[16] In January 2021, a judge dismissed a lawsuit Brimelow brought against The New York Times, ruling that his being called a "white nationalist" was not defamatory.
In 1990, Brimelow and Leslie Spencer's article "The Litigation Scandal", written for Forbes, won a Gerald Loeb Award in the "Magazine" category.
[25] In 2022, Brimelow called for a reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, a 1954 Supreme Court decision that directed an end to segregated schools.
[26] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described Brimelow's website VDARE as a hate group,[9][27][28] that was "once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page", but by 2003 became "a meeting place for many on the radical right".
[32][33] The book Anti-Immigration in the United States summarized Brimelow's position as being that whites had built American culture and should defend it against non-whites who would try to change it.
For the Hoover Institution journal Education Next, public policy consultant George Mitchell wrote: "Brimelow... demonstrates how collective bargaining for teachers has produced labor agreements that stifle innovation and risk taking.
He makes it clear that the dramatic rise in influence enjoyed by the teacher unions has coincided with stagnant and unacceptable levels of student performance."
However, in the same journal article, education consultant Julia E. Koppich took a more critical angle: "Brimelow uses a variety of linguistic devices to drive home his points.
But his over-the-top language soon grates on the nerves... His argument is not that teacher unions are destroying American education, but that they labor long and hard to preserve the status quo...
[48] In an article in Maclean's which was published in 2011, John M. Geddes says that Brimelow's book The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities "offered a bracingly of-the-moment conservative critique of Canada," and said that it was instrumental in shaping the thought process of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
[49] Brimelow's first wife was Margaret Alice "Maggy" Laws, a native of Newfoundland, Canada who worked for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research when they met in New York.