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New York Times is back on the race science beat

New York Times is back on the race science beat

A kinda boring article though

Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

Jan 25

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Back on the 23rd October 2025, some journalist I hadn’t heard of called Mike McIntire emailed me. He said he was writing some smear piece for the New York Times, and his email checked out. I mean, of course, he didn’t put it that way, but it was clear from his email what the intention was. Naturally, he asked to have some call or send some questions. The reason journalists do this is that their ‘professional ethics’ codes usually require it (sometimes local laws may also do so), and the secondary reason is that they can then engage in some fresh quote mining of whatever you say. So if you talk freely with such a journalist for an hour or so, then at some point you might have said something that sounded fishy taken by itself, but which in context made sense. However, it will soon appear in the smear piece without that context. Or better, it will appear with a rather different context that is provided by the journalist and probably be some adversary or another.

Mike McIntire is not a science journalist, so he is off his typical topic. This begs the question of why he was assigned to do this particular piece. I don’t know, but I can guess. My guess is that the piece was ordered by some editor or other higher-up. As a matter of fact, his email was timed with another very similar email around the same time from another journalist from another major American newspaper, Zusha Elinson from WSJ. Never heard of him either, but he emailed only a day later (24th October) and about the exact same topic. They both wanted to write some piece on Bryan Pesta’s academic freedom lawsuit. For those not familiar, Pesta was fired through tenure from his university ostensibly on grounds on data mishandling, but really for collaborating with us on doing anti-woke race and genetics research. The curious thing was the timing, only 1 day apart, and on an obscure lawsuit by a professor against a mediocre university. As far as I know, there were no legal updates on the case at the time, so why did 2 supposedly independent journalists both want to write a story before any legal updates? My guess is that they had insider knowledge of the verdict, which is why they were planning their smear pieces ahead of time and at two different outlets for extra publicity. Perhaps they were coordinating behind the scenes. I don’t really know, and any particular theory of this is of course a kind of conspiracy theory. Maybe one day we will know what the truth is.

Pesta’s lawsuit eventually concluded some time later (no money for poor Bryan), but no pieces by Mike McIntire or Zusha Elinson appeared. After a while, I started to think they had dropped the idea since apparently no one except Pesta replied to them. Today this was shown to be not correct, as New York Times dropped their new article:

If you read the piece you may get the impression that it’s a bit a nothingburger. I agree. Essentially nothing is new in it and it seems strangely delayed. It did however help provoke some debate on X/Twitter. There’s even a current AI news summary about it. It’s almost entirely negative about the NYT’s article. If you are too lazy to read the article, it goes like this:

  • Fringe researchers (that’s us!) used some federally funded data for analyses that the NYT disapproves of.
  • They duly bring in some carefully chosen critics to say some bad words about the work and or us. In this case everybody’s favorite strawberry Antifa geneticist Kevin Bird (burn down the buildings!), and omnibus denialist Sasha Gusev.
  • There’s some additional quotes from various officials from ABCD/PNC/NIH who feign astonishment, anger etc..
  • Some calls for further data security and of course more mandatory training.

The most amusing part is the angling to America’s geopolitical enemies, since apparently one of the authors of some paper or another is Chinese. According to their current googling, he may even live in China. Actually, at the time of the study he did not live in China at all. Then there’s another guy who was a coauthor on one paper, who lives in Russia. They then go on some fear mongering about what might happen if Americas enemies have copies of sensitive genetic datasets. It’s a funny line of argument considering that the ABCD itself previously held a contest for Chinese researchers to predict intelligence from the brain data. As a matter of fact, these data are not very sensitive, which is why 1000s of researchers and their students worldwide have access to them. You can simply go to the websites of these datasets and look at their proud listing of research. The page for ABCD’s portal lists 100s of studies, many done by researchers entirely based in China. This is also true for the UK Biobank by the way. The reason there isn’t more security is that the data aren’t terribly useful for anything geopolitically sensitive. In fact, even if the data were public, the subjects would have relatively little to fear. Yeah, someone could maybe identify some of them using FBI-like methods of uploading all the data to some genealogy websites and finding their 2nd cousins, but then so what? All you will get from this is that someone called Joe Doe filled out some survey years ago. It’s already illegal to use this information for much of anything. Since 1000s of people already have access to this kind of data, and I’ve never heard of any abuse cases, probably it’s not terribly useful otherwise someone would have already abused it to make money somehow.

Criticism of the study itself I think there were only two attempts. The first and most funny is that they showed this modified table:

The goal was to show that some of the sample sizes were small and this is very bad. Of course, the total sample size of ABCD is 10k+, but if one keeps subsetting to minor ethnic groups, the samples may become small. Not really the fault of the researchers as such, just a data limitation. The fun thing is that they had chosen these sample sizes among many from a larger table, which I think may be this one (from HV blog):

You can see that the larger sub-samples have all been left out to create the worst possible presentation. What a dumb trick. In any case, if one is estimating only the means of groups, and the gaps are large, then smallish samples can be OK. What matters is not so much the sample size, but the statistical power. That is, the precision of the studies relative to whatever effect is being studied. If you wanted to show that men and women differ in grip strength or height, you wouldn’t need many people since the gap is very large. Even 10 people from each group would be enough. In any case, what matters is the bigger picture, not the specific mean IQ of, say, Vietnamese Americans. There is a neat way to compare the precision of these estimates, namely, by comparing them with the same-ish groups on another test, the SAT/ACT. Doing so gives you this plot:

The IQ mean estimates are ‘only’ correlated at 0.93. Maybe there is some differences in the sampling (SAT takers are a different age cohort), but a small deviation from a correlation of 1.00 is expected due to the sampling error, and of course because the tests aren’t measuring entirely the same thing (SAT/ACTs are heavily loaded on knowledge, whereas ABCD’s battery includes a lot of memory tests). Rather, given that some of the samples are rather small, it is slightly surprising that they are so strongly correlated. It’s possible to adjust for the sampling error downwards bias (towards 0) in theory. If the amount of random error is known (standard errors of the mean) for each mean, one can estimate backwards and figure out what the original correlation most likely was before some random errors were added to the observations. The effect of the correction is probably small since we are already close to 1.00. I asked GPT to cook up some R code. After several false attempts, it got me some working code using variant of Deming regression I hadn’t heard of (based on York et al 2004). This approach produced the value of 0.965, which seems plausible enough. I would have to do some more simulations to be confident about this (topic for future post no doubt). The ones I did showed that the adjustment was working a little bit. Anyway, it is obvious that the small samples of some of the ethnics wasn’t important for the study.

The other criticism was just that the blank slate model was not assumed. Basically, the dog meme. One should control every possible alternative cause, according to NYT science, and not worry about the sociologist’s fallacy. Maybe they can take a lesson in causal reasoning since controlling for these factors gives uninterpretable results. Hereditarians and egalitarians agree that if we compare only (hypothetical) perfectly average specimens of this or that race group (in every way, their mothers and fathers income, education, occupational status, where they live, where they grew up, what job they have, their grandparents’ education etc.) then the gap would be smaller to some degree. Egalitarians like to think of this as some big a-ha! moment. However, on the hereditarian model this result is also expected because if you do such a statistical comparison, you are controlling for all the other things also indirectly caused by genetics (including in past generations by the ancestors’ genetics), and thus ending up with a comparison of a rather genetically elite hypothetical member of [ethnic group] compared with the average Joe Whiteman (or in the case of higher scoring ethnics, a below average member). This method cannot yield any causally informative conclusions, which is why it isn’t helpful to do this in endless detail as they propose (this useless method was also used in The Bell Curve replies). In fact, they spend a lot of space mentioning that the datasets didn’t even include all the possible hypothetical variables they could imagine being important, so naturally Pesta et al could not have used them to begin with, so how can they be faulted for not doing so?

The rest of the article was somewhat boring, and I don’t think it’s worth your time to dig up the various quotes they took from this or that blogpost and put in some other context. But I will give one example. They have this paragraph:

Another paper, coauthored by Mr. Kirkegaard, was limited by what he acknowledged were small sample sizes and a lack of nongenetic data. Those shortcomings did not stop him from trumpeting the findings online as proof that “genetic ancestry, not social race, explains observed gaps in social status.”

It concerns my 2023 blogpost about a paper based on ABCD data. They don’t seem to understand the point of the post. The point is simple: if social race (egalitarians claim, variously, that it’s not genetic, or it’s complicated, or whatever the current obfuscation of the month is) is so important causally for all sorts of things, then clearly, social race should predict outcomes better than genetic ancestry. This prediction has been tested a number of times in various datasets and using different methods. But it is always found that genetic ancestry (real race) predicts outcomes better than whatever race people consider themselves to be (or their parents or interviewers consider them to be). This is not consistent with their causal models that posit strong effects of social race. That’s why my quote says social race is not the causal factor at hand. They can then claim it is some other so far unidentified unmeasured causal factor (X), but then they gotta step up their science game and tell us what specifically it is. For decades, 100s of academics have been claiming it is discrimination based on skin color. But we and others have found that skin color does not predict outcomes when genetic ancestry is controlled so that causal model is clearly incorrect. The onus is on these egalitarians to produce anything resembling a coherent scientific theory of how gaps are caused, and how it can be tested. They have spent 10 decades making either too-vague-to-test claims, or advocating clearly disproven models (e.g. colorism, stereotype threat). It’s time to put up or shut up.

Just don’t hurt their feelings: Australia’s Frightening New “Hate Speech” Laws Are Clearly Aimed At Pro-Palestine Groups

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Australia’s Labor government has successfully passed a “hate speech” bill that’s plainly aimed, at least in part, at suppressing pro-Palestine organizations as “hate groups”.

Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about the new laws, saying their extremely vague wording, lack of procedural fairness and low thresholds for implementation mean groups can now be banned if they make people feel unsafe or upset without ever actually posing any physical harm to anyone.

For me the most illuminating insight into what these laws are actually designed to do came up in an ABC interview with Attorney-General Michelle Rowland on Tuesday. Over and over again throughout the interview Rowland was asked by ABC’s David Speers to clarify whether the new laws could see activist groups banned for criticizing Israel and opposing its genocidal atrocities in a way that causes Jewish Australians to feel upset feelings, and she refused to rule out the possibility every single time.

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“Let’s just go to what it means in practice: would a group be banned if it accuses Israel of genocide or apartheid, and as a result, Jewish Australians do feel intimidated?” Speers asked.

Rowland didn’t say no, instead saying “there are a number of other factors that would need to be satisfied there” and saying that agencies like the AFP and ASIO would need to make assessments of the situation.

“Okay, just coming back to the practical example though, if a group is suggesting that Israel is guilty of genocide, what other measures or factors would need to be met before they can be banned?” Speers asked.

“Under the provisions that are now before the parliament, there would also need to be able to demonstrate that there are for example, some aspects of state laws that deal with racial vilification that have been met as well,” Rowland responded, again leaving the possibility wide open.

(It should here be noted that Greens justice spokesperson David Shoebridge has pointed out that “state laws that deal with racial vilification” can include “tests like ‘ridicule’ and ‘contempt’,” meaning people could wind up spending years in prison for associating with groups that were essentially banned for upsetting someone’s feelings.)

“Just to be clear, if a group is saying Israel is engaged in genocide, or they’re saying that Israel should no longer exist, that is not enough for that group to be banned?” asked Speers.

“Well, again, that would depend on the other evidence that is gathered, David, so I would be reluctant to be naming and ruling in and ruling out specific kinds of conduct that you are describing here,” Rowland replied.

All this waffling can safely interpreted as a yes. Rowland is saying yes. Speers pushed this question three different times from three different angles because it’s the most immediate and obvious concern about these new laws, and instead of reassuring the public that they can’t be used to target pro-Palestine groups and aren’t intended for that purpose, the nation’s Attorney General confirmed that it was indeed possible.

So that’s it then. Under the new laws we can expect to see the Israel lobby crying about Jewish Australians feeling threatened and unsafe by every pro-Palestine group under the sun, and then from there all it takes is the thumbs-up from ASIO to put the group on the banned list and cage anyone who continues associating with it for up to 15 years.

