, 2026 3.3M Views

Yes, I know, I know. But remember, in 2015, Jeb Bush was openly running on Amnesty a.k.a. “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” Talk about doom.

A Guilty Elite: Immigration Beyond Economics

By Peter Brimelow. First published in Chronicles Magazine, January, 2015

America’s immigration enthusiasts, which is to say her entire ruling class, have such untrammeled access to the mainstream media that they are able to launch obviously absurd memes in shamelessly coordinated fashion. Thus, in the wake of the Republican triumph in the 2014 midterm elections—which of course had no effect on them at all; being an immigration enthusiast (to adapt the old movie Love Story) means never having to say you’re sorry—The New Republic ran “A Radical Solution to Global Income Inequality: Make the U.S. More Like Qatar” (November 6), by two University of Chicago academics, Eric A. Posner [Email him] and Glen Weyl. [Email him] They argued, seemingly with straight faces, that First World countries have a moral duty to admit Third World immigrants approaching levels seen in Persian Gulf states like Qatar (upward of 80 percent).

The New York Times then published “A Strategy for Rich Countries: Absorb More Immigrants” (November 8), by the George Mason University libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, [Email him] making an almost identical argument, this time because recent projections suggest that the global population may not, after all, be peaking out; and wealth needs to be shared.

(That bit about population not peaking out is really interesting. For years, immigration enthusiasts like the late Ben Wattenberg have been saying that immigration into the United States should not be cut because it would slow all by itself as global population peaked out. Now, the opposite condition is being claimed. Problems change, but the solution is always the same: more immigration!)

As a lifelong financial journalist and a battle-scarred veteran of the immigration wars, I know from bitter experience that, although everyone claims to be interested in what the dismal science has to say about immigration, actually they’re not interested in it at all. They really want to talk about, or more commonly emote about, race.

However, for the record: What Posner, Weyl, and Cowen are proposing is nuts. For more than 20 years, the consensus—the consensus—among labor economists has been that the immense inflow into the United States since immigration was reignited, after a 40-year lull, by Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 Immigration Act is of virtually no benefit, in aggregate, to native-born Americans. Immigration does increase output (GDP) in varying degrees. (In the case of unskilled immigrants, the increase is often minuscule.) But essentially all of that is captured by the immigrants themselves, through wages.

In other words, America is being transformed for nothing.

Immigration does affect native-born Americans economically, however, by causing a dramatic redistribution of income: It shifts two to three percent of GDP from labor to capital, by beating down wages. So policy-driven increases in immigration are in effect a subsidy to the owners of capital. This offers a crude but unfortunately accurate Marxist explanation for the class nature of the current debate, and of the nefarious role of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Thus, what the Posner-Weyl-Cowen meme proposes might marginally increase global GDP. And it might improve the incomes of the Third World immigrants themselves. But its impact on the incomes of most First World workers—that, of course, includes U.S. citizens—would be undeniably devastating.

Beyond economics—that is to say, to anyone other than a dogmatic libertarian—it’s obvious that the Posner-Weyl-Cowen proposal is a recipe for social conflict and utter disaster. As the brilliant and demoniacally energetic VDARE.com writer Steve Sailer noted sarcastically on TNR’s “Radical Solution” comment thread,

“Perhaps one wealthy country should test run this plan first. The easiest way to test Posner and Weyl’s plan would be for Israel to cut a 10 foot wide hole in one of those giant razor wire border fences they’ve built over the last few years to keep poor black immigrants out. “I look forward to The New Republic publishing Professor Posner and Weyl’s detailed plan for testing Open Borders by turning Israel into Qatar.”

The key to the Posner-Weyl-Cowen position, I believe, is Cowen’s claim in the NYT that

Developed countries that can absorb new immigrants at a modest cost should have relatively bright futures. They will help enable a rebalancing of population that will help the entire planet. In contrast, developed countries with relatively inflexible notions of national identity, and thus with strict immigration policies, may shrink in population and lose influence.

Ultimately, then, what Posner, Weyl, and Cowen are saying here is that national identity simply doesn’t matter. And, of course, the interests of ordinary Americans (or of any ordinary citizen of the great nations of the First World) simply don’t matter, either.

For nearly 30 years, I’ve been trying to get through libertarians’ thick heads the concept of the “metamarket”—the cultural prerequisites for capitalism. Admittedly, I’m just a journalist and don’t have tenure anywhere. Nevertheless, here’s what the University of Chicago’s Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman (got that?) told me 26 years ago (“Why Liberalism Is Obsolete,” Forbes, December 12, 1988):

[MF:] Let me summarize my own view. Private property is essential, but it’s not enough. Private markets are essential, but they’re not enough. Free private markets are the critical element. India is a non-free private market. In order to set up a business, you have to get a license from the government. The easiest way to get rich in India is to have an in with the government, so they’ll give you a license to get foreign exchange . . . [PB:] For example, we say the Chinese are clever people, but, as you point out, they never had any tradition of democracy or anything that resembles classical liberalism. And they had this historical episode where they apparently stagnated for a thousand years. What happened there? [MF:] I don’t know. Why has the world, as a whole, stagnated most of the time? See, you go back to the excerpt you read to me from Capitalism and Freedom. [“The typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude and misery.”] The history of the world is the history of tyranny and misery and stagnation. Periods of growth are exceptional, very exceptional. [PB:] You’ve mentioned what you see as the institutional prerequisites for capitalism. Do you think there might be cultural prerequisites, too? [MF:] Oh, yes. For example, truthfulness. The success of Lebanon as a commercial entrepôt was to a significant degree because the merchants’ word could be trusted. It cut down transaction costs. It’s a curious fact that capitalism developed and has really only come to fruition in the English-speaking world. It hasn’t really made the same progress even in Europe—certainly not in France, for instance. I don’t know why this is so, but the fact has to be admitted. [PB:] Does this mean that capitalism may not necessarily be exportable? [MF:] Beyond a certain point, it may not be. It’s been successful in Hong Kong, but there the limited-government framework was provided by the British—at the same time, incidentally, that they were depriving their own people of its benefits! Whether the Chinese themselves can generate that framework is very much an open question.

Posner, Weyl, and Cowen are not socialists. Posner is the son, and putative intellectual heir, of Judge Richard Posner, a key figure in the Law and Economics movement; Weyl, widely regarded as a future Nobel laureate, claims Milton Friedman is “the thinker that has most shaped me”; Cowen is well known as the coauthor (with his George Mason colleague Alex Tabarrok) of the libertarian blog Marginal Revolution. Nevertheless, nationality and culture are nonissues to them.

Intellectually, this libertarian lacuna has been to me—no doubt because of my mundane professional preoccupation with market forces—the most shocking development I encountered after I enlisted in the immigration wars by publishing a 14,000-word National Review cover story, “Time To Rethink Immigration?” (June 22, 1992—after, let the record show, Tom Fleming’s magisterial “The Real American Dilemma,”[PDF]the lead essay in Chronicles’ March 1989 “Nation of Immigrants” issue, which sparked perhaps the first shot in what turned out to be a brutal civil war within the late, great conservative movement).

More recently, I have been dismayed, and deeply impressed, by the bitter hostility that the younger writers for my immigration-focused website, VDare.com, have for the libertarians they have encountered on campus.

For us dinosaurs back in the 1970’s, the libertarian critique of the seemingly inevitable trend to socialism—which emphatically included Nixon’s capitulation to wage and price controls—was an epiphany. When the celebrated American socialist intellectual Robert Heilbroner (I argued with him in person!) famously conceded at the end of his life that, “Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won . . . Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism,” we were euphoric.

And we were right to be euphoric. We had been right. They had been wrong.

But it’s gradually become apparent to me that no one under 40 understands this—any more than he understands how omnipresent and existential was the threat posed by the Cold War.

And these young men are right, too. That was then. This is now. And what is at stake now is the survival of the historic American nation.

To be fair to me, I had reason for hope about the libertarians. The brief intellectual eddy of “paleolibertarianism” did take account of the metamarket. But, alas, this tendency was badly damaged by the premature death in 1995 of Murray Rothbard (although the economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe keeps the flame alive at his annual Property and Freedom Society conferences).

In my 1992 National Review article, and even more in Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (my 1995 book that grew out of it), I made serious efforts to engage the libertarians in argument. We even maintained a dedicated archive on libertarianism and immigration at VDARE.com.

But I’ve now concluded that it’s hopeless. The libertarians are as boneheaded as the Student Marxists of my youth. Whatever motivates them, it is not rational argument.

This was a serious problem for me as a financial journalist. For example, I had regularly used material from the libertarian Cato Institute in various polemical disputes that I prosecuted at Forbes. But, after clashing with Cato immigration enthusiasts, I realized (to my naive surprise) that their data simply could not be trusted. I remember cornering Catoite Steve Moore—subsequently at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and now (alarmingly) at the Heritage Foundation—over data on a different matter that he had expressed in absolute terms when they should have been expressed relative to GDP. I genuinely don’t see the point of this sort of legerdemain: It’s like sending troops into battle with defective rifles. Moore very grumpily conceded I was right.

