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Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson has gotten himself into the usual sort of Larry Summers / James D. Watson-style trouble for answering a question about economist John Maynard Keynes’s famous quip—“In the long run, we are all dead”—by cheekily pointing out that Keynes was a childless homosexual. There’s no transcript of his original remarks, but a writer who heard him speak wrote it up on his magazine’s website. [Harvard Professor Trashes Keynes For Homosexuality, By Tom Kostigen, fa-mag.com, May 3, 2013.]

Ferguson commented: “In the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.”

Ferguson has groveled, needless to say, but the Homintern is still pursuing him—see Niall Ferguson: Keynes Was Gay for Germany, by Jonathan Chait, nymag.com, May 7, 2013.

(In contrast to Keynes, the philoprogenitive Ferguson has three children by his first wife and one by his latest, the courageous anti-Islamist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)

Ferguson’s off-the-cuff comments generated a vast global spasm of gasping and tsk-tsking. A Google search of “niall ferguson keynes gay” comes up with over two million  hits.

Why the hysteria?

Because intellectual life has declined to the point where all that matters is Are You on the Side of the Good Guys or the Bad Guys? And the Good Guys are powerful groups of self-proclaimed victims.

Ferguson’s suggestion that family life can influence ideology is, of course, true. For example, Mitt Romney carried only 16 percent of the gay vote in 2012 in contrast to 57 percent of the married vote. Over the last four elections, the rate in each state at which whites are married has been the strongest determinant of the Electoral Vote.

But Ferguson felt it necessary to issue “An Unqualified Apology” [May 4, 2013]because he makes a lot of money giving speeches to financial organizations, so he can’t afford to offend Designated Victim Groups that play a major role within them—such as gays, Jews, and women. At this moment in our culture, gays are particularly dominant, and thus are looking for ways to throw their weight around to intimidate skeptics for good.

What’s more striking, though, are the Voluntary Auxiliary Thought Police who rush in to denounce heretics. As Dennis Dale commented during another recent brouhaha of ridiculous moral outrage:

The Left has routed us and is now chasing us into the weeds to cut us down individually--because they haven't even the capacity to imagine doing anything else.

What are they going to do, declare victory and behave graciously? Where's the fun—or more importantly the influence and cash—in that? They are like a vast standing army with nothing to do and no wish to return to civilian life.

Still, Ferguson was somewhat unfair. Keynes (1883-1946) betrayed today’s conventional wisdom by doing the supposedly impossible: he converted, permanently, from a homosexual lifestyle to a heterosexual lifestyle when—to the shock and dismay of his former Bloomsbury boyfriends—he married the popular ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925.

He wasn’t under any particular social or career pressure at the time. He just switched his affections.

Moreover, we can see that Keynes was concerned about the welfare of future generations of the British from his lifelong advocacy of….(wait for it) eugenics!

After all, in 1911 Keynes, along with the great statistician and geneticist

Americans have two days to intervene in their own affairs—specifically, to protest the refugee/ asylee scandal that, among other atrocities, produced the Boston Bombers.

If asked to describe VDARE.com's theme and purpose in one sentence, I'd say: "The site exists to document, vividly, that every aspect of the U.S. immigration regime amounts to a victimization of the American people ... and to press for immigration sanity in the national interest."

Our refugee and asylum programs constitute a major element in that victimization.  This particular, long-running scandal finally received a massive surge of publicly beneficial exposure from the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent revelation that the perps were beneficiaries, via their parents, of asylum—and, of course, generous public benefits.

But VDARE.com has been covering the abuse of asylum and refuge since at least 2002.  That August, in EOIR Immigration Court -- Implementing the permanent amnesty, Juan Mann wrote:

International alien smuggling enables virtually anyone in the world without legal documents to bypass the system of U.S. consular refugee processing abroad. Aliens who simply appear without documents at any U.S. land border or airport on American soil can request asylum through the "credible fear" process, be released from custody, travel on to another city, and perhaps later appear for a hearing to be awarded asylum by an EOIR immigration judge. The potential for abuse of the current system is so great that the INS "credible fear" and EOIR asylum process has the potential to become the greatest back-door amnesty program of all.

