Ryan P. Haygood, SPLC’s new President and CEO

The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] has not yet posted its Audited Financial Statement and IRS Form 990 for the year ending October 31 2025, delaying at least three months later than usual. This is an abrupt departure from the meticulous housekeeping under the regime of founder Morris Dees and President & CEO J. Richard Cohen (who resigned alongside Dees in 2019).

And the SPLC has also switched auditors: it is now using the Atlanta-based firm of CRI (Carr, Riggs & Ingram, L.L.C.), whereas for many years it used Jackson Thornton & Co., P.C. based in its hometown of Montgomery AL.

At commercial bank credit school many years ago, I was trained to regard any change of auditors as raising a red flag.

Is something going on?

The SPLC, long America’s leading anti-white vigilante outfit, has certainly been generating some interesting news this year. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against it, initially in April, amended in June. The core of the original indictment:

• 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 primarily for paying monies to questionable groups, as often misrepresented, including, alarmingly, by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at the DOJ Press Conference.)

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

Financial fraud laws are exceptionally savage, a hangover from the War on Drugs and the War On Terror. Under them, the only thing that matters is that a bank was misled. Why and to whom the money was paid does not matter.

The SPLC’s best chance is probably nullification by a Leftist judge or jury—admittedly all too possible in such a high-profile political case as this.

Consequently it is a puzzle to me why the DOJ is laying so much emphasis on the marginally relevant but headline-grabbing issue of the curious payments to supposed right-wingers for information or perhaps influence. DOJ is asserting this defrauded the SPLC’s donors. This may be be more of a stretch legally.

And a July 7, 2026, Washington Examiner story SPLC arraigned on superseding charges of donor fraud by Mia Cathell added the disturbing fact:

For the charged offenses, the SPLC faces up to 30 years in federal prison, a $1 million fine, and any applicable order of restitution. U.S. attorney Kevin Davidson, however, noted during the arraignment hearing that the SPLC is “a corporate defendant” and would not be subject to imprisonment as the federal statute stipulates in most fraud cases.

This very much puzzles old VDARE.com hands like myself. New York Attorney General Letitia James in her effort to destroy VDARE has filed against both the VDARE Foundation and Lydia and Peter Brimelow personally. (She is not alleging bank fraud. It’s a civil case).

The Federal financial fraud laws are intentionally designed to victimize individuals as well as institutions. In fact, their basic operational method is to terrify individuals into betraying their associates.

That the individuals pseudonymously named in the complaint are not being sued personally raises alarming questions about the seriousness of the DOJ. Merely fining the $829 million-asset SPLC a trivial $1 million is a bad joke.

Of course, these periphery charges have unquestionably hurt the SPLC’s public image. One of the startling stories arising from the DOJ’s legal offensive was summarized in the New York Post (SPLC boss funneled $1.2 million to lover in neo-Nazi group — pair even had joint bank account, By Chadwick Moore and Isabel Vincent, June 16, 2026):

Based on the details in the June 2 superseding indictment, “Employee-2” is believed to be Heidi Beirich, a 58-year-old fascism expert who was the director of intelligence at the Alabama-based anti-extremism nonprofit between 2012 and 2019.

“[Beirich] was also in a romantic relationship with F-9. During this relationship, [Beirich] and F-9 shared a house and two bank accounts,” the indictment alleges.

“Between 2015 and 2021, approximately $140,000 in donors’ money flowed from the SPLC operating account … and was ultimately deposited into the joint bank accounts held by F-9 and [Beirich].”

Heidi Beirich, now Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder of Global Project Against Hate And Extremism.

Some may find this amusing. But Heidi Beirich was for years one of the $PLC’s main thugs. See Hideous Heidi Beirich’s Bullying Laid Bare.

Perhaps some lawyer out there can explain why an apparent perpetrator—Beirich personally opened some of the fake accounts—who is also the beneficiary of bank fraud would not be charged.

On May 22 2026, I posted Why VDARE called Southern Poverty Law Center the “$PLC”

This recapitulated the $PLC’s astonishing financial success story and reported on its subsequent fall from grace, including founder Morris Dees’s abrupt firing in March 2019 for reasons never fully made public.

I also noted that, over the last few years, a Black takeover of the SPLC has seemingly taken place.

Judging from a screenshot from March 29 2024, posted below, now 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.

Moreover, in June 16 the SPLC website posted SPLC Announces Ryan P. Haygood as New President and CEO

Haygood, by an amazing coincidence, is black. Previously for ten years he was President of the New Jersey Institute For Social Justice, an outfit so obscure that it has not earned (or bothered to create) a Wikipedia page (neither has Haygood). The only news stories he has generated appear to be honorific.

The website of Haygood’s New Jersey Institute For Social Justice is as secretive as the SPLC’s. But it does disclose it was

established in 1999 by Alan V. and Amy Lowenstein and a group of visionaries steeped in the Civil Rights Movement.

and that it has appointed an Indian woman, Henal Patel, Interim President & CEO of the Institute.

(Senior Counsel, Nuzhat Chowdhury, and Senior Counsel “Democracy and Justice Reform” Rupal Motwani, are also obviously Indian—three out of the nine officers.)

So basically the Institute For Social Justice is an anti-white advocacy operation which is being forced to utilize “Blacks with Brains” to keep the shop operating.

Symbolically, the longstanding $PLC logo was changed in 2023. The new one dispensed with the Scales of Justice and is straightforwardly Black and White.

These changes at the SPLC have been accompanied by a radical reduction of transparency on the its website, which was historically quite informative. In particular, information about its Directors and Officers has been suppressed.

Yet the changes at the SPLC are significant. I noted in my May 2026 that, starting in 2020, invasions of the SPLC’s fabled “Endowment Fund”—not actually an Endowment Fund as usually understood in charity law but just a pile of money that Morris Dees seemed to like sitting on—had begun.

From Footnote 13 of the 2024 Consolidated Financial Statements (which reported the Endowment Fund at $787 Mm):

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).

Footnote 13 does not directly state when the “investment,” which of course is just a subsidy to black political activists, was voted. But I do not believe that any distributions from the “Endowment Fund” were ever allowed when Morris Dees was in control (ended 2019).

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.

If anyone is dubious of the political importance of the $SPLC case, or of the organization’s tremendous power of the $PLC, I commend the section Data products and mechanistic decisioning in Bits about Money’s definitive essay Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud mentioned above.

This nauseatingly explains that from 2017

The SPLC formed a coalition to gain account- and transaction-level decisionmaking capability at tech companies, financial infrastructure firms, and banks through a coordinated pressure campaign… Industry participants describe the coalition participants as threatening their employers, openly and by implication.

In effect, the SPLC effectively gained veto power of access to financial services over an amazingly wide range of institutions. Political opponents were systematically targeted. This may well explain the tremendous loss of services that VDARE.com suffered in those years.

The Biden totalitarian coup was communist in content, because it was egalitarian and anti-identitarian, but fascist in form, because like Mussolini it co-opted corporate insititutions.

