Steve Sailer On Michael Edison Hayden's Brimelow Derangement Syndrome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on Steve Sailer.net, April 12

Here is an interview in The Guardian:

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

J Oliver Conroy

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

Sat 11 Apr 2026 11.00 EDT

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

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

Some residents of Berkeley Springs

How many?

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

Okay!

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

From Hayden’s book:

From The Hill:

The SPLC is biased — and extraordinarily wealthy

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

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

For this, it has been regularly and rightly criticized.

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

Paywall here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to The Guardian:

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

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

Oh, wait, that didn’t happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012: 64-33

2016: 74-20

2020: 75-23

2024: 77-21

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I bet it has.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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