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Initiative #2: Solving The "Distribution Problem"
On May 31, 2021, in VDARE.com Is Building A Fortress—Visible And Invisible, I introduced the five initiatives critical to the survival of immigration patriotism as a movement, and VDARE.com specifically.
Each week in June, I’ll be focusing on one initiative, and below I tackle Initiative #2: Protect our ability to reach friends and educate the American public online.
VDARE.com is a non-profit. We publish information to educate the public on the negative effects of mass immigration, and to serve as the voice of the Historic American Nation.
This work is not easy, and it is not cheap. Please consider becoming a donor today, to fuel this work.
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How are YOU saving the American Nation with your donation to VDARE.com?
This second of five initiatives focuses on solving what I think of as the “distribution problem,” which is more recognizable to most Americans as traditional censorship than its modern forms of deplatforming and service denials. Because so many Americans have a hard time believing that censorship is now a serious problem, it’s important to fully understand both what censorship is and how it is manifesting itself right now.
The next is to develop and weigh strategies to get around censorship, both to communicate with established friends and to reach new audiences who are looking for our content but not finding it due to suppression.
Webster’s says that to “censor” means “to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable.” Censorship happens whenever one group of people succeed in imposing their political or moral values on others by suppressing words, images, or ideas that they find offensive.
It’s common to hear people say that the First Amendment exists to protect speech and activities that are unpopular— because if only those ideas which were popular were protected, censorship wouldn’t be needed. The irony here is, of course, that immigration patriotism is extremely popular among Americans. It is what elected Donald Trump and continues to poll well today.
It is only unpopular with the elites.
Limiting free speech is unAmerican—without it, all our rights and liberties quickly disintegrate.
Censorship is a violation on the rights of all of us, especially when what is censored is rational, fact-based news and analysis about an issue important to the American people and critical for American leadership to know and understand in order to steer the country with wisdom and judgement.
VDARE.com is the tip of the spear when it comes on online suppression. The first signs of VDARE.com’s censorship problems were in the early 2000s when Peter Brimelow, once a mainstay in conservative discussions on immigration (see his many television and media appearances highlighted in our 20th Anniversary celebration last year) was blackballed. Peter once described to me how he would be invited to a show, and they would be about to go live, when all of a sudden, the bookers would announce that the spot was off. He understood it to be the SPLC stalking his schedule and harassing his hosts until they canceled.
But by far the most serious blow came in 2017, when an algorithm change on the Google search engine completely hid VDARE.com’s rich and ample archives from its search results. (This not unique to us, other more conformist conservative sites have reported the same thing.)
As of February 2021, Google maintains a 92.05% market share of all search engine traffic. Before 2016, VDARE.com got a lot of traffic from relevant search terms such as “illegal immigration, “H1Bs,” and “border wall.” Since 2016, those terms don’t yield anything with VDARE.com as the source and just now as an experiment I Googled the words “illegal immigration VDARE” and our site didn’t appear until the sixth page of search results.
When was the last time you went to the second page of search results? Have you ever gone to the sixth?
After Google, the attacks have just kept coming: two email services, Facebook and YouTube, Coinbase, two accounts payable services, back-office database management software, our domain registrar, PayPal, Stripe, merchant services, even our CPA – all of these companies have dropped us as customers for political reasons.
And that doesn’t even count the scads of venues that yanked their contracts on our in-person meetings.
Now and in the future, VDARE.com has to be very careful about which businesses we patronize. We are practically professionals at studying Terms of Service to detect any Wokeness in a potential service provider.
And we need to build our own. Vertical integration gives us security.
Our web developers and special advisors are well into the process of building and deploying "hardened" access modes such as TOR pages, Open-Source payment processing tools and proprietary email solutions that are, at a minimum, well insulated from the PC-driven attacks by Big Tech.
But while necessity may be the mother of invention, financial support must be the father. And without yours, we will not succeed.
And while we work on these advances, we continue to use the tools at our disposal.
As of this writing, VDARE.com is still on Twitter and Telegram, and you can always find us on Gab. I encourage you to sign up for our ebulletin, as email remains the most effective way for us to keep you in the loop.
Also important is the strengthening of our professional networks to aid in distribution by proxy and collaboration. When the Main Stream Media isn’t defaming VDARE.com, they aren’t mentioning us at all. As a policy, when Main Stream journalists cover immigration patriotism or even VDARE.com specifically, they deny us any traffic by omitting links to our site or, frequently, by refusing to even identify us by name.
The only way to get around that is to work ever harder allying with like-minded organizations and collaborating with other friendly journalists.
Once we open the Castle to events, I anticipate we will have more earned media, boosted by friendly news coverage on other Dissident sites.
We also rely on you, our readers, for referrals. Very often when I speak with one of our readers, I’ll ask how they found VDARE.com. Frequently the answer is “a friend recommended it to me.” This makes me extremely happy – if you have a friend who you think might be interested in learning more about these critical issues, don’t hesitate to send them our way!
VDARE.com survived for years as a scrappy, low-overhead home-office shop for American First journalism. But to break out of the tiny box our enemies constructed for us, we have had to think and act big.
Our talented team is expanding, our infrastructure is hardening, our determination is growing, and we refuse to be canceled.
This is risky, expensive and exhausting work. But we love every minute of it, knowing that it is directly contributing to preserving this beautiful, heritage-rich country built by the Historic American Nation.
With your support, we’ll never stop. Please give your most generous donation today.
Lydia Brimelow
VDARE.com Publisher
VDARE Foundation President
PS: This really is a battle for survival of the Historic American Nation. Your donation means the world to me as we build a fortress – visible and invisible – to ensure an American future as our forefathers intended, “for ourselves and our posterity!”
Please give your most generous gift today!
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