Steve Sailer: ‘A former SPLC enforcer writes a book about how he inflicted Brimelow Derangement Syndrome upon his own fragile mental health.’

With some effort, I can feel empathy for all the characters in this story. I know what it is like to find some things (such as trans identity and gay marriage) upsetting that others valorize. If VDARE moves to your town and buys a castle, it’s not hard to feel empathy for those who feel horror as well as for the VDARE crowd who just want a safe space.
Steve Sailer’s piece is sharp and funny but it does what polemicists do: it treats the opponent’s distress as evidence of bad faith or weakness rather than as data about how the conflict feels from inside a different hero system. The SPLC researcher who spent a decade immersed in material he experienced as threatening, and who ended up with suicidal ideation, was not necessarily performing. He was broken by something. The question is what that something tells us.
From inside the SPLC formation, VDare represents an existential threat to a moral order built around the premise that demographic diversity is the telos of American civilization and that any resistance to it is not a policy disagreement but a recurrence of history’s worst chapters. If you have organized your sense of meaning around fighting that recurrence, then Peter Brimelow is not a eccentric British immigration restrictionist with a castle in West Virginia. He is a harbinger. The FBI call about an assassination threat is real. The stakes feel ultimate because the hero system says they are.
From inside the VDare formation, the SPLC is a well-funded coalition enforcement operation that destroyed careers, deplatformed speakers, and pressured hotels to cancel contracts, not to fight actual Nazis but to make the Overton window on immigration permanent and to label anyone who questioned it a white nationalist. That experience of suppression is also real. The castle in Berkeley Springs exists because public venues became unavailable.
Both sides experienced the other as a threat to something worth defending. The Michael Edison Hayden breakdown and the Sailer mockery of it are mirror images of the same thing: each side finds the other’s distress illegible because the hero systems are incommensurable. Sailer cannot see why anyone would crack up over VDare holding conferences. Hayden cannot see why anyone would find the SPLC’s tactics more troubling than the people it targets.