Online registrar threatens to drop anti-immigration website

2020/06/24 Leave a comment

Of note.

Brimelow, if I recall correctly, was mentioned by Paul Wells in his The Longer I’m Prime Minister as having an influence in his decision to replace the 2011 Census with the less accurate National Household Survey:

An internet registrar is threatening to delist a website that is a leading promoter of white nationalist and anti-immigration views, a move that could make the site accessible only to diehard users willing to use a special browser to find it on the dark web.

Network Solutions’ parent company, Web.com Group, notified a civil rights group on Friday that it has “taken steps” to terminate the company’s account for VDARE.com, which would make it unreachable on the public internet unless it can find another provider willing to register the domain name.

VDARE remained online Monday. The website has until Thursday to transfer the domain before Network Solutions may delete its services, a parent company lawyer said in a letter to a VDARE attorney last week.

In April and in May, the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sent letters urging Network Solutions to drop VDARE. Kristen Clarke, the Washington, D.C.-based group’s president and executive director, wrote that VDARE peddles “anti-immigrant and anti-Black hate,” spreads misinformation about the coronavirus and encourages violence against migrants.

“This is part of our ongoing work to confront the ways in which hate activity festers online,” Clarke said Monday. “We know that many white supremacists and extremists are not organizing in basements. They are using these platforms and websites to spread their dangerous ideologies, target victims and incite violence.”

In Friday’s response to Clarke, a company attorney said VDARE’s content “does not represent the values of our organization” and violates its “Acceptable Use Policy.” The policy bars customers from using its domains “to display bigotry, racism, discrimination, or hatred in any manner whatsoever,” the same company attorney said in a letter to a VDARE lawyer last week.

VDARE founder and editor Peter Brimelow said his site’s content hasn’t changed in the 20 years that it has been a Network Solutions customer.

“Censorship is just intensifying,” he wrote in an email on Monday. “We’re still working on a replacement, but there is certainly a chance we’ll have to go dark for at least a couple of days. And anyway we have no confidence that any US-based site will stand up to the PC lynch mob for long.”

Many websites that publish white nationalist, white supremacist or anti-Semitic material have struggled to stay online or been booted off mainstream internet platforms, often after violent attacks by far-right extremists.

Google and GoDaddy yanked The Daily Stormer’s web address after the neo-Nazi website’s founder, Andrew Anglin, published a post mocking the woman killed when a man drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Social media platform Gab, where the suspect in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre spewed anti-Semitic messages before the 2018 shooting rampage, was briefly knocked offline after registrar GoDaddy and others dropped the site. Gab returned after a Seattle-based company, Epik, agreed to register it.

Users spewed anonymous hate on 8chan, an online message boar d, until a string of mass shootings by gunmen who posted manifestos on the site led to it getting forced offline in August 2019. The disruption ended when the imageboard relaunched in November under the new name 8kun.

This isn’t the first time VDARE has been dropped by a technology company. Facebook announced last month that it removed accounts linked to VDARE and other groups, including pages devoted to the QAnon far-right conspiracy theory.

Brimelow sued The New York Times Company in January, claiming the newspaper defamed him by referring to him as an “open white nationalist.” The suit seeks at least $5 million in damages.

Last Thursday, newspaper lawyers urged a federal court in New York to throw out the lawsuit, accusing Brimelow of playing “word games about how his fringe views should be characterized.”

“Brimelow has promoted theories at the heart of white nationalism and white supremacy, including that certain races are predisposed to commit crime and that IQ is linked to race,” they wrote.

Brimelow has denied that his website is white nationalist but acknowledged it publishes works by writers who fit that description “in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites.”

Brimelow also operates a Connecticut-based nonprofit, VDARE Foundation, which raised more than $1.8 million in tax-exempt gifts, grants and contributions between 2014 and 2018, according to an IRS tax filing.

Source: Online registrar threatens to drop anti-immigration website

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Against #ResistanceGenealogy: Digging up information about the immigrant ancestors of Trumpsters is doing more harm than good.

2018/05/17 Leave a comment

Thoughtful critique, both substantively and in terms of effectiveness.