Bits about Money points out that the SPLC’s ludicrous reputation for holiness amongst the sheeple was key to this:

Industry participants… when the cameras are not rolling, when there is nothing to gain, repeatedly described the SPLC to me as being on the side of the angels.

Destroying this totally fallacious reputation is of course definitely in the interest of Americans. And there has already been some evidence this process has started.

But will the process be completed? The redoubtable Sam E. Antar, without whom the Letitia James mortgage fraud case would never have been assembled, suspects Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of having sabotaged that litigation.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche

Is Blanche, a former Democrat, reluctant to charge home against Democratic icons?

For my own part, having closely observed VDARE’s litigation experiences (and for that matter President Trump’s) has eliminated any confidence in the integrity of the American judicial system. Especially when any whiff of politics is involved.

However I do have confidence in Black behavior in financial matters.

Consequently, I have been eagerly awaiting the posting of the SPLC’s Audited Financial Statement and IRS Form 990 for their FY ended 10-30-2025.

Hurry up, $PLC!

p.s. For the record, my major, exhaustive but still-relevant, VDARE.com analyses of the SPLC phenomenon were

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

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

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

Significantly, the SPLC has now disabled its website’s links to the financial reports that I cited here. What is the new regime trying to hide?

Sign up for Patrick Cleburne’s free substack here.

As soon as I got the sad news of Jim Goad’s passing (read Greg Johnson’s powerful obituary), I posted in homage the 2020 video interview I did with him—part of the VDARE “Social Distancing” series that the YouTube Tech Totalitarians subsequently nuked without warning as part of their campaign to rig the election for Joe Biden.

But the last time I saw Jim Goad in person, alas, was way back in January, 2017. He saluted me in the interminable security line that we all had to go through to attend Donald J. Trump’s Inauguration Ceremony.

I was there because Lydia had told me we should go. And she was right: it provided me with a key, and subsequently all-too-vindicated, insight into the unreported communist fury building on the Left: “It Will Come To Blood”—Reflections On The Left’s Anti-Trump Inauguration Tantrum, Jan 22, 2017.

But why had Jim Goad and his lady come all the way up from Georgia? He quite obviously, to put it mildly, had no hope of preferment.

I suspect that, at a deep level, Goad was genuinely moved by Trump’s implicit appeal to the heroes of his 1997 book: The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats.

Goad, unfortunately, only wrote one piece for VDARE.com, a famous attack on J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. I’ve posted it below, emphasizing the passages in which Goad points to Trump’s appeal.

I must say that, although I now live in Appalachia and see the very real white social dysfunction Vance described, I didn’t think on reading/listening to Vance’s book that he was quite as dismissive as Goad thought. But of course, Goad—notoriously touchy— had reason to be hypersensitive.

Nevertheless, Goad was writing for us in 2018. Back then, he may well have thought, quite reasonably, that Vance aimed to emerge as a sort of neoconservative equivalent of Maine Democrat faux Great Blue Collar Hope Graham Platner.

But Goad outlined where he thought Vance was deficient.

But subsequently, in 2022, Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate with Trump’s endorsement. In 2024, Trump chose him as running mate.

And Vance has emerged as an articulate immigration patriot. He’s been particularly effective in defending the pro-Redneck agenda as suggested by Jim Goad: i.e. tightening up the labor market e.g. here.

I am also informed, by the recent Maggie Haberman/ Jonathan Swan book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, that Vance not only opposed Trump’s attack on Iran—but also, in my view more importantly, urged the invocation of the Insurrection Act in Minnesota.

J.D. Vance has a lot of critics on the right. They may be right. But I’m not sure that Jim Goad would agree with them.

Vance’s HILLBILLY ELEGY: A Dissent From Personal Experience,

by Jim Goad, VDARE.com, August 31 2018

As a clueless press stabbed its way through the darkness during the 2016 presidential campaign trying to suss out why all the yahoos were suddenly so ornery, many pointed to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy as a moving and poignant explication of the malignant psychology that had gripped America’s heartland.[Review: In ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ a Tough Love Analysis of the Poor Who Back Trump, By Jennifer Senior, NYT, August 10, 2016] I come from a similar background to Vance, but for all of his book’s alleged “poignance” and “compassion,” he strikes me more as a traitor and snitch toward hillbillies than an advocate.

I’ve been aware of Hillbilly Elegy since its release, just as I’d been aware of Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America and The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Out of the Dark, which was written by three moronic comedians. All three books were released in 2016, which was 19 years after Simon & Schuster released my book The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats.

Vance’s chief heresy was to portray Appalachia’s feral hillbillies—those blood-crazed subhuman river rats from Deliverance who’ve served as cultural and cinematic arch-villains for generations now—as human. It should tell you something about how far-gone American cultural discourse is that merely portraying common middle American human beings as human is considered radical.

Unfortunately, that’s about as radical as it gets. Although Vance often speaks with fondness of the gun-toting, foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, drug-addled crackers in his grandparents’ home base of Breathitt County, KY, he ends up placing most of their problems squarely at their own bunion-covered feet. Their problems can’t be genetic, he argues, because both he and his sister were able to crawl up from the meth-stained squalor and make something of themselves. Their problems can’t be blamed on the government for reasons he never quite explains beyond suggesting that people who blame the government for any of their problems are dodging the fact that everything is basically their own fault. So although he concedes that the oft-maligned rubes from flyover country are human, he concludes that for the most part, they are bad humans.

By Vance’s own admission his book is a personal memoir and not a scholarly study. It’s a linear tale describing how economic forces drove his family out of Kentucky and into a southern Ohio factory town. Battered both emotionally and mentally by his violent, drug-addicted mother, Vance finds his chief advocate in his “Mamaw”—a fiercely protective and aggressively violent grandmother who preaches hard work, clean living, and knocking the teeth out of anyone who gets in your way.

After a youth mostly spent being shunted from place to place as his mother descended from alcohol to pills to heroin while parading a series of unsuitable male suitors in front of Vance and his sister, he finally found solace by moving in with Mamaw and focusing on his education. Four years in the Marines gave him the structure that was absent in the hollers of Breathitt County, KY and the grey little factory burg of Middletown, OH. He ultimately was accepted into Yale’s law school and married an Indian woman (dot, not feather) named Usha.

The end of the book finds him a lawyer, successful author, and father of a mixed-race baby who lives in a comfortable bourgeois enclave far removed from the chaos and dysfunction of his youth.

Although he gives credit to his Mamaw, he largely seems to take most of the credit himself—he wriggled out of the benighted hill folk’s “learned helplessness” because he had the smarts and the gumption to do it, and, by gum, he’s not a statistical anomaly, he’s an example-setter for all the despicable Oxycontin junkies and welfare leeches who languish in self-inflicted pain far from the nation’s media centers.

I could relate to many things in Vance’s book—mainly, the fuming agony of being raised by a working-class parent who was not only violent, they cared more for intoxicants than for their own spawn. For Vance, both the violence and the addiction were embodied in his mother, as his father was a no-show almost from the start. Although both my parents were violent, my father was the hopeless alcoholic, and I feel the addiction was more systemically damaging to me than the violence was.

