Peter Brimelow writes: One of the very rare funny moments in VDARE’s ongoing four-year ordeal in the nightmare world of race-communist lawfare was the news that long-time Southern Poverty Law Center thug Michael Edison Hayden had actually conned Hachette, one of the biggest commercial publishers in the U.S., into commissioning a book on us!—Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town, to be published in April 2026.
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c) In 2024, D. Trump carried Morgan County WV—the county seat of which is our home town of Berkeley Springs, the “Small American Town” that “Extremism” a.k.a. us allegedly “Tore Apart”—by FIFTY-SIX POINTS (77%-21%). And Trump carried EVERY PRECINCT in Berkeley Springs. So this is “tore apart”?
d) The Brimelow family live lives of boring bourgeois blandness: Lydia is a Sunday School teacher at her Catholic Church; she homeschools; I take our children swimming at a local spa and otherwise rarely come out of my basement office hole; etc. That’s about it. So?
Hayden has been obsessed with VDARE.com for years. I suspect his 2021 attack on our “organizational prowess” may well have triggered the Anti-Defamation League’s decision to get NYAG James to take us out. Similarly, Hayden’s 2020 attack on our purchase of the Berkeley Springs Castle as a conference venue (containing the immortal lines “the castle is also securely embedded on a hill and surrounded by iron gates, making it hard for antiracist demonstrators to access [a.k.a. ATTACK AND SUPPRESS] it should VDARE decide to host a conference there” ) provoked his Twitter followers to debate how to firebomb us, after which he blocked us. (Probably because we had urged the FBI to investigate this blatant inter-state terrorist threat, which of course it did not).
But facts presumably do mean something to Hachette. My guess: Hachette editors (probably generic Manhattan leftists but quite possibly their even more idiotic anti-American French supervisors) genuinely thought they were getting the goods on the next incipient Waco, or at least another Hayden Lake, out here in darkest Appalachia.
It can’t be overemphasized how much the Left believes its own propaganda. Hence the Russia Hoax, J6 Hoax, Biden sharp as a tack, etc.
But presumably this means Hachette may be seriously shocked by Hayden’s foolish fizzle. Will it ask for its advance back?
The need to keep Hachette happy may explain the ludicrously portentous tone of Hayden’s book, as excerpted recently by the Leftist website TPM (below).
Thus Hayden presents it as a great triumph that he managed to “gain entry” to the Berkeley Springs Castle.
But he glosses over the reality that he did this by the simple expedient of using a fake name and buying a ticket to a fundraiser for the Bath Christmas Project, the local charity that decorates the town and the Castle and that we allow to put on fundraising events to benefit itself every Christmas Season. The Washington Post’s Ellie Silverman accomplished exactly the same heroic feat, with equally banal results, back in 2022. (But The Bath Christmas Project i$ grateful to them all!)
All of which sounds comic. And of course it is.
But there’s a dark side too. As the late Charlie Kirk pointed out on his Rumble show, discussing why we were so upset at finding Hayden and his SPLC sidekick Hannah Gais quizzing our eight year-old daughter, the issue was not just the ethics of trying to extract information from a minor, but that Hayden himself is an open sexual pervert. (Read the Kirk transcript linked above for graphic details. Or not, if you have weak stomach).
And perversion is the back story of the minimal but highly aggressive and very well-publicized communist presence in Berkeley Springs. (As it is for the American Left in general). Without going into details, we had to get a restraining order against a local transexual who was posting salacious material about one of our daughters on social media and also following her all around the local farmers’ market; a group of transexuals open-carrying guns began arriving at Lydia’s church, until deterred by the priest and congregation.
Interesting final point: in Hayden’s Bluesky post touting his book he writes: “There's also stuff about what was happening inside SPLC and... it doesn't exactly measure up to the standards of a civil rights org!”
Oh yeah? VDARE kept a close eye on the SPLC. We analyzed its 990s and found it was actually a huge hedge fund attached to a small public-interest law firm. We were the first to discover it had an offshore bank account (whatever for?).
