More Deplatforming Dissidents : New Order Deplatformed
The arbitrary power of major communications near monopolies has been used by the deep state to silence dissent. Here is the latest example.
“I have just received word from our webmaster that our website has been deplatformed. As of 7:30 pm (Eastern time) August 22, 2024 it has been offline.
Specifically, the company that registers domain names has suspended our address. They gave a vague reason why, basically accusing us of extremism.
We are working to get the site back up. We do not know why our enemies have chosen this moment to attack us. All other NEW ORDER operations are unaffected.
In the meantime, you may access previous versions of our site which have been archived by the Wayback Machine, here: — Martin Kerr
Tornados of controversy are swirling around the subject of mass graves in Canada and Gaza. Mass graves in Gaza were created along with the Israeli occupation and destruction of hospitals in Gaza. These grave sites are being dug up between rounds of Israeli bombing of Palestinian civilians. The evidence of mutilated humans coming out of Gaza’s mass graves have reportedly contained evidence of organ removal, handcuffing of doctors and patients, as well as point-blank executions including shots to the head.
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The discovery of mass graves is often seen as a hallmark that acts of genocide have occurred. While the association of mass graves with genocide is virtually irrefutable in Gaza, the same is certainly not the case in Canada. The discussion in Canada about the supposed discovery of unmarked mass graves adjacent to Christian residential schools is just now heating up.
From the late 1800s until the 1970s these federally-funded institutions were a core institution in providing education to Indian students. Issues concerning the provision of education to Indian groups often figured prominently in the Crown-Aboriginal treaty negotiations with Indian groups east of the Pacific watershed. To this day, this watershed marks much of the border of British Columbia with the rest of Canada.
The claims concerning the discovery of unmarked graves adjacent to Indian residential schools have been accepted as established fact by the government of Canada and much of the media since 2021. The story was quickly absorbed and adopted by the government of Justin Trudeau. In 2022 was adopted by Parliament without investigation as if it was a proven fact.
These claims are being subjected to vigorous scrutiny and a concerted effort of debunking. This project is being advanced by a formidable group of academics, journalists, retired judges and such. The volume is entitled Grave Error; How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools)
Before and After Pictures were a staple of Indian Residential Schools in Canada and the United States.The Idea was to illustrate the success of a “civilizing” process.
The Forward to Grave Error is written by the legendary neocon elder, Conrad Black. Black is the former Zionist media mogul and prison inmate who some see with justification as an authentic embodiment of a renaissance man. Besides making business history with his edgy (too edgy?) handling of Hollinger Inc., Black has written many important history books. I remember when I was working on my Ph.D. in Canadian history at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s that Black’s biography of former Quebec Premier, Maurice Duplessis, was required reading.
The co-editors of Grave Error are C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan. Professor Flanagan rivals the importance of Conrad Black in terms of the mark he has made for better or worse on Canadian history. Flanagan was at the core of the transformation of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada into the Conservative Party of Canada. The iconic leader of the CP was Stephen Harper, the core person in one of the few Canadian governments not dominated by Laurentian elites.
Flanagan took hold of the Social Credit legacy of Alberta that came to be embodied in Preston Manning’s Reform Party. Flanagan and Manning teamed up. Coming in from the edges was Torontonian Stephen Harper. By performing well as a student in Flanagan’s circle, Harper was successful in his quest to present himself as a credible Albertan politician.
Flanagan mixed the Manning heritage with Reagan-Thatcheresque enthusiasms of his circle of students who pretty much saw their prof as the rock star of the Texas North University in Alberta’s rising oil and gas metropolis. Among the Flanagan devotees were Harper, Ezra Levant, and the current Alberta Premier, Danielle Smith.
In the 1990s when I was a member of the Native American Studies Department at the University of Lethbridge, I saw Tom Flanagan as something of a nemesis. This American political scientist was one of the the original hires in 1968 at the nascent University of Calgary. In seeking to fit into his new academic home, Prof. Flanagan chose as his first Canadian subject the life and times of Metis Rebel Leader Louis Riel. Did Prof. Flanagan picture himself as the ring leader of an Alberta rebellion in the making?
Flanagan built on this base to become sufficiently expert on Aboriginal Affairs in Canada that he was able to hire himself out to federal agencies in order to give advice and to perform as an expert witness in court. I saw it then and see it now, Prof Flanagan’s expertise lay in directing judges how to undermining the exercise of Aboriginal rights as defined in their dubious rulings.
Regardless of my view of these matters, this aspect of Flanagan’s career has put him in a good position to intervene with insight into the growing furor driven by the supposed discovery of unmarked mass graves adjacent to Indian residential schools.
Thus it is that Black and Flanagan, both heavy hitters, have joined forces with a high-powered team of devoted writers and thinkers. Their shared aim is to say enough is enough to what they see as woke opportunists.
It is well known that Justin Trudeau tends to be especially generous with his patronage dollars to those who attach themselves to his agendas for First Nations peoples. Trudeau inherits a long Liberal tradition of using large concentrations of money to keep hand-picked leaders in partisan line with Liberal policies.
Not surprisingly, Trudeau did not do his homework as he has latched onto yet another divisive boondoggle to float his “post-national” contention that Canada is a genocidal country that should be enwrapped asap into more globalist webs of conniving intrigues. Of course in my view neither Black nor Flanagan have been exempt from implicating Canada in their own forms of conniving globalist intrigues.
This background helps explain how it is that a seemingly obscure book on an seemingly narrow subject is suddenly selling lots of copies in spite of it being banned here and there. As far as I know there hasn’t been a ritual book burning yet but the volume has definitely been removed from several libraries.
In the BC town of Quesnel, just looking at Grave Error was made to seem in April like an act of heresy to be punished by spurning, economic boycott and various forms of deplatforming. As in many small communities throughout Canada, Quesnel businesses depend on the ample purchasing power of many First Nations people in the region.
Frances Widdowson attended the meeting with the intention of explaining her own essay, “Billy Remembers.” Even before she made the long drive from her home in Calgary to Quesnel, she was interrogated by a CBC journalist Jordan Tucker, a person who embodies the transcendental character of the Liberal government’s state broadcaster these days.
The Transcendent CBC Journalist, Jordan Tucker
Interview with Jordan Tucker (she/her) by Frances Widdowson Frances Widdowson
It seems Dr. Widdowson has been appointed by some overseeing committee of high wokedom as the main embodiment of a new type of heresy designated as a “residential school denialism” by those in and around the Canadian version of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Investigation. Dr. Widdowson long wrangled with her former employer at Mount Royal because her discourse was allegedly not in line with the College’s policy of “Indigenization.”
In February of 2023 the then-President of the University of Lethbridge, Dr. Mike Mahon, gave the green light to silence Dr. Widdowson by overwhelming her scheduled talk with well-organized drumming, chanting and electric guitar screeching. The object of this attack on free speech and open debate was to block her capacity of making herself heard.
Many in Alberta and beyond saw this display as a very powerful symbol of the DEI intolerance that is replacing independent thought and articulation with group think in increasingly authoritarian universities throughout the West. As a result of the extension of the debacle in Gaza to sharp divides on university campuses, this pattern of sacrificing to large donors of control over curriculum and faculty staffing is being put on full display by many prominent IVY League schools in the USA.