Then again, my father was the oldest of four boys in an Appalachian town in Vermont during the Great Depression. His father, who abandoned the family after popping out four kids with my Grammy Goad, was allegedly the town drunk and was fond of blasting off his shotgun inside the house to terrify the kids. I never met my paternal grandfather and couldn’t even tell you his first name, but I was made aware that even before reaching puberty, my dad had to work to help support his mom and three brothers.

And while I was growing up, my father worked two full-time jobs—one as an oil-refinery foreman and one as a freelance plumber—an insane burden which likely contributed to his death at age 59. Dad also drank a full bottle of either Scotch or whisky every day and never spared the rod nor spoiled any of his four kids.

Nature v. nurture is such a sticky subject. Although I’d like to believe in free will and I deeply dread the very idea that we’re all automatons, I partially blame my father and I partially blame his life circumstances. I like to believe that even if you took the cream of New England’s Protestant nobility and raised them in a mountain shack with a father who blasted shotguns to terrify them, forced them to toil endlessly at menial labor before they even kissed a girl, made them fight in the Battle of the Bulge for reasons that were unclear to them, and then set them on a path that had them cleaning toilets and working oil rigs for 80 hours a week every week of their adult life, in most cases they’d be sufficiently shell-shocked to develop some addictions and to occasionally lash out with violence.

Trying to isolate blame on a single cause is a fool’s errand, yet people can’t seem to resist the temptation. In my dad’s case—as in his dad’s case and probably generations of dads before him—I suspect that a combination of personal failings and situational pressures can be blamed.

Yet when Vance takes a bleak look at the rotten-toothed, opiate-addled, food-stamp-slinging people who apparently didn’t have the smarts or character to lift themselves out of their environment like he did, he can’t seem to bring himself to blame anyone but the hillbillies. Rising addiction and suicide rates among this population, along with its unprecedented drop in longevity rates, is solely framed as a moral failing—it can’t possibly be pinned on the fact that politicians sold all the middle- and working-class jobs overseas and imported millions of hostile nonwhite proles to snap up the remaining low-paying jobs.

All the despair he observes is blamed on some vague spiritual sickness rather than on material realities. His diagnosis is no less scolding or condescending than Barack Obama’s finger-wagging about rural losers who bitterly cling to guns and Bibles.

Although he self-identifies as a conservative, Vance sends little moralistic smoke signals throughout the book that indicate he’s entirely under the thrall of liberal thought-policing. He repeatedly refers to racism, sexism, and homophobia as if they were leprosy. He speaks of Barack Obama with a reverence that is so squirrelly, it borders on Chris Matthews’s infamous line about a thrill going up his leg. He suggests that rural Americans who distrust a media who openly hate and defame rural Americans are simply paranoid and uneducated.

And this, I suspect, is why so many have found his book to be palatable—he unquestioningly parrots all the reigning pieties spewed out by the coastal elites whose policies have eviscerated rural America.

I recently caught a glimpse of Vance on CNN complaining that Donald Trump doesn’t offer any real solutions to what ails America’s poor white underclass.

But to my knowledge, Trump is the only major presidential contender in memory to even address outsourcing as a major factor in rural America’s pathologies.

Trump is also the only one who even bothers to mention the opioid crisis. Trump’s brand of economic nationalism seems like a far more pragmatic solution to rural poverty than Vance’s exasperatingly vague admonition of “Don’t be a bad person.”

And for all that Vance is presumed to speak for the anguished rural hordes of southern Ohio and Kentucky, the hillbillies seem to prefer Trump’s solutions.

In 2016, his grandparents’ breeding ground of Breathitt County, KY gave 62.5% of their votes to Trump. Middletown, OH, where Vance spent most of his youth, straddles two counties—one of those counties went for 61% for Trump and the other went 65% for Trump.

Vance is obviously writing what a lot of people want to hear, but it doesn’t seem to be what the hillbillies themselves want to hear. Part of this may be blamed on the fact that a lot of them are hopeless fuckups who refuse to take any personal responsibility, but part of it can also be blamed on the fact that they aren’t as dumb as they seem and are at least wise enough to perceive that the federal government views them as an obstacle rather than a constituency.

Yes, our choices matter. But they aren’t the entire picture, nor are they the entire solution. But I’m sure the coastal elites are happy that J.D. Vance blamed the hillbillies rather than the coastal elites.

In 2020, I interviewed Jim as part of our new Social Distancing video series, started at the urging of the indefatigable Paul Kersey (who is also the moving spirit of our current Tuesday night Life In The Alien Nation X Space series e.g. here).

Subsequently the Social Distancing videos were all nuked, without any warning, by the Tech Totalitarians at YouTube in their drive to elect Biden.

But our heroic videographer retrieved this copy.

(VDARE videos, still being made despite Letitia James, are now hosted at our Rumble Channel).

More on Jim Goad later.

I recently discussed SCOTUS’ treasonous Anchor Baby decision (but n.b it’s narrow—it hangs by a 5-4 thread, as VP J.D. Vance has said) with James Edwards on his POLITICAL CESSPOOL radio show here.

James Edwards has been a loyal friend of VDARE.com and a fellow inhabitant of the Dissident Right catacomb for many years.

As with my other recent podcast appearances on the issue here, here, here, here, we covered a lot of surprisingly variegated territory. But my basic point: it’s a huge victory that the Anchor Baby issue has finally gotten into political debate. Now it can be dealt with, by statute or by Constitutional Amendment. Let’s fight it out!

(Right, Congressional GOP? Hello?)

One issue that James Edwards and I focussed on: the Anchor Baby issue is ultimately about who enters the Political Nation—i.e. who gets to vote. Implicitly, the SCOTUS female consensus (counting Chief Justice Roberts) means that the U.S.-born children of the Biden Rush should ultimately be given the right to vote. Needless to say, this is just another attack on the Historic American Nation.

As it happened, Counter Currents Editor Greg Johnson simultaneously addressed this issue in his July 13 essay Disenfranchisement.

Greg was discussing the disenfranchisement of e.g. felons and other categories who already technically have the right to vote.

In contrast, James Edwards and I were discussing how to prevent illegal aliens from ultimately diluting (through their U.S.-born children) Ameericans’ right to vote.

But whatever. There are at least two examples of disenfranchisement in the Anglosphere: in the U.S., the elimination of black voting by white Southerners after Reconstruction; in South Africa, the elimination of Cape Colored voting, enshrined in 1909 U.K. South Africa Act, after Afrikaners got control in 1948.

Not pretty. But they wanted to survive as nations.

Then.

Tom Woods is a commendably entrepreneurial righteous Libertarian and he and I go back a long way—I believe I first met him when I spoke at Harvard (!) in the wake of my notorious 1992 “Time To Rethink Immigration?” National Review cover story. I remember him as slim, with long dark hair—I’ve changed a bit too!—and being highly amused when I told a pretty black co-ed who suggested that my immigration skepticism was really about race that OF COURSE IT’S ABOUT RACE!—OF COURSE IT’S ABOUT RACE!!—BECAUSE RACE IS DESTINY IN AMERICAN POLITICS!

