The Sin Of SULLIVAN: Why Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard and I Are Suing For Libel
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I must admit I was pretty startled early in the morning of Friday, January 9 when, reeling back after the usual breakfast battle with the children, I glanced at my cellphone and saw that POLITICO already had an article, [Anti-immigration author sues NYT over ‘white nationalist’ label, by Josh Gerstein, January 9, 2020] about our defamation suit against the New York Times which we had filed the previous evening not 12 hours before. We were meeting a litigation deadline and had planned to refine our complaint before actually serving the New York Times and going public sometimes in the next two months. But it seems the internet has speeded everything up—just as it has made the Main Stream Media more careless, and its libels more damaging. Which is one reason we’ve been, very reluctantly, forced into litigation.
You can read our provisional complaint here [PDF].
It’s important to realize, as many jeering Leftist commenters on the various MSM comment threads apparently did not, that the New York Times has already conceded that it was wrong and we were right.
Its original article, A Timeline of Steve King’s Racist Remarks and Divisive Actions [by Trip Gabriel, January 15, 2019, archive link], an attempt to smear the heroic Rep. Steve King by claiming an (absurdly tenuous) connection with me, referred to me as an “open white nationalist.” The headline also counted merely meeting me briefly on the platform at a public conference as a “racist” and/ or “divisive” action.
Gabriel’s article included no hyperlink to my work or to the website I edit, VDARE.com. Nor, of course, had I been contacted.
The plain fact, however, is that I’m not at all an “open white nationalist”—to the contrary, I have specifically denied being a “white nationalist.” My position: I’m a civic nationalist. In other words, I look forward to voting for Michelle Malkin when she runs for President on an immigration moratorium platform.
Similarly, I say explicitly in a response to an FAQ that has been posted on the VDARE.com menu bar since 2006 that VDARE.com is not a “white nationalist” site. It is a forum site that will publish anyone, of any political or racial persuasion, who has a rational criticism of post-1965 immigration policy.
This certainly does include a few writers whom I would regard as "white nationalist" in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. They are not white supremacists. They do not advocate violence. They are rational and civil. They brush their teeth. But they unashamedly work for their people—exactly as La Raza works for Latinos and the Anti-Defamation League works for Jews. As immigration policy drives whites into a minority, this type of interest-group, "white nationalism," will inexorably increase.
Does the New York Times think that American whites are not supposed to have interests that they can legitimately defend?
Maybe the New York Times thinks I’m lying—that I’m a secret (closed?) “white nationalist.” But even if that were true—and it isn’t—the fact remains I am still not an “open white nationalist.”
So our lawyer sent the New York Times a letter smacking it over the snout and demanding a retraction.
The New York Times did not deign to reply. But it did perform a “stealth edit” on its website—removing the word “open” and adding to the words “white nationalist” a hyperlink to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (also libelous) description of me.(This happened sometime between January 17 and January 24.)
However, although the New York Times had here tacitly conceded the justice of our charge, it did not follow its own published guidelines and acknowledge that it had done so.
Those guidelines state portentously:
Because its voice is loud and far-reaching, The Times recognizes an ethical responsibility to correct all its factual errors, large and small (even misspellings of names), promptly and in a prominent reserved space in the paper. Whether an error occurs in a print article, a digital graphic, a video, a tweet or a news alert, readers should expect us to correct it. There is no five-second rule. It does not matter if it was online for seconds or minutes or hours.
We Stand Corrected: How The Times Handles Errors, by Rogene Jacquette, June 7, 2018
And, from my point of view, it was particularly vital that this stealth edit be acknowledged—because, of course, the libel remained uncorrected in the New York Times’ print edition. Yet this was the version that was seen by millions of people and was, for example, read into the Congressional Record [January 16, 2019] by Rep. Bobby Rush (D.-IL).
Until the New York Times has formally acknowledged its correction, I can hardly go to Rep. Rush and ask him to correct his entry—which I naturally expect he will then do, as a man of honor.
