See also: “WHAT VDARE.COM NEEDS NOW IS A MIRACLE”—Peter And Lydia Brimelow On NYAG Letitia James’ Lawfare
VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow writes: This is the transcript of Lydia’s March 15, 2024 interview with Tom Woods, lightly edited for clarity, with our trademark links. Woods titled the interview ”Lawfare Against Normal People Is Here.”
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Woods: Hey everybody, Tom Woods here. Welcome to episode 2466. I’m delighted to be joined by Lydia Brimelow, who is fundraiser and office manager at vdare.com. She is the wife of Peter Brimelow, whom I got to know. I guess we had a, he might not even remember this, Lydia, but he and I had a lunch together, I think when I was a grad student at Columbia, I think I had seen him give a lecture at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, but I don’t think I really got in contact with him till I was in New York City. But Peter was a, well, I don’t want to talk to him like he’s deceased, but I mean, at that time, he was a pretty mainstream, right? Journalist wrote for National Review, Forbes when it was still a real publication, all these general… CBS Market Watch, I think. So we’re a fairly mainstream guy, but in any event, you’ve got a fairly eventful life and not the best way, lately, and we want to talk about that. So welcome to the show.
Lydia: Thank you so much. You know, I say you don’t want to talk about him like he’s deceased, but it does seem like another life, a lifetime ago when we could rely on media, maybe not always to be so transparent, but certainly not to be as politicized as it now is. And the polarization is absolutely insane. We’ve felt it not only in the coverage—or the lack thereof—of the work that our foundation has done, the VDARE Foundation, our main project is vdare.com. But also just in the pressure that everybody’s under. So I thank you very much for having us on the podcast. It’s a real pleasure.
Woods: Yeah, my pleasure. I mean, if people aren’t alarmed about what’s happened to you because they disagree with you, then they really are moral pygmies and cowards.
Lydia: How would they know about it? I mean, you know, we’ve had a real hard time getting the word out.
Woods: Yeah, yeah, but now there’ll be no excuse because now they’ve heard what’s going on. Why don’t we start off though, just to set the stage here with a bit of your background and what VDARE.com is all about. Not that it should even matter in light of what they’re doing to you because, you know, this is America and you can say what you want, but why don’t you give us some background on that?
Lydia: Sure, so in the late 90s, VDARE.com was started as a result of, it came out of the work that my husband Peter had done. He had a national bestselling book called Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster and there just wasn’t really any kind of journalism talking about the negative effects of mass immigration into the U.S. or defending American national identity and there was a period of time there when it just wasn’t in the news at all, and so Peter thought, well, I’m a journalist, I know a lot about this issue, it looks like there’s some interest, I’ll start this website and it was very small and it went along just fine for a while, but we were some of the early victims of cancel culture when the SPLC was first really getting up and running. Peter and VDARE were the first victims of it and he went from, you know, being hosted on, Charlie Rose and The Today Show and all of these mainstream media outlets whenever to showcase his work to having everything just totally shut down.
Woods: And I’m sorry to interrupt, but just for people who aren’t necessarily in on the lingo, can you explain what SPLC is?
Lydia: Oh, sure. The SPLC is named the Southern Poverty Law Center and while it is based in Alabama, they don’t focus on poverty or the law.
Woods: Or the South.
Lydia: Or the South, no, they specialize in being a Leftist enforcer group that goes around and populates blackball lists for the media. They call it hate lists, hate people, hate groups, perpetrators of hate speech, and they have incredible connections with the government and NGOs and the mainstream media. And so if the SPLC decides that they disagree with something that you’ve said and they put you on one of their lists, it can be very difficult to continue to do business as normal because a lot of people who have been or are in positions of power and influence take the SPLC very seriously. And once you’re put in that ghetto of the list that they put together, it’s very difficult to get out. I think the tides are turning a little bit on the SPLC. I have seen increasing skepticism of them, even by members of Congress and some, you know, more mainstream outlets, such as the Epoch Times and that kind of thing.
But that’s only because they have overplayed their hand. I mean, they’ve really done some egregious work in tarring and feathering people who were completely, you know, not only were they within the bounds of their freedom of speech, but everyone on their lists are, but they were also just completely innocent and weren’t even saying anything remarkable. And so at VDARE.com, we do take positions that are more controversial. Our job is to educate the general public on the negative effects of mass immigration as we see them. And those negative effects are extensive, and you cannot discuss them without discussing things like differences in culture, differences in races, the effects of different populations as they clash, putting value judgments on lifestyles and the way that people live. And that can sometimes make people very uncomfortable. We do it in the context of defending American national identity and the Southern Poverty Law Center has used that as racist, white nationalists, and if, oh, what have I left out?
