PETER BRIMELOW writes: Virginia Dare’s birthday, August 18 is bittersweet for us. Before VDARE.com was unconstitutionally subpoenaed into suspension by New York State Attorney General Letitia James in 2024, we used to celebrate it with a VDARE fundraiser that our supporters, bless them, always seemed to enjoy. Now, of course, thanks to Letitia James continuing persecution, we also have to raise money to meet our own personal legal costs.

But at least we put Virginia Dare back on the map. Political Correctness was clearly shaping up to erase her. I’m reposting here my exchange with the author of a paranoid book about her (VDARE seems to provoke paranoid books). Needless to say, despite my patient refutation, he described me in his book as a “White Supremacist.” Which justifies my refusal to deal with him except by email.

[Breaking news: since this exchange, more archeological evidence has surfaced suggesting the Lost Colony settlers did indeed migrate inland and may even have found shelter among friendly Indians].

WaPo’s Andrew Lawler, Virginia Dare And The “Myth Of Whiteness”

(First published May 24, 2018)

On Virginia Dare’s 430^th birthday last August 18, I wrote #DareToCelebrate Virginia Dare’s Birthday! Will Her Statue Be Torn Down Next—Along With America? Right on cue, the Washington Post on Thursday morning carried How a child born more than 400 years ago became a symbol of white nationalism, subhead “Virginia Dare and the myth of American whiteness,” [by Andrew Lawler, May 24, 2018].

Lawler quotes me:

Even now, white supremacists and their allies claim Virginia Dare as their own. Peter Brimelow, a friend of former White House aide Stephen K. Bannon and current White House adviser Stephen Miller, founded the Vdare Foundation and vdare.com in 1999 to warn Americans about the danger posed by African and Asian immigrants. [PB: What! No Hispanics?]

“I picked the name because I wanted to focus attention on the very specific cultural origins of America, at a time when mass nontraditional immigration is threatening to swamp it,” he wrote me. Brimelow originally is from Britain. One of his website’s postings notes that the Lost Colonists “simply found themselves outvoted, which is going to happen to us if we are not careful.” [Lawler, of course, does not link to the source of the quote, but it is from this interview with Alan Colmes, shortly before his tragic early death.]

No hyperlinks, of course, not that we care because MSM readers are notoriously incurious, but there is a link to Lawler’s forthcoming book The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. I presume he will be sending a review copy to PO Box 211 Litchfield CT, 06759.

Pausing briefly to point out that I have repeatedly said on VDARE.com that I’ve only met Bannon and Miller one time each, and that Lawler’s “white supremacist” smear occurs in the very same paragraph that quotes me saying that Virginia Dare exemplifies America’s (Anglo) cultural origins, I urge readers to note that Lawler does not really blame us for Virginia Dare emerging as “a symbol of white nationalism” at all—he blames the entire sweep of American history.

To do this, of course, he has to suppress the fact that progressive demigod President Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin D. Roosevelt enthusiastically gave a speech commemorating the 350th anniversary of her birth, and actually suggested the commemorative stamp.

But Lawler is easily able to do this because of what now drives the American Left: a determination to extirpate every vestige of white America from the land they carved out of the wilderness. Neither Washington nor Jefferson nor Robert E. Lee nor Steven Foster or even Virginia Dare will be left standing. “White supremacism” is equated with “white nationalism” and, ultimately with “whiteness” itself.

Their messianic nihilism is that of France’s Jacobins or China’s Red Guards. As Lawler puts it:

The infant of Roanoke offers us two very different futures. We can be martyred for some imagined race, or we can recognize that to be American is, in its essence, to be willing to redefine our beliefs, goals and even our ethnicity. Only by getting lost can we become something new.

Guess who will get to “redefine” America.

Lawler made repeated efforts to see me last year, when he claimed to be writing for National Geographic. I insisted on being interviewed by email, with the result that our exchanges (consolidated, slightly edited, and hyperlinked) are preserved for posterity.

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 10:55 PM, Peter Brimelow <pbrimelow@vdare.com> wrote:

Peter Brimelow: Sorry about this, Andrew, just got small children to bed. However, I think my written answers are not “Establishment”.

Andrew Lawler: When did you first hear about/learn about Virginia Dare?

When I first started studying American history, in high school in UK, circa 1965. In those days, it was axiomatic.

What was the moment/scene when you decided to link her name to your website?

Late 1999. I have all kinds of theories about naming websites, e.g. people confuse names amazingly—Forbes, Fortune, both of which I worked for—which I’m sure you don’t want to hear about.

Also, I was preoccupied with my small daughter, born as I then thought late in my life, and empathized with John White.

What do you think took place on Roanoke Island after Gov. John White left in 1587?

Obviously, I have no more idea than anyone else. Mortality was terribly high in those days, especially for women, and it’s quite possible they left no genetic trace even if sheltered by local Indians (which is certainly not impossible).

[btw what’s the story on the Lumbees right now? Haven’t checked for a while].

What do you think happened to Virginia Dare as well as the other colonists?

See above.

Research into the Roanoke voyages in the last 60 years shows a surprising diversity of colonists beyond purely English born; nine nationalities, as well as Catholics and at least one Jew. Most of those had essential expertise (navigation, metallurgy) that few English born had in that day. This information, based on historical documents, seems at odds with the old idea that this was purely an English colony when it was, in fact, a surprisingly multinational endeavor. How do you relate this to your views about Anglo Saxons as the root of the United States?

This is what I think I called in Alien Nation the horse/rabbit fallacy—a stew made of one horse and one rabbit is not half horse-half rabbit. Diversiticrats swoop on trace elements to try to deconstruct the Founding, but what language did the colonists speak? What laws did they acknowledge? If they weren’t an English colony, what was?

Several historians, including the distinguished David Quinn, argue that hundreds of Moors, black Africans, and South American Indians likely were left on Roanoke Island by Sir Francis Drake in 1586 after his Caribbean raids. If this is true, then these lost colonists outnumbered the English several to one. Does this possibility, unproven but apparently quite likely, alter your view of the Roanoke voyages and the founding of the United States by whites?

No. Is there any suggestion these maroons survived and interacted with the Roanoke colony? Did they change its language or its laws?

Historians generally agree that the ill-prepared and ill-provisioned Roanoke settlers didn’t have a chance of survival in the New World without extensive Native American assistance. Do you think this is true?

I don’t know specifically, but the fundamental fact is that the English crossed the Atlantic and founded self-sustaining communities in the New World—not the other way around. Moreover, they founded colonies in many other places. This has to mean something.

Virginia Dare was first popularly used as a symbol of white purity and Anglo Saxon dominance in the 1890s, in an era of Jim Crow laws that forbade African Americans basic civil rights, such as voting. She was often referred to then as “the first white child born” in the New World, since Spaniards and Portuguese and French did not count as white for many Americans in that day. How does “your” Virginia Dare relate to the Virginia Dare of that era?

It’s obviously ludicrous to claim that Portuguese, Spanish and French did not count as white to Americans in the 1890s—they looked to Europe, not Latin America.

But they did certainly see that Virginia Dare as their cultural ancestor (not necessarily “Anglo-Saxon”, c.f. Theodore Roosevelt’s boast that he had no British blood, but certainly Anglophone).

Re Jim Crow, I’m just not into white guilt. The problems of white-black relations in America, which are profound and very far from solved, are quite separate from the genesis of the Historic American Nation—which the Founding Fathers saw, as a matter of historical fact, as a white ethnostate.

So how do you define white? It is a definition that obviously has changed often since the days of the Founding Fathers (just look at the bewildering array of NC laws on this matter from colonial days until the 1960s).

This is just Left-deconstructionist hogwash. Just because an entity has fuzzy boundaries doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Jews argue about how to define a Jew, but no-one doubts Jews exist.

Would you advocate genetic testing to determine “whiteness”?

What have I ever written or published on VDARE.com that would imply a need for that?

I do think supporters of the Affirmative Action spoils system will eventually be driven to genetic testing to get around the Rachel Dolezal problem, but that’s on them.

Do you think Virginia Dare became popular in the 19th century because of fears of immigrants and African Americans? (I found that her popularity coincides with an increase in immigration and laws restricting African American rights in the 1830s and then the 1890s). Is she making a comeback for the same reason?

You mean her popularity spiked in the 1830s AND the 1890s?

I’ve seen it argued that there was a colonial revival here in New England in the 1890s, whitewashing clapboard houses etc., related to the concurrent immigration crisis, but I don’t know—seems to me that the Virginia Dare legend more likely to be an expression of burgeoning American nationalism and identity-awareness, especially after the Civil War.

The Roosevelt Administration made a big deal of the 350^th anniversary, which obviously was in a period of no immigration and no Civil Rights movement. Roosevelt made a speech drawing a progressive moral from the Virginia Dare story—she was a proto-democrat etc. So your hypothesis doesn’t really work there.

Is Virginia Dare making a comeback? I picked the name because I wanted to focus attention on the very specific cultural origins of America, at a time when mass non-traditional immigration is threatening to swamp it. Of course, it leads to all kinds of smears because she was white, but in fact there were earlier white children in Florida and Newfoundland. There’s just a lot of anti-white (and anti-Anglo) prejudice in the American chattering class.

My question about the diversity of Roanoke members is whether we have clung to an idea of “pure Anglo Saxon blood” and “first white child”—the popular 1890s-early 1900s idea—that turns out to be simplistic and just plain inaccurate. Yes, they spoke English and followed English law, but there was apparently far greater diversity among the settlers than once thought. This is not a political statement, but the result of sober historical research. Does this research alter in any way your views about the “Anglo” nature of the effort?

Well, none of the Lost Colony survived that we know, so it’s a moot point. Generally, my impression is the reverse: the heavily British nature of the early settlements is actually very much underplayed nowadays, because of the determination to retcon multiculturalism/ diversity into American history. But it’s obviously what John Jay was relying on in the famous passage in Federalist #2:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs …

From memory, I think the white population of the colonies in 1790 was 80% British, 60% English in 1790. That’s not very diverse.

On the Lumbee, they are clearly a mix of several Native American tribes, Europeans (Scottish and French mainly), and a variety of West Africans. Whether they took in the Lost Colonists is not possible to know, even through DNA, at least until we find the bones of Virginia Dare. How do you see this ethnic mixing?

So they’re tri-racial isolates, like the Melungeons etc.?

I don’t think there were many Scots or French in the Lost Colony (perhaps you disagree) so I guess that means that particular legend is looking frayed.

How do I see this ethnic mixing? You mean, can I be tricked into admitting I’m a Nazi? Try again.

I am genuinely interested in the Lumbees—and facts are facts.

Lastly, those pesky labels. I read that you don’t consider yourself a white supremacist. What moniker do you prefer?

It seems to me that “white supremacy” has to mean (1) a belief that whites are objectively superior and/or (2) the desire to have whites rule other races (specifically blacks in the South).

Since I am aware of the findings the East Asians are on average more intelligent than whites, and do not advocate ruling other races, I cannot be described as a “white supremacist” while retaining a modicum of meaning for the term. It would be like calling you a Communist because you’re trying to deconstruct an American legend.

On the other hand, it’s clear that the Left is now experimenting with using the term to mean any white who is not a total wimp about race.

The moniker I prefer is “American patriot.” I regard myself as a civic nationalist, which is what Trump seems to be i.e. I don’t regard America as an exclusively racial construct. On the other hand, it does have a specific racial core (something Trump has never acknowledged, I have no idea what he thinks, if he thinks about it at all).

There’s a discussion of this issue here. To quote me:

A few years ago, on VDARE.com, we actually had a debate on the issue of Citizenism vs. White Nationalism. This was in the days when Jared [Taylor] accepted the term “white nationalist.” [He’s stopped because he thinks it’s hopelessly smeared]. He debated Steve Sailer. Sailer made the argument that a nation is an ethno-cultural entity and the cultural aspect means that you can assimilate people who are not of the same race into the nation-state. Jared was more pessimistic.

Now, my heart belongs to Steve Sailer on this issue—because I’m a wimp. But my head belongs to Jared. Because of the Political Class’s fanatical determination to Elect A New People, I do think that politics will precipitate out on racial lines.

What is your definition of who is white and who is not? I’m looking for your view, whether it is counting haplotypes or some other measure.

Why are you so concerned about this? Personally, I don’t see any need for a complex explanation at this point. Whites are whites—descended from the indigenous European stock, who look white, consider themselves white, are accepted by whites cf. Jews.

As I said, given Affirmative Action, the Left is going to have to move to a more scientifically accurate definition of race at some point. Racially-mixed societies, e.g. Brazil, have a lot of words to describe degrees of admixture that don’t exist in English. But I myself would prefer to abolish Affirmative Action.

You mention higher intelligence among East Asians. Do you, then, believe that different ethnic groups can be ranked according to intelligence, and, if so, what ranking do you consider the most reliable?

There’s a ton of technical literature on this for God’s sake, see The Bell Curve, The g Factor , Richard Lynn

The mixed race question is important, since, as seems likely given recent archaeological finds, the Lost Colonists merged with Native American tribes in eastern North Carolina, who in turn merged with the growing African American populations around them (this seems true of the Lumbee as well, who have European and West African haplotypes and only, at most, a tiny percentage of Native American gene types, though direct tribe members did not participate in the study). By the late 19th century, all people of color in NC (setting aside the remnant Cherokee tribe in the mountains and the Lumbee who were granted Indian status based on Democratic politics of the 1880s) were classified by law as African American. Marriage with whites was forbidden. Therefore, if there are surviving Lost Colonist genes, they are within today’s African American community. So if Virginia Dare survived and had children, her descendants today are black. Whatever one thinks of American race issues, this does feel a little ironic, does it not?

Not particularly. Blacks are Americans, aren’t they? They speak English etc. See: Civic Nationalism.

It seems to me I anticipated this back in my 1999 post introducing the site Why VDARE.com? Why The White Doe?—and also the next step:

So Virginia Dare could be symbolic of the coming racial nirvana that immigration enthusiasts are forced to start fantasizing about when you compel them to look at the statistical consequences of current policy.

Or perhaps not. The actress Heather Locklear (Melrose Place, etc.) is claimed as a prominent Lumbee. But if, through some miracle of genetic recombination, Virginia Dare is reborn in Ms. Locklear’s beautiful face, John White might well have recognized her.

(Do you really think there’s archeological evidence the Lost Colony survived at all? Looks pretty shaky to me, but I may not be up to date.)

Lawler subsequently sent me a link to The Mystery of Roanoke Endures Yet Another Cruel Twist|An artifact found 20 years ago turns out to not be what archaeologists thought, by Andrew Lawler, Smithsonian.com, April 7, 2017.

Oddly, it says “recent archeological finds” do not confirm the that the Lost Colony merged with the local Indians.

PETER BRIMELOW writes: Earlier this year, at the urging of mutual friends, I spoke to an anonymous, underground, but flourishing, group Somewhere In America. It was like going back to the early catacomb days of the Conservative Movement in the U.S. (which I remember, see below!) Or, for that matter, in Canada, where it still hasn’t quite worked out (yet).

I’m glad to see there’s a new crop coming up.

Lydia was then experimenting with having me brush my hair straight back, which it doesn’t like and makes me look alarmingly like Steven Pinker c.f. my Tucker Carlson interview. I think the experiment may now have concluded.

(A separate thanks to the patriot who recorded the video!)

Peter Brimelow: Well, thank you, [--], and thank you, [--], and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming out here.

I see I’m going to have to shout here today. [No microphone!]

Well, the big problem with immigrants is that they have funny accents and nobody can understand them!

Even my five children--I have five American children--none of them can really imitate me. They make me sound like Daddy Pig.

So if you don’t understand what I’m saying, Lydia is in the back and will indicate to me, but you can raise a fiery cross or some other cultural symbol, and I will do my best to assimilate acoustically.

So I’m going to say three things today. The first is I’ll briefly discuss who I am, because nobody knows who I am.

And the second thing I’m going to discuss what was actually the subtitle of my 1995 book, Alien Nation--Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster: the post-1965 Immigration Disaster.

“Common Sense,” of course, was an homage to Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, Common Sense, when he was also an English immigrant, was instrumental in fueling the American Revolution.

And the third thing I’m going to talk about is: what happens next?

• ·So--who am I?

I’m an identical twin. I was born in Britain in 1947. That was the year that India became independent.

So that meant that throughout my youth, Britain was on constant geopolitical retreat, giving up one colony after another.

And, you know, losing is a very bad habit. One of the reasons I like President Trump is that I actually like him talking about annexing Greenland and annexing Canada and wherever else he’s thinking about annexing—possibly Cuba?

(No, I don’t want Cuba. I’d just like Miami back!)

Because he’s reversing this habit of defeat, which is a very bad habit to get into.

So my brother and I concluded all that was lost in Britain, actually in 1967, when the Cold War was moving to its height.

The reason was that we were extremely impressed by the Six-Day War when the Israelis, basically, defeated the Arabs in six days of savage fighting.

What struck us was the utter unreality of the British Ruling Class in their discussion of this phenomenon as opposed to the extraordinary realism that the Israelis showed. Whatever else you can say about Israel—and I think some people here would like to say quite a lot about Israel!—it does have a ruthless will to survive.

And this applies to the immigration question. When Trump started talking about the Border Wall in the 2016 debates, I was gritting my teeth and clenching my fists, saying “Talk about Israel, talk about Israel!”

They’d already built a wall! It’s 675 miles long! It’s about a third as long as the American wall on the southern border would have to be. It’s triple-fenced!

And you’ve paid for it!

I don’t think he ever mentioned it.

But the Israelis obviously thought walls worked. And they did work.

And one other way in which the Israeli example applies to the immigration debate: when Trump was elected, and he was in the White House, and he was faced with inundation of the southern border, according to the book the New York Times reporters wrote (Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration), he said, why can’t we just shoot them? He was told, well, that’s against international law.

John Kelly was his chief of staff. He was a former Marine general. How could he not have known what the Israelis were doing?

Well, Trump said, what about shooting them in the legs? That’s against international law too!

I particularly was interested in this question because I’ve been trying for years to find out why the Israelis don’t have what the American Border Patrol calls Zerg Rushes on their border.

In those days, at the U.S. southern border, what they used to do is all gang together in groups of like 100 and so on, and then suddenly rush the Border Patrol control point. And Border Patrol just simply couldn’t control them, so a lot of them got through. They called it a Zerg rush. One of our board members, and a long-time writer for VDARE.com, is a former border patrol officer.

Well, I couldn’t find out how the Israelis avoided this. And then eventually a Left-wing paper, Haaretz, in Israel, published an article about it, denouncing it from Left-wing perspective. And it turns out the Israelis do shoot them in the legs. They have a special group of snipers who were trained to shoot people, they say, in the legs.

But over the course of the 18 months or so that Haaretz had records, 70 of them had bled out and died.

For some reason, it’s never been reported in the American press.

My brother and I thought that the British Ruling Class did not have that kind of will. And we were right, as we see with this ridiculous situation of the English Channel where these dinghies are setting out into the English Channel and the lifeboat service in Britain, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, is picking them up and ferrying them into Britain.

The Israelis…would not do that.

So we decided to move to America. In 1970 we both went to the Stanford Graduate School of Business in an attempt to make useless literary intellectuals into something useful.

In my brother’s case, it took, and he had a long career at Wall Street. But in my case it didn’t take, and I reverted to the half-world of financial journalism.

I worked for various papers in Canada, and I worked for the Wall Street Journal and for Fortune and for Barron’s and Forbes in New York for a long time, and I wrote about a lot of highly technical financial issues and so on. And I moonlighted at National Review latterly.

Now in 1968, before we came to America, but the year after the Six-Day War, the British Member of Parliament Enoch Powell made his great speech. it’s called the Rivers of Blood speech although he didn’t actually use that phrase, about immigration in Britain.

He just surfaced the immigration debate very suddenly, after a long period of time when it had basically been repressed in respectable discussion. And that’s a phenomenon I’ll return to later.

Of course it meant he was anathematized.

Powell was the great Lost Leader of British politics. He really bears very close comparison to Pat Buchanan, also a great Lost Leader in American politics.

And Powell was especially interesting for two reasons.

When he died, I wrote that he was the greatest British politician of the 20th and the 21st century

Because in the 20th century he was involved in advocating free markets at a time when socialism, statism, the government control of the economy, was absolutely dominant in intellectual discourse. Even the Tories, the Conservatives, accepted the need for state control. As you remember, Richard Nixon imposed price and wage controls in America, even though he was supposed to be a Republican president.

But Powell was also the greatest political leader of the 21st century—because he pioneered the immigration issue. He died in 1998, so he was extremely prescient.

He realized that the mass movement of the Third World into the First World, happening for various reasons, and for also various reasons first evident in Britain, was the great issue that the First World in general, the Anglosphere in particular, would have to face.

Of course, he was part of the decisive victory against socialism. Those of you who are actually old enough to remember it, it was one of the greatest metapolitical victories of all time.

Famously, the economist Robert Heilbroner, who was a lifelong socialist, wrote an article in the New Yorker (January 16, 1989), admitting that the centuries-long argument between capitalism and socialism is over, capitalism has won. He didn’t like it, but he admitted it, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We haven’t reached that stage with the immigration debate yet. But we are working on it.

Now, also in 1965, there was an immigration act passed in America, which is generally referred to as the Hart-Celler Act, after the two people, the Senator, and the Congressman, who sponsored it. And it kicked in in 1967.

Now you have to realize that immigration everywhere, but particularly in the US, is not like rain. It doesn’t just come and go, which is how people tend to think of it.

It’s a government policy. The government determines how many people come in, it determines who they are, it determines what race they are, what countries they come from, and it determines their skill levels. All of those are entirely determined by government policy.

So what the Hart-Celler Act did was, it opened the floodgates after a 40-year pause, when there was almost no immigration at all. In fact, there was net negative immigration in the 1940s.

The 1924 Act, which dramatically reduced immigration, was passed after the great influx of immigration between the 1880s and the 1920s, which is now referred to as the First Great Wave. So it reduced it very dramatically, and it’s also re-oriented it so that the immigrants coming in would have the same national origins as Americans who were already here. It wasn’t going to change the ethnic balance.

And it was a great success, and it was essential to assimilation.