The SPLC has had two major but un-MSM-publicized upheavals recently: the 2019 firing of its founder Morris Dees along with his long-time associate and SPLC president Richard Cohen for never-fully-explained workplace transgressions; a remarkable 2024 purge of a quarter of its staff, apparently aimed at suppressing a pro-Palestinian rebellion, now an endemic problem for the American Left. Somewhere in the shuffle, Hayden appears to have left the SPLC.
So maybe he’ll have something original to say in his book after all!
First published on Talking Points Memo, March 16, 2026
In late February 2020, residents of the small tourist town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, woke to learn that a mysteriousright-wing group called VDARE [??Mysterious? We posted to a free website updated several times daily since 1999; we’re a 501(c3) charity and our Form 990s are publicly available] had purchased a beautiful nineteenth-century castle overlooking their town. The castle meant everything to Berkeley Springs. Images of it appeared on town promotional materials, and the outsiders business and restaurants owners relied on for tourist revenue always noticed the gorgeous sandstone building as they drove past Berkeley Springs State Park on Route 522. [In fact, the Castle had been effectively closed to the public since 1999, when it ceased to be a museum, and completely closed since the 2014 death of its last owner, Andrew Jackson Gosline V. Lydia’s opening it up after more than twenty years for tours, events etc. is one reason she’s so popular in the town].
With fewer than a thousand residents, gossip reverberated quickly through Berkeley Springs, and Peter and Lydia Brimelow, the castle’s new proprietors, soon became its subject. The Brimelows had a great deal of money for Morgan County, West Virginia [?? Maybe before we had to pay the costs of NYAG Letitia James’ lawfare against us personally], as well as inscrutable [??] benefactors and a fair share of infamy. My employer at the time, the Southern Poverty Law Center, labeled them “white nationalist[s],” [No! Not “White Nationalist[s]”! VDARE was actually a forum site, hosting anyone critical of the post-1965 immigration disaster] and VDARE’s website wrote credulously [i.e. presciently] about the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that mass shooters have used to justify their beliefs. [Nowhere near as much death as the Replacers are inflicting on Americans, e.g. here]. There were other reasons for gossip, too, including the nearly four-decade age gap between Peter and Lydia.
Fr. Robert Sirico officiating, February 24, 2007. Lydia was 22, I was 59. He told us: “The Church has no objection.”
My new book, Strange People on the Hill, covers a five-year period in Berkeley Springs — from the end of 2019 through the day after the 2024 election, when VDARE’s presence caused neighbors to turn on one another, taking sides across ideological divides. [Bunk. See election results above. And for that matter, Trump carried EVERY SINGLE COUNTY in West Virginia. It’s America.] The following excerpt begins on the night of December 8, 2023, after my colleague Hannah Gais and I managed to gain entry [!!!] to the castle for the first time. We did so by purchasing tickets to a local Christmas party. For years, I reported on the Brimelows, and they posted disparaging remarks about me and my family on their website [ie. we answered his smears e.g. here]. That night was the first — and last — time we met in person.
When Hannah and I entered the castle, a massive tree reached the high ceiling of the foyer beside it. White lights, translucent white ribbons, and a glowing angel adorned the tree. A matching wreath hung above the fireplace. Hidden speakers played Bing Crosby’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
I mentioned to Hannah the possibility that the Brimelows might not even show up. [It wasn’t our party, see above]. We grabbed champagne and appetizers from an adjoining room with a long, opulently laid table and then headed up a red carpeted staircase that split the big stone walls of the foyer.
On the next floor, we found a pristine phonograph [Lydia says it’s just a cheap plastic toy that plays records, CDs and cassette tapes. But I have to admit that I didn’t know that either] next to a painting of green hills and a white sky. They also had a print of the Karl Ludwig Friedrich Becker painting Othello Tells His Story to Desdemona. It showed Othello in front of a row of columns, his Black skin draped in Renaissance garb, gesticulating as he speaks to an older white man and a young white woman who is demurely peering up at him. [This obviously proves we’re RACISSS!!!]
We walked down the halls and found a few untouched [because WE DON’T LIVE there] bedrooms. They looked like part of a fancy hotel. [We use them for conference speakers etc.] Then we ducked into another room with a Christmas tree. It was empty and we hung out there for a minute to take a break. When we moved on to the next room, we found that it was a scullery. [Actually a Butler’s Pantry].