Woods: White supremacy.
Lydia: White supremacist, yes, I forget.
And so that’s how we’ve been smeared. Now, since the SPLC started experiencing so much success, it has actually grown into an enormous industry of suppressing speech. So SPLC at this point is still very active and still very toxic, but there are a lot of other organizations that are happy to assist them in their work, Media Matters and Sleeping Giants and lots of other groups that go around and do for corporate America what they sometimes call brand management or they have all these euphemisms where basically what they do is they provide quote unquote consulting services to big corporations to review their client list and say, oh, you don’t want to have this person or this company as your clients because they say the wrong things and you don’t want to be viewed as supporting by providing your services in exchange for money, the wrong things, the wrong thinkers. And that really is the root of cancel culture. It’s these oppressive policies enforced by private companies and they make it almost impossible to do business.
So during the years between 2015 and 2017, obviously something big changed in the landscape of immigration conversations, which was Donald Trump running for President. And he brought this whole conversation to the fore and that was a blessing and a curse for us. On the one hand, finally people were talking about the problems with immigration. And on the other hand, Trump Derangement Syndrome kicked in big time and we felt the brunt of it very quickly.
And we had to, between those years, we tried to have meetings and depending on how you count it, we were canceled by the venue spaces—so that’s hotels and conference centers—between eight and 12 times. We never successfully had a gathering.
And we heard, we’d been hearing this refrain for a long time from people who were callous about victims of cancel culture, which was “Build your own, make your own. Stop relying on services that don’t want you, you can’t force them to do business with you.” And of course that’s usually from the people that are saying it, it’s completely hypocritical because they would be happy to force businesses to work with individuals and other companies that I might find distasteful. It’s really a one-way street. But, and it’s also disingenuous because obviously a small organization with a specialty such as a nonprofit journalism can’t do something like start an Airbnb so that we don’t get kicked off Airbnb, or create our own bank so that we can have banking. But what we could do was buy our own venue so that we could control our own meeting space. And so we searched high and low for a venue and eventually purchased what is now our headquarters, a Historic Stone Castle on a mountain in West Virginia, where it was built in the late 1880s. It has two beautiful ballrooms where we gather people safely to talk about patriotic issues.
And that’s where I am now. I’m at our offices in the castle and all of the events that we’ve had here since we bought it have been sold out. And it’s been a real success story except that in the meantime, about two years ago, the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, the same Attorney General that’s tormenting Trump and now threatening to take away his buildings in the state of New York, opened an investigation on our foundation.
And it’s just been really brutal. We’ve experienced multiple subpoenas that are really extensive. And with the resources that we have that are minimal, it’s just not something that’s been supportable. And so we’ve attempted to fight back. We’ve filed to protect our First Amendment rights in federal court because one of the things that she is demanding that we turn over is all of the information about anybody that’s ever written for us or works for us under a pseudonym, under a pen name.
And she wants to know who they are and what they did for us. And we know that not only is she a malicious actor, and so we are skeptical of her anyway, but her charity’s bureau, which is the bureau responsible for these persecutions and that we would be turning information over to, has already, it has a track record of releasing confidential donor information. They did this from Nikki Haley’s campaign. And we know they would be all too happy to do it to anybody that has worked with VDARE in the past as well. So unfortunately, we have not experienced success in federal court. The courts in New York are not…
Woods: I mean, I don’t know what you can say, whether they’re corrupt.
Lydia: They’re certainly corrupt in terms of justice and in terms of law. Why that is, I don’t know. I couldn’t speculate. But at the same time that we are trying to defend our rights in federal court to protect the First Amendment, we are also—Letitia James’s attorney general’s office, has filed motions to compel us to cooperate in state court. And typically in a situation like that, the state court would have to wait until the federal court had ruled.
But for reasons that are beyond our understanding, the state court has been allowed to proceed. And so we’re fighting both court battles in parallel over the same issues, which means we get to pay double the lawyer fees. And at the end, they may have conflicting results, which would mean that we don’t know how to remain on the side of the law when one judge tells us to do one thing and one judge tells us to do the other. Of course, they could both agree in the end that we should not have to turn over the names of our pseudonymous writers, of our government employee whistleblowers, et cetera. But I’m deeply cynical that that will happen. So that’s sort of the skeleton of what we’re dealing with right now. And we’re just trying to get the word out. I mean, VDARE Foundation has been operating for 25 years. We’re in our 25th year of focusing on patriotic immigration reform. And it’s not at all clear that we’ll be able to survive under the kind of cancel culture that we’re experiencing. I had gotten very good at navigating cancel culture. I mean, we use alternative services for almost everything because I have a list a mile long of services that refused to work with us. And I figured it out. I can’t figure out a legal battle as big as the one that we’re experiencing right now in New York.
