UPDATED 6/18/20 | With ties to the Trump Administration, VDARE is arguably the most influential white nationalist organization in the country. Recently the organization, listed as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was suspended from Facebook following an investigation into inauthentic behavior ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Yet despite this ban, other companies continue to help the group raise funds and spread its propaganda.
On May 5, 2020, Facebook announced it had removed 19 pages, 15 accounts, and one Facebook group as part of an investigation into “suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior.” According to the “April 2020 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report,” this network was linked to VDARE and individuals connected to the Unz Review, a website that has published articles by Neo-Nazi propagandist “Eric Striker” and antisemitic self-styled theologian E. Michael Jones.
The website VDARE.com, created by British expatriate Peter Brimelow in 1999, publishes anti-immigrant screeds by white nationalists, Neo-Confederates, and Holocaust deniers. Although widely regarded as a fringe organization, it has long been buoyed by its ties to political commentators once viewed as mainstream, such as Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin.
Today, VDARE’s roots have reached the highest echelons of the U.S. government, which provides cover for the group’s crude racism.
Presidential adviser Stephen Miller, architect of some of the Trump Administration’s most draconian anti-immigration policies, such as separating migrant families and banning immigrants from five Muslim-majority countries, regularly promoted the website according to leaked emails reviewed by the SPLC.
Mother Jones recently reported that the Department of Commerce selected Adam Candeub, an attorney who represented white nationalist Jared Taylor in his ill-fated lawsuit against Twitter, as the deputy assistant secretary of its National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Candeub has also published four op-eds with VDARE columnist Marcus Epstein.
Last year the Department of Justice included an antisemitic article from the website in its internal news briefings service. And in 2018, it was reported that VDARE founder Peter Brimelow attended a gathering at the home of Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser.
The SPLC classifies VDARE as a white nationalist hate group, in part because of its promotion of the racist “white genocide” or “great replacement” conspiracy.
This conspiracy posits that white people are being systematically replaced with immigrants of color by left-wing or Jewish forces. Proponents believe this is part of a plot to outnumber white people in historically majority white nations. Some think the goal is to bring in reliable Democratic voters who will inexorably turn solidly red states into Democratic strongholds.
The tiki torch-carrying white nationalists who marched on the University of Virginia in August 2017 infamously chanted “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us” in reference to the “great replacement.” The conspiracy is thought to have inspired several terrorist attacks: in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 2018; Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019; Poway, California in April 2019; and El Paso, Texas in August 2019.
Following the attack in El Paso, in which a white nationalist gunned down 23 people at a Walmart in response to what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” VDARE appeared to defend the shooter’s manifesto by claiming the shooter’s choice of the word “invasion” was “apt.” Patrick Crusius, the man accused of carrying out that attack, is facing state and federal charges.
In spite of this, VDARE’s leadership and contributors continue to push the “great replacement” conspiracy. Most recently VDARE columnist Anthony Boehm warned of the “Great Replacement,” or “Great Invasion,” and its supposedly destructive impact on Newark, NJ. Moreover, VDARE promotes discredited race science and has argued for secession and the creation of a white ethnostate.
And, thanks to social media platforms, domain registrars, and online retailers, VDARE has a powerful megaphone with which to communicate its hateful message.
The Contributors
VDARE’s most high profile and prolific contributors include:
- Peter Brimelow
- Jared Taylor
- Michael J. Thompson
- Kevin DeAnna
- John Derbyshire
- Faith Goldy
- Steve Sailer
- Patrick J. Buchanan
- Michelle Malkin
- Others
Peter Brimelow – A former National Review writer, Brimelow founded the Center For American Unity and its accompanying website, VDARE.com, in 1999. VDARE was named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World.
In 1995 Brimelow published Alien Nation which, according to the SPLC, “argued that America is historically white-dominated and should stay that way.” In Alien Nation, Brimelow called taxpayer funding for multicultural projects “subversive,” and described immigrants as “weird aliens with dubious habits.”
He has spoken at annual conferences hosted by American Renaissance (AmRen), a white nationalist organization founded by Jared Taylor, in 2015, 2016, and 2017. At the 2015 conference, Brimelow gave a speech in which he suggested states like Texas secede from the Union in order to protect the “rights” of white people.
At the 2016 National Policy Institute conference, where attendees were filmed giving Nazi salutes after a speech by Richard Spencer, he praised President-elect Donald Trump’s coalition, which he described as having a “white core that’s implicitly ethno-nationalist.”
In a 2018 interview with Slate, Brimelow remarked that his “heart is with civic nationalism” while his “head is with racial nationalism.”