There were no Christmas decorations in it, just framed pictures of Civil War generals. General Robert E. Lee was there. So was Stonewall Jackson. They also had a portrait of General Ulysses S. Grant. I wondered whether the Brimelows had put them up or the room came that way. [So why didn’t Hayden ask? All the Castle furnishings were included when we bought it, that’s one reason it was such a good deal. This room also has the famous picture of the older Andrew Jackson—a hero to Andrew Jackson Gosline V—which Hayden obviously didn’t recognize].
Hannah and I jumped up another small flight of stairs and stumbled into the room where VDARE held its conferences. At the center, we found the dais marked with VDARE’s circular emblem, an outline of a white doe surrounded by blackness. Behind it was an oil painting and what looked like Chinese sculptures of white, red, and black guard dogs. [They’re Foo Dogs. Andrew Gosline, who was a Sinophile, collected three pairs for the Castle]. I found it bizarre that they had left the room accessible. [It’s because we have NOTHING TO HIDE].
“Let me take your picture,” I said to Hannah.
Hannah posed and then took my picture next. I opened my palms in a shrug at the dais when she snapped it. From that angle, I was looking at a giant illuminated wreath and VDARE’s conference tables. There were only a couple dozen chairs.
Next to the conference area, facing west [actually south], I saw two doors. Someone had put up signs telling people not to access them, and I wondered if people lived there. [What lives there are our other sixty-plus chairs, a giant teddy bear, assorted stuff, etc.]
We exited through a door on the eastern [actually northern] side of the room, stepping into the cold. We took selfies with the illuminated battlements behind us. I looked down on the silent town from there. Traffic lights were changing colors, but there was no traffic. [Ominous!]
When we went back inside, some other people had come into the conference room, and Hannah volunteered to take pictures of a couple who wanted a photo of themselves standing in front of the wreath. Then we walked back downstairs and got new drinks. We sat down together along a plush loveseat at the back of the foyer.
I contemplated interviewing the people milling around and then making an abrupt exit. But then the doors opened, the wind and cold air blew in, and Peter and Lydia stepped forward with their three daughters. [FWIW my recollection is that I was working in my office upstairs. Lydia and our daughters came in separately].
The bench Hannah and I were sitting on angled along the stone walls in a way that obscured our faces from most of the room. We turned our heads to the side and looked at our phones so it would be harder to notice us. The Brimelows talked about the weather when they came in, and some people walked over to be closer to them.
I was about to suggest to Hannah that we make a move back up the stairs when Peter walked directly toward me. Dressed in a brown corduroy blazer and matching pants [FWIW I don’t have a brown corduroy blazer], he came closer and closer and then marched past me. Behind my back, Peter fiddled with something [the thermostat] and muttered to himself. Hannah and I shared a glance. [Aaargh!]
Peter returned and hovered in front of us. He looked directly at us.
“I need to turn the heat on,” he said in his gravelly British accent.
He left. Someone pulled Lydia into a conversation, occupying her, so Hannah and I got up from where we sat and moved back to the table with the hors d’oeuvres. Two of Brimelows’ daughters, the older ones [then aged 11 and 13], dressed in plaid and white, were thumbing through a book that had pictures in it. Hannah and I communicated only with our eyes. [Wow!] We saw an opening, headed back up the stairs, and found an empty space in the room with the second Christmas tree.
“I gotta talk to them,” I said.
“Once you do they’re gonna throw us out,” Hannah said.
We walked back over to the top of the stairs, near Othello Tells His Story to Desdemona and the phonograph. There were a few guests wandering around. I composed myself before approaching.
Before I could descend the stairs again, the Brimelows’ youngest daughter [our redhead, then aged 8] bounded up to them, radiating the kind of energy kids get when they’re at an adult function after bedtime. [Accurate, but she radiates this all the time]. The girl said a few things to me and Hannah. She spoke like a child unfrozen from the 1840s. [Wha???]
“How is it living in a castle?” I heard myself asking, amid her monologue.
