Estranged National Review Readers: Come Home, to VDARE.com

By Nicholas Stix

(First posted on November 21, 2008; last updated at 4:34 a.m., on Monday, December 1, 2008.)

This year has seen the death of William F. Buckley Jr., his son Christopher’s coming out of the closet as a supporter of the man who calls himself, “Barack Obama,” and the divorce between the younger Buckley and the magazine his father founded. For longtime NR readers, however, both milestones were redundant, since the magazine that for over 50 years was inextricably associated both with the Buckley name and with American conservatism, had long been moribund.

As Peter Brimelow wrote in his Buckley obituary, “William F. Buckley, Jr., RIP—Sort Of,”

Just as the gangsters in The Godfather reassured each other that their bloody clashes were just business, not personal, I’d say that my disagreement with Buckley was fundamentally political, although I do consider his character to have been among the most contemptible I have encountered in public life. However, in Buckley’s case, the political was personal and vice versa. It was his personal failings that ultimately accounted for the four-decade fizzle of his once-brilliant career—and for the fact that, regularly credited with the making of the modern conservative movement, he must also be indicted for its breaking.

Above all, he must also be indicted for the breaking, through out-of-control post-1965 mass immigration, of the nation that some of us thought the conservative movement was sworn to defend….

For the plain fact, politely unmentioned in most Buckley obituaries, is that Buckley and National Review have been complicit in leading the conservative movement, the Republican Party and the country into utter disaster. Conservatives have essentially nothing to show for their moment in power except two completely unexpected colonial wars in the Middle East. And this year's elections are widely expected to be a generational catastrophe.

While NR’s early years may have been a golden age of American conservative writing, the past 11 years, since the first Great Purge, have been a Golden Age of Republican Talking Points.

Even when the magazine’s functionaries argued righteous positions, as in their sudden opposition to the 2006 Bush-McCain-Kennedy illegal alien amnesty attempt (unsuccessfully sold to the American people under the euphemism, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”), it wasn’t out of conviction or a careful weighing of the facts of mass immigration’s assault on America, but rather a case of political operatives putting their fingers to the wind, and changing direction accordingly, until which time they would again feel safe in helping the Party in its ongoing war on Middle America.

A March 2005 Middle American News article of mine presaged the GOP’s 2008 electoral collapse. I showed how the three most popular Republican Web sites, FreeRepublic.com, lucianne.com, and townhall.com stifled debate by censoring any writer whose positions were to the right of the Party’s neocon talking points. Note that those Web sites have since lost any ability to galvanize patriots, have squandered the dominance that Republicans and conservatives enjoyed on the Web back in 2000, and have been left in the dust by socialist-communist-whatever sites such as the Huffington Post and Daily Kos.

And since the collapse, the neocons are calling for more of the same leftism that gave the government away to the socialists, communists, and ethnic supremacists!

On November 10, in “Darkness at Dusk,” the New York Times’ neocon sophist David Brooks posited a fake battle for the soul of the Right, pitting neocons vs. … neocons!

Six years earlier, in Commentary magazine, at least Joshua Muravchik had the decency to argue—albeit absurdly—that the sort of issues raised by conservatives critical of the GOP and of neoconservatism – race, ethnicity, the welfare state – simply have no place in conservatism. Unlike Brooks, Muravchik did not seek to deceive and confuse readers about the conflict.

But VDARE does not seek to beat Brooks and his fellow courtiers at their game of suppressing debate, professionally destroying their rivals, hogging all of the GOP propaganda pork, and getting invited to socialist cocktail parties. VDARE’spurpose is to pursue the National Question, as in: Shall the United States of America endure?

In the course of researching that article, I interviewed Pat Buchanan—or did he interview me?; I’m still not sure—and this is what he said.

The neoconservatives, I think are, given their roots, wherever you want to place them, by nature intolerant of dissent. They are not conservatives in the old tradition of National Review, where there was a robust contest every two weeks, with Russell Kirk and Frank Myer and James Burnham and Buckley and Whittaker Chambers...

