I'm Lydia Brimelow and I'm the president
of the VDARE Foundation.
Recently my husband Peter announced that
we are being forced to
close our flagship project,
the patriotic immigration website
VDARE.com, and that
he's resigning as editor.
He said that VDARE.com had been murdered
by Letitia James after a
massive two-year investigation,
and we've not been charged with anything.
But Peter also said that the fantastic
costs of that investigation
have made it almost impossible
for us to continue to do business in the
face of the Cancel Culture onslaught
that we've had to deal
with at the same time.
So now I'm going to talk about that
because it's what I dealt with more
directly at the VDARE Foundation.
When I first started at VDARE, I was
brought on as a fundraiser, and that's
actually what I enjoy doing.
But we're a small organization, and when
a crisis happens, it's all hands on deck.
Over time, over the last decade, the
issues with Cancellation and our
inability to function as a back office
became more and more dominant in what I
had to do to keep VDARE operable.
Fighting these fights in parallel with
this extremely onerous
investigation has proved impossible,
and VDARE.com can no
longer publish as a result.
I put this on record in a 5,000-word
article that's been
published on VDARE.com,
and I thought it was really important to
spell everything out
there as clearly as I could,
listing about 50 different services that
our back office has been Canceled from,
whether they be social media, our ability
to distribute our message through email,
various technologies that are important
for making the back office work,
or, most critical, financial services that
are essentially inaccessible to us now
and have contributed directly to the
suspension of VDARE.com.
When Peter announced his resignation and
the closure of VDARE.com,
there was a flurry of social media
discussion of it, but there's been
essentially no mainstream coverage.
There hasn't even been much independent
media coverage of it,
and I don't think anybody knows what it's
like to try to run a
small Dissident organization
under the kind of
pressure that we've been under,
and that is why I felt like
I needed to write it all out.
Without this kind of documentation, it'll
be more challenging to build
a case for federal legislation
that would break up this totalitarian
marketplace where VDARE has been
completely paralyzed.
We can't be the only organization that's
experiencing these challenges,
but as I talk to other organizations that
I think would be targeted,
it seems like we are more targeted, we've
experienced a broader range of
Cancellations than anyone else.
The 50-plus institutions that Canceled us
are ones that I had
direct interactions with
that I spoke to their customer service
agents or signed a contract with,
and were in a position to Cancel us.
And so those are the ones that we were
officially Canceled from.
That number does not include the many,
many companies that I
would never have approached
because their terms of service are so
explicitly anti-freedom of speech.
So that includes Wells Fargo Bank or
other organizations that I had already
heard had Canceled other people
and whose terms of service made it clear
that if they received a little bit of
pressure, they would Cancel us.
So it's not worth my time to pursue.
There are news outlets such as Reclaim
the Net that monitor
these things very carefully.
And so whenever I would see coverage of a
particular company and
their efforts to censor speech,
I would make note of that and try to
avoid them in the future.
But some of these companies are so big
you can't really avoid them.
And everyone should take serious note
that Microsoft is one of these companies.
They have it in their terms of service.
That if you are detected engaging in hate
speech or facilitating hate speech,
one is left to wonder what it means to
facilitate hate speech.
They will suspend your services.
They will suspend your Microsoft account,
meaning you can't access Word,
you can't access your Outlook, and it's
up to their interpretation as to why.
So not only are they
reading what you're writing,
but they also are prepared to pull the
rug out from onto you at any moment
to stop your work from continuing.
I'm going to highlight a few particularly
atrocious or strange stories that I
experienced during my tenure at VDARE.com
trying to save off Cancel Culture.
It started with Constant Contact.
One day I was unable to send emails.
We'd been using
Constant Contact for years.
And sometimes when that happens, it's
because they wanted you to call and
verify that your sign-ups were legitimate
and you have to promise, like, yes, these
people actually have opted in.
And so I thought it was a normal
maintenance-level suspension that as soon
as I called in would be resolved.
But in fact, the customer service agent
on the other end said,
"Oh, you've been suspended. We no longer
do business with your industry."
And I said, "What industry is that?
Non-profits? Journalists?"