“Oh, it’s wonderful. And, there’s a dungeon!” she said.
The Brimelow girl detailed the time she’d visited the dungeon. My gaze hung over her shoulder, on her parents, who were chatting with someone in the center of the foyer. I decided to end the conversation and started moving down those carpeted stairs. I took no more than two steps before Lydia looked up at me.
I saw the stages of Lydia’s recognition in what felt like slow motion.
First, her eyes opened in shock. Then, her brows furrowed. Her frown sucked in to cover a row of teeth that clenched visibly beneath the curtain of her lips.
[Lydia has always been very good at concealing her true feelings].
Lydia led Peter into a private conversation, presumably warning him about our infiltration. I saw Peter straining to look for where we were.
His general cluelessness was almost charming. [??? Maybe Hayden is world-famous, but I’d never seen him before and had no idea what he looked like]. Hannah and I went to the bar and I got another drink [that’s # 3, hmmm] while the Brimelows talked. When I got my drink, I turned around to approach them. Hannah flanked me. [Dah-Dah-Dah-DUM!!! ]
Lydia stared at me like she wanted to jab a stake into my heart. She closed her eyelids around her dark irises and held them that way, letting them twitch with contempt. [See what I mean?]
“Hey Peter, how are you doing?” I said.
“No pictures of the children,” Peter said quietly.
Hannah and I erupted with crisscrossing expressions of “no” and “of course not” and “we would never do that.”
“No pictures of the children,” he said again.
“You had your phone out, and if you took pictures of my kids . . . ,” Lydia said.
“I wouldn’t do that,” I said. [But, n.b., he was obviously recording].
“You would do whatever you can,” Lydia said, raising her voice.
“I would not, I would not,” I said. “I’m not even here on behalf of SPLC.”
“What are you here on behalf of ?” Lydia asked.
“I’m writing a book,” I said, trying to project a little defiance.
“About what?”
“About the town.”
“Not about us?” Lydia asked.
I told them they had a wonderful home, referring to the castle. I thought it was the thing to say at that moment. Lydia leaned forward, towering over her husband. [Lydia is 6’ 1/2”, I’ve shrunk to 5’11” (it happens). But maybe she was wearing heels. I like her to wear heels.]
“It’s not our home,” she said. “It’s our office.”
I wanted to ask about the doors that they’d roped off adjacent to the conference room but I thought better of it. [Because he wanted to continue the insinuation?]
“I mean, you’ve spent nights here, right?” I asked.
“It’s not our home,” Lydia repeated. “That is a very important distinction. We have a house with our family, which is not this house.”
[It’s a very important distinction because NYAG Letitia James has alleged that we bought the Castle as a personal residence, whereas in fact we bought it to serve as offices and a conference space, after communists like Hayden succeeded in bullying commercial venues into cancelling on us. We lived in the Castle only transitionally, paying independently-determined rent. Nevertheless, New York State Judge Sabrina B. Kraus has repeatedly cited NYAG James’ lie, ignoring our refutation, with the result that people like alleged free speech maven Eugene Volokh (and born-again Democrat Richard Spencer, who admits he’s just jealous) get to echo it too. Note the number of times Hayden tries to insinuate it in this excerpt].
I told Peter that I wanted to interview him. He told me to send an email.
[He didn’t. I’ve learned not to do in-person interviews with JournoFa. If you do it by email, you at least have a record you can post e,g. here.
But, thinking about it, it is really odd that Hayden has apparently written an entire book without any further contact with us at all].
Then he looked at Hannah directly.
“What’s wrong with room temperature vodka?” he blurted out.
For years, Hannah and I had made watching VDARE’s holiday [“Christmas” in American] fundraising livestream an annual tradition. We would inevitably post screenshots and videos to Twitter and poke fun. In one of them, Hannah had mocked Peter for drinking room temperature Tito’s vodka. We laughed at Peter’s joke. At that moment, it felt like a peace offering.
“As a Slavophile, I simply think it should be cold,” Hannah said.
