Soviet NY: Letitia James’ Lawfare Has Killed a Conservative Website

By Selwyn Duke

“The Land the Law Forgot,” is what liberal legal scholar Jonathan Turley called New York in June. Oh, it’s not that it doesn’t have laws; it’s got so many, in fact, that studies found it to be our country’s least free state. It’s that N.Y.’s supposed law enforcers are ideological enforcers, using and going beyond the Empire State’s surfeit of strictures to build an empire of left-wing conformity.

Letitia James’ Vendetta

And now Letitia James, the notorious N.Y. attorney general who tag-teamed with a judge to try to pummel former President Donald Trump, has claimed another scalp: nonprofit anti-(destructive)immigration entity VDARE, which, after three years of lawfare attacks, is going to be suspending operations. The kicker:

James has not charged VDARE with anything, says site founder Peter Brimelow.

So this goes beyond even Stalin secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria’s vow, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

It’s “Show me the man and I’ll show you the process-is-punishment lawfare method.”

Multifaceted Attacks

Yet VDARE’s story is even more troubling than the above suggests. Also a victim of what Brimelow calls a “de facto ‘Social Credit’ system,” the organization has been subject to financial-arena and business-realm “cancellation” that have made survival difficult even aside from the lawfare attacks. (It’s part of a wider effort to “defund” patriotic, virtue-oriented voices.)

More bizarrely still, VDARE has been targeted with what Brimelow describes as cyberattacks so “extraordinary” that they’ve “baffled” the site’s techies. How’s that for “weird,” to use the term the mainstream media are now tarring Republicans with, all while ignoring the profoundly weird and newsworthy VDARE story?

The irony is that the organization’s problems started because of cancel culture in the first place. That is, since hotels kept canceling VDARE’s meeting bookings — an increasingly common experience for conservatives — it purchased a $1.4 million West Virginia castle as a conference space. Yet this acquisition was then used as a pretext to go after the site, with a legal case that appeared “to hinge on whether or not the founders of VDARE use[d] it as their personal dwelling,” as The American Conservative’s Christopher Brunet reported in April.

No Crime

If there were any “there” there, however, wouldn’t VDARE have been charged with a crime? Yet despite this not happening, the site has been, wrote Brunet earlier this year (his quoted material is from VDARE), forced to fight

“… Letitia James, at a cost of up to $1 million, for nearly three years.” An onslaught of onerous subpoenas marks not a quest for justice but an orchestrated attempt to financially and morally bankrupt those who dare resist the liberal creed.

Letitia James’s electoral platform was built on this very promise: she vowed to “shine a bright light into every dark corner of [Donald Trump’s] real estate dealings,” just like she promised to “take tougher legal action on organizations that engage in…online hate speech against protected classes.” Except, James cannot actually take legal action against VDARE for their “hate speech against protected classes” because everything that VDARE writes is protected by the pesky First Amendment.

So James instead embarked on a lawfare fishing expedition. So much for “protecting democracy.”

Once again, VDARE isn’t alone in such crosshairs. Along with Trump, the National Rifle Association has also been targeted by New York thought police. But while these victims had the resources to soldier on, VDARE does not. It thus is a canary in the coal mine.

VDARE’s Demise

Announcing the site’s closure with sadness, Brimelow elaborates on VDARE’s woes and what they portend for our civilization. Pointing out that the organization has been registered in New York since 1999, long before “lawfare” and Letitia were even a twinkle in Satan’s eye, he writes:

We can’t go on.

But there are three other [aside from lawfare] interlocking issues that are also forcing us to suspend.

The first one is the extraordinary wave of Cancellation that we’ve experienced increasingly over the last several years.

It extends even to personal matters, for example our long-time personal financial advisor, who’s been with us 15 or 16 years, was forced to drop us recently.

Americans generally don’t understand what is actually going on here—how this de facto “Social Credit” system, like the one the Chinese Communists have, [is] being used to suppress patriots.

… The second interlocking problem I mentioned is somewhat similar, and that’s our abrupt inability to accept online payments.

Now, in the past, when we’ve had credit card payment systems go down on us, we assume, for example with PayPal, that it’s the credit card processor that’s to blame.

Brimelow then explains that after playing a bit of credit-card-processor musical chairs, he realized the banks were a deeper issue, as even “when the payment processor wants to work with us, the banks won’t,” he laments. Ultimately, however, he believes the issue is deeper, and darker, still.

“Federal regulators are bringing pressure on banks to suppress unwelcome speech,” Brimelow states, “just as they’re bringing pressure on them to stop gun sales and so on.”

Then there were those profoundly weird cyberattacks, which inhibited VDARE’s ability to accept e-checks. “We can’t figure out where [the attacks are] coming from, but they’re extremely agile,” Brimelow reports. The site’s befuddled techies “say there’s obviously somebody behind it, there’s a human intelligence behind it, probably using AI,” he adds.

Another Win for the Deep State

The end result is that James has notched another win for the Deep State. The VDARE website will soon be suspended, and Brimelow doesn’t even know if its archives will remain available (talk about Stalin-like airbrushing of opponents from history).

Yet, again, this is just part of a pattern — of destroying the patriot movement by bankrupting it (and imprisoning people when possible). It starts with censorship: suppression of conservative media in search engine results, “shadow banning” on social media, and other methods. Note that perhaps 80 percent or more of a website’s traffic may come from search engines and social media; eliminating most of that traffic can wither a site on the vine, making it impossible to earn advertising money.

Compelling payment processors and banks to stop servicing the sites hits their donations, cyberattacks speak for themselves, and targeting the entities with lawfare can expend whatever funds they may have left. When you can’t win the arguments, you silence the arguers.

At the same time, do note, these victims’ (and everyone else’s) tax money — and funds the DOJ extorts from commercial entities — are funneled to liberal groups, thereby further empowering the Left.

It’s all as malevolent as anything that happened in the Soviet Union, except that no one is being put in a gulag. Our thought tyrants don’t have that kind of power — yet.

Addendum: For more information on VDARE’s case, you can watch the below excerpt from an interview commentator Tucker Carlson conducted with the organization’s president in February. 

Mass immigration is completely destroying our country. Why is no one doing anything about it? Because they’re afraid of ending up like Lydia Brimelow. pic.twitter.com/B5B0bh6t5O

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 20, 2024

                       This article was originally published at The New American.