I agree with the authors in Grave Error that the existence of unmarked mass graves adjacent to Indian residential schools have not been proven. The great weight of evidence points against the conclusions that arose first from a press release in May of 2021. The release came from Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc (Kamloops Indian Band). Without presenting credible evidence, Chief Casimir made the startling claim that an unmarked mass grave containing 215 bodies had been discovered in an apple orchard beside Kamloops Indian residential school.
I agree for the most part with Grave Error’s authors. They maintain that a solid evidentiary basis has not been established to prove the new thesis that mass murder and mass graves constitute an integral part of the history of Indian residential schools in Canada.
I do not agree, however, that these findings preclude the need to look at the possible role of various forms of genocidal activity in the genesis of northern North America from pre-Columbian times to the Canada that exists today. I find the conclusion that because certain claims about the existence of mass graves attending Indian residential schools have been disproven, the possibility of genocidal expressions in Canada’s history need never come up again.
I think it ill-advised to declare that all of Canadian history is devoid of genocide before and after the UN’s creation of the Genocide Convention in 1948. Canadian history does not exist in an isolated void. I have repeatedly put forward the view that the entire Western Hemisphere has been the site since 1492 of an inter-generational genocide that can be pictured as a single monumental event whose commemoration might be marked by a different kind of holocaust memorial.
For now, however, I’ll leave it at that. I’ll simply add that Dr. Widdowson and I are working together these days. We are engaged in a case study of the assault on free speech and open debate at University of Lethbridge, where I taught for 26 years. See the announcement of our upcoming meeting on the matter in the addendum below.
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Addendum
10 May, 2024 Dear Friends, Colleagues and Associates;
Above is the poster for an important upcoming public event on the afternoon of Saturday May 25 at the main branch of the Lethbridge Public Library. Many of you will remember when Dr. Frances Widdowson was overwhelmed by chanting, drumming and the screech on an electric guitar. The object of the ruckus was to prevent the speaker from delivering a public presentation in the Atrium of the University of Lethbridge. The censorship action proved to be a “success.”
Dr. Widdowson was silenced and those who came to hear her talk were deprived of her articulation. Certain faculty members had decided Frances Widdowson was afflicted with a malady they labelled “residential school denialism.”
Some faculty members decided to act on this judgment. For their students, these faculty members painted a picture of Dr. Widdowson as an embodiment of a constituency they identified as hostile to the idea that all residential schools at all times should be equated with genocide.
Disgruntled faculty and others pressured U of L President, Dr. Mike Mahon, to cancel Dr. Widdowson’s lecture after he had already announced that his Office approved of her talk. Some interpret what happened as a cave in by Dr. Mahon to political pressure. He ordered that a speaker on campus should be cancelled because she was the bearer of interpretations that some faculty and students wanted to censor. The rest, as they say, is history.
The key point in this matter is not that one side or the other is right or wrong. Individuals especially in the hallowed Halls of Academia have a right and sometimes even a responsibility to decide such matters for themselves. The key point is that academics must be able to research, argue and articulate issues in an environment of protected free speech and academic freedom regardless of the prevailing group think. Certainly it is not the role of academic administrators to jump in arbitrarily by making themselves instant experts in whatever academic debate they want to dominate and/or disrupt.
Dr. Widdowson has written academic essays and books in and around the topic of the history of Indian education in Canada. Whether one agrees with her views or not, it was wrong to have tried to silence her at an Alberta University. I attended the organized shutdown of her talk. In my view and in that of many other people I have since met and talked to about what happened, the shutdown of Dr. Widdowson in February of 2023 was not a proud moment. It was a very troubling occurrence in the history of the institution of higher learning where I taught from 1990 to 2016.
I moved to Lethbridge in 1990 to be Associate Professor of Native American Studies. In the early weeks of 2016 this tenured full professor was abruptly suspended without pay completely outside the rules of the Board’s collective agreement with the Faculty Association. Then in 2017 the matter went to court in the Lethbridge Court of (then) Queen’s Bench.
By court order the judge ruled that I should be reinstated into my academic position at the U of L. As I plan to discuss, there is every reason that the Board’s objective in trying to deplatform me was to silence my interpretations because my views went contrary to the agenda of a very rich and powerful lobby. I would still like to know how this lobby gained such a tight grip on the policies and actions of the administration of the University administration.
As the commentator in Frances’ forthcoming presentation on 25 May, I’m sure I will disagree with her on many points. Agreeing to disagree is a vital attribute of healthy academic life. But trying to shut down those with whom one disagrees, undermines the entirety of the whole academic project that is supposed to be a fair and balanced meritocracy.
When I met Frances after the event where her talk was shut down, we of course compared notes about our treatment at the University of Lethbridge. Eventually we came up with the idea of mounting the initiative we started earlier this year. In due course, as this process unfolds I intend to talk about my own experiences with the process of being deplatformed in ways that include many elements outside the set of facts outlined above.
I never did get back into the classroom. In 2018 I decided to retire. I did retire as a full professor in good standing. I gained the new title of Professor Emeritus. I am announcing here that I am henceforth acting in my capacity as a Professor Emeritus of the University of Lethbridge in the remaining part of the process that Frances and I have mounted. I think my taking on this responsibility in unusual times and under unusual circumstances is entirely consistent with the duties of an individual carrying the title of Emeritus Professor.
As I see it, I shall be speaking and acting in this process from within the U of L’s faculty. I have devoted some of the best years and professional efforts of my life to my academic endeavours at the University of Lethbridge. I would like to see the institution thrive and prosper.
As a senior faculty member I want to help in the process of making some suggestions that might assist our school in getting back on track. A University simply cannot fulfil a mission to be a school of authentic higher learning without creating a sound foundation for the expression of unhindered speech and academic freedom.
Since retiring from teaching I have continued to involve myself in research and publication as well as in very active community involvement starting with the manufactured COVID crisis. The questions come up in my community work: Where are all the hundreds of University professors and why are they not contributing more actively to working through issues of immense import– life and death issues in, for instance, public health matters.
What kind of message does our university send when it shuts down, rather than encourages, the highlighting of a diversity of perspectives in public discourse in local, regional, national and global contexts? The community wants and deserves better than what we have seen from the University of Lethbridge in recent years.
In this context I am not making any claim about who is right or wrong in the matters we have recently faced and are facing. But in my view there is no doubt that the University of Lethbridge has become way too isolated and partisan in key aspects of the community life of this region.
Please consider attending the public event at the Lethbridge Public Library on Saturday May 25 at 2 pm.
It has become unmistakably clear that NYAG James aims to suppress our VDARE.com website, seize control of the VDARE Foundation and even expropriate our Berkeley Springs Castle, WV headquarters (which she probably intends to fill with Third World “asylum seekers”).
VDARE.com, which is a tiny organization (revenues typically $600k-$800k range, no endowment), absolutely cannot.
Note also that NYAG Letitia James has not yet even accused us of any infraction—much less have we been convicted. We are merely being “investigated”—at deliberately destructive expense.