On a personal level, however, perhaps the most distressing debates over immigration were not with the libertarians but with the neoconservatives.

I knew so many of them personally in New York in the 1980’s. Their fighting spirit, if you share their enemies in the various wild fistfights that they get themselves into, can only inspire passionate love. Thus, I particularly remember Norman Podhoretz, the genius editor of Commentary, telling me, “You do realize what causes AIDS? Promiscuous buggery!” Podhoretz is also the only person I ever saw literally hopping with rage, over some maneuver in the advertising alliance between Commentary and National Review.

I genuinely thought, when I first began writing about the immigration issue, that Podhoretz and his circle might be our allies. (They said they believed in America, didn’t they?) I actually arranged a dinner with Podhoretz, Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and John O’Sullivan, then editor of National Review. Podhoretz was polite about our arguments, but eventually turned to Mehlman and invoked their common Ellis Island heritage—to which Mehlman replied that, just because he was once a fetus, he didn’t have to be against abortion. Podhoretz instantly clinched, and the debate ended inconclusively. But I thought (and said, when I reported this incident in Alien Nation) that he was thinking.

I was completely mistaken. I now suspect (I don’t know for sure, because he seems to have stopped talking to me) that Podhoretz was a factor in William F. Buckley’s firing of O’Sullivan and ending National Review’s brief (1992-97) resistance to ruling-class immigration enthusiasm. I used to assume Podhoretz’s unspoken motive might have been to preserve the scandalous 1980 refugee statute, which was serving in effect as an expedited, subsidized immigration program for Soviet Jews. Today, however, the former Soviet Union has run out of Jews; but the enthusiasm continues. (I must stipulate that a surprising number of individual neoconservatives are not immigration enthusiasts, although for some reason they have no influence.)

Of course, intellectuals are always inclined to think that ideas actually matter. But two grosser developments since the Reagan Revolution may be more important. The first is the rise of what New York Times token-conservative columnist Ross Douthat (I suspect he’s secretly OK) has called “Donorism”: the conscious domination of the Republican Party by its corporate supporters, who care about nothing but crony capitalism, which in the case of immigration policy means cheap labor. The second is the concomitant rise of what we at VDARE.com call “Conservatism Inc.”—the new class of Republican operatives and publicists based inside the Beltway, ultimately servants of the Donorists, who mediate between them and the liberal establishment, absorbing liberalism in the process.

Perhaps anomalously, my experience since entering the immigration wars causes me to echo abolitionist John Brown on his way to the gallows after Harper’s Ferry: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”

Of course, the land is not guilty—but its elite is.

And, as in the case of Brown, and of my former libertarian allies against socialism and communism, I still believe that what now appears to be an inevitable trend will not stand.

Lydia and me (facing camera) confronted by communist infiltrators Hannah Gais (left) and Michael Edison Hayden (right) during the Bath Christmas Project’s fundraiser at the Berkeley Springs Castle, December 8, 2023. Note magnificent Bath Christmas Project tree, decorated by a retired professional. Sign up for the Bath Christmas Project’s 2026 Christmas tours!

Peter Brimelow writes: One of the very rare funny moments in VDARE’s ongoing four-year ordeal in the nightmare world of race-communist lawfare was the news that long-time Southern Poverty Law Center thug Michael Edison Hayden had actually conned Hachette, one of the biggest commercial publishers in the U.S., into commissioning a book on us!—Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town, to be published in April 2026.

It’s funny because

a) the VDARE .com webzine will have been suspended almost two years by the time this book comes out, a result of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ unconstitutional mugging of us beginning in 2022. So what’s the point?

b) the immigration policies that VDARE.com advocated were essentially those that President Donald J. Trump outlined in his celebrated August 16, 2015 immigration position paper—on which he won two, arguably three, elections. So what’s the big deal?;

c) In 2024, D. Trump carried Morgan County WV—the county seat of which is our home town of Berkeley Springs, the “Small American Town” that “Extremism” a.k.a. us allegedly “Tore Apart”—by FIFTY-SIX POINTS (77%-21%). And Trump carried EVERY PRECINCT in Berkeley Springs. So this is “tore apart”?

d) The Brimelow family live lives of boring bourgeois blandness: Lydia is a Sunday School teacher at her Catholic Church; she homeschools; I take our children swimming at a local spa and otherwise rarely come out of my basement office hole; etc. That’s about it. So?

In other words, there’s simply no There there.

Facts like these, of course, mean nothing to Hayden. A half-Egyptian rich kid married to an Indian immigrant, he is one of several communist professional doxxers, a creator of witch-hunting paranoid fantasies designed to destroy ordinary Americans against whom he has an obscure, probably psychopathic, grudge.

Hayden has been obsessed with VDARE.com for years. I suspect his 2021 attack on our “organizational prowess” may well have triggered the Anti-Defamation League’s decision to get NYAG James to take us out. Similarly, Hayden’s 2020 attack on our purchase of the Berkeley Springs Castle as a conference venue (containing the immortal lines “the castle is also securely embedded on a hill and surrounded by iron gates, making it hard for antiracist demonstrators to access [a.k.a. ATTACK AND SUPPRESS] it should VDARE decide to host a conference there” ) provoked his Twitter followers to debate how to firebomb us, after which he blocked us. (Probably because we had urged the FBI to investigate this blatant inter-state terrorist threat, which of course it did not).

But facts presumably do mean something to Hachette. My guess: Hachette editors (probably generic Manhattan leftists but quite possibly their even more idiotic anti-American French supervisors) genuinely thought they were getting the goods on the next incipient Waco, or at least another Hayden Lake, out here in darkest Appalachia.

It can’t be overemphasized how much the Left believes its own propaganda. Hence the Russia Hoax, J6 Hoax, Biden sharp as a tack, etc.

But presumably this means Hachette may be seriously shocked by Hayden’s foolish fizzle. Will it ask for its advance back?

The need to keep Hachette happy may explain the ludicrously portentous tone of Hayden’s book, as excerpted recently by the Leftist website TPM (below).

Thus Hayden presents it as a great triumph that he managed to “gain entry” to the Berkeley Springs Castle.

But he glosses over the reality that he did this by the simple expedient of using a fake name and buying a ticket to a fundraiser for the Bath Christmas Project, the local charity that decorates the town and the Castle and that we allow to put on fundraising events to benefit itself every Christmas Season. The Washington Post’s Ellie Silverman accomplished exactly the same heroic feat, with equally banal results, back in 2022. (But The Bath Christmas Project i$ grateful to them all!)

All of which sounds comic. And of course it is.

But there’s a dark side too. As the late Charlie Kirk pointed out on his Rumble show, discussing why we were so upset at finding Hayden and his SPLC sidekick Hannah Gais quizzing our eight year-old daughter, the issue was not just the ethics of trying to extract information from a minor, but that Hayden himself is an open sexual pervert. (Read the Kirk transcript linked above for graphic details. Or not, if you have weak stomach).

And perversion is the back story of the minimal but highly aggressive and very well-publicized communist presence in Berkeley Springs. (As it is for the American Left in general). Without going into details, we had to get a restraining order against a local transexual who was posting salacious material about one of our daughters on social media and also following her all around the local farmers’ market; a group of transexuals open-carrying guns began arriving at Lydia’s church, until deterred by the priest and congregation.

It is undeniable that these people are dangerous—think The Covenant School in Nashville, Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. We have real reason to worry.

Interesting final point: in Hayden’s Bluesky post touting his book he writes: “There's also stuff about what was happening inside SPLC and... it doesn't exactly measure up to the standards of a civil rights org!”

Oh yeah? VDARE kept a close eye on the SPLC. We analyzed its 990s and found it was actually a huge hedge fund attached to a small public-interest law firm. We were the first to discover it had an offshore bank account (whatever for?).

The SPLC has had two major but un-MSM-publicized upheavals recently: the 2019 firing of its founder Morris Dees along with his long-time associate and SPLC president Richard Cohen for never-fully-explained workplace transgressions; a remarkable 2024 purge of a quarter of its staff, apparently aimed at suppressing a pro-Palestinian rebellion, now an endemic problem for the American Left. Somewhere in the shuffle, Hayden appears to have left the SPLC.

So maybe he’ll have something original to say in his book after all!

A White Nationalist Publication Took Over a West Virginia Castle. I Got Inside.