They could [unclear] disagree, but it was a wonderful magazine. My feeling is that the neoconservatives fundamentally come out of the Left. You find it in the rhetoric, the constant iteration of the use of the word “fascist,” and the kind of demonizing rhetoric that the Left has always used and the idea that the other points of view on the right not only don’t have to be answered but they ought to be squashed.

… with regard to immigration, we’ve had many of the old Republican conservatives [who] were both protectionists and in favor of restrictive immigration policies, so you could assimilate immigrants and that’s all consistent with traditional Republicanism and conservatism. And the idea’s been demonized, and more than demonized, it’s been denied a hearing. That suggests that the people who are now defining conservatism are not really conservatives at all.

Sometime around the spring of 2007, it occurred to me that Buchanan’s description of the old National Review sounded an awful lot like … VDARE! I have strongly suspected ever since, that Peter Brimelow founded VDARE as a reincarnation of the original National Review, whether out of (unconscious?) reverence for Bill Buckley’s original project, or to stick it in his eye, and show him that he could outdo him. (Note that not only did Peter not solicit this fundraising letter, but I have never raised the issue of the intellectual genealogy between NR and VDARE with him. Thus, when he reads this letter, it will be the first he will learn of my ruminations.)

As a cyber-publication, VDARE does not have fortnightly editorial meetings—contributors live in such disparate places as Connecticut, New York, Virginia, California, Mexico and Japan, and VDARE founder Peter Brimelow has so far proven unwilling to spring for hotel rooms, first-class (or any other kind of) airline tickets, or sumptuous spreads, so that his writers could shout at each other in splendor, but if you analytically read and compare the many front page and blog articles on any given day, the conflicting approaches and presuppositions distinguishing socialists, regular Democrats, paleoconservatives, and other political orientations will immediately become apparent.

No matter. VDARE is not an adjunct to, extension or tool of the GOP, or any other political party. Rather, it is a nonpartisan, non-profit organization devoted to creating an alliance for raising the National Question, and pursuing patriotic immigration reform. And the last time the Open Borders Lobby (OBL) tried to sneak an illegal alien amnesty past the American people—in 2006—it was VDARE that rallied the patriots who prevailed, and National Review that, after weighing its options, got out of the way, and then ran after VDARE, duplicitously shouting, “Me, too!”

Peter Brimelow may not spring for luxuries, but he does spring for the most important expense a publication can have: Paying his writers (like me)!

This year he had a major additional expense, which went for the publishing event of the year: Supporting Steve Sailer, as he wrote his first book, the just published, America's Half Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance," which you may purchase, for $29.95.

VDARE also provides free downloads of the entire text of Peter’s book, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster, the most important book on immigration in America ever written. As the saying goes, all contemporary immigration journalism is but a series of footnotes to Alien Nation. (Alright, I confess! It's my allusion. So, sue me.)

Ninety-nine percent of the sites on the Web do not pay their writers a farthing, and the results are about what you’d expect. Endlessly recycled talking points (whether of the Left or Right), suspect syntax, fact-free arguments, and loopy logic are the order of the day.

Except for the syntax, none of the above is true of VDARE. Unlike not only the Web but the supposedly “professional” press (e.g., the Associated Press), its writers do their own research, rather than taking talking points memos from, say, the SPLC, and moving around some paragraphs, in order to make it appear as if they had interviewed SPLC hoax-meister, er, “expert” Mark Potok in the course of researching a story, when in fact Potok had written and sent them the “story.” (Gosh, I’d better quit now, before Potok and my other fans at the SPLC turn on me. Say hey, Casey Sanchez!)

To make a short story long, please support VDARE with a tax-deductible donation. Support it, so that America may abide; support it so that VDARE's writers, editors, and fact-checker may abide.

Thank you.