Jared Taylor – The founder of the website American Renaissance, white nationalist Jared Taylor proclaimed at his organization’s inaugural conference in 1994 that we have “no duty whatsoever to look after every incompetent Third World tribe that drifts in the United States.” Since then his rhetoric hasn’t softened.
In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, he wrote, “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”
Taylor, who is fond of arguing that America should remain majority white and that Blacks and Latinos are, on average, less intelligent than whites and more prone to violent crime, has held a conference almost every year for the past 26 years. Past speakers have included Richard Lynn, Michael Levin, Richard Spencer, Paul Ramsey, Gordon Baum, Patrick Casey, Lana Lokteff, and Nick Fuentes.
When it became apparent that white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof, who murdered 9 Black churchgoers, had been radicalized by racist propaganda from the Council of Conservative Citizens, Taylor acted as the group’s spokesman. “Our site educated him,” he said. “Our site told him the truth about interracial crime. What he then decided to do with that truth is absolutely not our responsibility.”
Jared Taylor has written over 80 articles that have appeared on VDARE between 2001 and 2020. In one from 2015, called “The Great Replacement: The 1965 Immigration Act And The Think Tanks,” Taylor complained that while the U.S. had no national origins quotas, “Israel uses immigration policy to stay Jewish” and “African and Asian countries would never let their populations be replaced.”
Michael J. Thompson – Under the pseudonym “Paul Kersey,” former WorldNetDaily employee Michael Thompson founded the white supremacist blog Stuff Black People Don’t Like (SBPDL) in 2009. In his more than 3,500 articles on SBPDL, Thompson has painted Black people as genetically inferior, derided civil rights icons, and advocated for racial segregation.
Thompson claimed in a 2016 appearance on Red Ice, a white supremacist media outlet, that he started SBPDL as an in-joke between friends, but that it took a serious turn after he became convinced African-Americans had ruined Detroit. He called Detroit the “manifestation of Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant’s theories and frightening prognostications about what would happen with The Passing of the Great Race and The Rising Tide of Color.”
Thompson currently co-hosts a podcast with white nationalist Jared Taylor for the American Renaissance website. During an episode from October 2016 he suggested that movies depicting the evils of slavery and segregation foment anti-white violence.
According to a joint investigation by Angry White Men and Right Wing Watch which unmasked Kersey as Michael Thompson, he has promoted the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy over a dozen times on SBPDL. He has written that the “Great Replacement is not only real, but leveling the civilization our ancestors built in the United States and slowly — but surely — erasing the rights we were granted.”
Thompson has authored 384 articles that have appeared on VDARE, many of which frame black-on-white violence as a persistent scourge in the United States.
Kevin DeAnna – In 2006 white nationalist Kevin DeAnna founded the far-right student group Youth for Western Civilization (YWC). In 2011 Jared Taylor wrote a fundraising letter for YWC, describing him as “an eloquent and distinguished young man who knows how important our cultural identity is.”
In 2012 he stepped down as head of YWC and began writing articles for the far-right, conspiracy-peddling outlet WorldNetDaily. DeAnna continued doing so until at least 2017.
As reported by the SPLC, DeAnna also wrote nearly 450 articles since 2008 for white nationalist websites like American Renaissance under the pseudonym “Gregory Hood.” It was under this pseudonym that he penned the 2016 book Waking Up From the American Dream, which carries a foreword by antisemitic retired professor Kevin MacDonald.
Writing as “Hood” for the white nationalist website Counter-Currents, DeAnna cited SIEGE — a collection of essays by Neo-Nazi James Mason that is popular among the most violent factions of the white power movement — in calling for white nationalists to begin viewing all white people as “our army.” He added that the “overall strategic objective of political activity is to make race the defining difference between various political, cultural, and social groups.”
This, he wrote, is a “precursor to the formation of an ethnostate, the great dream of the White Republic.”
Under another pseudonym, “James Kirkpatrick,” DeAnna wrote at least 1,148 articles for VDARE between 2011 and 2020, and authored one book: 2019’s Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right.
In an article promoting the book, Peter Brimelow summarized his preface: “I took the opportunity to vent my rage that this outstanding young VDARE.com contributor is actually forced … to ‘live in the shadows’—and that so many of his contemporaries from what used to be called the Alt Right have suffered through an extraordinary unreported personal and professional—yes!—Holocaust after Trump’s 2016 election.”
In a July 2019 article DeAnna wrote that “Westerners must wake to this demographic tidal wave lest their culture, people and civilization be extinguished,” and that if they don’t, “every battle won or achievement made by Western Civilization is rendered pointless.”
