Why Is New York’s AG Targeting a Castle in West Virginia?

This article in Real Clear Investigations is good coverage of the VDARE lawfare situation and it appears in a mainstream publication. It makes it very clear that this was an aggressive attack against a political enemy:

One obvious clue is contained in the filing of the original civil complaint. Letitia James and James Sheehan, chief of the state’s charities bureau, are listed first, but right below them is Meghan Faux, a longtime progressive lawyer whose title is “chief deputy attorney general for social justice.”

Another attorney listed in the filing in the case against the Brimelows was Rick Sawyer, who in 2022 headed the New York attorney general’s Hate Crimes and Bias Prevention branch and is now director of its Civil Rights Division. In November 2022, at an Anti-Defamation League conference called “Securing Our Democracy: Taking Hate and Extremism to Court,” Sawyer laid out his prosecutorial strategy.

Sawyer acknowledged that “hate is protected in the U.S. Constitution; the First Amendment protects hate,” but said that should be no deterrent to aggressive tactics against those alleged to engage in it.

“Attorney generals offices have massive amounts of power,” he said. “In New York, we have subpoena authority for any kind of hate crime, subpoena power against charities – and this is before we even file a lawsuit, by the way. We can get massive amounts of discovery without even having to go to court.”

“We have the authority to do massive investigations that look into an organization, or sham charities that are advocating hate speech,” Sawyer continued. “We can look into groups that are making money off of hate, and we can look into individuals who committed acts of hate crimes without even going to court. It’s an untapped power.”

Kelly said politically charged prosecutors have followed that path.

“VDARE and the Brimelows were forced into exactly the outline Sawyer gave there,” he said.

The Brimelows have sought to admit Sawyer’s speech as evidence in a federal motion they filed on First Amendment grounds, but thus far the court has not accepted it. Kelly insisted that no federal judge has yet issued a ruling “on substantive grounds,” instead using procedural steps to punt the matter back to state court.

“But we knew that if Donald Trump didn’t have First Amendment protections in New York courts, then the Brimelows certainly wouldn’t,” Kelly told RCI.I couldn’t help but notice Peter B’s suggestion that the I as a “racist” and “anti-Semite” was a major problem. “It is this work Peter Brimelow believes leftist groups found particularly objectionable.” Peter was very courageous in posting my articles and told me more than once that posting my articles cost them donations. Another sad commentary on exactly what the boundaries of free speech are.

So they admit that it’s lawfare pure and simple, but the courts have so far turned a blind eye.

My VDARE articles can be found here. This is the page for donations to the Brimelows’ legal defense fund.

Some of the writers at VDARE were pseudonymous, as the Brimelows said they feared cancel culture, and many of them are unfamiliar to a wide audience. Most of the complaints lodged against VDARE by the Southern Poverty Law Center are from many years ago, when they highlighted the organization for publishing what they categorize as white nationalist or racist writers, like the late John Tanton and Sam Francis. The VDARE website also posted items by John Derbyshire, who was banned by National Review in 2012 for a piece he wrote for Taki’s Magazine that discussed IQ and race and crime and said it was best to “avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally … Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.”

VDARE also has published pieces by Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor and editor of a publication called The Occidental Observer, who has been characterized as racist and anti-Semitic by critics, and it is this work Peter Brimelow believes leftist groups found particularly objectionable.

The RCI article is here.