White Nationalist Website VDARE in Trouble, Loses Big Funder
The white nationalist website VDARE.com is in financial trouble — and its founder says that more mainstream anti-immigration groups may be responsible.
“If VDARE.com is to survive [the] latest threat, it must have your help now,” writes the website’s founder, Peter Brimelow, in a lengthy letter published on its homepage.
The latest threat, according to Brimelow, is that a big benefactor recently cut off funding for the website, which regularly publishes articles by white supremacists and anti-Semites. The “major foundation,” which Brimelow doesn’t name, helped finance the website since its inception in 1999. “ We’ve lost close to a third of our budget and we’ve been plunged into an immediate cash crisis,” writes Brimelow, a leading anti-immigration activist and author of the best-selling Alien Nation. “Of course, I’m still trying to find out what happened. One explanation I’ve been given is that the Washington D.C. ‘Beltway immigration reform groups’ lobbied against us, claiming that they would be tainted through guilt by association if our donor gave to us as well as them, because of our willingness to take risks and push the Political Correctness envelope.” (Brimelow doesn’t identify the “Beltway immigration reform groups,” but an April 7 VDARE.com column by Alexander Hart states that the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA are the “best-funded and most visible Beltway organizations in the patriotic immigration reform movement.” The SPLC identifies FAIR as a hate group because of its ties to white supremacists.)
Though Brimelow has denied that VDARE.com is white nationalist, his site features articles by extremists such as Jared Taylor, editor of the racist American Renaissance magazine; Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at the California State University, Long Beach, who argues that Jews are genetically driven to undermine the power of whites; and the late Sam Francis, who edited the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. Brimelow says he heard that the “Beltway immigration reform groups” especially objected to VDARE.com columnist and blogger Steve Sailer, who founded a neo-eugenics organization called the Human Biodiversity Institute. In a Feb. 7 column, Sailer wrote that murder “is for whites, and for anyone else who gets in the way of minorities that are clearly systematically prone to criminality.” He has repeatedly blamed the 2008 economic crash on a government push for minority home ownership. In a March 8 column complaining about Jewish support for immigration, he asserted that “American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant elite of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon themselves corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the United States — rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization.”
Brimelow, formerly a mainstream journalist at Forbes magazine and the National Review, explains that “supporting Steve is one of our main expenses” and laments that, “if VDARE.com fails, Steve Sailer will have no other outlets for his path-breaking work.” He also emphasizes the importance of paying VDARE.com’s other contributors, saying it’s critical to the website’s long-term health. Because operating expenses are low, he writes, “Essentially everything you give goes to pay writers and editors.”
Actually, quite a lot goes to paying Brimelow, who chairs the board of directors of the Connecticut-based VDARE Foundation, which manages the website. In 2007, Brimelow received $378,418, which accounted for nearly three-quarters of the foundation’s expenses. (Just $134,000 went toward paying freelance writers.) In 2006, Brimelow got $205,000; John Brimelow, Peter’s brother and fellow board member, was paid $45,020. That year, the compensation for both Brimelows amounted to more than half the foundation’s spending.
But VDARE.com wasn’t as personally lucrative for Brimelow in 2008, the last year for which tax forms are available. He received $115,000 — just over a quarter of the foundation’s spending for the year. Most of the remaining expenses consisted of fees paid to independent contractors.
