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December 21, 2006
Dear Friend of VDARE.COM:
There is simply no nice way to say this.
Our Christmas Appeal has gone much more slowly than
we hoped.
We’ve raised about $7600. By this stage, we were
hoping for at least twice that.
It happens. People are distracted at this time of
year. And there are so many worthy causes.
But it’s a serious problem. The great bulk of our
online donations come in the last month of the year.
(That’s partly for a good reason: until December 31,
it’s the season for giving stock to avoid capital
gains tax legally—see below).
I hate asking for money.
I don’t really even like running a webzine. I’d
prefer to write. I occasionally look wistfully at my
half-finished proposal for a sequel to my 1995 book
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s
Immigration Disaster. Heck, I’d even settle for
writing the occasional column!
But I created VDARE.COM—we put out our first mass
email on Christmas Eve 1999—to meet an imperative
need. There was at that time simply nowhere else to
publish facts and analysis exposing this American
disaster.
We’ve come a long way since then. We’ve even shamed
some of the Establishment media into covering
immigration, albeit in a half-hearted way.
We’ve seen stories we’ve broken appear on Mainstream
Media outlets like Fox, CNN, the New York Times, the
Chicago Tribune, plus of course nominally
“conservative” journals like National Review and
City Journal.
And the movement for patriotic immigration reform
has come a long way too. It has now developed a
number of different institutions, often
internet-based, that focus on different but mutually
supporting areas—litigation, lobbying, scholarship,
education, border security etc.
At VDARE.COM we support them all and link to them
all when legally possible for a charity (even when
they won’t link back to us!). Our object is to be a
forum, and an honest broker, for the patriotic
immigration reform movement.
Only a perennial shortage of resources prevents us
from doing this on a larger scale.
I believe that VDARE.COM plays a particularly vital
role even among all these patriotic immigration
reform groups. We operate at the high end of the
intellectual food chain. Our articles are carefully
researched and written. They break news and
introduce new concepts. They are of the highest
professional quality and could appear anywhere in
the Mainstream Media—except for the epidemic curse
of Political Correctness.
And except for epidemic media cowardice.
We exist to take risks and push the envelope in a
way that most professional (i.e. housetrained)
journalists and columnists will not.
Our theory is that, when an idea has been
sufficiently ventilated and tested, it will filter
down to the more cautious, to the less imaginative
and to the mass-media popularizers.
We see this happening all the time.
For example, our Letters Editor, Joe Guzzardi, keeps
a list of how many times an issue broached on
VDARE.COM appears within a few days on a popular TV
show whose host, bless him, has decided to break the
MSM taboo and cover the immigration issue. When I
last asked Joe, he’d counted more than a score of
such instances.
Of course, we don’t get any credit for this—as some
of you were kind enough to note when the immigration
issue was getting nation-wide publicity because of
President Bush’s illegal alien amnesty drive in the
summer of 2006. (He didn’t get it!—because the
patriotic immigration reform movement is now highly
organized, thanks in good measure to VDARE.COM’s
leadership role.)
But I don’t think we should care about credit.
(Which is why I don’t ask Joe about his list very
often!) Our purpose is to change the debate—and to
keep the pressure on until it become easier for
politicians to be with us rather than against us.
Our annual War Against Christmas competition, now
underway, tells the whole story in a nutshell.
As I relate every year, the War Against Christmas
(in the form of a leaked memo from the Clinton
Administration’s HUD) was almost the first thing
that VDARE.COM covered when it went live in 1999.
Our annual competitions now provide the best
compendium of anti-Christmas atrocities on the web.
It’s fun, but it’s also serious: the people who want
to abolish Christmas also want to abolish America.
In 2005, the War Against Christmas went mainstream.
Several organizations, and famous television
personalities, took up the cause. It was great! And
it definitely got the Christophobes worried.
In 2006, however, we are observing a different
pattern. As our blogger Patrick Cleburne has shown,
the Mainstream Media has suddenly begun to parrot
with eerie unanimity the line that there is no War
Against Christmas (according to one recent count,
there have been 106 major newspaper articles denying
the War Against Christmas and only 18 acknowledging
it). At the same time, the MSM is quite obviously
simply suppressing new anti-Christmas atrocities.
For example, the peculiar episode on December 12
where a California high school choir was ordered to
stop singing carols at a Christmas show for fear of
offending Olympic figure skater Sasha Cohen (who
said she wasn’t offended) took days to make it into
the national media, and then only in a minor way.
This is what I mean by changing the debate—and
keeping on changing it. Obviously, the Christophobes
are on the run. They are quite rightly shaken by the
American backlash when anti-Christmas atrocities do
get national attention. (As when, for example,
Christmas trees were removed from Seattle airport,
which through the miracle of the internet, VDARE.COM
was able to report within a couple of hours.) They
are putting out a smokescreen of War Against
Christmas denial to cover their withdrawal while
attempting to salvage their cultural power by
ridiculing those who dare draw attention to it.
And it works. Have last year’s TV Christmas
crusaders been so vocal this year? Have they even
noticed what is going on?
But VDARE.COM has noticed. And we will keep up the
pressure, whether resistance to the War Against
Christmas is fashionable or not, whether we are
ridiculed or not, until America’s Christmas is
restored.
This is what’s going to happen with the immigration
issue. Eventually, politicians will decide that
American opinion can no longer be ignored.
You can already see it happening—witness the absurd
claim that this summer’s legislation was not an
“amnesty” and that the whole package was
“immigration reform”, when it was actually
immigration capitulation. That’s the homage that
political vice pays to patriotic virtue.
But they didn’t get away with it.
The next step: politicians and their pundit groupies
will have to offer real immigration reform. But
they’ll be tricky about it. We’ll be watching to
make sure they don’t get away with anything there
too.
To do it, however, we need your help.
Please give generously.
And Merry Christmas!
/s/ Peter Brimelow
p.s. Don’t forget to go in through a VDARE.COM link
when you buy Christmas gifts from Amazon.com e.g.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060976918/vdare—we
get a commission at no cost to you!
p.p.s. As I mentioned earlier, this is the season
when you can give to avoid capital gains tax. Last
year, a couple of elves slid down the chimney at the
last moment.
We need this to happen again. If you have investment
gains, please think about VDARE.COM now.
NOTE: VDARE.COM is no longer associated with the
Center For American Unity, which plans to focus on
litigation. We are grateful for their past help and
wish them well in future. Our sponsor is now the
VDARE Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.
You can donate (tax-deductibly!)
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