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By Nicholas Stix
The picture above depicts VDARE editor-publisher Peter Brimelow and his youngest daughter, Karia. (How the image of a toddler shucking a father under his chin brings back memories!)
Kindly old man, right? Not for those who work for him. In the hours before a new front-page article goes to press, Peter is constantly on the phone, alternating between the author and his editor-fact checker-columnist-blogger, James Fulford, peppering them with questions and demands. "What does that mean?," he asks of a passage, and demands an answer, and usually a link to clarify and back up what the text says.
For instance, last night he came across an ambiguity in my manuscript on last week's seventh Knoxville Horror trial, which I attended as the only representative of a national media organization. Three different judges had presided over different KH trials: The ultimately disgraced and convicted Richard Baumgartner, followed by Jon Kerry Blackman, and Walter Kurtz. Baumgartner had presided over the first four state trials (still another trial was federal), before being replaced with Blackwood, who irrationally decided to give all four state convicts new trials.
I knew that Blackwood had then been removed (I thought by the Tennessee Supreme Court), eventually to be replaced by Kurtz, but couldn't recall why. Re-researching the matter, I determined that it was due to his apparent lack of impartiality, as evinced by his openly hostile courtroom attitude towards the prosecution. And it was the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, not the TSC, that removed him. And yet, after Judge Blackwood had been determined to lack (or at least the appearance of) impartiality, he was still permitted to preside over Vanessa Coleman's retrial the following month!
There was no room for most of the foregoing in my article, but Peter still had to know all the weird facts, before publishing a story in his webzine, and he did insert a link to a news story explaining why Judge Blackwood was removed from the case, although no story I saw explained why he was permitted to preside over Coleman II.
That's the way journalism is supposed to work, but rarely does today.
Another case: A couple of weeks ago, in the run-up to my story on openly discriminatory hate crime laws and prosecutions, during an afternoon grilling, Peter wanted to know the religion of a Lebanese federal judge who had presided over a "hate crime" trial of a presumably Christian American who had set a Moslem prayer rug on fire in an Ohio mosque. I didn't know the judge's religion, which could have been Moslem or Christian.
"Why didn't you ask?"
Peter made me call the Judge's office in Ohio, which I did immediately.
The Judge's top assistant put me on hold, while she and a third party (the judge?) conjured up a pretext for stonewalling me. She then asserted that it was a policy not to divulge any "personal details" about the judge.
If the policy had really existed, she would have told me so, straight off. Besides, I've never heard of keeping a judge's religion secret, and am not sure that that's even legal.
If a Moslem judge were ruling on a Moslem-Christian religious conflict, it would raise questions as to his impartiality. (Why not the same problem with a Christian judge? Because Christians are typically less insanely partisan than Moslems!)
Rigor is labor and time-intensive. In that vein, unlike the New York Times, VDARE also has its own, in-house fact-checker. This all costs money. You see, unlike 99 percent of Internet media operations, Peter actually pays his writers.
Please hit this link and give generously, so that Peter may continue to pay his writers, and maintain the highest standards in journalism.
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