Over the years, VDARE.com’s Thomas Allen, who specializes in this subfield, has written some twenty articles and blogs about the wide spectrum of outrages.  And our prolific Brenda Walker has frequently focused on this area, including, most recently, Burmese Refugees Flood Iowa Town to Fill Tyson Jobs.

My own "favorite" refugee/asylee story is of the Kurd who fled his native Iraq, landed first in Iran, stowed away on a ship to Brazil, lived in Brazil for a while, then stowed away again on a ship to New York.  Only upon reaching the U.S. did he apply for asylum, which was granted—at least provisionally, a year later.[ Tortured Iraqi Fugitive Given U.S. Sanctuary,  By Mark Fritz, LA Times, April 17, 1998]

(The "abuse of asylum and refuge" was the theme for the Summer 1997 issue of The Social Contract quarterly.  Articles by Norman Matloff, James Walsh, James Robb, Jack Martin, and Don Barnett should be helpful antidotes if you have low blood pressure.  The PDF versions are more readable than the HTMLs.)

So how is this obnoxious topic going to warm you up for the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge death match that's just ahead? 

Well, 5 p.m. Eastern Time, Wednesday, May 8 is the deadline for your emailed and faxed public comments regarding the Fiscal Year 2014 refugee admissions program to the State Department's Delicia Spruell (spruellda@state.gov  or fax (202) 453-9393).

That's also the deadline—if you live in the Washington, DC area and could attend the May 15 meeting itself to glower at the bureaucrats—for reserving a seat, by contacting Ms. Spruell.  Details are in this brief announcement.

On Sunday, May 5, I emailed Ms. Spruell my observations and questions about the program.  The questions are implicitly criticisms that the public isn't being provided with essential and internally-consistent data about the program's burden on taxpayers.  My note to Ms. Spruell is appended to this article, as an example, but your input doesn't need to be anywhere near as long as mine.

Beyond the niggling numerical points I focused upon in my email, here are several possible themes—courtesy of Don Barnett, who's a real expert on refuge and asylum abuses—that you could choose from to incorporate in your input, recasting the ideas into your own words:

• Implement a National Governors Association recommendation calling for consultation with state and local communities before refugees are resettled in a community. Local and state entities should have the right to refuse resettlement.
• Discourage “secondary migration”—when refugees move to a different location within the U.S. immediately after being resettled, usually to join an existing enclave of their own countrymen. This causes unplanned and unfunded demands on social services at the “secondary migration” destination. It could be largely prevented by allowing access to social services only in the original state
  

[See also Coolness Under Fire: Six Points To Remember About The 2013 “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” a.k.a. Amnesty War and The Boston Bombers, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” And The National Question]

Congress is back in town and the mark-up on the Obama-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill is scheduled for Thursday, May 9. But this legislative Titanic continues to spring amusing leaks, for example news that the most recent version (up from 844 to 867 pages, changes shown here) quietly increases the slush fund to pay for implementation from $100 million to $1 billion. [With one click, key part of immigration bill becomes ten times more costly, by Byron York, washingtonexaminer.com, May 4 2013].

I was particularly struck by this acid comment from Mickey Kaus, one of the very few Main Stream Media figures to risk the Curse of Stein by criticizing current manic immigration enthusiasm, on a recent network Sunday talk show lineup:

Has there ever been an issue on which the big national media were so one-sided and so untroubled by how one-sided they are?

You’d think they’d at least find the kookiest anti-amnesty crackpot they could find and put them on. But they don’t even do that.

If the national debate is so unanimous, why is it so hard for amnesty to get passed? Who are these mystery opponents, never seen, who wield vast under-the-radar influence? …

TV chat: All pro-amnesty, all the time, April 8 2013

(Needless to say, the networks Sunday talk shows have continued their shameless pimping—see here and here and here and here).

