VDARE.com FACING MORTAL THREAT!
NY Attorney General Letitia James Mugs Us (As Well As Donald Trump, NRA etc.).
“VDARE.com FACES MORTAL THREAT FROM LAWFARE THUG NYAG LETITIA JAMES!”—The tl;dr Version
See Peter Brimelow interviewed by Paul Harrell about this lawfare attack on the Stew Peters show here, and listen to him talk to James Edwards here.
See video interview with Peter and Lydia Brimelow here
Read John Kline's American Greatness article on Letitia James's "State Harassment and Institutional Terror" here.
President Donald J. Trump’s indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (as with impeachment, it was always obvious that if emoting Democrats didn’t charge Trump with this, they’d charge him with that) had one great redeeming feature for us here at VDARE.com: as with the concurrent Douglass Mackey / Ricky Vaughn lynching, it brings home, to at least the half of America that voted for Trump, that what Anglosphere independent media phenom Mark Steyn has judiciously described in a recent interview with Conrad Black as “America’s Dirty Stinking Rotten Corrupt ‘Justice’ System” is now hopelessly politicized, weaponized, and increasingly subordinated, exactly like Soviet law, to a totalitarian ideological faction.
Which makes it easier for us to explain why VDARE.com’s advocacy of immigration patriotism is now facing the most serious threat in its 24-year existence.
And that’s saying a lot in this era, unparalleled in U.S. history, of intensifying shadow-banning, deplatforming, demonetization, doxing and ongoing Chinese Communist Social Credit–style stealth deprivation of professional and commercial services.
VDARE.com is the main project of our tax-exempt 501(c)(3) VDARE Foundation. And the VDARE Foundation has been mugged—targeted for lawfare by New York State Attorney General Letitia James , yet another of those childless female Black Supremacists who so much enrich our political life.
https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1635757336357662720
[New York AG Letitia James hosts ’Drag Story Hour’ for children: ’Celebration of love, joy and family fun,’ by Lindsay Kornick, Fox News, March 19, 2023]
It has become unmistakably clear that NYAG James aims to suppress our VDARE.com website, seize control of the VDARE Foundation and even expropriate our Berkeley Springs Castle, WV headquarters (which she probably intends to fill with Third World “asylum seekers”).
Of course, we share this badge of honor with more prominent targets of NYAG James—notably Trump, but also the National Rifle Association [New York AG sues to dissolve the NRA, alleging widespread fraud, Politico, August 6, 2020], Project Veritas [N.Y. attorney general warns Project Veritas its fundraising license is at risk, by Shawn Boburg, Washington Post, November 30, 2017] and other patriots unfortunate enough to be technically in reach of her lawless politically motivated rampage.
But President Trump and the NRA (five million members, total assets over $200 million) can, arguably, afford it.
VDARE.com, which is a tiny organization (revenues typically $600k-$800k range, no endowment), absolutely cannot.
Note also that NYAG Letitia James has not yet even accused us of any infraction—much less have we been convicted. We are merely being “investigated”—at deliberately destructive expense.
In other words, we are being battered to death by subpoena.
It really is true that as Mark Steyn has also said, “the process is the punishment.” This is the regulatory version of the prosecutorial abuse epidemic identified more than twenty years ago (to the great dismay of his allies in the naive law-and-order Reagan Era conservative movement) by my old friend Paul Craig Roberts.
It is only because of the extraordinary generosity of our donors that we have been able to finance our defense against NYAG Letitia James’ mugging thus far.
Most tiny organizations like ours would already have been forced to capitulate—which is probably what NYAG Letitia James was counting on.
I am sure she is astounded by our supporters’ loyalty.
But now this effort has brought us to financial crisis. Our general funds have been drained, and we are right at the point of being unable to pay our writers and our technical support staff, with no end in sight to this harassment.
Which is why I must beg you to help us—now.
