Brimelow and Carlson: The Transcript
“Thirty years ago William F. Buckley banished Peter Brimelow from Con Inc. for saying that immigration was destroying the country. Turns out Brimelow was right.”
Peter Brimelow writes: Tucker Carlson’s reach is amazing. This interview was posted at 2:30 p.m. January19 and at 7 p.m. two people came up to me at a meeting I was attending in downtown Berkeley Springs WV to congratulate me.
I’m posting here the lightly-edited transcript with supporting links provided by my long-time VDARE.com lieutenant James Fulford (subscribe to his substack).
P
Thanks to everyone.
Replacing America: Peter Brimelow on the Invasion of America, Who’s Behind It, and How Long Until Total Collapse
TC: 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.
This is a tweet 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.”
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!”
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 Brimelow, whom 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 than that.
So I have to ask you what it feels like to see that.
PB: It feels kind of tingly!
TC: Tingly?!
PB: 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 VDARE.com, which was my website, about Birthright Citizenship and so on, are now in the public debate.
On the other hand, we’ve been ruined, and we’re now facing personal ruin of course, because of this attack on us by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
As nobody knows who I am Tucker, I should say that, in spite of my accent, I’ve been here for 55 years and I’m a long-time financial journalist. I worked for Forbes and Fortune and Barron’s and so on.
And I wrote for National Review a lot. I wrote a cover story on immigration in 1992, “ Time To Rethink Immigration,” that’s sometimes credited with kicking off the modern debate.
And there was a brief civil war within the Conservative Movement, which we lost. Buckley stabbed us in the back and purged the magazine of immigration patriots.
And for the next while, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Pagewas absolutely dominant, they were going on about the need for Amnesty and so on, and there was no way to combat it.
So I set up a website, which I named VDare.com after Virginia Dare, the first English child—not white child as they always say— born in the New World. And over a period of about 25 years, we built it up into quite a force until about two years ago it was destroyed by the New York Attorney General, Letitia James. She just basically subpoenaed us to death. And she has in fact now sued us both personally and through the foundation.
So we’re a bit like General Flynn, you know. No middle class family can stand up to this. General Flynn had to sell his house and we’re going to be driven into personal bankruptcy, I guess.
TC: It’s a horrifying story. I’ve kept abreast of it through your wife who texts me and is 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. 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 the then editor William F. Buckley Jr., stabbed you in the back. Can you tell the story?
PB: Sure. I was never on staff at National Review, I was what they called a Senior Editor, and I wrote for it a lot. In 1992, I wrote this very long cover story, it’s about 14,000 words. Bill had retired as the Editor by then, he was just circling around in the background, but the then-editor, John O’Sullivan, went with this story.
And for about five years, we basically directly challenged the official Conservatism Inc. 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 is still saying as far as I can tell.
Then in 1997, Bill just abruptly, without any warning at all, fired O’Sullivan and purged the magazine of immigration patriots and basically told them to shut up about immigration, which of course they all eagerly did. He put the Washington Bureau in charge, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru.
And so for two or three years you couldn’t get even the basic facts about immigration out to the public. But then the internet came along and rescued us. And I started VDARE.com.
TC: But why do you think Bill Buckley, who was retired and letting John O’Sullivan run it (another Brit—
PB: Yes, indeed.
TC: —who now is in Budapest) stepped back in to shut down that conversation specifically?
PB: Of course, I’ve had nearly 30 years to think about that. Over time, my answer’s evolved.. At the time I thought he was just jealous. This is actually a thing that you see–I was a financial journalist for a long time—in the corporate world. The original entrepreneurs will come back and fire the managers that they put in to replace themselves.
Also, I think the Congressional Republicans hated us talking about immigration because it upsets the donors, That was influential with Bill. He liked being lionized by the then-Republican majority in the House.
TC: So the Republican leadership, Newt Gingrich, etc., who came in in 1994 to much fanfare, achieved not a lot, they’re the ones who pressured Bill Buckley?
PB: I think that was true, but I also think that the Neoconservatives in New York hated the line. And Bill was very, very leery of offending the Neocons, people like [Commentary Magazine Editor] Norman Podhoretz. And I think they pressured him—I mean, I know they pressured—to get rid of John.
TC: Now, why would they care?
PB: Oh, because the Neoconservatives were a predominantly Jewish faction. They had this sort of Ellis Island view of America. And they were extremely frightened of the white majority in America becoming self-conscious because they felt as Jews that it might leave them out in the cold.
TC: 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?
PB: Right
And I actually think there was a certain jealousy there. If you look at ideas on the Right in recent years, a lot of them originated out of neoconservatism. But here was a non-neoconservative faction—we would have then described ourselves as paleoconservatives—coming up with a whole new issue .