Well, as we all know, Diversity Is Strength. And as a British immigrant I am able to answer Kaus’ question: yes, a similarly one-sided debate was the central feature of the British elite’s bipartisan, equally nation-breaking 1960-1975 campaign to get the U.K. into what was then called the “Common Market” (rapidly changed to the “European Economic Community” and subsequently, casting aside the mask, the “European Union”—an aspiring unitary polity without even a pretense of U.S. style federalism, dramatically negating 1500 years of British history).

In those days, we didn’t even have internet guerillas. We did have Enoch Powell, in my opinion the most significant British politician of the twentieth century. But he was shunned and suppressed by the Establishment—very like Pat Buchanan, in many ways his American equivalent, twenty years later.

I don’t like to bore my American readers with these remote tribal tragedies. But I will note that the Eurofanatic Economist Magazine, recently whooping up immigration in general and the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Bill in particular, has just casually observed of the EU “debate” in retrospect that

the economics of entry seemed weak or even negative: it was the politics of gaining global influence through Europe that drove successive governments.

Forty years on: Lessons of compromise and influence, January 19, 2013

Of course, this economic reality was always obvious to anyone who looked into the question, and eerily echoes the never-reported current consensus among U.S. labor economists that immigration confers no significant advantage to native-born Americans in aggregate (specific Americans benefit, but their fellow-citizens do not).

No doubt in forty years’ time, the Economist will, equally casually, acknowledge

The economy created 165,000 jobs in April, a smidgen above the consensus estimate but not nearly enough to shake the view that a spring/summer slowdown lurks. Economists say the double whammy of higher payroll taxes and lower federal and state spending create insuperable obstacles to economic growth.

Diana Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial in Chicago, agrees:

What’s the biggest drag on the economy? The government. If the government simply did no harm, we could be at escape velocity.  [U.S. Spending Cuts Seen as Key in Slowing Growth, By Nelson D. Schwartz, New York Times, May 2, 2013]

Ms. Swonk is right: government is the problem. But like most mainstream economists, and all Main Stream Media commentary, she is oblivious to the harm done by federal immigration policy.

About 90,000 legal immigrants are allowed into the country every month. This means that more than half last month’s job gain is needed just to absorb new legal entrants.

The “other” employment survey, of households rather than businesses, reported a fairly robust job gain of 293,000. Our analysis finds that, for the second straight month, native-born Americans enjoyed all the job gains while the number of foreign-born employed declined.

            In April:

• Total employment rose by 293,000, or by 0.20%
• Native-born employment rose by 317,000, or by 0.26%
• Foreign-born employment fell by 24,000, or by -0.10%

The return of illegal immigrants to Mexico in a U.S. weak job market could explain some of the foreign-born employment slippage.

It’s also a fact that, for whatever reason, immigrants have lost ground relative to the native-born in each of the past three Aprils. Indeed, immigrants’ job performance relative to the native-born was, if anything, better in 2013 than in prior years:

After declining by 0.6% and 1.3% in April 2011 and 2012, respectively, foreign-born employment fell by only 0.1% this April. The same trend is evident in the share of jobs held by immigrants.

So while the immigrant penetration of the U.S. workforce was reversed last month, the magnitude of the reversal was nowhere near what had occurred in the two prior Aprils.

The overall trend is made clear in our New VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index (NVDAWDI).  It tracks native-born and foreign-born employment growth for every month since the start of the Obama Administration:

Native-born employment growth is the blue line, immigrant employment growth is in pink, and NVAWDI—the ratio of immigrant to native-born job growth—is yellow. To chart American worker displacement, we set both the native-born and immigrant employment

There’s a stomach-turning segment of the American population that sees surviving Boston bomber suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a romantic maverick.

[With apologies to Wallace Stevens]

[VDARE.com note: This is a satire, satire, satire, SATIRE! It’s not 2014 yet, Lindsey Graham has not revealed himself as perfectly scrumptious, and no Bomb Brother acquittal has been announced (yet). However, nothing in this parody is beyond possibility—some surprising people have discovered their inner scrumptiousness, and juries are…unpredictable, if you are not aware that “race is destiny” in the jury room as well as the voting booth.]

