Letitia James vs. VDARE and the First Amendment

If a red-state politician weaponized the justice system to shut down a left-wing advocacy group, the media would surely invoke references to a parade of horribles including all the 20th century’s most loathsome dictators.

But in New York, state Attorney General Letitia James has embraced the Soviet mantra of show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime, and the media’s silence suggests a tacit endorsement.  

James proudly demonstrated her antipathy to the First Amendment in her 2018 campaign for office, pledging to weaponize the justice system against a range of political enemies from President Donald Trump to the National Rifle Association. She later followed through on these campaign promises and worked to stifle online speech critical of the regime.

James’ most pernicious attack on our Bill of Rights, however, may be her bureaucratic demolition of VDare, a group founded by Peter Brimelow to advocate for restriction on immigration. VDare and its leaders have not committed any crime other than deviating from the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party, a heresy sufficient to attract the crosshairs of James’ office.

After identifying VDare as a political enemy, James used the power of the state to bleed the group of its resources. She could not find any crime to allege, so she initiated a more concealed campaign against Brimelow outside the oversight of judicial review. 

Beginning in 2022, James used the state treasury to prolong “investigations” – including subpoenas and document requests – that cost VDare and its affiliates millions in legal fees. The attorney general did not risk an unfavorable ruling from a judge or a jury; instead, she initiated a war of attrition that the State of New York (with its annual budget of over $200 billion) was sure to win against a foundation with under $3 million in total assets. 

Last week, Brimelow announced that VDare will cease its operations after twenty-five years. He explained that the organization had been “battered to death by a massive and intrusive ‘investigation’” from Letitia James “that bears no rational relationship to any conceivable offense.” 

Brimelow’s opposition to third-world migration has earned him countless accusations of being a “racist” and a “white nationalist.” But the First Amendment overrides all pejoratives, regardless of their veracity. Now, Brimelow is up against a force that has demonstrated an ongoing disdain for our Constitutional liberties, and his persecution has gone unreported by a feckless media that is too cowardly to incur criticism for defending a group outside of polite society.

At Brownstone, however, we still believe in the “bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment” that “the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” as Justice William Brennan wrote in Texas v. Johnson. That principle animated the ACLU for nearly a century, as it defended the rights of the most loathsome in our society, from neo-Nazis to sex offenders. 

Now, free speech is in peril. Media, government, and industry leaders have united to promote censorship across the globe. Nonprofits like the ACLU and CATO have been derelict, if not complicit, in those efforts.

Letitia James, from her perch as Attorney General, now spearheads the effort to overturn the bedrock principle of the First Amendment, and her crusade threatens the essence of political freedom. 

Tish James vs. the First Amendment 

Suppression of dissent is a foundational tenet of James’ reign of anarcho-tyranny in New York.

In December 2018, the New York Times described her aim bluntly: “N.Y.’s New Attorney General Is Targeting Trump.” During her campaign, she vowed to weaponize “every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family.” 

At first, she built a case on the assumption that President Trump had undervalued his assets to evade taxes; then, the facts upended her narrative, so she accused him of overvaluing his assets to defraud creditors. As law professor Jonathan Turley writes, James then “secured an obscene civil penalty of almost half a billion dollars without having to show there was a single victim or dollar lost from alleged overvaluation of assets.” 

James expanded her weaponization of the justice system to attack any groups that challenge her party’s reign of power. 

In August 2020, she launched an unsuccessful attempt to dissolve the National Rifle Association. She filed suit to impose the “corporate death penalty” on the group, which the New York Supreme Court later dismissed.

At the same time, she worked to suppress free speech online. In 2020, she vowed to take legal action against “hate speech,” a phrase she left undefined. Later that year, she signed a letter demanding Facebook “aggressively enforce” policies to punish “hate speech.” She and her colleagues singled out posts that identified “threats to national culture or values,” which they described as “inflammatory advertisements that vilify minority groups.” 

Two years later, she advocated for a New York law that would require social media networks to police speech deemed “hateful.” “Extremist content is flourishing online, and we must all work together to confront this crisis,” she insisted.

This intolerance, coupled with the power of her office, left VDare with little hope to survive. Despite having never advocated for violence or committed libel, Brimelow and his group were guilty of dissent in a jurisdiction that elected a zealot. 

The Fall of VDare and the Failure of Conservative Media

Supposedly conservative media outlets have been conspicuously silent as a prominent Democrat has used her power to silence critics of her party. Fox News has not published a single article on VDare’s shuttering. Neither has the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, or the New York Post. 

Reporting has been left to alternate media, including Tucker Carlson on X, Pedro Gonzalez in Chronicles, and Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire. 

For now, the Murdoch-affiliated press and groups like National Review may be able to maintain their seat at Georgetown cocktail parties by avoiding affiliation with figures like Brimelow. Eventually, however, the system will come for them as well. As Gonzalez noted in Chronicles:

Those who might look the other way as the attorney general mauls VDARE should know that people like James will not stop with this one publication, any more than those who pulled down Confederate statues stopped at Robert E. Lee. If they can do it to VDARE under the fiction of hate speech, they can do it to anyone.

VDARE is not everyone’s cup of tea, and its content is certainly out of the mainstream of permissible thought. But are we willing to sit by as weaponized censors impose an information flow for a population of people treated as children by political elites? There is no conception of the First Amendment that should permit this, and yet it is ongoing right now and it is in front of all of us. Free people can handle unusual ideas but fearful regimes cannot.