In other words, we are being battered to death by subpoena.
It is only because of the extraordinary generosity of our donors that we have been able to finance our defense against NYAG Letitia James’ mugging thus far.
Most tiny organizations like ours would already have been forced to capitulate—which is probably what NYAG Letitia James was counting on.
I am sure she is astounded by our supporters’ loyalty.
But now this effort has brought us to financial crisis. Our general funds have been drained, and we are right at the point of being unable to pay our writers and our technical support staff, with no end in sight to this harassment.
Trump (Love Him Or Hate Him) Was Right About NYAG Letitia James
As single-issue immigration patriots, we at VDARE.com regarded presidential candidate Donald J. Trump’s historic August 15, 2015 immigration statement as a triumphant vindication of our long struggle to get the immigration issue into politics.
Nevertheless, let the record show that, in an August 10, 2022 deposition in NYAG Letitia James ’s lawfare attack on Trump (quite separate from Manhattan DA Melvin Bragg’s lawfare attack—there are a lot of them), Trump opened with a statement that was a definitive takedown of her thuggery.
Trump described James as “a renegade and out-of-control prosecutor” engaged in “an unfounded, politically motivated witch hunt.”
Bingo.
As Trump pointed out, James ran for New York State Attorney General in 2018 explicitly promising to sue him—before she could have known any of the actual facts. She did the same with the NRA. (Trump also noted that in her campaign she called him “an illegitimate president,” something which, if said about Joe Biden, is now apparently a hanging offense).
And now, at the age of 75, I am still working on the immigration issue in my office in the Berkeley Springs Castle every day.
I regret nothing—Non, je ne regrette rien, as the French Foreign Legionnaires famously sang as they were taken prisoner after their attempt to save French Algeria failed in 1961.
Maybe that’s not the most hopeful analogy. But I like it.
Nevertheless, nothing has infuriated me as much as the lying insinuation by NYAG James that I, and my wife Lydia, bought the Castle to benefit ourselves personally.
Exactly the opposite is true. Because Lydia and I knew no commercial bank could be trusted not to cave to political pressure and pull a mortgage in the most inconvenient way—as happened to Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant in Canada [Canadian media outlet says bank denied it a commercial mortgage over conservative political leanings, by Yael Halon, Fox News, December 30, 2021]—we had to gamble on pouring all of an unprecedented and wonderfully generous 2019 gift to the VDARE Foundation into buying the Castle for cash. (The prudent and self-interested course would have been to invest it and live off the proceeds.) We sold our much-loved home in the beautiful Connecticut Berkshires. We uprooted our little daughters and moved to a small rental cottage on the Castle grounds here in Appalachia. We were forced to do this because, in the three years before COVID, our proposed conferences had been canceled because of political pressure more than a dozen times (see e.g., here, here, here, here). We concluded that, for a persecuted organization like ours to hold conferences, it ultimately must own its own venue.
The net effect: The Brimelow family no longer owns a home. But its shelter dollars now go to support the Berkeley Springs Castle complex. What NYAG Letitia James is insinuating here adds insult to injury—in fact, it adds injury (in the form of her deliberately ruinous subpoena harassment) to insult (see above) to the professional injury I have already, I may say unflinchingly, sustained.
Of course, this could never happen if the U.S. were still the Land of the Free. But the fact is that what we all now face is a communist coup. And America’s corrupted legal and regulatory institutions are complicit.
And to hell with everyone else enabling this new Soviet America.
Why was the VDARE.com Foundation registered in New York State, and thus vulnerable to thugs like NYAG Letitia James, anyway?
The VDARE Foundation was set up in 1999 by a heroic volunteer lawyer who at that time did a great deal of pro bono work for the immigration patriot movement. He happened to be admitted to the bar in New York State, so he set it up there.
(However, contrary to NYAG Letitia James’ insinuations in her filings, the foundation was subsequently dormant for several years because we were working through another foundation registered in a different state. This is why we made no further filings: they were not necessary.)
It is perfectly normal for 501(3) charities to be registered in states other than those in which they have a physical presence.
And at the time, of course, with the West’s concurrent victory in the Cold War, no one had any idea of the communist Reign of Terror that was subsequently to sweep through American institutions, above all after the apparently unauthorized election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.
Thus our heroic volunteer lawyer was later forced by his white-shoe law firm, to its great discredit, to abandon his pro bono work for immigration patriots. This an example of the stealth “Chinese Communist Social Credit–style deprivation of professional and commercial services” (see above) that is a key part of America’s ongoing communist coup.
Because our unusually good fundraising year pushed us over a N.Y. regulatory threshold, we initiated an exhaustive financial audit (i.e., a qualified third party had to look over our accounts). Our aim was to be fully compliant before we even considered raising our heads above the parapet with a request to exit.
This audit was very much hampered by the fact that our Connecticut accountants suddenly abandoned us and refused to suggest referrals (see “Chinese Communist Social Credit–style stealth deprivation of professional services” above).
The trivial, very common, easily corrected, and anyway generally obviated by the statute of limitations regulatory missteps that NYAG Letitia James is now hyperventilating about (see below) arose in the resulting chaos because we had so much trouble finding a replacement. In fact, at one point we had to turn to VDARE.com accountant reader, who had kindly offered his services.
The audit was completed—triumphantly. But of course NYAG Letitia James has ignored it anyway.
However, once the VDARE Foundation was forced into the real estate business in order to own its conference venue, we had to reorganize legally, at considerable expense, in a way that is more typical of commercial operations, to protect ourselves against predatory lawsuits (whether politically motivated or not), e.g., slip-and-fall. Thus the VDARE Foundation now owns a for-profit LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) that holds the property surrounding the Castle and leases it back to VDARE. And the Berkeley Springs Castle itself is now owned by the Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation, a 501(c)(3) supporting organization of the VDARE Foundation that is registered in West Virginia. NYAG Letitia James has made numerous lying references to this reorganization (see below).
What has NYAG Letitia James done?
Last summer, we learned from Facebook that NYAG Letitia James had hit it with two overlapping subpoenas regarding its transactions with us:
This was a flagrant violation of procedure.The Stored Communications Act, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 2703(b)(1)(b), permits a government agency to obtain third-party information from Facebook or other internet services—provided that there is ”prior notice from the governmental entity to the subscriber or customer” [viz., the third party, here VDARE].
But NYAG Letitia James never provided VDARE.com with that notice. An email from Facebook was the first we heard about it.
She simply disregarded the law.
This has turned out to be a pattern.
Significantly, in both cases, the Facebook subpoenas were issued on NYAG Letitia James’ behalf by someone called Rick Sawyer, who is described as “Special Counsel for Hate Crimes.”(In his email signature, Sawyer advertises his pronouns as “he/him”—for now.)
Needless to say, VDARE.com has not committed, or has even (yet) been accused of, a crime of any kind—let alone a “Hate Crime” (which we have anyway consistently argued is an unconstitutional concept).
But Commissar Sawyer’s role betrays what is really motivating NYAG Letitia James: not some technical issue arising from her role of overseer of charities, but the suppression of political opinion she dislikes (aka “Hate”). She apparently thinks she can do this by claiming that such political opinion results in “Hate Crimes” (unlike, of course, Black Lives Matter rhetoric).