The bill that ended up making it through Parliament is actually a narrowed down version of an even scarier bill that was scrapped by Labor due to lack of support which went after individuals as well as groups. The earlier version contained “racial vilification” components which could have been used to target any individual who voices criticisms of Israel or Zionism — so it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing any prison time for my writing any time soon. The new version moved its crosshairs to groups with the obvious intent to disrupt pro-Palestine organizing in Australia.

And we’re already seeing the Israel lobby pushing to resurrect the laws targeting individuals. A new ABC article titled “Jewish leaders call for vilification offence to be revisited as Coalition splits over watered-down hate laws” cites Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Peter Wertheim arguing that the new laws don’t go far enough.

So we can expect the Australian Israel lobby to both (A) push to get pro-Palestine groups classified as “hate groups” under the new laws and (B) keep pushing to make it illegal for individuals to criticize Israel in the form of new “racial vilification” laws. They’ll keep trying over and over again, from government to government to government, until they get their way.

This comes after Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council Executive Manager Joel Burnie publicly stated that he wants to ban pro-Palestine protests and criticism of Israel throughout the nation, and as prosecutors drag an Australian woman to court for an antisemitic hate crime because she accidentally butt-dialed a Jewish nutritionist and left a blank voicemail.

So things are already ugly, and they’re getting worse.

It’s so creepy knowing I share a country with people who want to destroy my right to normal political speech. It would never occur to me to try to kill Zionists’ right to free speech, but they very openly want to kill mine. They want to permanently silence me and anyone like me. I find that profoundly disturbing.

Israel supporters are horrible people. And I hope my saying that hurts their feelings.

Jonathan Turley: “It’s Going To Get Really Serious”: Liberal Influencers Discuss Public Trials, Court Expansion After Democratic Takeover

“It’s Going To Get Really Serious”: Liberal Influencers Discuss Public Trials, Court Expansion After Democratic Takeover

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta spoke with popular podcaster Jennifer Welch, discussing the plans for radical changes after a Democratic takeover this year. Like many Democratic figures, they said that the expansion of the Supreme Court is obvious.

The expansion is essential to clear away any restraints on a radical agenda that will include the trial of a host of conservatives, from Trump to the young former DOGE employee who was injured when he came to the rescue of a woman in a carjacking in Washington, D.C.

Figures like Eric Holder have expressly stated that packing the Supreme Court with a liberal majority will be the priority after any Democratic takeover.

This has long been the plan among far-left figures, but it is now being embraced by establishment figures as essential to securing a radical agenda to achieve lasting power.

Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur.

This week, Democratic strategist James Carville laid out the step-by-step process of how the pack-to-power plan would work.

“I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen,” he said.

“A Democrat is going to be elected in 2028. You know that. I know that. The Democratic president is going to announce a special transition advisory committee on the reform of the Supreme Court. They’re going to recommend that the number of Supreme Court justices go from nine to 13. That’s going to happen, people.”

Acosta and Welch, however, added a Jacobin touch by demanding trials for a wide range of conservative figures — a call that has been echoed by Democratic members promising impeachments and investigations.

Welch, who appears to be auditioning for the role of Madame Lafarge, insisted:

“The blue tsunami means that Congress is going to haul Elon Musk, ‘Big Balls,’ and a bunch of other people’s a– in front and say, ‘What crimes did you commit?’ And it’s going to get really serious. And the same with Trump because I believe, and this is just my opinion, that Trump and all of the bottom-feeding morons surrounding him and Elon Musk and all the bottom feeding clinger-onners that surround him, I think they commit crimes every day.”

In my forthcoming book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I discuss how elected officials often try to enlist mobs to advance their political agendas — only to be consumed by the unrest they helped fuel. This yielding to a “mobocracy” was one of the critical dangers that the Framers sought to deter through protections against majoritarian tyranny.

What is most notable is the warning to establishment figures who are dismissed as “integrity Democrats” who might be squeamish about doing the things that must be done to political opponents. As always, Welch was the face of unrequited rage:

“And I think to reconcile all of this is going to take hardcore — not ‘integrity Democrats – ‘F–k you Democrats’ … ‘F–k you for f–king over our country.’ We are serious about this. We are prosecuting. We’re going to uncover every document, every phone call, everything you did. We will be relentless about it. And that’s the mindset they’ve got to have because I think the electorate is going from, ‘We’ve got to get him out, but also we want accountability.’”

With “integrity Democrats” out of the way, the left will be able to change the system to guarantee not just a radical agenda but permanent power, as explained by Klarman. It is a chilling and ironic prospect on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the author of the forthcoming “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” which will be released on Feb. 3 as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

JTA: Jews against ICE in Minnesota

I’m sure they would act exactly the same if Israel was rounding up illegal immigrants. And what did the Israelites do to the natives when they reached the promised land: Slaughter the natives of course.

Jewish groups opposed to the aggressive surge in immigration enforcement are signing letters, planning protests and mending frayed interfaith partnerships.

The Hebrews’ flight from Egypt is on a lot of Jewish minds right now, as the annual cycle of Torah readings has reached the Book of Exodus.

But for many Jewish leaders in Minnesota, the ancient story has particular resonance.

With Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descending on the Twin Cities in search of undocumented immigrants and stirring chaos and pushback, the story of Exodus — about a king who tries to thwart the growing number of “foreigners” in his midst, and the leader who seeks to protect them — is inspiring local Jews as they respond to ICE despite the risks of doing so.

“As we’re currently reading in the Torah, Moses confronts Pharoah knowing it won’t be easy, and feeling his own doubts about such an act,” Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in the suburb of Minnetonka, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And in doing so, the Israelites enslaved in Egypt are able to get unstuck. They’re able to taste freedom.”

Inspired by such teachings, and frequently invoked Jewish injunctions like “welcoming the stranger,” Jewish groups are signing on to open letters, and synagogues are actively involved in pro‑immigrant actions and advocacy. The Jewish presence at an interfaith anti-ICE rally this week is expected to be substantial, including about 100 rabbis and Jewish leaders who are flying in from out of state.

“Our community members and staff live and work in every corner of society. There are too many stories of lives upended by what the government itself refers to as the ICE surge,” reads an open letter, issued Monday, spearheaded by the Jewish federation and signed by around two dozen Jewish groups.

Jewish groups “are deeply concerned by the current volatile situation throughout the Twin Cities and Minnesota,” according to the letter. Its signatories as of Wednesday afternoon include 13 area congregations, ranging from Reform to Modern Orthodox; two Jewish day schools; Minnesota Hillel; the Minnesota JCC; the progressive group Jewish Community Action, and Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota.

ICE’s presence — which includes masked, heavily armed officers conducting aggressive traffic stops, neighborhood raids and street patrols — has wreaked havoc in the region, with mounting reports of legal immigrants, asylum seekers and even U.S. citizens being snatched off the street and from their homes as the agents, empowered by the White House, hunt for migrants.

The local school system has allowed students to attend virtually as many immigrants in the city are staying home to avoid becoming a target. One result has been a dearth of caregivers tending to local Jewish seniors, according to the letter from the Jewish groups.

Protesters demonstrate against Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Renee Good was fatally shot by an ICE officer Jan. 7, 2026 in Minneapolis. (Jen Golbeck/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The letter followed an earlier missive from 49 Minnesota Jewish clergy, distributed on Friday, that describes “grief” and “horror” over ICE “wreaking havoc across our state.”

Quoting Deuteronomy — “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” — the rabbis and cantors spotlight the “tragic death” of driver Renee Good at the hands of an ICE officer Jan. 7 and include a prayer to “spread a canopy of peace and protection over all those wrongfully targeted by ICE at this moment.”

Both of those letters precipitated what is turning into a larger institutional Jewish pushback to ICE. On Wednesday, leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements issued a joint statement to “condemn, in the strongest terms, the violence with which the Department of Homeland Security is enforcing American immigration law — above all, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as in cities and towns across the nation.”

“Our sages taught that the Book of Deuteronomy’s directive, ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (16:20), implies that the law must be enforced through a fair process, and that one should pursue justice whether it would be to one’s advantage or to one’s loss,” the statement reads, with the Jewish leaders further calling on the Justice Department to investigate Good’s death.

Rabbi Jill Avrin, campus lead at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said it was “unprecedented” for such a wide variety of local Jewish groups to sign onto such messages.

“We have a really diverse Jewish community here, and we felt that this is a moment that is impacting all of us,” Avrin, who helped draft the letters, told JTA.

The multiple open letters are trying to appeal to shared spiritual values as the standoffs between protesters and ICE agents become increasingly fraught. A number of prominent figures — most recently Bruce Springsteen — have compared ICE’s tactics to the Gestapo; at the same time, an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service over the weekend has prompted concern and controversy across the interfaith community and led at least one Republican to compare the protesters to Hamas.

Local Jewish leaders say they are not dissuaded from what they view as a Jewish imperative to respond.

“Judaism isn’t about skipping the hard parts,” Weininger said. “It’s about noticing the struggles for centuries that have led us to this point: slavery, persecution, destruction, exile, coming home.”

Residents protest during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Jan.14, 2026. The protest comes after an ICE agent shot a man in the leg during an enforcement operation. (Madison Thorn/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Rabbis have been active in local mobilizing against ICE. They attended a community vigil for Good; Weininger discussed the issue during his Shabbat sermon. He also helped draft the rabbinical open letter, and this week is one of around 80 to 90 rabbis — many others from out of town — planning to attend an interfaith march in Minneapolis with more than 600 clergy present. Around 50 of the rabbis expected to attend are part of T’ruah, a Jewish social justice network, which mobilized after local clergy put out the request.

“What’s scary is that lawful actions are being targeted,” Weininger said about the situation on the ground. “We’re talking about protest and prayer and taking action in community, and even those modes of engagement are under attack.”

Recalling how Minneapolis Jews similarly mobilized in 2020 to protest George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, the rabbi described “a real sense of civil society here, and I think that is true of the Jewish clergy community in how people care for one another.”

Rabbis also spoke out at a Tuesday interfaith press conference denouncing ICE and outlining plans for this week’s march. “As people of faith, as leaders of faith communities, we are called to say, ‘Enough. Not on our watch,’” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, who leads the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said while standing next to a local imam.

Some Jewish groups across the country have raised concern about ICE’s activities for months, with some synagogues posting signs identifying themselves as houses of worship that agents do not have authority to enter. Rabbis affiliated with T’ruah have participated in “ICE watch” actions in other cities.

But Minnesota’s Jews have now witnessed firsthand the effects of a sustained, targeted ICE presence on their community. Local synagogues have hosted “upstander” training seminars for congregants to learn how to react in the face of an ICE encounter. For many congregants, the experience has pushed them to action — but it’s also invoked an eerie sensation, bringing echoes of a dangerous past.

“As a Jewish parent in Minneapolis, history feels too close right now,” one Twin Cities resident told Daci Platt, a fellow Minnesotan who works at Kveller, a JTA sister publication. “The sense of safety we usually rely on feels shakier than it ever has.”

Jewish community organizations are particularly concerned about the threat the ICE raids, which have focused primarily on non-white Twin Cities residents, pose to a caregiving workforce largely composed of immigrants.

“Jewish seniors are not having their basic needs met because their caregivers are too afraid to come to work,” says the letter spearheaded by the federation.

Amy Weiss, CEO of Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota, told JTA that ICE has also affected her organization’s ability to serve its nonsectarian clients more generally. Much of their own staff are from immigrant communities, and Weiss worries about drawing attention to them by sending them out into the field to help clients.

“People are afraid to go to work. They’re afraid to leave their homes,” Weiss said. “I don’t see this as political. When you look at our mission, to support people in need, then this is very basic. These are the very basic needs of the community.”

The open letter also notes that there are Jews “who are immigrants themselves, have family members who are immigrants, or could be reasonably perceived to be immigrants. Many of these people are scared to leave their homes out of fear of being arrested and deported.”

The federation-backed letter is careful not to deride all law enforcement. It states, “We affirm our commitment to the rule of law, the lawful implementation of statutes, and the thousands of law enforcement officers charged with keeping us safe, whose efforts we deeply appreciate.”

Avrin, too, praised local law enforcement, whom she called “amazing” and “not the same thing as the ICE agents who are here on the ground.” She also noted that not all of the Jewish communal leaders shared the specific goals of this week’s march, which other Jewish leaders helped plan. The march’s demands include “ICE must leave Minnesota immediately” and “ICE should be investigated for human and Constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors.”