While I too share her initial like of Mendelsohn’s work, in the end, is it meaningful to compare previous immigration periods and patterns when the workforce was less dependent on skilled labour than today’s labour market needs? And does it resonate with those who are on the fence on immigration-related issues?:

I want to love #ResistanceGenealogy, the hashtag and project started by Jennifer Mendelsohn. The journalist and researcher digs up genealogical information on prominent Trumpsters, especially those who are architects and cheerleaders of the administration’s restrictive stance on immigration. Tomi Lahren’s great-great-grandfather forged citizenship papers; Mike Pence’s family benefited from “chain migration”; James Woods’ ancestors fled famine and moved to Britain as refugees. Plenty of liberals applaud Mendelsohn’s finds; others have joined in the project and contributed to the hashtag with their own family stories. She’s gotten coverage everywhere from Politico to Wonkette to CNN.

But #ResistanceGenealogy is fundamentally flawed. Its popularity showcases the left’s inability to recognize how deeply racism is embedded in the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, and to see clearly what the effects of that racism are.

Starting in the 1830s and 1840s, some American abolitionists advocated for a tactic called moral suasion, arguing that surely white Americans who truly knew about the full horrors of slavery would change their minds and fight for its abolition. They tried to promote fellow feeling, telling stories of separation and sexual abuse to play upon Victorian idealization of family togetherness and womanly virtue. This worked for some listeners, but not for others, whose racism and complicity in the system deadened any natural empathy they might have had. Ending slavery took a war.

It feels like we’re making a similar mistake here. Mendelsohn has tweeted that her project is about compassion, and strives for the awakening of empathy. But no extremely moving information about John Kelly’s or Mike Pence’s families from decades ago will make immigration hawks rethink the way they perceive a story like the one about ICE taking an 18-month-old child from his Honduran mother—telling her to strap him into a car seat, and then driving away without allowing her to say goodbye. From an immigration hawk’s point of view, that’s not anyone like their mother, not anyone like their family.

The chasm between the life and experiences of a white American, even one who’s descended from desperate immigrants of decades past, and the life of this Honduran mother is the entire point of racist anti-immigration thought. Diminishment of the human qualities of entering immigrants (“unskilled” and “unmodern” immigrants coming from “shithole” countries) reinforces the distance between the two. People who support the Trump administration’s immigration policies want fewer Honduran mothers and their 18-month-olds to enter the country. If you start from this position, nothing you hear about illiterate Germans coming to the United States in the 19th century will change your mind.

We need to get past the idea that immigration hawks simply don’t know the immigration history of this country.

Besides giving people who rally against immigration too much benefit of the doubt, this comparative approach is ahistorical (purposefully so, since it’s making an argument for the connection between human experiences across time). This, like our reliance on the invocation of the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty, flattens everything out in a way that does nothing to enhance a pro-immigration argument for 2018.

We need to get past the idea that immigration hawks simply don’t know the immigration history of this country. In an influential 1992 article in the National Review, anti-immigration hard-liner and white (excuse me, “civic”) nationalist Peter Brimelow wrote that the restrictive decades between the enactment of restrictive quotas in the 1920s and the 1965 Immigration Act—a time he called “the Great Immigration Lull”—gave the country time to absorb and assimilate the immigrants who came in the early 20th century. (In one surreal passage, he writes, “the American nation was just swallowing, and then digesting … an unusually large and spicy immigrant meal.”)

That 1920s decision to install quotas based on racist pseudoscience, which historians on the left view as a damning episode in American immigration history, was, to Brimelow, a positive story: “[O]nce convinced that their nationhood was threatened by continued massive immigration, Americans changed the public policies that made it possible.” (Jeff Sessions is a fan too.) Brimelow’s 1995 book Alien Nation got positive coverage from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Atlantic Monthly, and so on. Brimelow, and those who think like him, know very well what the history of American immigration was like. They just draw different lessons from it than liberals do.