Needless to say, this is a direct assault on our First Amendment rights.
(With characteristic leftist vindictiveness, Facebook also deleted our own personal pages, which in Lydia’s case was entirely non-political—she had used it, as all student Millennials were encouraged to do, as a diary, family resource and baby book, showing our children’s first steps, etc.—and has refused to return her data, although we understand it is legally her property.)
And we never raised much money through Facebook anyway, or spent much money on promotion there, partly because I had quickly concluded it was shadow-banning us.
So why was NYAG Letitia James targeting Facebook at all? One theory: She or her minions might actually have been crazy enough to think our Social Media Manager really was a Russian agent. (He is an American, albeit a Southerner, i.e., nearly as bad.)
Facebook, not a friend, informed us that it would comply with these subpoenas—no easy task—unless we contested them.
And we did indeed consider contesting James’ subsequent subpoena against the VDARE Foundation, because it was plainly harassment aimed at suppressing our First Amendment rights (see below).
But eventually, very reluctantly, we took the hard decision to comply, without prejudice, with NYAG Letitia James’ demands as much as possible—to demonstrate good faith to the court.
Facebook thereupon apparently met her demands.
At least, we think it did. Typical of the relentlessly hostile environment in which patriots now operate, Facebook will not tell us what data it supplied. And neither will NYAG Letitia James.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Because our relationship with Facebook was so minimal, we believe and hope that none of our readers, or even the commenters on our late lamented Facebook page—and certainly not our donors—are significantly at risk here.
But THEY COULD HAVE BEEN. This whole episode is disgraceful in a supposedly free society.
“Hate” is, of course, an offense unknown to the U.S. Constitution. “Hate speech” is in effect simply something with which NYAG Letitia James disagrees.
The Cornerstone Church has (good for them!) now filed an action under the Civil Rights Act against NYAG Letitia James. It points out that the original venue had cancelled the event after pressure from Democrat elected officials, notably Monroe County Legislature President Sabrina LaMar, and also that the Church’s hosting of the ReAwaken Tour was a legitimate exercise of their First Amendment Rights.
Free Speech Foe Sabrina LaMar
Especially significant from VDARE.com’s point of view: The Cornerstone Church has argued that NYAG James’ behavior violated provisions of the New York State Bar Association’s Rules Of Professional Conduct—because she abused her office for political purposes and lied about the nature of their meeting:
Specifically, plaintiff alleges that the Defendants negligently, wantonly, recklessly, intentionally, and knowingly sought to and did deprive them of their constitutional and civil rights, pursuant to the above-named statutes and causes of action by committing acts to deprive Plaintiffs of rights secured by the Constitution of the United States and the State of New York,” the suit states. “Further, Defendant James negligently, wantonly, recklessly, intentionally, and knowingly published multiple false statements to multiple media outlets to mar the reputations of Pastor Doyle and Clay Clark, to provoke objectionable opinions in the minds of members of the community to expose plaintiffs to hatred, contempt, and aversion.”
NYAG Letitia James’ subpoena made a staggering 44 separate demands for documents. Most of them were of no possible relevance to any oversight function that the New York Attorney General’s office could conceivably claim to exercise over charities registered in New York State.
For example:
We sued the New York Times because it described me, the Editor of VDARE.com, as an “open white nationalist.” Needless to say, this allegation is lethal in the current political climate. However, it is not an opinion, but a matter of fact—I have repeatedly said I’m a Civic Nationalist, i.e., I’m not “open” about being a white nationalist. The Southern District of New York Court recognized this when it acknowledged the issue was “actionable,” although absurdly claiming I had been made whole by the New York Times’ subsequent guilty stealth-edit of its website, even though correction was unacknowledged in the print edition despite its publicly stated ethics code.
At the time, a prominent First Amendment lawyer told us, “The Supreme Court is going to revisit SULLIVAN”—its disastrous 1964 decision that effectively deprived public figures of Common Law libel protection—”but not for you.”
We believe this is because our suppression by Colorado Springs was so flagrantly unconstitutional, as even one Reason commenter acknowledged. To quote Judge Harris L. Hartz’ magisterial dissent from the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals decision:
A government effort to punish or deter disfavored speech is what VDARE adequately alleges. And the City accomplished its purpose. The complaint plausibly alleges that the Mayor’s statement caused the Resort to cancel the VDARE conference.
This atrocity is simply not something to which our new communist overlords want to draw attention.
Our initial response—WHAT ABOUT THE FIRST AMENDMENT?
Looking over all three (3!) subpoenas, to Facebook and to the VDARE Foundation, it appeared to us that, of 68 separate demands, fully 53 were improper, with most violations landing squarely on First Amendment grounds.
For example, Item 4 of NYAG Letitia James’ subpoena to the VDARE Foundation:
Quite apart from the extraordinary, and utterly unnecessary, compliance burden that this demand imposes on the VDARE Foundation, it also aims to expose everyone who has ever been involved with us to doxing and harassment by Antifa thugs.
Above all, it aims to expose our writers, who have careers and families to support, and who therefore now operate under pseudonyms because of the Reign Of Terror.
There is simply no need for NYAG Letitia James to know who they are.
Moreover, 40 gigabytes of email could amount to a million individual items or more. Redacting them is an enormous and obviously very tricky task (because of the risk of accidentally exposing donors and supporters).
And we absolutely do not want to tell NYAG Letitia James who our writers are—because we know that she cannot be trusted with confidential information.
Just look at this MSM story about a leak from NYAG Letitia James’ office last year:
Like other nonprofits, Stand For America files an annual tax return with the IRS. While the agency and the nonprofit must make those filings available to the public, including the amounts of contributions to the group, such nonprofits do not have to disclose the identities of their donors.
However, the organization Documented, which describes itself as a nonpartisan government watchdog that investigates money in politics, obtained an unredacted copy of Stand For America’s 2019 filings, which it then shared with POLITICO. The group did not share the original source of the filing, but it bears a stamp from the charity office of the New York state attorney general. [Emphasis added]
Needless to say, giving money to GOP Establishment catspaw Nikki Haley is not really a hanging offense (except possibly in James’ crazed New York Democrat bubble).
But giving money to, or writing for, VDARE.com most certainly is a hanging offense right now—given the current Reign Of Terror. (Consider the fate of blogger Razib Khan, fired after less than 24 hours as a New York Times contributor just because he had some years earlier written a letter to VDARE.com opposing something we had published.)
So James’ incentive to leak the identities of our writers and donors is exponentially greater.
But significantly, Gulag Garland appears to have not responded to the GOP demand at all—further evidence that the Regime is now completely lawless.
(I might also note that Nikki Haley’s Stand For America appears effortlessly to have raised some $7 million in 2019. Obviously, this far outmatches any VDARE Foundation fundraising, even though donations to us are tax-deductible, whereas donations to Stand For America are not. It’s simply amazing how much money professional politicians can raise, as opposed to political truth-tellers like us. With that much money, we could cause a Cultural Revolution.)