“This moment is a moment that calls for coalition,” she said. “We are acknowledging and naming that we might be showing up with people whom we don’t actually agree with their broader platform.”

That discomfort has also arisen in some of the language of the opposition. As ICE protests in Minnesota attract growing national attention, comparisons to Nazis and the Gestapo have also grown. Avrin said the JCRC discourages such rhetoric.

During a concert in New Jersey last weekend, Springsteen decried “heavily armed, masked federal troops invading an American city and using Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens.” He then repeated a catchphrase popularized by Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’s Jewish mayor: “ICE should get the f–k out of Minneapolis.” (On Tuesday, Frey, along with other state officials, was subpoenaed by the Justice Department for alleged obstruction of immigration agents. Some of his critics have called attention to his Jewish identity.)

The comparison is resonating for some local Jews. “I feel like we’re facing the eternal question of ‘If you were in Germany in the [19]30s or 40s, what would you do?’” Rebecca Schwengber, a local Jewish business owner who has faced retaliation since launching a mutual aid effort, told TC Jewfolk this week. “I’m comfortable with my answer now. I hate the Holocaust comparison, but the Holocaust didn’t start with camps; it started with making life uncomfortable and questioning how far you can take a population while people look the other way.”

Anti-ICE protesters disrupt a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, accusing one of its pastors of working for ICE, Jan. 18, 2026. (Screenshot via YouTube)

The faith-based protests suffered a distraction when anti-ICE protesters disrupted a St. Paul church service. The protesters, including Black Lives Matter Minnesota, claimed that one of its pastors also works as a local ICE field office leader. The Trump administration has announced an investigation into the protest, which officials said could amount to a violation of a federal law permitting free access to any worship site.

Following the protest, Cities Church in Minnesota issued a statement saying the protesters “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat. Such conduct is shameful, unlawful, and will not be tolerated.”

The statement added, “Invading a church service to disrupt the worship of Jesus — or any other act of worship — is protected by neither the Christian Scriptures nor the laws of this nation.” A founding pastor of the church has ties to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary.

One Republican, Rep. Will Self of Texas, said the protesters — who had livestreamed themselves from inside the church — reminded him of Hamas livestreaming on Oct. 7.

“When you livestream something, you want it to cause terror in the population,” Self told the far-right TV network Newsmax. “So when they livestreamed it, I compare them to Hamas, who livestreamed the attack in Israel that killed thousands of people.”

American Jewish leaders, for whom the freedom of worship in America has long been a key policy plank, say they disagree such a protest in a house of worship. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who heads T’ruah, told JTA her organization “would not organize a protest of a church.”

The local JCRC also criticized the church protest, which comes in the aftermath of recent pro-Hamas synagogue protests in New York that were widely condemned by Jewish and progressive leaders alike.

“That is something we are absolutely opposed to. We would never encourage people to disrupt a worship service. That is not aligned with our values in any way,” Avrin said. “In my opinion it doesn’t reflect the broader efforts that are happening on the ground. That’s going to happen any time you have a large movement.”

Jews in that movement are focusing on injunctions drawn from the Bible. Speaking at New Birth, a historically Black Baptist church in Georgia with links to the family of Martin Luther King Jr., Georgia Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is  Jewish, gave a biblically inflected anti-ICE message.

“How can it be that masked federal agents set up checkpoints in American cities, demand papers, rip Americans from their cars, and throw them to the ground? Kill? Kill? With apparent license from the very top,” Ossoff told the congregation. “There’s a wickedness to the program. I don’t know, Pastor, where it is in scripture that it says ‘deny care to the sick, take from those with the least to give to those with the most, violate the house of worship to hunt down the refugee.’ Where in the scripture are those lessons taught?”

Ossoff, who is defending his seat in a tight reelection campaign, added that he and the church’s pastor had been “texting” about the Exodus journey of Moses, and how he used his staff to rally the Israelites.

In the face of the groundswell in Minnesota, President Donald Trump again forcefully rebuked the protesters and defended ICE.

“They’re apprehending murderers and drug dealers and a lot of bad people,” the president said of the agents during a press conference to mark one year of his second term.

Holding up images he said were of immigrant criminals apprehended by ICE, including one who he claimed was connected to Hezbollah, Trump asked the White House press pool, “Why don’t you talk about that more?… Do you want to live with these people?”

The president also referenced the church protest. “I have such respect for that pastor. He was so calm. He was so nice. He was just accosted,” Trump said of the clergyman whose sermon was interrupted. (He was not the pastor the protesters were targeting.) “What they did in that church was horrible.”

Trump, too, has been a mobilizing force for Jews in Minnesota. Following the president’s derogatory comments last month about the Somali population in the state — which Trump said justified the ICE raids — many local Jewish leaders had held coalition meetings with interfaith partners.

For some in the room at the time, Avrin recalled, it was the first time they had come face-to-face with these partners since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza, which frayed many Jewish-liberal coalitions when other communal groups denounced Israel and “Zionists.”

Such partners had “stopped speaking to us, basically,” she said.

But for the Jewish leaders in the room, the Talmudic imperative to love the stranger overcame lingering uncertainty about reconfiguring these coalitions: “We can’t walk away from that just because we’ve been hurt,” she said.

ZeroHedge: Left-Wing NGOs Plan “Economic Blackout” Across Minnesota As State Becomes Testbed For Revolution

ZeroHedge: Left-Wing NGOs Plan “Economic Blackout” Across Minnesota As State Becomes Testbed For Revolution

The color-revolution risk assessment we delivered to readers in August 2025 has since seen a timeline that has been accelerated, with Democratic Party-aligned dark-money funded NGOs, left-wing militant groups, and anti-Trump labor unions leveraging Minneapolis as a testbed for coordinated socialist resistance activity, including strike actions, boycotts, and engineered social unrest, all aimed at undermining President Trump’s legitimacy, authority, and governing capacity, with the end goal of regime change at the White House.

The assessment initially forecasted that selective resistance movements would begin to materialize in 2026, with mass resistance emerging in 2027-28 ahead of the presidential election. That timeline has since accelerated, as Marxist NGOs and unions are funneling personnel and resources into Minneapolis to fuel social unrest, with the hopes of impeding the federal government’s deportation operations targeting criminal illegal aliens. Remember, these illegals are either the Democratic Party’s current voting bloc or future voting bloc.

Several weeks of protests following the fatal shooting of a left-wing legal observer by an ICE agent in Minneapolis are now evolving into what local media outlet Minnesota Reformer calls a “general strike” set to unfold on Friday. The outlet reports that “Minnesota’s unions, progressive faith leaders, and community activists” are organizing the strike, called “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth & Freedom.”

It is time to suspend the normal order of business to demand immediate cessation of ICE actions in MN, accountability for federal agents who have caused loss of life and abuse to Minnesota residents, and call for Congress to immediately intervene,” ICE Out’s landing page says.

Again, this strike is unlikely to accomplish much on the ground beyond disrupting economic activity, but the objective for nonprofits stirring up their column of useful-idiot activists, some of whom are paid, alongside unions mobilizing their members, is an optics-driven informational war aimed at shifting public sentiment and influencing politicians on Capitol Hill.

Think of this boots-on-the-ground effort as a small number of voices using a megaphone in an attempt to manufacture the appearance of widespread public outrage. The hope is that polls shift and force the White House to back down.

However, 2025 was the year when the nation learned (read here) how left-wing billionaire foundations – and even foreign adversaries – are funding NGO networks to undermine the nation to sow chaos and collapse the country from within.

There is already movement on the White House level, and even the Treasury (as revealed in Bessent-Rufo interview last week), that suggests the federal government will begin pressuring the entire nonprofit sector that should be helping the homeless and the poor, but has been hijacked by left-wing billionaires to wage a color revolution operation against Trump to derail the America First movement. These types of operations are what the CIA does overseas in third-world countries for regime changes – it’s just that this type of statecraft was inverted when Trump won in 2016.

Taking a look at the Facebook page for “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth & Freedom,” the event is listed as hosted by left-wing nonprofits and unions, including TakeAction Minnesota, Gender Justice, COPAL MN, 50501: Minnesota, ATU Local 1005, CTUL, Twin Cities Democratic Socialists, and nine other groups

Highly organized. These groups are part of the protest-industrial complex.

Alpha News’ Liz Collin provided a memo to the Minnesota Nurses Association members encouraging members to participate in Friday’s “statewide economic blackout.”

Escalations everywhere by left-wing militants.

We warned last September:

Let’s not forget that CCP-linked communist billionaire Neville Roy Singham’s dark-money-funded NGOs have been involved in nationwide anti-ICE protests:

This color revolution operation, which hides behind the nonprofit industry, is called the “invisible insurrection“… and this social unrest will broaden come spring.

Just so readers are awareonce Democrats perfect the “Minneapolis experiment,” they will attempt to replicate it across every sanctuary city.

Relive The Civil Rights Era. Send In The Troops.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day this week, every liberal made the totally original point that anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis are walking in King’s footsteps! King protested — and they’re protesting. See? Same thing.

In any liberal morality play, Democrats always get to be the shivering, oppressed black people, while Republicans have to play the part Bull Connor, Birmingham, Ala.’s racist commissioner of public safety.

Except the facts are exactly the opposite. I’m sure you’re bored of hearing this, but Connor was a Democrat, as were all the politicians promising “massive resistance” to racial integration. Republicans were the ones forcing Democrats to abide by federal law, along with a few John Fetterman-style Democrats.

But the biggest fraud the media are trying to push on America is their total erasure of the most heroic actions ever taken by U.S. presidents: Invoking the Insurrection Act and sending troops to the states to enforce federal law against recalcitrant Democratic governors and individual citizens.

Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, then John F. Kennedy, deployed the military to compel Democrats to stop violating federal law — as set forth in the Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. In that case, the court found — for the first time — that the education of black and white children in “separate but equal” public schools violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

You want an “insurrection”? The constitutional rights of nine black people in Arkansas were being violated! More precisely, the rights of all 400,000 black Arkansans were being violated.

Today, the rights of all 340 million Americans to live in a law-based constitutional republic are being violated, and at least 77 million are ticked off about it.

Eisenhower didn’t wait for federal agents to be hospitalized, hit with shovels, injured with projectiles, their vehicles vandalized, and streets blocked for weeks on end to send in federal troops. State officials and private citizens were acting as if federal law didn’t apply to them. That was enough.

Eisenhower explained that “[c]ertain misguided persons, have insisted upon defying the law,” and unless the president intervened, “anarchy will result.” The “interest of the nation in the proper fulfillment of the law’s requirements cannot yield to opposition and demonstrations by some few persons.”

First, Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard, taking it out of an insubordinate governor’s hands, with instructions to enforce the ruling in Brown. Then he invoked his authority under the Constitution and the Insurrection Act to command all those impeding enforcement of the law to cease, desist, and disperse.

They did not, so the very next day, Eisenhower sent 1,000 soldiers with the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to walk nine black children to school. They stayed there for the entire 1957-1958 school year, ensuring continued compliance with federal law. Five years later, JFK did the same thing, federalizing the National Guard, whereupon they escorted two black students into the University of Alabama and 20 black students into Birmingham public schools.

Eisenhower and Kennedy were enforcing a single Supreme Court ruling — one, I might add, with a dubious conclusion, inasmuch as the real problem was that the schools were not remotely “equal,” not that black children need to sit next to white children in order to learn — a point made frequently and with some exasperation by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Still, the Court had ruled: Separate but equal violates the Constitution.

Any of this lighting up the “analogy” neurotransmitters in your brain? Just as Little Rock was the crucible for Democrats’ massive resistance to federal civil rights laws, Minneapolis has become the crucible for the Democrats’ massive resistance to federal immigration laws.

Govs. George Wallace (D-Ala.) and Orval Faubus (D-Ark. — and Bill Clinton mentor!) thought they could declare their states sanctuaries — or “islands,” if you will— from federal law. They seemed to believe they were entitled to their own interpretation of federal (civil rights) laws, while, today, Democratic governors are under the misapprehension that they are entitled to their own interpretation of federal (immigration) laws.

Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), fresh from overseeing a fraud scheme by Somali immigrants that stole $9 billion from U.S. taxpayers, has repeatedly referred to his state as an “island,” separate and apart from the federal immigration law.

Say, has the Supreme Court ever said anything about the states’ role in immigration? Why, yes it has! They have no role. None whatsoever. States are not even permitted to pass laws that comply with federal immigration law — that is, if the president is a Democrat and prefers not to enforce federal immigration law.

This, the court has made blindingly clear, not in one ruling, but in dozens, e.g., Toll v. Moreno, 458 U. S. 1 (1979); INS. v. Aguirre-Aguirre (1999); Miller v. Albright (1998); United States v. Valenzuela-Bernal (1982); Gonzales v. Reno (11th Cir. 2000); Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB (2002); Arizona v. United States (2012).

In 2010, Arizona passed a state law — not a bellicose statement from a showboating mayor, but an actual law — directing state law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration law, not defy it. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama preferred to not enforce the law.

Democrats screamed from the rooftops that Arizona’s law was an “assault on the domain of the federal government” — in the words of Sen. Chuck Schumer. The Obama administration took the case to the Supreme Court, citing the majestic “Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution,” and the fact that, “the federal government has preeminent authority to regulate immigration matters.”

The Supreme Court mostly agreed, striking down the entire law — except the provision that liberals had been most hysterical about, the so-called “Papers Please!” law. (Pause to note that liberals are always wrong about everything.)

The idea that states, much less individual citizens, are free to ignore federal immigration law is preposterous. This isn’t a close case.

We don’t need 177,000 troops in Germany, Spain, Belgium, Turkey, Guam, Bahrain, etc., etc. etc. (Wow, that is so not making America great again!) If Trump wants to be remembered by history as one of our greatest presidents, he should follow Eisenhower and JFK’s lead: Bring the troops home and send them to every sanctuary state in the union.

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER

Tucker interviews Peter Brimelow

Discussion between two guys who have known all the players in Conservatism Inc. Could be harder edged on the Jewish role.

Peter Brimelow on the Invasion of America, Who’s Behind It, and How Long Until Total Collapse

Tucker [00:00:04] Peter Brimelow, thank you so much for doing this. I thought of you last week when I read this, I don’t know how much you follow X, but there were a couple exchanges that suggested to me that things are changing very, very fast. Okay, so here’s one. This is a tweet from last week, less than a week ago from a basically anonymous account and I’m quoting, if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-whites openly hate white men, while white men hold a collective majority. Then they will be a thousand times more hostile and cruel when there are a majority over whites white solidarity is the only way to survive okay that’s on the internet elon musk retweets it and says 100 percent and then elon Musk writes this if current trends continue whites will go from being a small minority of the world population today to virtually extinct exclamation point All of that, in my opinion, is obviously true, and I think most people know it. But I read that and I thought, here’s the world’s richest man who owns this platform and a lot of other things saying this. And Peter Bremlow, who I know, who’s a thoroughly decent person, has had his life turned upside down and basically been destroyed in some ways, professionally anyway, for saying things that are way more restrained for that than that. So I have to ask you what it feels like to see that.

Peter Brimelow [00:01:33] It feels kind of tingly on the one hand, I’m happy that the debate has moved in that direction and the things that we were talking about 25 years ago on vdaer.com, which was my website, both about citizenship and so on, and now in the public debate. On the other hand, we’ve been ruined and we’re facing personal ruin of course because of this attack on us by the New York Attorney General Letitia James. As nobody knows who I am Tucker, I should say that, you know, I’m a long time, it’s part of my accent, I’ve been here for 55 years and I’m a long-time financial journalist. I work for Forbes and, and, uh, and fortune and the Barons and so on. And, uh. And I worked for National Review, I wrote for National Review a lot and I wrote a piece on immigration in 1992 saying time to rethink immigration. That’s sometimes credit with kicking off the modern debate. Uh. And there was a brief civil war within the conservative movement at that point, which we lost, and Buckley stabbed us in the back and purged the magazine of immigration patriots. And for the next while, you know, the Wolf’s Journal editorial page was absolutely dominant, and there was going on about the need for amnesty, and there’s no way to combat it. So I set up a website, which I named V-Dare.com after Virginia Dare, the first English child, not white shards as they always say, born in the new world. And over a period of about 25 years we built up into quite a force until about two years ago it was destroyed by the New York Attorney General, Tisha James, who just basically subpoenaed us to death and has in fact now sued us personally and through the foundation. So we’re a bit like General Flynn, you know, no middle class family can start up to this. General Flynn had to sell his house and we’re going to face, we’re driven into and bankruptcy, I guess.

Tucker [00:03:27] It’s a horrifying story. I’ve kept abreast of it through your wife who texts me as a wonderful person. And I know that you’re a man of great personal decency and restraint and basically a great citizen and the kind of immigrant we need, and I’m grateful to have. So the whole thing is shocking and so revealing, but I’d like, if you don’t mind, to start closer to the beginning of this story. With your experience at National Review. 1992, you said you wrote this piece saying time to rethink immigration, which I remember well. At the time, National Review really was a forum for conservatives to think through what it meant to be conservative. So that was a significant piece at the time. And then you said Bill Buckley, the then editor William F. Buckley Jr. Stabbed you in the back. Can you tell a story?

Peter Brimelow [00:04:18] What happened exactly? Oh, sure. I was never on staff at national rate, but I was what they called a senior editor, and I wrote for it a lot, and in 992, I wrote this very long cover story, it’s about 14,000 words. Bill had retired as the editor of that. He was just circling around in the background, but the then-editor, Jonas Orven, ran with the, went with his story, and for about five years, we basically directly challenged the, uh, the… The official conservative line, which was that immigration is good, more immigration is better, illegal immigration is very good, that’s what the Wall Street Journal said, and still saying as far as I can tell. Yes. And then at the end of five years in 97, Bill just abruptly without any warning at So I fired O’Sullivan and purged a magazine of her. Of immigration patriots and basically told us to shut up about it, told them all to shut up about immigration, which of course they all eagerly did. He put the Washington bureau in charge, Rich Lowry and Panouro and so on. And so for them, for two or three years, you couldn’t get even the basic facts about immigration out to the public. But then came along and you know rescued us and I started vda.com

Tucker [00:05:31] But may I ask you to pause and explain why that happened? Why do you think Bill Buckley, who was retired and letting John O’Sullivan run it, another Brit?

Peter Brimelow [00:05:40] Yes, indeed.

Tucker [00:05:41] Um who now is in Budapest. Why do you think that he stepped back in from retirement to shut down that conversation specifically?

Peter Brimelow [00:05:53] Of course I’ve had 20 odd years to think about that and the answer is that over the time my answers evolved, at the time I thought he was just jealous, this is actually a thing you see, I was a financial journalist for a long time, it’s a thing you see often in the corporate world, entrepreneurs will come back and purge the fire, the managers that they put in to replace themselves, that’s a huge jealousy. I think the Congressional Republicans hated us talking about immigration because it upsets Donut And I think that was influential with Bill. He liked being lionized by the then Republican majority in the House.

Tucker [00:06:30] So the Republican leadership didn’t like it, Newt Gingrich, etc., who was ascendant, came in in 94, to much, much fanfare, achieved not a lot, but they’re the ones who pressured Bill Buckley, you believe.

Peter Brimelow [00:06:46] I think that was true, but I also think that the neocons in New York hated it, hated the line. And Bill was very, very leery of offending the Neoconservatives, people like Norman Podhoretz and so on. And I think they pressured him to, I mean, I know they pressured them to get rid of John. Now, why would they care? Oh, because at that point, the Neoconservatives were a predominantly Jewish faction. They had this sort of Ellis Island view of America. They wanted to, they’re extremely frightened of the white majority in America becoming self-conscious because they feel as Jews that it will leave the mountain in the cold.

Tucker [00:07:33] Despite the fact there’s never been any real anti-Semitic movement in the United States, there’s no evidence that white people becoming aware of the fact that they’re white is a threat to Jews. I don’t know where that comes from.

Peter Brimelow [00:07:48] And I actually think there’s a certain sort of jealousy there, you know, they didn’t like, I mean, if you look at ideas on the right in the recent years, a lot of them originated out of neoconservatism, but here was a non-neoconservatism factor. We would have then described ourselves as paleoconservatives coming up with the whole idea and the whole issue, because the immigration issue was completely dormant from 1968 when Hart-Celler kicked in. Until the early nineties, but there was no discussion of it at all. I actually went through National Reviews archives and I found that they hadn’t discussed immigration at all between the passage of the 65 act and until the early nineties, people simply didn’t realize what was going on. What, why? I think there are a couple of reasons. So one is that, you know, there was a pause in immigration from 1924 to about 1968. So a whole generation grew up when there was essentially no immigration at all into the U.S. And so it just wasn’t an issue to them. And you know what happens with, it’s like an academic life, where they have an academic theory. It’s not that it conquers the other theorists by being better and better arguments, it’s just that the people who hold the earlier theories die off, and they’re replaced by younger. And that’s true for politicians too. A whole generation of politicians had never thought about this issue, and I include Ronald Reagan in that to me. It simply wasn’t an issue when he was growing up. And that’s why he was hornswoggled by this, the Amnesty in 1986. He actually genuinely thought that the government would exchange amnesty for serious enforcement, whereas in fact he just took the amnesty and didn’t enforce the law against illegal immigration at all.

Tucker [00:09:30] But I’m a little bit fixated on William Buckley because he was such a dominant force.

Peter Brimelow [00:09:38] Let me just back up a second. What I think now is, I think looking at National Review now, it’s obviously donor-driven, and we weren’t aware of that in the 90s. I wasn’t even aware. I didn’t think about donors and their role in politics really until some years later than that. We thought that people just got up and argued and you just simply didn’t realize how dominant or how important the donors are. I think now we’re looking back in a particularly given bill.Buckley was not as wealthy as he wanted people to think. And he depended on National Review financially to a considerable extent. It financed his lifestyle to a considerably extent. And I think that- Wait, he depended on the magazine? Yeah, yeah, I think- I think the rest of us thought the magazine depended upon him. Yeah, that’s what he wanted you to think, but in fact, it did finance his lifestyle to a conceivable extent. And- The winters in Gstaad and the sailing across the Bermuda race and- I don’t know how much, but there was certainly quite a lot that was deducted or expensed to the magazine. In any case, he just didn’t want to disrupt the donor flow, and the more I think about that, the more that probably was the reason.

Tucker [00:10:51] Basically a species of fraud. I don’t mean against the tax code. I mean, it’s intellectual fraud. It’s you’re making the case that you believe these things because they are true when in fact, you’re taking money to say them.

Peter Brimelow [00:11:09] I think Bill actually, my experience with Bill is that he actually was not very interested in politics. When he went to those dinners he used to put on 73, 73rd Street, it was very hard to talk about politics. He was always wandering off in odd directions and you can see that in the way he lived his life, latterly, in writing these books and so on. He just basically didn’t do any serious thinking about politics, initially he was very, I have a letter from him actually saying how wonderful my immigration story is. But, and, uh, and it was, you know, if I get what he said, but he said it was beautifully organized and beautifully argued and the tone was perfect. And that, that sort of stuff. He never admitted that he changed his mind on immigration. He just, he, he just said, told them to stop covering it. Uh, but the official, the official line of the magazine was that the immigration was, was questionable. They just didn’t do any journalism on it, which is how he was about drug legalization. He-he-he was officially in favor of drug legalization, but he very rarely let the magazine write about him. Uh, I guess he was balancing a number of, a number of issues, uh, in the case of immigration. He, you know, I, I think he’s don’t as immigration was a very unfathomable subject in the. I remember. And, uh. Uh, we were, I was, we, as we were talking earlier, uh I was watching Ben Shapiro on, on, uh Megan Kelly and Kelly. Yes. Uh, and he was attacking you for some reason or I forget what. And he was saying that, then he suddenly says, but Tucker’s good on some things, he’s good on immigration. Well, as I understand it, you’re interested in the idea of immigration moratorium and so on. Of course. This news to me, that’s what Ben Shapiro thinks is good about immigration. Right, well. I mean, just about five or six years ago, in National Review, he called me a white supremacist for basically, for no other reason than advocating immigration reduction. And those days, if you’re back in the old days if you were I advocated immigration control, you’re immediately suspect, you immediately suspect of being anti-Semite, even though there’s no direct connection at all. And now they’ve changed their mind on this, they’ve fallen back. I mean, Norman, before he died, I was very friendly with Norman, he didn’t talk to me for the last 10 years of his life, but he died just a few weeks ago, at the age of 95, but just before he’d died he gave an interview in which he said he’d changed his mind on immigration. He thought there was a limit to how much immigration could be absorbed. And he credited John O’Sullivan, the edge of National Review, for helping change his mind. He didn’t mention me. Why didn’t he speak to you for the last 10 years of his life? Well, I think he just decided that I was a suspicious character and I deviate on the immigration issue. And he suspected I had the habit of calling the National Review, the Goldberg Review, because at that stage briefly it was dominated by John and Goldberg, who I think is a complete fraud and lightweight, and of course was absolutely boneheaded on the immigration.

