Brimelow was previously a writer and editor at National Review, and columnist for Dow Jones' MarketWatch.[14] Brimelow founded the Center for American Unity in 1999 and served as its first president. He describes himself as a paleoconservative.[15] Brimelow has also been described as a leader within the alt-right movement.[16] In January 2021, a judge dismissed a lawsuit Brimelow brought against The New York Times, ruling that his being called a "white nationalist" was not defamatory.[17] According to the New York Times, Brimelow had a direct reporting relationship with Rupert Murdoch at Fox News.[18]
Early life and education
Brimelow was born in 1947 in Warrington, Lancashire, England, the son of Bessie (née Knox) and Frank Sanderson Brimelow, a transport executive. Brimelow (and his twin brother) studied at the University of Sussex (BA, 1970) and Stanford University (MBA, 1972).[19]
Brimelow opposes both illegal and legal immigration,[21][22] despite having immigrated to the United States himself, and has referred to Spanish-speaking immigrants as "completely dysfunctional".[21] He said California used to be a "paradise" but was "rapidly turning into Hispanic slum".[21] Brimelow has been described as a white nationalist[23] and a white supremacist.[24] In 2020, Brimelow sued The New York Times for labeling him a "white nationalist".[25] In 2022, Brimelow called for a reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, a 1954 Supreme Court decision that directed an end to segregated schools.[26]
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described Brimelow's website VDARE as a hate group,[9][27][28] that was "once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page", but by 2003 became "a meeting place for many on the radical right". The SPLC also criticized VDARE for publishing articles by white nationalists Jared Taylor and Sam Francis.[29] It has been called "white nationalist" by the Rocky Mountain News.[30] It has also been described as white supremacist.[31] VDARE has also been described by the Anti-Defamation League as a racist anti-immigrant group.[32][33] The book Anti-Immigration in the United States summarized Brimelow's position as being that whites had built American culture and should defend it against non-whites who would try to change it.[6]
Larry Auster, also a prominent immigration restrictionist, was a fierce critic of Brimelow's approach to the issue. For example, Auster criticized Brimelow's promotion of the views of antisemitic conspiracy theorist[40][41]Kevin MacDonald in the following manner: "The views of Alex Linder are not fundamentally different from those of Kevin MacDonald, who is published by Peter Brimelow and Richard Spencer. The only real difference between Linder and MacDonald is that Linder explicitly touts his goal of removing all Jews from the earth, while in MacDonald's case the same goal is implicit."[42]
Brimelow's book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster criticizes U.S. immigration policy after 1965.[43]
A review in Foreign Affairs acknowledged that the book raised a number of persuasive objections to contemporary American immigration policies, but criticized Brimelow for "defining American identity in racial as opposed to cultural terms", and for the "extreme character" of his proposals.[43]
The SPLC described it as an "infamous anti-immigrant book", and pointed to Center for Immigration Studies executive director Mark Krikorian's positive review of the book as evidence his organization had close ties to white nationalists.[44]
The Worm in the Apple discusses public education and teachers' unions, considering unions as "highly destructive".[45]David Gordon summarizes Brimelow's view in his review of the book in The Mises Review: "to attempt so far-reaching a goal as universal high school education is foolish."[46]John O'Sullivan[47] praised the book. For the Hoover Institution journal Education Next, public policy consultant George Mitchell wrote: "Brimelow... demonstrates how collective bargaining for teachers has produced labor agreements that stifle innovation and risk taking. He makes it clear that the dramatic rise in influence enjoyed by the teacher unions has coincided with stagnant and unacceptable levels of student performance." However, in the same journal article, education consultant Julia E. Koppich took a more critical angle: "Brimelow uses a variety of linguistic devices to drive home his points. But his over-the-top language soon grates on the nerves... His argument is not that teacher unions are destroying American education, but that they labor long and hard to preserve the status quo... But this book contains so little about education-virtually nothing about classrooms, schools, or districts-even that point gets lost." Koppich called the book "an anti-public school polemic".[48]
The Patriot Game
In an article in Maclean's which was published in 2011, John M. Geddes says that Brimelow's book The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities "offered a bracingly of-the-moment conservative critique of Canada," and said that it was instrumental in shaping the thought process of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.[49]
Personal life
Brimelow's first wife was Margaret Alice "Maggy" Laws, a native of Newfoundland, Canada who worked for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research when they met in New York. They were married until her death on February 6, 2004, from cancer.[50][51] Brimelow had two children with Laws, Alexander and Hannah Claire. As of June 2021, Hannah is a blogger for political commentator Tim Pool's website Timcast.[52]
In 2007, Brimelow married Lydia Sullivan; at the time, Lydia was 22 and Peter was 59. While Lydia officially claims to have started working for VDARE in 2014, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that Lydia had likely published numerous articles on the VDARE website between 2005 (while she was in college) and June 2014 under the pseudonym "Athena Kerry", and tax documents associated with the VDARE Foundation listed her as a business partner as early as 2008. As of 2020, she is the president of the VDARE Foundation and the publisher of VDARE.com.[53]
^Folk, Holly (2017). The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. p. 64. ...the white nationalist website VDARE.com.
^"Peter Brimelow". MarketWatch.com. The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on May 13, 2014. Retrieved January 11, 2020. Peter Brimelow has been an editor at Barron's, Fortune and Forbes and is the author of 'The Wall Street Gurus: How You Can Profit From Investment Newsletters'.
^"Ruth Cheney Streeter Weds". The New York Times. January 19, 1986. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved February 13, 2012. ... John Brimelow, a son of Mr. and Mrs. Frank S. Brimelow of Birkenhead, Merseyside, England... Peter Brimelow was his twin's best man.
^Mitchell, George; Koppich, Julia E. (Spring 2004). "Teachers Unions". Education Next. Archived from the original on October 9, 2011. Retrieved July 16, 2011.
