My husband, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow, has described, in his resignation announcement above, the lethal lawfare waged against us by New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
But Peter also mentioned other interlocking issues that are also contributing to our decision to suspend. Here I want to put on the record, because I lived it personally, the role of Cancel Culture in the demise of VDARE.com.
My role as President of the VDARE Foundation perforce became, not fundraising, but developing strategies to survive Cancel Culture. It is my sense that our little organization has been targeted more harshly than almost any other. We are genuinely puzzled as to why. Essentially, we’ve just been advocating what President Trump endorsed in his epochal August 15, 2015, Immigration Statement. What’s wrong with that?
Nevertheless, Cancel Culture is a key reason it has become impossible for VDARE Foundation to continue our main project, the VDARE.com website. My bitter task here is to explain that, and to describe what I have done to fight it off as long as possible.
For VDARE.com to operate, we need at a minimum:
Below, please find a list of business services from which we have been Canceled or who have otherwise failed us, categorized loosely.
(Note: this list does not include event venue cancelations, Lawfare, Berkeley Springs Castle administration, staffing challenges or the personal harassment of the Brimelow family, all of which taken serious tolls but do not directly contribute to the paralysis that our operation now faces.)
Network Solutions canceled our domain registration in 2020 (https://vdare.com/posts/breaking-network-solutions-driving-vdare-com-to-the-dark-web). I attempted to migrate VDARE.com to Epik, known at the time for hosting American Renaissance and Gab. After some extremely weird email and phone conversations with Epik’s Rob Monster (he told me on the phone that he would consider hosting us if we purchased a board seat for $1 million, and then sent me a several-thousand-word nonsensical rant about Christianity, implying that I needed to endorse it), I decided Epik was unworkable. That turned out to be a good judgement, given the scandals that have subsequently hounded his company.
From 2016-2023 VDARE.com used RKL, a Connecticut-based tech support company, to service our hardware, office network, backups, VOIP phones and Microsoft365 licensing and email hosting. In 2023, they abruptly canceled us for political reasons, taking with them a lot of institutional knowledge that I have subsequently tried hard to piece together.
I applied to TechSoup, a nonprofit organization dedicated to offering free and discounted tech support, software and hardware to other nonprofit organizations. TechSoup is a global leader in nonprofit tech support and is partnered with Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit (Quickbooks), HP, Docusign, Zoom, Youtube, and more.
But TechSoup rejected us for violating their Anti-Discrimination Policy. This “policy” was particularly notable because it said
…organizations must be willing and able to attest that they do not discriminate on any of the [listed] grounds in order to receive resources from TechSoup. External evidence, such as negative publicity or social media that reveals such discrimination, hate speech, or disrespectful or bullying behavior, as determined by TechSoup in its sole discretion, may be taken into consideration. TechSoup reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. [Emphasis added]
In other words: if you get smeared in the Regime Media, you are disqualified from TechSoup’s service—regardless of the truth.
Last year, I located a suitable tech support firm in Winchester, VA, about 45 minutes from our Castle offices, and spent several hours speaking with their representatives and negotiating a contract. At the last minute, they informed me that they could not go forward with the contract because their insurance company would not support the business relationship. Our contractual relationship was exactly the type of their business sought, so I have to assume it was political.
This type of unproductive wheel-spinning is a major contributor to the challenge of continuing to do business with VDARE.com’s baggage. I cannot overstate how much time is wasted on efforts like this.
It has the effect—would you call it a chilling effect?—of deterring me from even trying to find firms to work with that aren’t explicitly politically-aligned. Unfortunately, there aren’t many explicitly politically-aligned professional services, and even fewer of them are qualified and dependable.
Most services disqualify themselves before I even contact them, by posting the modern equivalent to “NO IRISH NEED APPLY” signs in their window—that is, “Hate Speech” clauses in their Terms of Service.
Before I contact a potential new vendor, I read the terms of service to size up my risk. Ninety per cent of off-the-shelf-services have Terms of Service clauses explicitly hostile to freedom of speech, and I know from experience they will lean on that to terminate our business when they come under the slightest pressure.