(Ironically, Rep. Rush himself could fairly be described as a “Black Nationalist.” The co-founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968, who once said “we advocate offensive violence against the power structure,” served six months in jail for taking a gun into a police station and commented more recently: "I don't repudiate any of my involvement in the Panther party—it was part of my maturing."
Of course, I’ve never done anything like that. It’s almost as if there is a double standard).
Accordingly, our lawyer wrote to the New York Times again, asking that it acknowledge the correction, pursuant to its own published guidelines, and/or publish a letter from me putting my defense on the record.
The publication of Letter To The Editor had, in fact, had been the resolution of an earlier go-round with the New York Times. On August 29, 2017, it published an Op-Ed by law professors David J. Herzig [Email him] and Samuel D. Brunson [Email him] demanding that the Internal Revenue Service strip VDARE.com and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance of our 501 c (3) tax-exempt status because, according to them, we were “white supremacist groups.” After a certain amount of argument, New York Times ran [September 6, 2017] a Letter to The Editor from Jared and myself refuting this ridiculous smear and pointing out that the professors simply wanted to suppress speech with which they disagreed.
But this time, the New York Times did neither. It refused to acknowledge publicly that it had made the change. And it did not publish my Letter to the Editor.
At this point, I should stipulate that, while I spent some 40 years in the Main Stream Media, a significant portion of that was in Canada, plus writing a column for six years for the Times in the U.K.. In both jurisdictions, the Common Law understanding of libel still applies. Basically, you have to get facts right. A mistake, even if honest, is not a defense to libel.
The U.S. is also a Common Law jurisdiction, of course. But here libel protection was gutted for elected officials, later expanded include to all so-called “public figures,” by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), in which the U.S. Supreme Court (Earl Warren, proprietor) unilaterally rewrote the law in order to get some black Civil Rights activists who had published untruths about a Southern law enforcement official, and their ideological ally, the New York Times, off the hook.
Since Sullivan and its progeny (e.g. Curtis Publishing Co. v Butts), American “public figures” (basically, anyone active in public life e.g. even an obscure journalist like me) has had to prove, not just that the published libel was false—that the facts were wrong—but that it was published with “actual malice.” In other words, that it was published with knowledge that it was false, or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.
As more than one Supreme Court justice has observed, “actual malice” has come to be an almost impossible standard to meet e.g., Justice White in Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. v. Greenmoss Builders, Inc. (1985), or Justice Thomas in McKee v. Cosby (2019).
Notwithstanding Sullivan, in both the Canadian and the U.S. Main Stream Media, there was a procedure you were trained to follow if you were making a controversial assertion, to show that you were not motivated by malice:
Contact victim beforehand and at least go through the motions of getting his side of the story. (In the internet age, this should obviously include a hyperlink to victim’s website, so readers can judge for themselves).
If victim objects after the story appears, publish a letter from him and/ or make a correction. This was not a complete defense to libel—the libel had, after all, appeared and the damage had been done—but it was supposed to show that you were not motivated by malice.
(This was an unspoken rule): to further show you are not motivated by malice, stop writing about victim.
Of course, it would be difficult to stop writing about the victim if he were e.g. Donald J. Trump. But it is less difficult to do if the victim is e.g. me/ VDARE.com, which the New York Times had contrived to mention me only 24 andVDARE.com 5 times in 42 years prior to 2019—despite the fact that we were right, and the New York Times was wrong, on immigration, the greatest public policy (and political) issue of the age.
But in this case, the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel did not contact me before publishing his libel. Plus, of course, the New York Times subsequently refused to acknowledge its mistake publicly, although implicitly conceding it was a mistake by (partially) correcting it.