First published on Talking Points Memo, March 16, 2026

In late February 2020, residents of the small tourist town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, woke to learn that a mysterious right-wing group called VDARE [??Mysterious? We posted to a free website updated several times daily since 1999; we’re a 501(c3) charity and our Form 990s are publicly available] had purchased a beautiful nineteenth-century castle overlooking their town. The castle meant everything to Berkeley Springs. Images of it appeared on town promotional materials, and the outsiders business and restaurants owners relied on for tourist revenue always noticed the gorgeous sandstone building as they drove past Berkeley Springs State Park on Route 522. [In fact, the Castle had been effectively closed to the public since 1999, when it ceased to be a museum, and completely closed since the 2014 death of its last owner, Andrew Jackson Gosline V. Lydia’s opening it up after more than twenty years for tours, events etc. is one reason she’s so popular in the town].

With fewer than a thousand residents, gossip reverberated quickly through Berkeley Springs, and Peter and Lydia Brimelow, the castle’s new proprietors, soon became its subject. The Brimelows had a great deal of money for Morgan County, West Virginia [?? Maybe before we had to pay the costs of NYAG Letitia James’ lawfare against us personally], as well as inscrutable [??] benefactors and a fair share of infamy. My employer at the time, the Southern Poverty Law Center, labeled them “white nationalist[s],” [No! Not “White Nationalist[s]”! VDARE was actually a forum site, hosting anyone critical of the post-1965 immigration disaster] and VDARE’s website wrote credulously [i.e. presciently] about the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that mass shooters have used to justify their beliefs. [Nowhere near as much death as the Replacers are inflicting on Americans, e.g. here]. There were other reasons for gossip, too, including the nearly four-decade age gap between Peter and Lydia.

Fr. Robert Sirico officiating, February 24, 2007. Lydia was 22, I was 59. He told us: “The Church has no objection.”

My new book, Strange People on the Hill, covers a five-year period in Berkeley Springs — from the end of 2019 through the day after the 2024 election, when VDARE’s presence caused neighbors to turn on one another, taking sides across ideological divides. [Bunk. See election results above. And for that matter, Trump carried EVERY SINGLE COUNTY in West Virginia. It’s America.] The following excerpt begins on the night of December 8, 2023, after my colleague Hannah Gais and I managed to gain entry [!!!] to the castle for the first time. We did so by purchasing tickets to a local Christmas party. For years, I reported on the Brimelows, and they posted disparaging remarks about me and my family on their website [ie. we answered his smears e.g. here]. That night was the first — and last — time we met in person.

When Hannah and I entered the castle, a massive tree reached the high ceiling of the foyer beside it. White lights, translucent white ribbons, and a glowing angel adorned the tree. A matching wreath hung above the fireplace. Hidden speakers played Bing Crosby’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

I mentioned to Hannah the possibility that the Brimelows might not even show up. [It wasn’t our party, see above]. We grabbed champagne and appetizers from an adjoining room with a long, opulently laid table and then headed up a red carpeted staircase that split the big stone walls of the foyer.

On the next floor, we found a pristine phonograph [Lydia says it’s just a cheap plastic toy that plays records, CDs and cassette tapes. But I have to admit that I didn’t know that either] next to a painting of green hills and a white sky. They also had a print of the Karl Ludwig Friedrich Becker painting Othello Tells His Story to Desdemona. It showed Othello in front of a row of columns, his Black skin draped in Renaissance garb, gesticulating as he speaks to an older white man and a young white woman who is demurely peering up at him. [This obviously proves we’re RACISSS!!!]

We walked down the halls and found a few untouched [because WE DON’T LIVE there] bedrooms. They looked like part of a fancy hotel. [We use them for conference speakers etc.] Then we ducked into another room with a Christmas tree. It was empty and we hung out there for a minute to take a break. When we moved on to the next room, we found that it was a scullery. [Actually a Butler’s Pantry].

There were no Christmas decorations in it, just framed pictures of Civil War generals. General Robert E. Lee was there. So was Stonewall Jackson. They also had a portrait of General Ulysses S. Grant. I wondered whether the Brimelows had put them up or the room came that way. [So why didn’t Hayden ask? All the Castle furnishings were included when we bought it, that’s one reason it was such a good deal. This room also has the famous picture of the older Andrew Jackson—a hero to Andrew Jackson Gosline V—which Hayden obviously didn’t recognize].

Hannah and I jumped up another small flight of stairs and stumbled into the room where VDARE held its conferences. At the center, we found the dais marked with VDARE’s circular emblem, an outline of a white doe surrounded by blackness. Behind it was an oil painting and what looked like Chinese sculptures of white, red, and black guard dogs. [They’re Foo Dogs. Andrew Gosline, who was a Sinophile, collected three pairs for the Castle]. I found it bizarre that they had left the room accessible. [It’s because we have NOTHING TO HIDE].

“Let me take your picture,” I said to Hannah.

Hannah posed and then took my picture next. I opened my palms in a shrug at the dais when she snapped it. From that angle, I was looking at a giant illuminated wreath and VDARE’s conference tables. There were only a couple dozen chairs.

Next to the conference area, facing west [actually south], I saw two doors. Someone had put up signs telling people not to access them, and I wondered if people lived there. [What lives there are our other sixty-plus chairs, a giant teddy bear, assorted stuff, etc.]

We exited through a door on the eastern [actually northern] side of the room, stepping into the cold. We took selfies with the illuminated battlements behind us. I looked down on the silent town from there. Traffic lights were changing colors, but there was no traffic. [Ominous!]

When we went back inside, some other people had come into the conference room, and Hannah volunteered to take pictures of a couple who wanted a photo of themselves standing in front of the wreath. Then we walked back downstairs and got new drinks. We sat down together along a plush loveseat at the back of the foyer.

I contemplated interviewing the people milling around and then making an abrupt exit. But then the doors opened, the wind and cold air blew in, and Peter and Lydia stepped forward with their three daughters. [FWIW my recollection is that I was working in my office upstairs. Lydia and our daughters came in separately].

The bench Hannah and I were sitting on angled along the stone walls in a way that obscured our faces from most of the room. We turned our heads to the side and looked at our phones so it would be harder to notice us. The Brimelows talked about the weather when they came in, and some people walked over to be closer to them.

I was about to suggest to Hannah that we make a move back up the stairs when Peter walked directly toward me. Dressed in a brown corduroy blazer and matching pants [FWIW I don’t have a brown corduroy blazer], he came closer and closer and then marched past me. Behind my back, Peter fiddled with something [the thermostat] and muttered to himself. Hannah and I shared a glance. [Aaargh!]

Peter returned and hovered in front of us. He looked directly at us.

“I need to turn the heat on,” he said in his gravelly British accent.

He left. Someone pulled Lydia into a conversation, occupying her, so Hannah and I got up from where we sat and moved back to the table with the hors d’oeuvres. Two of Brimelows’ daughters, the older ones [then aged 11 and 13], dressed in plaid and white, were thumbing through a book that had pictures in it. Hannah and I communicated only with our eyes. [Wow!] We saw an opening, headed back up the stairs, and found an empty space in the room with the second Christmas tree.

“I gotta talk to them,” I said.

“Once you do they’re gonna throw us out,” Hannah said.

We walked back over to the top of the stairs, near Othello Tells His Story to Desdemona and the phonograph. There were a few guests wandering around. I composed myself before approaching.

Before I could descend the stairs again, the Brimelows’ youngest daughter [our redhead, then aged 8] bounded up to them, radiating the kind of energy kids get when they’re at an adult function after bedtime. [Accurate, but she radiates this all the time]. The girl said a few things to me and Hannah. She spoke like a child unfrozen from the 1840s. [Wha???]

“How is it living in a castle?” I heard myself asking, amid her monologue.

“Oh, it’s wonderful. And, there’s a dungeon!” she said.

The Brimelow girl detailed the time she’d visited the dungeon. My gaze hung over her shoulder, on her parents, who were chatting with someone in the center of the foyer. I decided to end the conversation and started moving down those carpeted stairs. I took no more than two steps before Lydia looked up at me.

I saw the stages of Lydia’s recognition in what felt like slow motion.

First, her eyes opened in shock. Then, her brows furrowed. Her frown sucked in to cover a row of teeth that clenched visibly beneath the curtain of her lips.

[Lydia has always been very good at concealing her true feelings].

Lydia led Peter into a private conversation, presumably warning him about our infiltration. I saw Peter straining to look for where we were.

His general cluelessness was almost charming. [??? Maybe Hayden is world-famous, but I’d never seen him before and had no idea what he looked like]. Hannah and I went to the bar and I got another drink [that’s # 3, hmmm] while the Brimelows talked. When I got my drink, I turned around to approach them. Hannah flanked me. [Dah-Dah-Dah-DUM!!! ]

Lydia stared at me like she wanted to jab a stake into my heart. She closed her eyelids around her dark irises and held them that way, letting them twitch with contempt. [See what I mean?]

“Hey Peter, how are you doing?” I said.

“No pictures of the children,” Peter said quietly.

Hannah and I erupted with crisscrossing expressions of “no” and “of course not” and “we would never do that.”

