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I’ve had a hard time getting a summary together of VDARE.com’s activities in 2018. I like to be upbeat in these reports, and last year was just too much of a rollercoaster for an easy encapsulation.

But I will start with some good news: in 2018, for the fourth year in a row, VDARE.com’s year-end appeal broke our historical records. The final tally was $134,503, more than 34% over our $100,000.00 goal. And that doesn’t include cryptocurrency, which is a small but increasingly significant source of donations for VDARE.com.

I know I speak for Peter and the rest of the VDARE.com team when I say I am deeply humbled and eternally grateful for your support.

Thank you—thank you. We strive every day to secure America “for ourselves and our posterity”—and your moral and financial support is the fuel that keeps us going.

VDARE.com’s year-end success was particularly remarkable because, like many websites—and not just political ones—we have been impacted by mysterious changes to Google’s algorithm in 2018. It’s become much more difficult for us even to search our own site using Google, and new readers are not coming to us as much via random internet searches on key words that we specialize in, like for example “birthright citizenship.”ar.

“If you look at Trump in America or Bolsonaro in Brazil, you see that people now want politicians who are tough enough to do what they promise,” said Spanish businessman Juan Carlos Perez Carreño.

The Spaniard was explaining to The New York Times what lay behind the rise of Vox, which the Times calls "Spain's first far-right party since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975."

Indeed, the growing impatience of peoples with elected leaders and legislators who cannot or will not act decisively explains two realities of our time: the eclipse of Congress and the rise of autocracy worldwide.

In condemning President Donald Trump's decision to declare a national emergency and use Pentagon funds to build his wall, Beltway elites have charged the president with a multitude of sins against the Constitution.

He has usurped the "power of the purse" that the Founding Fathers invested in Congress. He has disregarded the "checks and balances" of Madisonian democracy. He is acting like an imperial president.

The Watcher said on January 25, After Shutdown Retreat, Trump Has Three Weeks To Save His Presidency. Maybe He Will. So did Trump save himself with his actions Friday? Our answer: a resounding Maybe.

VDARE.com’s John Derbyshire savagely denounced the funding bill Trump signed. And Derb was far from alone in the immigration patriot community. The bill was not ideal, to say the least.

But we should note that some patriots are arguing the most controversial “poison pill” concessions are not as bad as they appear at first sight—for example on the alleged veto power over wall construction by a handful of border counties. Similarly, some Twitter users have pointed out that the stipulations regarding sponsors of illegal alien minors would not cover people clearly associated with human trafficking and would not effectively hinder Homeland Security’s power to deport whoever deems fit for deportation. And the cap on beds in immigration detention (42,520) is, in fact, the current cap—not a reduction. The bill also gives Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the ability to appropriate money from other agencies if the number of detainees exceeds the number of beds; and allows ICE to obtain the resources to detain up to 58,000 migrants if necessary. [The Shutdown Deal Includes More Ice Detention Beds. That Doesn't Mean Mattresses, by Jack Herrera, Pacific Standard, February 14, 2019]

Interestingly, a particularly detailed argument for immigration patriot moderation about this bill comes from the much-persecuted hard-right podcast Fash The Nation. [FTN 190: Flight 93 Declaration, February 17, 2019]

India is a confusing place. It is able to send hordes of extremely intelligent and highly-motivated scientists to the USA, yet its city centres are so chaotic that tourists have to pay street urchins to throw themselves into the road just so that they can cross it. The land of the Hindus is pursuing its own space program, yet vast areas of the country lack electricity, running water, and even people who can read. What does this say about Indian IQ?

The late J. Philippe Rushton gave an answer to this question back in 2007: Indians Aren't That Intelligent (On Average). But much more evidence has since been developed.

A country’s average IQ is a massively important predictor of national accomplishment and national average living standards, as Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen showed in their seminal 2012 book Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, as well as in their earlier book IQ and the Wealth of Nations.

For a few years now  a German psychologist  trained in political science called David Becker has been tracking down and collating every possible source that might permit assessment of any nation’s IQ. The young researcher, who is based at Chemnitz Technical University in East Germany (the city was known as Karl-Marx-Stadt under Communism) places all his research online so that those who criticise national IQ data can easily have their criticisms refuted. He clearly presents his methodology, in a way which Lynn did not, so that critics can see precisely what’s he’s done, how he’s done it and why: samples are rated for reliability, for example.

On this basis, Becker has also recalculated all of Richard Lynn’s much-denounced National IQs. Significantly, his calculations strongly correlate with Lynn’s—see the results at ViewOnIQ.org.

As part of this project, Becker has also updated and recalculated the Indian IQ, the most recent known study of which was published in 2015 [Gender Performance on Intelligence Quotient Test among Medical Students in a Government Medical College, By B. Uppu et al., IOSR Journal of Dental and Medical Sciences, 2015]

Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, available exclusively on VDARE.com 

Thank goodness St Valentine's Day meant there was something to glow about this week. The political news just gets more depressing. I've been trying to hold on to some shreds of faith in our President, but he's making it awfully difficult. This week's fiasco, or Trumpasco, was of course the emergency funding bill out of Congress. Oh dear; oh dear, oh dear.

That funding bill is worse than bad: it's a catastrophe.

It contains some meager funding for border fences in crucial places on our southern border; but the local authorities in those places are given a veto on the actual building of the fences! Since all the jurisdictions concerned are, at best, deep-blue Democrat, and at worst, bought-and-paid-for by the Mexican smuggling gangs, there will be no fences.

The more you look at the bill, the worse it gets. There is a flat-out Amnesty provision in it for any illegal alien resident in the U.S.A. who says they might sponsor a unaccompanied-minor border-jumper, or who lives in a household with one, or who lives in a household that includes a person who might sponsor one, or whose cousin has a dentist who plays golf with a guy whose wife thinks she might know one.

As Daniel Horowitz has tweeted:

This bill is … worse than amnesty. Amnesty is a reprieve for a transgression of the past. This bill prospectively invites 15 million illegals to engage in human smuggling in order to obtain de facto permanent status here.

Quote from Dan Stein at the Federation for American Immigration Reform: "If this bill is enacted, expect the largest surge of unaccompanied minors this country has ever seen." [Experts: GOP/Dem Deal to Spark ‘Largest Surge’ of Young Border Crossers ‘Country Has Ever Seen’, by John Binder, Breitbart, February 14, 2019]