Following my article, “‘Debate Community’ Organizes to Silence Critic—Me!,” a reader wrote me about writer Stephen Whittle (pen name Luke O’Farrell), 41, and his publisher, Simon Shepherd, 51, “the Heretical 2.”

They were convicted earlier this month in the UK for writing articles that “incited racial hatred.” Yes, convicted for writing articles! [While out on bail, awaiting sentencing—NS] They fled to the US seeking asylum and are now sitting in the Santa Ana, CA jail awaiting their immigration hearing. As far as I can tell, their story has gotten zero US media coverage.

What I find frightening is that Canada has similar thought crime laws and some groups are trying to get them passed in our country. I think it’s imperative that Americans find out about their case, as it may be a sign of things to come if such laws are passed in the US.

Whittle and Shepherd are not sweethearts. They engage in Holocaust-denial (see the last paragraph of the linked essay), they don’t love Jews (not even me!), and fail to properly celebrate racial minorities.

Prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford told the jury …
“People in this country are entitled to be racist and they are entitled to hold unpleasant points of view, but what they aren’t entitled to do is publish or distribute written material which is insulting, threatening or abusive and is intended to stir up racial hatred or is likely to do so.”

[Sheppard and Whittle] told the jury that the articles were an attempt to “satirise” political correctness.

Sheppard said: “You can’t blame a Jewish person for being a Jew, you can’t blame a black person for being black, and you can’t blame a Yorkshireman for being forthright, which I am.”

Holocaust denier convicted of trying to incite race hate online by Rob Preece, Yorkshire Post, July 12, 2008.

As James Fulford recently reminded us, America is the only nation with a First Amendment, and yet he, Peter Brimelow, and Paul Craig Roberts have also written since 2000 of prosecutions of whites for “crimes” that, under the First Amendment, cannot be crimes. A white teenager is sentenced to ten years in prison for burning a cross, as a protest against black-on-white school assaults; the attackers are not prosecuted. An off-duty, Hispanic sheriff’s deputy gets a white woman arrested and prosecuted for engaging in offensive but protected speech. A white man is jailed for uttering a racial epithet at a black football referee who had just assaulted his wife (the referee is not charged, natch).

Such prosecutions are extensions of the elites’ campaign against ordinary whites that began with Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka , and picked up steam with the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In order to disenfranchise and dispossess ordinary whites, since 1964 public and private officials alike have engaged in massive resistance, violating the14th Amendment and, in the name of civil rights, even the Civil Rights Act! Like the Civil Rights Act, unconstitutional “hate crime” laws and some British and Canadian laws are written in race-neutral fashion, but wielded as racist brickbats against whites.

I’ve supported the First Amendment rights of black supremacist Leonard Jeffries, and of Alex “Don’t Call Me a Neo-Nazi” Linder. I’m not afraid of debating ideas with which I disagree, or of countering lies.

Several years ago, I realized that I might one day have to choose between prison and exile from the nation whose citizen I am both by birth and by choice. The greatest danger in America, however, will not be to Holocaust-deniers, but to those who tell the truth.

You can listen here. Dobbs writes

And PETER BRIMELOW, the editor of VDARE.com and the author of the best-selling Alien Nation, has an interesting take on the future: He thinks that big business, long a champion of large-scale immigration, will soon be singing a different tune.

See  Why Business Will Change Sides—And Accept An Immigration Cut-Off, by Peter Brimelow, December 18, 2007, for more details.

is the “Not a Bus” concept in “#147 - Public Transportation That Is Not a Bus.” Christian Lander developed my basic point nicely:

… White people all support the idea of public transportation and will be happy to tell you about how the subways and streetcars/trams have helped to energize cities like Chicago and Portland. They will tell you all about the energy and cost savings of having people abandon their cars for public transportation and how they hope that one day they can live in a city where they will be car-free.

At this point, you are probably thinking about the massive number of buses that serve your city and how you have never seen a white person riding them. To a white person a bus is essentially a giant minivan that continually stops to pick up progressively smellier people. You should never, ever point this out to a white person. It will make them recognize that they might not love public transportation as much as they thought, and then they will feel sad.