Tucker [00:14:11] Well, he’s certainly a lightweight. It’s hard to know what he believes or doesn’t, but he certainly, I mean, if Jonah Goldberg is like your intellectual force, then you’ve been degraded.

Peter Brimelow [00:14:23] Well, Norman actually emailed me and said, you’ve got to stop calling national view the Goldberg review because it sounds anti-Semitic. Actually, my understanding is that Goldberg is not technically Jewish. His mother was a Gentile. I knew her. She was a great person, actually. I replied and said that and he didn’t get bad, but he just gradually suspected more and he suspects me more and more of thought crime. And Norman was an extremely passionate man. He didn’t. Oh, so famously. He didn’t, uh, he didn’t uh, uh he didn’t socialize with, with, w with, uh opponents. I miss him. I, I really liked him. I was so, I was sorry that

Tucker [00:15:03] There was a lot about him that was appealing, he was a man of great energy, and I admired him in a lot of ways, kind of repulsive in others, but certainly he was not standing still, he constantly in motion and I admire that.

Peter Brimelow [00:15:15] And I actually owe his wife a midget act a lot because she was the chair thing of the Philadelphia Society, which is a conservative affinity group, and she invited me to speak on immigration in I guess 2005, and that’s where I met, my first wife had just died, and that is where I meet my current wife Lydia, who of course was running the Vida Foundation with me. She was the publisher of Vida.com, and he’s had her on of course.

Tucker [00:15:40] Oh, of course. And I’m a fan. She’s a brave woman and a smart one. May I ask what happened to your relationship with Bill Buckley?

Peter Brimelow [00:15:53] I, uh, when he fired John O’Sullivan, I was the only one of the entire staff who went in and asked, why did you fire him? What? Yeah. Well, the official line was John had resigned to write a book. That was because, uh John was very popular with, uh with the National Review, uh base and the immigration issue was, was, um, was very pop and so he didn’t want to admit that he was dumping them both. Uh, so he got really ruffled because he wasn’t used to being challenged and, and said, uh, he’s a nice writer, writer, book and resigned writer book. And, and, uh, we get basically never spoke to each other after that. I mean, uh I was constructed dismissed from national view. I got a letter to tell me I was no longer a senior editor, which was actually very, very important in, uh. In neither national view world because it was run like a fraternity. And, uh if you, if you were senior ed, you were automatically invited to all kinds of events and so on and to his dinners and all that kind of thing. And I never wrote for it again. Why did they dismiss you, do you think? Oh, well, I’m sure that the Washington Bureau was always upset with the immigration issue because it embarrassed them in Washington cocktail parties, you know, and he put the Washington bureau in charge of the magazine. So I’m they would be happy to do it. And they didn’t want to write about immigration. And I think also, you know mud sticks talk. So, you know, this constant whispering campaign of how I was a racist and anti-Semite for raising these issues, it sticks and it has stuck so that, you know, even though Ben Shapiro is now in his favor of just talking about immigration, I don’t see him apologizing to me.

Tucker [00:17:37] No, well of course not, he doesn’t care about you at all or other people at all.

Peter Brimelow [00:17:42] I had a really interesting experience recently, we, Lydia and I were at an ISI book event and I bought Matthew and Cottonette’s book, I mean I actually bought it, I put down my, it’s a rotten, awful book about the conservative movement, since I was born in Canada, which obviously wasn’t. Well it’s the silhouette, he’s a silhouette, I’m mean it’s all, this is Bill Crystal Sun at large. Bill Crystal Sun, well that’s the point, I took it up to him, I like to collect inscribed books, in fact I forgot to bring your book I’m sorry, but, and he wouldn’t sign them. He wouldn’t inscribe it. He said, I have nothing to say to you. And the really weird thing about this is that- Well, what crowd? I mean, I don’t think you’ve ever said it.

Tucker [00:18:19] That I’m aware of an antisemitic thing in your life. I don’t think you’re an antisemite.

Peter Brimelow [00:18:24] Well, Cotnett is a convert, of course, so he’s probably very, you know, particularly ardent. But the weird thing about this was that Cotnet had actually written some quite sensible things on immigration, which is odd when you think of his father-in-law.

Tucker [00:18:38] But he said to your face, I won’t inscribe your book because I have nothing to say to you? Essentially.

Peter Brimelow [00:18:45] He signed it, but he wouldn’t inscribe it, and then he said nothing to say to you. It’s kind of surprising, and we live out there in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia and we don’t have to face this stuff, but I guess when you’re in DC you face it all the time.

Tucker [00:19:00] Yeah, well, I left, but I also believe in forgiveness, and that’s kind of the difference, I think. I mean, we’re commanded to believe in forgiveness and to treat people as human beings. No one didn’t believe them. No, I’m very aware of that, very aware that.

Peter Brimelow [00:19:14] Principal position with it.

Tucker [00:19:15] It’s a principle, but it’s a satanic principle that you can’t forgive other people. That is, you’re not forgiven if you don’t. So that’s my view. But wow, that’s amazing. So you were just cast out.

Peter Brimelow [00:19:27] Well, the thing is, he’d already signed the book, so I couldn’t give it, he signed it and described it, I couldn’t give it back, get my money back. Whereas conversely, Yoram Hazony was also there. Hazony, as you know, banned us from his National Conservative Conference because he said he didn’t think we were appropriate. And so we have, and we had a series of bitter exchanges in V-Day, but Hazony is perfectly friendly and he signed the book and inscribed it and we chatted about children and grandchildren and so on.

Tucker [00:19:55] Yarmuzoni is a very courtly man, a very charming and warm person, I’ll say. I had lunch with him once and I don’t agree with him on a lot, but I, um, I, I was, I liked him. It’s hard not to like him.

Peter Brimelow [00:20:08] I think he’s very good, a lot of the stuff he says about consumerism isn’t exactly accurate to me. But I think that’s right. He’s moving it away from being classical liberalism. The problem of course is that he’s caught in this bind because he doesn’t want to admit that Israel is an ethno-state, because he does not want America to have ethno state, he wants them to be, to be a cult, a civic.

Tucker [00:20:31] What do you mean, won’t admit, I mean, Israel is by its own description an ethnostate.

Peter Brimelow [00:20:38] Yeah, but he keeps arguing that…

Tucker [00:20:40] List on the tag.

Peter Brimelow [00:20:41] Yeah, well, you know, I’ve never been able to get him to explain how you cannot say that there’s a racial component to Israel when the whole, when of course the Jewish religion is racially based. Of course. I mean, that’s why they have the matrilineal principle where you’ve got to have a Jewish mother. And I’ve not seen him respond to that, and I don’t think he can, because he doesn’t want to encourage straight up white nationalism in America.

Tucker [00:21:11] I just want to be clear about my own views, not that it matters, but just because I hold them sincerely, I have no problem with the fact that Israel is an ethno-state. It’s their country. You can have whatever state you want, as far as I’m concerned. But it is an ethnostate. By definition, the people who founded it were not religious. A lot of them were atheists. And they identified as Jewish racially. Again, I’ve no problem at that at all. That’s their county. But to say it’s not an ethnostate is not only a lie, but it’s like a ludicrous lie. And in.

Peter Brimelow [00:21:43] He won’t admit that. That’s my reading of what he wants, that’s all he’s saying, but it’s one of the situations where his civic nationalism is so intense that it might just as well be ethnic nationalism if for the US. A lot of things he says about immigration to the US are excellent.

Tucker [00:21:57] Right, I agree. And I’m not attacking your Amazonian at all, whom I like, but that’s dishonest because Israel is an ethnostate and you should just tell the truth about, especially about obvious things, right?

Peter Brimelow [00:22:11] Well, that’s what I would call double-think, isn’t it? You’ve got to believe two contradictory things at once and it’s necessary to operate in large parts of the political world.

Tucker [00:22:21] Interesting. So, but why wouldn’t people who support an ethnostate in Israel want one here? I mean, why would they object to that so strongly?

Peter Brimelow [00:22:31] I mean, of course, this is the profound question about the American Jewish role in the American immigration debate. They’re overwhelmingly pro-immigration. However, having said that, you know, typically, if you know anything about Jewish intellectual life, you’ll know there are people on the other side, and some people very hard on the other. Oh, are you?

Tucker [00:22:47] Oh, I, and I know a lot of them, why I would never be anti-Semitic. Cause I, I mean, you can’t generalize, you know,

Peter Brimelow [00:22:53] I mean, I have a hunch that Stephen Miller, who of course is an aid to Trump, I think he’s the deputy chief of staff or something, he’s going to be the first Jewish president. I say this because it’s hard, the prospect horrifies people so much. But he’s like Disraeli in Britain, Benjamin Disrael, of course, was Jewish, but converted to Episcopalianism, he was converted by his father to very early age, his father and took the whole family over to being Episcopalians. He basically reinvented the Conservative Party in the 19th century, he came up with a complete grand strategy for it based on the empire and imperial patriotism and so on. And that really carried the party through for the next term. 80 or 90 years, a couple of generations, the Conservative Party in Britain was a nationalist party and because of being a nationalist party you’ve got a very substantial working-class vote because it is the blue collar workers who are the patriots and the Conservative Party was able to tap into that, Miller’s done the same thing. He’s invented a grand strategy for the Republican Party, which he desperately doesn’t want to take up because it’s run by cowards and fools. But he thinks they should move towards, you know, re-stabilizing America’s ethnic balance and basically eliminating this immigrant inflow, which is causing all kinds of problems for the lower skilled workers and ultimately changing the racial balance. And he’s not afraid to admit that. And not only that, but he had the cunning to survive the Kushner White House. I mean, that was really extraordinary because Jared Kushner, of course, believed exactly the opposite. He’s basically a liberal New York Jew. But for some reason, Miller was able to survive with him. I couldn’t have done that. So, and I wouldn’t have abandoned Jeff Sessions in the way that he did. Sessions was his close aide and was his mentor. Then. Miller abandons him when Trump turns against him. I couldn’t have done that either, but then he’s in the White House and I’m not. Yeah, no, I think those are all.

Tucker [00:25:09] Fair and true observations. It’s interesting though the degree to which the immigration project is a demographic project. I mean, it has almost explicitly been an effort to make America less white. They’ll say that. It’s not controversial. I mean you could prove it on video or didn’t even bother to because I think most people watching us already know that. Its architects, starting with Teddy Kennedy in 1965, basically just said, ultimately admitted, this, the whole point is to make America less white and non-majority white country. Why is it so hard for conservatives to say the same? If Democrats are saying we want America to be non-white, why can’t conservatives say that that’s what their motive is?

Peter Brimelow [00:26:00] I have to say that Kendi didn’t say that when he was the floor manager of the Heart Seller Arctic. He gave a very explicit assurance. He loved to quote saying that this will not alter the racial balance of America and it will not mean a million people a year will be coming in. Whereas in fact a million a year are coming in and that’s one of the reasons I bitterly regret not having Vidare even though I have my own peterbrimow.com sub stack. That’s not the same kind of voice because we’ve got to get legal immigration to the debate here. I think what Trump has done on illegal immigration is remarkable and more and more remarkable than people realize, but we’re not doing anything on legal immigration. But I’m sorry, that means I’ve not answered your question. What was your question?

Tucker [00:26:45] Well, my question was the whole point of the project was not to like feed a desperate need for low skilled labor. That definitely no longer exists now with AI. And it wasn’t to improve America, it’s completely destroyed America, destroyed the state.