Trump (Love Him Or Hate Him) Was Right About NYAG Letitia James
As single-issue immigration patriots, we at VDARE.com regarded presidential candidate Donald J. Trump’s historic August 15, 2015 immigration statement as a triumphant vindication of our long struggle to get the immigration issue into politics.
Since then, of course, we have occasionally voiced disappointment with President Trump’s achievements in office (although we did accurately anticipate that a Biden Regime would be infinitely worse).
Nevertheless, let the record show that, in an August 10, 2022 deposition in NYAG Letitia James ’s lawfare attack on Trump (quite separate from Manhattan DA Melvin Bragg’s lawfare attack—there are a lot of them), Trump opened with a statement that was a definitive takedown of her thuggery.
Trump described James as “a renegade and out-of-control prosecutor” engaged in “an unfounded, politically motivated witch hunt.”
Bingo.
As Trump pointed out, James ran for New York State Attorney General in 2018 explicitly promising to sue him—before she could have known any of the actual facts. She did the same with the NRA. (Trump also noted that in her campaign she called him “an illegitimate president,” something which, if said about Joe Biden, is now apparently a hanging offense).
Trump then proceeded to refuse to answer any questions on Fifth Amendment grounds (at 12:12 below).
Quite right too.
(Transcript here.)
Subsequently, Trump wrote on his Truth Social outlet:
I don’t expect that President Trump will Truth Social any time soon about how our tiny VDARE.com should also be supported.
But the fact is that we are, all of us, in the same fight—against a Totalitarian Woke weaponized justice system.
And so is America.
A Point Of Personal Privilege
And I must rise here on a point of personal privilege, as they say in the U.S. Senate.
I began writing about America’s post-1965 immigration disaster with my 1992 National Review cover story that has been credited with starting the modern debate. I did this despite the fact that my then-employer, Steve Forbes, was gearing up for a Presidential run featuring bone-headed Wall Street Journal Editorial Page–type immigration enthusiasm. I kept on writing about the immigration disaster despite the savage Regime Media backlash, my completely unexpected betrayal by National Review founder William F. Buckley and by Conservatism Inc. in general, the increasingly ominous threat to my ability to feed my family even in the obscure briar patch of financial journalism, abandonment by cowardly former friends, unbridled abuse and physical threats.
And now, at the age of 75, I am still working on the immigration issue in my office in the Berkeley Springs Castle every day.
I regret nothing—Non, je ne regrette rien, as the French Foreign Legionnaires famously sang as they were taken prisoner after their attempt to save French Algeria failed in 1961.
Maybe that’s not the most hopeful analogy. But I like it.
Nevertheless, nothing has infuriated me as much as the lying insinuation by NYAG James that I, and my wife Lydia, bought the Castle to benefit ourselves personally.
Exactly the opposite is true. Because Lydia and I knew no commercial bank could be trusted not to cave to political pressure and pull a mortgage in the most inconvenient way—as happened to Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant in Canada [Canadian media outlet says bank denied it a commercial mortgage over conservative political leanings, by Yael Halon, Fox News, December 30, 2021]—we had to gamble on pouring all of an unprecedented and wonderfully generous 2019 gift to the VDARE Foundation into buying the Castle for cash. (The prudent and self-interested course would have been to invest it and live off the proceeds.) We sold our much-loved home in the beautiful Connecticut Berkshires. We uprooted our little daughters and moved to a small rental cottage on the Castle grounds here in Appalachia. We were forced to do this because, in the three years before COVID, our proposed conferences had been canceled because of political pressure more than a dozen times (see e.g., here, here, here, here). We concluded that, for a persecuted organization like ours to hold conferences, it ultimately must own its own venue.
The net effect: The Brimelow family no longer owns a home. But its shelter dollars now go to support the Berkeley Springs Castle complex. What NYAG Letitia James is insinuating here adds insult to injury—in fact, it adds injury (in the form of her deliberately ruinous subpoena harassment) to insult (see above) to the professional injury I have already, I may say unflinchingly, sustained.