Because the immigration issue was completely dormant from 1968 when Hart-Celler kicked in, until the early 1990s. There was no discussion of it at all. I actually went through National Review’s archives and I found that they hadn’t discussed immigration between the passage of the 1965 Act until the early 1990s. People simply didn’t realize what was going on.
TC: Why?
PB: I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that 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.
It’s like academic life. Where there’s a new academic theory. It’s not that it conquers the other theories by having better arguments. It’s just that the people who hold the earlier theories die off, and they’re replaced by younger academics.
And that’s true for politicians too. A whole generation of politicians had never thought about this issue. I include Ronald Reagan in that. Immigration simply wasn’t an issue when he was growing up.
And that’s why he was hornswoggled by the IRCA Amnesty in 1986. He genuinely thought that the permanent government would exchange Amnesty for serious enforcement. Whereas in fact they just took the Amnesty and didn’t enforce the law against illegal immigration at all.
TC: But I’m a little bit fixated on William Buckley because he was such a dominant force.
PB: Let me just back up a second. Looking at National Review now, it’s obviously donor-driven. And we weren’t aware of that in the 1990s. 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 about issues. We just simply didn’t realize how dominant and how important the donors are.
Particularly given that Bill was not as wealthy as he wanted people to think. He depended on National Review financially. It financed his lifestyle to a considerably extent. And I think that—
TC: Wait, he depended on the magazine?
PB: Yeah, yeah—
TC: I think the rest of us thought the magazine depended upon him.
PB: That’s what he wanted you to think!
TC: And the winters in Gstaad and the sailing across the Atlantic, the Bermuda race and-
PB: 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. The more I think about it, the more I think that probably was the reason.
TC: Basically a species of fraud. I don’t mean against the tax code. I mean intellectual fraud. You’re making the case that you believe these things because they are true, when in fact you’re taking money to say them.
PB: My experience with Bill is that he actually was not very interested in politics. When you went to those dinners he used to put on at [the Buckley NY pied a terre] 73 East 73rd Street, it was very hard to get him 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 silly novels and so on. He basically didn’t do any serious thinking about politics.
I have a letter from him, actually, saying how wonderful my immigration story was. I forget exactly what he said, but he said it was beautifully organized and beautifully argued and the tone was perfect. That sort of stuff.
He never admitted that he changed his mind on immigration. He just told them to stop covering it. The official line of the magazine was that immigration was questionable. They just didn’t do any journalism on it.
Which is how he was about drug legalization. He was officially in favor of drug legalization, but he very rarely let the magazine write about it.
TC: Huh!Why?
PB: I guess he was balancing a number of issues.
In the case of immigration—immigration was a very unfashionable subject in the early 1990s…
TC: I remember!
PB: As we were talking earlier, I was watching Ben Shapiro on Megyn Kelly. And he was attacking you for some reason or other, I forget what. And then he suddenly says, well, ““Tucker has been a wonderful advocate in the past, particularly on the immigration issue.”
Well, as I understand it, you’re interested in the idea of an immigration moratorium.
TC: Of course.
Well, this is news to me!—that’s what Ben Shapiro thinks is good about your views on immigration! Just about five or six years ago, in National Review, he called me a White Supremacist basically for no other reason than advocating immigration reduction.
In those days, if you advocated immigration control, you were immediately suspected of being an 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 was very friendly with Norman Podhoretz—he didn’t talk to me for the last 10 years of his life, he died just a few weeks ago, at the age of 95—and just before he’d died 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 Editor of National Review, for helping change his mind. He didn’t mention me!
TC: Why didn’t he speak to you for the last 10 years of his life?
PB: Well, I think he just decided that I was a suspicious character. And I had deviated on the immigration issue.
I had the habit of calling the National Review, the Goldberg Review, because at that stage, briefly, it was dominated by Jonah Goldberg, who I think is a complete fraud and lightweight, and of course was absolutely boneheaded on the immigration issue.
TC: He’s certainly a lightweight. It’s hard to know what he believes or doesn’t, but if Jonah Goldberg is your intellectual force, then you’ve been degraded.
PB: Well, Norman emailed me and said you’ve got to stop calling National Review the Goldberg Review because it sounds anti-Semitic.
Actually, my understanding is that Goldberg is not technically Jewish. His mother was a Gentile.
TC: I knew her. She was a great person, actually.
PB: So I replied and said that. And he didn’t get back to me. He just gradually suspected me more and more of Thought Crime.
And Norman was an extremely passionate man—
TC: [Laughing] Oh, so famously!
PB: He didn’t socialize with opponents.
I miss him. I really liked him. I was sorry that….
TC: 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 was constantly in motion and I admire that.
PB: And we actually owe his wife Midge Decter a lot because she was the Chairthing of the Philadelphia Society, which is a conservative affinity group, and she invited me to speak on immigration in 2005. My first wife had just died, and that’s where I met my current wife, Lydia, who of course ran the VDARE Foundation with me, she was the publisher of VDARE.com. And you’ve had her on of course.