And he said, "No, white
supremacy." It's not just business.
Often the Cancellation is accompanied
with some kind of punitive act on the
part of the Canceling service.
So in one case that was MailChimp.
When they Canceled us, they also held our
email lists hostage and
would not give them back to us
despite it being very clear in their
terms of service that your email lists
belong to you and not to them.
Another case that was painful to me
personally was when Facebook kicked off
everyone on our organization.
And that included personal pages, like my
personal Facebook page.
And when they did that, they took all my
data as well, including the video of my
middle daughter learning to walk
when I don't have another copy of that.
To me, it's clear on the basis of those
experiences that this is not just a
political effort to silence us,
which would be bad enough. It's personal.
These people want us to personally feel
pain in our personal lives.
And there's been some talk recently about
whether or not people on the other side
of these political controversies,
whether or not they hate us.
If they don't hate us, where's the video
of Karia's first steps and
why can't I have it back?
If they don't hate us, why do they try to
stab us on the way out the door when
they're the ones kicking
us out in the first place?
If they don't hate us, but this is how
they treat us, how do you
describe what it is they do feel?
And what's the difference?
I think we should just operate under the
assumption that they're going to treat us
as poorly as they possibly can.
And whether you can attribute that to
hate seems largely irrelevant.
The VDARE Foundation was kicked off of
Stripe earlier this year and terminally
became unable to accept
online payments in about March.
But this struggle to maintain online
payments has been going on since 2014.
In 2014, VDARE was supported by PayPal,
and we knew that PayPal was vulnerable
because it was already
kicking other people off.
So at that time, I asked my tech people
to set up a backup to
PayPal, and they chose Stripe.
And when PayPal kicked us off, it worked
out beautifully because we already had
Stripe integrated onto the website,
and we were able to just click it over.
Once Stripe was our main online payment
processor, I wanted to have a backup
against Stripe in the same way that
Stripe had been a backup against PayPal.
And so for the next seven years, I worked
to find a backup and
basically was unable to.
About three years ago, after going
through a bunch of different processors,
I contacted GabPay, and I developed a
relationship with them.
And we set GabPay up as
our fallback processor.
But unfortunately, when Stripe kicked us
off, it turned out that
GabPay's banks were not resilient.
And the banks that they had connected us
with also kicked us off.
So GabPay only lasted a couple of weeks.
And our feedback from them at the time
was that they're (the Banks) getting pressure from federal regulators.
So I don't know if that's true.
I don't know if they were
speaking loosely about that.
But it's the only clue I have as to why
VDAR has such a consistently difficult
time getting online payments when other,
even Dissident companies don't seem to
have the challenges that we have.
There are other organizations that have a
very difficult time
getting online payments.
We're certainly not the only one.
However, some of them have so much volume
and so much of an audience that it seems
like companies are willing to take the
money and not punish them.
Others of them have gotten clear
explanations for why they're kicked off,
which is their
inclusion in the MATCH list.
So the MATCH list is a list of
blacklisted fraudsters, criminals,
terrorists that all the
major credit cards share.
When you read about the MATCH list, it
doesn't look like it was set
up with any political intent.
But I have heard rumors that other
Dissident Right organizations have found
themselves on the MATCH list.
And therefore, they haven't spun their
wheels and wasted their time the way that
I have in trying to get another backup
payment processor because they know
they're never going to get it.
But VDARE was told pretty
straightforwardly by a bank that we
utilized that we're
not on the MATCH list.
So the reason we're kicked off is this
vague, unexplained reputational risk.
As the end user of these services that
Cancel me, I am left to speculate what
the actual motivations are.
I don't know if it's federal pressure. I
don't know if we're on some major
blacklist that just
hasn't been shared with me.
But these anecdotes are the only clues
that I have as to why this is happening
to us and why it
continues to happen to us.
Speaking of blacklists, I didn't spend
time in my article articulating,
identifying all the
different hotels that kicked us out.
That's something that's been pretty well
written about on VDARE over the years.
But I did talk about PSAV, which is a
major vendor to hotels and
motels around the country.
I believe they service about 2,000.
And they provide all the audiovisual
services and equipment that we might need
if we were going to have a conference.
