Photo Credit: ADL
On Saturday January 19, VDARE.com will hold its first ever webinar, further promoting its own special brand of bigotry. Essentially, VDARE is a hub of prolific blog writers who cloak white-nationalist doctrine in the more in-vogue and accessible rhetorical frameworks of cultural criticism collectively designed to blame the ills of American and European societies on immigrants, blacks, and Muslims.
VDARE was launched in 1999 by Peter Brimelow as a project of his group Center for American Unity, which he split with in 2007. Throughout the years VDARE has become a digital archive of the “elites” of so-called academic racism-John Derbyshire, Paul Gottfried, Jared Taylor, Brenda Walker, Donald A. Collins, Steve Sailer, Nicholas Stix, etc-many of who use their educational and/or professional backgrounds as the basis for separating themselves from more violent, low-brow white supremacists, as Brimelow has explained.
VDARE also promotes notions of IQ superiority-inferiority between races, and pointedly promotes the notion that Muslims are seizing control of western European countries and the US via cultural (“creeping”) jihad. Muslims are generally depicted as being innately violent, akin to VDARE’s characterizing of black Americans.
VDARE via Brimelow also maintains significant personal and working relationships with the power-centers of the established anti-immigrant movement, especially with its founder John Tanton, his flagship organization the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and The Social Contract, Tanton’s book press that produces a quarterly journal of the same name. In the span of one weekend at the end of September/beginning off October, Brimelow was present at FAIR’s 2012 national board of advisors meeting and was a featured speaker at The Social Contract Press’s Annual Writers’ Workshop. As we wrote in a blog titled, “Anti-immigrant Leaders and White Nationalists Converge on Capital for Weekend of Collaboration”:
“It’s no coincidence that the Federation of American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) national board of advisors meeting, the Social Contract Press’s Annual Writers’ Workshop, and Progressives for Immigration Reform’s (PFIR) Annual National Conference all occurred over a two-day span.”
Between the early- to mid-90s, John Tanton also donated and helped solicit funds to support Brimelow’s writing of his book, Alien Nation (1995).
In that book, his most recognizable work, Brimelow cloaks the same bigotries that now fuel VDARE in an argument that continually gestures towards economics. The book was widely promoted by the anti-immigrant movement for its expert take on immigration’s economic impacts on our country, with its reviewers delicately navigating the text’s undeniably racist conclusions. Ira Mehlman, FAIR’s current spokesperson, reviewed Alien Nation in The Social Contract Journal’s Summer 1995 issue in a piece titled, “Brimelow Drops ‘The Big One’.” In his own review of the book, Mark Krikorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies (another Tanton-launched organization), expressed anxieties over Brimelow’s take on race, but nevertheless titled his piece, “A Flawed Jewel.” Krikorian’s title speaks for itself, and both pieces read as apologism for Brimelow’s bigoted views.
Brimelow also maintains close relationships Wayne Lutton, who as editor of The Social Contract works directly under Tanton, and the aforementioned Brenda Walker, long-time VDARE contributor, hater of Muslims, and west coast editor of The Social Contract.
If one chooses to pay the $30 admission fee that VDARE is asking for its two-session webinar, one is promised much that is flawed; and with the cast of bigots confirmed to appear, many of who have been mentioned in this piece, one is certainly promised zero that sparkles.
This is to say, in these tight post-holiday times, a strong economic argument can also be made for just saving your $30, and ditching anti-immigrant, white nationalist rhetoric all together.