And, finally, shockingly, the New York Times continued to smear us throughout 2019:
In August, 2019, Ashley Tabaddor, a Leftist immigration “judge” (they’re actually bureaucrats, like insurance claims adjustors) had a hissy fit because the Department of Justice news briefing had included a link to a VDARE.com story that dared to criticize her as a “kritarch” i.e. a legislating judge, a term she claimed, ludicrously, was “anti-Semitic.”
(You might have thought, as an regular American under the impression that you live in a free society where debate is allowed, that the job of a “news briefing” is to provide, well, news. But our Ruling Class now demands to be protected from dissenting viewpoints. And the Trump Justice Department did indeed cave and promised to not to include items from VDARE.com again).
The New York Times eagerly publicized Tabaddor’s crazy claim [Justice Department Newsletter Included Extremist Blog Post, by Christine Hauser, August 23, 2019], again without deigning to contact us.
But Hauser did find time to contact the Jewish Anti-Defamation League vigilante group’s Aryeh Tuchman, who delivered himself of this mind-boggling circular argument:
“Many of the extremists on VDare who use this term are in fact anti-Semites, and they may intentionally be using ‘kritarch’ as a way to express their anti-Semitism, but on its own, the term is not self-evidently anti-Semitic.”
Emphasis added.
In other words, “kritarch” is not an anti-Semitic term, but when we use it, it is.
Needless to say, of course, Hauser did not provide an explanatory link to VDARE.com.
Again, on September 13 2019, the New York Times ran a story Top Immigration Judge Departs Amid Broader Discontent Over Trump Policies (by Katie Benner), about a different immigration judge, as part of an attack on the Trump Administration’s effort to get control of the federal immigration bureaucracy a.k.a. the Deep State.
Benner’s story contained this gem:
Last month, tensions increased when a daily briefing that is distributed to federal immigration judges contained a link to a blog post that included an anti-Semitic reference and came from a website that regularly publishes white nationalists.
The hyperlink in Benner’s story was not to VDARE.com, of course, but instead to Hauser’s August 23 New York Times story. And, naturally, Benner made no effort to contact us.
Indeed, on this occasion the New York Times editors chose to shield its delicate readers from VDARE.com’s dread name completely. But the hyperlink, and the context, makes it undeniable that the reference was to us.
And Benner’s story contained a significant escalation in the New York Times’ malicious campaign against VDARE.com. Whereas Hauser’s August 23 story featured a faux debate about whether the term “kritarch” was anti-Semitic, Benner’s September 13 story just flat-out announced that our blog post did indeed contain an “anti-Semitic reference.”
This is what we at VDARE.com call “smear creep.” As an allegation is repeated, it tends to intensify. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that too many journalists in the Main Stream Media now practice what I have called “not journalism but Googlism”—they just search the internet and rip off what they find, inevitably introducing errors in the process, a phenomenon we call “The Telephone Game” after the children’s party game in which messages are passed on and get progressively distorted. (This is what I believe happened with Trip Gabriel’s original January 15 libel, and I think I know his source: Republicans Have Tolerated Steve King’s Racism for a Long Time, by Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine, January 14, 2019, which links to this, from the Daily Kos
Obviously, contacting the victim of this sort of pile-on and asking him about the allegations would be a corrective. But, all too often, this is no longer done.
The New York Times is America’s Paper Of Record. Its pronouncement that VDARE.com did something “Anti-Semitic” will be a Smear Heard Round The World. In American politics, there could not be a more serious accusation. And now it will be taken as gospel all the way down the rest of Main Stream Media food chain.
Accordingly, in consultation with our legal counsel, I sent this updated Letter To The Editor:
As part of your campaign to demonize all dissent on immigration, you recently claimed that a blog post on the webzine I run, VDARE.com, included “an antisemitic reference” (September 13, 2019 ). Yet your original story on this blog post (August 23, 2019 ) reported that even Aryeh Tuchman of the Anti-Defamation League grudgingly conceded that the “reference”—the term “Kritarch”— has “long been used to describe ‘rule by judges’” and that “the term is not self-evidently anti-Semitic.” So your September 13 version is a classic example of smear-creep.