(Incidentally, note that, while we haven’t been kicked off of Microsoft, the Microsoft Terms of Service are very bad and leave all patriots totally exposed. If Microsoft detects you promoting “harmful stereotypes,” “calling for segregation,” making “dehumanizing statements,” or “communicating hatred or racial superiority,” they say they will restrict or suspend your accounts. In other words, if you are Politically Incorrect, Microsoft can lock you out of your email, calendar, Excel, Word and any other of their tools on which your work relies.)
So, currently, I am the de facto tech support for our office. I have done my best, but I have no background in technology and the little bit I know has come from troubleshooting on the job.
In several cases, VDARE.com’s existing tech problems are beyond my ability to address. For example, investigating a solution to the problems that Peter’s email is no longer opening on his cell phone, that VDARE.com’s bulk emails are not being reliably delivered, that restricted identities on Microsoft must be managed due to online attacks and also managing our complicated phone system. In the case of the VDARE.com email blacklist, I don’t even know the meaning of the words that Microsoft’s helpdesk suggests in their troubleshooting advice.
Our webmaster has helped when he can, but even he has met his match (see below). And the VDARE Foundation cannot support his fees any longer.
Distribution and Communication
The bulk email service ConstantContact kicked us off in 2018 .We turned to MailChimp where we lasted less than a month—and MailChimp even tried to steal our email lists rather than return them.
For a period of time, we sent out our own emails using the Microsoft servers. The process was time-consuming and cumbersome and could not send to large numbers at a time.
We moved to ActiveCampaign. They kicked us off, so we moved to the service where we currently sit. It’s a marginal product and delivers marginal results.
(By far our most crippling communication problem began recently, with a total block of all VDARE.com emails to any Gmail-based address (even paid customized emails that appear to have different domains, like that of our lawyers and of American Renaissance). This blacklisting dropped our ebulletin and other mass email sends from a 20%+ open rate—remarkably high, we were always proud of this—to an abysmal 1.24% open rate. It also meant that nobody with a @vdare.com email address could send or even reply to anyone on the gmail system.
For several week, I had donors emailing me and I was unable to respond because my “reply” emails are undeliverable.
All we could do was ask our readers individually to take steps to whitelist our domain. Of course, we knew very few were likely to do take the trouble.
In weeks of back and forth and troubleshooting with Microsoft, our webmasters and SendX, we never got answers about why we were blacklisted by Google. But then, equally unexpectedly and again without explanation, the blacklist was lifted earlier this week (around July 17, 2024). Will the blacklist stay lifted? I wish I knew.
Despite 25 years of VDARE.com posts updated several times a day, our Google Search traffic was sandbagged in the 2018 election cycle and has never recovered
The Apple Podcasts app hides VDARE.com podcasts such as the Radio Derb and VDARE Book Club from Search and marks them with a big red “content advisory” label as if they are gangster rap, totally choking our growth on one of the most easily accessible podcasting platform in America.
The terrible battle we waged against Facebook a.k.a. Meta, which we abandoned only because a New York judge disappointingly allowed the case to be transferred to California where loser-pay rules are prohibitive, was all documented on VDARE.com. (In a tellingly vindictive act, Facebook also confiscated my family pictures, graduation pictures, baby pictures etc. from my totally non-political personal account, begun when I was a student at Loyola Chicago, long before I met Peter, and has refused to return them).
Meta owns Instagram and Venmo, so those companies are unavailable to us too.
YouTube kicked us off in 2020, just as our channel grew large enough for monetization.
We were approved by X, formally known as Twitter, for monetization. But the only way to get paid by X is to connect our Stripe account, which of course was permanently suspended earlier this year. I haven’t connected a different Stripe account for fear of it being seen as some kind of violation. I have put in inquiries with our lawyers about doing so, it but the only response I’ve gotten is that it’s a “gray area.” We can’t afford gray areas (see: Lawfare).
Many journalists, and even some websites, have moved to Substack to solve their tech and monetization problems. But Stripe monetizes Substack, too, so we presume that’s not an option for us either.
PSAV (now Encore) is an in-house hotel Audio/Visual vendor used by more than 2,000 hotels and motels. VDARE.com has never worked with PSAV.