Of course, in this sort of regulatory situation, courts do typically operate on the assumption that the government is acting in good faith.
But NYAG Letitia James subpoenas’ fail rate—53 out of 68 demands turn out to be First Amendment violations—simply is not the record of a government acting in good faith. Whatever statutory presumption NYAG Letitia James might be accorded, it is rebutted by this pattern.
Initially, we replied to NYAG Letitia James making these points.
Our subsequent response—an exhaustive (and exhausting) effort to demonstrate good faith.
I must stipulate here that the VDARE Foundation really is a tiny organization— “lean,” in our auditor’s words. And apart from editorial and tech support contractors, VDARE.com generally has only two full-time employees—Lydia and myself, home-schooling parents of three small children. And, importantly, we have no in-house lawyers.
But it simply took us time to organize our legal response to James’ massive onslaught.
This was particularly true because we have increasingly serious difficulty procuring any legal services at all—all this stuff about John Adams representing the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre although himself a Patriot, once the pride of the American legal profession, has gone down the toilet in this new Soviet America. (See “Chinese Communist Social Credit–style stealth deprivation of professional and commercial services” above.)
As discussed above, we elected not to fight NYAG Letitia James’ subpoena on First Amendment grounds, despite its flagrant political motivation, but instead to begin more cautiously, by demonstrating good faith and complying with the subpoena as far as was compatible with our contractors’ and donors’ security.
But the cost of this good-faith effort has been enormous—see “the process is the punishment” above. This is how what Paul Gottfried calls “the Managerial State” enforces obedience.
Our legal fees already amount to over $300,000—and, remember, we have not yet even been accused of any wrongdoing at all.
Moreover, VDARE.com event-planning and fundraising has been completely crippled since the summer of 2022. (We will have our second invitation-only Annual Conference in June—contact Lydia for more details.)
If you’re a donor and you haven’t heard Lydia’s delicious alto on your voicemail thanking you for your donation, this is the reason: She was physically digging through the Foundation’s records, which reside in a cargo container on the Castle grounds.
She’s a tall, strong girl (6’ 1”). But this is still a huge pain.
The VDARE Foundation archives after our chaotic move from Connecticut during COVID, on Berkeley Springs Castle grounds, 2022
By December 2022, the VDARE Foundation had produced over 7,000 pages of documents to AG NYAG Letitia James. We had engaged a third-party custodian to sort through our 40 gigabytes of emails, the equivalent of perhaps millions of pages, because we needed to protect the identities of our vendors, writers, volunteers and donors. And our lawyers’ review of those emails was well under way.
(Significantly, in the course of this production, our lawyers protested NYAG Letitia James’ demand that we produce the names of vendors, e.g., our webmaster, and were told the NRA had been forced to do so. This turned out to be a lie, and another ethical violation. Specifically, it is a violation of Rules 4.1 (”Truthfulness in Statements to Others”) and Rules 8.4 (“Misconduct“) of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct.
Despite all this, in early December, we received a peremptory email from NYAG Letitia James’ office demanding that the VDARE Foundation, within ten days, disclose its constitutionally protected information, reveal previously redacted (because we want to protect donors, writers and correspondents) information in the first 7,000 pages of production; complete review of the 40 gigabytes of emails (ditto); and produce a complete redaction log for the entirety of its production.
Again, the VDARE Foundation is a tiny entity in the world of New York State charities, not at all worthy of this massive regulatory overkill. And in the normal course of events, NYAG Letitia James’ underlings would have simply discussed any concerns about the status of the production with a phone call or a meeting.
But of course her persecution of us is not normal. It is purely political.
So, at this point, with NYAG Letitia James’ bad faith irrefutably evident, we filed a complaint in federal court for declaratory and injunctive relief. In other words, we want an official declaration that James has violated the First Amendment, and we want the Court to halt her attempt to enforce the subpoenas.
In doing so, she violated procedural norms yet again—it’s a pattern.
As our lawyers subsequently told the Northern District of New York Federal Court:
Especially revealing is the OAG [Office of the Attorney General]’s unseemly subterfuge in secretly rushing to state court to secure a favorable order before this Court hears and rules on its motion to dismiss.
VDARE filed its complaint in this Court on December 12, 2022, simultaneously emailing a courtesy copy of its papers to the OAG in advance of formal service, which provided the OAG with three weeks (until January 4, 2023) to respond. [Citations omitted] On December 21, 2022, a full two weeks before the OAG’s response was due on January 4, 2023, the OAG requested and secured VDARE’s consent to an extension of its deadline to respond in federal court, from January 4 to 18, 2023. In so doing, the OAG claimed (in an email) that the extension was necessary because of the holidays and an attorney who had taken ill:
Because of the holidays and a member of our team who has COVID, we would appreciate an extension until Jan 18 to respond to VDARE’s complaint in the NDNY. Can you please confirm your consent? [Citation omitted]
Unbeknownst to VDARE when it consented to the extension on December 21, 2022, however, the OAG had already initiated its special proceeding in state court the week before (on December 16, 2022) with a proposed order to show cause. [Citation omitted]
In other words, NYAG Letitia James lied to us, at least by omission, in order to get her state filing heard first.
Of course, in a just world, even apart from NYAG Letitia James’ obvious malfeasance here, the New York State Court should have stayed or even dismissed NYAG Letitia James’ petition to compel enforcement of the subpoena, pending resolution of our First Amendment case in Federal Court, which would normally have had priority.
But to our lawyers’ shock (again), and with unprecedented speed—as in, the next business day after filings were completed—New York State Judge Sabrina Kraus ruled against us, uncritically accepting NYAG Letitia James’ lying and stupid assertions as to why she had cause to want disclosure.
Kraus even endorsed NYAG James’ demand that we provide the names of writers.
This is particularly telling because NYAG James had ostentatiously eschewed asking for the names of writers in her response to our Federal suit—presumably because of its obvious First Amendment implications.
As our lawyers subsequently told the Federal Court:
…the OAG represented to this Court in its motion to dismiss this case that its subpoena to VDARE does “not seek any information regarding the development or publication of VDARE’s online content.” [Citation omitted]
Simultaneously, the OAG took the contrary and constitutionally offensive position in state court that “the identities of contractors—including writers who contribute to the website—these are precisely the records the OAG must examine in its investigation of VDARE’s organizational misconduct.”
Apart from taking contradictory positions in two different courts, the OAG’s purported rationale for the demanded disclosure does not fit its rationale: a vendor’s provision of services to VDARE and a writer’s provision of content to VDARE’s website have no automatic connection to any legitimate investigative need.
Memorandum Of Law In Opposition To Defendant’s Motion To Dismiss, February 22 2023
Arguing contradictory things in different courts is flatly unethical. It violates the doctrine of judicial estoppel, which explicitly precludes litigants from making contradictory claims in different courts.
VDARE.com’s response to NYAG James’ aggression
Of course we appealed Judge Kraus’ ruling—but only because our heroic donors had provided the money to do it. And we were granted a stay of her decision pending a full hearing.
