Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Brimelow

“Hysterical” is doing the heavy lifting here, not “immigration.” Brimelow’s line is engineered less as an argument than as a delegitimizing move: it recasts people who support immigration as emotionally unwell, irrational, and therefore unworthy of serious engagement. That’s the intent - to shift the debate from policy and evidence to temperament and pathology. Once you brand the other side as “hysterical,” you don’t have to rebut their claims; you can diagnose them.

The subtext is a familiar culture-war maneuver. “Enthusiasts” frames pro-immigration voices as hobbyists or zealots, not citizens weighing tradeoffs. The pairing of “enthusiasts” with “hysterical” suggests a kind of manic devotion, implying they’re driven by status signaling, moral vanity, or elite fashion rather than material realities. It’s also a subtle inversion: in many immigration debates, restrictionists are portrayed as fearful or reactive. Brimelow flips that script, implying the real overreaction is on the welcoming side.

Context matters because Brimelow is not a neutral observer in the immigration discourse. As a journalist best known for hardline immigration restrictionism and later for founding VDare, he writes from within a broader nationalist ecosystem that treats immigration as an existential threat to cultural continuity. In that world, calling opponents “hysterical” isn’t just snark; it’s a tactic to portray the mainstream media, liberal institutions, and pro-immigration advocates as emotionally captured - and to position restrictionism as the sober, courageous realism everyone else is too panicked (or performative) to admit.