Peter Brimelow [00:27:02] Well, when I was writing the book I wrote on immigration alienation that flowed out of my cover story, the 95 book, which HarperCollins refused to reprint, I caught in a man called Earl Raab, who is a Jewish activist and so on, and he explicitly said that Jews were mass non-white immigration because it makes the rise of a, I didn’t use the term neo-Nazi but that’s what he meant, you know, a party in America impossible. In fact, he does the exact opposite, it makes it more likely. Well, exactly. Well, he did say that and he quite calmly said that this is why most Jews favor…

Tucker [00:27:43] Well, it’s also made the rise of hard edged anti-Israel politics. And I’m not pro Israel, especially, but I don’t, I don’t hate Israel, a lot of people who hate Israel are immigrants.

Peter Brimelow [00:27:55] Show them a look at the new york’s new yorker mirage well exactly and army won because the immigrant vote exactly exactly needs to be a tip on the native-born american new yorgos and gone those look at who they are for god’s sake i mean i mean uh… But they voted for uh… Against mandel exactly uh… Uh… So so they’ve really screwed themselves up this hasn’t worked for us

Tucker [00:28:15] I mean, if your interest was to keep anti-Semitism and really kind of crazy anti-Israel sentiment to a minimum, and I agree with that, I’m against anti-semitism and I’m like, basing our life on hating Israel, that seems kind of… If that was your goal, I mean, you literally achieve the opposite result. Is that, is that fair to say? Not for the first time. Yeah. Fair, fair. Um, so maybe think maybe that wasn’t the goal. I don’t know. I’m just guessing here. Maybe there was another goal that we don’t understand, but.

Peter Brimelow [00:28:47] Well, I think a lot of it is deeply emotional and can’t be analyzed intellectually. That’s just a whole series of reflexes. Or spiritual. But you know, one of the reasons, we know that the New York Attorney General’s attack on us was basically instigated by the Anti-Defamation League. Because a journalist we know actually got the ADL to admit this, that Latisha Jameson told her to take Fideira out. And we say to ourselves, why us, Jews? What have we ever done to you? We have the Berkeley Springs Castle in West Virginia, which we bought as a conference venue because we’re not allowed to have conferences anywhere else. The donor was Jewish. We had all kinds of Jewish donors and all kinds Jewish writers, but that doesn’t make any difference.

Tucker [00:29:38] To the idea all apart. Now to what happened to you and to VDAR. So you’re expelled both from National Review and you leave your old life as a financial journalist behind. I think it’s a fair summary. And then you create this organization called VDar named after Virginia Dare, the first British child born in the Americas. And it becomes successful, it becomes big and it’s not anti-Semitic, it’s no racist, it’s against changing America’s populations for immigration. Is that a fair summary?

Peter Brimelow [00:30:08] Yeah, I stayed in financial journalism for a long time. V-Day was kind of a moonlighting project. How’d you pull that off? It was very difficult. And, of course, eventually it became impossible. And I was fired both from Forbes and from CBS, what used to be CBS Market Watch became Dow Jones Market Watch. In both cases, it was during turn downs in the markets, but I happened to be the You know they chose to fire me rather than people who were frankly less valuable to them. So it did in the end terminate my career in the mainstream media. But on the other hand, we were developing Vidaire very rapidly and it became a quite a big deal. In 2019 we raised nearly four million dollars which enabled us to buy the castle and do all kinds of other things. Of course, it’s been utterly destroyed now. Out of it, you know, it was suspended two years ago and I resigned, so, you know, I’m supporting the family now on the pensions and savings and so on. And I do have a family, I have minor children, so it’s kind of irritating.

Tucker [00:31:19] Irritating doesn’t begin to describe it. So tell the story if you would. You’re running V-Dare and somehow Letitia James, who’s the

Peter Brimelow [00:31:31] Churchill of New York. There is a 5-1-C-3 charity and it was registered in New York in 1999 entirely because I then pro bono lawyer happened to be barred in New york and therefore that was convenient for him and this was when you know the Republican governor in New York and nobody ever heard of lawfare, nobody heard of it. The idea of law fair that this kind of exploitation of regulatory power never occurred to anybody at that point. Well, because we registered in New York, even though we don’t operate in New York, she was able to demand that we one day woke up and found we got these them these massive subpoenas, uh, demanding all kinds of documents, including all our email going back to 2016. And of course that was a huge problem because if she got that, she would have the names of our donors and our anonymous pseudonymous writers. And, uh I had people writing for me whose career would have been ruined if they were fired.

Tucker [00:32:27] I mean, ask him what, okay, so you’re not domiciled in New York, you’re not operating in New york, you know, nothing. Or you’re registered in New York.

Peter Brimelow [00:32:33] That’s the key point.

Tucker [00:32:33] But the 501CT is registered in New York, right?

Peter Brimelow [00:32:36] And you can’t get out, you’ve got to have her permission to get out and you know. You can’t change states? No, we can only with her permission and in some circumstances if we were to set up another 5-1-C-3 and start operating out of that she would claim that we were transferring assets and she could claim jurisdiction over that, it’s a huge mess. And we had very expensive lawyers looking at it for a long time but even before she came along and hit us with this. But may I ask on what grounds she should subpoenas to you in West Australia? They shouldn’t have to give grounds. Well, what she said was she wanted to investigate the castle purchase, which we did in 2000, or more accurately, I should say, Lydia did it in 2000. Because as you know, we had maybe a dozen, depends how you count, but a dozen or 15 conferences canceled. Hotels would accept a booking, then they would cancel as soon as they came under pressure from the left. And we realized we were never going to be able to have a conference, so we bought our own venue. And she wanted investigate that. Well, of course, all that purchase was very carefully lawed precisely because we knew she would want to investigate it, but it doesn’t make any difference. She demanded that and she demanded all kinds of other things. The really killing thing for us was demanding all the email. We had to turn over more than a million documents, the really killing things was demanding the email because we know if she got the writer’s names and the donor’s names, she would release them. She did that with Nikki Haley. They leaked her, her, the donors to her pack. And the papers that you saw that gave the names of Nikki Haley’s daughters were actually, the led head was the New York attorney general’s office. But of course nobody ever came after her. I’m just confused. Did she have evidence she committed a crime? No, she was looking for evidence. And she’s not found it, but she’s charged us anyway. Well she hasn’t charged us, it’s not a criminal thing, but, she’s suing us anyway

Tucker [00:34:30] My impression my guess my guess is that the Trump administration will begin to ignore the courts in some cases and People will say that this is the beginning of fascism and a takeover of the destruction of our legal system And you know, that’s a fair point No, I would not a fair part. Well exactly it’s right. That’s exactly what I’m about to say exactly it has already been destroyed. And when the attorney general of the state you don’t live or operate in can destroy you because she doesn’t like your opinions, then we don’t have a functioning legal system, period. And this happened before Trump. So I just wanna say that.

Peter Brimelow [00:35:11] One of the wonderful things that has happened within the last year is that a very enterprising journalist actually dug up a speech made to the ADL, they had a conference called Taking Hate to Court, by Rick Sawyer, who is one of Letitia James operatives, and he is the one who’s leading the charge against us. And he said at this, in this, to this conference that hate speech, that’s us, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, but there are ways around that. All you have to do, if it’s a charity and you have jurisdiction, is to start issuing subpoenas. He said it sucks to be sued, just subpoena them to death. And of course that’s exactly what he’s done to us. They inflicted over a million, nearly a million and a half dollars in out of pocket costs for lawyers and so on, let alone the hundreds of hours that lady had to spend digging through documents and so on. Which meant that she couldn’t fundraise or do any of the They just destroy you through the process of punishment, they just destroy that way. So he’s actually openly admitting this. So when we saw this we thought, oh it’s all over, they’ve obviously admitted that what they’re doing is not, it’s political, it is not because of some regulatory concern. But we’ve been totally unable to get the federal court to pay attention to this. Uh, we’re trying again now, we have a- We have what they call a 983 action against Letitia James and the operatives personally and we’re trying to raise this First Amendment question there, but the courts have been extremely resistant to looking at it.

Tucker [00:36:42] I mean, if the attorney general or staff are admitting they’re destroying you because they disagree with your opinions, it seems to me that any federal court would take that up because that’s a foundational question.

Peter Brimelow [00:36:56] What we thought. But in fact, the first time we did it, they’d called simply dodging a technical issue. They came up with a technical excuse to dodge it, and we have Troy trying again now, but you know, we just have to hope for the best. I think one of the things that, it’s clear to me. I mean, from looking at our litigation experience, which is now considerably goes far beyond this situation, another case I’m aware of is that there seems to have been some message gone out from Judge Central that anything that’s quote unquote a white nationalist has got to be suppressed by any means necessary. In our case, the classic example is we had a hotel cancel in Colorado Springs, And they Well, Cora was not with them because they paid up the liquidated damages like men and it was a lot of money. But they canceled because the mayor of Colorado Springs, who was a rhino, John Suthers, had said he wouldn’t extend police protection to the conference. In other words, Antifa could go in and- He wouldn’t extent police protection? Yes, that’s right. Now, this is an issue that- He’s threatening to kill you. That’s right And who is this? His name was John Sothers. He was the mayor. Of who was the Republican of

Tucker [00:38:19] John Suthers, the mayor of Colorado Springs, basically threatened to allow mortal violence against you if you went to his… That’s right.

Peter Brimelow [00:38:28] Now this is an issue which has been extensively litigated in the civil rights era, and the point was made very clear that by the courts, that the local authorities, the local government have to extend protection to people’s First Amendment rights. In other words, in those days, the black demonstrators would go into it, would have meetings in the city and the local whites would be angry about it, but those whites had to be kept away, the blacks had to have their meetings. Well, we litigated this right up to the Supreme Court. And which refused to take the issue up, and there was a, the appeals court in Colorado rejected us, and I believe it had at least one, we had one good judge there who said this is obviously an attack on First Amendment rights, but the other two who I think were Republican appointees, to vote against us. So we lost, and we weren’t able to, our initial lawyer, civil rights litigation is extremely damaging if you’re on the wrong side of it, I mean there’s enormous damages involved, so it would have been a huge sort of victory and we would have actually been made whole in a very dramatic way, and our initial lawyers in Cardiff Springs were so keen on this, it was so obvious, open and showcase, that he took it on contingency you know. But as soon as you realized that the city was going to resist, you ran away and we had to start paying our lawyers to litigate him. Well, anyway, subsequently there was a case before the Supreme Court, New York, I guess it was Volo, it was called the Volo case, V-U-L-L. And this was a place where the communists in New York were putting pressure on insurance companies not to insure the NRA. And the N.R.A. Fought it, and it won. And in the decision, Kadenti Jackson says, the NOS case is strong, but it’s essentially unpowerful. It’s not as strong as Vidar’s case, where they were denied police, but where the state agency basically discriminates against them on political grounds. What’s this? We never heard about this. Well, it turns out that 16 attorneys general had signed an amicus brief. Saying that the appeals court in Colorado had been wrong to reject our attempt to sue Colorado Springs on a civil rights theory and that it was wrong for the following reasons and for that reason the Supreme Court should take up the NRA’s case against, NRA vs Volo I guess it was called, and the Supreme court did take it up and ruled against the state New York 9-0, which of course does us absolutely no good whatever. Because we’re out all that money and, you know, our first memorize are not protected. I mean, in other words, there’s a real determination on the part of, the NRA is apparently more partable than we are.

Tucker [00:41:20] I’m a little bit confused conceptually with the idea that white self-awareness is effectively illegal in the United States, whereas ethnic self- awareness in every other group is encouraged. Doesn’t make any sense. Speak for myself, I’d rather live in a deracialized world where people think about it less because it does cause problems, but as long as you’re encouraging identity politics, why do whites not get to have it? What is the answer?

Peter Brimelow [00:41:49] Well, it’s completely hypocritical. It’s because the people running the society are anti-white and they’ve been able to persuade or intimidate the entire legal system to operate in an anti-White way. Anti-White in this case really means anti-American, I mean, because the whites are Americans, that’s who Americans are, you know, the people who signed the Declaration of Independence.