Woods: All right, let me clarify a few things. First of all, the reason that this is happening in New York, again, is because you’re incorporated there. So that’s how she’s able, because she seems like a megalomaniac anyway. You wonder how does she get herself involved in this? That’s the thing. Secondly, this seems to be revolving around something having to do with the circumstances surrounding your acquisition of the property, but you haven’t been charged with anything. And it seems pretty obvious that the reason you specifically would be investigated is they really don’t like you. They don’t like your opinions. They don’t like what you’re up to. I mean, what other explanation could there be?
Lydia: Right, right. I mean, the reason we’re incorporated in New York is really, it was a question of convenience. 25 years ago, we had a pro bono lawyer who worked for Covington and Burling, a major law firm in the United States. And he was barred in New York. So he’s doing pro bono work for us. He incorporated us in New York. And nobody thought anything about it. It’s not at all unusual to have companies and organizations incorporated in states where they don’t operate. We never operate it out in New York. But when the extreme political rhetoric started flying around in New York, and we realized, hey, maybe we should incorporate in a state where we actually operate that may not be hostile to the work that we do. This was well before we had been subpoenaed. We did some research and it turned out that in the state of New York, you as a nonprofit incorporated there, you’re not allowed to move without permission from the attorney general. You’re not allowed to reincorporate in another state. You’re also not allowed to sell or transfer assets without her permission. And you’re not allowed to dissolve without her permission. So it really is Hotel California. You can incorporate there, but you can’t leave.
And so we’re just held hostage until she decides that we’re dead enough, that she’s punished us enough. And it’s unclear when that will be.
Woods: Now, even though it’s the most boring part of the story, can you share some details about what exactly the alleged concern is about the property, just so that people won’t think that we’re dancing over it.
You did do something wrong and we’re just trying to make you a martyr because we don’t like the Democrats or something. (laughing)
Lydia: No, I’d be happy to. I wish I had more information, frankly. I mean, I—
Woods: They won’t really give you, but they’re very vague, aren’t they?
Lydia: They’re very vague. So the timeline is that the first alert we had that we were under investigation was a lawyer contacted us from Meta, which is the Facebook company, and said, we received a subpoena that originated in the Hate Crimes Division from the New York Attorney General’s office, demanding that we turn over all of the data associated with VDARE’s accounts on Facebook.
And so this was alarming for a lot of reasons. First of all, oh my gosh, we’re under investigation. Secondly, hate crimes.
And thirdly, it was interesting because we had not been on Facebook for, I think, two years. At that point, Facebook had kicked us off. And in fact, we had tussled with Facebook legally in an attempt to get my private data back.
And they refused to turn over any of the data that is supposed to be mine. That when they kicked us off of Facebook, they would not give me back, such as photos of my children and status updates and things like that.
And so we tried to—you said you don’t mind getting into the boring stuff. So I’m going to get into it a little bit.
Woods: Yeah, please.
Lydia: We tried to fight that because Meta said “We’re going to cooperate unless you object to us cooperating.” And so we said, actually, we do object to you cooperating because when VDare had a Facebook account, it had a little button up at the top that said donate now. You see this, probably; I haven’t been on Facebook in years, but it’s probably still there. And a reader who was looking at us on Facebook could click that and it would disburse, they would make a donation right there on the Facebook interface, and it would be disbursed to us through Network for Good later.
And I was adamant that our donors’ names not be turned over to the Attorney General’s Office. And so we tried to fight that and were unsuccessful. As far as I know, Facebook did turn over all of the data to the Attorney General’s Office, including….
I mean, the subpoena was very clear that they wanted every item of financial information, every dollar amount that we had spent on ads, every little thing. And so that was turned over. Then eventually, a few weeks later, maybe between four and six weeks later, VDARE itself was subpoenaed. The directors on our board were subpoenaed. And there are like 45 lists, 45 items, categories of items that were included in subpoena that we need to turn over. And basically it’s every document or piece of paper that we interacted with over a period of years. And it’s just endless. So a lot of it is financial.
Some of it is, like they asked for, before this happened, my husband was involved in litigation against the New York Times because they had called him an “open white nationalist,” which was clearly false. And when we objected to it, the New York Times did what we call a stealth correction. So in their rules of style, when they make a correction, they have to put a note at the bottom of the article saying that the article has been corrected. And they also have to put it in their paper, in the print edition of their paper. And all they did was go in and change the wording, but they didn’t post that the correction had been done and announced that a mistake had been made. And so we knew that that kind of behavior shows malicious intent. If you’re not announcing your correction, then clearly it was a malicious thing in the beginning. And so we sued them and we tried to take it all the way up to Supreme Court, but we were ultimately not successful.