“No pictures of the children,” he said again.

“You had your phone out, and if you took pictures of my kids . . . ,” Lydia said.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said. [But, n.b., he was obviously recording].

“You would do whatever you can,” Lydia said, raising her voice.

“I would not, I would not,” I said. “I’m not even here on behalf of SPLC.”

“What are you here on behalf of ?” Lydia asked.

“I’m writing a book,” I said, trying to project a little defiance.

“About what?”

“About the town.”

“Not about us?” Lydia asked.

I told them they had a wonderful home, referring to the castle. I thought it was the thing to say at that moment. Lydia leaned forward, towering over her husband. [Lydia is 6’ 1/2”, I’ve shrunk to 5’11” (it happens). But maybe she was wearing heels. I like her to wear heels.]

“It’s not our home,” she said. “It’s our office.”

I wanted to ask about the doors that they’d roped off adjacent to the conference room but I thought better of it. [Because he wanted to continue the insinuation?]

“I mean, you’ve spent nights here, right?” I asked.

“It’s not our home,” Lydia repeated. “That is a very important distinction. We have a house with our family, which is not this house.”

[It’s a very important distinction because NYAG Letitia James has alleged that we bought the Castle as a personal residence, whereas in fact we bought it to serve as offices and a conference space, after communists like Hayden succeeded in bullying commercial venues into cancelling on us. We lived in the Castle only transitionally, paying independently-determined rent. Nevertheless, New York State Judge Sabrina B. Kraus has repeatedly cited NYAG James’ lie, ignoring our refutation, with the result that people like alleged free speech maven Eugene Volokh (and born-again Democrat Richard Spencer, who admits he’s just jealous) get to echo it too. Note the number of times Hayden tries to insinuate it in this excerpt].

I told Peter that I wanted to interview him. He told me to send an email.

[He didn’t. I’ve learned not to do in-person interviews with JournoFa. If you do it by email, you at least have a record you can post e,g. here.

But, thinking about it, it is really odd that Hayden has apparently written an entire book without any further contact with us at all].

Then he looked at Hannah directly.

“What’s wrong with room temperature vodka?” he blurted out.

For years, Hannah and I had made watching VDARE’s holiday [“Christmas” in American] fundraising livestream an annual tradition. We would inevitably post screenshots and videos to Twitter and poke fun. In one of them, Hannah had mocked Peter for drinking room temperature Tito’s vodka. We laughed at Peter’s joke. At that moment, it felt like a peace offering.

“As a Slavophile, I simply think it should be cold,” Hannah said.

When I laughed about the vodka, I involuntarily put my hand onto Peter’s left shoulder, as you would do to a friend. After I realized what I had done, I drew my hand away. I watched Peter’s eyes monitor the movement of my hand as it left him. I continued to feel the corduroy of his jacket on my fingers long after touching it. [Dah-Dah-Dah-DUM again!!! Must say I don’t remember this].

“You traveled all the way here? For this?” Peter asked, his tone shifting to one of displeasure.

Lydia leaned forward in my direction.

“As soon as you come into town, I get a string of text messages,” she said.

“Well,” I said and stopped short.

“And I get recordings of your meetings.”

I searched myself for what she might be talking about. I remembered the night with Tanya Gersh and her comments about maggots.

[Although anyone reading this TPM excerpt must find it puzzling, Hayden is here referring to the fact that he brought Whitefish MT realtor Tanya Gersh to a meeting at the the Fairfax Coffee Shop, the local Berkeley Springs WV communist HQ,

Michael Hayden with Fairfax Coffee House’s communist proprietress Trey Johanson—recently convicted of harassment and filing false police reports, nothing to do with us—on left. Patriots visiting Berkeley Springs should patronize the patriot coffee shop, Lighthouse Latte!

where she, without ever having met us, called us “Nazis,” “worms,” and “maggots” and urged locals to begin a boycott of us, something she claimed to have organized successfully against fellow Whitefish resident Richard Spencer. Presumably she’s relented since he became a born-again Democrat].

“Well, it was certainly nice to meet you finally—,” I started.

“These people are normies,” Peter said in a low voice, putting emphasis on the word “normies.”

His eyes flitted to either side, referring to the people there. “Normies” had a particular connotation in the movement. He meant that they were people who had no connection to radical politics. Hannah and I were not considered normies because we were perceived to be in the fight — in the “cold civil war.”

“No, we’re not—,” I said, starting to explain that I wasn’t writing about the guests.

“And unblock me on Twitter,” Peter said.

I squinted at him after he made the comment and then looked at Lydia, who continued to watch me intently. It caught me off guard because of how stupid it sounded coming from Peter’s mouth.

[???Seems reasonable to me. We just want to monitor when his followers plan to fire-bomb us]

“I don’t want to get in any public back and forth,” I said.

“Then why do you attack?” Lydia asked.

“I don’t attack,” I said. “I never attack.”

“You’re writing a book called Strange People On The Hill, what do you call that?”

“It’s from a quote,” I said.

“It really should be called Strange People in the Castle,” Lydia said.

Her youngest daughter arrived at her side. She looked at Hannah and me like we were her new best friends.

“That’s not bad, but again, it’s from a quote,” I said and forced a smile.

“It’s disingenuous to say that you don’t want to get into a back and forth, so you’re going to mock,” she said.

“Well—”

Peter raised his hand.

“This is enough,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas to you,” I said.

[Note that we did not, despite Hannah Gais’ girlish fears, throw them out.]

The energy shifted from a pantomime of collegiality to something harsher, darker, and colder than the air outside. [Dah-Dah-Dah-DUM! again!] When we picked up our coats, someone who wasn’t the Brimelows followed us to make sure we left. He was an older middle-aged man wearing black fleece. As we stepped into the cold air, he looked down on us from the big doors.

“You’re not welcome here,” he said.

[N.b. A completely spontaneous reaction, we didn’t ask for it. But this is West Virginia, which has shifted overwhelmingly from Democrat to Republican—solely because the Republicans aren’t Democrats—over the last 20-30 years. Even the normies now know they have enemies].

Hannah and I walked the long driveway to the gates. They were closed. It might not have been more than a minute but it felt like half an hour before someone opened them for us. We crossed Route 9 and hiked down the hill to the park. The only place still serving food was a bar on 522 called the Naked Olive. [Link added].

“These people are normies,” I said to Hannah, imitating Peter’s voice.

[I doubt this. Even my American children can’t imitate my Northern English accent, which apparently hasn’t worn off after more that 50 years. They make me sound like Peppa Pig’s Daddy Pig.

[But of course Hayden’s insinuation is that our fellow West Virginians are, in fact, fascists. And that’s what he wants everyone to think about white Americans.]

New York State Hon. Judge Sabrina B. Kraus

PETER BRIMELOW WRITES: This is an update that I’ve just posted to my family’s personal GiveSendGo Appeal , first issued just days before Christmas. I‘m sorry to say things are getting worse.

Three months ago, I wrote to you with a heavy heart. New York Attorney General Letitia James had just sued my wife Lydia and myself personally, threatening our family

with bankruptcy after four years of lawfare that had already destroyed VDARE.com, the patriotic immigration reform nonprofit that we built over 25 years.

You responded. More than 280 of you donated over $35,000 here on Givesendgo to help us fight back. That money has gone directly to our personal legal defense—we have been forced to hire lawyers representing Lydia and myself quite separately from the VDARE Foundation—keeping a roof over our daughters’ heads and a lawyer at the table. From the bottom of my heart: thank you.

Now we are at a critical moment.

In January, VDARE Foundation’s lawyers and our personal lawyers together filed a motion to dismiss the NYAG lawsuits. These lawsuits have no legal basis—we have received no monies personally from any of the VDARE Foundation transactions under investigation—and should be thrown out.

What happened next was... unsettling.

The NYAG took their opportunity to reply and we prepared our final brief. This back and forth is standard. Then our legal team requested a simple extension—a professional courtesy routinely granted. The AG’s office agreed to an adjournment until March 17.

But then the New York State court intervened.

A clerk for New York State Judge Sabrina B. Kraus [pictured above] emailed both legal teams and informed us that she had never agreed to the extension—despite all parties consenting—and that everything was due by midnight the next day.

Our VDARE lawyer, with twenty years of experience, has never seen a court override an agreement between all parties like this.

Our personal lawyers had to plead with the clerk directly, citing urgent personal circumstances, just to get the additional time they had already been promised.

VDARE’s reply was ready and filed immediately. But our personal lawyers’ filing remains pending until March 17.

And yet Judge Kraus has already ruled on the motion to dismiss VDARE’s case. She denied it.

It is extremely rare to see a case decided like this, before all parties have had their say.

And, as if that weren’t enough, Judge’s Kraus decision misstated the facts, claiming that we might have owned two entities that a) we did not and do not and b) the NYAG never even claimed we owned.

