White Nationalist Website VDARE in Trouble, Loses Big Funder
The white nationalist website is in financial trouble â and its founder says that more mainstream anti-immigration groups may be responsible.
âIf VDARE.com is to survive [the] latest threat, it must have your help now,â writes the websiteâs founder, , 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 âmajor foundation,â which Brimelow doesnât name, helped finance the website since its inception in 1999. â Weâve lost close to a third of our budget and weâve been plunged into an immediate cash crisis,â writes Brimelow, a leading anti-immigration activist and author of the best-selling Alien Nation. âOf course, Iâm still trying to find out what happened. One explanation Iâve been given is that the Washington D.C. âBeltway immigration reform groupsâ 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.â (Brimelow doesnât identify the âBeltway immigration reform groups,â 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 âbest-funded and most visible Beltway organizations in the patriotic immigration reform movement.â The ĂŰĚŇ´ŤĂ˝ 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 , editor of the racist magazine; , 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 , who edited the newspaper of the white supremacist . Brimelow says he heard that the âBeltway immigration reform groupsâ especially objected to VDARE.com columnist and blogger Steve Sailer, who founded a neo-eugenics organization called the . In a Feb. 7 column, Sailer wrote that murder âis for whites, and for anyone else who gets in the way of minorities that are clearly systematically prone to criminality.â He has repeatedly on a government push for minority home ownership. In a March 8 column complaining about Jewish support for immigration, he asserted that âAmerican 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 â rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization.â
Brimelow, formerly a mainstream journalist at Forbes magazine and the National Review, explains that âsupporting Steve is one of our main expensesâ and laments that, âif VDARE.com fails, Steve Sailer will have no other outlets for his path-breaking work.â He also emphasizes the importance of paying VDARE.comâs other contributors, saying itâs critical to the websiteâs long-term health. Because operating expenses are low, he writes, âEssentially everything you give goes to pay writers and editors.â
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 foundationâs expenses. (Just $134,000 went toward paying freelance writers.) In 2006, Brimelow got $205,000; John Brimelow, Peterâs brother and fellow board member, was paid $45,020. That year, the compensation for both Brimelows amounted to more than half the foundationâs spending.
But VDARE.com wasnât as personally lucrative for Brimelow in 2008, the last year for which tax forms are available. He received $115,000 â just over a quarter of the foundationâs spending for the year. Most of the remaining expenses consisted of fees paid to independent contractors.