So you had this phenomenon of Italians and Germans fighting in the U.S. Army against the Italians and the Germans in the Second World War without any serious problems. That was largely due to the 1924 cut-off that allowed assimilation to take place.

And that’s one of many such pauses in American history, by the way. They’re usually spontaneous, but they are frequently legislated. Those pauses have been essential to assimilation.

The most important was perhaps after the American Revolution, when there was a period of more than 40 years when there was almost no immigration at all into the U.S.

So the 1965 Act had two key effects.

First of all, it completely destabilized the racial balance of the U.S. In 1960, the U.S. was 90% white. At the last survey, it was below 60% white. And that’s entirely due to government policy.

People talk about the Great Replacement. There’s a term coined by Renaud Camus, a French intellectual, and if you look it up on Wikipedia or something, you’ll find it’s denounced as a “conspiracy theory.”

But it’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a fact. There is a Great Replacement going on right across the White West, right across the Anglosphere, right across North America. The population which was here is being replaced by a new population predominantly drawn from the Third World.

One of the interesting side effects of the 1965 Act, by the way, is that it dramatically cut off British immigration. Immigration from Western Europe in general, but particularly from Britain. Immigrants from Britain fell from about 40,000 a year to about 15,000 a year just overnight.

Which was a big problem for us, my brother and I, at Stanford. We were supposed to go back to the underdeveloped countries from which we came to help them develop, because we both had Fulbright Awards.

The second consequence of the Act was that the U.S. now has a much larger population, and is projected to have a very much larger population, than it would have done if that Hart-Celler hadn’t been enacted.

And the numbers are not small. If it was up to the 1924 Act, if that had been left in place, the population in the U.S. would have been 250-270 million. Instead, it’s 343 million.

This is a particularly interesting thing when you think about environmentalism.

I mean, environmentalism, since the 1960s, has been a really important force in American politics. But nothing degrades the environment more than importing 120 million people and paving over all of Northern Virginia to accommodate a million H-1B Indians.

Environmentalism is not just a question of ecology, of whether the environment is healthy or not. It’s also an amenity issue. I think the destruction of the Northern Virginia farmlands was a really serious aesthetic crime.

So the question is: where are the environmentalist groups on immigration?

And the answer is: they’re hiding.

They’re hiding because about 20 years ago, there was a huge riot. The Sierra Club used to be in favor of reducing immigration, stabilizing America’s population, entirely because they knew it was degrading the environment. But about 20 years ago, they changed sides on the issue.

First of all, they didn’t talk about immigration at all. And then, secondly, they joined various pro-Amnesty coalitions.

And the reason for this was they got enormous amounts of money from a Jewish hedge fund manager who was still hung up on Ellis Island and the Russian pogroms and so on, and thought the borders had to be kept open.

The monies were very large, and it just completely changed the Sierra Club’s mind as to what it thought about immigration.

Now, so to finish this section, I’m just going to quote from Senator Teddy Kennedy. He was the floor manager of the Hart-Celler bill in 1965

And he gave a quote, which is notorious among immigration patriots, in his final statement in the debate:

First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same, as then about 300,000 a year.

Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. Contrary to the changes in some quarters, the bill will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or the most populated and deprived nations, Africa and Asia. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/yHamzkG2A84g

Every single one of these predictions was proved false. Kennedy was either a fool or he was a liar. But either way he simply wasn’t telling the truth.

And he wrapped up with this:

The charges I’ve mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact. They are out of the line of the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage.

Now, this is very typical of the way the immigration debate has gone since then, since 1965. Basically, it’s not treated like a normal debate. Opposition to immigration has been seen as completely immoral.

And when they say hate, “hate of our heritage,” they’re on the verge of getting this into the Constitution—effectively banning “hate speech.” I’ll come back to that in a moment.

What they mean is: criticism of immigration has to be repressed. And it was very successfully repressed for a long time.

Discussion of immigration simply vanished from American public discourse, really, for nearly 30 years. The changes were happening, but people weren’t really aware of them.

I often compare the Hart-Celler Act, the 1965 Immigration Act, to one of those mythical (I suppose they’re mythical) Chinese executioners’ swords that can cut somebody’s head off and leave the head still standing on the shoulders. The only way you can tell what’s happening is that some blood trickles from the mouth.

Well, after 50 years, America’s head has fallen off.

So, anyway, my brother and I immigrated to the U.S. We really immigrated to the American Conservative Movement, which had nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964 and ultimately elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, which I really do think was one of the great flowers of democracy.

Of course, it subsequently degenerated into racket, but that’s how things are.

I remember talking to a Goldwater supporter at Stanford, a member of the small conservative student group that was there. That was the badge of honor, having been a supporter of Goldwater in 1964.

We started talking about immigration, and he said to us: “Immigration’s never going to be a problem in America because the country’s just too big. It’s not possible to make a significant difference to the U.S. population by any kind of influx.”

Now we had a lot of experience with American immigration policy because we spent a lot of time in American immigration offices getting papers filled out and that kind of thing. And we knew that we were the only white people there. The influx had been completely changed.

And eventually, another British emigrant published an article, I think, in Newsweek, I’ve been looking for it, now AI’s around maybe I can eventually find it, in which he made exactly the same point. He said that a new nation is being built in these immigration offices. It’s completely different from the nation that exists right now. [Still can’t find this article—help!]

And our friend, our Goldwater friend, was completely shocked. He’d never thought about it at all.

And this went on for a long time. In the early 1990s, I had a debate with Bob Bartley, who was then the Editor of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, an absolutely fanatical immigration enthusiast.

And afterwards, the head of one of the major foundations in New York came up to me and said, “This is amazing. I’d never heard of this 1965 Immigration Act and the effect it had.”

This was a serious conservative intellectual who spent a lot of money giving out money to conservative intellectuals—including ultimately me, I’m happy to say.

He had never even heard of the 1965 Act.

In 1982, I was a writer at Fortune Magazine, and they were looking for big stories to make a splash. So I proposed that we do a story about how the 1965 Immigration Act had not worked out the way that Ted Kennedy had promised.

The editors couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d hit them over the head with a wet fish. They’d never heard of this immigration issue. The New York Times had never written about it!

In those days—and it’s still true but not as much as it was—the New York Times was kind of a bellwether for the Establishment Media. And if things didn’t appear in the New York Times, they just didn’t exist.

And the Fortune editors had never heard of the immigration issue. So I didn’t get to write my story.

I did get to write it, though, after a protracted struggle, in National Review over ten years later. It was the cover story:

It was 14,000 words long and was called Time to Rethink Immigration [June 22, 1992)] And as [---] mentioned, it is often credited with kicking off the modern immigration debate.

Ann Coulter very kindly has said that it’s what changed her mind on the immigration issue. Until then, she’d just gone along with the Wall Street Journal flow and assumed that immigration was good and opposition to it was racist and embarrassing. And she hadn’t thought about the actual practical implications of introducing such very large numbers of heterogeneous and often unskilled people.

And she went on to write Adios America, of course, which is credited with giving Trump the idea to start talking about the immigration issue in 2016.

But, very typical of the way the immigration debate was working then, both I and James Fulford, my chief lieutenant on VDARE.com, read Ann’s book in manuscript and critiqued it. And then she wrote us and said she was very sorry but, on the advice of other friends, she wasn’t going to be able to credit us in the acknowledgments because she would just be attacked for it. And people would say that she had what they call tainted sources.

And so she didn’t credit us. But she felt badly about it, and I think she did credit me in subsequent editions.

But that was typical of the Reign of Terror that was going on until then, keeping the immigration debate out of public awareness.

A lot of people want to think Ann is a bimbo. But Adios America! is extremely serious. I’m an expert on immigration books. And she is very rigorous in the way she went into the law and the facts behind it. And it’s actually very funny, of course, being Ann.

So anyway, my National Review cover story ultimately flowered into my book, published in 1995. It was called Alien Nation. And the subtitle is Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster.

Now, I didn’t like the title. One of the things about working with commercial publishers is their great moment of creative thrill is to force an author to accept a title he doesn’t like and impose their own title on him. That’s happened to me a few times.

I wrote a book about Canadian politics, which they insisted on calling The Patriot Game. Of course, right at that time, Tom Clancy’s novel came out, Patriot Games. And with Alien Nation, there’s apparently a science fiction series called Alien Nation, which everybody confuses it with. It’s a pattern.

I wanted to call my book Electing a New People. That’s after the famous poem by Bertolt Brecht, the German poet, which he wrote after the 1953 Rising against the Communist government in East Germany. He said the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one.

And that’s literally what America’s doing. The American government is dissolving the people and electing a new one.

In those days, with commercial publishers, you did very long book tours, addressing dozens of audiences—like this one! You had to keep mentioning the name of the book. And if you didn’t like it, it really got on your nerves.

But I’ve eventually come to like Alien Nation, because it does make a point.

The term “nation” is derived from the Latin nascere, and it means birth. So what it implies is there’s an ethnic link, a link by blood, a community that’s linked ultimately by blood.

Of course, nations are not simply linked by blood. They’re ethno-cultural entities. There are some people there who have just assimilated the nation, who don’t necessarily share a common ethnic heritage. But fundamentally, there is a need for a common ethnic heritage.

And this is what Abraham Lincoln drew on in his First Inaugural Address, when he was trying to persuade the South not to secede. He referred to “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave,” those Revolutionary War graves, and he argued that if they were struck, they would produce harmony.

And of course, the South and the North did indeed share those mystic chords of memory. They both fought in the Revolutionary War. (Not all on the American side, I may say—there were a lot of Loyalists in the North and the South). But they did have that in common.

In contrast, for example, Norman Podhoretz, the great editor of Commentary magazine, once wrote that—his family, of course, all arrived in the 1880s, 1890s when the great Russian Jewish immigration came in from Russia—that, to him, the American Revolution was as remote of the Wars of the Roses.

And that must affect the way in which people view their fellow Americans, if you don’t share that in common.

In any case, from about 1992 to 1997, we had a civil war within the Conservative Movement. National Review and its editor, John O’ Sullivan, and I were arguing with the Wall Street Journal, and everybody else in the Conservativism Inc., about whether or not they should talk about immigration.

And we lost this war.

In 1997, Bill Buckley abruptly fired John and purged the magazine of immigration patriots. And for a while, there was nowhere to get facts and analyses about immigration out into the public domain.

So I founded my webzine VDARE.com--actually on Christmas Eve of 1999.

And we built the organization and went along very happily, with a lot of hard work, inspired by my wife, Lydia, who reformed our back-end and fundraising procedures, until 2022, when we were mugged by Letitia James, the New York State Attorney General, a very unpleasant black woman.

This is a distinction we share, of course, with President Trump and the National Rifle Association. She prosecuted them on fantastic theories which would never have stood up in a normal court of law.

And we simply couldn’t finance this lawfare via subpoena and we had to suspend VDARE.com in 2024—n.b. even before any charges were filed.

But in the interim, I should say, we’d made a discovery after Trump’s election, that what was going on in America was really a slow-motion communist Coup. Dissenting views were simply being suppressed.

We found that we couldn’t hold public conferences. Lydia made somewhere between 10 and 15 bookings to hold conferences in hotels between 2016 and 2019.

And we would say, well, this is a controversial conference, and you might get demonstrators. And the hotels, which were all run by Americans who thought they lived in a free country, would say, no, no, no, we’re not afraid of controversial conferences. We’ve had many controversial conferences. We had a Right To Life conference once!

But they all folded. As soon as they came under pressure, and as soon as the Southern Poverty Law Center started contacting locals and organizing angry phone calls, they all folded.

Of course, all these hotels were owned by big corporations, and corporations are complete cowards, and they ran away from everything.

And they did this even though Lydia had very cleverly gotten them to sign a liquidated damages clause. Normally when you sign a booking with a hotel, they’ll say you have to undertake to pay the money if you cancel. And she would say yes, she would do that, but you have to sign it on our behalf too, to protect us.

And they would say, oh, we’re not going to cancel!

But they always did cancel, and they always had to pay us substantial sums of money. In the case of New York Hilton, I think it was over $100,000, just because they didn’t want to face protests, and local politicians denouncing them.

So Lydia bought the Castle. It’s in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, which is in the Eastern Panhandle. It’s only two hours from the U.S. Capitol, if you want to stage a protest against an election count, as many of the inhabitants of our town did. Trump carried Morgan County by 52 points in 2020 and 56 points in 2024. West Virginia has become a Republican state, although very poor.

And we still hope to resume having conferences there, especially for organizations that don’t want to take the risk of having a conference that might be canceled.

It’s also open for weddings and other things, and if anybody want to have a wedding in a Castle in West Virginia, please speak to Lydia at the back. She has her card and everything!

Now, I was at Forbes Magazine for 16 years.

Paul Craig Roberts had been an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, an academic, a leader in developing the Reagan Supply Side tax policy. But in 2000, he broke from the Conservative Movement and wrote a book called The Tyranny of Good Intentions, How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

And this was a real shock for the Conservative Movement because the War Against Crime and the need to toughen up on judges and so on had been a major part of the Conservative Movement’s rise to power in the 1970s and 1980s.

So they just didn’t want to think about the idea that they may actually have overshot in the War Against Crime. And so they wouldn’t review it in the Wall Street Journal, National Review and so on.

And Craig, who I had known since I was at Stanford, got so mad about this that he called up Steve Forbes. In those days, the Forbes family very rarely intervened in the content of Forbes magazine, they left all that to the Editor. They were only interested in selling advertising. But Steve called the Editor of Forbes, Jim Michaels, and said, basically, get somebody to review this book. So I went down to Florida.

Craig was then living in the Florida Panhandle. And of course, as usual with journalists, I didn’t look at, think about, read or do anything at all about the story until I was actually on the plane flying down there.

But when I got the book and started to read it, I was blown away by it. It was a revelation.

The changes that were made during the War On Drugs, the free hand given to prosecutors in various ways, really had caused enormous amount of injustice in the US. In the first instance, it was probably against black drug dealers who may or may not have deserved it, but were not necessarily gotten in a legal way, a constitutional way. But it also goes right across the board.

Prosecutors got into the habit of crushing anybody they don’t like, principally by the mechanism of just piling costs on them, forcing them to surrender.

Craig said to me: “They can put anybody they want in prison.” There’s no defense, no recourse to what he called the Rights of Englishmen.

There’s no defense against what these empowered prosecutors can now do.

And that, of course, has turned out to be the case with this wave of lawfare that we’ve seen since Trump was elected.

It’s quite astonishing how many Trump-adjacent people are fighting for their lives, financial lives at the moment, or have actually been through hell already.

General Flynn, for example, he was Trump’s first National Security Advisor, was forced to sell his house because of the protracted prosecution against him. He was pardoned when Trump came back into power.

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, he was called “America’s Mayor” because he was there at the time of 9-11, is still facing absolutely ruinous prosecution in Arizona, which is in trial right now. [Case dismissed but Arizona prosecutors say they will re-indict].

And, of course, it’s this type of lawfare that forced us to suspend the VDARE.com website.

We spent somewhere between one and two million dollars defending ourselves against this “investigation,” where they wanted thousands of documents and so on—even before were charged. This lawfare is not a joke.

I should say, by the way, that we’re not accused in the actual complaint of misappropriating funds. We’re just charged with trivial paperwork violations—which we don’t think we did; but anyway it’s the kind of thing that would normally be settled by a phone call and refiling and so on.

No middle-class family can stand up to this kind of assault, and we’re probably going to be forced into personal bankruptcy.

So my three daughters by Lydia are not going to the Ivy League! But they won’t go to the Ivy League anyway. I would worry about their wellbeing there.

I’m gonna conclude this section very quickly by saying we actually have a video in which the New York Attorney General henchman who is leading the charge against us, his name is Rick Sawyer, gave a speech to an Anti-Defamation League conference called “Taking Hate to Court.”

And he said [31m 21s into the video] that “hate,” “hate speech”—that’s us!—is protected by the First Amendment.

But, he said, there’s a way around that! You can simply subpoena—state attorney generals have enormous subpoena power—you can simply subpoena the purveyors of hate, namely us, to death.

In other words, he made an absolutely explicit statement of his desire to get around the First Amendment.

But we’ve been absolutely unable to get the courts to pay attention to this. And that speaks to the collapse of law in the US.

So that’s why I said earlier that banning “Hate Speech” is effectively on the verge of being written into the Constitution.

Which is partly, not entirely, but very much partly caused by the tremendous ethnic changes that have gone on in the U.S. For example, in our trek through the New York State Court system, we haven’t met one white gentile judge.

And this is particularly disturbing because there’s a ton of technical evidence that the concept of an objective law is really something only whites believe in. No other race apart from whites polls that way. That is, when most groups are faced with a preferred policy outcome versus the Letter Of The Law, they would rule against the Letter Of The Law. They just rule for what they want politically.

As I say, this idea of an objective law is a uniquely white thing, and it only worked when we had an overwhelmingly white nation.

So I’ll now move on to my second section:

• ·America’s post-1965 immigration disaster.

You have to realize what America was in 1790, after the Revolutionary War. The Census in that year reported that the white part of the nation—about 20% of the population were black slaves, but they were not part of the political nation—the white part of the population was 60% English, 80% British. The rest were Germans and Dutch and so on.

And that made a big impression on them at the time, by the way.

You often found Americans rhapsodizing about how Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, the French intellectual, said, “What is the American, this new man, created from all parts of Europe?”

And there were trace elements of many parts of at least Western Europe.

But overwhelmingly it was a British nation, a white nation.

The 1790 Citizenship Act actually said that only free white persons could become citizens. And that was only rescinded in 1952, so which is well within living memory. Well, fairly well within living memory. I remember 1952!

So that’s how Americans saw themselves. They saw themselves fundamentally as a nation-state, a white nation-state.

And this was represented in this famous quote—famous among immigration patriots—from John Jay in the second Federalist Papers, trying to explain to his countrymen why the federal system could work in the U.S.

He said, of this vast area--this was even before railways, it’s quite extraordinary what they were able to do when you think every single letter and newspaper had to be carried by horse from one end of the country to another, and yet they still were able to build a vibrant debate in an area the size of Western Europe.

Jay said:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion—

—and he didn’t mean Christianity, he meant Protestantism, the country was 98% Protestant at that point—

—attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence

I remember being at a National Review Institute Conference in Washington D.C. in the mid-1990s where we were discussing immigration. And Robert Bork thought my answer to a question had not been satisfactory.

Does everybody know who Robert Bork was? This is the problem with getting old, you know, things that you remember very clearly, the younger generation don’t know about at all!

He was a very distinguished law professor, and he was a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 after the Republicans lost control of the Senate

I knew the people in Reagan’s judge-picking operation. They’d saved Bork in case the Republicans lost control of the Senate, because his credentials were so stellar that they just assumed nobody could seriously oppose him.

But in fact, of course, Ted Kennedy and the Democrat Regime Media made up all kinds of fantastic reasons to oppose Bork, like he rented inappropriate movies from Blockbuster. (Do people remember Blockbuster?) [Tellingly, my memory misled me here--an example of the effectiveness of Regime Media propaganda. Bork’s rentals were entirely innocent, although the Washington City Paper reporter Michael Dolan, who broke the story, falsely insinuated that they were not. An early example of meming falsehood into existence, c.f. Charlottesville, J6].

And they succeeded in stampeding the Democrats and the various RINO Republicans to turn Bork down.

It was really the first sign, the first major sign, that the concept of objective law in the U.S. was collapsing. It became that the only thing that mattered was: which way would Supreme Court nominees rule on certain cases on political grounds?

Anyway, Bork gets up at the NR conference, and he didn’t like my answer, so he gave a better answer. And he quoted that famous passage from John Jay.

And he said, you know, this is a big problem because it means the way Americans been held together in the past was not just by agreeing on common principles, but because they were a common people. And we are now headed towards a state which no longer possesses a common people, united in these various ways. And we don’t know if it’s going to work.

So what that means is that, at the highest levels of the Conservative intellectual world, there were people who had already had doubts about immigration. They just weren’t vocalizing it.

They were often under the spell of the reinvention of America that went on, really, after this First Great Wave of immigration, very largely by Jewish intellectuals.

They invented this concept of the Melting Pot, a concept that only came into popular parlance in 1908. It’s not a concept that Americans have been aware of and been conjuring with since the Republic was founded.

So by 1965, before the Hart-Celler immigration act kicked in, you had a white nation which was reasonably coherent, which had substantially assimilated each other, and there was a lot of intermixing between the various ethnic factions.

But there was still serious sectionalism among white Americans. In the 1960s, there were these deep divisions within the white community which existed quite apart from anything else that was going on.

And that can be traced back to different immigration patterns. There’s a famous book by a Brandeis University historian called David Hackett Fisher about immigration and how it affected the white American community: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America.

Does anyone know anything about this? Well, it came out nearly 40 years ago. He traced cultural patterns in the U.S. to different waves of immigration from different parts of the British Isles, which do have significant differences. The most prominent one, for example, being the Puritans, who all came from East Anglia into New England and have completely distinct ways of life to the Southerners. The Southerners, who come mainly from the South of England and the West Country, who were Anglicans and not Puritans. And of course, then there’s also the Scotch-Irish from Ulster, who emigrated to Appalachia and formed a separate group. Hackett Fischer calls them Borderers. [I forgot to mention Quakers, from English North Midland, into the Delaware Valley]. And they’re all significantly distinct, although they all speak English and they’re all white.

Now, one example that struck me about this is my wife, Lydia.

She’s a Texan. And when she married me, she had to move to Northern Connecticut, to New England, because I was living there with my two children with my first wife who had died, and we didn’t want to move them.

So she moved to Connecticut. And she never really settled—because, fundamentally, Southerners and the Yankees don’t like each other. This is a very deep division. The Civil War was about a lot more than slavery. There were deep sectional divisions within the white community.

So when my eldest daughter with my first wife was going to go to university, we maneuvered her to go into Southern Methodist University in Dallas, because that’s where Lydia’s parents lived, and we wanted to move down there in search of free babysitting. (Lydia and I have three children).

So Lydia sat Hannah Claire down and said to her: when you’re on the campus, you will meet people and have brief conversations with them.

And they will then think that they’re your friend and you’re their friend, and they will do things for you. And they will expect you to think that you’re their friend and you should do things for them.