But again, with unprecedented speed, the Appeals Court then rejected our stay pending appeal. Significantly, they even passed the matter on to their clerk for a summary order, indicating that they did not think it worth their time to be bothered with our First Amendment rights. We were granted no relief at all, not even the protection of our writers’ identities, which NYAG Letitia James of course had lyingly assured the Federal court she did not want.
From our point of view, this nightmare is like watching water cascade uphill—the case should never have been heard in New York State Court; it should not have been rejected; and our stay should never have been rejected on appeal.
But rules just don’t seem to apply to immigration patriots.
Note the net effect of NYAG Letitia James’ aggression: We are now forced to fight this ruinously expensive war on TWO fronts—in Federal Court and in New York State Court.
In fact, THREE fronts—because Lydia is still being forced to prepare production to comply with NYAG Letitia James’ demands in case we lose. See below.
The downside of VDARE Foundation’s good faith effort to comply
The downside of VDARE.com’s good faith effort to comply: NYAG Letitia James was able to find and trump up (excuse the term!) various trivial alleged infractions.
“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” This principle, supposedly enunciated by Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, is of course why Americans today are terrified of audits by the Internal Revenue Service.
And it’s why President Trump, in the video we linked to above (at 12:05), forcefully asserted his right to take the Fifth Amendment in his deposition, although specifically pointing out (at 10:36) that he had once thought that innocence was a sufficient defense.
Among alleged VDARE Foundation infractions that NYAG Letitia James is trumping up:
Lydia (“Secretary, Treasurer and Publisher”) of VDARE and I (“Director/CEO/Chairman”) did not specify in filings that we are married.
Even if this technicality were true, Lydia and I obviously USE THE SAME LAST NAMES! We file joint taxes with the same IRS where we file our 990s!! And, critically, NO BENEFIT WAS GAINED by the supposed failure to report!!!
And we have repeatedly, perhaps boringly, celebrated on VDARE.com the fact that we are married. For example, here in 2007, announcing our marriage, Another Personal Message From Peter Brimelow:
Manifestly, we had no intent to deceive.
And NYAG Letitia James knows this—because she admits elsewhere that she is stalking VDARE.com: She cites VDARE.com posts in her filings to support her lie that we were living at the Castle rent-free.
So NYAG Letitia James’ lie here is not merely malicious. It is stupid.
NYAG Letitia James claims, without evidence, that our Berkeley Springs Castle purchase is suspect
The Berkeley Springs Castle is a beautiful charismatic property and only two hours from the U.S. Capitol. (This is probably what alarms NYAG James—as Southern Poverty Law Center enforcer Michael Edison Hayden quite accurately complained in 2020: “[t]he castle gives them greater proximity to Washington D.C. and a place to hold conferences without fear of being shut down”).
But this is in West Virginia, and therefore actually surprisingly cheap—we got the Castle, 55 acres of mountain and three somewhat dilapidated cottages for $1.4 million.
(WE URGE PATRIOTS TO JOIN US HERE IN AFFORDABLE, D.C.-ADJACENT, WEST VIRGINIA! Its demographics “Look Like America” before the disaster of the 1965 Immigration Act, it has no big city to outweigh the rural vote, and it went for Trump 68.62% in 2020.)
But the serious point: It’s obviously a total waste of New York taxpayer money for NYAG Letitia James to spend so much time on this tiny transaction.
Furthermore, it is absolutely standard for 501(c)(3) charities like the VDARE Foundation to own their own headquarters, office space, meeting rooms etc. Here, for example, is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s headquarters in Montgomery AL—the notorious “Poverty Palace”:
And, as outlined above and confirmed by SPLC thug Michael Edison Hayden, we bought the Berkeley Springs Castle only becausewe discovered we could not rely on the corporate/ Ruling Class complex to defend our right to hold conferences—and the holding of conferences is critical to our role in advancing Patriotic Immigration Reform.
This is a problem that the SPLC and other communist groups absolutely do not have, for reasons that invite analysis, in the current political climate.
FOR THE RECORD: every step of the Berkeley Springs Castle transaction was carefully monitored by expensive lawyers—because we were well aware that we were susceptible to scrutiny by a malicious and unscrupulous politically motivated regulator.
Specifically:
NYAG Letitia James is lying, and stupidly lying, when she claims that the Castle purchase was illegitimate because VDARE Foundation’s board was “overseen exclusively by the Brimelow family.”
In fact, despite NYAG James’ insinuation, there is absolutely no reason the VDARE Foundation board should not have been made up of Brimelow family members: this is common for small, family-run foundations.
But again, James’ claim is still a lie, and a stupid lie. Our board has always had at least one, and at various times at many as three, non-family members, as is perfectly obvious from our filings.
NYAG Letitia James is similarly lying, and stupidly lying, by claiming that the Brimelow family’s temporary residence in the castle, and subsequently in a refurbished cottage on the castle grounds, was somehow illegitimate.
But in fact at every step, again carefully monitored by our lawyers, we paid independently determined fair market rent.
NYAG Letitia James knows this because we insisted on disclosing it to her at an early point when we were told it was allegedly the matter of concern.
But she refused to meet with our lawyers to discuss this disclosure. And her subpoena harassment rolled on.
NYAG Letitia James is lying, and stupidly lying, when she claims that we transferred assets purchased by the VDARE Foundation to a for-profit corporation that Lydia controls.
But this for-profit corporation, part of the aforementioned restructuring after we were forced into the real estate business, is in fact owned by the VDARE Foundation—NOT by Lydia personally.
NYAG Letitia James knows this because it was disclosed, e.g.,on our 2020 Form 990, which we provided (and she has access to anyway).
Again, NYAG Letitia James is simply lying, and stupidly lying.
Facebook Expenditures
NYAG Letitia James asserts that Facebook Cancelled VDARE.com in early 2020 because it determined we engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” by creating a botfarm and that “these expenditures could constitute a waste of charitable assets and breach of the Brimelows’ fiduciary duties as VDARE officers and directors.”
Facebook, probably because it has testified before Congress to the contrary, seems not to want to admit that it is engaging in political censorship. But of course it is absolutely obvious to everyone that it is—e.g., completely independent third-party Facebook users who wish to share VDARE.com items are now libelously informed ”this URL goes against our community standards on spam.”
And in any case, VDARE.com is a charitable/educational organization that is in the business of spreading its message.
Paying to promote our message is unimpeachably legitimate.
Furthermore, most of the monies that NYAG Letitia James instances were actually paid, not by the VDARE Foundation, but separately by our Social Media consultant, to promote his own private business, helping us and his other clients.
NYAG Letitia James knows this—because the expenditures appear nowhere in our accounts.
By not acknowledging this she is, again, stupidly lying about material facts.
Payments
NYAG Letitia James asserts:
In 2019, VDARE reported a six-fold increase in revenue, from $700,000 in 2018 to approximately $4.3 million in 2019 […] Also in 2019, VDARE doubled the salary of its Chairman, Peter Brimelow, to approximately $345,000,
The VDARE Foundation had a great year in 2019, thanks to our wonderful donors. In previous years, in a way that is typical of small business owners, Lydia and I had often eschewed income to pay bills, depending on financial circumstances. So in 2019, the VDARE Foundation Board formally approved a payment for the year to me of $349,500. (N.b. Lydia was paid some $10,000.)
