On the News Corp.-owned financial site MarketWatch, columnist Peter Brimelow is touted as a veteran financial editor offering the latest research from investment newsletters. But investing advice isn't Brimelow's only interest. He's also the founder and editor of VDARE.com, a website which argues against non-white immigrants and features the writings of white nationalists and supremacists.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has identified Brimelow's VDARE as a “hate group,” writing that the site publishes content “by prominent academic racists” and writers who “decry the demise of white America, blaming immigrants, multiculturalists, and members of the 'Treason Lobby' -- essentially groups concerned with protecting immigrants' human and civil rights -- for undermining the racial cohesion of the nation.”
Brimelow -- who believes that "[d]iversity is not strength. It is, in important respects, repression" -- has warned that the country will face dire consequences if whites are no longer the ethnic majority. And Brimelow's fundraising efforts make clear what audience he's targeting. In a December 2010 appeal, Brimelow wrote that there's “one brutal reason you must support VDARE.com. Sometime in the next few months, the Census Bureau will announce that a majority of births in the U.S. are now non-white.” A May 2007 fundraising appeal by Brimelow was headlined, “Coming White Minority? Help VDARE.COM Now!"
Brimelow has suggested a reason for the different focuses of his VDARE posts and MarketWatch investment columns, writing on VDARE that he tries “not to mix my political and financial journalism, partly because the former invariably causes tolerant and diversity-loving liberals to try to get me fired from the latter, which gets to be a bore.” MarketWatch is a subsidiary of Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp. (also the parent company of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News).
When asked for further info about Brimelow's role at MarketWatch, a spokesperson for Dow Jones told Media Matters that Brimelow has been a paid “non-staff contributor to MarketWatch for 10 years and writes exclusively on investment topics.” The spokesperson declined to comment on criticisms of VDARE and Brimelow's views on race and immigration.
Brimelow's immigration views received notice in the mid-1990s, when he published the controversial book Alien Nation. In a 1995 review for the New York Times, Nicholas Lemann -- now the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism -- wrote that Brimelow, himself an immigrant, “wants to keep the immigration flow not just limited, and not just higher-skilled, but also mostly white. A waiting room of the Immigration and Naturalization Service reminds him of the New York subway: he finds each to be 'an underworld that is not just teeming but also is almost entirely colored.'” Lemann added:
Most industrial nations are essentially monoethnic states that allow hardly any immigration at all. Mr. Brimelow admits that the United States has been more successfully multiethnic than any other country, but at bottom he just doesn't believe in the “American idea” that people here can transcend ethnicity through allegiance to abstract national principles like democracy and opportunity. What is required for the successful functioning of a nation, he insists, is “a link by blood.”
Even “model minorities” that aren't white arouse Mr. Brimelow's suspicions. Reports of the success of Asian-Americans may be “just another immigration myth.” Recently arrived Cubans “in fact participate heavily in welfare.” West Indians? “It must be said that nowadays part of their enterprise goes into drug 'posses' and car-theft rings.” Judging from a couple of asides, Mr. Brimelow doesn't consider Jews to meet his definition of “white” either; for example, he refers to the Clinton Administration as “a black-Hispanic-Jewish-minority white (Southerners used to call them 'scalawags') coalition.” Elsewhere he points out that Jews played a major role in the passage of the hated 1965 immigration law. On the other hand, he calls it “a profound tragedy” that we don't relax our immigration restrictions to let in hundreds of thousands of eastern Europeans.
The SPLC has categorized VDARE and Brimelow's ideology as white nationalist, and noted that the site also publishes white nationalist and white supremacist writers like Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald and the late Sam Francis.
Brimelow has denied that VDARE is a white nationalist website, claiming: “We are certainly politically incorrect--but the merest glance would show that we are not 'white nationalist.'” With regards to the categorization of some of his writers as white nationalist and white supremacist, Brimelow wrote that he would regard “a few” of his writers as "'white nationalist,' in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. They are not white supremacists":
We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers, for example Jared Taylor, 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.
Brimelow added to critics in his post, “Get used to it. As immigration policy drives whites into a minority, this type of interest-group 'white nationalism' will inexorably increase.” Brimelow has made similar arguments elsewhere, stating in a 2009 speech that “an explicitly white nationalist party it seems to me that would be a perfectly legitimate response to the immigration-driven ethnic shift and the rise of ethno-centric politics on the part of the minorities.” And in a response to criticism from Media Matters, Brimelow wrote in a 2010 post that “white nationalism, explicit or implicit, is simply inevitable, as America balkanizes because of government immigration policy. Why does this frighten Media Matters so much? What does it (or its funders) have against American whites?"
VDARE has published several of Jared Taylor's columns, which carry headlines like, "Color Of Crime, Sound Of (Big Media) Silence," "Do We Need More Hispanics?" (Taylor writes: “If we applied ordinary logic to the question with which we began--Should we add millions of Hispanics to our population?--the answer would be a unanimous 'no'”) and "Race/ IQ Explanation Gap At 'Achievement Gap Summit.'"