In Connecticut, it doesn’t work that way. When Lydia was putting together Hannah Claire’s high school graduation party, she said, “Well, who are you going to invite? What about so-and-so?” Hannah Claire says, “Well, she’s not really a friend.”

“What do you mean, she’s not really a friend? She’s been in the house so many times.”’

This girl had been in the house many times--but she hadn’t crossed the threshold that, in Connecticut, constituted being a friend.

Now, in defense of the Yankees, they’re not vicious. I realized this when I was a weekender, I used to have cars repaired in New York City, and then I started having them maintained in northern Connecticut.

And I thought that the car mechanics in Connecticut were hostile, because they barely spoke. They were very monosyllabic. And then one day, one of them said to me, “You know, this car—[such a thing] has gone wrong with it. We can fix it, but it will cost $400. But you should go back to the dealer, because there’s probably a recall on this, and then you could get it done for nothing.”

In other words, he was turning away business. And so I realized he wasn’t hostile at all. He was friendly. He was very honest. He just didn’t talk very much.

But these things do cause friction within the white community.

And that’s why we have a federal system in the US. So these different types of people can govern themselves as much as possible. One of the very serious negative developments in U.S. politics at the moment is the attempt to concentrate the government in the hands of Washington D.C.

Well, anyway, these sectional divisions have been enormously exacerbated by post-1965 immigration.

One example of that is California.

California was the heartland of the American Conservative Movement. It’s where Reagan came from. It’s what nominated Goldwater. But now it’s thought to be completely inaccessible to the Republican party. It’s totally controlled by Democrats. It’s a one-party state—basically because of immigration.

So the proportion of illegal immigrants in California is something like 10% of the population. It’s very substantial. And they of course all have anchor babies. And then of course there’s legal immigration into to California. Over a quarter of California’s population is now foreign-born.

So whites a.k.a. Americans in California now are driven to, I think somewhere around 32-34% of the population is white.

But I have to say, though, that the voting age population is still much whiter. However, it doesn’t matter because one of the characteristics of the Republican Party is that it’s totally afraid to appeal to its own base.

The Republican party in California has never run state-wide on opposing immigration. Even Proposition 187, which was trying to withdraw state welfare subsidies and transfer payments from illegal immigrants and was ultimately sabotaged by a Federal judge, the Republican party ran away from it. It was passed by a pure grassroots movement and it was never taken up by the Republican party.

And the result of that is that there have been many state-wide elections in which the Republican Party has not achieved 50% of the white vote in California.

People don’t seem to know this. They think it’s entirely because of the immigrant vote. But it’s because the GOP didn’t rally its base.

Another example of a sectional transformation by immigration: Virginia.

Northern Virginia was a Southern state and it’s now become something else. The northern part of Virginia (lovingly know as NOVA) is entirely populated by immigrants and civil servants.

And they move the state decisively to the Left. And that’s why the current Governor is trying to force through gun control. She’s removed tax exemption from Confederate charities. In the land of Robert E. Lee, she’s just removed tax exemption from Confederate charities!

And she’s trying to gerrymander the state. There’s going to be a referendum about that on Tuesday [April 21, 2026]. The state, which voted 46% for Trump in 2024, under her plan will only have one Republican district. The rest of the 10 districts are very long strips from Northern Virginia, incorporating just enough NOVA Democrats to swamp the votes of rural Virginians to the south. [The referendum passed narrowly, but was voided by the Virginia Supreme Court].

Well, people say a week is a long time in politics. But 50 years can be a blink of an eye.

We saw Roe v. Wade reversed after 50 years or so, although it was considered to be settled law. Regardless of what you think about abortion, Roe was clearly wrongly decided as a matter of law. The Liberal majority just made up the law to pass it.

Another example is Brown v. Board of Education which imposed school integration across the country. Again, completely absurd legal reasoning, regardless of what you think the merits of the policy were.

But one example which you’ve probably not heard of: Reynolds v. Sims, one of the last of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s catastrophic court rulings.

What that did was force the states to apportion all their legislative districts on the basis of population.

It had been the case that many states had state Senates which, like the US Senate, were not based on population per se, but were an attempt to give representation to the several different communities that exist within each state.

So, for example, typically the rural areas in a state like Illinois would have more Senators than would be indicated purely on the basis of population, because otherwise the rural areas were simply outvoted by the big city of Chicago.

Reynolds v. Sims is justified on the grounds of “one man, one vote.” But that’s not the sole issue in democracy. The issue is: what constitutes a community. Should a community be outvoted by the majority—subjected to the tyranny of the majority?

So the result of this decision is that many states now are completely dominated by their big cities, which of course are increasingly overwhelmingly non-white, increasingly immigrant-descended.

Chicago is a classic example, I think something like 70% of the population of Illinois lives in Chicago. But Illinois is 400 miles long. Lydia’s grandparents, on her Union side, lived in Bradford IL, which is three hours south and west of Chicago. It’s a completely different world, an absolutely different world than Chicago. But they have no control over their local affairs at the state level.

It’s true to a certain extent in Michigan. Michigan is dominated, although not as much dominated, by Detroit.

And it’s true in Maryland, which is completely dominated by Baltimore. And it’s true in New York State. It’s a major problem.

And what it means is that the only answer to being ruled by what is essentially a foreign community is state secession.

And that’s why you see state secession movements springing up. For example, in the Greater Idaho movement, which seeks to remove Eastern Oregon from the rule of Portland. And in Illinois itself, there are several different movements to partition Illinois and transfer parts of it to Indiana and to Wisconsin.

And that’s happened because there’s no other way to get representation apart from secession.

And that’s a theme that’s steadily rising in American politics.

So I’m going to talk about how Trump has impacted the post-1965 immigration disaster.

Firstly, post-Trump, there has been absolutely dramatic change in the GOP in regards to the general immigration debate.

When I got started on this debate, the conventional wisdom among conservative Republicans was that immigration is okay, we don’t need to worry about it.

That’s completely gone now.

Tom Tancredo, who was a congressman from Colorado, another state that’s been debauched by immigration, once told me that when he was in Congress, there was a sort of affinity group meeting of Republican congressmen, and they made the mistake of making him the chair briefly. So he showed them a video of the situation at the southern border, completely chaotic, people rushing the Border Patrol and sneaking across at night and all this kind of thing.

And he said the response from Republican members was that they all got up and walked out.

And by the time the movie was over, there was nobody in the room except him and one or two of his friends.

Because they just simply didn’t want to think about this. It upset the donors, and it meant they might be called racists, and the leadership didn’t like it, and they didn’t want to think about it.

Well, now, of course, they are thinking about it.

And we see, for example, there’s a Cuban Republican congressperson, Maria Elvira Salazar, trying to get an Amnesty bill through at the moment.

And she’s been fiercely beset by other Republicans, Brandon Gill and so on, in Texas. And her opponents make exactly these arguments that this is going to Elect a New People.

Now, as a policy matter, secondly, Trump has produced a really dramatic turnaround, and there’s essentially no border crossings now. And they were running at the rate of millions a year.

But less noted than that, he’s also dramatically reduced legal immigration by about half. And some key parts of this, like Asylum Seekers and Refugees, have been reduced by a fraction of 90%.

The problem is that this has entirely been done by Executive Action. It can be reversed, as it was after Trump went out of office in 2020 by Biden.

But I should say, one other great thing Trump has done: he’s brought Birthright Citizenship into public debate.

Birthright Citizenship, the idea that anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a U.S. citizen, is a most peculiar interpretation of the law. It’s not in the Constitution, it was done by incremental judicial decree--the child of any illegal alien born in the U.S., even a tourist’s, is a U.S. citizen and entitled to all kinds of benefits and so on.

And as a practical matter, the parents, it’s very difficult to deport the illegal parents if they have a citizen child Anchor Baby.

Birthright Citizenship could be reformed by statute. Congress could simply pass a bill saying what they meant, what the Constitution meant by “subject to jurisdiction thereof,” which is in the Constitution.

Alternatively, Congress could trigger a Constitutional Amendment, which is not easy, but at least would force the Democrats to vote up or down on this in all the states, and then run in elections on it.

Now, what we’ve been writing about for nearly 25 years—we first wrote about it in 2002—has finally gotten into public debate.

I must admit that had never occurred to us as a possibility that that it could be done through Executive Action. But that is what the Supreme Court is currently ruling on. It’s not directly ruling on whether birthright citizenship is in the Constitution. It’s ruling on whether or not you can do these things by executive action.

But whatever they rule, you know, it’s incumbent on the Republican Congress to immediately start move legislation on Birthright Citizenship.

I mean, you know, the income tax was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

But the result of that was a Constitutional Amendment had to pass, and it was passed. And that’s how we have income tax.

This idea that the Supreme Court is like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with tablets that he discovered with all these rules on them, and there’s nothing to be said about it, that any Supreme Court ruling is the law of the land, is completely wrong.

It’s not the way law is supposed to work. Congress, the legislative branch, is supposed to change the law.

Anyway, what is really disappointing about Trump’s action is that he blinked on the question of this Minneapolis insurrection.

It’s only the Blue States where they’re not cooperating with the law, where the federal government has to do these mass deportations.

I thought the thing was developing very well. Trump had forced people like Tim Walz and Jacob Frey in Minneapolis to make the most extravagant statements about how they’re going to defy federal law. They were actually inciting an insurrection.

And I thought that the obvious thing to do was follow through and invoke the Insurrection Act. Jail Governor Walz. And, if necessary, push him to the point where you have a Kent State situation where there’s so many attacks of law enforcement that there’s a serious shooting outbreak

I remember Kent State and it’s quite contrary to the way you think it went. What happened was anti-war demonstrations on the campus immediately stopped and Nixon won the 1972 election overwhelmingly.

So that’s what I assumed that the Trump Administration was going to do. The peak of that thinking, which I think is what some of his aides did want to do, was the State of the Union address where he actually said everybody stand in favor of illegal immigrants being deported and none of the Democrats stood except Senator Fetterman from Pennsylvania.

That’s a great thing to run on. That’s going to make a great Republican campaign if they choose to run on it.

But Trump didn’t choose to run on it. He has apparently decided to attack Iran instead. Which is a very big bore.

Still, I have to say what he’s done is not completely reversible, because he’s done immense damages to these refugee NGOs, these refugee rackets like Catholic Charities and so on.

They have had to lay masses of people off.

They can’t reconstruct their treasonous illegal immigrants-settling activities for quite some time after Trump’s out of office, even if he’s not succeeded by another immigration patriot.

Of course, the biggest single failure is that Trump has not got behind the idea of an immigration moratorium.

That is to say: no net immigration for at least 60 years, to match the post 1965 immigration disaster

About 300,000 people leave the US every year, so you could have 300,000 coming in to take care of any hardship cases, and needed skills and so on. Ironically, it’s quite close to the number that Teddy Kennedy claimed would continue to come in if the Hart-Celler Act were passed in 1965.

• ·What happens now?

The short answer is: I don’t know what’s going to happen now.

The first possibility is that the U.S. will indeed become more of an Alien Nation.

1) We’ll see sectional break up. Boundaries could be drawn across North America.

This is a pattern. The Canadians have messed themselves up as well. The Canadian West and in particular Alberta are talking about seceding and possibly forming relationship with the U.S. You could see boundaries drawn across North America--putting compatible communities together.

What people don’t realize is that actually the U.S. is already in a state of secession. Some states have already effectively seceded from the Union. I said earlier that the Blue States, for example, Minnesota, openly say they’re not going to enforce federal immigration law. How much more insurrectionary can you get?

But the even more serious problem: it turns out the Trump Administration can’t enforce the law anywhere in Blue States easily.

Because both the Blue State judges and the prosecutors—you can only appoint them with the consent of the U.S. Senate—but particularly there’s this thing called the Blue Slip arrangement whereby senators from each state can veto people they don’t like.

What that means is that both the U.S. prosecutors and the judges in the Blue States are partisan Leftist Democrats. And that’s why you see Antifa prosecuted in Texas and not in Seattle.

And similarly, Jury Nullification has become a very serious problem.

For example Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York whom I mentioned earlier, is quite clearly engaged in serial mortgage fraud going back 40 years.

She was exposed by a very interesting forensic accountant called Sam Antar, who is particularly qualified in this area because he served some years in federal confinement for being engaged in the Crazy Eddie fraud.

Does anybody remember Crazy Eddie? It was a huge electronics discount store in New York City. There were famous advertisements of Crazy Eddie—his “prices were insane.”

The reason the prices were insane is they weren’t paying taxes of any kind!

Anyway, it’s a bit like the movie Catch Me If You Can. He flipped sides and became a forensic accountant and he’s been able to show that Letitia James engaged in serial mortgage fraud in many different cases.

But the Trump administration so far has been unable to get an indictment.

Because Grand Juries in jurisdictions like DC and the Eastern District of Virginia, which is dominated by Northern Virginia, will not indict a Democrat official.

Prosecutors in these areas are also Democrats, and they won’t generally prosecute them.

On the occasions when Trump got special prosecutors into do it, the Federal Courts said they haven’t been legally appointed because the Senate is not approving the appointment of Trump’s prosecutors. The situation is completely paralyzed.

So these states are already in a state of secession.

Now the second possibility:

2) The U.S. will move into something similar to South Africaa, with a paralyzed, parasitized white minority

Whatever else was going on in South Africa, there was a coherent nation there—the Afrikaners, Dutch-speaking whites, who have been there since the around the time the Pilgrims came to Massachusetts.

The Afrikaners developed a nation there and it controlled a state—latterly known as the Republic of South Africa.

But it had of course all kinds of other people within its territory, which was an awkward problem for them.

So although they did control the state, they were induced to abandon it. In the end, they never mounted a really serious opposition to their dispossession. They abandoned their state--with the result that South Africa is now falling apart.

And the white minority is paying the taxes that keep the whole thinh going.

I have theories as to why this happened. One is just sheer bribery. I think the mining companies may have bribed the Afrikaner leadership.

But one another reason is just ideological hegemony. South African whites weren’t just able to formulate the ideas with which they could have defended themselves.

Now that’s the nightmare scenario here in the U.S. That white America, which is to say America, will not be able to stop what’s being done to it. They won’t be able to develop the leadership before it’s too late.

What was going on in the Biden Administration, as I said earlier, was a communist coup. It was fascist in form, but communist in content.

What I mean by fascist in form is that they worked through private corporations. For example, if you go and look at the VDARE.com website archive, you’ll see a discussion from Lydia and a video presentation about this. We had a very long list of allegedly private entities cancel us and impair our functioning.

For no commercial reason—just for political reasons.

For example, bulk email tools, very important in building an audience, just suddenly up and cancelled us.

One of them was Constant Contact, which is the industry leader. When Lydia found we could no longer send stuff out, she called them and said: “What’s going on here?” The girl says: “We no longer service your industry.” Lydia says: “What industry is that?” She said: “Just a moment…Oh, it’s white supremacy.”

So that’s the reason we’d been cancelled.

It’s a long, long list. And it goes to payment processers as well, which was really crippling.

It was being done, as it turns out, by pressure from the Biden Regime. These banks were not supposed to work with people the Regime didn’t like.

Most notably gun dealerships—but we’re worse than gun dealerships! We were told that by one bank. We were more evil than gun dealerships! Worse than pornographers!

The Biden coup was communist in content because it was not a nationalist movement, it was an egalitarian movement. It’s basically a racial socialist movement transferring wealth using state power to favored races.

And it’s resulting in a Cold Civil War.

One of the big problems with a divided community like America now is, as I’ve said, that justice systems don’t work across racial lines.

But neither does democracy. And this is something that is actually contributing seriously to the heat level in U.S. politics: this national bi-polar racial distribution of who votes for which party.

The Democrats have not carried the white vote in America since 1964.

Their party is a coalition of People of Color, homosexuals and Jews, with a minority of residual whites.

I’ve seen reports that in the 2024 election, incredibly, 14% of the Democrat vote was made up of homosexuals.

I find that hard to believe, but the fact is we were going through a moment during the transgender craze when the numbers of Americans who identified as homosexuals ticked up very sharply. It was getting to five or six percent rather than one or two percent which has been for years.

Of course, as we all know, gays are everywhere and there are plenty of gays in the immigration patriot movement.

But it also is true that the Democrat Party is driven by these groups.

There is technical literature on this subject. These groups making up the Democrat base are significantly more prone to emotional disorders than normal white Americans. And I think that’s something that we now see in American politics quite a lot.

Overall, it raises the stakes in elections, because it means that each one of these parties essentially represent “two nations—in the bosom of one state.”

Neither can trust the other to control the state.

3) So the third possibility is: Will it all just go away?

I’m fond of saying that miracles happen quite often in politics.

I’m old enough to remember the Cold War.

Nobody remembers the Cold War. You have to be at least over 40, I guess, now.

But it was extremely serious. And after the fall of Vietnam it was the universal assumption the America Conservative Movement that the US was done for.

I remember I went to see Bill Rusher in 1975. Bill Rusher was the publisher of National Review and actually I think a much more important figure than Bill Buckley.

He said to me, when he realized I was a friend, I was interviewing him for the Canadian Financial Post, when he realized I was a friend we went off the record and he said to me, confidentially—all is lost. Vietnam had just fallen. Angola and Mozambique had just fallen.

The Soviets had built a Blue Water navy and they were operating in every ocean of the world.

He said: the last chance was in 1976 when we tried to nominate Reagan. Now the Red Flag will wave over the world.

This was one of the leaders of the American Conservative Movement!

But he said we persevere—because on the one hand you never know what’s going to happen next.

(And that’s a principle in Clausewitz, the Prussian military theorist. There’s a whole section where he discusses why you don’t surrender because you don’t know what’s going on over the hill. The other side may be in even more trouble than you are).

And the second reason, Rusher said, is that there are theological injunctions against despair. Of course, he’s right. He was a very serious Anglican Catholic.

Anyway, it all turned around—in five years. 1980 Reagan was elected and he proceeded to win the Cold War.

Things just got better all by themselves.

So I’m going to conclude one of my favorite quotes which I’ve not used for a long time by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian dissident. He said this in his Nobel Prize speech, which was in the early 70s at the height of the Cold War.

He had been a convinced Young Communist, and in the Soviet Union they had this theory that they’d abolish nationalities. They invented what they called a New Soviet Man, who was entirely a cultural and ideological construct. All the various national groups in the former Russian Empire were going to be subsumed.

Very similar, not coincidentally, to the Neo-Conservative theory of America—that it would be a “universal nation”—the title of Ben Wattenberg’s book—that had gotten away from its ethnic roots.

Anyway, this is why what Solzhenitsyn says was so radical. He said:

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face.

Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of God’s design.

Well, I think that the US, when I saw it when I came here in 1970, was a special facet of God’s design.

And I think we should keep it that way.

Thank you very much.

Peter Brimelow writes: I’ve recently discussed the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 30 5-4 Anchor Baby atrocity on several different podcasts (Auron MacIntyre, Mike Farris, Harrison Smith, Kevin DeAnna, Tom Woods, James Edwards). All took interestingly different directions. Plus, of course, I had anticipated SCOTUS’ dereliction here.

James Edwards is also a columnist for the American Free Press treezine and he kindly invited me to do a Q&A with him there. It’s off the stands now, so I am free to post it.

I told Edwards: “I think this ruling will backfire on the Left just like the 1973 abortion ruling Roe vs Wade did.”

And there have been a flurry of statutory and Constitutional Amendment proposals introduced into Congress since June 30. But I don’t see much sign right now that Trump is going to make it the main issue in the 2026 midterms, despite my express instructions below. Maybe he thinks the Iran War will do it for him.

Note my subversive comments on 250th vs. 200th Anniversary celebrations. I was there!

James Edwards: The Supreme Court just handed down this ruling in Trump v. Barbara upholding automatic citizenship for children born to illegal aliens and people here on temporary visas. Many ideological fellow travelers are saying this basically guarantees that the invasion of our country will continue indefinitely, no matter what the American people want. What was your immediate reaction and why do you think so many of our friends were so quick to label this an unmitigated defeat?

Peter Brimelow: This decision is a blessing in disguise. There’s no doubt it puts the Historic American Nation into what the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu called “Death Ground”—if it’s not reversed, the U.S- born children of the illegals here (and Biden let in some 11 million) will eventually get the vote and elect anti-white gay race communists who will abolish America.

But the point is that at least the Birthright Citizenship issue is now in politics. When we started writing about it on VDARE.com 25 years ago, almost no one had any idea of what was going on. America was being transformed by stealth.

Some of our friends are shocked because the decision is such a legal atrocity. However, all is not lost. There are fixes. They’re hard, but they are simple.

Only five justices voted to read Birthright Citizenship into the Constitution (where it was otherwise not at all explicit, just as the notorious alleged right to an abortion nowhere appears). So, replacing one justice could flip the result. That’s why Vice-President J.D. Vance said that Birthright Citizenship “hangs by a thread.”

Plus, Congress could try to fix Birthright Citizenship by statute, imposing its own interpretation of the passage in the Fourteenth Amendment that the five justices exploited.

Or it can begin the process of amending the Constitution to end Birthright Citizenship. Which would be a huge fight. And that would be great!

Lawyers often say, “the process is the punishment,” which certainly been true with NY Attorney General Letitia James’ ruinous “investigation” of VDARE.

But in this case, the process is the prize! Democrats in Congress and in every state would be forced to justify the children of illegals and tourists automatically getting U.S. citizenship, and the whole “Birth Tourism” racket whereby foreign women are flown in to give birth, collect citizenship papers for the baby, and then fly out. Americans generally didn’t know all this was going on, and when they find out they get really mad.

I think this ruling will backfire on the Left just like the 1973 abortion ruling Roe vs Wade did. But this time, it won’t take 50 years.

The Supreme Court is not God. It is not Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. If Americans don’t like what it says, they can legislate to change it.

That’s what happened with the Federal income tax. The Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional in 1895. So, Congress proposed the 16th Amendment permitting it and it was ratified by 1913.

And this was for income tax, which everybody hates! Nobody loves Birthright Citizenship, except the Abolish America lobby.