In one from August he again referenced the “great replacement” by asking, “But why does Europe need ‘new blood’? … What kind of self-loathing society takes it as a commandment it must replace itself?” He later warned: “Without Europeans, there is no ‘Europe,’ and no European culture, traditions, or values. The European landmass just becomes another extension of Africa.”
John Derbyshire – John Derbyshire is a prolific far-right commentator and self-described “race realist” who writes articles and records a podcast for VDARE. In February 2012 he gave a speech at CPAC, during a panel hosted by the hate group ProEnglish, on whether the “elite” classes will abandon the belief that social forces are responsible for group differences.
In April 2012 Derbyshire lost his job with the National Review over an article he wrote for the racist online publication Taki’s Magazine. Inspired by the death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black child, by George Zimmerman, Derbyshire wrote that white parents should give a “talk” to their children about avoiding Black people for their own safety.
In “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” Derbyshire advised that white children, among other things, “[a]void concentrations of blacks not known to you personally” and not “act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, i.e., on the highway.”
In his 2,529 articles for VDARE — many of which are transcriptions or adaptations of his Radio Derb show — Derbyshire has expressed a belief that the U.S. should adopt laws that would preserve a “large majority ethnic core,” and has claimed that “Invasion is the new immigration.”
He’s ridiculed the idea that any immigrant can become an American, writing that if “we just move thirty or forty million” people from South and Central America to the U.S., “our Magic Dirt will transform them into civic-minded Jeffersonian yeomen!”
In December 2015, Derbyshire supported then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call for a Muslim ban. “It is true of course that most Muslims aren’t extremists planning terrorism. Only a tiny minority are,” he wrote. “The world has a lot of Muslims, though. What’s a tiny minority—0.1 percent? There are 1.6 billion Muslims. Zero point one percent of 1.6 billion is 1.6 million. Keep ’em out!”
On May 9, 2020, he celebrated a school district’s decision to ban Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings over its graphic depictions of the author’s molestation as a child and its “anti-white messaging.” “I don’t care about the self-reported molestation, which the old fraud probably made up anyway,” Derbyshire wrote, “but ‘anti-white messaging’? Hallelujah!”
Derbyshire has spoken at the 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2019 AmRen conferences.
Faith Goldy – In 2017 Faith Goldy was fired by the Canadian right-wing outlet Rebel Media after she traveled to the white power “Unite the Right” rally, and appeared on a Neo-Nazi podcast. Since then she’s become a popular fixture on white nationalist podcasts, where she’s recited the white supremacist 14 Words and praised white nationalists for their “well thought out ideas” about the “JQ” — or “Jewish Question.”
In 2018, the same year she was banned from PayPal, Goldy was hired by VDARE as a full-time contributor. In a March 2, 2020 video for VDARE TV, Goldy agitated for secession in order to create a right-wing, white ethnostate. In the video, Goldy warned viewers that “minorities vote majority Democrat,” and that as “America nears white-minority status, either the Republican Party will go the way of the dodo or it will become a shell of its former self.”
She has also used VDARE TV to promote a slew of so-called “America First” congressional candidates who vowed to enact an immigration moratorium, and attack Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black man who was killed while jogging through New Brunswick, Georgia. Goldy called the Ahmaud Arbery case a “warning sound for a nation in demographic decline,” and justified Arbery’s death by misreading Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law.
Goldy was originally slated to speak at AmRen’s 2019 conference — though her appearance never came to fruition — and has 17 articles to her name on VDARE. She is currently active on both Twitter and Telegram, the latter of which she recently used to ask, “What exactly does a synagogue do except mutilate the genitals of young men?”
Steve Sailer – Another former National Review columnist, Steve Sailer has been dubbed the “man who invented identity politics for the New Right” — and with good reason. In 2000 Steve Sailer suggested that Republicans could win elections, not by appealing to minority voters, but by “raising its fraction of the white vote minimally.”
In 2016 Donald Trump appears to have successfully executed the “Sailer Strategy” with an intensely xenophobic campaign.
Sailer is credited with popularizing the term “human biodiversity” (HBD), which refers to the biological differences between different races, and has been described as the “ideological successor to eugenics.” In a 2011 interview with the H.L. Mencken Club, a white nationalist hate group, Sailer defined human biodiversity as both a “field of study” and a “political movement.”
Steve Sailer has written some 11,439 articles that have been published to VDARE since 2000. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which left over 1,800 people dead, Sailer wrote that African-Americans “tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and, thus, “need stricter moral guidance from society.”
He echoed those remarks after 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which killed over 3,000, writing that the “catastrophic incompetence of Puerto Rico today is a foretaste of what is in store for the Hispanicized USA later in the 21st Century.” He added that, “Natural disasters in Latin America routinely unleash horrors of ineptitude and apathy, because that’s how Latinos roll.”