Of course, this could never happen if the U.S. were still the Land of the Free. But the fact is that what we all now face is a communist coup. And America’s corrupted legal and regulatory institutions are complicit.
So I say: to hell with NYAG Letitia James!—and to hell with those e.g., the supposedly libertarian Reason commenters cheering her on.
And to hell with everyone else enabling this new Soviet America.
Why was the VDARE.com Foundation registered in New York State, and thus vulnerable to thugs like NYAG Letitia James, anyway?
The VDARE Foundation was set up in 1999 by a heroic volunteer lawyer who at that time did a great deal of pro bono work for the immigration patriot movement. He happened to be admitted to the bar in New York State, so he set it up there.
(However, contrary to NYAG Letitia James’ insinuations in her filings, the foundation was subsequently dormant for several years because we were working through another foundation registered in a different state. This is why we made no further filings: they were not necessary.)
It is perfectly normal for 501(3) charities to be registered in states other than those in which they have a physical presence.
And at the time, of course, with the West’s concurrent victory in the Cold War, no one had any idea of the communist Reign of Terror that was subsequently to sweep through American institutions, above all after the apparently unauthorized election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.
Thus our heroic volunteer lawyer was later forced by his white-shoe law firm, to its great discredit, to abandon his pro bono work for immigration patriots. This an example of the stealth “Chinese Communist Social Credit–style deprivation of professional and commercial services” (see above) that is a key part of America’s ongoing communist coup.
Why didn’t VDARE leave New York State?
New York State has to give its consent for a 501©(3) to leave.
Because our unusually good fundraising year pushed us over a N.Y. regulatory threshold, we initiated an exhaustive financial audit (i.e., a qualified third party had to look over our accounts). Our aim was to be fully compliant before we even considered raising our heads above the parapet with a request to exit.
This audit was very much hampered by the fact that our Connecticut accountants suddenly abandoned us and refused to suggest referrals (see “Chinese Communist Social Credit–style stealth deprivation of professional services” above).
The trivial, very common, easily corrected, and anyway generally obviated by the statute of limitations regulatory missteps that NYAG Letitia James is now hyperventilating about (see below) arose in the resulting chaos because we had so much trouble finding a replacement. In fact, at one point we had to turn to VDARE.com accountant reader, who had kindly offered his services.
The audit was completed—triumphantly. But of course NYAG Letitia James has ignored it anyway.
However, once the VDARE Foundation was forced into the real estate business in order to own its conference venue, we had to reorganize legally, at considerable expense, in a way that is more typical of commercial operations, to protect ourselves against predatory lawsuits (whether politically motivated or not), e.g., slip-and-fall. Thus the VDARE Foundation now owns a for-profit LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) that holds the property surrounding the Castle and leases it back to VDARE. And the Berkeley Springs Castle itself is now owned by the Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation, a 501(c)(3) supporting organization of the VDARE Foundation that is registered in West Virginia. NYAG Letitia James has made numerous lying references to this reorganization (see below).
What has NYAG Letitia James done?
Last summer, we learned from Facebook that NYAG Letitia James had hit it with two overlapping subpoenas regarding its transactions with us:
This was a flagrant violation of procedure. The Stored Communications Act, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 2703(b)(1)(b), permits a government agency to obtain third-party information from Facebook or other internet services—provided that there is ”prior notice from the governmental entity to the subscriber or customer” [viz., the third party, here VDARE].
But NYAG Letitia James never provided VDARE.com with that notice. An email from Facebook was the first we heard about it.
She simply disregarded the law.
This has turned out to be a pattern.
Significantly, in both cases, the Facebook subpoenas were issued on NYAG Letitia James’ behalf by someone called Rick Sawyer, who is described as “Special Counsel for Hate Crimes.” (In his email signature, Sawyer advertises his pronouns as “he/him”—for now.)