However, during the period before the purchase of the Castle, when we were canceled out of so many conference contracts, I had an interesting conversation with a PSAV employee. He called me after the Lotte New York Palace Hotel cancelation, because the Lotte failed to tell him that they’d reneged on our conference contract. He was puzzled by a “red flag” on our client file in the internal PSAV system. He speculated that Lotte had canceled because PSAV gave them a heads-up before they signed the final contract.
Being blackballed by the major provider of A/V to America’s hotels and motels is significant. Why did PSAV have us flagged if we’d never worked with them?
Pam Matocha of the TM Byxbee Company in Connecticut was our CPA for several years until she abruptly canceled us in 2020. Her abandonment of us mid-COVID and on the verge our first audit, key to getting solicitation licenses in multiple states, triggered a nightmarish series of accounting crises that took me years to resolve and at one point threatened us with more than $30,000 in IRS penalties that, thank goodness, were waived after we spent a pretty penny on a tax lawyer in Texas.
It took us almost a year to find an auditor who would do the audits required for solicitation licensing. It wasn’t until Laura Loomer put out a call for referrals on her massive network that one brave auditor picked us up.
The financial services front of the Cancel Culture war has been the most complex, unpleasant and time-consuming challenge in my professional life—second only to our “investigation” by NYAG Letitia James.
In early 2022, VDARE Foundation’s long-time and highly-trusted financial planner joined a new firm, CCR Wealth Management LLC associated with Cetera Advisors. He didn’t know until he was already in contract, and we had already transferred our professional and personal accounts, that the new firm would not take us on as clients—neither the VDARE Foundation nor Peter and myself as private individuals. By the time we were informed, VDARE’s investment accounts had already been orphaned for two weeks.
The scramble to find a new advisor and shift the money over was extremely difficult. Additionally, our new firm has a different approach to insurance and so a number of changes were made to our arrangements that took time and focus, during a time when my attention was in high demand getting the Berkeley Springs Castle in order, fending off the accounting crisis, grappling with staff turnover etc.
It isn’t just financial services, though. VDARE.com has experienced serious trouble finding legal representation against the onslaught from NYAG Letitia James.
Thus there are two talented and patriotic lawyers who would represent us pro bono but are not allowed to by their firms. Of note, one of the firms did allow pro bono work for the terrorist prisoners in Guantanamo Bay —but said VDARE.com is beyond the pale.
There are other distinguished lawyers who are willing to advise us but not to sign anything or appear publicly on our behalf.
We ran into this representation problem in trying to find a qualified lawyer argue for us at the Supreme Court in VDARE vs Colorado Springs. The firm we use for corporate advice was shocked when their well-connected go-to litigator declined, saying he was worried about reputational risk.
Even in small matters, this hounds us. Thus the VDARE Foundation recently engaged in a minor real estate transaction. The first lawyer that our buyer approached would not take the job because he didn’t approve of VDARE.com.
That’s right – he wouldn’t even represent the other party.
This friction in the market is a constant drag on our productivity, and in fact, our ability to do business at all.
AirBNB, which I hardly used, kicked me personally off last year.
That doesn’t make much difference to VDARE.com, but this type of cancelation adds strength to my sense that VDARE.com is excluded from the world of business.
The above list includes payment platforms for both fiat and crypto payments, ads and commission-based revenue, donation management software and accounts payable software.
Discover Card and Coinbase decline and block donations to VDARE Foundation.
Kraken severed our crypto accounts due to some dispute they have with the State of NY where we are incorporated (not that I blame them).
We bought the Berkeley Springs Castle in cash precisely because we were afraid our political enemies would pressure our lending bank to pull the mortgage. But, just out of curiosity, I did inquire with a bank about getting a loan. They rejected the VDARE Foundation before I could even submit an application, and told me outright it was because they don’t want to take the political risk.
Donorperfect is a CRM software that helped me manage donor contact information and receipting. They abruptly kicked us off after many years. When pressed, they said a third party they had gotten involved with—presumably one of the communist vigilante groups like Sleeping Giants—who had them know we were on their customer list and should be purged.
