Brimelow denounced Rocky Mountain News' label of “white nationalist website,” while acknowledging he publishes “white nationalist” writers
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
Even as he criticized a Rocky Mountain News article that described his VDARE.com as a “white nationalist Web site,” Peter Brimelow acknowledged that VDARE publishes writers that he “regard[s] as 'white nationalist.' ” VDARE has recently been touted by radio hosts Mike Rosen and Peter Boyles.
In a July 23 “Speakout” op-ed in the Rocky Mountain News, Peter Brimelow -- editor of the “immigration reduction” website VDARE.com, a website recently touted by radio hosts Mike Rosen and Peter Boyles -- acknowledged that VDARE.com publishes writers he “regard[s] as 'white nationalist.' ” Brimelow's admission came as he called a July 15 Rocky Mountain News article that described VDARE.com as a “white nationalist Web site” “seriously wrong” and a “mischaracterization” of the website.
According to Brimelow, such “white nationalist” authors “unashamedly work for their people -- exactly as La Raza works for Latinos and the Anti-Defamation League works for Jews.”
In his Rocky Mountain News op-ed, Brimelow, who also is a financial journalist for MarketWatch.com and the president of the Center for American Unity, responded to a July 15 News investigative article by staff reporter Kevin Flynn that scrutinized out-of-state contributions to Defend Colorado Now (DCN). DCN was the campaign organization for Initiative 55, a proposed constitutional amendment to deny non-federally mandated, non-emergency services to illegal immigrants. Flynn reported that DCN received "[i]ts largest contributions from a national group whose longstanding campaigns for immigration cuts, border defense and official English have brought it some fringe and sometimes unwelcome bedfellows -- racists." In his article, Flynn described VDARE.com as a “white nationalist Web site.”
Brimelow responded in his Rocky Mountain News op-ed that “the merest glance [at VDARE.com] would show that we are not 'white nationalist.' ” Brimelow explained, however, “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.” Taylor is editor of the magazine American Renaissance, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described as “focus[ing] on alleged links between race and intelligence, and on eugenics, the now discredited 'science' of breeding better humans.” The SPLC also described Taylor as “a courtly presenter of ideas that most would describe as crudely white supremacist.”
Brimelow added:
Get used to it. As immigration policy drives whites into a minority, this type of interest-group “white nationalism” will inexorably increase.
You read it first on VDARE.com -- and if you don't like it, let's have an immigration moratorium now.
In his News op-ed, Brimelow stated that “VDARE.com flowed out of a best-selling book I wrote back in 1995, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster [Random House].” Brimelow wrote Alien Nation while employed as a senior editor of Forbes magazine. In an April 17, 1995, Business Week article about the book, immigration economics reporter Christopher Farrell wrote, “Brimelow underestimates just how vibrant and durable American society is -- and he demonizes immigrants just as xenophobes did in the 1850s and 1920s.”
Brimelow also has been criticized by conservatives and advocates for reduced immigration. For example, in an article about Alien Nation, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies -- an immigration think tank that "seeks fewer immigrants" -- stated that Brimelow “never quite admits that blacks are actually Americans” and that "[Brimelow] complains that immigration is upsetting the racial balance by reducing the white share of the population." Krikorian added, “This ambivalence about the American-ness of black Americans is disturbing and further evidence of Brimelow's feeling that 'white' and 'America' should be synonymous.”
In a February 24, 2002, commentary in the Los Angeles Times, National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg wrote that "[r]ather than focusing on how to create a rational immigration policy that recognizes the permanence of America's ethnic diversity," Brimelow and VDARE.com contributor Samuel Francis, who died in 2005, “live in denial about how to get back to the days when America was 90% white.” Brimelow was once a frequent contributor to National Review but a search of the magazine's archives shows that the last Brimelow article to appear in the magazine was in 1997.
In an August 23, 2000, VDARE article, Brimelow criticized the National Review for having “caved” on immigration. Brimelow wrote, that "Taylor is, according to Buckley, 'a white separatist of sorts.' That is, at the time when National Review was founded, he would have been called an American patriot." In his Rocky Mountain News op-ed Brimelow said he “regard[ed] [Taylor] as 'white nationalist'.”