He asked her something like: “You’ve not heard that before, have you?”

At least, that’s what I recall. And I’m writing too late at night to check with him now. I know he has to get a small child to go to sleep and I’ve been there. Maybe tomorrow.

Tom is also one of the irritatingly few of my 40-year colleagues in the Conservative/ Libertarian movement who have actually given VDARE.com a platform to defend ourselves against New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ unconstitutional mugging.

We appreciate that.

Tom’s and my discussion on the predictable, disastrous, but easily reversible, 5-4 SCOTUS decision on Birthright Citizenship—and much else!— is here.

In his July 3 address at Mount Rushmore, President Trump upset a lot of people by launching into an attack on “communism.” He said:

Yet as we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack, a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism.

There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty.

It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.

(And there was a lot more where that came from!)

Needless to say, I was delighted. The re-emergence of the term “communism” in American political discourse is one of those rare cultural victories, like the emergence of the War On Christmas concept, won spontaneously in the teeth of intense elite opposition.

I’d like to think that I played a small role in this re-emergence. I discussed the term in a speech I gave to the 2021 Amren conference surveying the early Biden Regime and making the critical point: communism really means totalitarian Leftism, which the Biden Regime was clearly displaying, for example in its persecution of the J6 Martyrs. [Video versions of speech here].

It also includes totalitarian lawfare, which is why I can no longer write this on VDARE.com.

(Extract from

VDARE.com’s Brimelow: “This Is A Communist Coup. But White America Is On The Move”

first published January 2, 2022)

…we have to recognize that we are in the early stages of a communist coup. It just crept upon us.

Now, there’s some wimps around here who don’t like us using the term “communist” to describe our Biden Regime Rulers. Isn’t that right, Jared? [A loving reference to AMREN’s notoriously authoritarian—all libertarians are authoritarian—Style Sheet.]

In fact, I’m reliably informed that AMREN has banned the use of the term “Cultural Marxists,” which I experimented with for a while because I thought it just more precise.

I was actually converted on this matter by the great John Derbyshire. He regularly used the term “communist” to describe the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio. And when I was looking this up today, I discovered that the de Blasio was actually involved in pro-Sandinista activities in the 1980s, when, of course, that put him on the wrong side of the Cold War.

And the term “communist” is gradually creeping into mainstream discourse. Someone who’s done great work in this area is the podcaster Jesse Kelly, who’s been using it for a long time.

The problem is that we’ve all been subliminally subverted by the McCarthy wars. We think that “communist” has to mean “card-carrying Communist”—that is, a member of the Party (although my understanding is that the party did not actually issue cards).

But in fact, the term “communist” pre-exists formally organized “Communist” parties. Marx used it in his 1848 Communist Manifesto—he said a specter was “haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” At that time, remember, he hadn’t written Das Kapital.

I recently read a famous, really eerie Catholic triumphalist dystopian futurist novel, Lord Of The World. It’s still in print, after over 100 years, and it’s been praised by a number of recent Popes including, oddly, Pope Francis. The author, Monsignor Hugh Benson, was a son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, so it was a huge scandal when he converted. In 1907, Benson was talking about this war between the persecuted Catholics and what he unhesitatingly called “communists” just as a matter of fact. They weren’t visibly Marxists from an economic standpoint—in fact, economic structure doesn’t figure in the novel at all. But they were fanatical totalitarians and anti-Christians.

And that’s the point, I think. You occasionally hear people arguing that well, you know, you can’t call these people “communists” because they don’t know about the Labor Theory Of Value. But the Labor Theory Of Value wasn’t around when Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. The point is that they’re Left Totalitarians. They go back to the Jacobins.

And there’s a constant theme among them: anti-religious, not just totalitarian but Christophobic, and also distinct elements of sexual perversion. Andy Ngo has done wonderful work documenting Antifa in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s astonishing how many of these people actually turn out to be trannies and other forms of deviants.

For example, some of you remember that one of our members got into a fight with an Antifa guy in 2017. Well, I’ve watched this case carefully because I want to see what happened to the perp. The answer was nothing. He turns out to be a tranny. Well, they’re everywhere.

If any of you read Stan Evans’ great book about Joe McCarthy, Blacklisted by History, you end it with a feeling of despair—because McCarthy had been defeated and the Communists were still operating. It’s actually a miracle that America won the Cold War.

And there was never a Reckoning for that. McCarthy, of course was vindicated by the Venona intercepts. The FBI actually knew who these people were and had been wiretapping them for years. That’s news that emerged in the 1990s. But the transcription of those Venona intercepts was stopped during the Carter Administration—almost the last thing that Carter did. Why?

The truth is the Democrat Party has always been soft on Communism—because so many of them were implicated. The people that we see in Antifa, they are literally their children.

There’s a whole concept of “Red Diaper Baby.” There’s at least a score of books written about it. They are gloating about it. The fact that they’re the children of Communists—and this case I do mean card-carrying Communists—is not a problem in American politics today. You can test this by looking at recent biographies. Look at Obama—one of his close friends, and people sometimes say his actual father, was Frank Davis, a black Communist. Obama’s book was reportedly ghosted by Bill Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground communist terrorist group in the 1980s. Ayers was, of course, rewarded by being made a tenured professor at the University of Illinois—Chicago.

Look at Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. Kaine was also involved with the Sandinistas in the 1980s. That’s not something you just did out of moral fervor. It you meant you were on the wrong side of the Cold War. But it’s never been seriously raised by the Republicans. Tim Kaine‘s son is a member of Antifa; he was actually arrested for throwing explosives, firecrackers in an Antifa riot at the Minnesota Capitol in 2017. Needless to say he was let off with just probation.

But you know, these people in the January 6 Mostly Peaceful Protest are not going to be let off with just probation. We have a completely asymmetrical system of Unequal Justice in this country now.

And then there’s the case of Chesa Boudin, the son of David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who went to jail for being involved in the murder of two policemen in a robbery. He was then adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who were also members of the Weather Underground. And he’s now the District Attorney in San Francisco, where he’s systematically not prosecuting criminals.

Michelle Malkin, who is also here today, for which she deserves congratulations—she’s got real courage—wrote a recent savage column, Coward Cuomo’s Last Act Of Treachery, pointing out that the last thing the governor of New York Andrew Cuomo did before he was driven out of office by Me-Tooism was to pardon David Gilbert. In other words, he pardoned somebody who had been convicted of murder and was involved in extensive terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s—including, by the way, bombing the U.S. Capitol, something you never hear of when the Democrats go on about how terrible the Mostly Peaceful Protest was.

Why would he do that? I go back to what I said before—the Democrat Party has always been soft on Communism.

So these Communists are still there. They’re still active. They’re making public policy right now.

My recent appearance on Kevin DeAnna’s Identity Politics is here. We started off with SCOTUS’ predictable Birthright atrocity and how it’s put U.S. patriots in a Sun Tsu-type Death Ground situation—while showing a clear path to victory. But we talk about a lot more, including my theory that, just as there’s Money Illusion that disguises the initial impact of inflation, there’s a Judicial Illusion that causes people to believe that judges are impartial—until they realize they’re not. Which is happening now.