Edwards: You have identified a silver lining, noting that SCOTUS was not ruling on birthright citizenship per se, but rather only whether it can be abolished by Executive Order. Considering that Trump’s EO on birthright citizenship would have certainly been overturned by a potential future Democratic president, could this be a blessing in disguise?

Brimelow: Exactly. I must say it never occurred to us at VDARE.com that Birthright Citizenship could be prevented by Executive Order. We assumed legislation or a Constitutional Amendment would be necessary.

But I’m actually glad that Trump tried to do it this way, because if upheld it would have prevented the Biden Rush illegal aliens’ U.S. born children getting the vote from the date of the order; and also, of course, because it has gotten the issue into political debate. The GOP leaders in Congress apparently didn’t have the courage or the imagination to do that.

If Trump had prevailed on the Executive Order, however, everyone would have all gone back to sleep. And then the Democrats would have eventually reversed the EO, as you say.

A permanent solution is ultimately needed.

I was mildly surprised the Chief Justice Roberts, who ruled with the women (Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson, Barrett), didn’t try to confine the decision to the narrow issue of the EO. He’s a coward and usually avoids rocking the boat. Ann Coulter, whom I respect, has speculated that he’s being blackmailed. But I suspect that he was just afraid of the female justices’ unbridled hysteria, which in turn presaged the utterly unbridled hysteria with which Democrats would have greeted any threat to Birthright Citizenship.

Three generations of Democrats, going back before the 1954 Brown decision banning racial segregation, which whatever its merits as policy was utterly lawless, have gotten used to the idea that the U.S, Supreme Court is God. And that God agrees with them.

And lot of Democrats react viscerally to the idea that American citizenship is ultimately a matter of blood rather than birth location (technically jus sanguinis rather than jus soli) because they themselves stem from recent immigration. They instinctively recoil from the idea that there was a pre-existing American ethnocultural community — a nation — to which they may or may not belong. Even though abolishing Birthright Citizenship doesn’t actually affect them at all.

Edwards: The 14th Amendment, of course, was passed after the War Between the States by the Reconstruction-era Congress to deal with the children of freed slaves. What sort of mental gymnastics must be put into play to believe that this applies to the children of illegal aliens from the far reaches of the planet?

Brimelow: Well, obviously, it’s a reach.

But, as I say, that’s no longer the issue. SCOTUS has ruled, however mistakenly, and there are ways to undo that ruling if it’s what Americans want. Let’s get on with it.

Edwards: If we don’t put an end to this insane “anchor baby” loophole, millions of other foreign nationals are going to flood across the border knowing their kids will be instant American citizens with full access to our welfare state, schools, and political system. Heritage American taxpayers would be on the hook for the education, healthcare, and eventual welfare of these children who were never supposed to be citizens in the first place. Would this be us subsidizing our own demographic displacement?

Brimelow: Of course. That’s the idea!

But the key thing is to make it clear to Americans that this displacement is what’s being done. The Regime Media will lie about it.

Edwards: In Alien Nation you laid out how post-1965 immigration was fundamentally altering the racial and cultural character of the United States. Now, 30 years later, we stand at the precipice. What hope can you give readers that common sense will prevail?

Brimelow: Well, of course, the underlying numbers have gotten much worse, just as I predicted. On the other hand, awareness of the issue is vastly greater than it was, especially among young men on the Right. So, it’s a question of the irresistible force vs. the immoveable object.

My view is that miracles happen quite often in politics. Nobody expected the Soviet Union to collapse. Nobody expected Trump. I am surprised by how long it’s taken, but everybody may be surprised by how quickly it turns around.

Edwards: What is your overall opinion of the current Supreme Court, looking at its complete body of work since the Trump appointees have been added to the bench, rather than just this single ruling?

Brimelow: It’s obviously vastly better than the flagrantly legislating Leftist Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-1969) or the Country Club / Chamber of Commerce Supreme Courts that succeeded it. There was a whole missing generation of conservative legal intellectuals and the Federalist Society, because it didn’t address National Question issues, has not completely filled the gap.

Edwards: Shifting focus slightly to America’s 250th birthday. Your colleague, Kevin DeAnna, recently wrote that “Changing demographics mean many so-called Americans have no connection whatsoever to the historic nation and regard its history as offensive, racist, and even evil. Meanwhile, many white Americans, especially those who are young and on the hard right, are disillusioned with the entire national project.” Did the overall vibe across the country seem depressed to you on what should have been an important national milestone?

Brimelow: Well, because of my appalling age, I remember the 200th Anniversary celebrations, and they weren’t as unclouded as people think now. There had been the Watergate coup, the Democrats had handed Vietnam to the Communists, Communists had seized Angola and Mozambique, the Soviets had built a Blue-Water navy, they really appeared to be winning the Cold War.

Frankly, I think the 200th Anniversary looks better in retrospect because the recycled ads and footage that you see now was not infected by DEI casting dogma. Everyone was white. And everyone was white, the U.S. population was over 80 percent white, over 20 percentage points more than it is in 2026. So that reinforces Kevin’s point.

Edwards: On that theme, your family recently attended Trump’s Great American State Fair in Washington, which has been the focus of a lot of media attention. What was the vibe there and did everyone have a good time?

Brimelow: Lydia did go with our daughters to the Great American State Fair on the National Mall, it’s only about two hours from where we live in West Virginia. It was over 90 degrees, so she banned me on the grounds I wouldn’t survive! But they all thought it was great. Despite mean-spirited sabotage attempts by a few Democrat governors, for example our previous home state of Connecticut. She thought the relentlessly negative coverage was just deceptive.

Edwards: Your Substack is essential reading for those interested in America First immigration policies from one of its staunchest advocates. Where can people find it?

Brimelow: You can reach my Substack at peterbrimelow.com, my X and Gab are @peterbrimelow and @PeterBrimelow

And VDARE.com’s X and Gab are @vdare and @VDARE.

VDARE’s soul (if you will pardon the reference) goes marching on!

This article was originally published by American Free Press – America’s last real newspaper! Click here to subscribe today or call 1-888-699-NEWS.

Ryan P. Haygood, SPLC’s new President and CEO

The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] has not yet posted its Audited Financial Statement and IRS Form 990 for the year ending October 31 2025, delaying at least three months later than usual. This is an abrupt departure from the meticulous housekeeping under the regime of founder Morris Dees and President & CEO J. Richard Cohen (who resigned alongside Dees in 2019).

And the SPLC has also switched auditors: it is now using the Atlanta-based firm of CRI (Carr, Riggs & Ingram, L.L.C.), whereas for many years it used Jackson Thornton & Co., P.C. based in its hometown of Montgomery AL.

At commercial bank credit school many years ago, I was trained to regard any change of auditors as raising a red flag.

Is something going on?

The SPLC, long America’s leading anti-white vigilante outfit, has certainly been generating some interesting news this year. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against it, initially in April, amended in June. The core of the original indictment:

• 6 counts of wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343)

• 4 counts of false statements to a federally insured bank (18 U.S.C. § 1014)

• 1 count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering (18 U.S.C. § 1956(h))

(Not primarily for paying monies to questionable groups, as often misrepresented, including, alarmingly, by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at the DOJ Press Conference.)

These financial fraud charges will be extremely difficult to defeat, as chillingly laid out in the middle part of Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud (Bits about Money, May 1^st, 2026.)

Financial fraud laws are exceptionally savage, a hangover from the War on Drugs and the War On Terror. Under them, the only thing that matters is that a bank was misled. Why and to whom the money was paid does not matter.

The SPLC’s best chance is probably nullification by a Leftist judge or jury—admittedly all too possible in such a high-profile political case as this.

Consequently it is a puzzle to me why the DOJ is laying so much emphasis on the marginally relevant but headline-grabbing issue of the curious payments to supposed right-wingers for information or perhaps influence. DOJ is asserting this defrauded the SPLC’s donors. This may be be more of a stretch legally.

And a July 7, 2026, Washington Examiner story SPLC arraigned on superseding charges of donor fraud by Mia Cathell added the disturbing fact:

For the charged offenses, the SPLC faces up to 30 years in federal prison, a $1 million fine, and any applicable order of restitution. U.S. attorney Kevin Davidson, however, noted during the arraignment hearing that the SPLC is “a corporate defendant” and would not be subject to imprisonment as the federal statute stipulates in most fraud cases.

This very much puzzles old VDARE.com hands like myself. New York Attorney General Letitia James in her effort to destroy VDARE has filed against both the VDARE Foundation and Lydia and Peter Brimelow personally. (She is not alleging bank fraud. It’s a civil case).

The Federal financial fraud laws are intentionally designed to victimize individuals as well as institutions. In fact, their basic operational method is to terrify individuals into betraying their associates.

That the individuals pseudonymously named in the complaint are not being sued personally raises alarming questions about the seriousness of the DOJ. Merely fining the $829 million-asset SPLC a trivial $1 million is a bad joke.

Of course, these periphery charges have unquestionably hurt the SPLC’s public image. One of the startling stories arising from the DOJ’s legal offensive was summarized in the New York Post (SPLC boss funneled $1.2 million to lover in neo-Nazi group — pair even had joint bank account, By Chadwick Moore and Isabel Vincent, June 16, 2026):

Based on the details in the June 2 superseding indictment, “Employee-2” is believed to be Heidi Beirich, a 58-year-old fascism expert who was the director of intelligence at the Alabama-based anti-extremism nonprofit between 2012 and 2019.

“[Beirich] was also in a romantic relationship with F-9. During this relationship, [Beirich] and F-9 shared a house and two bank accounts,” the indictment alleges.

“Between 2015 and 2021, approximately $140,000 in donors’ money flowed from the SPLC operating account … and was ultimately deposited into the joint bank accounts held by F-9 and [Beirich].”

Heidi Beirich, now Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder of Global Project Against Hate And Extremism.

Some may find this amusing. But Heidi Beirich was for years one of the $PLC’s main thugs. See Hideous Heidi Beirich’s Bullying Laid Bare.

Perhaps some lawyer out there can explain why an apparent perpetrator—Beirich personally opened some of the fake accounts—who is also the beneficiary of bank fraud would not be charged.

On May 22 2026, I posted Why VDARE called Southern Poverty Law Center the “$PLC”

This recapitulated the $PLC’s astonishing financial success story and reported on its subsequent fall from grace, including founder Morris Dees’s abrupt firing in March 2019 for reasons never fully made public.

I also noted that, over the last few years, a Black takeover of the SPLC has seemingly taken place.

Judging from a screenshot from March 29 2024, posted below, now only four of the 13 Board Members are White (at least three apparently Jewish) and Blacks are in a majority.

In contrast, as recently as 2018, there only three Black members out of 13 and at least eight members appeared to be Jewish.

Moreover, in June 16 the SPLC website posted SPLC Announces Ryan P. Haygood as New President and CEO

Haygood, by an amazing coincidence, is black. Previously for ten years he was President of the New Jersey Institute For Social Justice, an outfit so obscure that it has not earned (or bothered to create) a Wikipedia page (neither has Haygood). The only news stories he has generated appear to be honorific.

The website of Haygood’s New Jersey Institute For Social Justice is as secretive as the SPLC’s. But it does disclose it was

established in 1999 by Alan V. and Amy Lowenstein and a group of visionaries steeped in the Civil Rights Movement.

and that it has appointed an Indian woman, Henal Patel, Interim President & CEO of the Institute.

(Senior Counsel, Nuzhat Chowdhury, and Senior Counsel “Democracy and Justice Reform” Rupal Motwani, are also obviously Indian—three out of the nine officers.)

So basically the Institute For Social Justice is an anti-white advocacy operation which is being forced to utilize “Blacks with Brains” to keep the shop operating.

Symbolically, the longstanding $PLC logo was changed in 2023. The new one dispensed with the Scales of Justice and is straightforwardly Black and White.

These changes at the SPLC have been accompanied by a radical reduction of transparency on the its website, which was historically quite informative. In particular, information about its Directors and Officers has been suppressed.

Yet the changes at the SPLC are significant. I noted in my May 2026 that, starting in 2020, invasions of the SPLC’s fabled “Endowment Fund”—not actually an Endowment Fund as usually understood in charity law but just a pile of money that Morris Dees seemed to like sitting on—had begun.

From Footnote 13 of the 2024 Consolidated Financial Statements (which reported the Endowment Fund at $787 Mm):

During the year ended October 31, 2020, the Board of Directors approved $30 million from the Endowment Fund for the Vote Your Voice initiative…the Board of Directors approved a $100 million investment from the Endowment Fund over the next decade to support voter outreach…The commitment…marks a more-than-threefold increase…pledged in 2020.

The total Vote Your Voice expense for the year ended October 31, 2024, was $14,068,100 (total $41,964,614 for four years).

Footnote 13 does not directly state when the “investment,” which of course is just a subsidy to black political activists, was voted. But I do not believe that any distributions from the “Endowment Fund” were ever allowed when Morris Dees was in control (ended 2019).

It is axiomatic, and has been underlined by the recent Somali and BLM funding scandals (see here and here and here), that showering money on Black-controlled outfits just enables fraud.

If anyone is dubious of the political importance of the $SPLC case, or of the organization’s tremendous power of the $PLC, I commend the section Data products and mechanistic decisioning in Bits about Money’s definitive essay Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud mentioned above.

This nauseatingly explains that from 2017

The SPLC formed a coalition to gain account- and transaction-level decisionmaking capability at tech companies, financial infrastructure firms, and banks through a coordinated pressure campaign… Industry participants describe the coalition participants as threatening their employers, openly and by implication.

In effect, the SPLC effectively gained veto power of access to financial services over an amazingly wide range of institutions. Political opponents were systematically targeted. This may well explain the tremendous loss of services that VDARE.com suffered in those years.

The Biden totalitarian coup was communist in content, because it was egalitarian and anti-identitarian, but fascist in form, because like Mussolini it co-opted corporate insititutions.

Bits about Money points out that the SPLC’s ludicrous reputation for holiness amongst the sheeple was key to this:

Industry participants… when the cameras are not rolling, when there is nothing to gain, repeatedly described the SPLC to me as being on the side of the angels.

Destroying this totally fallacious reputation is of course definitely in the interest of Americans. And there has already been some evidence this process has started.

But will the process be completed? The redoubtable Sam E. Antar, without whom the Letitia James mortgage fraud case would never have been assembled, suspects Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of having sabotaged that litigation.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche

Is Blanche, a former Democrat, reluctant to charge home against Democratic icons?

For my own part, having closely observed VDARE’s litigation experiences (and for that matter President Trump’s) has eliminated any confidence in the integrity of the American judicial system. Especially when any whiff of politics is involved.

However I do have confidence in Black behavior in financial matters.

Consequently, I have been eagerly awaiting the posting of the SPLC’s Audited Financial Statement and IRS Form 990 for their FY ended 10-30-2025.

Hurry up, $PLC!

p.s. For the record, my major, exhaustive but still-relevant, VDARE.com analyses of the SPLC phenomenon were

· The Good News: SPLC loses $50 Million. Bad news: $PLC can afford it 04/08/2009

· Will The Southern Poverty Law (And Investing) Center Return Its Madoff Money? 05/20/2010

· Is The Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) The Next Financial Bubble? 06/01/2011

Significantly, the SPLC has now disabled its website’s links to the financial reports that I cited here. What is the new regime trying to hide?

Sign up for Patrick Cleburne’s free substack here.

As soon as I got the sad news of Jim Goad’s passing (read Greg Johnson’s powerful obituary), I posted in homage the 2020 video interview I did with him—part of the VDARE “Social Distancing” series that the YouTube Tech Totalitarians subsequently nuked without warning as part of their campaign to rig the election for Joe Biden.

But the last time I saw Jim Goad in person, alas, was way back in January, 2017. He saluted me in the interminable security line that we all had to go through to attend Donald J. Trump’s Inauguration Ceremony.

I was there because Lydia had told me we should go. And she was right: it provided me with a key, and subsequently all-too-vindicated, insight into the unreported communist fury building on the Left: “It Will Come To Blood”—Reflections On The Left’s Anti-Trump Inauguration Tantrum, Jan 22, 2017.

But why had Jim Goad and his lady come all the way up from Georgia? He quite obviously, to put it mildly, had no hope of preferment.

I suspect that, at a deep level, Goad was genuinely moved by Trump’s implicit appeal to the heroes of his 1997 book: The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats.

Goad, unfortunately, only wrote one piece for VDARE.com, a famous attack on J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. I’ve posted it below, emphasizing the passages in which Goad points to Trump’s appeal.

I must say that, although I now live in Appalachia and see the very real white social dysfunction Vance described, I didn’t think on reading/listening to Vance’s book that he was quite as dismissive as Goad thought. But of course, Goad—notoriously touchy— had reason to be hypersensitive.

Nevertheless, Goad was writing for us in 2018. Back then, he may well have thought, quite reasonably, that Vance aimed to emerge as a sort of neoconservative equivalent of Maine Democrat faux Great Blue Collar Hope Graham Platner.

But Goad outlined where he thought Vance was deficient.

But subsequently, in 2022, Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate with Trump’s endorsement. In 2024, Trump chose him as running mate.

And Vance has emerged as an articulate immigration patriot. He’s been particularly effective in defending the pro-Redneck agenda as suggested by Jim Goad: i.e. tightening up the labor market e.g. here.

I am also informed, by the recent Maggie Haberman/ Jonathan Swan book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, that Vance not only opposed Trump’s attack on Iran—but also, in my view more importantly, urged the invocation of the Insurrection Act in Minnesota.

J.D. Vance has a lot of critics on the right. They may be right. But I’m not sure that Jim Goad would agree with them.

Vance’s HILLBILLY ELEGY: A Dissent From Personal Experience,

by Jim Goad, VDARE.com, August 31 2018

As a clueless press stabbed its way through the darkness during the 2016 presidential campaign trying to suss out why all the yahoos were suddenly so ornery, many pointed to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy as a moving and poignant explication of the malignant psychology that had gripped America’s heartland.[Review: In ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ a Tough Love Analysis of the Poor Who Back Trump, By Jennifer Senior, NYT, August 10, 2016] I come from a similar background to Vance, but for all of his book’s alleged “poignance” and “compassion,” he strikes me more as a traitor and snitch toward hillbillies than an advocate.

I’ve been aware of Hillbilly Elegy since its release, just as I’d been aware of Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America and The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Out of the Dark, which was written by three moronic comedians. All three books were released in 2016, which was 19 years after Simon & Schuster released my book The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats.

Vance’s chief heresy was to portray Appalachia’s feral hillbillies—those blood-crazed subhuman river rats from Deliverance who’ve served as cultural and cinematic arch-villains for generations now—as human. It should tell you something about how far-gone American cultural discourse is that merely portraying common middle American human beings as human is considered radical.

Unfortunately, that’s about as radical as it gets. Although Vance often speaks with fondness of the gun-toting, foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, drug-addled crackers in his grandparents’ home base of Breathitt County, KY, he ends up placing most of their problems squarely at their own bunion-covered feet. Their problems can’t be genetic, he argues, because both he and his sister were able to crawl up from the meth-stained squalor and make something of themselves. Their problems can’t be blamed on the government for reasons he never quite explains beyond suggesting that people who blame the government for any of their problems are dodging the fact that everything is basically their own fault. So although he concedes that the oft-maligned rubes from flyover country are human, he concludes that for the most part, they are bad humans.

By Vance’s own admission his book is a personal memoir and not a scholarly study. It’s a linear tale describing how economic forces drove his family out of Kentucky and into a southern Ohio factory town. Battered both emotionally and mentally by his violent, drug-addicted mother, Vance finds his chief advocate in his “Mamaw”—a fiercely protective and aggressively violent grandmother who preaches hard work, clean living, and knocking the teeth out of anyone who gets in your way.

After a youth mostly spent being shunted from place to place as his mother descended from alcohol to pills to heroin while parading a series of unsuitable male suitors in front of Vance and his sister, he finally found solace by moving in with Mamaw and focusing on his education. Four years in the Marines gave him the structure that was absent in the hollers of Breathitt County, KY and the grey little factory burg of Middletown, OH. He ultimately was accepted into Yale’s law school and married an Indian woman (dot, not feather) named Usha.

The end of the book finds him a lawyer, successful author, and father of a mixed-race baby who lives in a comfortable bourgeois enclave far removed from the chaos and dysfunction of his youth.

Although he gives credit to his Mamaw, he largely seems to take most of the credit himself—he wriggled out of the benighted hill folk’s “learned helplessness” because he had the smarts and the gumption to do it, and, by gum, he’s not a statistical anomaly, he’s an example-setter for all the despicable Oxycontin junkies and welfare leeches who languish in self-inflicted pain far from the nation’s media centers.

I could relate to many things in Vance’s book—mainly, the fuming agony of being raised by a working-class parent who was not only violent, they cared more for intoxicants than for their own spawn. For Vance, both the violence and the addiction were embodied in his mother, as his father was a no-show almost from the start. Although both my parents were violent, my father was the hopeless alcoholic, and I feel the addiction was more systemically damaging to me than the violence was.

Then again, my father was the oldest of four boys in an Appalachian town in Vermont during the Great Depression. His father, who abandoned the family after popping out four kids with my Grammy Goad, was allegedly the town drunk and was fond of blasting off his shotgun inside the house to terrify the kids. I never met my paternal grandfather and couldn’t even tell you his first name, but I was made aware that even before reaching puberty, my dad had to work to help support his mom and three brothers.

And while I was growing up, my father worked two full-time jobs—one as an oil-refinery foreman and one as a freelance plumber—an insane burden which likely contributed to his death at age 59. Dad also drank a full bottle of either Scotch or whisky every day and never spared the rod nor spoiled any of his four kids.

Nature v. nurture is such a sticky subject. Although I’d like to believe in free will and I deeply dread the very idea that we’re all automatons, I partially blame my father and I partially blame his life circumstances. I like to believe that even if you took the cream of New England’s Protestant nobility and raised them in a mountain shack with a father who blasted shotguns to terrify them, forced them to toil endlessly at menial labor before they even kissed a girl, made them fight in the Battle of the Bulge for reasons that were unclear to them, and then set them on a path that had them cleaning toilets and working oil rigs for 80 hours a week every week of their adult life, in most cases they’d be sufficiently shell-shocked to develop some addictions and to occasionally lash out with violence.