When I laughed about the vodka, I involuntarily put my hand onto Peter’s left shoulder, as you would do to a friend. After I realized what I had done, I drew my hand away. I watched Peter’s eyes monitor the movement of my hand as it left him. I continued to feel the corduroy of his jacket on my fingers long after touching it. [Dah-Dah-Dah-DUM again!!! Must say I don’t remember this].
“You traveled all the way here? For this?” Peter asked, his tone shifting to one of displeasure.
Lydia leaned forward in my direction.
“As soon as you come into town, I get a string of text messages,” she said.
“Well,” I said and stopped short.
“And I get recordings of your meetings.”
I searched myself for what she might be talking about. I remembered the night with Tanya Gersh and her comments about maggots.
Michael Hayden with Fairfax Coffee House’s communist proprietress Trey Johanson—recently convicted of harassment and filing false police reports, nothing to do with us—on left. Patriots visiting Berkeley Springs should patronize the patriot coffee shop, Lighthouse Latte!
where she, without ever having met us, called us “Nazis,” “worms,” and “maggots” and urged locals to begin a boycott of us, something she claimed to have organized successfully against fellow Whitefish resident Richard Spencer. Presumably she’s relented since he became a born-again Democrat].
“Well, it was certainly nice to meet you finally—,” I started.
“These people are normies,” Peter said in a low voice, putting emphasis on the word “normies.”
His eyes flitted to either side, referring to the people there. “Normies” had a particular connotation in the movement. He meant that they were people who had no connection to radical politics. Hannah and I were not considered normies because we were perceived to be in the fight — in the “cold civil war.”
“No, we’re not—,” I said, starting to explain that I wasn’t writing about the guests.
“And unblock me on Twitter,” Peter said.
I squinted at him after he made the comment and then looked at Lydia, who continued to watch me intently. It caught me off guard because of how stupid it sounded coming from Peter’s mouth.
[???Seems reasonable to me. We just want to monitor when his followers plan to fire-bomb us]
“I don’t want to get in any public back and forth,” I said.
“Then why do you attack?” Lydia asked.
“I don’t attack,” I said. “I never attack.”
“You’re writing a book called Strange People On The Hill, what do you call that?”
“It’s from a quote,” I said.
“It really should be called Strange People in the Castle,” Lydia said.
Her youngest daughter arrived at her side. She looked at Hannah and me like we were her new best friends.
“That’s not bad, but again, it’s from a quote,” I said and forced a smile.
“It’s disingenuous to say that you don’t want to get into a back and forth, so you’re going to mock,” she said.
“Well—”
Peter raised his hand.
“This is enough,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas to you,” I said.
[Note that we did not, despite Hannah Gais’ girlish fears, throw them out.]
The energy shifted from a pantomime of collegiality to something harsher, darker, and colder than the air outside. [Dah-Dah-Dah-DUM! again!] When we picked up our coats, someone who wasn’t the Brimelows followed us to make sure we left. He was an older middle-aged man wearing black fleece. As we stepped into the cold air, he looked down on us from the big doors.
“You’re not welcome here,” he said.
[N.b. A completely spontaneous reaction, we didn’t ask for it. But this is West Virginia, which has shifted overwhelmingly from Democrat to Republican—solely because the Republicans aren’t Democrats—over the last 20-30 years. Even the normies now know they have enemies].
Hannah and I walked the long driveway to the gates. They were closed. It might not have been more than a minute but it felt like half an hour before someone opened them for us. We crossed Route 9 and hiked down the hill to the park. The only place still serving food was a bar on 522 called the Naked Olive. [Link added].
“These people are normies,” I said to Hannah, imitating Peter’s voice.
[I doubt this. Even my American children can’t imitate my Northern English accent, which apparently hasn’t worn off after more that 50 years. They make me sound like Peppa Pig’s Daddy Pig.
[But of course Hayden’s insinuation is that our fellow West Virginians are, in fact, fascists. And that’s what he wants everyone to think about white Americans.]
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Didn’t expect to be so entertained by a Christmas gathering “infiltration” — West Virginia is the new Florida. Thanks for sharing
Imagine the same scenario, reversed. You attend some leftist Equinox bacchanal.
Do you think they’d have chatted over room temp vodka?