What about the idea that Americans who benefited from immigration in the past should not “pull up the ladder” after themselves—that they should, knowing their family’s history of struggle and success, give others the chance their ancestors were accorded? Liberals, animated by a sense of fairness, can’t believe that somebody descended from Italian peasants can live with the idea of excluding Syrian refugees today. But what looks like the most galling hypocrisy to liberals seems, to immigration hawks, like self-protective common sense. In one passage, Brimelow mocked the core of the very argument animating #ResistanceGenealogy: “How can X be against immigration when the nativists wanted to keep his own great-grandfather out?” This concept is illogical, Brimelow writes: “This, of course, is like arguing that a passenger already on board the lifeboat should refrain from pointing out that taking on more will cause it to capsize.”

It’s not possible to overcome today’s racist thought on immigration with reminders about past discrimination. The Irish and Italians and Germans weren’t “white” back then, as resistance genealogists like to remind people like John Kelly, but they sure are white now. Since it’s a stated belief of many on the right that a history of discrimination, even a horrific one, shouldn’t matter to a person living in 2018 (see: “Why are black people always talking about slavery?”), it makes little sense to expect that this information about past oppression would move any immigration hawk to defend today’s huddled masses.

One mistake that the left tends to make in engaging in historical fights is to believe the right is simply ignorant and that exposure to more history will change their minds. Liberals do this again and again: writing pieces about Andrew Jackson’s horrific treatment of the Cherokees, issuing correctives about the cause of the Civil War (slavery—it was slavery), telling Kanye to read a book. We seem to hope, all evidence to the contrary, that the real information will get through—and once it gets through, it’ll meet minds that share our moral values and will change accordingly. #ResistanceGenealogy makes all of these assumptions. It gravely underestimates the gulf between these two belief systems. I wish it would work. It won’t.

via Against #ResistanceGenealogy: Digging up information about the immigrant ancestors of Trumpsters is doing more harm than good.

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The Trickle-Up Theory Of White Nationalist Thought : NPR

2017/08/19 2 Comments

Good analysis of some of the more educated white nationalists and how they provide the intellectual underpinnings for the more blatant antisemitism, neo-nazism and racism seen as Charlottesville:

Jared Taylor was not in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday. But Taylor, one of the leading voices for white rights in the country, says it was clear what really happened at that rally.

“Anyone who wishes to speak in the name of whites is subject to the heckler’s veto,” said Taylor, founder of the white advocacy website American Renaissance. “There would have been no violence, no problems of any kind if people had not shown up as counterdemonstrators, many of them wearing helmets, wielding batons, wearing shields, shouting for the death of the demonstrators. … This is not something that was provoked by the presence of racially conscious whites. It was something that was provoked by people who hate any white person who has a racial consciousness.”

Two days later, President Trump, in one of his most controversial press conferences to date, described the events — at which hundreds of white protesters gathered for the so-called “Unite the Right” rally and after which a white nationalist sympathizer drove his car into a crowd, killing a counterdemonstrator — in a similar way.

“Let me ask you this,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “What about the fact that [counterdemonstrators] came charging, with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. … You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on another side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. But I’ll say it right now.”

Taylor is among a group of educated, white-identity advocates who, critics say, normalize the ideas of white supremacy by couching them in language that doesn’t sound overtly racist. In doing so, those critics say, people like Taylor, authors Kevin MacDonald and Peter Brimelow, and “Unite the Right” organizers Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer sanitize racist tropes to make them palatable to a broad audience, including the upper reaches of the political mainstream.

“I think that it’s true that ultimately a lot of these ideas travel all the way from the farthest fringe of the political world, ultimately to the very top in some kind of form,” said Mark Potok, former editor of Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s journal monitoring extremism.

The white protesters in Charlottesville came, among other things, to contest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. They were there, Taylor said, “to pursue their destiny free of the unwanted influence of others. This is not a hateful thing.”

Some wore swastikas. Others carried torches and Confederate flags. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, made a speech. Videos from Friday and Saturday show marchers chanting: “Jews will not replace us!” and “blood and soil,” a Nazi slogan. Later, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. allegedly drove a car into a crowd, killing counterdemonstrator Heather Heyer.

Taylor called Heyer’s death “a terrible, murderous act” that “no one would defend.” He said he is not associated with “Unite the Right” and didn’t agree with the decision some people made to wear swastikas. As founder of American Renaissance, which he says is among the “many websites and organizations that speak in the name of whites,” Taylor claims that there is no place for bigotry or hate in his ideology.