I knew Kevin when he was James Kirkpatrick and wrote great stuff for VDARE.com! He ran the VDARE Book Club until we had to suspend it because of the legal costs inflicted upon us by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ unconstitutional mugging. Kirkpatrick’s archive here.

He has blue eyes too, like Eva Vlaardingerbroek, sort of.

Many thanks for Alex Jones War Room’s Harrison Smith for having me on to discuss the SCOTUS’ Birthright Citizenship atrocity. I think worse is better!—let’s finally get this issue into politics!

Interview starts about 4:00, but if you tune in earlier you will be treated to a European Nationalist presentation featuring Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s astonishing blue eyes.

https://rumble.com/v7c2f7o-war-room-live-3-of-3-tuesday-63026-peter-brimelow-on-birthright-citizenship.html?e9s=src_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_o&sci=e348fee0-5fe3-4155-b1a8-6ab06e29f910

Peter Brimelow writes: I am most grateful to Auron MacIntyre for interviewing me on June 22. It produced an impressive flow of new subscribers to this substack (it’s free, but some heroic individuals paid!). We covered a lot of ground—including my contention that the recent Makerfield byelection, literally held in my and John Derbyshire’s ancestral hearth of Wigan, was actually a strong result for British immigration patriots, masked by poor expectation management and the usual media mendacity. The whole thing is viewable below. But here I’m just transcribing our discussion of the imminent U.S. Supreme Court decision on Birthright Citizenship, the jugular of the Great Replacement, which begins at 43:57.

p.s. I had a haircut today

Peter Brimelow: The other issue, as you have mentioned, is Birthright Citizenship. God knows what the Roberts court is going to do. He’s not distinguished by courage in these areas. But it doesn’t actually matter because what we’re talking about is an Executive Order.

At VDARE.com, we were writing about Birthright Citizenship, the need to cut it off, for 25 years but it never occurred to us that it could be done by Executive Order. We assumed it was going to have to be done by statute, there are ways to do it, or by a Constitutional Amendment. If it was done by Executive Order, that could be reversed,

What we need, of course, is to get this issue into politics, because most Americans have absolutely no idea at all that, if you come here illegally, or even as a tourist, and have a child here, that child’s an American citizen.

And not only do they have no idea about it, when they discover it they get extremely angry. They think that the whole thing is crazy, as of course it is.

That’s why I like the idea of a Constitutional Amendment. That has to be ratified by two-thirds of the states. So in two-thirds of the states, there has to be a fistfight over whether or not we should have Birthright Citizenship.

Make the Democrats stand up and justify it. That’s going to do them no good at all with Americans.

I would like to think that the Trump Administration has a whole battery of responses to a bad ruling---there are both moves to get a Constitutional Amendment and also statutory reform introduced in the House at the moment. They’ve just not been taken up by the Republican leadership.

They should be taken up if this decision goes the wrong way. They should be taken up right away—immediately.

I’d like to think the Trump Administration is well prepared for that, but, you know he’s had all these foreign wars to fight. and stuff like that.

But I am confident Steven Miller is thinking about it.

PETER BRIMELOW writes: SCOTUS watchers are saying it's going to rule against Trump in the current Birthright Citizenship case.

Phooey! SCOTUS is not ruling on Birthright Citizenship per se, but on whether it can be abolished by Executive Order. (Which means that, even if Trump won at SCOTUS, Birthright Citizenship could then be reinstated by next Dem president’s reversing the EO).

Ultimately, a statute or Constitutional Amendment will be necessary to abolish Birthright Citizenship. That’s how we got a federal income tax: a Constitutional Amendment was passed after SCOTUS ruled that an income tax imposed by statute was unconstitutional.

SCOTUS is not God. It can be overruled by the legislative process.

And having to go the statutory/ Constitutional Amendment route is GREAT, because it ensures that the Birthright Citizenship issue will GET INTO PUBLIC DEBATE (you know, like in a democracy)(the Left would lose).

As I just discussed on Auron MacIntyre’s podcast, GOP legislators have already introduced bills into Congress to deal with Birthright Citizenship by statute and by Constitutional Amendment.

I am SURE the Trump Administration is ready to spring into action and endorse these bills!

And I am even MORE confident that Stephen Miller is.

This Birthright Citizenship issue was essentially unheard of in public debate when VDARE.com ran its first major analysis back in 2001, posted below. (I must admit that, at that time, the Executive Action solution simply didn't occur to us—it appears to have been subsequently thought up by Michael Anton. But, hey, let 100 flowers bloom). Because the issue was then so revolutionary, we added a VDARE.com introduction.

Weigh Anchor! Enforce the Citizenship Clause

by Nathaniel Parker. First published on VDARE.com, August 31, 2001.

VDARE.com comments: Get ready to hear more about amnesty (or whatever they’re calling it now) when Mexico’s Fox visits America’s Bush next week. Already the Bush Administration’s admission that it intends to connive at the continued colonization of the United States by contemplating another, bigger, amnesty, has caused muttering amongst the American peasantry. It has even been necessary to call out the guard dogs, such as the Wall Street Journal‘s Paul Gigot, to snarl the serfs back into appropriate subservience.

But it is crucial to realize that in reality amnesty is already being granted in slow motion - merely by the reconquistas and their peers being permitted to live and have children here. This is because of a wrong-headed interpretation of the 14^th Amendment. As Nathaniel Parker explains below, no such interpretation was ever intended by the Reconstruction Congress.

Because any baby born in America is deemed currently to have an absolute right to American citizenship, his parents, siblings, and ultimately his extended family obtain an enormously enhanced ability to be here. ‘Family Reunification,’ rather than skill sets, and sentimentalism rather than self-interest, being the themes of immigration policy, this “Anchor Baby” effect rips a huge chasm in effective immigration control.

Fixing this flaw deserves utmost priority. No responsible political leader could consider an amnesty otherwise. Could they?

The problem could be eliminated either by sensible judges, if such items exist, or by Act of Congress. A Constitutional amendment is not required. Political will is.

This is probably the most serious article that VDARE has published.. But, hey, it’s a long weekend. And we figure, the great glory of the Internet is that it can handle any level of seriousness. We offer it as a resource. Bookmark for future reference!

Nathaniel Parker:

One simple reform would end a powerful incentive luring would-be illegal aliens from around the world to the United States: adjust the currently tortured interpretation of the right to citizenship expressed in the 14^th Amendment. Absurdly, current federal policy is to confer American citizenship automatically on any child (with very narrow exceptions, none applicable to illegal aliens) born within the United States. The legal status of the parents is deemed irrelevant. We must accept that a baby born to foreign parents five minutes after they crept over the border illegally is just as American as a baby whose parents are both Americans and U.S. citizens and whose ancestors have been here 350 years.

This new “American” is not the end of the story, either. The U.S.-born child becomes an anchor in American soil that will permit his parents and minor siblings to remain and, later, his grandparents, aunts, uncles, in-laws and all of their children to immigrate legally, not to mention any friends and acquaintances from home who may follow them illegally. All of their children born here will also be considered American citizens. Neither the Census Bureau nor the INS can say how many aliens have availed themselves of this gift already. We can only be sure that many millions more will also, unless Americans end it.