Provoked by my bad experience with DonorPerfect, as well as my growing distrust of third-party services that might see who was interacting with VDARE.com, my developers and I spent several years building our own CRM on the VDARE.com backend. We had our own sophisticated system to manage event ticketing, book and merchandise sales, subscriptions to 1620 Society, the Book Club and our VQ magazine. Donors could log in and see their online donation history and manage their payment methods. I could see who had recurring donations and whose credit cards had expired. I got alerted when subscriptions were canceled. I had a mapping tool that allowed me to pull up a list of donors within a certain radius of a given location, facilitating local meetups when Peter and I traveled. With a few clicks, I could build our weekly ebulletin auto populated with the week’s headlines. It was within this system that I managed our email lists for the ebulletin, legal updates and donor communications. Tragically, that all fell apart when we lost online payments. Years of work and six figures in development costs were rendered useless.
MineralTree is a financial software company that helped us manage bookkeeping with our remote office. When MineralTree kicked us off, they told my bookkeeper that it was because my own social security number was “associated with membership of the Alt Right.”
The Alt Right does not (did not? Is it still a thing?) have membership rolls. And even if it did, I never joined—and certainly never gave “the Alt Right” access to my social security number.
And even further furthermore, if I had, how would a random bookkeeping software company have access to it?
Paypal and Stripe kicking us off are well documented, as are the Donor Advised Fund blocks.
The rest on the list above are ad companies that solicited placement on VDARE.com and then reneged, sometimes stiffing us the promised ad revenue on their way out.
Fidelity Charitable, the world’s largest vehicle for charitable giving, blocks all donations to VDARE.com, as have other smaller Donor-Advised funds.
This year, we lost $15,000 in known donations, because some donors are locked in to using Fidelity.
These are the ones I know about. But, as with all of these donation problems, I will never know what donors just walked away when they experienced friction and never contacted me.
*AN IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT ONLINE PAYMENTS: Once the VDARE Foundation was kicked off Paypal and Stripe, we were thrown into the bewildering and Byzantine world of disaggregated financial services that all have to sync seamlessly in order for online payments of any type to work. For VDARE.com to accept online donations, there are four critical components:
a) a Merchant Service Provider/Independent Sales Organization [MSP/ISO];
b) an acquiring bank;
c) a payment gateway;
d) our own intact website security.
The MSP/ISO works between the business (in this case, the VDARE Foundation) and the credit card companies, as well as the acquiring banks and all other parties involved in the merchant processing. It is essentially a sales office.
I have worked with several MSP/ISOs that specialize in servicing “high-risk” merchants. “High Risk” means merchants who experience a lot of fraud (pornography) or are selling goods that people frequently want refunded (male enhancement supplements) or are in a grey area legally (cannabis) or experience a lot of liability (guns).
An MSP/ISO’s first order of business is to connect us with an acquiring bank. This is the trickiest part, and the piece most vulnerable to Cancelation.
The MSP/ISOs I worked with are listed below not because they willingly canceled us, but because none of them successfully connected us in a lasting relationship with any acquiring bank.
The process of connecting with an acquiring bank is not transparent. I have lost count of the number of applications I’ve filled out for these banks. Most of the applications don’t even have the bank’s name on them—I just fill out my information and give it to the MSP/ISO, which then deals directly with the bank. So the names of a lot of the banks that refused the VDARE Foundation are unknown to me. I actually tried to keep up with who they all were, since each time we signed up with a new MSP/ISO I thought it would be efficient to avoid applications to previous rejects, but for reasons I’m not privy to, the bank names are kept close to the chest. I did get some of them, and they are included on this list, but the list is incomplete.
To be clear: some of the online payment companies listed, like Gab Pay, did NOT cancel the VDARE Foundation. But they are companies that I tried, and they failed to assist us.
In two notable cases the representatives implied to me that they were getting pressure from “the Feds” not to partner with us.
One bank did do me the favor of checking to see if VDARE Foundation is listed on the MATCH list. We aren’t. (The MATCH list is a database of businesses that are considered unacceptably risky. It was created by Mastercard, and it is shared by acquiring banks so that really bad actors can be identified before an unsuspecting bank signs up with them. Nobody tells you when you are put on the MATCH list, you just figure it out by being rejected out of hand by acquiring banks…which is what happens to us despite not being on the list.)