Where we stand now:

Our personal lawyers have until Tuesday March 17 to file their final reply. After that, Judge Kraus will decide whether the claims against us personally will proceed.

If she grants our motion to dismiss, the threat against our family, specifically, will end. The suit against VDARE Foundation will continue, but Lydia and me—and our three daughters—would be spared personally.

If Judge Kraus denies our motion, NY AG Letitia James gets discovery against my family.

And we know what that means: years more of invasive demands, crushing legal bills, and the state rifling through every corner of our lives— the process as punishment, which is what the NYAG attorney Rick Sawyer bragged about in his speech to the Anti-Defamation League as the way he could get around our First Amendment protections.

We are not optimistic.

But we are not without hope.

What we need now cannot be bought with money. We need prayers.

• Pray for our lawyers, writing under immense pressure.

• Pray that Judge Sabrina B. Kraus reads every word of our filings.

• Pray that she sees the truth: that we are innocent of these allegations, that no penny was ever taken for personal gain, that this entire prosecution is a political act dressed up in legal language.

• Pray for a miracle.

If the motion is granted, our need for this personal fundraiser will greatly diminish. But if it is denied, we will face discovery—and all that entails.

For now, we wait, we pray, and we trust that the truth has a power even resistant judges cannot forever ignore.

Thank you for standing with us. Your support—financial and spiritual—has been a light in a very dark time.

Wars in the Middle East—they come and go. But Black America’s Holocaust [TM] against White America—it just keeps rolling along.

My long-time VDARE colleague Kenn Gividen has found 30 black-on-white homicides reported in February 2026.

(Before VDARE.com was mugged by New York Attorney General Letitia James, we used to report Kenn’s tally under the running head “A Month In The Death Of White America”—example here. It was one of our most popular features. Maybe that’s why James mugged us. VDARE can no longer pay Kenn, but I urge you subscribe to his AbateHate.com—it covers a lot more than black crime— here!)

As always, despite the fact that there are many more whites than blacks in the U.S., white-on-black killings were far fewer—just five in February.

My analysis of Kenn’s February 2026 findings:

Also as always, the single most consistent theme in this ongoing white Holocaust [TM]: the killing of white women by black Significant Others.

Some examples from this month: here, here, here.

Do high school sex education classes warn white girls about this very real danger?

The reverse, white-on-black Significant Other killings, is very rare. But in February Kenn did find three: here, here, here. (Although local media is as usual determinedly incurious, the last looks like a lesbian killing—which, interestingly, would make it one of two this month).

The corollary to black Significant Other killings: the killing of adjacent white family members. As happened in January, this tragically often means white babies.

Thus Paisley Brown, 3, above, died after Jeroen Jarrel Coombs, the black Significant Other of her mother, Jennifer Kendrick, both below, bound her limbs with rope and tape before dropping and hitting her multiple times, causing deadly injuries. He was allegedly supposed to be baby-sitting Paisley and her siblings.

(Fox 25 Orlando),

An even more appalling case: Levi Cole Ellerbe, 6 months old, burned to death by Felicia Marie-Nicole Smith, black, after his mother, Smith’s lesbian lover Hannah Nicole Barker, white, told her to dispose of him. (All below).

The savagery and stupidity of this crime—how could they possibly have expected to get away with it?—is a theme that is mind-numbingly recurrent in Kenn’s monthly Holocaust [TM] tally.

(Both women were sentenced to 80 and 30 years respectively in 2022. But, because of the Regime Media blackout, Kenn only just became aware of the case. Pursuant to his system, he records these atrocities in the month he finds them).

Another infanticide, that of Harlow Smith, 3, [pictured at top], occurred because Alexander Lamar Banks Jr., 21, drove his car into her family during their walk in Delta Township, Michigan, before shooting them. Her parents were seriously injured but survived. The assault appears to have been completely random. No motive has been reported.

Nor is one likely to be.

Another case of a Significant Other-adjacent family killing: Christopher Lopez, white, and his wife Trinette Rayson-Lopez, black, shot to death by the black father of a foster child in their care, reportedly because of a custody dispute.

There was one black-on-white cop killing in February, as usual completely unsung (c.f. Derek Chauvin).

However, yet another of those Black Significant Other killings involved a black cop murdering his white wife. In other words, this peculiar phenomenon is not restricted to the underclass.

In a scenario straight out of the TV series Landman, Michael James Nash, white, and a Hispanic co-worker were shot at an oilpad site by another employee, Jeffrey Rayshum Foster, black, who went on to attempt to kill a former girlfriend (race unspecified) and then himself die in police custody for unexplained reasons.

VDARE.com used to collect this sort of black workplace rampage under the heading Disgruntled Minority Massacre. It’s a Thing.

The Regime Media suppresses the immigration status of perps even more rigorously that their race. But at least two killings in February were by black immigrants: here (Eghafona is a Nigerian name) and here.

Still, one of February’s white victims was himself a Ukrainian immigrant, Vasyl Shvets—a Lyft driver. Working for these apps is clearly becoming dangerous—here, here.

A particularly dark theme I see in February’s tally: whites who comply with black robbers’ demands—but are then killed anyway (here, here).

Maybe there’s a grand moral to be drawn.

Another theme I see in this month’s MSM reports of these atrocities: how much they’ve shocked their “close-knit,” “tight-knit,” “quiet,” “serene,” “otherwise-calm” etc. communities.

Maybe this is just an AI reporting template, like “thoughts and prayers” and candlelight vigils.”

Or maybe it’s a sign that black crime is beginning to invade the suburbs. Which could be politically explosive.

Kenn concludes his February 2026 post with his normal summary of government data demonstrating that blacks are vastly more criminal that whites. It’s boring to have to keep repeating this, but it’s necessary because of the false consciousness induced among normies by the Regime Media.

He also notes that, based on FBI statistics for 2019, the most recent data available (why?), black-on-white homicides should be higher than his counts, about 47 a month.

Regime Media suppression is getting ever more intense. Ken urges you to send anything you see to him by Direct Message on his X account , by email, or Comments on

AbateHate.com

Disliking individuals or people groups due to immutable characteristics such as race is both immoral and illogical. It is also immoral and illogical to ignore reality. The site sometimes includes satire (or ‘rhetorical hyperbole’).

By DailyKenn.com

Peter Brimelow writes: Lydia and I recently attended two memorial gatherings in the Washington D.C. area for the late Robert Vandervoort, felled by the curse of cancer at the tragically early age of 52. (Full obituary here). He’s pictured (above, right) at the 2012 ProEnglish breakout session at CPAC which he, as Executive Director, had heroically invited me (above, left) to address. (Bob also invited John Derbyshire, whose address really was radical!)

Bob paid a heavy price for his heroism. To everyone’s surprise, but following the Alinskyite tactic “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it," there was one of those obviously co-ordinated Regime Media feeding frenzies picking on (of all people) me—ludicrous demands that CPAC (and GOP Presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney!) Disavow me etc. etc.

I would like to think that, in the Age of Trump, patriots are now less easily stampeded by these communist moral panics. But at the time, we got this:

Al Cardenas, director of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which organizes CPAC, said he had never heard of Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.com…

"I don't really know what his values are," Cardenas said. "I have asked my staff to delve into that."

Well, I’d never heard of Al Cardenas either!

Talking of values, Cardenas and his new trophy wife Ana Navarro, also a Conquistador-American immigrant, have now retreated to occupied Miami, where they have become Never-Trumpers.

But the ProEnglish board was apparently rattled by the uproar. They declined to capitalize on it by sponsoring another breakout session at CPAC the next year. And I am afraid it may have contributed to Bob’s subsequent departure from ProEnglish.

Lydia and I owed a particular debt to Bob: when we bought the Berkeley Springs Castle in West Virginia because it had become clear that communist pressure and corporate cowardice meant we would not be allowed to hold conferences anywhere else in the Land Of The Free, he vouched for us with the local GOP congressman for whom he had worked. No doubt this helped when the local Leftists tried to whip up hysteria. But alas, Bob was already sick and was never able to visit us.

St. Petersburg is famously said to be built on the bones of the unknown serfs who perished draining the swamp on which it now stands. When the Historic American Nation is finally reconstituted, I will be honored if my bones supply as much support as those of Robert Vandervoort.

“Canadian Bilingualism & Multiculturalism as it Relates to America“ (Yawn!)

First published on VDARE.com, February 16, 2012

Peter Brimelow writes: This was the title of my much-denounced but completely unreported speech to ProEnglish’s breakout panel on “The Failure of Multiculturalism” at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference, which we post here in adapted form.

“Yawn”? Of course, I don’t really think the subject is boring. I think the public choice consequences of America’s creeping institutional bilingualism are profound. I think someone could be elected President by opposing it.

Someone? Anyone?

