NY State AG Forces White Supremacist Website VDARE to Shut Down

22 years after the death of National Alliance founder/Turner Diaries author William L. Pierce, another neo-fascist entity in West Virginia goes away.

Four months before the American Renaissance Conference, which will be held this year ten days after the likely election of a Black woman prosecutor to be the next president, one of its regular speakers if he speaks this year will more than likely lament how another Black woman prosecutor took down his White supremacist, anti-immigration proverbial website after 25 years of being a neo-fascist presence.

On Tuesday, VDARE editor Peter Brimelow took to Twitter to announce in a videotaped statement that the website he started in 1999 was shutting down and blamed New York State Attorney General Letitia James who has gone after the New York-based VDARE Foundation and Brimelow in court over the misuse of non-profit resources. “VDARE’s been murdered by the New York State Attorney General Letitia James,” Brimelow said in the video. “She’s not charged us with anything, it’s important to note, she’s simply battered us to death with an enormous, ongoing, intrusive, quote-unquote, investigation.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, James has alleged that VDARE “violated New York law” in February 2020 after it purchased a castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia for $1.4 million without the help of a loan. Curiously in 2019, DonorsTrust, a dark money outfit that disperses wealthy conservatives’ charitable funds anonymously, and has for years funded the New Century Foundation, the organization that runs American Renaissance, gave over $1.5 million to the VDARE Foundation, nearly three times larger than VDARE’s total 2018 revenue. The castle, which was built in 1885 by distiller and politician Samuel Taylor Suit who died before it was completed and is currently in the National Registry of Historic Places, has been a venue since the VDARE Foundation acquired it for various White Supremacist events and conferences. A possible instance of how nonprofit resources have been misused that has been identified in court however has been how Brimelow 76, and his wife Lydia, 39 have resided on castle grounds since March 2020, as court records and people-finding databases have shown.

In March 2024, a New York judge found the VDARE Foundation in civil contempt for failing to produce hard copy and electronic files related to an AG investigation into the group’s business practices. The ruling has required VDARE to pay a $250-per-day fine. That added to the cost of VDARE’s defense which Brimelow said crippled the Foundation and the website. To that end, the website will be suspended within a few days, and that he was unsure how long archives would remain up. “My role here as editor of vdare.com for the last 25 years has been destroyed, so I’m going to resign, and I’m also resigning from the VDARE Foundation,” Brimelow said, stating further that Lydia Brimelow will remain on board to pay lawyers and cease operations.

Brimelow, an immigrant himself from England, has been a mainstream figure for over 40 years via his right wing columns in outlets such as Forbes Magazine and the National Review, where he would attack the immigration policy in the country. He was best known for his first book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster’ published in 1995. In the book, Brimelow lives up to the last sylable of his surname. who he openly declares the 1965 Immigration Act as “Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America.” Going further, he calls for America to maintain a “link by blood” – a link by blood to the white race. Brimelow was forced out as a contributor for the National Review in 1997 at a time that the conservative magazine was trying to weed out White Supremacists within its pages.

VDARE featured articles by prominent conservative writers such as Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. It also included commentary from the likes of people such as Jason Kessler, who orchestrated the tragic Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that Brimelow had connections to the Trump administration, including Stephen Miller, who invited Brimelow to speak at Duke University in 2007 while an undergraduate, Julia Hahn, a special assistant to Trump who connected to Brimelow and Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser, invited Brimelow to his home for a birthday party, although Kudlow would later claim he was unaware of Brimelow’s views.

Brimelow is not listed as one of the speakers at the American Renaissance Conference, which is scheduled to take place at the Montgomery Bell Park Inn in Burns, TN Nov. 15-17, but VDARE/American Renaissance staffer Kevin DeAnna will be speaking under his pseudonym Gregory Hood.