Trying to isolate blame on a single cause is a fool’s errand, yet people can’t seem to resist the temptation. In my dad’s case—as in his dad’s case and probably generations of dads before him—I suspect that a combination of personal failings and situational pressures can be blamed.

Yet when Vance takes a bleak look at the rotten-toothed, opiate-addled, food-stamp-slinging people who apparently didn’t have the smarts or character to lift themselves out of their environment like he did, he can’t seem to bring himself to blame anyone but the hillbillies. Rising addiction and suicide rates among this population, along with its unprecedented drop in longevity rates, is solely framed as a moral failing—it can’t possibly be pinned on the fact that politicians sold all the middle- and working-class jobs overseas and imported millions of hostile nonwhite proles to snap up the remaining low-paying jobs.

All the despair he observes is blamed on some vague spiritual sickness rather than on material realities. His diagnosis is no less scolding or condescending than Barack Obama’s finger-wagging about rural losers who bitterly cling to guns and Bibles.

Although he self-identifies as a conservative, Vance sends little moralistic smoke signals throughout the book that indicate he’s entirely under the thrall of liberal thought-policing. He repeatedly refers to racism, sexism, and homophobia as if they were leprosy. He speaks of Barack Obama with a reverence that is so squirrelly, it borders on Chris Matthews’s infamous line about a thrill going up his leg. He suggests that rural Americans who distrust a media who openly hate and defame rural Americans are simply paranoid and uneducated.

And this, I suspect, is why so many have found his book to be palatable—he unquestioningly parrots all the reigning pieties spewed out by the coastal elites whose policies have eviscerated rural America.

I recently caught a glimpse of Vance on CNN complaining that Donald Trump doesn’t offer any real solutions to what ails America’s poor white underclass.

But to my knowledge, Trump is the only major presidential contender in memory to even address outsourcing as a major factor in rural America’s pathologies.

Trump is also the only one who even bothers to mention the opioid crisis. Trump’s brand of economic nationalism seems like a far more pragmatic solution to rural poverty than Vance’s exasperatingly vague admonition of “Don’t be a bad person.”

And for all that Vance is presumed to speak for the anguished rural hordes of southern Ohio and Kentucky, the hillbillies seem to prefer Trump’s solutions.

In 2016, his grandparents’ breeding ground of Breathitt County, KY gave 62.5% of their votes to Trump. Middletown, OH, where Vance spent most of his youth, straddles two counties—one of those counties went for 61% for Trump and the other went 65% for Trump.

Vance is obviously writing what a lot of people want to hear, but it doesn’t seem to be what the hillbillies themselves want to hear. Part of this may be blamed on the fact that a lot of them are hopeless fuckups who refuse to take any personal responsibility, but part of it can also be blamed on the fact that they aren’t as dumb as they seem and are at least wise enough to perceive that the federal government views them as an obstacle rather than a constituency.

Yes, our choices matter. But they aren’t the entire picture, nor are they the entire solution. But I’m sure the coastal elites are happy that J.D. Vance blamed the hillbillies rather than the coastal elites.

In 2020, I interviewed Jim as part of our new Social Distancing video series, started at the urging of the indefatigable Paul Kersey (who is also the moving spirit of our current Tuesday night Life In The Alien Nation X Space series e.g. here).

Subsequently the Social Distancing videos were all nuked, without any warning, by the Tech Totalitarians at YouTube in their drive to elect Biden.

But our heroic videographer retrieved this copy.

(VDARE videos, still being made despite Letitia James, are now hosted at our Rumble Channel).

More on Jim Goad later.

I recently discussed SCOTUS’ treasonous Anchor Baby decision (but n.b it’s narrow—it hangs by a 5-4 thread, as VP J.D. Vance has said) with James Edwards on his POLITICAL CESSPOOL radio show here.

James Edwards has been a loyal friend of VDARE.com and a fellow inhabitant of the Dissident Right catacomb for many years.

As with my other recent podcast appearances on the issue here, here, here, here, we covered a lot of surprisingly variegated territory. But my basic point: it’s a huge victory that the Anchor Baby issue has finally gotten into political debate. Now it can be dealt with, by statute or by Constitutional Amendment. Let’s fight it out!

(Right, Congressional GOP? Hello?)

One issue that James Edwards and I focussed on: the Anchor Baby issue is ultimately about who enters the Political Nation—i.e. who gets to vote. Implicitly, the SCOTUS female consensus (counting Chief Justice Roberts) means that the U.S.-born children of the Biden Rush should ultimately be given the right to vote. Needless to say, this is just another attack on the Historic American Nation.

As it happened, Counter Currents Editor Greg Johnson simultaneously addressed this issue in his July 13 essay Disenfranchisement.

Greg was discussing the disenfranchisement of e.g. felons and other categories who already technically have the right to vote.

In contrast, James Edwards and I were discussing how to prevent illegal aliens from ultimately diluting (through their U.S.-born children) Ameericans’ right to vote.

But whatever. There are at least two examples of disenfranchisement in the Anglosphere: in the U.S., the elimination of black voting by white Southerners after Reconstruction; in South Africa, the elimination of Cape Colored voting, enshrined in 1909 U.K. South Africa Act, after Afrikaners got control in 1948.

Not pretty. But they wanted to survive as nations.

Then.

Tom Woods is a commendably entrepreneurial righteous Libertarian and he and I go back a long way—I believe I first met him when I spoke at Harvard (!) in the wake of my notorious 1992 “Time To Rethink Immigration?” National Review cover story. I remember him as slim, with long dark hair—I’ve changed a bit too!—and being highly amused when I told a pretty black co-ed who suggested that my immigration skepticism was really about race that OF COURSE IT’S ABOUT RACE!—OF COURSE IT’S ABOUT RACE!!—BECAUSE RACE IS DESTINY IN AMERICAN POLITICS!

He asked her something like: “You’ve not heard that before, have you?”

At least, that’s what I recall. And I’m writing too late at night to check with him now. I know he has to get a small child to go to sleep and I’ve been there. Maybe tomorrow.

Tom is also one of the irritatingly few of my 40-year colleagues in the Conservative/ Libertarian movement who have actually given VDARE.com a platform to defend ourselves against New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ unconstitutional mugging.

We appreciate that.

Tom’s and my discussion on the predictable, disastrous, but easily reversible, 5-4 SCOTUS decision on Birthright Citizenship—and much else!— is here.

In his July 3 address at Mount Rushmore, President Trump upset a lot of people by launching into an attack on “communism.” He said:

Yet as we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack, a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism.

There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty.

It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.

(And there was a lot more where that came from!)

Needless to say, I was delighted. The re-emergence of the term “communism” in American political discourse is one of those rare cultural victories, like the emergence of the War On Christmas concept, won spontaneously in the teeth of intense elite opposition.

I’d like to think that I played a small role in this re-emergence. I discussed the term in a speech I gave to the 2021 Amren conference surveying the early Biden Regime and making the critical point: communism really means totalitarian Leftism, which the Biden Regime was clearly displaying, for example in its persecution of the J6 Martyrs. [Video versions of speech here].

It also includes totalitarian lawfare, which is why I can no longer write this on VDARE.com.

(Extract from

VDARE.com’s Brimelow: “This Is A Communist Coup. But White America Is On The Move”

first published January 2, 2022)

…we have to recognize that we are in the early stages of a communist coup. It just crept upon us.

Now, there’s some wimps around here who don’t like us using the term “communist” to describe our Biden Regime Rulers. Isn’t that right, Jared? [A loving reference to AMREN’s notoriously authoritarian—all libertarians are authoritarian—Style Sheet.]

In fact, I’m reliably informed that AMREN has banned the use of the term “Cultural Marxists,” which I experimented with for a while because I thought it just more precise.

I was actually converted on this matter by the great John Derbyshire. He regularly used the term “communist” to describe the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio. And when I was looking this up today, I discovered that the de Blasio was actually involved in pro-Sandinista activities in the 1980s, when, of course, that put him on the wrong side of the Cold War.

And the term “communist” is gradually creeping into mainstream discourse. Someone who’s done great work in this area is the podcaster Jesse Kelly, who’s been using it for a long time.

The problem is that we’ve all been subliminally subverted by the McCarthy wars. We think that “communist” has to mean “card-carrying Communist”—that is, a member of the Party (although my understanding is that the party did not actually issue cards).

But in fact, the term “communist” pre-exists formally organized “Communist” parties. Marx used it in his 1848 Communist Manifesto—he said a specter was “haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” At that time, remember, he hadn’t written Das Kapital.

I recently read a famous, really eerie Catholic triumphalist dystopian futurist novel, Lord Of The World. It’s still in print, after over 100 years, and it’s been praised by a number of recent Popes including, oddly, Pope Francis. The author, Monsignor Hugh Benson, was a son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, so it was a huge scandal when he converted. In 1907, Benson was talking about this war between the persecuted Catholics and what he unhesitatingly called “communists” just as a matter of fact. They weren’t visibly Marxists from an economic standpoint—in fact, economic structure doesn’t figure in the novel at all. But they were fanatical totalitarians and anti-Christians.

And that’s the point, I think. You occasionally hear people arguing that well, you know, you can’t call these people “communists” because they don’t know about the Labor Theory Of Value. But the Labor Theory Of Value wasn’t around when Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. The point is that they’re Left Totalitarians. They go back to the Jacobins.

And there’s a constant theme among them: anti-religious, not just totalitarian but Christophobic, and also distinct elements of sexual perversion. Andy Ngo has done wonderful work documenting Antifa in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s astonishing how many of these people actually turn out to be trannies and other forms of deviants.

For example, some of you remember that one of our members got into a fight with an Antifa guy in 2017. Well, I’ve watched this case carefully because I want to see what happened to the perp. The answer was nothing. He turns out to be a tranny. Well, they’re everywhere.

If any of you read Stan Evans’ great book about Joe McCarthy, Blacklisted by History, you end it with a feeling of despair—because McCarthy had been defeated and the Communists were still operating. It’s actually a miracle that America won the Cold War.

And there was never a Reckoning for that. McCarthy, of course was vindicated by the Venona intercepts. The FBI actually knew who these people were and had been wiretapping them for years. That’s news that emerged in the 1990s. But the transcription of those Venona intercepts was stopped during the Carter Administration—almost the last thing that Carter did. Why?

The truth is the Democrat Party has always been soft on Communism—because so many of them were implicated. The people that we see in Antifa, they are literally their children.

There’s a whole concept of “Red Diaper Baby.” There’s at least a score of books written about it. They are gloating about it. The fact that they’re the children of Communists—and this case I do mean card-carrying Communists—is not a problem in American politics today. You can test this by looking at recent biographies. Look at Obama—one of his close friends, and people sometimes say his actual father, was Frank Davis, a black Communist. Obama’s book was reportedly ghosted by Bill Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground communist terrorist group in the 1980s. Ayers was, of course, rewarded by being made a tenured professor at the University of Illinois—Chicago.

Look at Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. Kaine was also involved with the Sandinistas in the 1980s. That’s not something you just did out of moral fervor. It you meant you were on the wrong side of the Cold War. But it’s never been seriously raised by the Republicans. Tim Kaine‘s son is a member of Antifa; he was actually arrested for throwing explosives, firecrackers in an Antifa riot at the Minnesota Capitol in 2017. Needless to say he was let off with just probation.

But you know, these people in the January 6 Mostly Peaceful Protest are not going to be let off with just probation. We have a completely asymmetrical system of Unequal Justice in this country now.

And then there’s the case of Chesa Boudin, the son of David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who went to jail for being involved in the murder of two policemen in a robbery. He was then adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who were also members of the Weather Underground. And he’s now the District Attorney in San Francisco, where he’s systematically not prosecuting criminals.

Michelle Malkin, who is also here today, for which she deserves congratulations—she’s got real courage—wrote a recent savage column, Coward Cuomo’s Last Act Of Treachery, pointing out that the last thing the governor of New York Andrew Cuomo did before he was driven out of office by Me-Tooism was to pardon David Gilbert. In other words, he pardoned somebody who had been convicted of murder and was involved in extensive terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s—including, by the way, bombing the U.S. Capitol, something you never hear of when the Democrats go on about how terrible the Mostly Peaceful Protest was.

Why would he do that? I go back to what I said before—the Democrat Party has always been soft on Communism.

So these Communists are still there. They’re still active. They’re making public policy right now.

My recent appearance on Kevin DeAnna’s Identity Politics is here. We started off with SCOTUS’ predictable Birthright atrocity and how it’s put U.S. patriots in a Sun Tsu-type Death Ground situation—while showing a clear path to victory. But we talk about a lot more, including my theory that, just as there’s Money Illusion that disguises the initial impact of inflation, there’s a Judicial Illusion that causes people to believe that judges are impartial—until they realize they’re not. Which is happening now.

I knew Kevin when he was James Kirkpatrick and wrote great stuff for VDARE.com! He ran the VDARE Book Club until we had to suspend it because of the legal costs inflicted upon us by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ unconstitutional mugging. Kirkpatrick’s archive here.

He has blue eyes too, like Eva Vlaardingerbroek, sort of.

Many thanks for Alex Jones War Room’s Harrison Smith for having me on to discuss the SCOTUS’ Birthright Citizenship atrocity. I think worse is better!—let’s finally get this issue into politics!

Interview starts about 4:00, but if you tune in earlier you will be treated to a European Nationalist presentation featuring Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s astonishing blue eyes.

https://rumble.com/v7c2f7o-war-room-live-3-of-3-tuesday-63026-peter-brimelow-on-birthright-citizenship.html?e9s=src_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_o&sci=e348fee0-5fe3-4155-b1a8-6ab06e29f910

Peter Brimelow writes: I am most grateful to Auron MacIntyre for interviewing me on June 22. It produced an impressive flow of new subscribers to this substack (it’s free, but some heroic individuals paid!). We covered a lot of ground—including my contention that the recent Makerfield byelection, literally held in my and John Derbyshire’s ancestral hearth of Wigan, was actually a strong result for British immigration patriots, masked by poor expectation management and the usual media mendacity. The whole thing is viewable below. But here I’m just transcribing our discussion of the imminent U.S. Supreme Court decision on Birthright Citizenship, the jugular of the Great Replacement, which begins at 43:57.

p.s. I had a haircut today

Peter Brimelow: The other issue, as you have mentioned, is Birthright Citizenship. God knows what the Roberts court is going to do. He’s not distinguished by courage in these areas. But it doesn’t actually matter because what we’re talking about is an Executive Order.

At VDARE.com, we were writing about Birthright Citizenship, the need to cut it off, for 25 years but it never occurred to us that it could be done by Executive Order. We assumed it was going to have to be done by statute, there are ways to do it, or by a Constitutional Amendment. If it was done by Executive Order, that could be reversed,

What we need, of course, is to get this issue into politics, because most Americans have absolutely no idea at all that, if you come here illegally, or even as a tourist, and have a child here, that child’s an American citizen.

And not only do they have no idea about it, when they discover it they get extremely angry. They think that the whole thing is crazy, as of course it is.

That’s why I like the idea of a Constitutional Amendment. That has to be ratified by two-thirds of the states. So in two-thirds of the states, there has to be a fistfight over whether or not we should have Birthright Citizenship.

Make the Democrats stand up and justify it. That’s going to do them no good at all with Americans.

I would like to think that the Trump Administration has a whole battery of responses to a bad ruling---there are both moves to get a Constitutional Amendment and also statutory reform introduced in the House at the moment. They’ve just not been taken up by the Republican leadership.

They should be taken up if this decision goes the wrong way. They should be taken up right away—immediately.

I’d like to think the Trump Administration is well prepared for that, but, you know he’s had all these foreign wars to fight. and stuff like that.

But I am confident Steven Miller is thinking about it.

PETER BRIMELOW writes: SCOTUS watchers are saying it's going to rule against Trump in the current Birthright Citizenship case.

Phooey! SCOTUS is not ruling on Birthright Citizenship per se, but on whether it can be abolished by Executive Order. (Which means that, even if Trump won at SCOTUS, Birthright Citizenship could then be reinstated by next Dem president’s reversing the EO).

Ultimately, a statute or Constitutional Amendment will be necessary to abolish Birthright Citizenship. That’s how we got a federal income tax: a Constitutional Amendment was passed after SCOTUS ruled that an income tax imposed by statute was unconstitutional.

SCOTUS is not God. It can be overruled by the legislative process.

And having to go the statutory/ Constitutional Amendment route is GREAT, because it ensures that the Birthright Citizenship issue will GET INTO PUBLIC DEBATE (you know, like in a democracy)(the Left would lose).

As I just discussed on Auron MacIntyre’s podcast, GOP legislators have already introduced bills into Congress to deal with Birthright Citizenship by statute and by Constitutional Amendment.

I am SURE the Trump Administration is ready to spring into action and endorse these bills!

And I am even MORE confident that Stephen Miller is.

This Birthright Citizenship issue was essentially unheard of in public debate when VDARE.com ran its first major analysis back in 2001, posted below. (I must admit that, at that time, the Executive Action solution simply didn't occur to us—it appears to have been subsequently thought up by Michael Anton. But, hey, let 100 flowers bloom). Because the issue was then so revolutionary, we added a VDARE.com introduction.

Weigh Anchor! Enforce the Citizenship Clause

by Nathaniel Parker. First published on VDARE.com, August 31, 2001.

VDARE.com comments: Get ready to hear more about amnesty (or whatever they’re calling it now) when Mexico’s Fox visits America’s Bush next week. Already the Bush Administration’s admission that it intends to connive at the continued colonization of the United States by contemplating another, bigger, amnesty, has caused muttering amongst the American peasantry. It has even been necessary to call out the guard dogs, such as the Wall Street Journal‘s Paul Gigot, to snarl the serfs back into appropriate subservience.

But it is crucial to realize that in reality amnesty is already being granted in slow motion - merely by the reconquistas and their peers being permitted to live and have children here. This is because of a wrong-headed interpretation of the 14^th Amendment. As Nathaniel Parker explains below, no such interpretation was ever intended by the Reconstruction Congress.

Because any baby born in America is deemed currently to have an absolute right to American citizenship, his parents, siblings, and ultimately his extended family obtain an enormously enhanced ability to be here. ‘Family Reunification,’ rather than skill sets, and sentimentalism rather than self-interest, being the themes of immigration policy, this “Anchor Baby” effect rips a huge chasm in effective immigration control.

Fixing this flaw deserves utmost priority. No responsible political leader could consider an amnesty otherwise. Could they?

The problem could be eliminated either by sensible judges, if such items exist, or by Act of Congress. A Constitutional amendment is not required. Political will is.

This is probably the most serious article that VDARE has published.. But, hey, it’s a long weekend. And we figure, the great glory of the Internet is that it can handle any level of seriousness. We offer it as a resource. Bookmark for future reference!

Nathaniel Parker:

One simple reform would end a powerful incentive luring would-be illegal aliens from around the world to the United States: adjust the currently tortured interpretation of the right to citizenship expressed in the 14^th Amendment. Absurdly, current federal policy is to confer American citizenship automatically on any child (with very narrow exceptions, none applicable to illegal aliens) born within the United States. The legal status of the parents is deemed irrelevant. We must accept that a baby born to foreign parents five minutes after they crept over the border illegally is just as American as a baby whose parents are both Americans and U.S. citizens and whose ancestors have been here 350 years.

This new “American” is not the end of the story, either. The U.S.-born child becomes an anchor in American soil that will permit his parents and minor siblings to remain and, later, his grandparents, aunts, uncles, in-laws and all of their children to immigrate legally, not to mention any friends and acquaintances from home who may follow them illegally. All of their children born here will also be considered American citizens. Neither the Census Bureau nor the INS can say how many aliens have availed themselves of this gift already. We can only be sure that many millions more will also, unless Americans end it.

This perversion of American citizenship, commonly called “birthright citizenship,” is the result of the federal government and judiciary’s willful misinterpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[i] In truth, the Citizenship Clause confers nothing so broad. The plain language of the 14^th Amendment does not grant automatic birthright citizenship. A review of the Senate debate before the 14^th Amendment’s ratification makes clear that the Citizenship Clause’s proponents were careful to preclude any automatic grant of citizenship based only on birth within the territory of the United States.

Some legal theorists, along with those who favor unrestricted immigration, argue that only another amendment to the Constitution would be constitutionally adequate to end automatic birthright citizenship. That is wrong. All we need do is read (and enforce) the Citizenship Clause as written. Legislation to enforce the limits inherent in the Citizenship Clause is well within the Congress’ constitutional power. As the 14^th Amendment itself explicitly states: “The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”[ii]

The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

The first sentence of the 14^th Amendment says:

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. [emphasis added]

To hold that the Citizenship Clause confers birthright citizenship on anyone born in the United States is to ignore the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”: a selective misreading of plain English. No argument rooted in the Constitution can support automatic birthright citizenship. The only question is how broadly to read the jurisdiction phrase in the Citizenship Clause. Logic, assisted by the Senate floor debate, answers this. The U.S. Supreme Court has since clouded the picture with its relatively few rulings on the Citizenship Clause, but despite what we are often encouraged to believe by some justices and law professors, the Constitution does not mean only what the Supreme Court says it does. Even so, the Court has never held that the Citizenship Clause automatically confers U.S. citizenship on all children born within the territory of the United States.

The Ratification Debate

The 14^th Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, is the second of the three Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution ratified in the years immediately following Union victory in the War Between the States. A primary concern of the amendment’s proponents was the extension of civil rights to recently freed slaves. Senators feared that state legislatures would assert that, not having been born U.S. citizens, emancipation did not make freedmen citizens of their states (hence of the United States; state citizenship was a prerequisite to U.S. citizenship). To forestall any denial of citizenship to freed blacks and to overturn the Dred Scott decision[iii] explicitly, the 14^th Amendment’s proponents introduced the Citizenship Clause.

Nevertheless, they were well aware that a blanket grant of birthright citizenship was not consistent with American tradition and could lead to a demographic transformation in the event of high immigration. To prevent it, the senators included the jurisdiction phrase. The floor debate[iv] reveals their concerns and their views of how far birthright citizenship should extend.

Introducing the proposed amendment, Senator Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan stated that he believed the Citizenship Clause was “simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural and national law, a citizen of the United States.” He went on to say specifically whom he considered that natural and national law excluded:

This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.