The book is on Amazon for $11.80. I was going to mention that it’s very easy to give books as gifts via Amazon (just fill in the address of the recipient), but then I noticed “#138 Books:”

So now that you know that white people like books, you might assume that a book is the perfect gift. Not so fast. There are a few possible outcomes from giving books, and few of them end well. If you get a white person a book that they already have, the situation will be uncomfortable. If you get them a book that they do want, you will be forever viewed as someone with poor taste in literature. In the event that you get them a book that they want and do not have, they are forced to recognize that they have not read it, which instantly paints you as a threat. There is no way to win when you give a book to a white person.

In the latest Batman movie (or “the Batman” as all the bad guys in the picture say), Katie Holmes has been replaced as the love interest by Maggie Gyllenhall, who looks like a sad cartoon turtle. Exactly why we’re supposed to believe that Christian Bale and Aaron Eckhart are both hopelessly in love with Maggie Gyllenhaal is unexplained, but that’s not the point.

The point is that casting Mrs. Tom Cruise in a blockbuster movie is like picking Mrs. Bill Clinton to run on the national ticket–she’s okay, but what’s her husband going to do be doing? He’s got way too much energy to stay out of the spotlight. Who needs him? And, thus, who needs her?

The border fence is 700 miles long–and counting. Border Patrol apprehensions have been dropping for three years. Remittance outflows to Mexico were down nearly 3% in the first three months of this year from the same period last year. A poll of migrants by the Inter American Development Bank in April confirms that fewer are sending money back regularly.

“Evidence” for a decline in the illegal immigrant population has been limited to these anecdotal items–until now. A new report by Steve Camarota finds that the illegal population fell by some 1.3 million, or 11%, through May 2008 after peaking in August 2007 The study is based on the Current Population Survey, widely regarded as the most accurate gauge of U.S. population available between Census years.

We feel justified in crying out “We told you so!” For years we have tracked monthly trends in Hispanic and non-Hispanic employment, highlighting the disproportionately large advance in Hispanic labor since the start of the Bush Administration.

Since last summer, however, we’ve noted what can be reasonable called a sea change: Hispanic employment growth rates started lagging non-Hispanic employment growth rates.

Our last employment update, published in early July, contained the following prescient observation:

“VDARE.com’s American Worker Displacement Index (VDAWDI), calculated as the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth indexes during the Bush years, fell to 122.8 in June– its the largest decline since January. Since peaking in August, VDAWDI has encountered upside resistance:”

“Our general economic funk undoubtedly plays a role, dissuading legals as well as illegals from coming to these parts. But there are plenty of reasons to suspect that a diminished influx of illegal workers is playing the larger role.”

The post-August 2007 reversal, now confirmed by Camarota, was quite evident in our last VDAWDI graphic:

Is it just the economy? No, stupid. Camarota finds that employment of less-educated Hispanic immigrants began to fall well before their unemployment rate started to rise, noting:

“This suggests that the fall in the size of the likely illegal population was caused by enforcement rather than deterioration in the economy. However, the rise in unemployment now may be acting in concert with increased enforcement efforts, making it increasingly difficult to determine the relative importance of the economy or enforcement if the current decline continues.”

To be sure, Camarota’s illegal alien population figures are estimates. His data source–the Current Population Survey - does not ask immigrants their legal status. This egregious flaw forces researchers to estimate the illegal alien population using various markers–citizenship status, age, country of birth, level of education, household size, etc.

Some have abandoned CPS for other data sources. They report the illegal alien population may be as high as 30 million.

One of the eerier feelings for me is to start reading a New York Times op-ed and realize partway through that the columnist is engaging in an argument with me, even though I’m not named. That happens several times per year with David Brooks’s NYT columns. (I’ve been told on trustworthy authority that he is a regular reader, so I’m not just being paranoid here.)

A moderate amount of his stuff seems to be either echoing or arguing with me, (The last time Brooks mentioned my name in the NYT back in 2004, he got a lot of grief from the commissars about it.)

Without the Secret Decoder Ring, it’s often hard to figure out what Brooks is talking about. Consider his recent column “The Luxurious Growth.” (Here’s John Derbyshire’s reply.) Or here’s his September 2007 column on “The Waning of IQ” that makes no sense at all except under the presumption that NYT subscribers are regular iSteve readers who are almost persuaded by my work. (Here’s GNXP’s response to it.)

As you know, my basic shtick is that, increasingly, specific government policies tend to matter less than the quantities and qualities of various populations. For example, Hong Kong became prosperous under free trade and laissez-faire, while Singapore became prosperous under protectionism and paternalism.

