YouTube helps a leading white nationalist group raise thousands of dollars

VDare YouTube fundraiser

The white nationalist website VDare said it surpassed a $40,000 fundraising goal thanks, in part, to a livestreaming fundraiser yesterday on YouTube. Despite criticism, the technology company has declined to ban the organization from its platform. 

VDare is a leading white nationalist website that regularly attacks immigrants. The Southern Poverty Law Center has written that the site “regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites.” Numerous Republicans have promoted VDare content over the years. Now-White House senior adviser Stephen Miller shared a link to VDare in 2015, as the SPLC’s Michael Edison Hayden recently reported

The site also runs a YouTube channel which regularly features white nationalist propaganda. For example, VDare host Wilson Hewlett said the alleged El Paso shooter’s use of the word “invasion” to describe immigration was “apt,” praised an anti-Semitic trope as potentially being “onto something,” and argued there are “general differences in aptitude across racial lines." 

Despite YouTube’s claim to have a policy that prohibits “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities” such as race, the platform has allowed the organization to continue to post videos (it briefly banned the channel in August then reversed itself). 

YouTube's willingness to grant a platform to VDare allows the outlet to directly raise money on the video site for its work.

On December 3, VDare spent nearly two hours on YouTube promoting its year-end fundraising campaign, which Editor Peter Brimelow called “the most important part of our financial life.” The fundraiser also featured VDare contributors John Derbyshire and Faith Goldy. Derbyshire, who has described himself as “a mild and tolerant” “racist” and “homophobe,” was previously fired from the National Review after he penned a column advising white and Asian parents to warn their children about the supposed threats posed by Black people. Goldy is a white nationalist who last year unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Toronto. 

The livestream naturally featured white nationalist content. Brimelow pushed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, stating that there’s a “demographic disaster” happening and people in “Europe and America are being displaced, are being outnumbered, swamped, by massive immigration.” And Derbyshire, apparently referencing a blog post by “The Z Man,” said: “He was writing just yesterday, I think it was, how you can’t help but notice that some of the whitest states like Maine and Minnesota have been getting some of the most troublesome groups coming in as refugees from Africa. That’s how we got Ilhan Omar. That’s how Lewiston, Maine, turned Somali. These people know what they’re doing.” 

During the livestream, VDare displayed a banner asking viewers to visit its site to donate money. VDare’s commentators also used YouTube’s “super chat” feature, which enables viewers to pay money to have their comments featured prominently. (VDare wrote at one point: “Your super chats will be read at the end of the stream! Thank you all!”) 

At the beginning of the livestream, Brimelow stated that site had already raised “about $16,000” and hoped to get to $20,000 by the end of the night to get a “matching grant.” By the end of the lifestream, VDare advancement officer Lydia Brimelow said “we were only $387 short of the super stretch. That amount—and more—came in within minutes of turning off the mics. By midnight we surpassed the super stretch matching by over $1,000, bringing our 24 hour total, including the fully matched pledges, to $42, 574!” 

In addition to white nationalist YouTube videos, the funding enables VDare to publish posts such as: “One Problem With These Hispanic Immigrants Is Their Disgusting Behavior,” “Indians Aren`t That Intelligent (On Average),” “Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also…Hispanic Immigrants Taking Over FBI’s Ten Most Wanted,” “America Does Not Need ANY Immigrants From Africa,” and “Roll Over, JIHAD—There’s Also HIJRA, Muslim Conquest By Immigration.”