# Peter Brimelow Peter Brimelow (born October 13, 1947, in Warrington, England) is a British-born American writer and the founder of [[VDARE]], the anti-immigration website widely described as white nationalist. A former mainstream financial journalist who reinvented himself as the movement's most prominent anti-immigration intellectual, Brimelow is a connective figure linking establishment conservatism, paleoconservatism, and the [[Alt-Right]]. ## From Forbes to the Fringe Brimelow studied at the University of Sussex and earned an MBA at Stanford. He built a substantial mainstream career — securities analyst, then editor and writer at the *Financial Post*, *Maclean's*, *Barron's*, *Fortune*, *Forbes*, and *National Review*, and a columnist for Dow Jones' MarketWatch. He served as an aide to Senator Orrin Hatch in the late 1970s and won a Gerald Loeb Award for financial journalism in 1990. His 1995 book *Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster* attacked U.S. immigration policy in explicitly racial terms and became a foundational text for the modern restrictionist movement. ## VDARE and White Nationalism In 1999 Brimelow founded VDARE, which evolved from a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page into what the SPLC calls a hate group and a hub of the radical right, publishing white nationalists such as [[Jared Taylor]] and [[Sam Francis]]. Brimelow describes himself as a paleoconservative but has been repeatedly characterized as a white nationalist and white supremacist; in 2021 a court dismissed his defamation suit against The New York Times, ruling that calling him a "white nationalist" was not a defamatory statement of fact. He has called for reversing *Brown v. Board of Education*, argued the GOP should focus on "white votes," and promoted the antisemitic work of [[Kevin MacDonald]]. He has appeared at events of Spencer's [[National Policy Institute]] and was hosted at a 2018 birthday party by Trump economic adviser [[Larry Kudlow]], who said he'd known Brimelow "forever." His daughter Hannah has blogged for [[Tim Pool]]'s Timcast. In 2024 Brimelow suspended VDARE's operations, and in 2025 New York Attorney General [[Letitia James]] sued the VDARE Foundation, alleging Brimelow and his wife Lydia diverted about $1.4 million to buy a castle-like property ("Berkeley Castle") in West Virginia. ## The DeAnna Connection Brimelow was [[Kevin DeAnna]]'s editor at VDARE, where DeAnna wrote prolifically under the pen name "James Kirkpatrick." The leaked [[Katie McHugh]] emails captured Brimelow in July 2016 scolding DeAnna for failing to keep VDARE "abreast of Alt Right developments" — and specifically griping that he was "fed up with being surprised about e.g. this meeting with the Right Stuff, [[Ann Coulter]], [[Peter Thiel]] etc." That email is a key piece of evidence placing DeAnna's Thiel dinner inside a dense 2016 web of contacts between the white nationalist right and Trump-aligned money and media. ## See Also - [[VDARE]] — the site he founded and edited - [[Kevin DeAnna]] — his pseudonymous VDARE writer "James Kirkpatrick" - [[Richard Spencer]] — alt-right ally; NPI host - [[Alt-Right]]