[See also Beware Bilingualism! The Catastrophic Canadian Case by Peter Brimelow]

Thank you, Bob [Robert Vandervoort, ProEnglish’s Executive Director].

Ladies and Gentleman:

Unlike Dr. Porter, [Rosalie Pedalino Porter] I’m still struggling with one language! So it may be that some of you may not be able to understand me, particularly in the back. If anybody can’t hear me just indicate in the usual way.

I want to thank ProEnglish for inviting me today. It’s very brave for a number of reasons. In the way back, you’ll see we have some copies of the Social Contract Magazine’s Winter 2006-2007 special VDARE.com issue which you can pick up for free. I don’t want them floating around my office anymore!

Are there any Canadians in the audience? [Sun News Network’s Kris Sims raises elegant hand]. Ah, so I have to be careful! [Sims interviewed me, but I don’t believe it ever ran. Political Correctness is intense in Canada: alas, Sun’s attempt to become Canada’s Fox failed].

If you cross the border into Canada anywhere, you’re going to see bilingual signs in the airport and you’re going to conclude from this that there are a lot of bilingual and French-speaking people in the country. But this just isn’t true.

Less than a fifth (17%) of Canadians speak both languages. That number has not changed for many years. As far back as 1931, it was 12%. In spite of nearly 50 years of intense social engineering, since the Official Languages Act of 1967, that number hasn’t significantly increased.

And most of those bilinguals live in Quebec or its immediate environs. Above all, there are essentially no French-speakers, and very few bilingual Canadians, west of the Lakehead. For nearly 2000 miles, there is almost no French spoken in the home.

But nevertheless, at the moment, there is a bill being considered in the Canadian Parliament demanding that all Supreme Court Justices be able to hear arguments in French.

That doesn’t mean having a translator and listening to a French-language argument—it means the judges themselves have to be French-speaking, have to be bilingual.

Of course, this also means, as a practical matter, that there are going to be no more Western Canadians on the Supreme Court. And that’s really the main point to grasp about institutional bilingualism: it’s about power—it’s about the distribution of power and perquisites in a society.

I lived in Canada as a young man and I wrote a book about Canadian politics (The Patriot Game: Canada and the Canadian Question Revisited). Canada is a really interesting society. It’s responsible for a inventing a great number of modern political diseases that have subsequently infected the entire world..

One of them is multiculturalism, which in a nutshell is the determination of the elites throughout the First World not to press immigrants to assimilate—unlike in the U.S. in the early 20^th century, where they had “Americanization” campaigns. Now it’s the direct opposite. The elites encourage immigrants not to assimilate.

Another of those modern political diseases is “bilingualism”.

As I said earlier, this is fundamentally about power. People like to say, “Well, it’s a great thing to speak more than one language.” I think this is hogwash, myself. I’ve never felt the absence of more than one language (I know Dr. Porter would disagree with me!) I do feel the absence of math. I wish I were better at math than I am. I think that’s because of the scientific world we live in.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about institutional bilingualism—requiring the government of the state, and institutions within it, to function in both languages on demand.

That’s exactly what’s happened in Canada. As a result of the 1967 Official Languages Act, the Federal Government, right across the country, now functions in both languages. And that means, as a practical matter, that it is substantially staffed by Francophones from Quebec. Institutional bilingualism has made a huge difference on the Federal Government’s hiring practices.

In certain areas of the county, for example, in Newfoundland where my first wife was born, or in the rural West, the Prairie provinces, a major thing that kids did in those areas was to go into the RCMP—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But that’s very difficult to do now, because of these bilingual requirements. As a practical matter, people do not learn two languages unless they’re in an environment where they hear both languages spoken. And most Canadians are not.

But the demographic realities in Canada are that only about 17% of the population speaks both languages. And over half of those are “Francophones”—Canspeak for people who speak French in their home. One out of every three Francophones is bilingual. But only one out of 15 of Canadian “Anglophones” are bilingual. So it’s a highly asymmetrical situation. Institutional bilingualism puts the majority language community at a serious disadvantage.

Now, there are basically two ways in which you can become an institutionally bilingual country. One is, you can bring a lot of immigrants in who speak a different language and persuade them not to assimilate. This is what the Americans have been working on since the 1965 Immigration Act. It has come a long way and it has created a whole new minority—“Hispanics”.

If you look in detail at the numbers, you see that 1990 was the first time the US census reported a category of native-born Americans, individuals born in the country and over the age of 14, who couldn’t speak English. It had never been picked up before.

The Census has another category, too: “linguistic isolation”—the number of families in which no one over the age of 14 speaks English. When I last looked at that, in the 2000 census, that number had doubled. And now it appears to have doubled again.

So we are steadily working on building foreign-language enclaves in this country.

But the second way you can move toward institutional bilingualism is to have a large part of your national territory that is entirely inhabited by people who don’t speak the majority language and don’t want to learn it.

The Canadians had this in the province of Quebec, where essentially all the Francophones in Canada live. Quebec is a nation-state in every sense except for political independence, and it’s very close to that now.

The Canadian elites, for reasons we can speculate about, were desperate to keep in Quebec in Confederation. So they decided to bribe it with, among other things, this Official Language policy. It created jobs all over the country. And it also had serious consequences for Canadian political discourse.

Now, the Americans are working on this second method too, of course, by considering the idea of bringing Puerto Rico into the union and making it a state. As far as I can see, every single Republican presidential candidate is in favor of this—not having given it two seconds’ thought, of course.

If Puerto Rico comes in to the Union and becomes a state, I don’t see how, under the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution, it’s going to be possible to stop institutional bilingualism spreading across the country. (We have an article about this on VDARE.com this morning)

I said earlier on that institutional bilingualism has a serious effect on political discourse. When Canada’s Official Language act was passed, it immediately became sacred, rather like the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the U.S. It was bitterly opposed at the time, for cogent and legitimate reasons, but once it was passed it became sacrosanct, a sacred cow. It is impossible for any public official to criticize the Official Language Act in Canada.

In the early 1970s, I was an editor for the Financial Post in Canada. And a young man came to see me who was running for the Progressive Conservative leadership—the equivalent to the Republican Party in the U.S. I asked him about the then-hot issue of free trade between the US and Canada. Free trade was a hot issue, but it was fiercely opposed by the Canadian Nationalists.

The young man immediately fell apart. He said, frankly, that he didn’t know anything about free trade—this was only the most important economic issue for Canada over its entire history that he didn’t know anything about. He said that, when he went into politics, he had to choose between learning French and learning economics. And, he said, “I chose French”.

He was from Western Canada. And, you know, to learn a language so you can function and debate as an adult, is no mean task. It’s very time-consuming. I wasn’t surprised he didn’t have time to study economics.

So, anyway, I promptly lost interest in him. And he went on to win the leadership and, eventually, to become the Prime Minister of Canada. His name was Joe Clark.

But note this effect on Canadian public debate. At the time Clark said this to me, in the middle 1970s—none of you will remember this now, not even Bob [Vandervoort]—socialism was really on the march. Everybody thought that we were going to move to a permanently socialized society, with government-mandated wage and price controls. Nixon introduced wage and price controls here, long-time Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had given a speech in which he said, the free market doesn’t work, we need to have wage and price controls. We all really thought we were going to move all the way to a social democratic state.

And no one was opposing it, least of all Joe Clark, who just went along with the flow.

It’s hard to remember that now because it’s all been blown away by the great inflation of the early 1980s and by Ronald Reagan, God rest him.

But Canada was very slow to get that message. And one reason was the way in which their political climate was so messed up by this language stuff.

Canada is a warning. The way in which they imposed institutional bilingualism on federal and provincial [= state] institutions was a terrible thing. It led to the dispossession of people who aren’t bilingual. It’s been highly regressive. It’s meant that the power has remained in the hands of central Canada, when the demographics suggest it should be moving to the West, and specifically in the hands of Quebec, of course. And it’s had a highly regressive social effect. It meant, basically, that the government and the Canadian elite institutions are essentially all staffed by the same types of people—namely Francophones, and bilingual Anglophones, from Montreal and the central Canadian region.

Charles Murray has just written a book (Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 ) that says the elites here are getting out of touch with the majority. Well, that effect is enhanced in Canada by the effect of the Official Languages policy.

But there is also something very good about Canadian language policy which I didn’t think enough about at the time. That is, although the Federal Government institutions in Canada work in French and English, the Quebec government works entirely in French.

Over a period of several years in the 70s and 80s, successive governments in the province of Quebec passed legislation which essentially crushed the use of English in Quebec. You could not require an employee to speak English in most circumstances. You couldn’t even display signs in English in Quebec. So for example, if you go into an English language bookstore in Montreal, you’ll see a sign that said “Romans”— which means “novel.” All the books themselves are in English, but the sign is in French.

