December 21, 2006

Dear Friend of VDARE.COM:

There is simply no nice way to say this.

Our Christmas Appeal has gone much more slowly than we hoped.

We’ve raised about $7600. By this stage, we were hoping for at least twice that.

It happens. People are distracted at this time of year. And there are so many worthy causes.

But it’s a serious problem. The great bulk of our online donations come in the last month of the year. (That’s partly for a good reason: until December 31, it’s the season for giving stock to avoid capital gains tax legally—see below).

I hate asking for money.

I don’t really even like running a webzine. I’d prefer to write. I occasionally look wistfully at my half-finished proposal for a sequel to my 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. Heck, I’d even settle for writing the occasional column!

But I created VDARE.COM—we put out our first mass email on Christmas Eve 1999—to meet an imperative need. There was at that time simply nowhere else to publish facts and analysis exposing this American disaster.

We’ve come a long way since then. We’ve even shamed some of the Establishment media into covering immigration, albeit in a half-hearted way.

We’ve seen stories we’ve broken appear on Mainstream Media outlets like Fox, CNN, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, plus of course nominally “conservative” journals like National Review and City Journal.

And the movement for patriotic immigration reform has come a long way too. It has now developed a number of different institutions, often internet-based, that focus on different but mutually supporting areas—litigation, lobbying, scholarship, education, border security etc.

At VDARE.COM we support them all and link to them all when legally possible for a charity (even when they won’t link back to us!). Our object is to be a forum, and an honest broker, for the patriotic immigration reform movement.

Only a perennial shortage of resources prevents us from doing this on a larger scale.

I believe that VDARE.COM plays a particularly vital role even among all these patriotic immigration reform groups. We operate at the high end of the intellectual food chain. Our articles are carefully researched and written. They break news and introduce new concepts. They are of the highest professional quality and could appear anywhere in the Mainstream Media—except for the epidemic curse of Political Correctness.

And except for epidemic media cowardice.

We exist to take risks and push the envelope in a way that most professional (i.e. housetrained) journalists and columnists will not.

Our theory is that, when an idea has been sufficiently ventilated and tested, it will filter down to the more cautious, to the less imaginative and to the mass-media popularizers.

We see this happening all the time.

For example, our Letters Editor, Joe Guzzardi, keeps a list of how many times an issue broached on VDARE.COM appears within a few days on a popular TV show whose host, bless him, has decided to break the MSM taboo and cover the immigration issue. When I last asked Joe, he’d counted more than a score of such instances.

Of course, we don’t get any credit for this—as some of you were kind enough to note when the immigration issue was getting nation-wide publicity because of President Bush’s illegal alien amnesty drive in the summer of 2006. (He didn’t get it!—because the patriotic immigration reform movement is now highly organized, thanks in good measure to VDARE.COM’s leadership role.)

But I don’t think we should care about credit. (Which is why I don’t ask Joe about his list very often!) Our purpose is to change the debate—and to keep the pressure on until it become easier for politicians to be with us rather than against us.

Our annual War Against Christmas competition, now underway, tells the whole story in a nutshell.

As I relate every year, the War Against Christmas (in the form of a leaked memo from the Clinton Administration’s HUD) was almost the first thing that VDARE.COM covered when it went live in 1999. Our annual competitions now provide the best compendium of anti-Christmas atrocities on the web. It’s fun, but it’s also serious: the people who want to abolish Christmas also want to abolish America.

In 2005, the War Against Christmas went mainstream. Several organizations, and famous television personalities, took up the cause. It was great! And it definitely got the Christophobes worried.

In 2006, however, we are observing a different pattern. As our blogger Patrick Cleburne has shown, the Mainstream Media has suddenly begun to parrot with eerie unanimity the line that there is no War Against Christmas (according to one recent count, there have been 106 major newspaper articles denying the War Against Christmas and only 18 acknowledging it). At the same time, the MSM is quite obviously simply suppressing new anti-Christmas atrocities. For example, the peculiar episode on December 12 where a California high school choir was ordered to stop singing carols at a Christmas show for fear of offending Olympic figure skater Sasha Cohen (who said she wasn’t offended) took days to make it into the national media, and then only in a minor way.

This is what I mean by changing the debate—and keeping on changing it. Obviously, the Christophobes are on the run. They are quite rightly shaken by the American backlash when anti-Christmas atrocities do get national attention. (As when, for example, Christmas trees were removed from Seattle airport, which through the miracle of the internet, VDARE.COM was able to report within a couple of hours.) They are putting out a smokescreen of War Against Christmas denial to cover their withdrawal while attempting to salvage their cultural power by ridiculing those who dare draw attention to it.

And it works. Have last year’s TV Christmas crusaders been so vocal this year? Have they even noticed what is going on?

But VDARE.COM has noticed. And we will keep up the pressure, whether resistance to the War Against Christmas is fashionable or not, whether we are ridiculed or not, until America’s Christmas is restored.

This is what’s going to happen with the immigration issue. Eventually, politicians will decide that American opinion can no longer be ignored.

You can already see it happening—witness the absurd claim that this summer’s legislation was not an “amnesty” and that the whole package was “immigration reform”, when it was actually immigration capitulation. That’s the homage that political vice pays to patriotic virtue.

But they didn’t get away with it.

The next step: politicians and their pundit groupies will have to offer real immigration reform. But they’ll be tricky about it. We’ll be watching to make sure they don’t get away with anything there too.

To do it, however, we need your help.

Please give generously.

And Merry Christmas!

 /s/ Peter Brimelow

p.s. Don’t forget to go in through a VDARE.COM link when you buy Christmas gifts from Amazon.com e.g. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060976918/vdare—we get a commission at no cost to you!

p.p.s. As I mentioned earlier, this is the season when you can give to avoid capital gains tax. Last year, a couple of elves slid down the chimney at the last moment.

We need this to happen again. If you have investment gains, please think about VDARE.COM now.

NOTE: VDARE.COM is no longer associated with the Center For American Unity, which plans to focus on litigation. We are grateful for their past help and wish them well in future. Our sponsor is now the VDARE Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

You can donate (tax-deductibly!) http://www.vdare.com/asp/donate.asp by check http://www.vdare.com/donate/mail.htm or credit card http://www.vdare.com/asp/donate.asp#paypal1 —and you can do it monthly http://www.vdare.com/asp/donate.asp#paypal2 if you prefer. ALSO: you can now fax your credit card info! http://www.vdare.com/donate/fax.htm Donations are tax-deductible.
 
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