But for some reason in this subpoena, it said, "Turn over all depositions that happened during your litigation between the New York Times and Peter Brimelow." And in fact, there wasn’t any, I mean, the depositions didn’t happen. But I mean, that’s how broad it was. It was like everything that you’ve ever done.
And our advice with the lawyer that we had in the beginning was, "Listen, the Charities Bureau has broad authority, it’s the regulatory body that’s responsible for charities incorporated in the state of New York. They have broad authority to investigate you. So the best way forward is to operate in good faith, to produce as much of the documentation that they require as you can until you run into, you know, your First Amendment protected speech. And at that point, if they really insist that you turn over these things, then we’ll file in federal court. And the idea was that we would show that we’re operating in good faith, that we don’t have anything to hide, but that there are certain things that really we can’t turn over. And that doesn’t seem to have done us any good.
So even while we were trying to turn over these documents, and it took me months, I mean, it took me probably eight months to gather and review these documents that we could turn over. And they were just nasty the whole time, very vicious people to deal with. And we kept saying, "If you could just tell us what it is that you’re worried about, we’ll prioritize turning over the documents that speak to those questions." So in one conference with the lawyers there, they implied that there was concern about how the castle had been purchased.
And as I say, VDARE is a small organization, typically our operating budget is about $800,000 a year, we don’t have a lot of employees. And so us buying the castle was remarkable. I mean, it was out of character with the way that we normally operate.
But that’s because in 2019, I had two donors come forward and tell me that they wanted to make a material difference to the cause of patriotic immigration reform. And I conveyed very clearly to them that the biggest difference, the biggest change that you could make is to give us a space where we can meet so that our people who are like-minded friends can get together and develop relationships and brainstorm ideas and support each other and have a nice time in the way that any affinity group can do, particularly one that thinks they’re going to save the world. So they did that. And I brought in more than $4 million in that year. I mean, I’ve never done that kind of, that kind of that level of fundraising, but they made it clear that what they wanted to do with that money was make a change. And so we found the castle, the Berkeley Springs Castle, as I said, it’s in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia and Berkeley Springs. And I was able to get the castle itself, which is 10,000 square feet. It was fully furnished. It’s on about 55 acres of mountain. And it came with two additional, three additional homes, two of which were kind of dilapidated. We’ve been working on fixing them up. That entire purchase was $1.4 million.
And so on the one hand, it was a big purchase. On the other hand, it was a good buy. It was a good value. (laughs) And the board was fully aware, fully in approval. The donors knew exactly what we were going to be doing with the money. When we moved our offices here, it was in the middle of COVID. And as everybody knows, COVID was a weird time. And my family did actually live in the castle for a few months, about five months, while we were waiting for one of the dilapidated houses on the property to be fixed up. We paid rent while we were living here, rent that was determined by a local realtor, actually the realtor that we used in the purchase of the castle. And then we moved to a little house further down the road.
And all of this was heavily lawyered. They said it was well-papered over, which is lawyer-speak for all the documents were in order. And so we took all that documentation having to do with the board, the governance questions. Did the board approve the purchase of the castle?
The activities that we’ve done at the castle, the rent that my family paid for the couple of months while we lived here, all this kind of stuff, we turned it over as soon as we could, as a priority, in hopes that it would clear our name. And they have never acknowledged that they received all that documentation. They have continued to tell the judges that they’re suspicious of the castle transaction without telling us what questions they may have. Our lawyers have repeatedly requested conferences with them to go over the details and answering questions. They have denied the conferences. They’ve declined the invitations for conferences.
And they’ve sort of shifted in their conversations. And we have to read between the lines because when we ask them “What are you looking for?” Their answer is, we have the authority to investigate whatever we like.
But when they’re talking to a judge, or when they’re needling us about any given thing, then they make implications. “Well, maybe we’re concerned now about related party transactions.”
So for people who aren’t lawyers or involved in governance of an organization, a related party transaction is sort of like an inside deal. So an example of a related party transaction would be if I have a sibling I hire to do consulting work, which is not very clear, and I pay them a huge amount of money.
And it’s clearly like they got that money and that job because of their connection to me as a board member and somebody who can sign checks. There are totally aboveboard related party transactions. So if I legitimately had a family member or a close friend who, no, it’s not even close friends. It really does have to be family members who had a legitimate service that they wanted to provide me, I’m not barred from doing business with them, but it has to be made very transparent in conversations with the board and the contracts have to be looked at very carefully just to make sure there’s not anything untoward going on with donor money. And so we turned over everything that might be relevant to related party transactions. During COVID, my adult step-children were laid off like so many people were. And so I paid them $12 an hour to do manual labor and labor around the castle. (We had a tree fall through the roof of the third floor, and so we had a massive construction project and there was a lot of demo and stuff like that. So I turned over all that information because technically it’s a related party transaction, although clearly it’s not some kind of a sweet deal to be pulling drywall off in the middle of the summer for $12 an hour.