Excerpts from press coverage of the acquittal of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 15, 2014:

I: Associated Press:  

In an expected development, confessed Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was acquitted today on each of four counts of first-degree homicide and 190 counts of aggravated assault. The jury of eleven women and one man declared him “innocent on account of cuteness.”

II: TMZ:

Juror Kendra Newton explained after the verdict, “To be honest, I kind of zoned out, you know? I was trying to pay attention so I could write a book and make a lot of money, but trials are a lot more boring and confusing than you’d think from TV. They should edit out all the dull parts and have a musical score that tells you how you are supposed to feel.” 

III: Hollywood Reporter:

Ben Affleck announced that he had acquired the rights to the life story of his fellow Cambridge Rindge & Latin School graduate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The biopic will be Affleck’s long-awaited follow-up to his Best Picture-winning Argo. “Dzhokhar will portray what you might assume was a national humiliation,” Affleck declared, “But, when you look at history from just the right angle, you’ll see that these events were actually a brilliant triumph by a Democratic Administration.” Affleck is growing a foot-long beard to play pious elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while Rindge grad Matt Damon will portray Vice President Joe Biden.

IV: Boston Globe:

Defense attorney Gloria Allred argued that Dzhokhar was the real victim. If anyone in the Tsarnaev family were to blame, she said, it would have to be Tamerlan. But, she contended in a rousing closing argument that had jury members gasping with anger, "the real killer is Hector Torres. He killed Tamerlan's American Dream."

Torres was the white Hispanic trainer of a rival boxer. He became the Mark Fuhrman of the trial after the New York Times revealed on April 27, 2013 in "Before Bombs, a Battered American Dream" that Torres had crushed Tamerlan's patriotic hopes by getting him disqualified from the 2010 Golden Gloves tournament for not having completed his path to citizenship, thus forcing him to do what he did.

Torres has gone into hiding.

Commenting on the verdict, Senator John McCain, a member of the bipartisan Gang of Seven immigration reform leaders, told reporters, “This just proves what I’ve always believed: We must immediately grant American citizenship to anybody in the world who wants it. And bomb everybody who doesn’t.”

V: Today Show:

Jury forewoman Jihada Allahuakbarova described the defendant as “Kind of dreamy, like in a boy band, a practice boyfriend type. But when they talked about him killing those people,” Allahuakbarova noted, “I could tell he was all man.”

VI: Transcript of defense attorney Gloria Allred’s closing summary:

Djhokhar Tsarnaev had a dream, an American Dream. Like all those millions of immigrants who came to a boring, white bread country and built this land with their bare hands, he had a plan, a hard-working plan to do the job Americans just wouldn’t do: deal drugs out of his dorm room in-between marathon X-Box sessions. He had a faith, a vibrant faith that his immigrant entrepreneurship would let him afford all the gold chains that signify virile manhood in his own diverse culture. Was it his fault that America failed his American Dream? What else could this Dreamer do but take a stand against the haters, the xenophobes, the racists that say his family maybe shouldn’t have been allowed to come to this country in the first place? If you convict this boy, then the nativists have won.

VII World Star Hip Hop:

I liked when the lawyer lady said, “If you ain’t a bigot, you must acquit it.”

VIII New York Times:

The verdict came as a rebuke to the once widely-praised jury selection strategy of federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz, who had decided to pack the jury with women and focus her prosecution on demanding feminist vengeance for the murder of the two female victims. Ms. Ortiz had been especially admired for her policy of never challenging any prospective female juror on whether she was undocumented.

Mr. Tsarnaev's attorney, Gloria Allred, had surprised courtroom commentators by playing along with Ms. Ortiz's selection tactics. The normally media-friendly Ms. Allred has kept her silence on the thinking behind her juror strategy, citing only "a hunch."

Ms. Ortiz had called for a 30-year-sentence for Mr. Tsarnaev,

  VDARE.com note:  Just over a year ago, National Review fired their most brilliant writer, John Derbyshire—then in the midst of chemotherapy!—over an article he wrote for another webzine flowing out of the Trayvon Martin scam, then being ramped up in the Main Stream Media as part of the Obama re-election campaign. Every last word in Derbyshire’s article was defensible on the basis of truth and National Review’s capitulation was simply an aspect of the Conservative Establishment’s wider capitulation to the Left’s ideological hegemony that, among other things, meant that Mitt Romney lost the 2012 Presidential election because he was too cowardly to mobilize the white (formerly known as American) vote.