It does have this subliminal effect that you see in reverse when you go into the Vancouver airport. You forget about the presence of any Anglos in Quebec, in Montreal—although that’s a city which they essentially built, it was an English speaking city until very recently.

I think this example of what the Quebeckers have done, although it’s not pretty, is most interesting. It has actually completely broken the back of the Anglophone resistance to Quebec separatism. If people don’t like Quebec separatism, they leave. in fact the Quebec Anglos are now the most bilingual of all the ethnic groups in Canada. But they tend to be quite sympathetic, or at least resigned, to Quebec separatism.

Montreal was a bastion of the British Empire. It is the city with the greatest number of road signs to Queen Victoria in the world. But now it’s a French speaking city. In 50 or 60 years, Montreal Anglos have gone from being Romans to being Anglo Argentineans. Their ethnic patterns and social lives are slightly different. But they’re essentially assimilated.

I think that something like this Quebec language legislation is going to have to happen here in the U.S.

It’s not enough to have Official English as the government level. I get email all the time, from people in places like eastern Washington State, who say their kids can’t get jobs in McDonalds and stuff because they don’t speak Spanish. This creeping institutional bilingualism is a ferocious attack on the living standards of the American working class, the blue collar workers—just as current immigration policy in general is.

It will take Quebec-style legislation to stop it. They’ve shown us the way.

I will finish up with a hopeful anecdote. My first wife, who died some years ago, was from Newfoundland, which is an island in the North Atlantic. It’s sort of a salt-water Appalachia, really. No French at all is spoken there. But she was completely “bilingual”—that is to say, in Canadian terms, that she spoke French and English.

This was because her father, who like all Canadians thought it would be a good idea to work for the federal government, pushed her through French in school.

But it had the opposite effect of what they thought it was going to do. It had absolutely no effect at all on her attitudes to Quebec—tolerance for them and stuff. She retained all the traditional Newfoundland attitudes to Quebec, which is to say that she thought they were all thieves and should give back the Churchill Falls. (It’s a great rip-off off of Newfoundlanders, it’s rather arcane, we can talk about it later).

The important practical effect was that we had to go to Paris every year. In fact, she was living in Paris when I married her, and she had to come to Washington, for which she didn’t forgive me for a long time.

The moral is that it doesn’t work—these great social engineering programs don’t work.

Even though Joe Clark was a completely useless Prime Minister, nearly as bad as George W. Bush, the fact is that there is a Canadian government now that is predominately from English Canada. It did not require a Quebec vote to win. They’ve assembled a majority out of English Canada alone to win, something which I predicted in my Canadian book 25 years ago would eventually happen.

Now, they haven’t actually done very much about anything—because they’re still under the ideological hegemony of the Liberals and the Official Language myth.

But it’s going to happen.

PETER BRIMELOW WRITES: New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ unconstitutional lawfare forced us to suspend our VDARE.com webzine in 2024. But she hasn’t yet got her filthy paws on the Berkeley Springs Castle in Berkeley Springs WV, which Lydia bought in 2020 as our own conference venue when it became clear that a combination of communist thuggery and corporate cowardice made it impossible for us to hold conferences at commercial venues anywhere in the Land Of The Free. The Castle is now owned by a separate West Virginia charity run by volunteers, including Lydia, and is available for private functions, weddings etc. (inquiries here). It has also hosted events by other persecuted patriots and we still hope someday to resume our own VDARE conferences there. Meanwhile, events like the (strictly non-political) Historical Tours that Lydia announces here help us stop the Castle from falling down. The tours are strictly non-political, but if any readers come, I’ll be happy to meet up with them.

Lydia Brimelow

Feb 18, 2026 • 1 min read

Spring is just around the corner, and we are thrilled to announce our 2026 Historical Tour schedule at the Berkeley Springs Castle! Join us for a journey through time as we open our doors to share the stories, secrets, and stunning architecture of this Gilded Age treasure.

Tours are led by our knowledgeable volunteer guides and last approximately one hour and twenty minutes. Space is limited, so we encourage you to book early!

2026 Tour Schedule:

April 25, Saturday, 1:00pm and 4:00pm
May 2, Saturday, 1:00pm and 3:00pm
May 9, Saturday, 1:30pm
May 16, Saturday, 1:00pm and 3:00pm
May 23, Saturday, 1:00pm and 4:00pm
June 6, Saturday, 1:00pm and 3:00pm
June 13, Saturday, 1:00pm and 4:00pm
June 19, Friday, 5:00pm
June 20, Saturday, 1:00pm and 3:00pm
June 27, Saturday, 1:00pm and 4:00pm

More dates coming soon! We will be adding additional tours, including special Apple Butter Festival weekend dates, so stay tuned.

Ticket Information:

• General Admission: $25 (Ages 6 and older)

• Children 5 and under: Free (please reserve a complimentary ticket)

Tickets are available now! CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

We can’t wait to welcome you to the Castle!

PETER BRIMELOW writes: Patrick Cleburne was one of our most popular writers on VDARE.com (his archive here). Scandalously, VDARE.com was forced to suspend in 2024 after its unconstitutional mugging by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. But Cleburne has just resurfaced on Substack, like other VDARE.com refugees such as James Fulford, Kenn Gividen, Federale, Andrew Morrison. Subscribe to them all!

We just have to hope Substack doesn’t do pull another YouTube.

Cleburne, manifestly driven by savage indignation, does not charge subscribers. But he is also now free from VDARE.com’s narrow focus on the immigration issue, hence his recent acerbic refutation of a new book reflecting the communist-dominated academic conventional wisdom on the Vietnam War. (“In other words, 50 years after America suffered a humiliating defeat which should never have happened and for which the culprits have never been suitably punished, the American publishing industry has produced…a stale hatchet job.”)

And, although it certainly does involve the immigration issue, I’m not sure I, as VDARE.com’s Editor, would have had the nerve to drive home, as Cleburne has done here, the hypothesis for which he was developing evidence on VDARE.com: that the Biden Regime’s inexplicable relaxation of the Unaccompanied Child Program was motivated by pervert rings that extended into the (proudly LBTQ-a.k.a. pervert prominent) Biden White House.

We all know that the Regime Media will not ask this question.

But here’s James Fulford with VDARE.com links on Jeffrey Epstein’s death: BREAKING: Epstein Dead, Democrats RELIEVED!

Biden’s Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) Atrocity

History will condemn all of us that this was not stopped.

By Patrick Cleburne, first posted February 9, 2026

Of all the evil things the Biden Administration perpetrated, their Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) policy was in my opinion the most wicked.

Under this, foreign children crossing the border without adult companions were admitted and then turned over to anyone willing to take them. Minimal qualifying of these people was done, and follow-up wellness checks were ineffectual.

According to Grok

“more than 552,000 UACs were encountered at the Southwest border during the Biden years with 491,762 being handed over to the Office for Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for distribution within the US.”

On February 2 this year, ZeroHedge ran an Epoch Times update: Border Czar Homan Says More Than 145,000 Illegal Immigrant Children Located. This said-

…an August 2024 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General, which showed that more than 323,000 illegal immigrant children were unaccounted for in the United States.

So the Biden ORR lost touch with 65.6% of the children it placed within the US.

Furthermore

“Many of the children who came across the border unaccompanied were allowed to be placed with sponsors who were smugglers and sex traffickers,”

Much to its credit, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) posted on October 12, 2023 a chilling 46-minute Podcast with the accurate headline Unaccompanied and Unsafe: Biden Policies Facilitate Exploitation and Abuse of Child Migrants. This was an interview between CIS’s Jessica Vaughan and Tara Lee Rodas which thoroughly discussed this scandal. Rojas tried heroically to be a whistleblower throughout the later Biden years.

Needless to say, the MSM completely ignored this. CIS, for reasons I cannot fathom, never posted a transcript. That meant that most journalists would skip the video (more on this below).

In Obama’s second term his administration moved aggressively to expand and consolidate the illegal immigrant presence in America.

They had already realized that the standing orders to the Border Patrol to accept UACs and hand them over to ORR for ‘resettlement’ was a loophole in immigration control and they now exploited this forcefully. Per Grok, in the first Obama term some 39,000 went to ORR, in the second some 161,000.

At the time it was generally implied these children were going to relatives. Nevertheless, the impact on social services such as schools and the blatant end run around immigration laws caused outrage. The Obama Administration ignored this and so of course did the Congressional GOP: Obamacrats Stay With No-Borders/Kidinvasion Stratagem. GOP Leadership Stays Bribed

The failure of the Congressional GOP Leadership to take any interest in this matter is of course directly responsible for the hugely intensified use of this loophole in the Biden years. As noted, referrals to the Office for Refugee Resettlement more than tripled over the already egregious second Obama term.

