In a world where it pays to belong to a designated victim tribe, a perhaps unsurprising phenomenon is the current rush by some whites, who can’t claim special status by ancestry, to have themselves elevated above criticism by the privileged status of their sexual orientation. Homosexuals have often formed pseudo-clans, perhaps the most famous being the Bloomsbury cabal to undermine Victorian virtues organized by biographer Lytton Strachey around John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf. When Harvard historian Niall Ferguson recently alluded unflatteringly to this immensely well-documented bit of history, he was denounced worldwide for his insensitivity to a powerless victim group. He’d never lecture in this town again!

Ferguson, a financial historian who knows which side his bread is buttered on, immediately apologized.