This perversion of American citizenship, commonly called “birthright citizenship,” is the result of the federal government and judiciary’s willful misinterpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[i] In truth, the Citizenship Clause confers nothing so broad. The plain language of the 14^th Amendment does not grant automatic birthright citizenship. A review of the Senate debate before the 14^th Amendment’s ratification makes clear that the Citizenship Clause’s proponents were careful to preclude any automatic grant of citizenship based only on birth within the territory of the United States.

Some legal theorists, along with those who favor unrestricted immigration, argue that only another amendment to the Constitution would be constitutionally adequate to end automatic birthright citizenship. That is wrong. All we need do is read (and enforce) the Citizenship Clause as written. Legislation to enforce the limits inherent in the Citizenship Clause is well within the Congress’ constitutional power. As the 14^th Amendment itself explicitly states: “The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”[ii]

The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

The first sentence of the 14^th Amendment says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. [emphasis added]

To hold that the Citizenship Clause confers birthright citizenship on anyone born in the United States is to ignore the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”: a selective misreading of plain English. No argument rooted in the Constitution can support automatic birthright citizenship. The only question is how broadly to read the jurisdiction phrase in the Citizenship Clause. Logic, assisted by the Senate floor debate, answers this. The U.S. Supreme Court has since clouded the picture with its relatively few rulings on the Citizenship Clause, but despite what we are often encouraged to believe by some justices and law professors, the Constitution does not mean only what the Supreme Court says it does. Even so, the Court has never held that the Citizenship Clause automatically confers U.S. citizenship on all children born within the territory of the United States.

The Ratification Debate

The 14^th Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, is the second of the three Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution ratified in the years immediately following Union victory in the War Between the States. A primary concern of the amendment’s proponents was the extension of civil rights to recently freed slaves. Senators feared that state legislatures would assert that, not having been born U.S. citizens, emancipation did not make freedmen citizens of their states (hence of the United States; state citizenship was a prerequisite to U.S. citizenship). To forestall any denial of citizenship to freed blacks and to overturn the Dred Scott decision[iii] explicitly, the 14^th Amendment’s proponents introduced the Citizenship Clause.

Nevertheless, they were well aware that a blanket grant of birthright citizenship was not consistent with American tradition and could lead to a demographic transformation in the event of high immigration. To prevent it, the senators included the jurisdiction phrase. The floor debate[iv] reveals their concerns and their views of how far birthright citizenship should extend.

Introducing the proposed amendment, Senator Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan stated that he believed the Citizenship Clause was “simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural and national law, a citizen of the United States.” He went on to say specifically whom he considered that natural and national law excluded:

This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.

The only, tenuous, way to read Senator Howard’s statement to support birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens or, indeed, most legally resident aliens is to assume that the only foreigners or aliens he meant are those belonging to the families of diplomats. The simpler reading is to construe the sentence as what it is: a list of excluded categories.

Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin was troubled by Howard’s language, not because he wanted to find a way to include any foreigners or aliens, but because he wanted to ensure that American Indians remained excluded. Howard (and, ultimately, the Senate) thought Doolittle’s proposed clarification unnecessary. As Howard pointed out:

Indians born within the limits of the United States, and who maintain their tribal relations, are not, in the sense of this amendment, born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They are regarded, and always have been in our legislation and jurisprudence, as being quasi-foreign nations.

It is, or should be, clear that language denying citizenship to people born within the United States on the theory that they were subject to ‘quasi-foreign nations’ must exclude the children of people who have broken this country’s laws in entering it, and whose whole allegiance is to entirely foreign nations.

Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania spoke at length about the limits of citizenship and the rights of states (and, by extension, the federal government: senators in 1866 still acknowledged that the powers of the federal government were those expressly delegated to it by the states in the Constitution) to control who may enter from abroad:

[A foreigner in the United States] has a right to the protection of the laws; but he is not a citizen in the ordinary acceptance of the word.

It is perfectly clear that the mere fact that a man is born in the country has not heretofore entitled him to the right to exercise political power. … I have supposed … that it was essential to the existence of society itself, and particularly essential to the existence of a free State, that it should have the power, not only of declaring who should exercise political power within its boundaries, but that if it were overrun by another and a different race, it would have the right to absolutely expel them.

I do not know that there is any danger to many of the States in this Union; but is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration…? Are they to be immigrated out of house and home by Chinese? I should think not. It is not supposed that the people of California, in a broad and general sense, have any higher rights than the people of China; but they are in possession of the Country of California, and if another people, of different religion, of different manners, of different traditions, different tastes and sympathies are to come there and have the free right to locate there and settle among them, and if they have an opportunity of pouring in such an immigration as in a short time will double or treble the population of California, I ask, are the people of California powerless to protect themselves? … As I understand the rights of the States under the Constitution at present, California has the right, if she deems it proper, to forbid the entrance into her territory of any person she choose who is not a citizen of some one of the United States.

His terms might seem impolitic today. But what Senator Cowan would think of the current interpretation of the Citizenship Clause is clear. Cowan took pains to point out that he was not denying the human or civil rights of foreigners generally; his concern was with their relation to the United States:

I wish to be understood that I consider those people to have rights just the same as we have, but not rights in connection with our Government. If I desire the exercise of my rights, I ought to go to my own people, people of the same beliefs and traditions, and not thrust myself in upon a society of other men entirely different in all those respects from myself. I would not claim that right.

The notion that an accident of geographic location at birth could confer U.S. citizenship on someone whose family had no prior connection to the United States, no attachment to America other than presence on its soil at that moment, was utterly alien to Senator Cowan and his colleagues. What Senator Cowan would think of the Mexican government’s recent demands of the United States with respect to the millions of its citizens now in the United States illegally (blanket amnesty plus guest-worker programs; Spanish-language schooling at American taxpayer expense; full access to all American social welfare programs, again at American taxpayer expense) is equally clear.

Senator John Conness of California, an Irish immigrant himself, was less worried than Cowan about the disruptive potential of birthright citizenship. Speaking of the Chinese of his day, he said:

[I]t is only in exceptional cases that they have children in our State; and therefore the alarming aspect of this provision to California, or any other land to which the Chinese may come as immigrants, is simply a fiction in the brains of persons who deprecate it, and that alone.

Cowan seems to have been a better prophet than Conness. Could Conness have foreseen the Mexican (and Chinese) population explosion of the Twentieth Century and the attendant demographic pressure on California and the rest of the country, he probably would not have been so sanguine.

The Senate expanded its debate of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the context of American Indians. Most Indians were people present (and bearing children) within the United States who had never been considered citizens, because generally they were not considered subject to the jurisdiction of any state; Indians who had become assimilated (and become taxpayers) in a state were considered citizens. Senator Doolittle emphasized the weighty consequences of granting citizenship:

[C] itizenship, if conferred, carries with it, as a matter of course, the rights, the responsibilities, the duties, the immunities, the privileges of citizens, for that is the very purpose of this constitutional amendment to extend. … [I]n the Constitution as [the Founding Fathers] adopted it they excluded the Indians who are not taxed; not enumerate them, indeed, as part of the population upon which they based representation and taxation; much less did they make them citizens of the United States.

