Peter Brimelow writes (December 30):
Many thanks to our friends who are rallying around. Any amount, as the month draws to a close and your checkbook loses air, would be deeply appreciated and well invested...$25, $50, $100 are common donation amounts—but we've also had our share of stock gifts and major bequests, so desperately needed now, of $10,000 and $20,000.
I also know that many old friends sadly can’t help us now, because of the economy, and because of the gathering American Worker Displacement crisis that only VDARE.com seems willing to document.
Just keep coming and reading VDARE.com anyway—it will always be free—and perhaps share our articles with friends, MSM comment threads and, especially, enemies! Make it a Happy New Year for everyone!
Ron Paul, VDARE.com—And Why You Must Help Us NOW!!
By Peter Brimelow
VDARE.com’s 2011 year-end fund-raising drive stalled when we opened the website over Christmas. It is only slowly recovering.
This always happens—but I open the website anyway, because I don’t like asking for money on Christmas Day.
However, there are now only three tax-deductible giving days in 2011. And we are still very far from the $50,000 we generated last year. (Details forthcoming shortly).
Plus, as other non-profits have noted mournfully, the excitement of the election season always draws donations towards political campaigns—and away from the support of ideas.
Amazing amounts of money are raised for election campaigns. President Obama is expected to raise as much as $1 billion in this cycle. GOP candidate John McCain raised $400 million in 2008.
In contrast, VDARE.com’s budget has never reached $500, 000.
I’m sure I speak for the heads of all 501(c)(3) public policy organizations—left, center, and right—when I say this campaign funding is essentially all wasted. WASTED! (Unless you positively wanted to buy Karl Rove a ranch).
Of course, I know this won’t make any difference. For most people, politics is like sports. They like the horse race. And they like supporting a team.
But ultimately what moves politics is ideas. As the British economist Lord Keynes (not a right-winger!) famously said:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”
IN OTHER WORDS: A small investment in ideas through VDARE.com will ultimately have more effect than vast sums spent on television advertising. Or lobbying.
There can be no clearer example of the importance of ideas than the Ron Paul phenomenon.
VDARE.com does not endorse candidates. And, even on the idea level, Congressman Paul has been a disappointment to us in our specific area of immigration.
He kindly gave us an exclusive interview when he ran for president in 2008 and said some excellent things about national sovereignty, ending birthright citizenship, deporting illegal aliens etc. But he did not campaign on them, presumably at the behest of his left-libertarian handlers—with the disgraceful result that he was outpolled among voters who said they worried about immigration by arch-amnestiac Senator John McCain.
In this campaign cycle, Paul has regressed even further on immigration, into hopeless left-libertarian and even liberal duckspeak.
Nevertheless, Ron Paul does exemplify the power of ideas— over 45 years in politics, he has stuck unwaveringly to libertarian ideas on government, taxation and foreign policy, even though they were far out of conventional political discourse. (Personally, I sympathize with many of these ideas and even wrote what I believe is the only feature-length article on one of them, privatized money, for Forbes Magazine in 2008. We’ve reposted it on VDARE.com).
And guess what? Now the conventional political discourse, and the Republican Party, in a significant degree have both moved Paul’s way.
It is all unmistakably reminiscent of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Presidential run—right down to the incredulity with which Paul’s (actually well-attested) ideas are greeted; and the pious announcements by Republican grandees that they will vote for the (very liberal) Democratic President rather give up their control of the party.
But there’s another way in which the Paul phenomenon illustrates the power of ideas—and, this time, specifically VDARE.com’s ideas.
The Establishment (left and right—if distinguishable) has apparently decided that Paul can be stopped by harping on the newsletters published under his name in the 1990s.
These letters were certainly Politically Incorrect. But it looks like only VDARE.com is willing to say (see here and here) that there’s nothing in them that would be exceptionable in a society that really believed in free and frank debate.
Unfortunately, Dr. Paul and his advisors apparently decided that their only option was to run away—to claim, incredibly, that he didn’t know what was in the letters that bore his name.
Let me be clear: I don’t blame them for this…altogether. Professional politicians do not have the freedom of journalists. Out there in the arena, they must sometimes have recourse to what Shakespeare (As You Like It, Act 5 Scene 4) called the Lie Direct—and also to what he might have called the Scuttle Ignominious.
And it works. Sometimes. (Quite often, actually.) But I don’t think it will work this time.
I believe that Dr. Paul would have been better advised to have stood his ground and defended his letters on the basis of truth.
However, this would run into a fundamental problem: no language now exists in which to describe the dispossession of the historic American nation, through immigration policy but also through the attendant and not coincidental institutionalization of Cultural Marxism.
There has never been anything like the anti-“racism” witch-hunt that has increasingly paralyzed political debate since World War II. The much-denounced episode of anti-communist “McCarthyism” lasted less than ten years—and anyway there really were Soviet spies.
At VDARE.com, we are developing that language. It involves risks. That’s why we are listed as a “hate group” by the $outhern Poverty Law Center.
But it has to be done.
There is a high cost to this. It is increasingly clear that VDARE.com and its writers are ostracized by the MSM.
I don’t care about this for myself. I’m old and at the end of my career—even if my daughter Felicity (born August 4, 2010) is not.
(In response to email queries: I was NOT forcing her to eat the ice cream—she was lunging at it. And I don’t know why I always look so grim—maybe I’m brooding about her future, and that of the Republic).
I do, however, worry about our younger writers. They have families to form, and to feed. They write for us although they know they will be subject to relentless and ruthless attack by the forces of Political Correctness.
Money is our secret weapon at VDARE.COM. Our fixed costs are very low, we operate entirely virtually. We don’t have to pay printing and postage (thank goodness!).
What this means: essentially everything you give goes to pay writers and editors.
Our writers and editors are not paid as much as I would like. But they do get something. This ability to pay our writers is what has distinguished VDARE.COM from a host of excellent but evanescent blogs which have come and gone.
Writers will often write for love—because they passionately believe in our cause. But in the long run, they need to be able to justify the time spent, to their families and to themselves.
At VDARE.COM, we are in this for the long haul. We are building an institution. We need money to do that.
Please help us now. You have just three days to do it in this tax year.
I, and all of us at VDARE.COM, and I believe future generations of Americans (especially Felicity), will be profoundly grateful.
Sincerely,
Peter Brimelow
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P.S. Don’t forget to submit entries for our 2011 War Against Christmas Competition!—email to witan@
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