Recently, in response to public protests against police brutality and systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Sailer tweeted, “The worship of blacks is now the state religion of America.”
Patrick J. Buchanan – A former senior advisor to three Republican presidents, Pat Buchanan is an old school white supremacist who spent decades resisting the civil rights movement. In 1969, Buchanan issued a memo to Richard Nixon urging him not to visit Coretta Scott King, and calling her late husband “one of the most divisive men in contemporary history.”
Following Nixon’s reelection in 1972, Buchanan reportedly urged him not to “fritter away his present high support in the nation for an ill-advised governmental effort to forcibly integrate races.”
In 1989, Buchanan defended Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial dating in an op-ed, and complained that freedom now “takes a back seat to integration.” The following year, writing of South African apartheid, Buchanan asked why “white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong,” considering the “Founding Fathers did not believe this.”
Buchanan has also repeatedly flogged the “great replacement” conspiracy in books and podcast appearances.
In Buchanan’s 2007 book Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart, he declared that America was “committing suicide” by “not reproducing itself” while “Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see.”
While promoting his book on Hannity & Colmes, Buchanan warned of a “wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country.”
In his 2011 book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, Buchanan lamented that the “white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear.” Suicide of a Superpower was the final straw for Buchanan’s employers at MSNBC, who fired him in February 2012.
Yet years later Buchanan’s message remains the same. During the August 20, 2019 episode of The Laura Ingraham Podcast, Buchanan said that “Texas is fading away,” and that when Texas resembles California “demographically” it will resemble it “politically.” Buchanan has written 1,415 articles that have been published on VDARE since 2005.
Michelle Malkin – Once considered a mainstream conservative commentator, Michelle Malkin has increasingly backed the political fringe. In 2019, Malkin threw her support behind white nationalists who called themselves the “groyper army” and heckled conservative pundits with racist and homophobic questions.
The “groypers” are a not-so-clever re-branding of the racist alt-right, and its thought leaders include the likes of Holocaust-denying podcaster Nick Fuentes, and white nationalists Patrick Casey, Vincent James Foxx, and Scott Greer.
In response to Malkin endorsing explicitly racist figures like Fuentes, the organization Young Americans for Freedom ended its 17 year relationship with Malkin. Doubling down, Malkin spoke at the inaugural America First Political Action Conference in February.
In April, Malkin appeared on Radio 3Fourteen, a white power podcast whose host once said media depictions of interracial relationships are “more devious than blatant in-your-face mass murdering.” Malkin said she won’t “apologize” for “defending the idea that America should maintain its historic demographic balance.”
Yet even before the groyper dust-up Malkin had lent her support to white nationalists. Between 2002 and the present, Malkin has authored 1,298 articles for VDARE, many of which are explicitly anti-immigrant. In 2004, Malkin wrote a book defending the WWII policy of detaining Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
Malkin is currently using her social media presence to promote anti-vaxxers and COVID-19 truthers.
Others
In addition to the aforementioned contributors, the following people have also authored articles on VDARE: far-right author Ann Coulter, white nationalist anthropology professor Virginia Abernethy, “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler, white supremacist and terrorism advocate Paul Nehlen, antisemitic retired psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, Klan lawyer Sam Dickson, white supremacist blogger Brad Griffin, managing editor of the (now-defunct) anti-immigrant journal The Social Contract Kevin Lamb, white nationalist Scott Greer, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Taki’s Magazine columnist Jim Goad, American Renaissance contributor Devin Saucier, white nationalist Richard Spencer, Neo-Confederates Clyde Wilson and Boyd Cathey, and white nationalist anthropologist Edward Dutton.
The Companies
Network Solutions, LLC – According to domain name searches, the registrar for both VDARE and American Renaissance is the Virginia-based Network Solutions, LLC — a subsidiary of Web.com. Network Solutions has an Acceptable Use Policy which prohibits hate speech and is incorporated into the service agreement.
Section 10(b) of the service agreement provides that they “may terminate this Agreement or any part of the Network Solutions services at any time … if we determine in our sole discretion that you have violated the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy.”
Section d(xiv) of the Acceptable Use Policy states that “Users may not … utilize the the Services in a manner deemed, in Company’s sole discretion, to display bigotry, racism, discrimination or hatred in any manner whatsoever.”
And Section d(xv) prohibits users from using their services “in a manner that might … adversely affect Company’s public image,” including distributing “hateful, vulgar, racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable materials.”
In a May 27th episode of VDARE TV’s Social Distancing program, Jared Taylor told Peter Brimelow that he would restart the American Renaissance newsletter “only if we lose our URL the way poor Andrew Anglin did with The Daily Stormer.”