Doolittle was especially concerned to ensure that the citizenship clause not be read to confer citizenship on Indians, even those on reservations receiving food from the War Department and, in his view, to that limited extent subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. In response, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, dismissed any notion that the Citizenship Clause could be read that way:

[I]t is very clear to me that there is nothing whatever in the suggestions of the Senator from Wisconsin. The provision is, that “all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” That means “subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof.” [emphasis added] Now does the Senator from Wisconsin pretend to say that the Navajo Indians are subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States? By no means. We make treaties with them. … It cannot be said of any Indian who owes allegiance, partial allegiance if you please, to some other Government [by which Trumbull means his tribe] that he is “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” … It is only those persons who come completely within our jurisdiction, who are subject to our laws, that we think of making citizens; and there can be no objection to the proposition that such persons should be citizens. [emphasis in original]

Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland (the lone Democrat among the Senators quoted; all the others were Republicans in this Reconstruction Senate) was less certain than his colleagues that the proposed amendment clearly excluded Indians not taxed, but wished to clarify how American citizenship was created. He accepted that birthright citizenship for the children of U.S. citizens was natural and the appropriate norm, but worried that the proposed amendment might be read too broadly:

Now, all this amendment provides is, that all persons born in the United States and not subject to some foreign power – for that, no doubt, is the meaning of the committee who have brought the matter before us – shall be considered as citizens of the United States. … I am, however, by no means prepared to say, as I think I have intimated before, that being born within the United States, independent of any new constitutional provision on the subject, creates the relation of citizen to the United States. [emphasis in original]

Johnson went on to quote from the Civil Rights Act of 1866[v], which had just passed. He considered that its wording better expressed what the Citizenship Clause was meant to achieve: “That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign Power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens.” [emphasis added] None of his colleagues, not least Senator Howard, the Citizenship Clause’s proponent, disagreed.

The Citizenship Clause in the Supreme Court

The Citizenship Clause has been surprisingly little litigated. Supreme Court opinions construing it have almost all addressed the question of when and why a U.S. citizen, whether native or naturalized, may be stripped of his citizenship. The Court has held that U.S. citizenship, once conferred, cannot easily be taken away. The current interpretation (in which Justice Hugo Black, one of the Warren Court’s more creative jurists, read meaning into the 14^th Amendment that is not there) is that U.S. citizenship can never be involuntarily relinquished.[vi] More importantly, just as the Court maintains that the government cannot unilaterally strip a U.S. citizen of his citizenship, an individual cannot unilaterally decide to be a U.S. citizen. Citizenship is not self-selected: it is granted on the basis of qualification for it. Throughout the Supreme Court’s citizenship jurisprudence runs a thread of reciprocity between the individual and the nation, subject to the principle that no one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent.

No Automatic Birthright Citizenship: The Case of American Indians

In 1884, the Supreme Court ruled on the applicability of the Citizenship Clause to an American Indian. [vii] John Elk was an Indian born within the territory that some years later became the state of Nebraska. At statehood in 1867, Nebraska limited the franchise to adult male citizens who had been bona fide resident in Nebraska for all of the previous six months prior to an election. In 1880, Elk sought to vote in a Nebraska election, claiming U.S. citizenship on the basis of the Citizenship Clause. At the time he had been living in Omaha for more than a year and had renounced his tribal affiliation. When his case finally reached it, the Supreme Court rejected Elk’s claim to citizenship.

In its opinion the Court applied the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” phrase, interpreting it in light of its ratifiers’ Senate debate:

The evident meaning of [the jurisdiction phrase] is not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance. Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States … although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more ‘born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ within the meaning of the [Citizenship Clause], than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government…

In Elk, the Supreme Court was true to the meaning of the Citizenship Clause, both as its drafters wrote it and, from the Senate debate, as they evidently meant it. The opinion makes clear that the status of the parents of a child born within the territory of the United States determines whether or not the child is eligible for U.S. citizenship. To qualify the child for citizenship, his parents must be “completely subject” to the jurisdiction of the United States and must owe “direct and immediate” allegiance to the United States.

The obvious corollary to being completely subject to the jurisdiction of one nation and owing it direct and immediate allegiance is that one can have no conflicting obligations to another. In Elk, the competing sovereign to which John Elk was held to have disqualifying allegiance was his tribe, even though he had renounced membership in it. The legality of Elk’s presence in the United States was not an issue; his right to be in Nebraska was not disputed.

In the case of illegal aliens, the illegality of their presence in the United States is not in dispute. They remain entirely subject to the jurisdiction of their home countries, the only nations to which they owe direct and immediate allegiance. To reason that, through breaking the laws of the United States by entering and remaining illegally, an illegal alien has somehow transferred his allegiance from his home country to the United States is absurd. One does not pledge allegiance to any republic by entering it uninvited and flouting its laws through his continued presence. It is more absurd still to allege that, by breaking into its territory, the illegal alien subjects himself willingly to the jurisdiction of the nation he has invaded. The only jurisdiction to which he is willingly subject, if any, is that of his own country, which does not renounce its claim on his allegiance or its right to exercise jurisdiction over him merely because he has chosen to be a squatter somewhere else. The Mexican government’s activism on behalf of all Mexicans in the United States (even those with U.S. citizenship) is the example of greatest concern to Americans, but not the only one.

Proponents of amnesties for illegal aliens may argue that, by analogy to the former denial of citizenship to “Indians not taxed,” illegal aliens effectively subject themselves to U.S. jurisdiction by paying sales tax when they buy things in the United States. Even ignoring their massive evasions of federal and state income tax, the argument is a red herring. The only meaningful subjection to the jurisdiction of the United States that an illegal alien can make is his prompt surrender to the INS. The Supreme Court in Elk denied birthright citizenship to a man with far stronger links to America than any illegal alien; a man who was resident in compliance with American law. The Court did so on the basis of a common-sense reading and application of the Citizenship Clause, one that gives due weight to its jurisdiction phrase and reflects the understanding of its drafters. There is no latitude in that correct interpretation for any grant of U.S. citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal aliens. While the immediate issue in Elk became moot in 1924 with the Congress’ grant of U.S. citizenship to all American Indians in the United States, the Court never overruled Elk and has never repudiated Elk‘s analysis of the Citizenship Clause.

Birthright Citizenship for Legal Immigrants’ Children? The Supreme Court Overreaches

It is clear that the Citizenship Clause does not justify granting citizenship to illegal aliens’ U.S.-born children. Does it justify granting citizenship to the U.S.-born children of legally resident aliens? In a ruling that ignored (while not denying) the Court’s Elk analysis, a later Supreme Court mistakenly held that it does. In 1898, the Supreme Court granted citizenship to Wong Kim Ark.[viii] Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco, was the son of Chinese nationals who were not eligible for U.S. citizenship and who ultimately returned to China. In 1895, Wong Kim Ark returned to San Francisco from a voyage to China and was denied entry on the ground that he was not a U.S. citizen. He sued, and his case made its way eventually to the Supreme Court.