In one of his recently re-published articles on VDARE.com titled “The Immigration Debate: Racism -- Or Treason?” Brimelow wrote:
There is an obvious and undeniable risk that a country which in 2050 will be, for example, one-quarter Latino, must also be, in some degree, Latin American in its politics and culture. Will it then be tranquil domestically? Will the blessings of liberty be secured?
And do supporters of current immigration policy know and intend that it will "weaken" the United States?
Media Matters for America previously noted that in 2003, the SPLC added VDARE.com to its list of “hate sites on the Web,” and the SPLC described it as an “anti-immigration Web page that carries an array of frankly white supremacist and anti-Semitic essays.”
Brimelow has previously acknowledged that VDARE.com “publish[es] writers who could fairly be described as 'white nationalists.' " In a 2004 VDARE.com article, Brimelow wrote that white Americans “made up 90 percent of the populations in 1960, before the disaster of the 1965 [Immigration] Act. And we will continue to [defend the interests of American whites], because this point of view is at least as legitimate as black nationalism or Hispanic nationalism.”
In January 2003, Brimelow participated in a FrontPageMag.com online symposium about white nationalism. Taylor, the VDARE.com contributor whom Brimelow described in the Rocky Mountain News as a “white nationalist,” also participated in the forum. In a November 8, 2005, article published on VDARE.com, Taylor wrote:
Although immigration is today the greatest threat to the survival of Western Civilization on this continent, it is hardly the only threat. Every social problem -- poverty, crime, illegitimacy, school failure -- has a clear racial dimension that Americans refuse to recognize. There will be no honesty and no solutions until whites clear their heads of cobwebs and start thinking straight again. This will be better for everyone.
In a July 9, 2005, VDARE.com article, Taylor wrote:
Government should be concerned with crimes, not manners, and if a man tells a woman “Give me sex or you don't get a promotion,” it is bad manners but not a crime. A boss should be free to ask anything he likes in return for a promotion: kickbacks, maid service, yard work, groceries. It's up to employees to decide if their conditions of employment are acceptable. They can quit if they don't like them.
Everyone should always have an absolute legal right to be offensive, intolerant, or downright nasty. If a nasty boss is chasing away workers, the company can kick him out. If a worker is nasty, the boss can fire him. None of this should ever be the government's business.
As editor of VDARE.com, Brimelow has also published works by Francis and Steve Sailer.
As previously noted by Media Matters for America, in a VDARE column on Jews and Christmas, Sailer stated that “American Jews, those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas.”
In a January 17, 2005, VDARE.com article, Francis wrote about the 2005 “arrest of 79-year-old former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi”:
The murders of course were notorious at the time and are immortalized by Hollywood in the 1988 anti-white film “Mississippi Burning,” which manages to smear every white man and woman in the state (and by implication everywhere else) by virtually stating that whites are by nature genocidal.
It's therefore not too surprising that the media reaction to Mr. Killen's arrest has been one of almost universal gloating. To bust a 79-year-old white Southerner for racial murders is almost as much fun as deporting 80-year-old concentration camp guards to communist countries to stand trial for war crimes, and that amusement has worn thin in recent years. Concentration camp guards have the habit of dying natural deaths eventually, but there's an endless supply of white Southerners to put on trial closer to home.
Brimelow is one of a growing list of guests on Boyles's show who have written for VDARE.com. On his June 20 show, Boyles interviewed Edwin Rubenstein, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a regular VDARE columnist. Among Rubenstein's VDARE articles are a June 4 VDARE column titled "May Jobs: Hispanics Gain -- Whites Lose," and a March 10 column titled "A Cold February for White Workers." In his May 9 column, Rubenstein stated that there is a “nexus between innovation and harsh immigration restrictions” and that "[i]mmigration may have destroyed the mother of American invention: necessity ... and, ultimately prospects for a better life in the U.S."