Tucker [00:42:15] I did know that and the purpose of the project, like big picture, again, I keep going back to this, but I’m just, I am a little bit confused because this is the defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated and I would like to know why. Do you have any guesses?

Peter Brimelow [00:42:34] As I say, I think it derives from emotion rather than a kind of rational calculation. I mean if you look at what’s happened in South Africa or for that matter in every big American black city that’s majority black, I mean they can’t want it to get into a situation where the water is putrid and nothing works and all that kind of thing, but they do. So what they know the purpose system is is what it does and that’s right and the purpose of You know, non-white government is to produce non-White government and non- White results. Unless of course you’re Chinese, because Singapore’s run Japanese, they’re run very efficiently.

Tucker [00:43:13] They are it’s just interesting that people move here because it’s a white country and we see to run it into the ground Yes Well all of us benefit white and non-white benefit alike from systems created by whites because they’re more humane They’re more just they’re fair and they’re much more efficient and cleaner obviously

Peter Brimelow [00:43:33] You know, I was looking at an interview, if I can interrupt you, I did somebody sent me an interview I did for Forbes magazine with Milton Friedman and I asked him, are there cultural prerequisites for capitalism? And he said, yes, I think it’s, and now as you know, he’s a very fire-breathing libertarian and, but he actually thought about this question and he said that, you know he said capitalism is really only ever worked in the English speaking countries. I don’t know why this is so, but the fact has to be admitted. There’s some kind of a cultural underpinning for capitalism, what economists call a meta-market, a framework where meta- market operates. So the question is, why are these capitalists, why is the Chamber of Commerce suing to keep the H1B flow coming, when it’s obviously going to produce people like Mandami who don’t support capitalism and in fact hate it, what are the capitalists doing? While they’re doing what Lenin said, they will sell us the rope. By which we hang them.

Tucker [00:44:37] And I mean, that’s demonstrable. It was true in 1917. It’s true in 2026. Do you think it’s the product of short-term thinking?

Peter Brimelow [00:44:47] Oh, in the case of business people, of course it did. The Malayan influence, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, a whole generation of businesspeople actually believe all this nonsense. It’s very hard to get out of their heads because they never allowed, I mean, they never allow criticism of immigration on the editorial page.

Tucker [00:45:05] So you’ve referred repeatedly to the Wall Street Journal and also to Harper Collins. Both of them are owned by the Murdoch family. What’s been your experience with the Murdocks?

Peter Brimelow [00:45:14] Well, you know, I… I, uh… Uh, I spent well over a year working for Rupert, um, in, I think that’s 1990, uh, on a ghosting his autobiography, uh which was never published, for various reasons, he changed his mind about it. But I have to say he was extraordinarily generous to me personally and he continued to be extraordinarily generous until very recently when, when, um… I guess I had been on the payroll quietly for a very long time and they dropped me when you came under attack because somebody looked into people on the pay roll and they found that this thought criminal was on the Payroll. So at that point I was dropped but he’s always been extraordinarily generous to me.

Tucker [00:45:58] That is my experience with Rupert Murdoch in my life.

Peter Brimelow [00:46:00] It’s not the case with a lot of these characters, a lot these molds, Robert Maxwell and so on. I remember Rupert telling me once that he thought that Maxwell, as you know, fell off his yacht off the Canary Islands and was found dead. Ruperts theory was this guy is such a jerk that the crew probably couldn’t see him.

Tucker [00:46:20] I don’t understand him anymore. That is one theory. His lawyer told me that he was murdered by the Israelis for whom he worked. I don’t t know the truth of that. But he certainly had a lot of enemies and a lot suspects in that crime. But I mean he was a personal employee. That’s not the case with Rupert. He’s not cruel. He’s no vindictive. Ruper is one of the most personally gracious people I’ve ever met in my life. I mean, he has perfect manners. He is truly Anglo in that way. And I never had a bad time with him. Always agree. Even when he fired me, I talked to him after and he couldn’t have been nicer. So I strongly agree with your assessment, but he kept you on the payroll for decades.

Peter Brimelow [00:46:58] So I had five children born on his health care. I had some born on health care too.

Tucker [00:47:05] God bless you, Rupert Murdoch!

Peter Brimelow [00:47:09] It was very good. I mean, no, it’s a, I mean I don’t know. The truth should be told good and bad. Um, so essentially I was a consoler for him and I, and he didn’t console me at all, uh, because of course I would have told him to do the exact opposite of what he was actually doing, but, but I, I have no complaints.

Tucker [00:47:25] Yes, no, I, I just want to say out loud, I agree with you 100% through much experience, 25 years. Um, so, but it does, it does raise the question as it does with Bill Buckley, then, you know, Rupert has great personal decency, um, that I, and I’ve seen it, but his, the editorial product is aggressively opposed to American, basic American interests. So like, what is that? This guy likes America. He treats people around him well There’s a lot good to say about Rupert, but the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, HarperCollins, like all of them are engaged in a very aggressive campaign against America’s interests. So why, why is that? Do you know?

Peter Brimelow [00:48:10] Well, I think he handed over the sort of intellectual, the thinking part of News Corporation or 21st Century Fox, whatever it’s called now, to the neoconservatives. And so he took on a lot of neoconsiderate baggage at that point. I mean, they used to run an editorial every year saying there ought to be a constitutional amendment, there shall be open borders, you know. I mean it was really lunatic and I believe that’s still the case. But why would he do that? First of all, because they’re very good. They’re extremely active, full of ideas, full of energy, they were extremely good in the Cold War. They were, that’s correct. But that was then, and this is now, and they just simply haven’t made the transition, but that’s a major reason. I know Osweat’s operating in New York, and he’s under a lot of suspicion there, and he had to show what he was, what Gore Vidal called once an okay guy, and he is showing that. It’s genuine though with Rupert, I remember once talking to him about why he was so pro the initial Iraq war, the Gulf War, and he said, well, you know, it goes back to my father and Gallipoli, you now, his father played a major role in discrediting the Gallipolis expedition, which was this attack orchestrated by Winston Churchill, they’re trying to break through the Dardanelles to get to Russia, to help Russia join the war. He said, so, so I’m just, I guess I’m just basically anti-Arab. I said, those aren’t Arabs, they’re Turks. Well, exactly.

Tucker [00:49:49] Yeah, the Ottoman Empire is gone and they’ve done an enormous amount of business in the Gulf with Arabs who helped finance his companies. So it’s kind of a strange answer. His father was a famous journalist in Australia who broke the news of the disaster at Gallipoli. And he was very proud of that. But that’s not much of an answer. What are you doing better than I do talking? I don’t know. I just, it’s, it, you know, he said such an effect on the world and on my life. And as I said five times, I’ve always liked him and still do, but it does.

Peter Brimelow [00:50:22] Somebody said to me once, one of his henchmen in Australia said to me that Rupert is a businessman who wants to be a journalist and his father was a journalist who wanted to be businessman because he did found a publishing empire in Australia, Sir Keith Murdoch. I think there’s a lot in that. I mean I think that you and I are ideologues. Professional ideologues, Buru’s not a professional ideologue, he’s somebody who spends all of his time looking at numbers, he has a fantastic memory for numbers, I can never remember any phone numbers, every phone number is ever dialed, you know, and running an operation like his, it requires a tremendous attention to detail, a tremendous application going another page and page and pages of figures. And I don’t know that he spends a great deal of time thinking about politics, except in a sporting sense. I mean, he likes to be backing winners and winning elections and that kind of thing. But then he likes going to Australian football matches too, so I think it’s kind of a similar thing.

Tucker [00:51:29] Very smart analysis. I think you’re exactly, I think, you just answered the question. He’s outsourced a lot of the thinking to others. It’s transactional. He’s not tightly wedded to ideological details at all, but he’s really allowed the Wall Street Journal editorial page to become a force of destruction.

Peter Brimelow [00:51:50] Well, I have to admit, it’s many years since I bothered to read The Wolf’s Journal. Yeah, me too. I rely on people sending me things, and they don’t send much from The Wolfs’ Journal, or for that matter, from National Review. I very rarely seem to see them. Is National Review still in existence? Apparently so, it has the Republican establishment to support.

Tucker [00:52:14] Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and

Peter Brimelow [00:52:16] What, do you know the?

Tucker [00:52:16] Editor of now?

Peter Brimelow [00:52:18] I have the, I mean, Rich Lowry, he’s gone for some time now, hasn’t he? Hasn’t he been done there for somebody else? I had the faintest idea. But did you know him? You know, I sat in rooms with him and I went to bogus parts with him, I have absolutely no memory of him at all. He never said anything at all of significance and I think that’s why, why Bill hired him because he was completely malleable. Yeah. I think.

Tucker [00:52:42] That sounds that sounds right sad. That’s how much has been lost. So Speaking of lost what happened in the end if you go and I interrupted your story my apologies, but to

Peter Brimelow [00:52:54] Fidare is suspended, suspended in July of 2024 because we just ran out of money. The foundation is still in existence and Lydia is still, she’s not paid, but she’s still paying lawyers and dealing with the legal situation, which continues to ramify as I say, we’re being sued personally and as a foundation and- On what grounds are you being sued? Oh, there’s a whole bunch of things, fundamentally technical issues to do with them. To do with whether we had the right number of directors vote on the right number of things. It’s all paperwork stuff. It is all stuff that would normally resolve with a phone call and possibly refiling and stuff like that. They have not found any evidence of a misappropriation of funds and in fact we move to dismiss on this basis that although they huff and puff a lot, I mean the 60 odd pages of rhetoric, but the actual charges, they haven’t I haven’t got anything. Who is showing you? This is New York State. So they’re using tax dollars still to see? Oh yes, that’s right. Enormously. They’ve spent a great deal of money on this. They also, very weirdly, subpoenaed Facebook for all our records of all our dealings with Facebook. Well, Facebook banned us in 2020 as part of Zuckerberg’s campaign to defeat Donald Trump. They thought we were pro-Trump. So we actually hadn’t had any dealings with Facebook for more than two years when they came after us. But nevertheless, they got all these records off of Facebook, but they’ve done nothing with them. Because of course, there’s nothing there. I think they genuinely thought that they would find that we were accepting money from the Russians. The Russians? To run bat farms. Do you remember that was the allegation with interference in 2016 that the Russians were financing tiny little Facebook pages and that’s how they were manipulating the election. . I think they genuinely believe that. I think one of the things about Democrats is that they really do believe their own propaganda. Oh, a hundred percent. They do think that the middle America is full.

Tucker [00:54:55] People weren’t pointed out. We’ll be at war with Qatar by the end, just because they’ve talked themselves into believing Qatar secretly controls America as they did with Russia, then we went to war with Russia and we’re still at war Russia over that.

Peter Brimelow [00:55:07] The difficulty with this is that the Republicans believe in Democrat propaganda too, which is why they won’t, for example, appeal to the white vote. One of the things we did at VDL is we discussed and documented what we call the Sailor strategy as opposed to the Roe strategy. In 2000, Karl Roe was saying that the republicans have got to do outreach to minorities. And it makes no sense statistically, because I think George Bush, George… W. Bush got like 51% of the white vote. It’s appalling performance. So Steve Saylor was one of our writers who we’ve had on, pointed out that if they could just increase that percentage proportion of the vote to what his father got, which was like 57-58%, that would swamp and overwhelm any possible conceivable gain among minority voters. So we were saying You should go for the white vault and Now, this caused a great deal of trouble for us. I remember there was a letter from an email from Jude Wineski. Do you remember Jude Wynyski? Very well. He said, Peter, you’ve gone too far. In other words, appeal to the white vote is not allowed. And look, it’s just a question of arithmetic. There’s more of them than there are of minorities. In any case, to this day, the Republicans have still not done that. They’ve done it tacit. Why was Jude Winesski mad? Jude was a liberal, you know, way back when he was a Liberal Democrat and he still had a lot of these reflexes, but it was just thought to be, people just got very emotional about it. You know, they think it’s somehow illegitimate and they still do think it is illegitimates. For example, so we see in Virginia in this last election. There’s a Yonkin who’s a complete cypher as far as a Wall Street cyphe as far as I can see, chooses his success in the gubernatorial race, a candidate who has won an immigrant, two a woman and three black, she’s a black Jamaican immigrant and this is how he’s going to appeal to the white vote. They’re going to get people in the south, or the halls of southwest Virginia out to vote for this black immigrant. It’s ridiculous and of course they’ve got a terrible share of the white voters, like 53% and that’s why they lost. But it was rather loose than to make a full out appeal to my crew.