The only, tenuous, way to read Senator Howard’s statement to support birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens or, indeed, most legally resident aliens is to assume that the only foreigners or aliens he meant are those belonging to the families of diplomats. The simpler reading is to construe the sentence as what it is: a list of excluded categories.

Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin was troubled by Howard’s language, not because he wanted to find a way to include any foreigners or aliens, but because he wanted to ensure that American Indians remained excluded. Howard (and, ultimately, the Senate) thought Doolittle’s proposed clarification unnecessary. As Howard pointed out:

Indians born within the limits of the United States, and who maintain their tribal relations, are not, in the sense of this amendment, born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They are regarded, and always have been in our legislation and jurisprudence, as being quasi-foreign nations.

It is, or should be, clear that language denying citizenship to people born within the United States on the theory that they were subject to ‘quasi-foreign nations’ must exclude the children of people who have broken this country’s laws in entering it, and whose whole allegiance is to entirely foreign nations.

Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania spoke at length about the limits of citizenship and the rights of states (and, by extension, the federal government: senators in 1866 still acknowledged that the powers of the federal government were those expressly delegated to it by the states in the Constitution) to control who may enter from abroad:

[A foreigner in the United States] has a right to the protection of the laws; but he is not a citizen in the ordinary acceptance of the word.

It is perfectly clear that the mere fact that a man is born in the country has not heretofore entitled him to the right to exercise political power. … I have supposed … that it was essential to the existence of society itself, and particularly essential to the existence of a free State, that it should have the power, not only of declaring who should exercise political power within its boundaries, but that if it were overrun by another and a different race, it would have the right to absolutely expel them.

I do not know that there is any danger to many of the States in this Union; but is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration…? Are they to be immigrated out of house and home by Chinese? I should think not. It is not supposed that the people of California, in a broad and general sense, have any higher rights than the people of China; but they are in possession of the Country of California, and if another people, of different religion, of different manners, of different traditions, different tastes and sympathies are to come there and have the free right to locate there and settle among them, and if they have an opportunity of pouring in such an immigration as in a short time will double or treble the population of California, I ask, are the people of California powerless to protect themselves? … As I understand the rights of the States under the Constitution at present, California has the right, if she deems it proper, to forbid the entrance into her territory of any person she choose who is not a citizen of some one of the United States.

His terms might seem impolitic today. But what Senator Cowan would think of the current interpretation of the Citizenship Clause is clear. Cowan took pains to point out that he was not denying the human or civil rights of foreigners generally; his concern was with their relation to the United States:

I wish to be understood that I consider those people to have rights just the same as we have, but not rights in connection with our Government. If I desire the exercise of my rights, I ought to go to my own people, people of the same beliefs and traditions, and not thrust myself in upon a society of other men entirely different in all those respects from myself. I would not claim that right.

The notion that an accident of geographic location at birth could confer U.S. citizenship on someone whose family had no prior connection to the United States, no attachment to America other than presence on its soil at that moment, was utterly alien to Senator Cowan and his colleagues. What Senator Cowan would think of the Mexican government’s recent demands of the United States with respect to the millions of its citizens now in the United States illegally (blanket amnesty plus guest-worker programs; Spanish-language schooling at American taxpayer expense; full access to all American social welfare programs, again at American taxpayer expense) is equally clear.

Senator John Conness of California, an Irish immigrant himself, was less worried than Cowan about the disruptive potential of birthright citizenship. Speaking of the Chinese of his day, he said:

[I]t is only in exceptional cases that they have children in our State; and therefore the alarming aspect of this provision to California, or any other land to which the Chinese may come as immigrants, is simply a fiction in the brains of persons who deprecate it, and that alone.

Cowan seems to have been a better prophet than Conness. Could Conness have foreseen the Mexican (and Chinese) population explosion of the Twentieth Century and the attendant demographic pressure on California and the rest of the country, he probably would not have been so sanguine.

The Senate expanded its debate of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the context of American Indians. Most Indians were people present (and bearing children) within the United States who had never been considered citizens, because generally they were not considered subject to the jurisdiction of any state; Indians who had become assimilated (and become taxpayers) in a state were considered citizens. Senator Doolittle emphasized the weighty consequences of granting citizenship:

[C] itizenship, if conferred, carries with it, as a matter of course, the rights, the responsibilities, the duties, the immunities, the privileges of citizens, for that is the very purpose of this constitutional amendment to extend. … [I]n the Constitution as [the Founding Fathers] adopted it they excluded the Indians who are not taxed; not enumerate them, indeed, as part of the population upon which they based representation and taxation; much less did they make them citizens of the United States.

Doolittle was especially concerned to ensure that the citizenship clause not be read to confer citizenship on Indians, even those on reservations receiving food from the War Department and, in his view, to that limited extent subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. In response, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, dismissed any notion that the Citizenship Clause could be read that way:

[I]t is very clear to me that there is nothing whatever in the suggestions of the Senator from Wisconsin. The provision is, that “all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” That means “subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof.” [emphasis added] Now does the Senator from Wisconsin pretend to say that the Navajo Indians are subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States? By no means. We make treaties with them. … It cannot be said of any Indian who owes allegiance, partial allegiance if you please, to some other Government [by which Trumbull means his tribe] that he is “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” … It is only those persons who come completely within our jurisdiction, who are subject to our laws, that we think of making citizens; and there can be no objection to the proposition that such persons should be citizens. [emphasis in original]

Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland (the lone Democrat among the Senators quoted; all the others were Republicans in this Reconstruction Senate) was less certain than his colleagues that the proposed amendment clearly excluded Indians not taxed, but wished to clarify how American citizenship was created. He accepted that birthright citizenship for the children of U.S. citizens was natural and the appropriate norm, but worried that the proposed amendment might be read too broadly:

Now, all this amendment provides is, that all persons born in the United States and not subject to some foreign power – for that, no doubt, is the meaning of the committee who have brought the matter before us – shall be considered as citizens of the United States. … I am, however, by no means prepared to say, as I think I have intimated before, that being born within the United States, independent of any new constitutional provision on the subject, creates the relation of citizen to the United States. [emphasis in original]

Johnson went on to quote from the Civil Rights Act of 1866[v], which had just passed. He considered that its wording better expressed what the Citizenship Clause was meant to achieve: “That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign Power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens.” [emphasis added] None of his colleagues, not least Senator Howard, the Citizenship Clause’s proponent, disagreed.

The Citizenship Clause in the Supreme Court

The Citizenship Clause has been surprisingly little litigated. Supreme Court opinions construing it have almost all addressed the question of when and why a U.S. citizen, whether native or naturalized, may be stripped of his citizenship. The Court has held that U.S. citizenship, once conferred, cannot easily be taken away. The current interpretation (in which Justice Hugo Black, one of the Warren Court’s more creative jurists, read meaning into the 14^th Amendment that is not there) is that U.S. citizenship can never be involuntarily relinquished.[vi] More importantly, just as the Court maintains that the government cannot unilaterally strip a U.S. citizen of his citizenship, an individual cannot unilaterally decide to be a U.S. citizen. Citizenship is not self-selected: it is granted on the basis of qualification for it. Throughout the Supreme Court’s citizenship jurisprudence runs a thread of reciprocity between the individual and the nation, subject to the principle that no one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent.

No Automatic Birthright Citizenship: The Case of American Indians

In 1884, the Supreme Court ruled on the applicability of the Citizenship Clause to an American Indian. [vii] John Elk was an Indian born within the territory that some years later became the state of Nebraska. At statehood in 1867, Nebraska limited the franchise to adult male citizens who had been bona fide resident in Nebraska for all of the previous six months prior to an election. In 1880, Elk sought to vote in a Nebraska election, claiming U.S. citizenship on the basis of the Citizenship Clause. At the time he had been living in Omaha for more than a year and had renounced his tribal affiliation. When his case finally reached it, the Supreme Court rejected Elk’s claim to citizenship.

In its opinion the Court applied the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” phrase, interpreting it in light of its ratifiers’ Senate debate:

The evident meaning of [the jurisdiction phrase] is not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance. Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States … although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more ‘born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ within the meaning of the [Citizenship Clause], than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government…

In Elk, the Supreme Court was true to the meaning of the Citizenship Clause, both as its drafters wrote it and, from the Senate debate, as they evidently meant it. The opinion makes clear that the status of the parents of a child born within the territory of the United States determines whether or not the child is eligible for U.S. citizenship. To qualify the child for citizenship, his parents must be “completely subject” to the jurisdiction of the United States and must owe “direct and immediate” allegiance to the United States.

The obvious corollary to being completely subject to the jurisdiction of one nation and owing it direct and immediate allegiance is that one can have no conflicting obligations to another. In Elk, the competing sovereign to which John Elk was held to have disqualifying allegiance was his tribe, even though he had renounced membership in it. The legality of Elk’s presence in the United States was not an issue; his right to be in Nebraska was not disputed.

In the case of illegal aliens, the illegality of their presence in the United States is not in dispute. They remain entirely subject to the jurisdiction of their home countries, the only nations to which they owe direct and immediate allegiance. To reason that, through breaking the laws of the United States by entering and remaining illegally, an illegal alien has somehow transferred his allegiance from his home country to the United States is absurd. One does not pledge allegiance to any republic by entering it uninvited and flouting its laws through his continued presence. It is more absurd still to allege that, by breaking into its territory, the illegal alien subjects himself willingly to the jurisdiction of the nation he has invaded. The only jurisdiction to which he is willingly subject, if any, is that of his own country, which does not renounce its claim on his allegiance or its right to exercise jurisdiction over him merely because he has chosen to be a squatter somewhere else. The Mexican government’s activism on behalf of all Mexicans in the United States (even those with U.S. citizenship) is the example of greatest concern to Americans, but not the only one.

Proponents of amnesties for illegal aliens may argue that, by analogy to the former denial of citizenship to “Indians not taxed,” illegal aliens effectively subject themselves to U.S. jurisdiction by paying sales tax when they buy things in the United States. Even ignoring their massive evasions of federal and state income tax, the argument is a red herring. The only meaningful subjection to the jurisdiction of the United States that an illegal alien can make is his prompt surrender to the INS. The Supreme Court in Elk denied birthright citizenship to a man with far stronger links to America than any illegal alien; a man who was resident in compliance with American law. The Court did so on the basis of a common-sense reading and application of the Citizenship Clause, one that gives due weight to its jurisdiction phrase and reflects the understanding of its drafters. There is no latitude in that correct interpretation for any grant of U.S. citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal aliens. While the immediate issue in Elk became moot in 1924 with the Congress’ grant of U.S. citizenship to all American Indians in the United States, the Court never overruled Elk and has never repudiated Elk‘s analysis of the Citizenship Clause.

Birthright Citizenship for Legal Immigrants’ Children? The Supreme Court Overreaches

It is clear that the Citizenship Clause does not justify granting citizenship to illegal aliens’ U.S.-born children. Does it justify granting citizenship to the U.S.-born children of legally resident aliens? In a ruling that ignored (while not denying) the Court’s Elk analysis, a later Supreme Court mistakenly held that it does. In 1898, the Supreme Court granted citizenship to Wong Kim Ark.[viii] Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco, was the son of Chinese nationals who were not eligible for U.S. citizenship and who ultimately returned to China. In 1895, Wong Kim Ark returned to San Francisco from a voyage to China and was denied entry on the ground that he was not a U.S. citizen. He sued, and his case made its way eventually to the Supreme Court.

A majority of the Court held that Wong Kim Ark was a U.S. citizen through the operation of the Citizenship Clause. The majority opinion is a lengthy disquisition on the English Common Law understanding of citizenship and how it is acquired, and how those common law antecedents made their way into the laws of the United States. The Court preferred the older English view of jus soli birthright citizenship, which had allowed the Crown to assert jurisdiction over anyone born in England, no matter who his parents were. Paradoxically, an ancient doctrine designed to extend the power of the English crown over as many subjects as possible was invoked to grant U.S. citizenship to a Chinese subject returning to California. The majority gave short shrift to the intent of the Citizenship Clause’s framers. They ignored the fact that, by putting the Citizenship Clause, qualified by the jurisdiction phrase, into the Constitution, the country had deliberately superseded the common law view. They preferred to read the jurisdiction phrase as applying to little more than the children of accredited diplomats.

The dissenting minority paid more attention to the Senate ratification debate, and also noted the language of the contemporaneous Civil Rights Act of 1866, which used the phrase “and not subject to any foreign power” in lieu of the Citizenship Clause’s jurisdiction phrase. While we might criticize the 36^th Congress for poor drafting, it does not make sense to say that the drafters of the essentially simultaneously enacted Civil Rights Act of 1866 and 14^th Amendment meant to create two different standards for U.S. citizenship. The dissenters also noted, correctly, that there is nothing in the wording of the Citizenship Clause or the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that limits the application of the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof/not subject to any foreign power” language only to diplomats or other accredited representatives of foreign governments. Similarly, there is no warrant in the Citizenship Clause for automatic extension of birthright citizenship to the children of aliens legally resident in the United States. They are subject to another jurisdiction: that of their parents’ (and their own) native countries.

In Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court treated the jurisdiction phrase of the Citizenship Clause as almost a nullity. The Court was not in fact ruling on illegal aliens, which is today’s larger problem, but Wong Kim Ark’s over-expansive reading of the Citizenship Clause is substantially to blame for the current mistaken policy of extending birthright citizenship to illegal aliens’ children.

Citizenship for Whom? Applying the Citizenship Clause

There has been no test case yet of the applicability of the Citizenship Clause to illegal aliens. In the current political climate it is very unlikely that there will be one. It is hard to imagine the INS under this Bush Administration (or any Democratic administration) suing to deprive a Mexican child of U.S. citizenship.

The issue is properly one for the Congress, pursuant to its powers under Article I of the Constitution and the explicit grant of Congressional enforcement authority in Section 5 of the 14^th Amendment.

Not all Congressmen are ducking the issue. A number of bills to conform the application of the Citizenship Clause to the way it is written have been introduced in the House of Representatives. The most recent is H.R. 190, introduced by Rep. Robert Stump of Arizona on January 3, 2001. H.R. 190 would deny citizenship to the U.S.-born child of “a mother who is neither a citizen or national of the United States nor admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident.” H.R. 190 would consider such a child as born subject to the jurisdiction of his parents’ country and a citizen of that country and not of the United States.

But H.R. 190 would be only one step in the right direction. The Citizenship Clause gives the Congress more power than that to prevent the unintended gift of U.S. citizenship to foreign nationals’ children born in the United States. At a time of largely uncontrolled immigration into the United States, with social tensions growing and the fragmentation of the national polity ever more likely, the Congress must, within the constraints set by the Citizenship Clause, take control of that most basic element of American civic life: who is and who is not entitled to be a citizen of the United States at birth.

Clearly, under the Citizenship Clause the Congress has no power to deny citizenship to a U.S.-born child of American parents, who is in no way subject to any foreign power. But the truth is, that is all the Citizenship Clause says.

Reasonable legislation to enforce the Citizenship Clause would provide that:

• the child of U.S. citizens, wherever born, is a U.S. citizen;

• the child of a U.S. citizen and a foreign national, wherever born, should be treated as a U.S. citizen until age 18, at which age he must choose between U.S. citizenship and his foreign parent’s citizenship; no dual citizenship allowed;

• the U.S.-born child of legally resident aliens is not a U.S. citizen. If his parents, with whom he then resides and whose dependent he is, should become naturalized U.S. citizens before his 18^th birthday (and he has no criminal record) he may naturalize with them. At 18, he must choose between the U.S. and his ancestral country; no dual citizenship allowed; and

• the U.S.-born child of illegal aliens is not a U.S. citizen, any more than he would be if born in his home country.

These restrictions take into account the concerns that the Citizenship Clause’s drafters had about not devaluing American citizenship and the conflicts inherent in dual allegiance. The denial of birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of foreign nationals, whether legally resident or illegal aliens, is neither a denial of their right to U.S. citizenship (they have none) nor does it render them stateless. They are citizens of their own countries, their parents’ home countries, and entitled to all the privileges and immunities of that citizenship, whatever they may be. These restrictions are constitutional, and would be a foundation on which an intelligent immigration and naturalization policy, one that is in the interest of Americans, and the United States, could be built.

The national character of America is already being eroded by forced multiculturalism. Diversity-driven racial and ethnic preferences are increasing social tensions among Americans. The United States cannot absorb mass immigration in these (or any) circumstances without that character being destroyed. The American prosperity that many immigrants and illegal aliens presumably want will be destroyed with it.

One of the first, and most important, steps to Americans’ reclaiming control of their country’s fate is to make sure that only Americans enjoy the automatic privilege of U.S. citizenship at birth.

************

[i] U.S. CONST. amend XIV, § 1.

[ii] U.S. CONST. amend XIV, § 5.

[iii] Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 577 (1857).

[iv] CONG. GLOBE, 39^th Cong., 1^st Sess. 2890 et seq. (1866). All Senate debate quotes are from the Congressional Globe (precursor of the Congressional Record) for May 30, 1866.

[v] Ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27.(now 42 U.S.C. Sec. Sec. 1981-82).

[vi] Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967).

[vii] Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884).

[viii] United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).

(Video here).

In response, I Quote-tweeted/ Xd

Which reminds me: After the 1996 Dunblane School Massacre, I met then-UK Home Secretary Michael Howard at one of the last of Bill Buckley's Manhattan dinners to which I was invited.

Howard freely admitted that the sweeping handgun ban that his "Conservative" government was pushing through Parliament would punish the innocent, not improve safety, and was actually just a symbolic response to the public Moral Panic.

But he was perfectly OK with that.

He was simply a certain political type.

(And it worked for him—he subsequently became Leader of the Conservative Party, which is full of such types. Still, he never became Prime Minister).

n.b. Rwandan anchor baby Axel Rugakubana carried out the 2024 Southport School Massacre with a knife.

Also: the Dunblane Massacre perp was apparently homosexual. No move to ban that.

(Footnote: An X reader has complained about this parallel. But I meant it to be shocking. The average British gun owner was just as innocent as my critic believes the average homosexual to be. And all are now defenseless in the face of an increasingly totalitarian government).

[PETER BRIMELOW writes: In the next few days, I have to force myself to write a comprehensive update on what’s happened since New York Attorney General Letitita James’ lawfare battered us into suspending the VDARE.com website more than two years ago. Gearing up, I came across this incisive summary of the issues involved, which I missed because it was posted long before Greg Johnson persuaded me to resurface on substack. Two of the point it makes are rarely noted. (1) We fought James’ flagrantly excessive subpoena demands because we wanted to protect the identities of our writers (and donors), which we had every reason to believe she would leak. I still find it incredible that no judge has recognized the obvious First Amendment issue. (2) James was able to inflict the $1 million-plus “investigation” costs that forced us to suspend even before actually suing us. This, of course, is the type of prosecutorial abuse about which I interviewed Paul Craig Roberts in FORBES Magazine over 25 years ago. I didn’t need to experience it first-hand.

Subsequently we have indeed been sued as the VDARE Foundation and also personally. The legal action is accelerating. More later, alas.

VDARE goes down with the ship rather than give up their writers

(First published on Bennett’s Phylactery, April 9, 2024)

The selective prosecution of political enemies is nothing new, but they used to maintain at least the performance of objectivity.

In 2018, New York Attorney General Letitia James publicly campaigned on a promise to target her political enemies, and got puff pieces from NPR and the Washington Post.

Now, she is threatening anti-immigration nonprofit VDARE with bankruptcy unless they divulge the identities of their anonymous writers as part of a subpoena regarding the Berkeley Springs Castle in West Virginia.

Obviously the identities of those writers has nothing to do with the provenance of their property, any more than a New York Attorney General has anything to do with a real estate purchase in West Virginia — but unfortunately VDARE incorporated their nonprofit in New York (back in 1999, when that wasn’t an obviously crazy thing to do), which puts them in Letitia James’ jurisdiction.

Without ever explicitly charging them with any wrongdoing, James has succeeded in bleeding VDARE for over a million dollars. The process is the punishment.

VDARE could, of course, hand over the names of their writers (who would certainly become unemployable in any corporate setting) — but the Brimelows have made the courageous decision to defy the order, and close up shop rather than roll on their people.

Two important lessons from this fiasco:

1. Nonprofit status is dangerous for anyone with unauthorized opinions.

Nothing the Brimelows did was out of the ordinary or at odds with the wishes of their donors — but the accounting and reporting requirements imposed by 501(c)(3) status are onerous, and defending your actions against a hostile and determined State is probably not worth the tax breaks.

Of course, this amounts to a massive subsidy for leftist action in the US through tax-advantaged NGOs — but not much can be done about that until red-state AGs are willing to respond in kind.

2. Minimize your professional and investment exposure to blue jurisdictions.

Incorporating in Delaware was a $55 billion mistake for Elon Musk. Douglass Mackey got a kangaroo court in Brooklyn (despite posting from Manhattan) because the prosecution argued that the data passed through Brooklyn on its way to Georgia and California. Donald Trump’s real estate holdings in New York created the justification for a $454 million penalty (for perspective, his 2016 campaign cost $600 million).

These are high-profile lawfare cases, but even basic property rights are increasingly at risk. Squatting laws have made ownership of real estate — especially rental properties, but in some cases even personal homes — a very dicey proposition in Atlanta, New York, Seattle, and other leftist-controlled cities.

You should get out if you can.

Keith Woods speaking at the Berkeley Springs Castle. We never succeeded in getting Ann Coulter there. But maybe if we can start conferences again…

I’ve been tied up with Discovery resulting from New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ lawfare against us, Land Of The Free. But yesterday I was distracted by a reader’s comment into a displacement-activity exchange that I’ve decided to immortalize here.

Irish internet phenom Keith Woods (his speech to the 2024 VDARE conference is here) recently Noted this on his substack:

Keith Woods 18h @keithwoodspub

Liberals could fatally undermine the “far right” and solve 90% of the problems of immigration by just selecting immigrants from other European countries. It’s the ultimate “solve everything” switch.

The random stabbings, rapes, ethnic ghettos, grievance narratives against natives, elevated crime rates, they all come from importing large non-White populations.

