“The land forgotten by law” is how liberal legal scholar Jonathan Turley called New York in June. Well, it's not without laws. In fact, there are so many that studies have called it the least free state in America. The problem is that New York's alleged law enforcement is an ideological enforcer, using the imperial state's excessive regulations and transcending them to build an empire of left-wing sympathy.
Letitia James' Revenge
And now New York Attorney General Letitia James, who notoriously teamed up with judges to bash former President Donald Trump, has claimed a new victim: the nonprofit anti-immigrant group VDARE, which will be shutting down after three years of loafer attacks. Here's the kicker:
The site's founder, Peter Brimelow, said James had not made any allegations against VDARE.
This therefore goes beyond even the promise of Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenty Beria: “Show me the person and I will show you the crime.”
It's, “Show me the man, and I'll show you the Loafer method, where the process is the punishment.”
A multi-pronged attack
But VDARE's story is more troubling than the above suggests. A victim of what Brimelow calls a “de facto 'social credit' system,” the organization has been subject to “churn” from the financial and business communities, making it difficult for it to survive apart from legal attacks (which are part of a broader effort to “defund” patriotic and virtue-driven voices).
Even more bizarrely, VDARE has been the target of a cyberattack that Brimelow describes as “unusual,” leaving the site's engineers “stumped” — and while the mainstream media is using a smear campaign against the Republican Party to make it “weird,” the extremely bizarre and newsworthy VDARE story is being ignored.
Ironically, the organization's problems started because of cancel culture in the first place: After hotels kept canceling VDARE's conference bookings (an increasingly common experience for conservatives), the group bought a $1.4 million West Virginia castle as meeting space. But the purchase was then used as a pretext to go after the place, with the lawsuit seemingly “hinging on whether VDARE's founders used it as a personal residence,” as The American Conservative's Christopher Brunet reported in April.
No crime
But if something had happened “out there,” wouldn't VDARE have been charged with a crime? And yet, even though that didn't happen, the site was forced to fight, as Brunet wrote earlier this year (the material he cited is from VDARE):
“…Letitia James, at a cost of $1 million over approximately three years.” The onslaught of vexatious subpoenas is not a pursuit of justice, but a systematic attempt to financially and morally ruin those who dare resist liberal beliefs.
Letitia James' campaign pledge was based on this very promise. She vowed to “shine a bright light on all the dark corners of[Donald Trump's]real estate deals,” just as she promised to “take tougher legal action against organizations that engage in online hate speech against protected classes.” Except James can't actually take legal action against VDARE for “protected class hate speech,” because everything VDARE writes is protected by that pesky First Amendment.
So James embarks on a loafer-fishing expedition instead. “Defending democracy” be damned.
Again, VDARE is not the only target — along with President Trump, the NRA has also been targeted by the New York Thought Police — but these victims have the resources to continue the fight, and VDARE does not — making it the canary in the coal mine.
The End of VDARE
Brimelow sadly announced the site's closure and detailed VDARE's woes and what they mean for our civilization. He noted that the organization has been registered in New York since 1999, and has been in existence since long before “Loafers” and Leticia were in Satan's sight, and wrote:
I can't continue this any longer.
But there are three interlocking issues (besides loafers) that are also forcing us to pause:
The first is the extraordinary wave of cancellations that has been growing over the past few years.
It even gets to the personal side of things, like a long-time personal financial advisor who had been with us for 15-16 years who recently had to terminate her engagement with us.
Americans generally don't understand what's really going on here – how a de facto “social credit” system, like the one the Chinese Communist Party has, is being used to suppress patriots.
… The second interlocking issue I mentioned is somewhat similar, which is the sudden inability to take online payments.
Now, in the past when credit card payment systems have gone down, like PayPal, people assumed the credit card processor was to blame.
Brimelow later explains that after playing a bit of musical chairs with credit card processors, he realized the banks' problems ran deeper — “even if the payment processors want to work with us, the banks don't,” he laments. But ultimately, he thinks the problem is deeper, and darker.
“Federal regulators are pressuring banks to curb unwelcome speech just as they are pressuring banks to ban gun sales,” Brimelow said.
Then there was a very strange cyber attack that prevented VDARE from accepting electronic checks. “We don't know where it's coming from, but it's very agile,” Brimelow reports, adding that a bewildered technician at the site “says there's clearly someone behind it, possibly human intelligence using AI.”
Another Victory for the Deep State
In the end, James handed the Deep State another victory: VDARE's website will soon be taken down, and Brimelow doesn't even know if the archives will still be available (a Stalin-like act of erasing a historical opponent).
But this, too, is just part of a pattern of destroying the patriotic movement by bankrupting it (and jailing people if possible). It starts with censorship: suppressing conservative media in search engine results, “shadow banning” them on social media, and other methods. Remember that 80 percent or more of a website's traffic can come from search engines and social media. Eliminate most of that traffic and the site will wither and die, making it impossible to generate advertising revenue.
Forcing payment processors and banks to cut service to the sites would reduce donations, cyber attacks would tell the tale, and targeting these groups in legal battles could erode what funds they have left. When you can't win the argument, the only way is to silence the ones who argue.
At the same time, keep in mind that the tax money of these victims (and everyone else), and the funds the Department of Justice extorts from commercial entities, will flow to liberal entities, thereby further empowering the left.
All this is just as vicious as what happened in the USSR, except that no one will be sent to the Gulags – our ideological tyrants do not have that power yet.
UPDATE: For more on the VDARE case, you can watch below excerpts from an interview commentator Tucker Carlson conducted with a representative from the organization in February.