We were proud to offer John Derbyshire another home and we are delighted to publish From The Dissident Right, our collection of his columns.  As he said gratefully in his first post-firing column for us, he was enormously buoyed up by “the kindness of strangers”—the individual Americans who spontaneously gave money to support him because they applaud his courage in defense of then and their posterity. Similarly, we support John Derbyshire’s writings through our earmarked John Derbyshire Fund (it’s tax-deductible). 

Please consider an anniversary donation—and buy his book!

I have a new book out this week, title: From the Dissident Right.  You can buy it on Kindle right now;it will be available in paperback shortly (if you’d like to be notified when, email here).  is available here

Publishing a book is an act of such antisocial conceit (“this epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper”—Dr. Samuel Johnson), it calls for an explanation.  Here’s mine.

I have been posting columns on VDARE.com since mid-2000, but with a four-year hiatus from 2008 to 2012.  Let me explain the hiatus.

In February of 2008 William F. Buckley, Jr. died.  Peter Brimelow posted some unflattering remarks (positively understated—PB) about his former boss at VDARE.com.  Peter does not hold the admonition de mortuis nil nisi bonum in very reverent esteem; but then, as he pointed out, neither did Buckley.  Unreceptive to this defense, the editor of National Review, Rich Lowry, [Email him] banned his contributors from associating in any way with VDARE.com.

I had been contributing to National Review since 1998, so I came under the ban, and crossed VDARE.com off my list of outlets.  I was, and have always been, a freelancer.  Juggling one’s outlets like this is part of the lifestyle. 

Hence the beginning of that hiatus.

Four years later, on April 5, 2012, I published a column titled The Talk: Nonblack Version (hereinunder “The Talk”) in a different outlet, Taki’s Magazine.  That column, as I explain in the introduction to From the Dissident Right,

while repeatedly stressing openness to the individual personality, points out negative—true, but negative—group characteristics of American blacks, without placing the blame for those negative characteristics on past or present malice by whites.  That brings it within the scope of “racism” as currently understood in the U.S.A.

National Review—which, as one of the editors told me once, “doesn’t do race”—took exception to “The Talk.”  They called it “nasty.”  This time they crossed me off their contributor list.  I tell you, it’s swings and roundabouts out here in Freelance Land.

(A few days later they dropped my friend Bob Weissberg from their list because of a speech Bob gave at the 2012 American Renaissance conference.  They called Bob’s speech “noxious,” although at the time they did so the speech had not been reproduced in any form and National Review’s only source of information about it was an old Stalinist warhorse named Leonard Zeskind, whom, to the magazine’s everlasting shame, they thanked.  Since these events Bob and I hail each other when meeting with: “Good evening, Mr. Noxious!”  “Ah, hello there, Mr. Nasty!”  Bob has mused that if vaudeville had not died, we could go on the road as a double act:  Noxious and Nasty.)

Following my defenestration by National Review Peter Brimelow,

Israel's Egyptian border fence. NB armed IDF man.

Yesterday Israel HaYom, the free Israeli newspaper with which owner Sheldon Adelson is distorting the Israeli media market as much as he is the operations of the GOP, came out with a peculiar headline: Infiltrators sneak into Israel despite completion of security fence by Lilach Shoval April 28 2013. This announces-

For the first time since the recent construction of the security fence along Israel's border with Egypt, four African infiltrators and five other individuals managed to breach the barrier and enter Israel during April

but also reports

The African infiltrators, who scaled the 5-meter (16-foot) fence to enter Israel illegally, were apprehended by Israel Defense Forces patrols in the area and transferred to the Saharonim detention center near the border, where by law they will be held for at least three years

(My emphasis. No ‘Catch and Release’ for Israel!).

The IDF response was