But in contrast, in 2020, with no major donor, Lydia and I together were paid only some $270,000.
And, for what it’s worth, in 2023 to date, basically because of the cost of NY AG James’ regulatory onslaught, we have not taken any salary at all.
Personally, I think that Lydia and I deserve to earn much more. In 2021, National Cuckview’s Rich Lowry was paid apparently paid $400,000.
Who is doing more for the Historic American Nation?
Compliance
NYAG Letitia James asserts about our purchase of the Berkeley Springs Castle and subsequent reorganization transactions:
[u]nder New York law each required approval and written documentation of that approval by disinterested members of the VDARE Board of Director [CITATION OMITTED] and should have been submitted for review and approval to OAG or to Supreme Court [CITATION OMITTED]. Transfer of charitable assets to a for profit entity without fair consideration to disqualified persons is a violation of both New York and federal law.
But this would only be true if the purchase and transfer were to a non-profit entity independent of, and not controlled by, the VDARE Foundation.
NYAG Letitia James knows that this is not the case with the VDARE Foundation’s purchase of the Berkeley Springs Castle and its subsequent creation of a for-profit entity that the Foundation controls.
She is again lying to the Court—stupidly, because the facts are readily ascertainable, for example in our lawyers’ briefs.
Why now?
When I’m in an optimistic mood, I think this lying Deep State assault, along with so many others, is happening now because the Ruling Class is panicking. It has simply never recovered from the shock of Trump’s 2016 victory and the realization that the Democrat stealth strategy of Electing A New People could be halted (as it actually was for a time under Trump) and even reversed.
That’s why Biden has risked impeachment by opening the borders to rush in the Great Replacement in a plainly treasonous way, to finish the job as quickly as possible.
Which means that, now more than ever, the Regime must keep the immigration issue out of public debate—until America’s demographic transformation is complete.
Dissent on immigration must be utterly crushed—even polite dissent from a tiny operation like VDARE.com.
What happens now?
Frederick J. Scullin, Jr., the senior judge in the federal District Court for the Northern District of New York,will rule ontwo of the competing motions that are pending before him:
On NYAG Letitia James’s motion to dismiss the entire case, which he will either grant or deny and
The VDARE Foundation’s motion to enjoin any attempt to enforce the subpoena by the AG.
We don’t know how long this will take. Federal judges are supposed to rule within six months, but often don’t. However, we are told this is not likely to be the case here.
But a footnote: Lies have consequences—we intend to move to sanction and disbar lying NYAG Letitia James
In journalism, and of course in politics, you get used to opponents lying all the time.
But NYAG Letitia James is not just a journalist and not just a politician: she is also the head of a state agency, and a lawyer.
That means that, as a lawyer, she is what is known as an “Officer of the Court.” As Law.com says
As officers of the court lawyers have an absolute ethical duty to tell judges the truth… [Emphasis added]
You can see why this is necessary. The system simply cannot function if all factual assertions have to be checked all the time. Truthfulness “cuts down on transaction costs,” as the great Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman once pointed out to me.
NYAG Letitia James, however, has consistently lied in court filings.
And it has worked—until now.
Thus, for example, New York State Judge Sabrina Kraus, in her ruling all too obviously cut-and-pasted from NYAG James’ brief, stated:
Public postings by Respondent Chairman Peter Brimelow and others indicate that he and his family have used the castle as their primary residence since at least March 2020. [A lie. As stated above, we lived only briefly in the Castle before moving to the cottage, AND WE PAID INDEPENDENTLY DETERMINED RENT THROUGHOUT. Moreover, Judge Kraus nowhere acknowledges that the Castle was purchased for an unimpeachable purpose: providing a venue for meetings that, because of communist threats that U.S. law enforcement authorities seem unable to counter, we cannot hold elsewhere.] During this same period, Respondent also substantially increased payments to Brimelow and to third-party, for-profit companies he controls… [A (confused, see “payments” above) lie. The West Virginia for-profit company—there’s only one—is OWNED BY THE VDARE FOUNDATION.]
Respondent separately reported spending tens of thousands of dollars on office expenses in 2019 [this is because at that time we operated from a home office in our home in Litchfield CT, a completely standard procedure] as well as paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a third-party LLC controlled by Brimelow that was based at Brimelow’s residential home address. [This was simply an employee leasing company that paid the salaries of all VDARE employees, including Lydia and myself. One of its purposes was to protect our employees from being doxxed.]
In December 2020, Respondent conveyed the entirety of the Berkeley Springs Castle property to two West Virginia corporations incorporated by Lydia Brimelow, Peter’s wife and a Respondent director, five months earlier. Respondent conveyed the castle itself and the land that it sits on to the Berkeley Castle Foundation (BCF), a non-profit corporation. Respondent conveyed the remaining land, consisting of eight parcels, to BBB, LLC, a for-profit corporation. [Misleading at best. Judge Kraus nowhere acknowledges that the West Virginia corporations are ALL controlled by the VDARE Foundation.]
Of course, Judge Kraus could have avoided these stupid errors simply by reading our lawyers’ brief.
But apparently New York State judges don’t have to do that kind of thing.
Nevertheless, and this is a critical distinction: Attorney General NYAG Letitia James absolutely does have to tell the truth to Judge Kraus, and to all courts involved in our lynching.
(1) make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal or fail to correct a false statement of material fact or law previously made to the tribunal by the lawyer…
(3) offer or use evidence that the lawyer knows to be false…
The official comments, which are designed to elucidate the rule, provide the gloss:
This Rule sets forth the special duties of lawyers as officers of the court to avoid conduct that undermines the integrity of the adjudicative process…although a lawyer in an adversary proceeding is not required to present an impartial exposition of the law and may not vouch for the evidence submitted in a cause, the lawyer must not allow the tribunal to be misled by false statements of law or fact or by evidence that the lawyer knows to be false. [Comment 2 to Rule 3.3]
Further:
…an assertion purporting to be based on the lawyer’s own knowledge, as in an affidavit or declaration by the lawyer or in a statement in open court, may properly be made only when the lawyer knows the assertion is true or believes it to be true on the basis of a reasonably diligent inquiry. There are circumstances where failure to make a disclosure is the equivalent of an affirmative misrepresentation. [Comment 3 to Rule 3.3]
Paragraph (a)(3) requires that the lawyer refuse to offer or use evidence that the lawyer knows to be false, regardless of the client’s wishes. This duty is premised on the lawyer’s obligation as an officer of the court to prevent the trier of fact from being misled by false evidence.
Lawyers have a special obligation as officers of the court to protect a tribunal against criminal or fraudulent conduct that undermines the integrity of the adjudicative process.
Accordingly, paragraph (b) requires a lawyer who represents a client in an adjudicative proceeding to take reasonable remedial measures, including disclosure if necessary, whenever the lawyer knows that a person, including the lawyer’s client, intends to engage, is engaging or has engaged in criminal or fraudulent conduct related to the proceeding.