And again, they have not acknowledged receipt of that documentation. They have not told us whether it looks good or bad. It’s: the investigations continue. And right now they’re saying that in light of their concerns about related party transactions, it is in that context that they require the names of every writer that has ever published on VDARE and every vendor that we have ever had, no matter how little money they were given. So somebody who wrote for VDARE under a pseudonym and got paid 250 bucks, seven years ago, they want that name. They want that name.
Woods: All right. So does it seem likely that what’s actually happening here is these people wish that they had the kind of hate speech laws that they would like to see in order to give people like you a hard time. But since they don’t have that, what they’re going to do is something like this that will drain your time and resources and your finances so that you just slowly wither away. Is that what’s probably happening?
Lydia: I think that’s absolutely the case. That’s absolutely the case. I mean, when you look at the fact that Black Lives Matter is also incorporated in the state of New York and they have bought huge, amazing buildings where their board members live, where they do not host events that are focused on the mission.
You know, they end up giving cash and buildings and other kinds of assets to family members. And I remember, I can’t remember her name now, but one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter was confronted about this by the press. And she said, well, my family members are Black.
So it really isn’t keeping with the mission. And you know, so what it is, there’s two things. One is it’s total projection. I really do think that these people drink the Kool-Aid and they have convinced themselves that because they do these things, we must also be doing that. They genuinely think that we’re guilty because they think we’re evil.
And regardless of whether we’re evil, obviously I would say that we’re not. We have objectively not done these things. And we have the documentation to prove that we have not done that.
But they don’t actually care. They just want us to be miserable and hopefully to expire.
And the way that they can do that, now that we have the ability, you know, to have a website, we have developed strategies to survive cancel culture and we can have our meetings in a place of peace and beauty, is to distract our leadership by forcing us to deal with this overwhelming burden of compliance and the production from these subpoenas and also drain us of resources with the overwhelming burden of legal fees that we’re enduring right now.
Woods: I want to shift gears and talk about the aspect of the story that involves people following you around. Basically, let’s just be blunt about it. People who follow you around. Can you talk about that?
Lydia: The personal harassment.
Woods: Yeah.
Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, so on the one hand, you know, I can’t tie that to Letitia James per se and on the SPLC necessarily, although their ties are more direct, but it’s all of a piece. You know, it’s, if they can’t shut us down one way, then they’re going to try another way.
And so we have this legal and administrative battle that we’re fighting. We have cancel culture that we’re fighting.
Turns out we’re very resilient and we are surviving these things. And so the next thing that they threaten is our families. And the way that they do that is by sending journalists—and crazy people—I actually do distinguish between the two, although sometimes it’s difficult to do so—follow our family around our little town and make us feel threatened and make us feel observed and have no privacy. So there are a couple of stories about that. One is directly from the SPLC.
They have flown in or driven in my home, Michael Edison Hayden and Hannah Gais [Tweet her], who are journalists for Hate Watch, which is one of these lists that SPLC maintains. And they send them to my town, which is a very small town. We have fewer than a thousand residents here. I love to talk about how the mayor won his mayoral position because he got like 28 out of 32 votes cast.
And so this is not a town that would normally be getting national media, but because we bought property here and because we live here, it has now become an intense focus.
And I don’t know if you’ve ever read Andy Ngo’s book about Antifa, where he talks about how this is not, Antifa is not an idea. It’s actually a highly organized criminal network. And one of their strategies is to identify small art towns and set up shop either at a coffee shop or at a bookshop.
And that’s their toehold in this community where they can then take over and have violent Leftists dominate. And to a certain extent, that was beginning to happen in Berkeley Springs before we bought here. There’s a small business that was very aggressive in their Leftist progressive politics. And this doesn’t fit with Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. This is a town that’s experienced serious financial depression for a long time. It was hard-hit by the opioid epidemic. These are people who voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
And they’re really not the audience for this kind of messaging, but it was being pushed on them anyway. And when my family, the Brimelows, and our organization, VDARE, arrived in Berkeley Springs, it really agitated this group of a handful of leftists. And so the SPLC sent journalists here to host secret meetings after hours when the businesses were closed where they could present to these friends or present to these frightened people. I think there were like 12 people at the last one. How scary we are and how awful we are. And they say things like, they call us all the worst names in the book.