But the ideas that people gathered to defend over the weekend — that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and should remain so; that white people face an existential threat by becoming a racial minority; that there are biological differences among racial groups that make some more intelligent and others more prone to criminality — those are ideas that Taylor has been working to legitimize for decades.

“All of these characters, Peter Brimelow, Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor, say they’re terribly opposed to violence and, of course, would never engage in that kind of a thing,” says Potok. “Well, that’s very nice and very fine and the words are very pretty. But the reality is that these people provide the ideological foundation for people who are not so careful in what they say and do. People who are actual terrorists.”

Potok and others say that Brimelow offers such an ideological foundation with his book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, and his website, VDARE, where he says he’ll publish “anyone who has anything critical to say about immigration, environmentalists, progressives, etc.”

On Saturday, Brimelow published his own take on the events in Charlottesville, calling it a “remarkable torchlight procession.” He has published articles by fellow white-rights advocates Spencer, Kessler and MacDonald.

Marilyn Mayo of the Anti-Defamation League once described MacDonald as the country’s “foremost anti-Semite, next to David Duke.”

MacDonald is the editor-in-chief of The Occidental Observer and a former professor who left California State University, Long Beach, after coming under fire for his controversial writings. He is also one of the directors of the American Freedom Party— an anti-gay, anti-feminist political party that supports deporting any American who became a citizen after 1965.

MacDonald is celebrated among neo-Nazis for a trilogy of books he published in the 1990s that trade in some of the most pernicious stereotypes about Jewish people, all under the guise of researching their evolutionary biology.

The difference between Duke and MacDonald, Mayo said, is that Duke was largely ostracized from mainstream society for his public racism, whereas MacDonald’s work was bolstered by the credibility of his university position.

MacDonald, she says, “couches his anti-Semitic views as legitimate intellectual inquiry. That’s something that might make him more acceptable to people.”

It’s hard to put numbers on how many people Taylor, Brimelow, MacDonald and others like them reach. The Internet provides a degree of anonymity to those who visit their websites. Membership in hate groups, Potok estimates, numbers around half a million people. But include those who believe that “the United States, as well as a lot of European countries, were created ‘by and for whites and ought to return to being that,’ ” he adds, and “you’re looking at a group of several million people, if not more.”

MacDonald said the organizers of Saturday’s rally had misstepped; that the swastikas and other Nazi symbols should have been banned. “Because that stuff is never going to appeal to a wide swath of white Americans,” he said. “It’s simply not. And you’re in a political arena. You have to do what’s possible and what sells. And so you have to be very cautious about that kind of thing. And I don’t think the organizers were.”

But as for the basic message from “Unite the Right,” MacDonald was on board. The marchers on Saturday were trying to convey “that whites should be able to have their own identity and a sense of their own interests like anybody else,” he says. White people in the U.S. may not be ready to accept that message now, he adds, but they will be in the future “as whites become more and more of a minority in the coming years. So I think we’re ahead of the curve.”

On that last point, MacDonald and Potok meet.

“We’re seeing the continuing normalization of these ideas,” Potok said. “I think there is a real kind of conveyor belt we have seen develop over the last few years, and even the last few decades.”

Ideas start in a tiny radical fringe group somewhere, he explains. And then they travel to larger and more moderate groups — but still outside the political mainstream.

“And then they are picked up by the Drudges of the world, by the Breitbarts of the world, by those kinds of websites and ‘news organizations.’ And within, it seems, minutes, they will then be picked up and exploited by certain politicians … It is terribly important not only to have people like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow providing a kind of ideological foundation, but also critically important, I think, to have people like Donald Trump, who are essentially helping to mainstream and normalize these ideas.”

Accusations that Trump has been flirting with far right ideology have dogged him since before he was elected. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from people espousing white nationalism. He said multiple times that he disavowed the support of Duke and other white supremacists who endorsed his presidency.

But the president has been widely criticized since Saturday — by both detractors and supporters — for his responses to the events in Charlottesville. He first condemned the violence “on many sides,” then gave a more direct rejection of racists, “including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups,” but then followed that with even more controversy.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Trump clarified what he meant by “all sides.” And it sounded remarkably similar to something MacDonald said over the phone on Monday afternoon.