Such conduct includes, among other things… unlawfully destroying or concealing documents or other evidence related to the proceeding; and failing to disclose information to the tribunal when required by law to do so. For example, under some circumstances a person’s omission of a material fact may constitute a crime or fraud on the tribunal.”
In our case, New York Attorney General NYAG Letitia James has committed every one of these violations.
The Ontario Civil Liberties Association has received documentation from Ontario lawyer Aaron Rosenberg showing that Amazon interfered with and repeatedly deplatformed his client’s book.
The book is “China Virus: How Justin Trudeau’s Pro-Communist Ideology is Putting Canadians in danger”, by Ezra Levant of Rebel News.
Amazon is enabled by State corporate laws to in-effect operate as a book publishing monopoly.
Amazon benefits from corporate law by tax advantages and by shielding its executives and board members from personal liability.
Amazon occupies the internet, thus using internet facilities that have been largely created with public money. The internet is a publicly-funded shared resource, from landlines following rail and road networks, to university hubs, and so on. The very architecture of the internet is from publicly-funded intellectual efforts.
Corporations, such as Amazon, are free to be independent in their corporate strategy and functioning. However, non-specialized monopolistic online publishers and social media giants, because of their fundamental and government-enabled societal role in giving individuals a voice to participate in democracy and to express themselves freely, with equal access, should not violate the constitutional, Charter, democratic, political, and natural freedom-of-expression rights of authors and readers, arbitrarily or by contract.
Blocking YouTube channels and banning books on Amazon are akin to requiring government authorisation to operate a printing press or to buy a photocopier or pen and paper. Only the technology and the administrative covering structures have changed. Establishment censorship is establishment censorship.
Amazon is applying the correct principle of free expression in publishing the historically influential works of Mao, Hitler, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Errico Malatesta, Adam Smith, and many others, but it is applying outright censorship against current works that it deems threatens the dominant establishment projects of the moment.
OCLA has noticed an aggressive censorship of influential works that potentially threaten the current global state of medical totalitarianism. “Public health risk” is being wielded as a ready-made pretext for deplatforming and censorship. This is obscene. There must be free expression, whether establishment structures have declared a pandemic or not. There must especially be free expression when the government is enacting draconian measures, such as a global lockdown and forcing individuals to wear masks, no less. Everyone must have a voice. Everyone is impacted by unprecedented (we argue reckless[1]) government actions.
It appears that Ezra Levant’s book may have been captured by the medical totalitarian net. Whatever the actual reasons for Amazon’s egregious violation of Mr. Levant’s free expression, and of the rights of his readers, the actions of Amazon are wrong and harmful to society.
Activists have successfully forced Mastercard to hold a vote by shareholders on a proposal which, if passed, could see the company monitoring payments to global far-right political leaders and white supremacist groups. The proposal aims to see Mastercard establish an internal “human rights committee” that would stop designated white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists, such as Tommy Robinson, from getting access to money sent from donors using the company’s card payment services. It’s been conceived by US-based political activists SumOfUs, who want to escalate the battle against white supremacists and far-right groups from tech platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Patreon, and PayPal to one of the biggest companies in world finance, in an attempt to choke off donations.
Mark Metcalfe / Getty Images
Activists have successfully forced Mastercard to hold a vote by shareholders on a proposal which, if passed, could see the company monitoring payments to global far-right political leaders and white supremacist groups.
The proposal aims to see Mastercard establish an internal “human rights committee” that would stop designated white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists, such as Tommy Robinson, from getting access to money sent from donors using the company’s card payment services.
It’s been conceived by US-based political activists SumOfUs, who want to escalate the battle against white supremacists and far-right groups from tech platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Patreon, and PayPal to one of the biggest companies in world finance, in an attempt to choke off donations.
Robinson and several other leading figures in the global far right have been forced in recent months to solicit donations directly on their websites via Mastercard, Visa, and American Express after PayPal banned payments to them. Facebook also disabled the donation function on Robinson’s fan page before deleting it completely.
“Spreading hate involves spending money,” Eoin Dubsky, from SumOfUs, told BuzzFeed News. “Whether it’s paying for online advertising or organising violent rallies, white supremacist groups need financial services from companies like Mastercard.”
Christopher Furlong / Getty Image
Tommy Robinson launches his EU election campaign in Wythenshawe, England. Over several months, SumOfUs has been locked in a battle with Mastercard executives behind the scenes in order to get the new committee proposal put to the shareholders ahead of the company’s June annual general meeting. It would see the formation of a “human rights committee” at the board level, which would monitor financial transactions with designated hate groups. Documents seen by BuzzFeed News reveal that the US Securities and Exchange Commission has given the green light for shareholders to get the chance to vote on the formation of the committee, despite staunch opposition from the Mastercard board and executives.
In the material to be sent to shareholders, the activists refer to a website called Blood Money, which tracks online payments to white supremacist groups from the likes of Mastercard, American Express, and Stripe. The website currently claims that Mastercard services are being used by groups like Counter-Currents Publishing, Covenant People’s Ministry, the United West, Sultan Knish, and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation.SumOfUs has also pointed to the activity of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. The former English Defence League founder is running as an independent in May’s European election. In November 2018, PayPal banned donations to the anti-Islam activist, with the online payment company saying that its services wouldn’t “be used to promote hate, violence, or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory”. More recently, Robinson has been calling on his global network of supporters to donate to his election campaign through his website, which allows payments from Mastercard.
“Having a Mastercard logo on their website also gives these groups a veneer of legitimacy, and allows those who want to donate to do so quickly and quietly,” Dubsky told BuzzFeed News. “Mastercard also benefits, pocketing a transaction fee for each purchase or donation.” Mastercard declined requests for comment, pointing instead to the board’s position laid out in the information sent to shareholders ahead of the general meeting. “Mastercard is committed to treating all people fairly and with dignity, and our interest in human rights extends to all areas in which our business is involved and where we have particular expertise,” it reads. “The Board does not believe that establishing a separate human rights committee is necessary to properly exercise its oversight of this important area.”
It’s unclear whether the proposal stands a chance of succeeding at June’s meeting. But the move to confront such a big, mainstream company like Mastercard over issues like the funding of white supremacy and the far right comes after action from smaller, online financial platforms like PayPal and Patreon in the area. PayPal has banned payments to Robinson, US far-right group Proud Boys, and Canadian anti-Islam activist Laura Loomer. It also acted against several US anti-fascist groups because the company had no tolerance for groups that promoted “hate” and “violence”. Last year, Patreon banned YouTuber Sargon of Akkad over a 2015 video that featured the Gamergate leader repeatedly saying the n-word in a Google Hangout with the alt-right. According to the New York Times, Sargon of Akkad, whose real name is Carl Benjamin, had 3,000 subscribers and was being paid $12,000 a month on Patreon when he was removed from the site.
In a recent YouTube video, Benjamin and Robinson talked about being de-platformed by social media companies. But Robinson also suggested that he has long-term fears beyond the big tech companies.
“I am being completely un-personed,” Robinson said. “What’s next—my mobile-phone contract?”
Mark Di Stefano is a media and politics correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in London. Contact Mark Di Stefano at mark.distefano@buzzfeed.com.
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