The Daily Stormer, a prominent Neo-Nazi website, was banned by both GoDaddy and Google after 2017’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally. Since then it has cycled through numerous domain registrars in an effort to stay online.
“That, to me of course, is a huge object lesson of what could be in store for us,” Taylor said. “We all tend to think that at least our URL, that’s sacred. But no, it’s not sacred. If you cross certain lines … you may even lose your URL.”
On June 17, Lydia Brimelow announced on VDARE that Network Solutions LLC “suddenly gave us 10 days’ notice of its intention to terminate our account, after some 20 years.” Network Solutions allegedly told VDARE that their continued use of Network Solutions’ services were a “serious issue and risk to our business and corporate reputation.”
Twitter – Although the social media giant has made progress in prohibiting white nationalists from using its platform over the past few years, its actions have largely been inefficient.
While Twitter could take the same aggressive approach to white nationalist accounts as it has to pro-ISIS content, one employee claimed that doing so would incidentally ensnare the accounts of Republican politicians.
As a result, numerous high-profile white nationalists and antisemites still have accounts on Twitter, and several are even verified. This includes the account for VDARE, which currently boasts a total of 44.5 thousand followers and regularly tweets messages about the “great replacement.”
Additionally, multiple contributors have active Twitter accounts, including Peter Brimelow, John Derbyshire, Faith Goldy, Michael J. Thompson, Kevin DeAnna, Steve Sailer, Pat Buchanan, Michelle Malkin, Nicholas Stix, Kevin MacDonald, Jason Kessler, Ann Coulter, Richard Spencer, Scott Greer, Jim Goad, Kathy Shaidle, Edward Dutton, Chuck Baldwin, Sam Dickson, William Gheen, Ilana Mercer, and Joshua Foxworth.
In early June Michelle Malkin was temporarily locked out of her Twitter account over a tweet advocating the use of deadly force against looters.
YouTube – Like Twitter, the Google-owned video-hosting site has been slow to deal with the problem of white nationalist and far-right content. YouTube has long provided a path to radicalization for viewers, directing them to increasingly extreme political content. As white nationalist James Allsup admitted last year, “the YouTube radicalization rabbit hole — it’s real.”
In August 2019, as part of a half-hearted effort to crack down on extremist content, YouTube terminated the accounts of James Allsup, The Right Stuff, American Identity Movement, and VDARE TV. It quickly reversed course on VDARE’s ban, however, telling reporters it made the “wrong call.”
VDARE TV, which currently boasts 10.4 thousand subscribers, produces content attacking immigrants and anti-fascists and promoting extremist figures. In his new Social Distancing video series, Brimelow has interviewed John Derbyshire, Michelle Malkin, racist troll Peter D’Abrosca, and Gateway Pundit columnist Cassandra Fairbanks, who called the Unabomber a “brilliant man.”
As reported by Media Matters, VDARE also used its YouTube channel to raise over $40,000 during a December 2019 live-stream.
As of August 10, 2020, the official YouTube account for VDARE was permanently suspended.
Amazon – The world’s largest online retailer, Amazon has been loath to remove hate literature from its stock. A joint investigation by ProPublica and The Atlantic found that white nationalist publications, including books authored by Neo-Nazis Billy Roper and Gary Lauck, are “widely available” on Amazon.
In a separate investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy, an Amazon spokesperson was quoted as saying, “As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important. That includes books that some may find objectionable, though we have policies governing which books can be listed for sale.”
In response to CMD’s inquiry, Amazon removed a single book: Behold the International Jew by Jack Mohr.
Amazon currently offers over one hundred titles by people whose columns are featured on VDARE. That list includes:
- Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right by Kevin DeAnna
- Open Borders Inc.: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction? by Michelle Malkin
- SBPDL Year One: 365 Days in Black Run America by Michael Thompson
- Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? by Pat Buchanan
- America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance” by Steve Sailer
- Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster by Peter Brimelow
- Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America by Jared Taylor
- We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism by John Derbyshire
- Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole by Ann Coulter
- Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America’s Culture War by Sam Francis
- Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa by Ilana Mercer
- Wage the Battle: Putting America First in the Fight to Stop Globalist Politicians and Secure the Borders by Paul Nehlen
- No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination by Scott Greer
None of these companies — Amazon, Google (which owns YouTube), Twitter, or Network Solutions, LLC — responded to inquiries as to whether or not VDARE and its contributors violated their terms of service. Network Solutions LLC did, however, officially sever ties with VDARE as of June 15, 2020.
Angry White Men 