Why do I say that VDARE more targeted than Infowars?
At VDARE.com’s most recent conference, Harrison Smith of Infowars expressed his condolences on the lawfare struggle VDARE is enduring at the whim of Letitia James. “Well, it’s nothing compared to what Infowars is facing,” I replied. “No,” he said, “at least at Infowars we know what they think we did wrong. You don’t even know.”
There’s something to that—cold comfort though it must be to Alex Jones. And Infowars still has online payments, and his emails get delivered.
(I approached the email service that Infowars uses but they said our numbers were too low for them to take us on. Infowars has huge lists. I also approached his payment provider and they asked me gather letters from all of our board members attesting to “not being racist or antisemitic.” Setting aside this clear violation of the spirit of the First Amendment, I know from bitter experience that such documents would not prevent them from canceling us on a whim, so I did not pursue the relationship.)
Why do I say that VDARE.com is more targeted than America First Foundation? Remember, the very same bank that refused VDARE now supports AFF’s online payments. And their emails send.
Why do I say that VDARE more targeted than NRA? One reason is that lawyers who worked on the NRA’s defense were not allowed by their firms to work with us.
But don’t take it from me – take it from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who, in her recent concurring opinion in NRA vs. Vullo, where SCOTUS found that the NRA has a First Amendment claim against coercive regulation by the New York State insurance commissioner, actually said that VDARE Foundation’s case against Colorado Springs was stronger.
Let me repeat that: our case was stronger than the NRA’s winning case. But SCOTUS still declined to hear it.
Plus the NRA has more money, bigger lists, etc. There’s a question of proportionality. Meaning, the NRA is attacked, but they, like Trump, have the resources to fight it. VDARE Foundation doesn’t.
To recap: we’ve found that even banks specializing in servicing high risk merchants, such as porn, cannabis and guns, will not service VDARE.com. But those same banks will service Infowars, the NRA and AFF. Why is VDARE.com so excluded?
After 25 years, VDARE.com has reached a good level of brand recognition, and our readers have grown to know and trust us. Our donors are connected enough to our mission that they give substantial gifts and include us in their estate planning. Peter and I take a lot of pride in the fact that we carved out a niche in online journalism that answers questions others are not answering.
A U.S. Congressman told me just recently: “You’re the only news outlet I trust.”
Peter often comments about this momentum that comes from our careful and long-lasting dedication to the mission and the organization. VDARE Foundation has not been mismanaged, and has not experienced any scandal, aside from the scandalous attacks we have endured year after year. We wouldn’t have a funding problem if there were a level playing field. Our donors are loyal and generous.
We thought that VDARE.com was rolling, slowly at first, but picking up momentum, and would soon be unstoppable.
However, it has become clear that we are not unstoppable.
My sense is that we are a lion succumbing to hyenas.
First one hyena attacks, then another, and the lion throws them off. But the pack is large, and the lion is alone. Two hyenas are now four, now six. No other lions come to his aid. He continues to fight. Now there are ten hyenas. No handful of them could take him down, but there are so many now. The lion is completely weighed down by these scrawny, nasty things. He can’t stand up. It’s over.
It was in December 2023, when our traditional year-end appeal was completely disrupted by online attacks, that I realized there were too many hyenas.
Our webmaster, who is very sophisticated, says that the attackers are not random bots online. They are human, they respond to every defense we put up, they are probably using AI and they are relentless.
(NB: Yesterday, July 23, 2024, a fresh attack hit, knocking out a little used email address [email protected]. It sent 1,000 spam emails before Microsoft put it on the restricted list. Will this throw our domain back on the email deliverability blacklist? I don’t know what got us there in the first place, but maybe.)
VDARE.com has several “forms” i.e. points at which readers can interact with our website. The donation form is the one everyone thinks of, but the ebulletin signup form is another, as is the search bar and the members’ area login.
All of these forms have been repeatedly and endlessly exploited by online attacks since December 2023. We have not had a data breach; we have not been “hacked” in that way. The ebulletin signup form, when exploited, is just hit with hundreds of thousand fake signups per hour. Each fake signup triggers a confirmation email to be sent from the VDARE.com email servers. The server flags this as spammy behavior and locks everything up.