The Anti-Defamation League notes that Taylor “promotes his views by attacking racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, which he calls 'one of the most divisive forces on the planet' and therefore 'dangerous.' .... Taylor promotes the idea that racial segregation is 'natural' and society is best organized along racially homogenous lines.”
A description for Taylor's book White Identity states that he documents how “Diversity of race, language, religion, etc. is not a strength for America but a source of chronic tension and conflict.” In a plug for White Identity, Brimelow calls him “arguably the most brilliant of the leaders of what is now sometimes called the 'Alternative Right'” and adds, "Diversity is not strength. It is, in important respects, repression. Only because of the internet, and the new publishing technology, can we continue to hope that the truth, as well represented by White Identity, will set us free." (Brimelow's views on diversity clash directly with MarketWatch parent News Corp., which states on its website that it “values diversity and recognizes it as an important component to sustaining and enhancing the Company's success.”)
VDARE also publishes columns from anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald, who, writes the ADL, “has asserted that anti-Semitism, including the anti-Jewish hatred exhibited by the Nazis and those who carried out the Spanish Inquisition, is a 'rational' response to Judaism. ... According to MacDonald, Jews maintain their elite position by fostering non-white immigration into America to alter the country's 'racial hierarchy' and by creating intellectual movements that weaken ethnic European identity.”
VDARE hosts an archive of columns from Sam Francis. The SPLC describes Francis as “the immigrant-bashing editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens who died in 2005. In his columns, Francis rails against the 'emerging Hispanic majority,' plugs conspiracy theories, and promotes white racial consciousness." Francis wrote the Council of Conservative Citizens' statement of principles, which argues “that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character” and “efforts to mix the races of mankind” should be opposed:
We believe that the United States derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and the European people and that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime. We believe that illegal immigration must be stopped, if necessary by military force and placing troops on our national borders; that illegal aliens must be returned to their own countries; and that legal immigration must be severely restricted or halted through appropriate changes in our laws and policies. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.
Brimelow blurbed an anthology of Francis' work, writing: “The poet Robert Burns coined the expression 'gentleman and scholar:' Sam Francis was also a journalist. Nothing engaged his analytical and expository talents more than the science and politics of race. No subject was more vital in his lifetime, nor more taboo. This book is a well-organized and illuminatingly-annotated selection of Francis's thinking on race. It is valuable today; it may well prove seminal in the future."
The belief in maintaining a white majority in the United States (or risk the consequences) is a major theme on VDARE. In a December 2010 appeal, Brimelow wrote that there's “one brutal reason you must support VDARE.com. Sometime in the next few months, the Census Bureau will announce that a majority of births in the U.S. are now non-white”:
Let me give you just one brutal reason you must support VDARE.com.
Sometime in the next few months, the Census Bureau will announce that a majority of births in the U.S. are now non-white.
That means the U.S. will be majority non-white around 2040--when my new daughter, pictured above, will still be a young woman,
It's an astonishing, indeed unprecedented, transformation of a country every one of whose Founding Fathers was white--in which nine out of every ten citizens was white as late as 1960.
And it's all a result of government policy--specifically, the 1965 Immigration Act and the subsequent collapse, or sabotage, of law enforcement at our southern borders.
No-one wants to talk about this. (I'm sure that even some VDARE.com readers flinched when they read it). No-one wants to think what it means.
But at VDARE.com, we are prepared to say what it means: the end of the historic American-nation state--a nation-state being the political expression of a particular people, in this case the historic American nation as it had evolved by 1965.
Another recurring theme on VDARE is the highlighting of crimes by immigrants, which Brimelow and other VDARE writers have dubbed, “Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome.”
For example, in response to the Virginia Tech murders, Brimelow wrote: “There are, of course, plenty of native-born American criminals. But, unnoticed by the Mainstream Media, mass murders by immigrants have quietly but unmistakably become a real Trend. A quick count shows eleven cases in the last sixteen years, for a total of 72 deaths. (For example, see here and here). Maybe it's because some of these immigrant killers come from chronically violent parts of the Third World. Maybe, as our Brenda Walker has suggested, it's because of the very real but rarely-discussed psychological stress of transcultural migration. We don't know. And nobody in the American elite is asking." Brimelow concluded, "Seung-Hui Cho may be an aberration. But, as always with America's post-1965 immigration disaster, we come back to the question: why take the risk?"
In a 2006 blog post, Brimelow summarized his views about where America was heading in response to a letter from the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's office to a VDARE reader about immigration reform. A staffer began by pointing out that it's a “complex issue,” which prompted Brimelow to write: “No, it isn't. The question is simple: does America become a Spanish-speaking slum, with the cultural traditions of the pre -65 nation obliterated, the living standards of the majority eroded --but with an upper class including the Kennedys benefiting from the regressive income distribution effect of flooding the labor market?"