Make "Black Friday" Weekend Red, White And Blue—Give (Tax-Deductibly) To VDARE.COM!
Peter Brimelow celebrating his 66th birthday with his daughter Felicity and Ulrich von Dog, October 13, 2013
By Peter Brimelow, Editor, VDARE.COM
OK, I’m completely out of touch with popular culture. I had to be told by my young family that the day after Thanksgiving is now called "Black Friday."
Apparently, it's the heaviest shopping day of the year.
So, to celebrate America's spending mood, I'm starting our annual year-end VDARE.COM fundraising drive now!
Fundraisers are always stressful for us. VDARE.com has no financial reserves and no margin for disappointment.
But our year-end fundraiser has turned out to be when we get the bulk of our (tax-deductible!) contributions. It’s the time we feel most hopeful about our great gamble:
that the internet has made possible a new type of low-cost independent media, supported directly by readers, free of pressure from advertisers and subscription managers, able to deliver the Politically Incorrect truth about immigration’s impact on America’s future which simply will not and cannot be published by the Main Stream Media.
Let’s start with some good news: Christmas is coming!
• Don't forget that, if you buy your Christmas gifts (not just books!) by entering Amazon through a VDARE.COM link e.g. here, we get a commission at no cost to you!
Please do take the trouble to do this—these commissions have become a significant source of income for us.
Now some sort-of good news:
The 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge legislation is stalled.
Note: at VDARE.com, we always refer to S.744, the Schumer-Rubio legislation that passed the U.S. Senate earlier this year, as the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge—to make the point that it involves both amnesty for illegal aliens and an enormous increase in legal immigration, already running at record highs.
Somehow, that plotted increase in legal immigration gets lost amid all the sob stories.
This stall may be hard to detect, given the MSM’s constant drumbeating about how the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge (which, in a telling admission of weakness, is always called “Immigration Reform”) is going to pass Real Soon Now!!!!
But the undeniable fact: the immigration enthusiasts’ arrogantly-proclaimed Amnesty/ Immigration Surge timetable has slipped—from “before July 4th” to “before the August recess” to “October”…and now to “2014,” and even “during the lame-duck session” (i.e., again tellingly, after the mid-term elections.)
There hasn’t been a climactic battle yet, as there was in 2007 when American patriots’ protesting phone calls melted down the Senate switchboard and scared Senators into killing George W. Bush’s Amnesty/ Immigration Surge.
But instead, something else has happened that is in some ways even more impressive: the lavishly-funded Amnesty/ Immigration Surge drive has been stopped dead by stubborn, inchoate, intense, leaderless resistance from the American people.
It’s like the situation on World War I’s Western Front exactly this time 99 years ago—after fierce battles, both sides are deadlocked and deeply entrenched.
There’s sniping and flares, but little apparent movement…although, of course, there’s still the constant fear of a sudden surprise offensive.
I say this Amnesty/ Immigration Surge stall is “sort-of good news” because, while it’s not victory—which would be a 1920s-style time-out or moratorium from immigration to increase wages, lower unemployment and permit assimilation—it’s very obviously not at all what the Treason Lobby expected…and paid for.
And this stall has happened for a single simple reason.
Thus I was delighted to see the fashionable smart-alec Leftist webzine Daily Beast recently (October 3) reporting with horror a lunch at Manhattan Le Cirque restaurant where a collection of fat-cat donor “financial industry types and lawyers” whining to Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, that the GOP House caucus was too much “in the thrall of its most extremist wing.”
Walden (who actually has a pretty good record on immigration) responded fiercely:
“If we don’t do this [take a strong line], these guys [his fellow-caucus members] are going to get primaried and they are going to lose their primary.”
(My emphasis.) The single simple reason the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge has been stopped in its tracks: an informed, aroused grass roots.
Not inside-the-Beltway lobbying and maneuvering. Not pitifully attempting to curry favor with MSM moguls, liberals, “Progressives,” and all the established powers in the ruling elite that has set America on this path to disaster.
This grass roots resistance yet again proves VDARE.com’s long-standing contention: patriotic immigration reform can only come from the heartland.
It will not come from inside the Beltway—it will have to be imposed on the Beltway.
That is why I believe that what VDARE.COM does, in providing telling facts and incisive arguments to the grass roots, free of charge, is more important than any amount of Beltway wonkery.
But we can only continue providing those facts and arguments with your help.
Let me say also, as a battle-scarred veteran of the immigration debate, that I do see real signs of movement.
For example:
- This year, there has finally been some MSM discussion of the extent to which the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge is suicide for the Republican Party—and whether the GOP’s problem is really its failure to appeal to Hispanics, or rather its failure to motivate its (many times larger) traditional white a.k.a. American base.
At VDARE.com, we have been writing about this issue for nearly fourteen years. It got us banned from the Republican booster site FreeRepublic.com way back in 2001.
This is not, of course, because we care about any particular political party. It is because we saw that the immigration-triumphalist narrative promoted by the MSM is simply false.
However, this is no mere theoretical point. It’s dynamite.
- If professional politicians can be induced to see that the MSM narrative is false—and the stalled Amnesty/ Immigration Surge suggests this is happening—they can next be induced to see the need, and the utility to their careers, of an immigration moratorium.
Who knows? Perhaps the next step will be MSM discussion of the extent to which immigrant workers are displacing Americans workers.
Uniquely, VDARE.com has been providing monthly tracking of displacement, based on our analysis of federal government employment data, since 2004. It’s amazing that this displacement issue hasn’t surfaced already, given that it’s all too obvious that neither party has any idea what to do about the chronic high unemployment that persists in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash.
Maybe it will surface now. Stranger things have happened! (See above).
