VDARE

History

VDARE.COM was established in 1999 in connection with the Center for American Unity, a Virginia-based non-profit foundation founded by British-born American journalist and editor (Forbes and National Review) Peter Brimelow, who writes for the publication. Brimelow served as the Center's first president but is no longer affiliated with the organization. After leaving, Brimelow established VDARE Foundation in 2007, also known as Lexington Research Institute Limited, as a 501(c)3 charity to continue supporting VDARE.COM.

The name VDARE and the site's logo, the head of a white doe, refer to Virginia Dare, the first child born to English settlers in the New World; soon after her birth she disappeared with the rest of the early English settlement of Roanoke. In fiction, Virginia Dare was the main character in Sallie Southall Cotten's 1901 book, The White Doe: The Fate of Virginia Dare. In the book, she is turned into a white doe by a Native American medicine man after she rejects his advances.

Designation as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), VDARE was "once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page"; which, according to the SPLC, had become by 2003 "a meeting place for many on the radical right". The SPLC describes VDARE as "an anti-immigration hate website" which "regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites."

The SPLC cited examples such as a column concerning immigration from Mexico that warned of a "Mexican invasion" where "high teenage birthrates, poverty, ignorance and disease will be what remains," and an essay complaining how the U.S. Government encourages "the garbage of Africa" to come to the United States. SPLC criticized VDARE for publishing articles by Jared Taylor and Sam Francis, whom it has called "outright white nationalists". VDARE was labeled "white nationalist" by the Rocky Mountain News, a charge which Brimelow denied in an op-ed published by the newspaper in 2006.

VDARE editor Peter Brimelow rejected the SPLC accusations as "guilt by association". Writing that "We have published writers of all races, and most political tendencies—including self-identified 'progressives.'" and "We are certainly politically incorrect—but the merest glance would show that we are not "white nationalist."

Hurricane Katrina and IQ

Steve Sailer argued on VDARE following Hurricane Katrina that the lower average IQ of African-Americans found in intelligence research correlates with "poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups resulting in the need for stricter moral guidance from society." He said that looting after the 1995 Kobe earthquake was minimal because "when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks".

National Review writer John Podhoretz called Sailer's comments racist. Sailer responded that his accusers had acknowledged a correlation between low IQ and poor judgment by supporting the Supreme Court's 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision "that, in effect, banned the death penalty for killers with IQs under 70". John Derbyshire defended Sailer, citing large variance in incarceration rates by race and birth rates for unmarried women by race.