When Biden’s managers gained power in January 2021, they immediately shut down US border enforcement. This had actually been the Democratic Party’s objective since Obama’s second term: Pelosi Stated Obamacrat Immigration Policy: Not Open Borders: NO Borders. GOP/AdelZuck response: Zzzzz. By 2023 they were even transporting in by air hundreds of thousands of “refugees’ they had recruited: Regime Media Rushes To Cover Up Biden’s Flying In 320,000 Illegals In 2023.

Estimates of the numbers admitted and crossed illegally range up to 10 million. The equivalent number in Trump’s first term was 1 million. (Numbers per Grok).

With this great leap forward in the Great Replacement, why was the messy and expensive Unaccompanied Alien Children loophole exploitation expanded? Children could and did cross with Parents and the entire Biden border policy was an end run around immigration law. Yet the Biden Administration hugely increased the risks to all unaccompanied child illegal aliens by dismantling virtually all vetting of would-be sponsors - and continued to try weakening them. Compared to the overall influx they engineered, the incremental UACs numbers were modest.

Distressingly, I believe the answer lies in the possibility I raised in COULD The Biden Regime POSSIBLY Have Ramped Up The Unaccompanied Child (UAC) Program… To Supply Pedophile Rings?

Many of these kids are made to work for unscrupulous employers, their sponsors acting as gangmasters. But I doubt the anticipated profitability of this could have been such as to induce the Biden Mob to make the sweeping regulatory changes that they did.

What would be profitable enough: sex.

My theory: Perverts in the Biden Administration and their friends in the prostitution Industry pushed through these changes, for their profit and pleasure. In this depraved Age, of course, little boys are as vulnerable as little girls.

In the course of this essay I presented an 800-word synopsis of the 46- minute CIS discussion between Jessica Vaughan and whistleblower Tara Lee Rojas. It starts

Both ladies put sex-trafficking front and center of their concerns). They mentioned it repeatedly. For instance, at 10:05 Rodas tells of a young girl complaining she did not know the woman she had been placed with, who was pimping her out.

Biden employed some very strange people as Pádraic O’Bannon noted in: Maybe the Biden Regime IS Sex Trafficking Kids. After All, It Hired An Advocate For Underage Homosexual Prostitution.

Sex sells newspapers. But not in the Biden era where UACs where concerned. VDARE noted in in MSM Ignores Veritas' Expose of Biden Child Sex & Labor Trafficking that a powerful two-part James O’Keefe documentary was shut out in 2022.

Tellingly, when the New York Times got around in 2023 to running a story on the situation: As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings by Hannah Dreier April 23 2023 interest was shown in cruel employers and delinquent Federal officials, but none at all in the glaringly obvious risk of sex predation.

Dreier continued to evade the issue the following year as discussed in Biden Perverts’ Child Trafficking Scandal—NEW YORK TIMES Starts Shifting Blame To Capitalism And (Guess Who!) Whites. (Link to her story here). This is bizarre, not to say delinquent behavior.

In all likelihood, fear of antagonizing the powerful LGBTQ lobby lay at the root of this unprofessionalism - if not actually ordered by such forces in the NY Times management.

Revolver noted on February 3 And just like that, Pizzagate is back in the news… This points out that the discovery of child sex rings in countries like Australia and suspicious references in the Epstein files makes dismissal of those 2016 rumors more questionable:

It means don’t shut up just because the wrong people are uncomfortable.

Democrats in general have been conspicuously uninterested in the fate of Biden’s UACs. But the Congressional Republicans have not been much better. An honorable exception to this was Missouri’s Senator Josh Hawley: Hawley Almost Goes There, Hints That Traitor Joe’s Regime Is Sex Trafficking Illegal-Alien Kids. (This essay provides the happy news that President Biden boasted

‘nearly 14% of his 1,500 agency appointees identify as LGBTQ”)

The culprits in this dreadful scandal have two problems. First, President Trump appears to have ordered vigorous investigation into the facts (as yet not impeded by federal judges). Second, there are hundreds of thousands of young people who actually experienced this treatment. As they grow up and become articulate, horrible stories will emerge. And these will probably be seized upon by the ethnic-grievance specialists among the growing crew of rent-seeking Hispanic politicians.

America will then have to decide whether to be more ashamed of the atrocity or the coverup.

See also Are Biden Regime Perverts Facilitating Child Sex Trafficking, Child Labor Abuse?

and

View Powerful Muckraker Video On How Biden’s Alien Kid (Sex?) Trafficking Is Being Paid For By You

Funny thing: January saw another BLM-style elite moral panic breaking out because two communists decided to commit Suicide By Insurrection in Minneapolis—but absolutely no concern that there were THIRTY-FOUR (34) black-on-white homicides found in the same month, as opposed just two (2) white-on-black homicides, both arguably self-defense.

And this happens every single month. FBI data for 2019, the last year available (why?), reported the year’s total of black-on-white homicides at 566, which implied an average of some 47 a month. But my long-time VDARE.com colleague Kenn Gividen can’t usually find that many killings in his monthly survey (January survey here), basically because racial Hate Facts are increasingly suppressed by the Regime Media. (Subscribe to Kenn’s AbateHate.com—it covers a lot more than black crime— here!)

Similarly, Kenn reports that one of his sources, the National Gun Violence Memorial, has now apparently blocked him. Needless to say, the gun-grabbing Leftists who run it don’t report race, but Kenn was often able to use the pictures they post to figure out the truth. So, given the totalitarian reflexes of the modern American Left, he must be suppressed!

Before VDARE.com was mugged by New York Attorney General Letitia James, we used to report Kenn’s work under the running head “A Month In The Death Of White America” (Example here). Maybe that’s why she mugged us.

What is going on here is a Holocaust (TM) and it’s a scandal and a disgrace that no Regime Media outlet is covering it by listing each month’s victims, as we did at VDARE.com. The imploding Washington Post deserves its fate.

Haitians are also in the news, because of Biden-appointed immigrant kritarch Ana Reyes’s absurd February 2 attempt to prevent the Trump Administration from allowing their 16-year (!) Temporary Protected Status to expire.

And, right on cue, we have a Haitian killer: daycare employee Theah Loudemia Russell, pictured above, who choked 11 month Hervey Mucklebust to death by forcing her fingers down his throat. Incredibly, Russell had earlier attacked another child similarly and had a record of erratic behavior, but was still employed.

All of which raises the question, again, of what exactly the authorities are doing in Minnesota. (This happened in a suburb of Minneapolis).

The Regime Media don’t ask whether Russell was a TPS beneficiary, of course. But she is reported to have made frequent trips to her native Haiti—showing, despite the ululations, that it’s actually safe enough for TPS beneficiaries to return.

(The immigration status of perps is suppressed even more intensely than their race, but at least three in Kenn’s January haul appear to be immigrants: here, here, here).

Heartbreaking especially to parents, Kenn reports another case of fatal white child abuse: 17-month Kai Tesoro died from abuse inflicted by his mother’s black boyfriend, Christian Moniz Rabino. Incredibly, after a plea deal, Rabino was sentenced only to probation.

The killing of white women by black Significant Others is the single most consistent theme we find in Kenn’s work. Examples this month: here, here, here.

The reverse is very rare.

But in January 2026 another aspect of the black Significant Other problem was noticeable: the collateral killing of the miscegenating woman’s white family members by her black Significant Other.

Kai Tesoro, above, is just one. Perhaps the most telling example: Charles Broomfield, the black estranged fiance of Jacqueline Neil, white, shot her and her two white teenaged sons to death—while sparing his own mixed-race son with Neil.

Another example of a Black Significant Other Collateral Killing here.

Some other themes:

• Good Samaritan killings. Rule (10h) of John Derbyshire’s epochal The Talk was “Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.” VDARE.com continued to post proof as long as it was in existence. January 2026 saw two examples: here, here.

• Drug deals gone wrong. Drug deals are just dangerous for whites. January 2026 examples here, here.

• Social relationships with blacks are just dangerous. This again is John Derbyshire territory. For example, I (and apparently others) suspected that one appalling case in January 2026, the killing by Nijyle Lewis, 25, black, of Amanda Smith, 23,white, along with her white mother and brother, might be yet another case of Black Significant Other/Collateral Killing. But it seems, at least according to the Regime Media and the police (who of course can’t be trusted but why would they lie, they support miscegenation?), that Lewis was just an “associate,” not of Amanda Smith, but of her mother.

  Another example here.

• Whites caught in black crossfire. Example here.

• Utterly inexplicable random killings. Enduring these seems to be part of the price of integration. January 2026 example here.

• Social media sales meetups. Something I don’t remember noticing before: the killing of whites who meet up with blacks to make a sale or purchase arranged over social media. It looks like this is the New Mugging. January 2026 examples: here, here.

Kenn concludes his January 2026 post with his normal summary of government data demonstrating that blacks are vastly more criminal that whites. It’s boring to have to kee repeating this, but it’s neccessary because of the false consciousness induced among normies by the Regime Media.

Just as it is now doing about ICE.