Even Ireland’s former Taoiseach, when he didn’t know he was being recorded, admitted he didn’t have a problem with immigration so much as Africans and Islam. Even if you ignore race, that’s the common sense position of anyone who just looks at the outcomes of immigration policy, but it’s impossible to imagine him ever saying that openly in public life.

But modern liberalism begins from the premise that it is evil to make political judgements on the basis of group identity, so we are permanently trapped in this political dialectic between infinity immigration and secondary arguments about services and integration. Conor’s messaging is much better – import the third world, become the third world!

106 Likes, 12 Replies, 8 Restacks Jun 10 at 6:24 AM

Of course, as Keith knows perfectly well, Western governments would never flip that “solve everything” switch and ban Third World immigration because they HATE the nations (= ethnocultural entities) that they rule and want to deracinate them. But nevertheless I helpfully restacked his idea with a comment:

The much-vilified but unimpeachably sensible 1924 immigration cutoff was based on the assumption that ethnicity matters. And, whatever else you can say about it (a lot), the post-1965 Hart-Cellar immigration inflow has now incontrovertibly confirmed that ethnicity does matter (a lot).

My reader said:

I replied:

But then I realized my reader was actually referring to an Ann Coulter Post in which she had hilariously tortured Google about the absence of straight white Protestant men in the Biden White House that I had also just helpfully Restacked with a comment. They both (this is my excuse) dealt with currently-unmentionable ethnic patterns.

So I followed up with my reader:

Kevin MacDonald’s 2011 article here (for the record, he was brought up an Irish/ German Catholic, just like Lydia) is a very funny account of the DAILY SHOW’s flying him from California to New York to discuss the final disappearance of White Protestants from the U.S. Supreme Court—and the subsequent arbitrary suppression of the interview. Probably the producers genuinely became afraid that WASPS would rise in rebellion with pitchforks and torches if the remarkable fact was publicly Noticed.

So it’s not just Google that doesn’t want to mention the mysterious vanishing Protestants

Of course, they don’t seem to want to mention it themselves.

Race is even more unmentionable. VDARE.com first analyzed the increasingly bipolar racial distribution of the Republican and Democratic parties in 2018. The GOP is de facto the White Party; the Democrats are the party of POCs, Jews, homosxuals.

This means that what amounts to two nations are warring in the bosom of a single state. (A reference to Canadian history, which I think everyone ought to know, dammit).

And this, of course, explains the increasingly zero-sum nature of American politics. One pole of the bipolar electorate might well think it has the chance to conquer the other—and/ or that it can’t afford to lose.

I think this is an interesting development. But I don’t see it discussed.

My final word to my reader:

Meaghan Bowler came all the way from Australia to marry Jesse Jones. He stabbed her multiple times

Kenn Gividen’s computer broke down recently (before VDARE.com’s mugging by NYAG Letitia James, we would simply have bought him a new one), so his April 2026 roundup of America’s ongoing black-on-white homicide Holocaust™ wasn’t published until May 21. Which means his May 2026 survey will appear next week—he’s relentless.

But then, so is America’s black-on-white Holocaust™.

Before VDARE.com was mugged by Letitia James, we used to report Kenn’s roundup of black-on-white homicides under the running head “A Month In The Death Of White America”—example here. It was one of our most popular features. Maybe that’s why James mugged us. But thanks to her lawfare, VDARE.com can no longer pay Kenn. So I urge you subscribe to his substack AbateHate.com—it covers a lot more than black crime— here!

Since the mugging of VDARE.com, I have begun to analyze Kenn’s results separately from his own roundup e.g. my March analysis here. My analysis usually differs somewhat from Kenn’s, partly because of subsequent developments e.g. I’ve found a couple more immigrants this month; and partly because of methodology. Thus I include all of the black-on-white homicides that Kenn discovers in any given month, whereas in May he broke out the older killings that he had found separately (and there are generally a lot of them, only slowly surfacing). So he reports an April total of 43; my total is 53.

My philosophy: it all come out in the wash. Kenn reports Grok says there are 40-50 black-on-white homicides each month, comporting with FBI figures, which means he always misses 10-20. But the intense Regime Media suppression of Politically Incorrect racial hate facts sometimes lessens after the initial furor, e.g. in trials that no-one is monitoring.

Except for us.

The other difference between Kenn and myself: I look for overall themes in the American black-on-white Holocaust™, whereas he lets the appalling truth just speak for itself.

Not for the first time, the theme that leaps out from the April data:

• The absolutely extraordinary number of white women regularly killed by Black Significant Others (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here).

Thus my featured image, above,

is of Meaghan Bowler, who came all the way from Australia to marry Jesse Nichols Jones, also pictured, who then proceeded to stab her multiple times (this is a recurrent aspect of Black Significant Other killings) despite having two children with her.

In other words, even apparently stable Black Significant Other relationships can end in savage homicide.

In contrast, it is vanishingly rare to see the opposite: black women killed by White Significant Others. Kenn found no examples at all in April.

• A related theme: Black Significant Other Collateral Damage, e.g, a white brother trying to protect his sister from a black ex-boyfriend (examples here, here).

To put Black Significant Other killings in perspective: in the 1970s, feminist scholars began whooping up the concept of “femicide,” the killing of women. They never agreed whether this meant all killings of women, or just killings of women for being women. But where is the discussion of Black Significant Other femicide of White domestic partners?

• And if “femicide” does mean the apparently-motiveless black killing of white women, April examples are here, here, here.

Where are the feminist scholars on this?

Other consistent themes:

• Crossfire. Innocent whites die in crossfire between black shooters every month, here, here, here, here.

• White deaths in robberies, here, here, here, here.

• White deaths in illegal drug transactions (bad idea!), here, here.

• Black impulsivity here, here, here.

• Black stupidity as in how could he have possibly expected to get away with this? Here

• Vehicular homicide. Kenn includes these, although it bothers liberal me because they could be genuine accidents. But some of these are indeed plainly criminally reckless here, here,

• Home invasion here.

• Immigrant/ immigrant stock homicides. The Regime Media represses the immigration status of criminals even more sternly than their race. But the recent surge of immigrants is so great that it can be detected because some don’t even have Americanized names— here, here, here, here.

Kenn counted just five white-on-black homicides in April. Obviously this is tellingly disproportionate, given that the white population is (still) so much larger than the black.

One white-on-black homicide was a road rage incident in which the perp has a typically Puerto Rican/ Ashkenazi Jewish name. Another appears to be a confrontation between white and black teenagers.

But we don’t know the details—because local media coverage has ignominiously collapsed, often relying entirely on law enforcement press releases.

This is particularly unfortunate because local media would often report race when the national media was working hard to repress it. But no more.

So please send Kenn Gividen tips by DMing him on his substack Chat, or email him at Abatehate@usa.com.

Blacks, POCs, now majority of $PLC Board

[PETER BRIMELOW writes: Patrick Cleburne was one of VDARE.com’s most valued contributors (his archive here). I particularly liked his analyses of the SPLC’s finances—he was the first to discover that it had an offshore bank account—but he refused to update them because he got bored by its apparent invincibility. Now he has been inspired to return. Sign up for his free substack, where he is Free At Last from my inhibiting editorial hand, here].

PATRICK CLEBURNE: Why VDARE called Southern Poverty Law Center the “$PLC”

We at VDARE always followed the lead of our old friend Paul Craig Roberts in believing that the bank fraud legislation that Congress cooked up 1989-90 supposedly because of the War On Drugs, subsequently enhanced during the War On Terror, is a major infringement of liberty and a big step towards an American Police State.

So it was actually with (somewhat) mixed feelings I heard the news that our tormentors at the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] being indicted for

• 6 counts of wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343)

• 4 counts of false statements to a federally insured bank (18 U.S.C. § 1014)

• 1 count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering (18 U.S.C. § 1956(h))

(Not primarly for paying monies to questionable groups, as often misrepresented, including, alarmingly, by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at the DOJ Press Conference.)

These charges will be extremely difficult to defeat, as chillingly laid out in the early part of Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud (Bits about Money May 1^st, 2026.)

There is also the intriguing question of discovery. As Lydia Brimelow says in It’s All Happening For The SPLC!

Discovery will be a bear for them (I know!). And it could find evidence of tortious interference.

Tortious interference is when A and B have a contractual relationship and C comes along and blows it up, causing damage. Like, to choose an example at random, if VDARE had a conference scheduled at the Cheyenne Mountain Lodge in Colorado Springs, CO, with deposits fully paid up and tickets sold, and the SPLC or their minions intentionally disrupted that conference, causing the Lodge to pay out liquidated damages and VDARE to lose its conference. If that happened, the SPLC could be prosecuted for tortious interference.

Despite these exciting developments, I think it important to remember the first evidence that persuaded some alert members of the general public (its victims and, apparently, some of its employees already knew) that the SPLC was morally depraved. This was the organization’s extremely peculiar handling of its finances, specifically the obsessive squirreling away of a remarkable money mountain.

For three years, in 2009, 2010, and 2011, I posted on VDARE exhaustive analyses of the Financial Reports and Form 990s of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which for obvious reasons I lovingly nicknamed the $PLC. (Form 990 is an extremely intrusive questionnaire which tax-exempt charities (“501(c)(3)s”) have to submit to the Federal Government.)

These articles were:

[A] The Good News: SPLC loses $50 Million. Bad news: $PLC can afford it 04/08/2009

[B] Will The Southern Poverty Law (And Investing) Center Return Its Madoff Money? 05/20/2010

[C] Is The Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) The Next Financial Bubble? 06/01/2011

I followed up in 2017 with a summary and partial update -

[D] Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) Handling Its Loot Even More Strangely 08/31/2017

In this article, for convenience’s sake, I will refer to each below by letter.

The salient fact which emerged from these inspections: the Southern Poverty Law Center was extremely wealthy. Even in the year ending 10-31-2008 dealt with in [A], some $32.4 million was raised from the public and combined assets totaled $191.8 Mm.

A peculiar feature was a $156.2 Mm “Endowment Fund”. As I discussed in [A], almost all of this was (and is) not an Endowment Fund in the legal sense usually meant in the charity world, with only limited and specific disbursements allowed. Instead the pool was entirely at the discretion of the $PLC management, who had chosen to separate it from the operating business for unpersuasive reasons.

The intervening years have been kind to the $PLC. The latest reports, for the year ending 10-31-2024, show “Contributions” of $129.1 Mm, and “Total Assets” of $829.2 Mm including “Endowment Assets” of $738.4 Mm.

I noted in [A] that, even in the financially stressful year of 2008, the $PLC had managed to squirrel away another $4Mm from operating revenue into its “Endowment Fund”—12.3 cents of every dollar contributed. Also, it had committed to pay $8.3Mm to “limited partnerships and LLCs”—apparently held in the “Endowment Fund”—i.e. more than the $8 million it spent on “Legal Services” in 2008!

This by a ”Law Center” mainly famous at the time for politically-motivated lawfare.

No donations were made to help any other Leftist 501(c)(3), although many were hard hit that year.

The “Poverty Palace”—the SPLC’s purpose-built HQ in Montgomery AL

Of course, several writers whom I cite in [A] had already been repelled by the $PLC’s money-grubbing. My favorite is Joan Wypijewski’s scathing advice to her liberal readers in The Nation: (You Can’t Get There From Here, February 26, 2001):

What is the Poverty Law Center doing…? Mainly making money…the center doesn’t devote all of its resources to any kind of fight….A few years ago the American Institute of Philanthropy gave the SPLC an F for ‘excessive’ reserves. [VDARE.com note: as it still does in its December 2008 Rating Guide] So readers, rip up those pledges to the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

(Per Grok, the SPLC still got an F in 2025)

An extraordinary aspect of the $PLC’s squirreling away of assets: the extreme aggressiveness with which the portfolio is managed.

When I looked at their accounts for the year ended 10-31-2009 discussed in [B], I fully expected to find they had sustained losses in the Madoff Ponzi fraud, which collapsed in December 2008. Many charities and endowments did, because the Madoff marketing pitch, extremely stable but adequate returns with a long track record, had great attractions for conservative fiduciaries.

But there were no losses. For the $PLC, what was jokingly called the “Jewish T-Bill” was apparently not what they were looking for.

This was vividly illustrated in the accounts for that year. For the first time, the $PLC disclosed in in its 990 that it had an offshore bank account, in the tax-haven of the Cayman Islands.

Why a tax-exempt entity like the $PLC needs a bank relationship in a tax haven is a mystery. The $PLC is, after all, tax-exempt. And even quite small Hedge Funds groups have mirror on- and off-shore funds which offer the same strategy. Any suggestion that it was necessary to go offshore for a particular management style is implausible.

In [D], I noted a quote reported an excellent article by Joe Schoffstall in the Washington Free Beacon (Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities August 31, 2017)

“I’ve never known a US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services to have any foreign bank accounts,” said Amy Sterling Casil, CEO of Pacific Human Capital, a California-based nonprofit consulting firm… I am stunned to learn of transfers of millions to offshore bank accounts. It is a huge red flag and would have been completely unacceptable to any wealthy, responsible, experienced board member who was committed to a charitable mission who I ever worked with.”

“It is unethical for any US-based charity to invest large sums of money overseas,” said Casil. “I know of no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money in overseas, unregulated bank accounts.”

Fast-forward to the present: in the 990 dealing with the year ending 10-31-2024, the $PLC again admits to having a foreign bank account but curiously fails to answer the follow-up question about location. However, in the section disclosing “Activities Outside The United States” it does report having “Investments” of $30.7 Mm in the “Central America and the Caribbean” region. Maybe not answering the account location question was a clerical error.

By the time I wrote [C] in 2011, I was able to report what the SPLC was doing with these enormous liquid resources.

It was making them illiquid and non-transparent—by moving them into “alternative investments,” investment partnerships of various types. In 2009 75.4% of the investment portfolio was so deployed, up from 49% in 2008—by 2010 the proportion was up to 87% —i.e. substantially all of it.

This policy has been maintained. The latest $PLC Financial Statement, for the year ending 10-31-2024, indicates the proportion described as ‘long-term investments’ was 94.5%.

Why the $PLC has chosen to tie its capital up in this illiquid way is a puzzle to me. In fact, why it has chosen to amass so much money at all is also a mystery. Personal enrichment seems, I think, to be ruled out by the extremely rigorous nature of the 990 (assuming there is not outright misrepresentation). And it has to be said that the salaries paid to senior executives, while high perhaps for inexpensive Montgomery AL, are not huge by non-profit standards. Margaret Huang, President and CEO during the latest reporting period, was paid a total of just $522,740. And the directors have never been paid fees. Far more egregious cases exist in the world of charities.

Perhaps Morris Dees, the founder of the $PLC, and J Richard Cohen, the long-time President, the architects of this strange organization, enjoyed being money managers and effectively Fund-of Fund executives? It is certainly a pleasant life.

A little more than 20 years ago, the $PLC began an important shift in targeting. Their key fundraising base, which Peter Brimelow has described as “the elderly Holocaust-haunted rich” were dying off. And more or less every White man in the South was aware that anyone purporting to be a recruiter for any Ku Klux Klan outfit was probably an FBI agent provocateur. The low hanging fruit had been harvested.

So the $PLC took up immigration, targeting even the most timid and professionally ineffectual immigration patriot outfits. Thus after it had existed for 29 years, the $PLC finally named the biggest, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a “Hate Group” (VDARE.com was proud to accept this accolade after only 4 years!). I discussed this event and FAIR’s characteristically inept reply in FAIR On The SPLC: Nice Guys Get Smeared Some More 09-14-2009.

Immigrants themselves, of course, were useless as a fundraising field. But the Democrat Nomenklatura had woken up to the point made in Peter Brimelow’s 1995 book Alien Nation—that American immigration policy was “Electing a New People” with them the primary beneficiaries. By the middle of the next decade, Democrat Party policy had reached the current ‘No Borders’ stance. Many of the Democratic plutocrats, driven anyway as they usually are by anti-Historic American animus, were happy to pay the $PLC to protect this trend.

The $PLC was a particularly valuable hire in this respect because of the role it fallaciously claimed to have played in the sacred “Civil Rights” movement. The Main Stream Media effectively accorded its pronouncements something like Papal Infallibility. Being declared a Hate Group in the ensuing reign of terror/ Cancel Culture years meant journalists were afraid to quote such a source. Increasingly, a whole range of normal commercial services would be denied. Even supposedly conservative outfits like Human Events shamefully drank the Kool-Aid.

In 2011 in [C] I said

the $PLC is in effect a modest public interest law firm and fundraising operation, linked to a very large, wildly aggressive investment pool. It’s really the Southern Poverty Law and Investing Center!

But the ensuing years made clear I should have said Southern Poverty Law, Investing & Political Police Center.

Recently, however, the tide has turned against the $PLC. From about 2010 with the American Family Council (AFA) and the Family Research Council (FRC) it started naming various Christian organizations “Hate Groups” for their views on sexuality and abortion—transparently in a quest for homosexual money. This puzzled and offended many Normies. Then in In June 2018, the $PLC issued an apology and paid $3.375 Mm to UK citizen Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation for accusing him of being an anti- Muslim extremist.

Finally, in 2019, disaster really struck. To quote the current Wikipedia page on the Southern Poverty Law Center:

In March 2019, the SPLC fired founder Morris Dees for undisclosed reasons and removed his profile from the SPLC website… Following the dismissal, a letter signed by two dozen SPLC employees was sent to management, expressing concern that “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism threaten the moral authority of this organization and our integrity along with it.”

A week later, President Richard Cohen and legal director Rhonda Brownstein announced their resignations…The associate legal director Meredith Horton quit, alleging concerns regarding workplace culture.

Since Dees had been canonized by the Left as a secular Saint, with some idiots actually making a movie about him, this was a massive blow. The $PLC staffers were certainly right to say it threatened “the moral authority of this organization and our integrity”

$PLC co-founder Morris Dees

In his resignation statement, Cohen spoke reverentially of an upcoming “audit of the organization’s practices” by Tina Tchen, former Chief of Staff to Michelle Obama. But if completed, this report has never been made public.

SPLC President J. Richard Cohen

Such was the revulsion on the Left that The New Yorker was emboldened to publish The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center by Bob Moser (March 21 2019). This is a macabre account of the pervasive atmosphere of financial and sexual exploitation at the $PLC’s “Poverty Palace” headquarters in Montgomery AL.

Needless to say, it would have been better for America if Moser and a publication like The New Yorker had possessed the moral fiber to publish this expose back when Moser left the outfit in 2004. But that would have destroyed Moser’s career and been politically inconvenient.

Human failings are one thing, political embarrassments are quite another. Margaret Huang, imported in April 2020 as President and CEO, supplied these in plenty.

Before Huang arrived, the organization had, somewhat paradoxicaly for a Leftist outfit, indicated that it was determined to prevent its staff unionizing. But discontent was such that management’s effort failed. Then, after the October 7 2023 Gaza offensive, there was apparently a huge surge of pro-Palestinian sentiment among the (naturally highly politicized) staff. Huang responded in June 2024 by firing a quarter of them and shutting down some flagship programs. With money so plentiful, cost was not plausibly the reason. More likely these programs had particularly anti-Zionist staff.

I dealt with these important events in

The $PLC Massacre—Purging Pro-Palestinians? 06-14-2024

and

NOW I See Why $PLC Dumped Classroom Propaganda Program. Left’s Palestinian Purge Problem Just Beginning. 06-18-2024

and

SPLC Union Strikes Another Shattering Blow At $PLC. But Is This A Labor Or A Political Dispute? 06-20-2024

From X account of SPLC union— challenging management’s account

In fact this was an early sign of the epochal split between the senior Democratic Pols and their Zionist Donors on the one hand, and the Hard Left and younger zealots on the other. We are going to hear a great deal more about this.

In July 2025, Huang abruptly resigned. Bryan Fair, a Black University of Alabama Law professor, was appointed Interim CEO. He has explicitly said he is acting as a figurehead. As of May 2026 no permanent CEO has been appointed.

Bryan Fair, Interim President and CEO, Southern Poverty Law Center

So where does this leave the $PLC, with its financial and corporate governance under serious question, its liberal credentials badly damaged, its Federal indictment for bank and wire fraud (and, probably as an automatic consequence of the indictments, Donor-Advised Funds refusing to allow donations)?

Basically it leaves it in the hands of Blacks—at least ostensibly.

What might be called a Black Curtain of secrecy has come down over the SPLC website. It has been simplified, with all information on and pictures of directors and senior officers removed and financial information now buried in a sidebar. In the “Annual Report” and “Impact Statement,” (both of which have always been just sales brochures), almost all pictures are of Blacks alone, with only one showing Whites (in a street scene). This is a big departure from the traditionally carefully diverse illustrations of the past. Judging from a screenshot from March 29 2024, posted above, only four of the 13 Board Members are White (at least three apparently Jewish) and Blacks are in a majority.

In contrast, as recently as 2018, there only three Black members out of 13 and at least eight members appeared to be Jewish

Interestingly, the $PLC logo has been changed. The new one, appropriately, is Black and White.

Probably this tells us the ultimate fate of the $PLC. Footnote 13 of the 2024 Consolidated Financial Statements reports

During the year ended October 31, 2020, the Board of Directors approved $30 million from the Endowment Fund for the Vote Your Voice initiative…the Board of Directors approved a $100 million investment from the Endowment Fund over the next decade to support voter outreach…The commitment…marks a more-than-threefold increase…pledged in 2020.

The total Vote Your Voice expense for the year ended October 31, 2024 was $14,068,100 (total $41,964,614 for four years).

This does not directly state when the increase was voted.

I do not believe that any distributions from the “Endowment Fund” were ever allowed when Morris Dees was in control (ended 2019).

Vote Your Voice is a $PLC initiative to boost the Black & Brown vote in the South.

Of course it is axiomatic, and has been underlined by the recent Somali and BLM funding scandals (see here and here and here), that showering money on Black-controlled outfits just enables fraud.

So maybe the obsessive money-grubbing of Morris Dees will finally improve the fortunes of at least some in the Black community!

Lydia moderating a debate at West Virginia’s Berkeley Springs Castle, bought because the SPLC kept bullying hotels into cancelling VDARE.com conferences.