Here’s MacDonald on Monday:

“I’m not from the South. I understand they have a history and a heritage, and they don’t want to just throw it all out. But that’s what we’re going to see. And it’s not going to stop with General Robert E. Lee statues. It’s going to continue with Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, all those people, because they owned slaves, they will eventually be removed, I think. It’s just the beginning.”

And here is Trump on Tuesday:

“Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee. … So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

Source: The Trickle-Up Theory Of White Nationalist Thought : Code Switch : NPR

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ICYMI: How Ann Coulter inspired Donald Trump

2016/02/11 Leave a comment

Interesting little nugget connected to Canadian politics, the reference in the last para to Peter Brimelow, a seminal influence on the Reform party and Stephen Harper, according to William Johnson and Paul Wells.

Helps explain some of the anti-Muslim rhetoric during the last campaign:

Being a pundit is a show business occupation, and Coulter, like many show business stars, seemed to have been supplanted by younger models. She had become famous in the cable TV world of the 1990s as a good-looking blond lawyer willing to say the most outrageous things about liberals, especially Bill Clinton. As this kind of put-down became more common, and channels like Fox News put conservative blond women all over television, her uniqueness seemed to fade and her sales with it: in 2011, the Washington Post reported weak sales for her book Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America.

¡Adios, America! changed that, debuting at No. 2 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list and reinventing Coulter’s image. The younger pundits who were eclipsing her have been thrown for a loop by Trump’s rise—Glenn Beck contributed to National Review’s “Against Trump” issue last month—and left Coulter as the voice of pro-Trump punditry. When Trump walked out on a Fox News Republican debate, Coulter, writing in the Hollywood Reporter this week, trashed Fox as “trivial and self-important” and praised Trump as the only candidate who “takes principled stands.” Trump fans can count on her to defend their idol against mainstream conservatism.

If Trump is pulling Coulter back into the limelight, she might end up pulling a lot of other people in with her. The Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out that Coulter “routinely cites white nationalists” in ¡Adios, America! In an interview with Chronicles magazine, she stated that one of her key inspirations for writing the book was Alien Nation author Peter Brimelow, who recently called for the expulsion of Muslims from the U.S. and declared “whites are America.” A year ago, such associations seemed like a bad move for a mainstream conservative. But, thanks to Donald Trump, Ann Coulter might be the head of the new conservative mainstream.

Source: How Ann Coulter inspired Donald Trump

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The ideological roots of Stephen Harper’s vendetta against sociology

2014/08/28 Leave a comment

While a bit over-the-top, there is a more than an element of truth to the roots of the Government’s distrust of social science and sociology. Paul Wells captured some of this in The Longer I’m Prime Minister in his discussion of the reasons behind the cancellation of the Census and his explanation of some of the thinkers, like Peter Brimelow, behind his views and ideology.

But sometimes the social scientists assign all responsibility to structural factors, neglecting the individual. Bit more complicated.

But worth reading and reflecting upon:

Harper’s two disparaging comments about sociology, however, also need to be understood alongside his gutting of the long-form census in 2010. It is widely accepted that this action fundamentally undermined Canada’s ability to understand its own demographics, long-term social trends, and inequalities — in short, its sociology.

So what does Harper have against sociology? First, Harper is clearly trumpeting a standard component of neo-liberal ideology: that there are no social phenomena, only individual incidents. This ideology traces back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society.” Neo-liberalism paints all social problems as individual problems. The benefit of this for those who share Harper’s agenda, of course, is that if there are no social problems or solutions, then there is little need for government. Individuals are solely responsible for the problems they face.

This ideology is so seductive not only because it radically simplifies our world, but also because it mirrors the two social institutions neo-liberals actually believe in — the “free” market and law and order. Everything is reduced to either a simplistic market transaction or a criminal case. In the former, you either have the money to buy stuff, or you don’t and it’s up to you to get more. In the latter, a lone individual is personally responsible for a crime and is punished for it. Easy peasy. No sociology needed.

via The ideological roots of Stephen Harper’s vendetta against sociology | Toronto Star.

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