I have a recording of one of the meetings where the locals were encouraged to close their doors to us and our businesses, to not serve us at restaurants, not allow us to have gym memberships. Not let us join the schools. We actually were refused an interview with the local public school as a result. Now this is not characteristic of the town. We actually have tons of friends. I’m very happy to live here. I’m actually much happier here than I was in Northwestern Connecticut, which had a very different type of people there.
But it just shows the bad intent with which these people are operating. And sometimes, so that didn’t intimidate us either. And now Michael Hayden, who’s this journalist who was organizing these meetings on behalf of the SPLC, is writing a book about, as he claims, a book about the town, but everybody knows he would not be interested in this town if it weren’t for the SPLC’s interest in people who they consider people of hate, which is me. And so he has been going to my church and trying to interrogate my priest about my faith habits.
He has just been barraging everybody that I know, asking them to talk about my private life. And he even purchased tickets to a private event where we were also guests, and under a fake name, and took the opportunity of speaking to my daughter, who was then eight years old, when I was not around, and asking her questions about the off-limits areas of the castle, and where we live personally.
And it wasn’t until I saw him at the party, it was a big space, and I wasn’t, my kids weren’t right with me, it was a family-friendly event, that he was identified and eventually left the party. But I can’t tell you how unnerving that is.
And then, separately from that, when you have the media just continually telling people that you’re evil, and dehumanizing you, which is a word that’s thrown around a lot by the Left, dehumanizing, but when I say dehumanizing, I mean, literally, these people refer to my family as maggots that should never see the light of day. And there are people in this country who are mentally unstable, and they’ll believe you.
And they convince themselves that, maybe this is a situation, those silly hypotheticals, if you saw baby Hitler, and you knew that he was going to grow up to be mean Hitler, would you have killed him in his crib? And these are the kind of people that would say, yes, and we have a responsibility to kill those people now.
And there is a group of those people, they are transsexuals, so there are two or three of them that go around and stalk my family, and two of them are male to female. One of them is male to goblin.
And I don’t know what their sex problems are. I guess I presume that they are like humans and had male and female, but this person says he’s not a male, he’s a goblin.
And they have started, they started attending my church, and they would come in in all their weird clothes with guns on the outsides of their big coats, and clearly trying to intimidate us. There was one in particular, the male-to-female, who would follow us around the farmer’s market and make pedophilic comments about my daughter. The worst one was that he hoped he caught my then 11-year-old daughter alone in a coat closet. He would say things like, she was sexually attractive. There are things that I don’t want to say because they’re just so horrific, saying, commenting, calling her pizza, which is obviously a red flag for people who are very online, that’s supposed to be something that has to do with the way that pedophiles talk about children.
And I’m very blessed to live in a community that really circles the wagons and tries to protect us from these people, but it takes a certain nerve and frankly, faith in God to continue on saying these things in the face of what feels like overwhelming pressure to just shut up.
If we just stopped, if we just stopped talking about how immigration and open borders is destroying America, maybe we wouldn’t have to deal with this anymore.
Woods: Well, also, you’ve talked about the way they use words like dehumanize and this and that, but if they were to walk in your shoes for 10 minutes, they wouldn’t survive. And these are the people who think they’re oppressed. They’re terribly oppressed. They should be part of a protected group and get special legal benefits and handouts from other people.
Lydia: Well, it’s all a piece too, because in dealing with some of these, and I want to emphasize that the people that I’m talking about in my day-to-day life and in my town are such a small minority of the people that I deal with day-to-day and who live in this area, but they’re so aggressive. They’re so vocal that it seems like they’re more present than they are to people that are really sensitive to it. I mean, because we have sort of a national perspective, it’s a little easier for me to pull back and be like, yes, this is one story in one small town. It happens to be my story in my small town, but there are a lot of other conversations happening in the world, but they start to convince people that they’re more present, they’re more significant than they are because they’re so persistent. And one of these things that they were advocating for was communal policing, or what do they call it?
They want to defund the police and have social workers deal with these problems instead of police officers, basically a very anti-law enforcement position. And yet I know people in law enforcement here and they say that they are the worst at calling for no reason, that they’re calling the cops all the time because somebody said the wrong thing in their shop or because somebody parked in the wrong parking spot or parked in the right parking spot, but they don’t like it where they’re parked.