To unlock it, I have to go in to the Microsoft server security system (see: no tech support) and unwind it. But there is no point in me doing that until the webmaster adds another defense to block the attack.
The webmasters have tried rucaptcha, recaptcha, invisible captchas, Cloudlfare, AbuseIPDB and others. Nothing holds. The automated email sign-up form for VDARE.com has been disabled for months as a result.
Is it because of the online form exploitation that our VDARE.com bulk emails no longer deliver reliably? Possibly, although early on in the online attacks, I set the lock trigger very low in an effort to immediately clamp down on any spammy behavior. I know that on an excellent day we get fewer than 50 new ebulletin signups. So I told Microsoft to trigger the lockdown if more than 100 emails were sent in a day. So even when an online attack hit, the volume of spammy email sent from VDARE.com address was relatively small. Was it enough, anyway, to cause Gmail to blacklist us?
It isn’t just the emails. When GabPay’s bank pulled the rug out from under us, we reverted to echecks, which were, in turn, overrun with online attacks that ended up costing us more in fees than we deposited in donations.
When we finally deactivated echeck donations on VDARE.com/donate, there was no way to tell a legitimate donation from a fraudulent one. I had to throw them all out. Many people initiated legitimate donations that never went through.
(If this happened to you, please use GiveSendGo or snail mail a check. We do still have legal bills to pay).
Some people think we should keep the site up and keep fundraising for it in hope of a miracle. I am convinced that is the wrong decision here.
We have been praying for a miracle for more than two years, hoping that some judge would recognize our First Amendment rights, or someone in a position of power could wave a wand to solve any one of our many problems.
And in February, we did get not one miracle—but three:
The first miracle was my appearance on Tucker Carlson.
Mass immigration is completely destroying our country. Why is no one doing anything about it? Because they’re afraid of ending up like Lydia Brimelow. pic.twitter.com/B5B0bh6t5O
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 20, 2024
Even as of this writing, almost six months later, when Tucker is posting almost every day and has interviewed Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and other world-historical figures, my interview is in the top 10 watched with over 21 million views. Publicity miracles don’t get much bigger than that.
The second and third miracles: The pro bono professional helpers that stepped forward as a direct result of my appearance on Tucker. One is an experienced paralegal with a specialty in e-discovery. The other is an attorney admitted to the bar in New York State who specializes in preparing documents for regulatory review.
Between the two of them, they have not only met NYAG James’ deadlines (which were totally impossible before) but also saved us an estimated $1 million+ that we definitely didn’t have, to ensure careful and precise redactions so that no sensitive piece of information about donors, writers or vendors would accidentally get through to the hostile regulators.
We think of it as saving anons from the guillotine.
These are not the miracles that I prayed for. But we must recognize them for what they are.
I asked for God to show us the way, and he sent a highly skilled team specializing in exactly what we needed in order to answer NYAG James’ subpoena demands, and they work for free.
So the answer seemed clear.
Personally, I don’t have the heart to suggest to my donors that their hard-earned money should go to the pit of endless costs that VDARE.com now faces.
Some heroic donors certainly do want to fight Letitia James. And God bless them—they are the only reason we are able to redact from our emails writer, donor and vendor information and meet NYAG Letitia James’ otherwise impossible subpoena deadlines.
But most donors want to educate the American public on the negative effects of mass immigration.
And, in fact, this is what Peter and I ourselves want to do.
But it has become impossible for the VDARE Foundation to execute that mission.
From a practical standpoint, we will perform a carefully-planned-wind down. With the Board’s support, I am cutting back to skeleton operations. The VDARE Foundation itself will remain intact, and we will work to wrap up the regulatory action with New York in a professional manner commensurate with our fiduciary duties.
Suspending VDARE.com is an agonizing decision and we are full of bitterness.
Perhaps I am naïve, but it remains my true hope that we can, at some point, experience that miracle of justice, or a breaking up of this totalitarian marketplace, and the VDARE Foundation can again bring VDARE.com back to life.
Until then, the board of the VDARE Foundation join me in thanking Peter for his 25 years of unmatched dedication, profound sacrifice, and inspirational leadership.