At one point, I was Canceled out of a
conference, and the salespeople forgot to
tell the vendors that
we'd been Canceled out.
So I got called from both the caterer and
the audiovisual crew to say, "Oh my gosh,
your conference is supposed to be in four
days and we haven't
arranged what you need."
And I had to tell them, "Well, there is
no conference because
the hotel Canceled me."
The representative from PSAV on the phone
at that time said, "Oh, that's funny. Why
do you have a red flag on your client
file that I'm looking at right here?"
And of course, I couldn't answer him
because we've never actually worked with
PSAV. I'm surprised we
even have a client file.
And I asked him, "Why do people get red
flags? You tell me."
He said, "I don't know. Maybe you didn't
pay a bill or maybe you're extremely
difficult to work with, but neither of
those things could be true because we
never worked with them before."
And I did have two different instances
with hotels that Canceled me right around
the time when they were connecting me to
PSAV as their AV vendor.
And I can't help but think now that
they're running their own private
blacklist to keep clients out of hotels
that they don't want to work
with for political reasons.
There was one company that represented to
me that they had a blacklist and I
actually don't believe them. I don't know
the story behind it. It
actually makes no sense.
When I was Canceled from Mineral Tree,
which is an accounts payable service that
helped facilitate my bill pay, basically,
because I have a remote bookkeeper, they
told her, "Lydia Brimelow's Social
Security number is affiliated with the
Alt-Right, with
membership in the Alt-Right."
So what they're telling me is that they
check people's Social Security numbers
against their political memberships,
their political registration.
This is ludicrous on multiple levels. The
first level is that the Alt-Right has no
registry, as far as I know. Certainly, if
they did, I never joined it.
And I never actually wore the mantle of
the Alt-Right anyway. That's not a label
that I took for myself.
I'm saying myself because they said my
Social Security number.
They didn't say VDARE.com.
Furthermore, even if I had registered,
how would a random accounts payable
service be able to check
my political affiliations?
And if they were, why
would they purge me for it?
I don't know what the advantage is for
them to have told me that they have a
political blacklist, one that's clearly
ludicrous that they couldn't have.
What is it that they're actually hiding?
What was the actual reason? The whole
situation is just mind-boggling.
I was born and raised in Texas, and now
I'm a proud West Virginia resident, and I
thought we lived in a free country. But
it turns out we don't.
There are solutions to these problems.
There can be federal legislation that
could prevent viewpoint discrimination
from continuing, and that would break up
this totalitarian marketplace.
There are models for this, such as Texas
House Bill 20 and legislation that was
passed recently in Tennessee to prevent
banks from engaging in
viewpoint discrimination.
But they need to be made federal. The
problem with the House Bill 20 in Texas
is that it's limited
social media platforms.
So while you can't perhaps be censored on
social media, that doesn't prevent your
email service from Canceling you, and
then you can't get your message out
outside of social media.
The problem with the Tennessee bank
legislation is that
it's limited to Tennessee.
And one thing that I've learned the hard
way is that none of these banks are
independent. None of them are an island.
They all require the use of services that
are national or at
least across state lines.
And if they get pressured by these other
services, then they will Cancel you.
And I don't know how that works with the
legislation, whether that would be an
excuse that the courts would accept or
how that's going to work.
But regardless, states like West Virginia
and Florida and Wyoming and any other
patriotic state should be adopting these
same legislation so that we can protect
the First Amendment in
this country going forward.
At VDARE, we don't know what the future
holds. VDARE.com is being suspended, but
the VDARE Foundation remains.
I remain the president of the VDARE
Foundation board. And we'll continue
fighting as much as we can.
There are still ways that you can donate
to VDARE.com. You can send paper checks
the old-fashioned way to P.O. Box 211,
Lynchfield, Connecticut 06759.
Or you can donate to our GiveSendGo,
which is givesendgo.com/VDARE.
That money will be used to support our
ongoing legal troubles with Letitia
James, which are still unresolved, and to
wind down the company to the best of our
ability within our
fiduciary responsibilities.
At any rate, whatever the future holds,
we'll see you on the other side.