I mean, to the point where the law enforcement is trying to weigh up, do we continue answering their calls or not because they’re just pests. So how can you on the one hand say you don’t believe in law enforcement or on the other hand, completely waste the resources of the law enforcement that you claim not to believe in. Similarly, they like to talk about how they get all kinds of hate mail, that people harass them all the time. They like to say that it’s because VDARE is here and has provoked right-wingers in the area, which by the way, that’s everyone. That’s everyone here. Like that’s how our population is. The whole county voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
And these are the kind of people that really hate Trump. And so if you happen to vote for Trump, then you’re evil in their eyes. First of all, why are you here? Why don’t you go someplace where you have like-minded individuals that you can do business with and socialize with? But also, I have no pity for you if you got a couple of pieces of hate mail because as you just said, Tom, that is nothing compared to what we have to deal with every day. And when I, I don’t spend a lot of time complaining about it. I don’t spend time blaming people in my community for these things. It’s just a cross that I’ve decided to bear. There’s this line in the Godfather, when I say “This is the life that we’ve chosen.” Peter and I sometimes say that to each other. It comes with certain drawbacks.
But we’re happy warriors. As long as we can continue to fight and to live by our principles, we’re going to do it. But the double standard and the hypocrisy is … you can’t pretend like it’s not there.
Woods: And at this point, it’s almost like I don’t even talk about it as a double standard anymore because then that implies that there is some standard. The only standard is if you’re against the revolution, we want to kill you. Like that’s the standard.
Lydia: Exactly.
Woods: And you know, if— So then, well, what would you—if I say what would you like to see happen? Obviously you’d like all this to go away. But short of that, assuming that you’re stuck with this situation for a while, what’s your appeal to normal people? Because by the way, those people who are harassing you, they have a lot of people to go after in Japan because almost everybody in Japan has the same views of what immigration policy should be as you do. I mean, if anything, maybe they’re even more to the right on this. Like there’s a whole country they could be going and harassing. However, they’ve chosen to latch on to you folks for some reason. What would you like people to do now that they have this information about what’s going on, about what lawfare can mean for people who aren’t billionaire presidential candidates? What would you like to have happen?
Lydia: Well, I guess there are a couple of answers to that question. In my case, you know, I’m soliciting donations to help us survive the lawfare. So if you go to vdare.com/donate, and you feel inspired to support us with your financial gifts, we’d be absolutely grateful for that.
In a more general sense, I think that you need to look after your neighborhoods, and you need to look after your local communities because it doesn’t take much. When you have a highly motivated activist, even just one, they can steamroll normal people into allowing things to happen because those normal people don’t realize the implications of them, and they think that they can compromise with revolutionaries. And in fact, you cannot.
So it’s absolutely critical that you look at things like, we talk about school boards a lot, we talk about town councils, look at even your historical landmarks committee meeting, look at your zoning boards, look at all of these things. If you have any skills and abilities and any time at all, it’s really important that you take a position where even if your sole purpose is to stay there and to prevent craziness from happening, that’s one more wagon in the circle protecting your community.
And I think it’s also important that we talk about these things with each other. I mean, part of the problem with polarization and isolation, which is what the Left have done very effectively, is that people don’t know what’s happening because the people that do know are too afraid to say something about it. And it’s incumbent upon us to make these things known. When things aren’t talked about, then they’re not thought about. And that puts all of the power in the hands of people who are loud and aggressive.
So I would say, if you feel inspired to donate to the VDARE Foundation, that would be wonderful, but do what you can to protect the organizations that you love and the communities that you love and vote and do your best. Look out, I mean, it’s a similar thing. It’s not our issue, but when you look at people who are very concerned about COVID policies or very concerned about election integrity, what do those people have to do? They have to do the same things that we do because they’re under so much pressure. And what we need to be doing is building networks of like-minded people, which have been destroyed. It’s not that the networks never existed. It’s that over the past 20 or 30 years, networks which should have functioned as a backstop to some of these things, these things were effectively destroyed by, by guilt by association issues, by infighting, by a blindness of normal Americans to see how motivated these revolutionaries were. And so they were not, they didn’t have the backbone that they should have had to defend themselves. We just have to rebuild all that. We have to rebuild all that.
That’s one of the reasons why us buying the castle was so critically important, because you can’t build community if you don’t see each other. If you don’t actually get to know each other and care about each other and hear each other’s ideas and flesh them out. And so the more that that could happen within the niche of any given person’s interest and the community’s interest, the stronger that we’ll be as a nation against basically this weird hybrid that we have going on of communism and fascism. The messaging is communism. But a lot of the ways that they’re getting this stuff past is through the help of private companies that function as enforcers for the revolutionary message and for the government priorities.
Woods: I’m sure you have experienced quite a bit in the, what we laughingly call the Conservative Movement.
People who want to go out of their way, if they’re, let’s say, interviewed by the New York Times to say, "Oh, we’re not like those people over there. We’re very respectable and we have all the opinions that you’ve allowed us to hold. So don’t come after me." I do feel like the Overton Window has shifted a bit and that there’s somewhat less of that. The fact that Tucker Carlson interviewed you is very significant.