Tucker [00:57:24] Hell was in the ability, so this was in, you know, I’m not saying a bad person, but Winsome Sears was not a good candidate, it was kind of an incapable candidate and hard to deal with. So, like, they chose her because she was black, despite the fact that she wasn’t good at her job. And this is epidemic in the Bolton Party. Well, it’s epidemic in

Peter Brimelow [00:57:49] The Republicans in particular, they’ve chosen so many black candidates. They’re about to adhere in Florida. The next gubernatorial candidate is likely to be black unless a miracle occurs. Why is that? They are just pixelated by this, transfixed by this… I’m trying to find the right word… Hypnotized by this phenomenon, by the whole race question. Now this race whip is what it comes down to. So afraid of being called racist that they’d rather lose with a black candidate than run a candidate to appeals to whites. Trump did appeal to whites, not enough, but he does it in some kind of really implicit way. If you actually look at what Trump said, in spite of all the rhetoric, he’s not said anything that’s explicitly white nationalist or anything. I see no sign that he’s an ethnic or a civic nationalist, but for some reason he’s made some connection. I mean, all through West Virginia for that, you know, while Biden was, was, President, you will see these signs supporting Trump and saying very rude things about Biden. And these are outside.

Tucker [00:58:56] Very rude things about Biden, yeah.

Peter Brimelow [00:58:58] I mean, you know, this is a poor area, these rundown trail homes that you see with these Trump signs on them. For some reason, Trump made a connection with them and it’s eerie. Now on the other hand, he also had a disconnection with the other side, so you get this Trump derangement syndrome, but he was able to mobilize the white voters. Why do you think that was? Which part of it?

Tucker [00:59:18] That he was able working class whites love Trump. Trump is not a racist. I’ve never seen any sign of that at all and not a white nationalist at all, and hardly a Christian nationalist, but he for some reason had an emotional connection with these voters. Why?

Peter Brimelow [00:59:40] There’s a concept in sociology called the implicit community, you know. Communities that represent or appeal to some people without actually saying it explicitly. The classic example, with NASCAR for example, why is NASCAR a white stronghold or everybody watching NASCAR is white? And the NASCAR operatives don’t like this and they hate it. Yeah, they’re constantly trying to diversify. Republican part is a classic example of this. I mean, without ever doing anything to deserve it, Republicans have become absolutely unbeatable in Virginia. And you and I both remember then when the Democrats were unbeatables in Virginia, you know, I forget when the last Republican, I always keep forgetting when the last Republican Democrat to carry West Virginia was, but it might have been Clinton. And now it’s just, the Democrats have ceased to exist in West Virginia, even though this is a very poor state. The Republicans prevailed by, simply by virtue of…

Tucker [01:00:34] Bill Clinton lost California in 92 and won West Virginia. That’s how much has changed.

Peter Brimelow [01:00:43] So there’s something that’s going on at a very deep psychological level. There’s some kind of, some kind implicit, implicit signaling and it’s baffling. Now, of course he did say, you know, when he came down the elevator and said just a few words about Mexico, uh, about Mexican immigration and never look back, so he obviously struck a nerve there, so we did enough to strike a nerve and simply by raising immigration in the sort of world rather, you No. I’m sure it drives Stephen Miller crazy, incoherent and peculiar, and he constantly forgets his lines and says the wrong thing the way that Trump does talk about immigration. But he did raise it, and of course until then it’s been driven out of Republican politics completely. I know, we wrote about it for 16 years.

Tucker [01:01:27] You were fired over it!

Peter Brimelow [01:01:30] There was almost no sign that any Republican would pick it up, but then when he did the damn broken now, a big difference that I found, Tucker, is if you speak to grassroots Republicans as opposed to elected Republicans, the consensus is overwhelming that immigration has got to be ended. The consensus is overwhelmingly. Whereas when I got involved in this in the early 90s, a lot of Republicans never heard of this question. And they would assume, for example, that immigrants don’t go on welfare to the same extent that native born do, which is completely wrong, it’s completely reversal of truth. And it was back then, it was obvious that they were going back into welfare in disproportionate numbers, but people didn’t know, and the Wall Street Journal is not telling them. Well, the Wall St. Journal still isn’t telling them, but they do know now, and maybe we played a role in that.

Tucker [01:02:19] Well, yeah, and it’s had such a complex and degrading effect on the native population. It hasn’t been, it’s not just a matter of competition in the job market or my tech job went to an Indian or something. It’s way more complicated than that. As immigrant communities became totally dependent on federal benefits, it changed the incentive structure for native-born communities, and a lot of them started going on at higher rates also. It created a vortex that’s hurt everybody, I think, especially the whites. Where does it go from here?

Peter Brimelow [01:02:56] The big thing that has to, the next, if I was still running Videre, and on my own website peterbrimmore.com now, what I’m interested in is legal immigration. Legal immigration is still running at a million a year. No, that puts the fact that the foreign born population in the US has fallen by two and a half million in the last, just during this year, that’s an extraordinary number. I used to track at Videre the foreign-born population because it was the way of tracking the impact of immigration. It very rarely goes negative, it went negative briefly, when Trump first got in because they were frightened of him and a lot of eagles left and then towards the end, before COVID it was falling because of various technical executive action measures that Trump and the administration are taking to tighten up on both legal and illegal immigration. Now it’s two and a half million, gone four and two and half million to the foreign born population. Even though we know a million, a million um… Legal immigrants have come in, 90% of them color by the way, only about 10% white. So what we really need is an immigration moratorium and I’m delighted to say that there is a bill proposed by Chip Roy in the House called the Paws Act, calling for a moratorium. And there’s several other very interesting bills, a very good bill on both rights citizenship and if you look at my list here secure the board I mean in other words They should set and codify Trump’s activities, tighten up on the executive action, tighten up on on the southern border because we know that when the Democrats get in they’ll reverse it but they won’t be able to do that if it’s in the law, they thought they’d have to pass a law and have to admit what they’re doing. The problem is that the White House seems to be… Is not pushing any of these bills, and unless they do, I don’t think that Speaker Johnson is going to raise anything, it’s just going to, you know, it is just going to lie low, and I don t know why the White House isn’t pushing these bills. Of course it’s got its hands full in Minnesota where they clearly need to declare the Insurrection Act and that kind of thing, and they keep going around blowing up foreign governments and stuff like that, and sinking ships and stuff, I mean, which it must be entertaining but I would really rather focus on end in this immigration disaster. You know, it’s whatever it is, 34 years now since I started writing about this in National Review. I’m 78, I can’t wait much longer. I think we should just get on with it. And you have a number of children who will inherit the country. That’s really the point, you know, people occasionally still. Yeah, people say, okay, I get attacked all the time for not being, for being an immigrant. My position is, you know, I’m an immigrant doing a dirty job that Americans won’t do, talk about immigration. But the real reason is I have children here. My youngest child is 10 years old and God knows what the country’s going to be like by the time she’s a grown woman. Are you bitter? I’ve been extremely blessed in my personal life. Uh… Even though my first wife died so uh… I don’t think… I think things could have worked out differently for me professionally, but in my personal life I’m very blessed.

Tucker [01:06:30] You don’t seem angry. I mean, my read on it is what happened to you is grotesque and is evil and not the kind of thing I thought would ever be allowed here. So I’m shocked, always shocked to hear your story.

Peter Brimelow [01:06:46] I guess I am bitter at the conservative movement, people in the conservative movement, the people I’ve known for 30 and 40 years who basically haven’t helped us, haven’t defended us. The most prominent people who have defended us, Tucker, are you and Laura Lumer, your friend Laura Lummer. So that just shows how ecumenical we are. So Loomer helped you? Oh yeah, she supported us on Twitter when we were trying to raise money to defend ourselves and I have a give-send goal which I just launched before Christmas, frankly to help us personally because we’re now facing tremendous legal costs personally and I believe she’s helped us with that. Have you received a

Tucker [01:07:30] Department of Justice.

Peter Brimelow [01:07:34] We know that there are people in the Department of Justice who are, not directly, on the other hand, Trump can’t stand Letitia James, quite rightly, and they’ve made various attempts to bring her to book for various crimes. For one thing, I mean, she’s clearly guilty of massive morgue fraud going back over 40 years. But you know, the obverse of lawfare run by Democrats is joint notification by Democrats. They’ve been unable to indict it because, basically because judges keep disallowing the prosecutors and because the grand jury won’t indict Democrats. So I don’t know where that stands. They also have an investigation into her deprivation of Trump’s civil rights in these scandalous cases in the, you know, the hush money case and the fraud case and so on. We should never have been allowed to go to court. The judges should have stopped it, but of course the judges are on the other side. And our judges just tried to get, tried to strike that down by disallowing the prosecutor. I mean, what’s happening in this, these Democrats, senators… Not only have the power to veto judicial appointments, federal judicial appointments but they also have the apparently to veto prosecutors, federal prosecutors. And they’ve apparently taken the position that they won’t allow the appointment of a federal prosecutor if he’s likely to prosecute Letitia James or any other Democrats. You know, and God knows there are enough Democrats out there that need prosecuting. That’s how they’re protecting them. Many respects, you know, we’re looking to slow motion civil war here. I mean, New York and Minnesota have essentially seceded from the Union. The whole legal system is opposed to what the federal government is doing. Jonathan Turley, who is a First Amendment specialist, wrote recently that New York is the land that law forgot, because normal legal norms simply don’t apply there. What happens is what the Democrat operatives want, and of course this is not a government under law. So, in effect, New York is seceding from the Union, and that’s why I think ultimately we’re going to have to go to the insurrection act, and we’re going to go have to the wholesale impeachment of judges. All these judges brought in by Biden, I think he had one or two white men, both of them were gay, something like that, all the others were women and people of color and so on, and they delivered the most extraordinary rulings. Disregarding the plain language of the law, ultimately it’s gonna have to be purged of the judicial system.

Tucker [01:10:07] Trump, when that happens, Trump will be attacked as destroying the third branch of government, but it’s been completely destroyed long before Trump. Right. My last question to you, Peter Berloin, thank you so much for doing this, is are you hopeful?

Peter Brimelow [01:10:33] I have a, one of the sayings I want to be remembered for is based on a talk I gave in about 2015 is that miracles happen quite often in politics. I mean, nobody expects the Soviet Union collapse. Are you old enough to remember that? I’m 56, yeah, I remember it like it was yesterday. 30 years ago. I know. 30 years. I mean that’s literally true. Nobody, nobody either under after all the right expect the Soviet collapse. On the other hand, You know, I don’t think they expected the Catholic Church to go in the direction it went, and Vatican too, and on the third hand, nobody expected Trump, and he has been a miracle. I mean, he’s changed the situation in so many ways, not of which I think he has probably thought about, but he does it anyway. So I’m hopeful because I think miracles happen in politics frequently, but we need one. The situation right now, we’re heading in a very, very bad direction and in the situation where, you know, Democrat politicians are openly calling on people to disobey federal law, disobeying law, prevent ICE from deporting illegals, that’s more extreme than ever happened in the South during the desegregation. Much

Tucker [01:11:50] It’s more extreme than what the South did at Fort Sumter. I mean, this is insurrection, actual insurrection.

Peter Brimelow [01:11:59] That’s right, it’s insurrection, and of course, Eisenhower and Kennedy did use interaction to impose integration.

Tucker [01:12:10] He sent the 101st Airborne to a high school.

Peter Brimelow [01:12:12] Yeah. Right, right. With the total applause from the mainstream media which was then of course completely oligopolistic. I mean, it was dominant. At least now we have Twitter, even if we are shadow banned on Twitter. Are you still shadow banned? Oh yeah. Well, as far as we can see, we are. Anne Coulter, you know, her followership has not risen. For like six years, it’s been 2.1 million for six years. Doesn’t go up, it doesn’t go down. I mean, it obviously, you can see from the engagement that there’s something very strange going on. It’s all the Indians he has in there. He hasn’t been able to root them how he had. Thank you very much.