Douglas County election conspiracist, podcast host, and defamation defendant Joe Oltmann had Lydia Brimelow, publisher of the white nationalist website VDARE, on his Conservative Daily podcast yesterday.
“At VDARE.com, we’ve called ourselves the voice of the historic American nation,” said Brimelow. “The idea of a nation is often lost on people now because it’s actually the political expression of a particular people. It is not the state. And people now think that a country is a state. No, a state is a government and a nation has customs. It has celebrations, it has a shared history.”
VDARE was founded in 1999 by former Forbes editor and National Review columnist Peter Brimelow, Lydia’s husband since 2007, who since the 1990s has been one of the leading voices in the anti-immigrant movement. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “VDARE has long attracted proponents of scientific racism, such as Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist site American Renaissance, and Kevin MacDonald, an antisemitic psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach. Other prominent white nationalist contributors include and ‘Unite the Right’ organizer Jason Kessler, who writes regularly about legal issues facing the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who organized the deadly rally. Finally, Kevin DeAnna, a longtime white nationalist propagandist, has written for the site since 2011 under the pseudonym James Kirkpatrick while simultaneously moonlighting at a number of other white nationalist sites. As Hatewatch reported in March 2020, DeAnna has also provided editorial and social media support for the organization at various points throughout the years.”
In 2017, VDARE announced plans to hold a conference at the Cheyenne Mountain Resort in Colorado Springs, but the event was canceled by the venue after public outcry following the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Businesses need to make their own decisions in situations like this, and in doing so, consider both the business and community impacts of hosting disruptive groups,” said former Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers in a statement. “I know I am joined by many Colorado Springs residents when I say I appreciate Cheyenne Mountain Resort’s action to cancel this conference, and its conscientious decision not to bring this group to Colorado Springs.”
As a result of the cancellation, VDARE accused Suthers of violating their first amendment rights by refusing to provide municipal resources for the conference and filed a lawsuit in December 2018, which was dismissed in March 2020. VDARE appealed and lost again in 2021.
VDARE was originally represented by conservative radio host and Colorado Republican National Committeeman Randy Corporon.
Like Oltmann, Corporon is currently a defendant in a defamation lawsuit brought by former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer. The lawsuit claims that by hosting Oltmann and his claims of hearing Coomer on an “antifa conference call” — which were described as “probably false” by Denver District Court Judge Marie Moses — Corporon “elevated Dr. Coomer into the national spotlight, invaded his privacy, threatened his security, and fundamentally defamed his reputation through a relentless election fraud campaign.”
Oltmann has also been involved in anti-immigration activism. His former Conservative Daily cohost, Max McGuire, was the sole contributor to the website illegalaliencrime.com, a website registered to Oltmann which posts arrest data of undocumented Hispanic and Latino immigrants.
“I look through your mission and what you’re trying to bring to the American people is the dangers of this mass migration, especially what’s happened in Europe,” said Oltmann. “You can’t ignore it if you go to Europe. It literally is a shadow of its former self. The culture is literally being changed before our eyes. Much like what is happening here.”
According to the SPLC, VDARE’s website has published defenses of the writings of far-right terrorists and promoted racist conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement,” the false belief that elites are systematically eliminating whites through non-white immigration. In January, the Douglas County Republican Party promoted the Great Replacement Theory on their Facebook page.
“You know, so many of us have been marginalized as, quote unquote, conspiracy theorists [due] to this idea that you have the replacement theory — that you’ve got elites, they’re looking at a servant class, which really is in line with what your hypothesis is,” said David Clements, Oltmann’s cohost and former New Mexico business professor turned election conspiracy filmmaker. “One of the things that I guess I wonder about is that the economic power, or the co-opting of people, as units, as you put it, in their purview, the better way to exploit them is to not have borders. So it’s like the globalist regime, right? It’s front and center, as opposed to a philosophy that most MAGA patriots would say, well, wouldn’t we actually be wealthier, wouldn’t we be more economically sound if we just cleaned up our own mess within our borders? It makes you wonder why the radical left thinks that that power is actually more achievable if we obliterate our borders and destabilize the very nation that they live in.”
Brimelow lamented the impact of what she called “cancel culture” during her Conservative Daily appearance. “We have been dealing with cancel culture for decades now,” she said. “I sometimes say that I specialize in strategies for navigating the world of cancel culture because we have seen it all, including now one that I have not found a way around, which is, banks refusing to sponsor our merchant services … it’s becoming more and more overt, more and more explicit, and increasingly difficult to survive.”
Oltmann encouraged viewers to support her and VDARE. “Go donate, go donate,” he said. “We’ll drop a donation to you as well.”
In the past, Oltmann has exerted considerable political influence over the Colorado Republican Party. Former members of his conservative activist group FEC United include Parker Mayor Jeff Toborg and former Colorado GOP Chair Kristi Burton Brown. During the 2022 Republican state assembly Oltmann was briefly nominated for governor by delegates, and the motion from the floor was seconded by then-Rep. Patrick Neville of Castle Rock, a former House minority leader. Last month Oltmann posted to Facebook, “I have only endorsed one person in colorado and he withdrew from the race. Anyone that says I endorsed them or implies is not being truthful. I continue to meet with Colorado candidates and I will have a list shortly of the who and the why.”