A majority of the Court held that Wong Kim Ark was a U.S. citizen through the operation of the Citizenship Clause. The majority opinion is a lengthy disquisition on the English Common Law understanding of citizenship and how it is acquired, and how those common law antecedents made their way into the laws of the United States. The Court preferred the older English view of jus soli birthright citizenship, which had allowed the Crown to assert jurisdiction over anyone born in England, no matter who his parents were. Paradoxically, an ancient doctrine designed to extend the power of the English crown over as many subjects as possible was invoked to grant U.S. citizenship to a Chinese subject returning to California. The majority gave short shrift to the intent of the Citizenship Clause’s framers. They ignored the fact that, by putting the Citizenship Clause, qualified by the jurisdiction phrase, into the Constitution, the country had deliberately superseded the common law view. They preferred to read the jurisdiction phrase as applying to little more than the children of accredited diplomats.

The dissenting minority paid more attention to the Senate ratification debate, and also noted the language of the contemporaneous Civil Rights Act of 1866, which used the phrase “and not subject to any foreign power” in lieu of the Citizenship Clause’s jurisdiction phrase. While we might criticize the 36^th Congress for poor drafting, it does not make sense to say that the drafters of the essentially simultaneously enacted Civil Rights Act of 1866 and 14^th Amendment meant to create two different standards for U.S. citizenship. The dissenters also noted, correctly, that there is nothing in the wording of the Citizenship Clause or the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that limits the application of the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof/not subject to any foreign power” language only to diplomats or other accredited representatives of foreign governments. Similarly, there is no warrant in the Citizenship Clause for automatic extension of birthright citizenship to the children of aliens legally resident in the United States. They are subject to another jurisdiction: that of their parents’ (and their own) native countries.

In Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court treated the jurisdiction phrase of the Citizenship Clause as almost a nullity. The Court was not in fact ruling on illegal aliens, which is today’s larger problem, but Wong Kim Ark’s over-expansive reading of the Citizenship Clause is substantially to blame for the current mistaken policy of extending birthright citizenship to illegal aliens’ children.

Citizenship for Whom? Applying the Citizenship Clause

There has been no test case yet of the applicability of the Citizenship Clause to illegal aliens. In the current political climate it is very unlikely that there will be one. It is hard to imagine the INS under this Bush Administration (or any Democratic administration) suing to deprive a Mexican child of U.S. citizenship.

The issue is properly one for the Congress, pursuant to its powers under Article I of the Constitution and the explicit grant of Congressional enforcement authority in Section 5 of the 14^th Amendment.

Not all Congressmen are ducking the issue. A number of bills to conform the application of the Citizenship Clause to the way it is written have been introduced in the House of Representatives. The most recent is H.R. 190, introduced by Rep. Robert Stump of Arizona on January 3, 2001. H.R. 190 would deny citizenship to the U.S.-born child of “a mother who is neither a citizen or national of the United States nor admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident.” H.R. 190 would consider such a child as born subject to the jurisdiction of his parents’ country and a citizen of that country and not of the United States.

But H.R. 190 would be only one step in the right direction. The Citizenship Clause gives the Congress more power than that to prevent the unintended gift of U.S. citizenship to foreign nationals’ children born in the United States. At a time of largely uncontrolled immigration into the United States, with social tensions growing and the fragmentation of the national polity ever more likely, the Congress must, within the constraints set by the Citizenship Clause, take control of that most basic element of American civic life: who is and who is not entitled to be a citizen of the United States at birth.

Clearly, under the Citizenship Clause the Congress has no power to deny citizenship to a U.S.-born child of American parents, who is in no way subject to any foreign power. But the truth is, that is all the Citizenship Clause says.

Reasonable legislation to enforce the Citizenship Clause would provide that:

• the child of U.S. citizens, wherever born, is a U.S. citizen;

• the child of a U.S. citizen and a foreign national, wherever born, should be treated as a U.S. citizen until age 18, at which age he must choose between U.S. citizenship and his foreign parent’s citizenship; no dual citizenship allowed;

• the U.S.-born child of legally resident aliens is not a U.S. citizen. If his parents, with whom he then resides and whose dependent he is, should become naturalized U.S. citizens before his 18^th birthday (and he has no criminal record) he may naturalize with them. At 18, he must choose between the U.S. and his ancestral country; no dual citizenship allowed; and

• the U.S.-born child of illegal aliens is not a U.S. citizen, any more than he would be if born in his home country.

These restrictions take into account the concerns that the Citizenship Clause’s drafters had about not devaluing American citizenship and the conflicts inherent in dual allegiance. The denial of birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of foreign nationals, whether legally resident or illegal aliens, is neither a denial of their right to U.S. citizenship (they have none) nor does it render them stateless. They are citizens of their own countries, their parents’ home countries, and entitled to all the privileges and immunities of that citizenship, whatever they may be. These restrictions are constitutional, and would be a foundation on which an intelligent immigration and naturalization policy, one that is in the interest of Americans, and the United States, could be built.

The national character of America is already being eroded by forced multiculturalism. Diversity-driven racial and ethnic preferences are increasing social tensions among Americans. The United States cannot absorb mass immigration in these (or any) circumstances without that character being destroyed. The American prosperity that many immigrants and illegal aliens presumably want will be destroyed with it.

One of the first, and most important, steps to Americans’ reclaiming control of their country’s fate is to make sure that only Americans enjoy the automatic privilege of U.S. citizenship at birth.

************

[i] U.S. CONST. amend XIV, § 1.

[ii] U.S. CONST. amend XIV, § 5.

[iii] Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 577 (1857).

[iv] CONG. GLOBE, 39^th Cong., 1^st Sess. 2890 et seq. (1866). All Senate debate quotes are from the Congressional Globe (precursor of the Congressional Record) for May 30, 1866.

[v] Ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27.(now 42 U.S.C. Sec. Sec. 1981-82).

[vi] Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967).

[vii] Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884).

[viii] United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).

(Video here).

In response, I Quote-tweeted/ Xd

Which reminds me: After the 1996 Dunblane School Massacre, I met then-UK Home Secretary Michael Howard at one of the last of Bill Buckley's Manhattan dinners to which I was invited.

Howard freely admitted that the sweeping handgun ban that his "Conservative" government was pushing through Parliament would punish the innocent, not improve safety, and was actually just a symbolic response to the public Moral Panic.

But he was perfectly OK with that.

He was simply a certain political type.

(And it worked for him—he subsequently became Leader of the Conservative Party, which is full of such types. Still, he never became Prime Minister).

n.b. Rwandan anchor baby Axel Rugakubana carried out the 2024 Southport School Massacre with a knife.

Also: the Dunblane Massacre perp was apparently homosexual. No move to ban that.

(Footnote: An X reader has complained about this parallel. But I meant it to be shocking. The average British gun owner was just as innocent as my critic believes the average homosexual to be. And all are now defenseless in the face of an increasingly totalitarian government).

[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 battered 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.