Thus, immigration policy is more central to the future of America than most of the controversies more welcome in the pages of the New York Times.

My impression is that Brooks finds my work highly persuasive, but also highly troubling, both from an ideological and career perspective. So, he sometimes seems to be groping around for some way to refute me, but all without mentioning my name. Thus you end up with weird columns that are structured like this:

1. The conventional wisdom is [something that only iSteve readers would dare imagine].

2. But, the latest research actually shows that this [utter heresy] isn’t quite the sure thing everybody [i.e., my readers, not NYT subscribers] assume, and the reality is [pretty much what politically correct people everywhere assumed all along it was].

For example, today’s column parallels my January 1, 2008 VDARE.com column on James Heckman’s research on high school graduation rates, but then skids off the rails at the end. Brooks writes:

The meticulous research of Goldin and Katz is complemented by another report from James Heckman of the University of Chicago. Using his own research, Heckman also concludes that high school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability. He uses common sense to intuit what these traits are, but on this subject economists have a lot to learn from developmental psychologists. [See my February blog posting on this second aspect of Heckman's work: "Psychology for Economists."]

I point to these two research projects because the skills slowdown is the biggest issue facing the country. Rising gas prices are bound to dominate the election because voters are slapped in the face with them every time they visit the pump. But this slow-moving problem, more than any other, will shape the destiny of the nation.

Second, there is a big debate under way over the sources of middle-class economic anxiety. Some populists emphasize the destructive forces of globalization, outsourcing and predatory capitalism. These people say we need radical labor market reforms to give the working class a chance. But the populists are going to have to grapple with the Goldin, Katz and Heckman research, which powerfully buttresses the arguments of those who emphasize human capital policies. It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.

But, obviously, the current immigration system of large amounts of unskilled illegal immigration and large amounts of highly skilled legal immigration widens “the skills gap.” And, nice as it is to imagine that, after 45 years of failing, we’ll suddenly somehow dream up a way for “boosting educational attainment at the bottom,” the much more plausible thing that we can actually get done before hell freezes over to slow the widening of the skills gap is to fix immigration policy.

The LA Times has one staffer, Andrew Malcolm, who was a big Hillary Clinton fan, so we are occasionally treated to headlines like this:

Phil Spector endorses Barack Obama

The Democratic congressman from Chicago, who has been using his office of trust to preach to “xenophobic and anti-immigrant” Americans that illegals are people “who clean our toilets, make our beds, watch our children, pick our produce,” is now on record as approving of them stealing our Social Security cards as long as they’re used only to gain employment,  [Politics led to Postville raid, Democrat alleges, by Tony Leys, Des Moines Register, July 27, 2008]

Gutierrez said federal authorities filed unfairly tough criminal charges against the workers. He said most of the workers were charged with aggravated criminal identity theft, which means they allegedly stole someone’s Social Security number with the intent to gain something, such as a credit card.

“Well, we haven’t heard testimony here that anybody did anything with Social Security cards other than going to work,” he said.

Memo to “The Honorable” Rep. Gutierrez: Here, allow me to draw you a picture using the same writing tools that you and many of your House colleagues use to mark up legislation aimed at advancing your amnesty agenda. And, please, try to stay with me on this, OK? When you use a legitimate Social Security card that has been stolen to get a job that many Americans used to do but for wages that allowed them to support their families, have you not “gained something”?

Jake Jacobsen of Freedom Folks was at the Postville demonstrations mentioned below. They have all kinds of pictures, like the one on the right. Why does a town of 2,200 people, in Iowa  of all places need a Multicultural Center? Or a Diversity Council?

We were able to attend the shenanigans out in Postville this last weekend, here is our coverage so far…

Picture post of the town.

Picture post of the pro-enforcement side.

Picture post of the anti-enforcement side.

Video post.

And a scoop we haven’t seen anyone else talking about as of yet.

I had long had this impression, and now the Olympics issue of Sports Illustrated confirms it: Californians are hugely over-represented on the Summer Olympics team.

“Based on hometowns, California produced more members of Team USA (175) than any other state.”

Indeed, the next seven states only produced 176 athletes.

Similarly,

“The colleges with the most team members (current students or alums) are Stanford (31), UCLA (19), USC (19), Texas (17), Cal (14), and North Carolina (13).”

Why is this?