And the fact that even a mainstream figure like John Stossel makes fun of the SPLC at this point. I think when they went after the Family Research Council, that was just like, come on. Like at this point, people are just going to laugh when they hear, "Oh, they’re on the SPLC List." Yeah, I know what that means. Or they go after Judge Napolitano or Ron Paul.
Come on.
Lydia: Right, right. I think they went after Ben Carson.
Woods: Yeah, they probably did. (laughing) So eventually, as you said earlier, they overplayed their hand. That is true. And I think in our circles, we sometimes conclude from that, "Okay, it’s been de-fanged." But there’s still a massive section of our society that even now relies on their hate lists and whatever.
Lydia: Well, and that’s why I wanted to emphasize that it’s actually not just the SPLC. First of all, I do think they still have power. They have massive connections and influence.
But it’s not just the SPLC that’s functioning anymore. It’s an entire industry that has developed that thrives on censorship and population control. But not population, not in terms of numbers, but in terms of making sure that people are thinking the right things and behaving the right way and not going beyond certain boundaries. So as an example, a few years ago, I stumbled across, you know, you got these alerts if your name appears in a search engine. I don’t know if you do this, but like, you know, Google alerts that somebody wrote about you.
(laughing) But VDARE came up and I was looking at it. It was this white paper that was developed by some group that I’d never heard of before. And then I’m looking at it, I’m like, this group is from Britain. Why are they writing about VDARE? It was in a whole white paper about how VDARE should be censored, and we shouldn’t be able to use certain financial tools and things like this, you know, that our income should be—I’m like, why do you care?
You’re in Britain. So I’m looking at it, it’s called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it.
Woods: No.
Lydia: And at that time they had, you know, they’re so arrogant, these groups, these organizations, they just put everything up, you know, and they just think they’re right. And they just say things without any sort of self-reflection. I don’t know, I could go on about that for a little. Anyway, the point is they listed all their financial partners, like you could just go look and say, oh, who has donated money? And it blew me away because of course you have like Open Society and Bill and Melinda Gates, you have Meta, you have at that point Twitter, but that was, you know, way before Elon Musk had Twitter. But then you also have like Columbia and Stanford and the U.S. State Department.
And, you know, these actual, these things are totally supported by taxpayer money, which are the funding partners of a European NGO that is pushing for censorship and, you know, de-platforming cancellation of totally lawful American organizations on the basis of their political attitudes.
And the SPLC wasn’t on that list.
And, you know, when you look at these woke companies, every once in a while there’ll be some flurry in the news about so and so, you know, had to go through some kind of crazy DEI training.
And you’ll see, you know, these awful things that people have to endure. Well, you know, the companies that make you go through these trainings, they have to pay, they don’t invent those things themselves. They bought that training from some company. They’re paying people to come in to train you. There’s a lot of money in this.
It’s an entire industry that is a private industry that works hand in hand with, you know, public money and with progressive ideology that’s tied in with taxpayer money that is well established at this point. So I don’t know if I’m being articulate about it, but, you know, I think that we need to be careful, not to just blame the SPLC for anything, but recognize that this is a broad spectrum of enforcement, you know, groups that are making huge amounts of money in conveying that the Historic American Nation is evil and should be extinct.
And unless you are mentally unstable, then you don’t deserve, you know, anything that you’ve got. Basic, you know, I mean, it’s just, it’s why.
Woods: I pick out the SPLC because I have a personal vendetta against them because they’ve gone after so many of my friends and then, you know, then they have like this hate list and I got like three of my friends in there. I’m thinking, what? I’ve done way more than they have. Like, how do I, not even on there.
Lydia: I have a funny story about that actually.
One of my friends moved to a new area and was having a hard time finding a church. And on a whim, he went to SPLC hate map. And it turned out there was a church like 20 miles from him that was listed on a hate map. And now he’s, that’s his congregation, that’s where he got it. (laughing)
Just crazy.
Woods: I think it’s obvious who the actual haters in the situation are. All right, give us a link one more time.
Lydia: Okay, so you can find all of our work at vdare.com. And if you’re inspired to donate to help us survive our lawfare situation, it is vdare.com slash donate. We have a big conference coming up at the end of April. So we’ll also be selling you live stream tickets to that pretty soon.
Woods: Okay, very good. All right, well, Lydia, thanks so much for your time and best of luck navigating this bizarre and insane society.
Lydia: Thank you. Absolutely. Come up and see the castle sometime. We’d love to show you around.
Woods: Sounds terrific. Thank you very much. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
EARLIER:
A native Texan, Lydia Brimelow [email her] graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 2006. She is fundraiser and office manager, lion tamer, fire extinguisher and miscellany handler at VDARE.com. She and Peter married in 2007 and have three daughters together.