Peter Brimelow writes: James Edwards, host of The Political Cesspool radio show, recently had Lydia on to discuss the Southern Poverty Law Center indictments (they’re serious!), Michael Edison Hayden’s crazy book about VDARE, and NYAG Letitia James’ lawfare against us. Edwards also writes for the American Free Press, and he asked Lydia to contribute to a panel discussion about the SPLC indictments. It’s not yet available on the AFP site, but Kevin MacDonald has posted the whole thing on his Occidental Observer. Here’s what Lydia had to say:

American Free Press Panel Discussion on the SPLC Indictment

Lydia Brimelow, President of the Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation and half of the husband-wife team that ran VDare: My only question about the SPLC indictment is, what does this mean for the Historic American Nation? There are several facets of the answer that particularly interest me.

1. Does it damage the SPLC? Undeniably. Even if a large portion of their donors rally around and they drum up support to defend themselves against “persecution,” a flaw has been revealed. It will have repercussions. Not only will some portion of their donors lose enthusiasm, but the ability for our enemies to use the SPLC as their weapon of choice in Cancel Culture battles has been profoundly handicapped. And who knows, some of them might even go to jail. A girl can dream!

2. Does it benefit the SPLC or any of the Leftist with whom they are in league? They were hiding these transactions for a reason. If they thought the exposure would help their cause it would have been in their public communications. Even in the worst case for us – they beat the charges – great! It’s still an ugly clean-up job. The more resources they waste the better. Best case scenario for us…could be historic.

3. Does it damage the Historic American Nation? Not directly. It is extremely annoying that some influential voices of the mainstream Right are using the SPLC indictments to falsely claim that Unite the Right was a hoax, and it is worth correcting them. On the one hand, it shows how profoundly uninvested in our people they are. On the other hand, the distance (however inappropriate given the facts) that Fake News creates between the massive smear job that Charlottesville turned out to be, may permit some normal Americans to reconsider their fear in associating with right wing activism. Scapegoats have a purpose after all, and they do important psychological work. There is obviously the question of the paid informants and the people who were informed on, but I have to assume that if any juicy tidbit was shared, the SPLC has already cashed in on it. It’s all from years ago. The damage there is most likely already done.

4. Does it benefit the Historic American Nation? Yes. We should take any and all opportunities to celebrate, unconditionally. A federal indictment that will precipitate massive discovery against our enemies is an objective good, even if the SPLC manages to throw it off. In the best-case scenario – and I’m just talking about logical possibilities here, not realistic ones – the SPLC gets shut down.

Hope is a dangerous thing because disappointment is so painful. I have seen months lead to years when there are no victories. In that interminable desert, keeping the faith takes real effort. And, ultimately, God’s time is not our time – we may never see victory. But we’re called to fight, and we’re called to rally, and victory comes one win at a time.

So, pop some champagne and take this win, patriots! We’re joining you in a toast at Berkeley Springs Castle.

The indicted Southern Poverty Law Center’s favorite picture of Charles Murray. Maybe they were hoping he was about to give a Nazi salute

Recently, Charles (“The Bell Curve”) Murray tweeted/ Xed

In other words, my book ALIEN NATION: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, which came out in 1995, a year after The Bell Curve, made no impression on Charles, although we knew each other well.

I had already sort of intuited that.

I responded:

Charles, to his credit, replied:

This exchange inspired the following comment, heartwarming to me personally (thanks Matt!):

Gone but not forgotten!

Of all the factions I encountered during Alien Nation’s brief but intense moment in the MSM spotlight, Libertarians were by far the most bone-headed.

This was a mild sorrow to me because I had been deeply influenced by my encounter with libertarianism after coming to the U.S. from England to study at Stanford in 1970. (Libertarianism simply did not exist at the University of Sussex back then). I spent a lot of time working through the relationship between libertarianism with immigration patriotism—in fact, with any kind of patriotism—as Greg Johnson recently discussed in his review of Quinn Slobodian’s 2025 Hayek’s Bastards, a book which paradoxically is the closest thing to an intellectual biography I’m ever likely to get. (Greg’s parallel podcast interview with me is here).

Of course, by then I’d realized that many Libertarians, seeking for a once-size-fits-all explanation of the world, were psychologically similar to the dogmatic Student Marxists who had so brightened up my undergraduate days (and who now rule Britain). Although, of course, the Libertarians’ one-size-fits-all panacea was immeasurably superior.

But there was one exception to this: the “Paleolibertarians,” a factional split led by the brilliant (and famously factional) economist Murray Rothbard. Paleolibertarians were enthusiastically willing to consider what the new issue of post-1965 mass, non-traditional, immigration meant to libertarianism, partly because it so irritated what Rothbard gleefully termed The Kochtopus e.g. the Cato Institute.

And they did so until Rothbard’s untimely death in 1995, at what now seems to me to be the early age of 68. Thereafter their chief internet forum LewRockwell.com, edited by Mises Institute founder Lew Rockwell, regressed to left-Libertarianism, probably following its donors, and the Paleolibertarian faction was eclipsed.

But not completely. Rothbard’s most prominent student, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who has been described as “The Last Paleolibertarian, ” founded the Property and Freedom Society in 2006 and sustained the tradition. (I am sorry to learn that Hoppe’s long relationship with the Mises Institute has recently, abruptly, been Cancelled).

I spoke to his PFS conference in 2008.

The issue hasn’t gone away. (Sigh again)

"Immigration Is The Viagra Of The State"—A Libertarian Case Against Immigration

First published on VDARE.com, 06/04/2008

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I want to start off by thanking Hans [-Hermann Hoppe] and Guelchin [Imre, his wife and owner of the equally beautiful Karia Princess Hotel] for hosting this conference and in particular for inviting me to speak here today.

We’re at a peculiar moment in the history of liberty. It’s been almost seventeen years since the Soviet Union collapsed. (I’m acutely aware of this because my son was born that day, making him, as I like to think, the very first post-Communist baby!) At that time, even a life-long American academic socialist like Robert Heilbroner was compelled to confess, in a celebrated essay in the New Yorker magazine, [The Triumph Of Capitalism, January 23, 1989] that the century-old battle between capitalism and socialism is over and capitalism has won.

Yet in the US it’s very probable that the party of free markets—perhaps I should say the alleged party of free markets—is going to be annihilated in this year’s election and that the party of statism may be in power for a generation.

There are obviously a number of reasons for this reversal. But one of them, I think, is that (at least in the US) libertarianism rested on its laurels and simply did not address the next generation of problems that came to the fore amid the wreckage of socialism. One of those is problems is immigration and, ultimately, the role of the national community, the nation-state. As I understand it, the role of the Property and Freedom Society is to address those problems and to rearticulate the libertarian vision.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe did address the problem of immigration, in his own writings and by arranging for a special issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, the summer 1998 issue [Volume 13, Number 2] guest edited by Ralph Raico, which was devoted to the subject. It’s a seminal volume of essays, revealing for example that the dean of American libertarian philosophers, John Hospers, who actually received one electoral college vote when he ran for President as the Libertarian Party candidate in 1972, rejected Open Borders and the notion that if you support free trade, you have to support free immigration. [A Libertarian Argument Against Opening Borders(PDF). ]I don’t think the debate among libertarians has moved much further forward, greatly to the discredit of the Libertarian Establishment. Hans should really be giving this talk today. But I guess he believes in the Division Of Labor!

So my topic today is “A Libertarian Case Against Immigration”. I am myself an immigrant (or an emigrant, depending how you look at it) from Britain to the U.S. with some years in Canada. So I’m not saying that immigration is absolutely a bad thing. But I am saying that it can be a bad thing, and that in the US today—and also Europe—it is a bad thing. In the U.S., we’re constantly told by immigration enthusiasts, a distinct subspecies among American intellectuals, that immigrants do dirty jobs Americans won’t do. And, I tell them, here I am!

I’m going to make this case with special reference to the example of the U.S., partly because that’s where I’ve lived for nearly forty years and partly because I’m a financial journalist, not a philosopher, and I find the presence of actual facts, as opposed to pure theory, kind of comforting. I will say, however, that the problems of America are the problems of the West.

How many of you are Americans? Any Canadians? Europeans? Brits? (I distinguish between Britain and Europe!). [PB: Mostly Europeans, a few Americans and Brits, one Australian on walkabout, no Canadians.]

I am going to start off by reviewing the facts of the US example. Then I’m going to analyze those facts from what appears to me to be a libertarian perspective, looking at practical problems and then theoretical problems. I’ll conclude by suggesting what this suggests about immigration—and about libertarianism itself.

Americans are taught to believe that they are “a nation of immigrants.” Of course, all nations are nations of immigrants. There is no known case where people grew out of the ground. What’s different about America is the speed with which it was put together. Unfortunately, it can be unput together just as quickly. And that, in essence, is what’s happening.

So these are the facts:

• For almost 50 years in the middle of the twentieth century, from the early 1920s to about 1970, there was pause during which there was almost no immigration into the US at all.

There have been many such pauses in American immigration history, stretching right back into the colonial period, and they have been essential to the process of assimilation. During that period, no-one, not even the great Austrian economists like Mises or Hayek (and certainly not the influential Objectivist novelist Ayn Rand, remarkable though she was), really thought much about immigration.

• The 1965 Immigration Act, plus a simultaneous decision to stop enforcing the law against illegal immigration, unleashed a new influx. (The decision to stop enforcing the law is very obvious in the date, most glaringly in the 98 percent collapse in workplace prosecutions during the Bush Administration, unmistakably a precursor to the planned integration of North American workforces as in the European Union). About 1 million legal immigrants and some 3-500,000 net illegal immigrants now enter the US every a year.

• For technical reasons—basically the emphasis on so-called family reunification, which is not family reunification at all but chain migration—immigration has been skewed away from Europe and toward the Third World.

• As a result, although Americans are stabilizing their population at around 300 million, the government is in effect second-guessing the people on population size, which because of immigration could be 400 million by 2050. One third will be post-1970 immigrants and their descendants. Because these are overwhelmingly non-white, the U.S., 90% white as recently as 1960, will be majority non-white sometime after 2050.

This is a transformation without precedent in the history of the world. To adapt Brecht, the government is dissolving the people and electing a new one

• Amazingly, the consensus among labor economists, confirmed by the 1997 National Research Council report The New Americans, is that there is no significant net aggregate economic benefit to native-born Americans. There is an increase in Gross Domestic Product, but virtually all of that is captured by the immigrants themselves in the form of wages. If transfer payments factored in, there is a small but significant nation-wide loss.

In other words, Americans are not merely being transformed for nothing, but they are actually paying to be transformed.

Of course, individual Americans benefit, notably employers of cheap labor, and they lobby hard for the privilege (not something libertarians of which would normally approve). But other Americans, notably workers, lose. And they lose a lot—basically government policy is redistributing about 2 percent of GDP from labor to capital.

So here’s something that is having enormous consequences, inflicting enormous expense, operating quite contrary to what was anticipated.

Obviously, it’s a government policy!

And that’s the bottom line to this review of the US situation, which I really want to stress. The point is that the status quo is statist.

We don’t have open immigration in the US or any Western country. We have an extremely complex and intrusive government policy. Government determines, by commission and omission, how many immigrants come in, what race they are, and what skill levels they have. (In the U.S. the post-1965 influx has been significantly less skilled than before, basically of the emphasis on “family reunification”, which is not family reunification at all but chain migration). Doing nothing about immigration as it exists right now is not a libertarian option. It’s a statist option.

Conversely, arguing that the US should restrict immigration, should in fact have a simple moratorium, with no net immigration, could paradoxically represent a diminution of the government’s role, in its powers and its opportunity to exercise them. We’ve all heard of the night watchman state. What libertarians also should want, it seems to me, is a gatekeeper state.

So that’s the situation in our case study, the US. Now I’m going to analyze it from a libertarian perspective. It seems to me that it presents two types of problems—practical and theoretical.

Practical

The Americans have had mass immigration before—notably the so-called Great Wave of immigration from about 1880 through the 1920s, when it was cut off by legislation. And they’ve had a welfare state before, roughly since the New Deal in the 1930s. But they’ve never had both together. And they just don’t work.

At one stage, when I worked at Forbes, I used to interview Milton Friedman every year, until we got a new editor and he stopped it on the curious grounds that Friedman was too old. In one of these interviews, Friedman said something that has been much quoted. He criticized the Wall Street Journal, which has a major and negative role in this and other American debates and said “They’ve just got an idée fixe“ about immigration: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.“

But it’s not obvious to many libertarians, who continue to think about immigration as if it was still 100 years ago and the government was taking just 5 percent of GDP, instead of 30-40%. Yet the welfare state has visibly altered the incentive structure for immigrants. One of the ways it shows up is that, in the last Great Wave, somewhere up to 40% of all immigrants ended up going home. If they failed in the workforce, there was no safety net. Now there is. And net immigration is 90% of gross immigration.

Now the Libertarian response to this is often to say, well, let’s just abolish welfare. Obviously, despite the reforms of the 1990s, the US has failed to do that. But it’s also important to note that we’re not just talking about “welfare“, strictly defined. We’re talking about transfer payments of all kinds. One of the most important is public education, which currently represents a subsidy from the taxpayer to the student of some $8000 a year. And because of a Supreme Court ruling called Plyler vs. Doe, American school districts have to educate the children of illegal immigrants. So what rational immigrant is going to go home when his child is getting an education worth, or at least costing, two or three times the per capita GDP of his country of origin?

Of course some Libertarians say, let’s abolish public schools too. And I agree—I’ve actually written a book advocating wholesale privatization of public education. But let me put it this way: at the very least, abolishing public education is going to take even longer than abolishing welfare. Meanwhile, immigration continues at a million and a half a year.

And the government is even trickier than this. It’s invented subsidies to immigrants that don’t pass through its books at all. For example, it’s required of all hospitals to treat patients for free if they can’t pay. This is how many immigrants get their health care. Private hospitals have to find the money from somewhere, so they pass the cost on to Americans with health insurance.

And then we get into the whole area of race-based “affirmative action”—in other words quotas, which the government has succeeded in imposing throughout public and private sector in America in the teeth of the letter of the law, with very little debate. They’re not trivial. Fifteen years ago in Forbes, I used standard techniques to estimate that they retard American economic growth by up to a percentage point.

The original rationale for quotas was that they compensated American blacks for the lingering effects of slavery and segregation. But all immigrants who belong to the so-called “protected classes“—basically non-whites—are eligible for affirmative action preferences, even though they by definition were not in the country to suffer any wrongs.

One of the interesting points about quotas is that they force you to think about race. The single most denounced passage in my immigration book Alien Nation was my reference to the fact that my son, Alexander, has blue eyes and blond hair. American intellectuals get hysterical about this sort of thing. Yet I was making an unimpeachable point: quotas are a zero-sum game. So if you import more members of the “protected classes”, you disadvantage Americans who are not members of the “protected classes“, as Alexander manifestly is not.

For this reason alone, when the government monkeys with the racial balance through immigration, it matters

Further practical problems with immigration arise in the area of freedom of speech. For example, in Britain there is a Race Relations Act and under it, people have been jailed for saying things, like blacks are disproportionately involved in crime, which are actually true. But truth is not a defense. The leader of the British National Party has been prosecuted for critical things he said about Islamic immigration in a private meeting—a prosecution conveniently launched on the eve of an election. Obviously this is an abomination. And it would not have come about if the government had not created through immigration policy racial minorities to whom the British (completely white until after World War II) were required to “Relate”.

There are similar atrocities in Canada, where the celebrated journalist Mark Steyn is currently running afoul of the quasi-judicial “Human Rights Commissions”. It hasn’t quite happened in the US because of the inconvenient fact of the First Amendment. But that problem is being worked on, with hate speech codes. As a practical matter, public debate is narrowing, as we saw in the reaction to the Ron Paul Letters.

Randolph Bourne famously said that war is the health of the state. That the perceived need to combat an external enemy requires and permits government to assume increased powers that, of course, it never lets go. And we’re learning that again to our cost in the US, with the so-called War Against Terror.

But what I would suggest here is that the immigration influx of the late twentieth century into the US and the West in general has been the Viagra Of The State. It has reinvigorated the state, when it was otherwise losing its powers because of collapse of socialism and the triumph of classical liberalism. It’s an aspect of what should be called neosocialism—the statists’ argument for government control of society, not in the interests of efficiency—not because government can prevent another Great Depression etc.—but in the interests of equity, rooting out discrimination, racism and so on.

Immigrants, above all immigrants who are racially and culturally distinct from the host population, are walking advertisements for social workers and government programs and the regulation of political speech—that is to say, the repression of the entirely natural objections of the host population.

So these are the practical objections to the current situation from a Libertarian perspective. Let’s look at things from the point of view of theory.

Theoretical

The most obviously troubling problem from a Libertarian perspective is the notion that support for free trade necessitates support for free immigration.

Some of the answer to this is clear from the preceding section. Imported goods are not people. Their arrival in a society is not subsidized by the taxpayer. Imported goods do not have implications for future transfer payments, much less freedom of speech. And, of course, imported goods don’t vote.

Also, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has pointed out, imported goods differ from immigrants in that they are imported by someone who wants them. Both buyers and sellers volunteer for the transaction. But immigration is a unilateral decision by the immigrant. He arrives even if the host community does not want him. Arguably, he is trespassing. Government immigration policy amounts to what Hoppe calls “forced integration.”

Of course, you can have situations where an employer wants to import labor, usually cheaper labor, but his neighbors or the community at large don’t want him to. In the end, this raises the question of the legitimacy of collective action, which I’ll discuss later.

But there is also a practical point. The way immigration works in the welfare/transfer state like the US is that employers are privatizing profits from imported labor and socializing costs, such as education, health care etc. Obviously, this is indefensible for Libertarians—but you don’t hear many American Libertarians talking about it.

Libertarians would presumably agree that in a regime where property was completely private, property owners could exclude whomever they chose. This is actually what happened to Friedrich von Hayek. He was refused permission [PDF] to buy land in the Tyrolese village where he had spent his summers for many years on the grounds that the community did not want to sell to foreigners. Hayek thought this was perfectly reasonable—evidence that he, at least, had some sense of collective action.

(I say “Libertarians would presumably agree” because private property in the U.S. is trammeled by public policy. For example, you can’t place a restrictive covenant on who your property can be sold to, part of the general assault on freedom of association that came with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Again, because of the general US hysteria about “racism“, this isn’t something that most American Libertarians want to talk about, although from a theoretical point of view, it’s indefensible.)

What about property that is owned by the government i.e. most of the country? There is a Libertarian argument that no-one, even foreigners, can be forbidden access to that. But Hans-Hermann Hoppe has countered that these public goods are actually held in common by taxpaying citizens, hence a species of private property.

To my mind, this is conclusive. Last year, Walter Block and Anthony Gregory published a response in the Journal of Libertarian Studies [PDF], which struck me as ineffective. But I will quote a footnote from it because it illustrates another problem with libertarian theory and immigration:

“Another anomaly for the Hoppe position surfaces when we consider migration between cities and states within the US. If migration from, say, Norway or Brazil to the U.S. constitutes an unwarranted ‘forced Integration‘, then why does not movement of people from, say, Texas to Ohio fall under this rubric too?“

The answer, of course, is that Texans and Ohioans are Americans. But Walter, like many Libertarians, simply does not recognize the reality, and the necessity, of the national community.

And this is my final point about Libertarian theory on immigration.

Any libertarian must recognize the importance of the “metamarket“, the institutional framework without which markets cannot function. The most obvious example is that you cannot have a functioning market economy without property rights, a law of property.

But it’s equally clear that you can’t have a functioning market without some degree of cultural coherence. And that probably ultimately means ethnic coherence too.

In the US, public policy is breaking down that coherence by importing immigrant groups with vastly different cultural traditions. For example, somewhere over a quarter of the current influx is Mexican, an unusual if not unprecedented concentration. The Mexican elite is openly following a policy of dumping its poor on the US welfare system, resulting in an astonishing mass movement sometimes called the “Mexodus.“

The result of this is that American border towns that were Anglo a generation ago are now Mexican—and now have Mexican characteristics, such as crime, corruption, poverty etc. Mexicans are also bringing with them a predilection for labor unions, socialism and the repression of free speech—the major Mexican organization in the US has unblushingly begun a campaign to lobby the major American media to prevent them quoting or featuring immigration critics on the grounds that criticism of immigration is “hate“.

Walter Block says that it was contemplating this phenomenon of one ethnic group swamping another, specifically the Russians swamping the Baltic Republics, that caused Murray Rothbard to rethink his previously uncritical libertarianism on immigration.

Americans are taught that “Diversity is our strength.” But diversity is not strength. It is weakness, for a wide range of reasons. America, notably including its Libertarians, has not thought through the implications of the post-Communist break-up into their component nations of the syncretic states that sought to base themselves on ideology or creed, as the US is now being encouraged to—the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Hayek had an interesting quasi-sociobiological explanation for the apparently immortal appeal of socialism. He argued that for essentially all of human history, we lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. Face-to-face relationships are much more intuitively comprehensible to us than impersonal ones. So a rent increase provokes the urge to bash the greedy landlords with rent controls, despite all the evidence that this reaction leads merely to shortages and inequity.

To extend Hayek’s point, it’s much easier to demonize a landlord if his features—language, religion—appear alien.

Conclusion

There is a reason there are no families in Ayn Rand’s novels. It’s because Libertarianism is too often an incomplete philosophy. It takes little or no account of the non-atomistic aspect of the human experience, of human groups, their dynamics and differences.

It was to supply that lack that Rothbard and others tried to bring into existence a refinement of Libertarianism, which incidentally accepted the need to control immigration: paleolibertarianism.

It’s tragic that this attempt has stalled since Murray’s death. I salute Hans, and all of you here, for seeking to revive it.

In conclusion, I’m going to cite, as I often do, and not least because Yuri [Maltsev] has already discussed him, Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s I970 Nobel Prize speech—a speech which I think is all the more remarkable because it marks Solzhenitsyn’s break with the ideology under which he grew up, which, very like modal libertarianism today, also denied the importance and legitimacy of national communities. Solzhenitsyn said:

“The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made like, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors, and embodies a particular facet of God’s design.“

I believe that America, and the historic nations of the West, represent a “particular facet of God’s design”.

Part of that design is liberty. Without the historic nations of the West, it will not survive.