Similarly, you earlier referred to me as “an open white nationalist” [January 15, 2019]. But VDARE.com is an equal-opportunity forum site open to all critics of the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act regardless of color, creed or national origin. And I have specifically stated that I am a “civic nationalist,” for example in an interview with SLATE (February 23, 2018).
This “white nationalist” smear has become increasingly toxic over the course of 2019 because of Left’s unscrupulous efforts to link it, and all dissent on immigration, to violence. Yet you have repeatedly refused to acknowledge your error, merely stealth-editing it to remove the word “open,” with the result that the original version still exists uncorrected in print and in many other places, for example the Congressional Record.
You do now link on “White Nationalist” to an attack on me by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But this is the direct equivalent of me calling the New York Times “fake news” and citing President Trump.
Except, of course, that it would be true.
But the New York Times refused to publish even this very moderate protest against its arrogant and malicious behavior.
Incredibly, even after this exchange, the New York Times ran yet another attack on VDARE.com and myself [The White Nationalist Websites Cited by Stephen Miller, by Katie Rogers and Jason DeParle, November 19, 2019].
Apart from repeating libels from the Southern Poverty Law Center—and, remember it is no defense to libel (even in jurisdictions no longer strictly following the common law) that you have attributed the libel to someone else—the Rogers/ DeParle article misquoted me:
Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE, believes that diversity has weakened the United States, and that the increase in Spanish speakers is a “ferocious attack on the living standards of the American working class.”
Naturally, the hyperlink here is not to VDARE.com but to a quite separate and typically disingenuous Leftist smear [VIDEO: Peter Brimelow attacks multiculturalism at CPAC, by Sonia Resnick, Colorado Independent, February 9, 2012] of my talk to a 2012 breakout CPAC session on the Public Choice consequences of Canada’s Official Language policy—with all mention of this self-evidently innocuous subject deliberately suppressed.
If the hyperlink to VDARE.com had been supplied, readers would have seen that it wasn’t the immigration of Spanish-speakers in itself that I said was a “ferocious attack on the living standards of the American working class,” but instead the tendency of employers to demand bilingual employees in response to Spanish-speaking immigration, thus materially disadvantaging the monolingual native-born population. For this reason, as I pointed out in my talk, Canada’s majority French-speaking province of Quebec, which actually cares about its people, has banned businesses from requiring employees be bilingual in French and English.
(Rogers/ DeParle treated American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor even worse, quoting him as saying that "newcomers are not the needy; they are the greedy"—whereas Jared was in fact talking specifically about the Syrian “refugee” influx. In his polite way, Jared has applied for a correction through the usual channels. Needless to say, he has heard nothing).
So, to summarize the story to this point: throughout 2019, the New York Times showed a systematic pattern of (1) portraying me and the webzine I edit as racial extremists through consistent misrepresentation; (2) refusing to contact us, thus denying us the chance to refute (or at least protest) these misrepresentations; (3) refusing to hyperlink to us, thus denying readers the chance to see for themselves that we have been misrepresented; (4) refusing to correct misrepresentations, and to acknowledge surreptitiously correcting one misrepresentation, albeit merely on its website.
Let me make clear: Personally, I absolutely do not care what the New York Times, and the people who run it, think about anything. And I have shrugged off a great deal of abuse since I broke the taboo and started writing critically about America’s immigration disaster in 1992. So why have I decided to sue for libel now?
Partly it’s because I’ve realized that mud sticks. The rise of the internet has meant that nothing ever goes away, and everything always gets worse, especially because so many Main Stream Media journalists nowadays are in fact unscrupulous Leftist vigilantes determined to propagate the worst possible interpretation. (See “Smear Creep,” “Googlism Not Journalism,” and “The Telephone Game” above).
But mostly it’s because this sort of charges have increasingly serious real-world consequences. In effect, America now has a Cultural Marxist corporate elite that