"I couldn’t write about this because it made me too angry."

Ann Coulter On Letitia James' mugging of VDARE.com

One of the Five Stories For This Week in Ann Coulter’s November 8 podcast [Listen here, here, or here] was Letitia James’s attack on VDARE.com. James Fulford has transcribed it and added some hyperlinks. (Subscribe to Ann here. Subscribe to James here).

Ann:

My second story is a fantastic article in Real Clear Investigations, a report on the New York Attorney General Letitia James’s relentless attack on VDARE, the immigration-restrictionist website I’m sure you’ve heard me mention before. It’s run by Peter Brimelow, a British guy who wrote the blockbuster book Alien Nation. I think it’s worth mentioning that the Conservative Movement, back when it was ossified, stultifying, and I was a young pup there were two things—since tariffs are in the news right now—Conservatives were supposed to consider the Smoot Hawley Act, you know, the equivalent of enacting Nazism and oh immigration, and “It’s our strength.”

It took people like Peter Brimelow and Pat Buchanan coming along to blow up both of those points. But boy did Brimelow do it with his1995 book Alien Nation. I’ll play a clip of him talking about it on C SPAN.

Brian Lamb: When you take this position in public, what’s the general reaction in this country?

Brimelow: Oh, well, it depends where you take it. It’s an issue where there’s a chasm between the leadership, the political leadership and the intellectual leadership of the country and the people at large. Immigration is massively and fantastically unpopular in the country at large. It’s not at all unusual for me to be on a talk show and have one hundred percent supportive calls.

But with the media elite, it’s become sort of an icon. So I get, you know, very savage reviews. If it wasn’t for electronic media, I would probably been quite serious trouble.[ Book TV May 18, 1995]

You can watch the whole Brian Lamb interview on YouTube:

He’s been asking me to write about this outrageous lawfare against VDARE.

They finally had to just shut down the website last summer because they couldn’t pay the legal bills. No action had been brought, no accusations had been made, but the Attorney General’s office just kept issuing subpoena after subpoena after subpoena, Their legal fees skyrocketed. They couldn’t keep paying it, so they said, okay, “Uncle, we’re just going to shut the website down.” And it was a great website.

There’s really no daylight between Donald Trump’s position on immigration, I.E. a majority of the American people and VDARE’s position on immigration. So I couldn’t write about this because it made me too angry. There are very few issues that I’m just too angry about that I can’t write about.

And also what was kind of complicated. I left the law for a reason and I really didn’t want to figure out what was going on. So there’s a great report in Real Clear Investigations. God bless this guy James Varney, obviously very smart who went to Lawrenceville, oh And graduated from Wesleyan—he’s probably the only conservative there and the Columbia School of Journalism—really really great article. I’m going to link to that too. But the highlights from the Real Clear Investigation report. The battle has been that Letitia James’s office has been going after VDARE, which stands at for Virginia Dare, the first European born on the American continent.

What it is about a castle that VDARE bought. And I happen to know why they bought what they bought a castle for those of us who followed VDARE and read VDARE. Every once in a while they’d try to throw a conference. That’s what publications do. We can gather and talk about how much immigrants are enriching us.

And more than a dozen times they would be booked at hotel. They would have attendees coming, they would have collected money, they had speakers, they had rooms, they were ready to go, and Antifa and liberal protesters would call him threaten to bomb the hotel. A Mayor of Colorado Springs said, we’re not going to send the police. We’re not going to send the fire department to this hotel or conference under whatever it was, we are not going to give them protection if you allow VDARE to have a conference here.

For Pete’s sake, you’d think it was the Klan again, it’s people who support Donald Trump on immigration. So they couldn’t. They couldn’t—kept trying to hold conferences. They kept having to get it closed down.

The only the only way they were making money was, you know, getting the kill fee from these various resorts. So they think, Okay, there’s this beautiful landmarked castle in West Virginia, we buy it. Not only do we have a place to hold our conferences, really difficult for Antifa to even get there and also we own it, so we’re not going to shut down the conference. And also they rent it out for weddings and make more money for v there.

So according to the Attorney General, she made a lot of claims, Oh, this is a charity, you’re not allowed to use it to buy this castle. There’s a scam, blah blah blah. So James Varney goes through the details of the case that we’re too boring for me to go through, but there are these crucial paragraphs from his investigation. First, Varney goes through all the allegations against VDARE and then presents it to a charity watchdog group.

As he says here

without citing this case or naming specific nonprofits because of the political nature of the case, real clear investigations. Ask charity Watch, a prominent nonprofit watchdog, whether these sorts of transactions raise red flags. A charity Watch representative said they are common,

So there are no complaints from the IRS. There are no complaints from West Virginia. There are no complaints from the donors to be there, So why was New York State pursuing this? And this is the key part of the real clear Investigations article.

One obvious clue is contained in the filing of the original civil complaint. Letitia James and James Sheehan, chief of the state’s charities bureau, are listed first, but right below them is Meghan Faux, a longtime progressive lawyer whose title is “chief deputy attorney general for social justice.”

Another attorney listed in the filing in the case against the Brimelows was Rick Sawyer, who in 2022 headed the New York attorney general’s Hate Crimes and Bias Prevention branch and is now director of its Civil Rights Division. In November 2022, at an Anti-Defamation League conference called “Securing Our Democracy: Taking Hate and Extremism to Court,” Sawyer laid out his prosecutorial strategy.

Sawyer acknowledged that “hate is protected in the U.S. Constitution; the First Amendment protects hate,” but said that should be no deterrent to aggressive tactics against those alleged to engage in it.

Here

This full paragraph is a quote from him.

“Attorney generals offices have massive amounts of power,” he said. “In New York, we have subpoena authority for any kind of hate crime, subpoena power against charities – and this is before we even file a lawsuit, by the way. We can get massive amounts of discovery without even having to go to court.”

Which is actually true. They finally, after years of harassing VDARE, they finally filed their civil suit last month. It worked. The IRS records show that VDARE’s legal bill skyrocketed, jumping quickly to about two hundred thousand dollars a year, and in 2023 hit more than half a million dollars a year.

So they couldn’t keep paying the legal fees. The only thing I’d add to this excellent report is that the NRA., you may recall won a free speech case against New York State a different a different official just last year for harassing them, using the power of the state to squelch the NRA on they argued because of their speech. It was a little bit more of a more circuitous and interestingly enough, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—oh, this was a nine-zero decision, by the way, by the Supreme Court—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a concurrence in which she cited VDARE’s case against Colorado Springs, the one I just mentioned to you three times, saying it was a much stronger case than the NRA case.

Yes, some lawyer has got to pursue this case and take it to the Supreme Court. It’s really outrageous what is being done to VDARE.

We agree. Some lawyer has got to. They can write Lydia here: lbrimelow@vdare.com

I don’t know that anyone other than Ann has commented on Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s citing of our attempt to defend our First Amendment rights against the city of Colorado Springs.

The story gets even odder. When we looked into it, we found that 18 (EIGHTEEN) State Attorneys General had filed an amicus brief arguing that our Colorado Springs case had been wrongly decided, and that SCOTUS should agree to hear Vullo, which it did.

They just didn’t tell us.

Nor, needless to say, did they file an amicus brief for us.

Incidentally, there a short (12 1/2 minutes) but effective podcast interview with James Varney on his RCI story here.