Whenever I do an interview with Emerald Robinson, my breath is taken away with how perfectly beautiful she is.
Emerald recently (October 5) talked to me about Federal Judge Mae D’Agostino’s shocking attempt to dodge our irrefutable video proof that New York State Attorney General Letitia James is involved in a conspiracy to violate VDARE’s First Amendment rights. Video and transcript below.
As an editor, I worry that people are getting bored with our Political Correctness martyrdom. We’re bored too. But it’s still gotten almost no attention even from “conservative” commentators—and it’s life or death for us.
Emerald Robinson: Apparently, in the state of New York, you only get your First Amendment rights if [New York State Attorney General] Letitia James approves of your politics. And the organization VDARE is now asking a very simple question: How many times are federal courts going to dodge what it calls the First Amendment Smoking Gun?
VDARE has spent year after year after year arguing that New York Attorney General Letitia James didn’t just investigate a charity. The organization says her office used the enormous power of the state to target their political speech, which they despise.
And one of the most damning pieces of evidence comes from the Attorney General’s own lawyer, Rick Sawyer, who at a 2022 Anti-Defamation League conference openly described just how much power the New York Attorney General’s office can wield before a case even reaches court. Watch:
Rick Sawyer:
I mean, I can speak a little bit about Attorney General’s offices. So Attorney General’s offices have a massive amount of power within their jurisdiction. So in New York, we have subpoena authority for any kind of Hate Crime that’s under Section 79-N of the civil rights law. We have subpoena authority against charities. We have subpoena authority against any business that’s engaged in business in the state of New York.
And so we have—and this is all before we even file a lawsuit, by the way, for people who aren’t lawyers—we can get massive amounts of discovery without even having to go to court. And so that’s part of our unique role. We have the opportunity to do massive investigations into organizations that are sham charities that are advancing “Hate Speech.” We can look into groups that are making money off of Hate. And we can look into individuals who’ve committed Hate Crimes without even going to court.
And we can enter into creative settlements like we were discussing earlier today, before even filing a lawsuit.
So, you know Attorney General’s offices, I would say, are an untapped resource in in this area. A lot of our offices are waking up to the power we have.
Emerald Robinson: Wow. When a government lawyer brags that his office can get massive amounts of discovery without even going to court at all, and talks about using that power against groups engaged in protected speech, yeah, you should get concerned.
Joining us now, and to give us the latest in his years-long saga against Letitia James’ political weaponization of her office, is Peter Brimelow with VDARE. He is also the regular OG of Cancel Culture. It’s good to see you, Peter.
Peter Brimelow: Thanks for having me on, Emerald. That really is a Smoking Gun. I mean, he’s just saying the quiet part out loud. And he directly said, in that speech to the Anti-Defamation League, that “Hate Speech” is constitutionally protected by the First Amendment. But then he goes on to explain how to get around it. So how much more blatant can you get?
But, as you know, up to now we’ve been unable to get a federal court to pay attention to it.
Emerald Robinson: Well, that’s right. The latest installment is that a U.S. federal judge named Mae D’Agostino—she’s a Biden appointee, we shall note—ruled on September 10th that she must “abstain” from addressing your free-speech claims. Tell us about this latest judicial trick.
Peter Brimelow:
Well, we’ve had two go-arounds in the federal courts. In the first one, they simply did what she’s trying to do here, which is to find some technical excuse to avoid ruling on the First Amendment question. This one stems from the fact that Letitia James sued the VDARE Foundation and us personally last September, which was over a year after we’d just had to suspend VDARE because we’d run out of money. She’d already inflicted between $I-$1 1/2 million dollars of costs on us, even before suing us over anything.
But when she sued us, it opened the whole case up anew, and we were able to try to get an injunction from the federal court to stop her going ahead because of this blatant expression of intent to violate the First Amendment. It’s clearly a conspiracy against civil rights.
And the federal court, all of this year, has been basically trying to dodge this question. And that culminated in this ruling that this woman made a few weeks ago. She’s basically trying to say that the matter should be returned to state courts.
Which is not, in fact, true. Constitutional issues are usually resolved in federal courts.
And, of course, we know that in New York State, with a New York State jury and a New York State prosecutor, and New York State judges, we have absolutely no chance.
Look what they did to Donald Trump. I don’t think there’s been enough outrage about the way Trump was treated in the New York State courts.
Emerald Robinson: Yeah, especially if there’s been no accountability for them to even do it to a past president who’s now become the sitting president again. I mean, why would they back off?
Peter Brimelow: Trump is trying to get redress. The DOJ is pursuing a theory of conspiracy against his Civil Rights in upstate New York courts. But the problem is that the whole prosecutorial apparatus there, even at the federal level, is infected by Democrats. So it’s been extremely difficult to get these charges off the ground.
Letitia James has clearly engaged in serial mortgage fraud going back forty years but, up to now, they’ve been unable to launch a prosecution against her because of sabotage by Democrat prosecutors and Democrat grand jurors.
Emerald Robinson: I think there’s also some distaste at the federal level for addressing that as well—
Peter Brimelow: Certainly among the career civil servants in the DOJ. As for [USAG] Todd Blanche, I guess we’ll have to and see.
Emerald Robinson: Yeah, we’ve been asking about that.
But for VDARE, you’re kind of caught in this litigation loop, right? And we’ve seen this with other things. We’re talking about these Dominion lawsuits today. We’re talking about the FBI seizure of Mike Lindell’s phone and the targeting of him through Arctic Frost. What they can do without going to court, they can get you in this litigation loop, subpoena loop, and just drain you of funds.