And all by themselves, these two arguments will revolutionize the immigration debate.
Because arguments do ultimately shape policy. But money matters too.
Indeed, perhaps the single biggest change in public discourse since VDARE.com first went live on Christmas Eve 1999 is an increased general awareness of donors and of how they, and the professional campaign consultants who live off them, distort political debate. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat calls this phenomenon “donorism.”
The classic case: Mitt Romney’s hapless 2012 Presidential campaign, which was quite clearly run to maximize donations at the expense of issues that motivate the GOP base.
Immigration was merely one example. After the primaries, Romney stopped even hinting at resisting illegal immigration. Instead, he explicitly promised both to increase legal immigration and to get “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” a.k.a. an Amnesty/ Immigration Surge passed in his “first year.” (Yes, yes, I know this is contrary to MSM myth, but VDARE.com documented the disgraceful details here).
Romney’s reward: humiliating defeat, due to record low white turnout. But his consultants got to spend some $1 billion on themselves!
And big donors really really want an Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill. The Sunlight Foundation has reported that they have spent $1.5 billion lobbying for it since 2007. (And that doesn’t include this year’s splurge).
At VDARE.com, again I think uniquely, we have used standard economic techniques to explain why this is happening.
Although immigration doesn’t benefit Americans in aggregate, it does benefit some Americans—at the expense of others. It does this by increasing competition for jobs and thereby depressing wages. The accepted estimate: immigration redistributes some 2 to 3 percent of GDP from labor to the owners of capital.
In 2013, that’s about $300 billion-$450 billion, a very large number. And remember, the 2013 Amnesty/Immigration Surge bill could triple legal immigration. So we could be looking at a total diversion of income amounting to more than a trillion dollars.
This is a looting of the U.S. economy that can only be compared to the Russian oligarchs’ theft of assets as the Soviet Union collapsed. It explains the extraordinary parade of plutocrats—for example, Sheldon Adelson, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Paul Singer, the Koch brothers—currently pushing the 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill.
When Americans hear that immigration will “spur economic growth,” they should read: Permit more plutocrat plundering of America’s middle and working class.
American politics seem have entered a new Gilded Age, with politicians (and journalists) all too eager to do the bidding of high-tech Robber Barons.
But there is this silver lining: money without ideas doesn’t work. (Ask Mitt Romney).
The Treason Lobby needs to outspend immigration patriots by a thousand to one, lie that what it’s doing is not Amnesty but “immigration reform” (an immigration moratorium would be “immigration reform” too) and try to smuggle through the logically-unconnected legal immigration surge because what it is doing is all intensely unpopular with Americans.
And more immigration just makes the problems worse—politicians trying to “get it behind” them are just going to be bitten in the buttock.
Look at it this way: every (tax-deductible) dollar you give VDARE.com forces the Treason Lobby to spend at least a thousand, much of it on political campaigns and hence not deductible!
That’s some investment! And it’s in our children’s future.
And this brings me to some bad news that I also have to report: Repression is intensifying.
The internet has given dissident publications like VDARE.com life. But it has also made the need for VDARE.com more imperative. It has enabled Main Stream Media ideological gatekeepers to co-ordinate their political line and to orchestrate hysterias, like their Trayvon Martin scam, and witch hunts, like the ones that claimed the MSM careers of VDARE.com contributors Pat Buchanan and John Derbyshire—and even civilian bystanders, like celebrity chef Paula Deen and Heritage Foundation researcher Jason Richwine, (lynched for the content of his Harvard Ph.D. !)
Just a couple of days ago, VDARE.com chronicled an assault on criticism of illegal immigration at, and to a shameful degree by, the University of Texas.
This repression is intensifying partly because short-sighted monied interests want the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge—and partly because far-sighted Leftists behind the Obama Regime and what I have called the nation of “Anti-America” are absolutely conscious that there is still time for the historic nation of America to unite, to throw off what from a demographic point of view is undeniably a Minority Occupation Government, and to stop its Electing A New People through immigration policy.
And they are absolutely determined to prevent the historic nation of America from uniting—by “any means necessary.”
We post an enormous amount of material every day at VDARE.COM. There are just so many targets!
And what we post is prepared to the highest professional standards—I've not been working in the Mainstream Media for nearly 40 years for nothing. And we use hyperlinks, not the least of the advantages of this wonderful new medium, better than anyone else on the internet...at least, I think so. They help us document our case.
Readers who are new to the cause of patriotic immigration reform find our hyperlinks particularly compelling. But the whole process is very labor-intensive.
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. We can only do it with your help.
To me as a professional journalist, the quantity and quality of non-professional writing on the immigration issue that comes in over the e-transom has been a revelation. Many of these writers have full-time careers in other fields, some are students; I encourage these to write anonymously because of the very real reign of terror imposed by the curse of Political Correctness. Others are struggling, idealistic free-lancers; I shudder for them. All are patriots deprived of outlets because of the orthodoxy of the Mainstream Media.
Patriotic immigration reform can only be addressed from completely outside the political establishment. The Main Stream Media, liberal and "conservative", would not carry facts and analysis about America's immigration disaster. But I have been sorry to see that even fairly brave conventional funders can be intimidated by the terrible curse of Political Correctness.
Fortunately, the internet makes possible this wholly new type of journalism: one financed directly by its readers because they believe in the cause.
This strikes me as an entirely legitimate form of economic activity, like a church. And, like a church, it's tax-deductible!
Please help us now.
I, and all of us at VDARE.COM, believe future generations of Americans, will be profoundly grateful.
Merry Christmas!
P.S. Don’t forget to submit entries for our 2013 War Against Christmas Competition!—email to witan@vdare.com
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