Needless to say, VDARE.com has not committed, or has even (yet) been accused of, a crime of any kind—let alone a “Hate Crime” (which we have anyway consistently argued is an unconstitutional concept).
But Commissar Sawyer’s role betrays what is really motivating NYAG Letitia James: not some technical issue arising from her role of overseer of charities, but the suppression of political opinion she dislikes (aka “Hate”). She apparently thinks she can do this by claiming that such political opinion results in “Hate Crimes” (unlike, of course, Black Lives Matter rhetoric).
Needless to say, this is a direct assault on our First Amendment rights.
NYAG’s James’ move against Facebook was especially bizarre because Facebook had, without warning to us, deleted VDARE.com’s page some two years earlier, all too obviously as part of its Woke campaign to defeat President Trump in that fall’s Presidential election [The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg, by William Doyle, The Federalist, October 12, 2021].
(With characteristic leftist vindictiveness, Facebook also deleted our own personal pages, which in Lydia’s case was entirely non-political—she had used it, as all student Millennials were encouraged to do, as a diary, family resource and baby book, showing our children’s first steps, etc.—and has refused to return her data, although we understand it is legally her property.)
And we never raised much money through Facebook anyway, or spent much money on promotion there, partly because I had quickly concluded it was shadow-banning us.
So why was NYAG Letitia James targeting Facebook at all? One theory: She or her minions might actually have been crazy enough to think our Social Media Manager really was a Russian agent. (He is an American, albeit a Southerner, i.e., nearly as bad.)
Facebook, not a friend, informed us that it would comply with these subpoenas—no easy task—unless we contested them.
And we did indeed consider contesting James’ subsequent subpoena against the VDARE Foundation, because it was plainly harassment aimed at suppressing our First Amendment rights (see below).
But eventually, very reluctantly, we took the hard decision to comply, without prejudice, with NYAG Letitia James’ demands as much as possible—to demonstrate good faith to the court.
Facebook thereupon apparently met her demands.
At least, we think it did. Typical of the relentlessly hostile environment in which patriots now operate, Facebook will not tell us what data it supplied. And neither will NYAG Letitia James.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Because our relationship with Facebook was so minimal, we believe and hope that none of our readers, or even the commenters on our late lamented Facebook page—and certainly not our donors—are significantly at risk here.
But THEY COULD HAVE BEEN. This whole episode is disgraceful in a supposedly free society.
Significantly, NYAG Letitia James’ targeting of VDARE.com followed her creation of a ”Hate Crimes Unit,” which she claimed would “strengthen oversight, because we see how much hate is being fueled by content on the internet” [’Hate Has Been Unleashed’ | New York’s AG Lays Out Her Plan to Solve the State’s anti-Semitism Crisis, by Amir Tibon and Danielle Ziri, Haaretz, January 8, 2020].
“Hate” is, of course, an offense unknown to the U.S. Constitution. “Hate speech” is in effect simply something with which NYAG Letitia James disagrees.
For example, in August, during the run-up to the 2020 Presidential Election, NYAG Letitia James joined in a letter to Facebook demanding that it increase censorship against ”hate speech and hate organizations,” aka suppress pro-Trump Facebook pages. [PDF] [AG Racine Leads 20-State Coalition Urging Facebook to Aggressively Combat the Spread of Hate and Disinformation Online, Office of Attorney General for the District of Columbia, August 20, 2020].
Similarly, in August 2022 James took the extraordinary step of trying to intimidate the tiny Cornerstone Church in Batavia, NY out of hosting an event featuring President Trump’s son Eric and former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn [ReAwaken Tour host feels harassed by NY attorney general , oleantimesherald.com, August 11, 2022].
The Cornerstone Church has (good for them!) now filed an action under the Civil Rights Act against NYAG Letitia James. It points out that the original venue had cancelled the event after pressure from Democrat elected officials, notably Monroe County Legislature President