And they have unlimited funds, right? It’s the government. They can just keep going and going.
So if the federal court does not address this, Peter, what recourse do you and your wife and VDARE have?
Peter Brimelow: Well, we’re in completely uncharted territory. We will probably be personally bankrupted by this, because, of course, we’re having to pay for our own lawyers quite separate from the VDARE Foundation’s lawyers. And the VDARE Foundation is rapidly running out of money.
I think what Letitia James wants to do is seize the Foundation and seize the domain name. (Which is why I no longer use my mailto:pbrimelow@VDARE.com email, because it looks like the New York State courts are going to give her the domain name. Use editor@peterbrimelow.com]).
But I think her ultimate objective is to get her filthy paws on the Berkeley Springs Castle.
Because we got so fed up with being canceled out of hotels when we were trying to hold conferences during the first Trump administration, and because we had very generous donors, Lydia bought a castle here in Berkeley Springs WV so that we could have our own conference venue.
And we did have a number of very successful conferences
You came to one of our Twelfth Night parties, Emerald! (Am I allowed to say that?)
Emerald Robinson: You can say that!
Peter Brimelow: The Castle has been spun off into a separate West Virginia foundation.
And Letitia James has a bad record here, because she seized the headquarters of the Irish Historical Society in New York a few years ago. Now, that case, there was a split on the board, but there’s no split on our board.
So we’re assured by our lawyers, the extremely expensive lawyers who lawyered the whole transaction of buying the Castle and then spinning it off into a separate foundation, that it’s unbreakable. She can’t get her filthy paws on the Castle.
But New York courts—New York State courts—have shown that they’re capable of anything. So we just don’t know what’s going to happen, except that we’re probably going to be personally bankrupt.
Emerald Robinson: It’s a lovely castle. It’s a lovely property, and it’s a beautiful venue to get together and have discussions, debate, you know, think, discuss. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and the surrounding town is just lovely.
And, you know me, I’m an Appalachian girl, so I love the mountains, and it’s nestled in the beautiful mountains there in West Virginia. It’s absolutely stunning.
And you had lots of plans, right? You were going to promote debate, promote discussion. I love it because I personally enjoy the old-school kind of political salons, literary salons, sitting and talking about what you’ve read and what you think about it. And it was a perfect venue to do that.
What do you need people to help you, Peter? How can we help you and VDARE?
Peter Brimelow: Well, immediately, as you know, Emerald, about this last atrocity, I just ask people to publicize it.
My observation of these judges is that they’re not swayed by considerations of the law or facts or common decency. The only thing that seems to sway them is publicity and being in the public eye.
I mean, that’s why that judge [Colombian-born Judge Juan Merchan] backed off of punishing Trump for the alleged campaign financing infractions about the [Stormy Daniels] hush money payments.
He let the thing go to trial. He let Trump be convicted. He then said he was going to wait to sentence him until after the election.
And then he gave him an unconditional discharge.
Well, if he was going to get an unconditional discharge, why did it even go to trial?
The answer is that Trump was president, and that the judge didn’t want to take the heat of giving a sitting president a suspended sentence. He’s a coward.
And so, as I say, my first request is basically that people just circulate our story. If you go to the VDARE site on X, which is @VDARE, or my own Substack site,
you’ll see the video you just played, and the discussion is pinned.
And beyond that, I’m afraid to say that, like everybody else, we need money. We have two GiveSendGos up. One is for the VDARE Foundation itself, and the other frankly, is for us personally, because, you know, we just wrote a seventeen-thousand-dollar check last week to our personal lawyers.
They’re trying to depose Lydia in New York sometime in this fall, but we’re not even at the stage of depositions yet, so the personal cost will be colossal.
I mean, it’s extraordinary—given that I suspended the site two and a half years ago—it’s quite extraordinary that they’re continuing this case. I truly think that James actually wants to seize the Castle.
Emerald Robinson: And so I’ll also mention that a good place to find what is going on with VDARE and the Brimelows is Peter Brimelow’s Substack www.peterbrimelow.com . That’s got the latest article, Do Federal Courts REALLY Intend To Dodge VDARE’s 1A Smoking Gun AGAIN? You can subscribe there as well.
And, look, you just never know. You know, we’ve had this discussion with the alleged pipe bomber’s mom here on Lindell TV. You just don’t know when you might be the target of the federal government.
Peter Brimelow: When I was at Forbes more than twenty years ago, Paul Craig Roberts—do you remember him? He was a Reagan administration official—published a book breaking from the Conservative Inc. consensus on prosecution. He said that there actually is prosecutorial abuse in this country. And Steve Forbes told me to go down and write an article about this because it had been completely shunned by the Conservative Establishment.
And, of course, I didn’t do anything until I was actually on the plane going down to Florida, when I actually read the book. It absolutely blew my mind.
This has been going on a long time—prosecutorial abuse. It really stems back to the relaxation of standards from the War On Drugs, from the War On Terror.
But now it’s being used to suppress political speech. Of course, Letitia James is a particularly radical example.
Emerald Robinson: I like what you said about the publicity aspect of this—so share out this story!
We do know that they’re not really particularly brave. Most of these people involved in weaponization, when it’s turned back on them, are quite cowardly.
Peter Brimelow, thank you for coming and sharing your story once again. We—and we’re sad it’s been years and continues to go on—but we’re all rooting for you. Thank you, Peter.
Peter Brimelow: Thank you, Emerald!