Another VDARE contributor, John Vinson, president of the American Immigration Control Foundation, appeared on the Boyles show on June 22, as previously noted by Colorado Media Matters. According to the SPLC, Vinson “is a founding member of the white supremacist League of the South.” Vinson contributed to the League of the South's The Grey Book: Blueprint for Southern Independence (Traveller Press, 2004), which argues that Southern states should secede from the United States and form their own country. According to the SPLC, Vinson “often speaks” at meetings of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that the Anti-Defamation League reported was “established by former activists in the segregationist White Citizens' Councils” and that, according to the SPLC, has described blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity.”
From the July 18 broadcast of KHOW-AM's The Peter Boyles Show:
BOYLES: Peter, give a website if you would for people to look at your work.
BRIMELOW: It's VDARE.com.
BOYLES: V then dash or V one word?
BRIMELOW: It's just one word it's named after Virginia Dare, first English child born in the new world.
On July 10, Rosen touted VDARE.com as “a website with a bias ... in the direction of immigration reform” that is “proactive on illegal immigration, changing our immigration laws and our policies to restrict the number of people who come into this country, both legally and certainly illegally.” Rosen then read from a letter posted July 8 on VDARE.com by a nurse who wrote she is “sick of the 14th Amendment being hijacked to give illegal alien anchor babies citizenship. We must stop this perverted interpretation of the law.” Rosen commented, “That's a good point.” “Anchor baby” is a term used by anti-immigration activists to describe children born in the United States to illegal immigrants. These children, who are U.S. citizens at birth by the terms of the 14th Amendment, are said to “anchor” illegal immigrant families to the United States and to qualify them for access to some government services.
From the July 10 broadcast of KOA's The Mike Rosen Show:
ROSEN: I've got -- I have a letter to a website called VDARE.com, and this is a website with a bias, and its bias is in the direction of immigration reform -- being proactive on illegal immigration, changing our immigration laws and our policies to restrict the number of people who come into this country, both legally and certainly illegally. And this is from a registered nurse. This is on the topic of the cost of illegal immigration. Not just financially, but in other terms. And while there are benefits that accrue to consumers and to our economy from people who come from Mexico both legally and illegally, there are costs. And that debate continues as to the magnitude of the cost. But here's one perspective.
“I am a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist writing to give a first hand account of the invasion the United States is under. At present, in my South Carolina hospital one-third of our births are to illegal aliens. When social security numbers were required, few of our expectant mothers had them. Now social security numbers have been removed from patient's identification labels probably because of illegals heavy involvement in identity theft.
”Every year at least 350,000 illegal alien women in the U.S. give birth." By some estimates it's as high as half a million. “This is the first order of business for them -- to have their ”jackpot" or “anchor baby” born in the U.S.
“Almost all give birth at hospitals to document that their children are American citizens. At $5,000 per vaginal delivery and $10,000 for a Cesarean Section (and 25 percent need C-sections), you do the math. You pay over $2 billion each year just for illegals to have their anchor babies. Incidentally, if you use the higher estimate of 500,000 illegal alien women giving birth in the United States, that number would exceed $3 billion.”
The letter writer continues, this nurse anesthetist - “I am sick of the 14th Amendment being hijacked to give illegal alien anchor babies citizenship. We must stop this perverted interpretation of the law.”
That's a good point. The 14th Amendment was written in the wake of the Civil War, and ratified after the Civil War. And that provision in the 14th Amendment, that talks about birthright citizenship, was originally intended to ensure that slaves now emancipated after the Civil War would be regarded as citizens. And the key section, Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
Now, some exceptions are made. For example, if the ambassador to the United Nations from France is in this country performing his duties as an ambassador to the U.N. and his wife with him gives birth to a baby, she is not -- that baby is not an American citizen. The jurisdiction -- the question of subject of the jurisdiction thereof is the key phrase in that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment that is debated by Constitutional scholars.
The ongoing interpretation appears to be that it applies to people who came in the country illegally, but there are those who disagree with that interpretation. And the point that this letter writer made when she says “I'm sick of the 14th Amendment being hijacked to give illegal alien anchor babies citizenship” is a valid point. The 14th Amendment had its eye on former slaves -- not on illegal aliens from other countries.