Virginia Dare was the first reported child born to early English colonialists in Roanoke Colony (Lost Colony) on August 18, 1587, some three decades before the Jamestown settlement and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia’s shores. In the four-plus centuries since her birth, Virginia Dare has variously evolved as a folklore and myth to represent innocence, purity, promise, and mystery.
At a time when women’s suffrage was gaining momentum, the trope of Virginia Dare came to represent preservation and protection of white women. Ultimately, the legend morphed into the dark depths of anti-immigration (or, as more current terminology would have it, restrictionist) issues and association with white supremacist individuals and groups.
In 1999, Peter Brimelow, an English-born writer and former editor at National Review, created the Center for American Unity, based in Warrenton, Virginia, which sponsored a website/blog devoted to limiting immigration into the United States. The Center–later renamed the American Unity Legal Defense Fund to focus on legal intervention in immigration matters–filed amicus briefs in state and federal courts. American Unity remains active today.
Meanwhile, Brimelow had established VDARE, sponsored by the Virginia-based Center, to promulgate anti-immigration propaganda employing the Virginia Dare trope as a symbol. In 2007, the two organizations disaffiliated and VDARE relocated to Connecticut. All three organizations, it should be noted, function under the IRS code as not-for-profits, meaning that their activities are subsidized by a population that includes immigrants, including the foreign born Mr. Brimelow himself.
Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia explains that “For Brimelow, Anglo-Saxon Americans and their culture are in danger of disappearing, like Virginia Dare; he writes that he considered adding a fictional vignette at the end of his book Alien Nation (1995), in which the last white family flees Los Angeles, which had been overrun by the crime and pollution caused by its non-white residents.” VoxFairfax (Racism Needs No Renaissance in Virginia, Aug. 11, 2019) noted the kinship of a number of supremacist individuals and groups with roots and ties in the Commonwealth. It’s no surprise, then, to read a comment from Brimelow at the 2017 American Renaissance conference:
But there’s no doubt that something in that book got to [President Donald Trump], because the way his speech was set up. His announcement speech went to the question of Hispanic crime, specifically rape. And [Ann Coulter]’s book is a very powerful statement of the fact that crime in this country is ethnically variegated. There’s ethnic specialization in crime. And Hispanics do specialize in rape, particularly of children. They’re very prone to it, compared to other groups.
Brimelow’s activity with VDARE has earned designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a hate group. All of this background has been an entry to discussion of the title of this article: Kritarchy–which means rule by Biblical judges.
A few weeks ago, the Department of Justice filed suit with the Federal Labor Relations Authority seeking to decertify the National Association of Immigration Judges, the collective bargaining unit for its 440 members. DOJ publishes a weekly newsletter from its Executive Office for Immigration Review; a late-August issue contained a post from VDARE characterizing the judges as kritarchs, along with pictures of two of the Association’s officers, one Iranian, the other Pakistani.
While the term has been employed properly in academic use, the Anti-Defamation League noted that recently, the term has been co-opted by white nationalists and anti-Semitic extremists to describe liberal American judges. Some of our readers are familiar with VoxFairfax’s fondness for Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ (of Naval Criminal Investigative Service fame) citation of Rule #39: There are no coincidences.
One of VDARE’s continuing contributors has written:
Jewish activity collectively, throughout history, is best understood as an elaborate and highly successful group competitive strategy directed against neighboring peoples and host societies. The objective has been control of economic resources and political power. One example: overwhelming Jewish support for non-traditional immigration, which has the effect of weakening America’s historic white majority.
— Kevin MacDonald, VDARE.com, Nov. 14, 2006, cited by the SPLC
How, then, does the United States Department of Justice, which has responsibility for the legal aspects of immigration, especially the jurists who rule on immigration cases, have a rabidly anti-immigration and racist organization participate in a weekly newsletter communication? What a coincidence—if you believe in them.
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