11/26/2021
01m34s Too soon made glad. (Post-Rittenhouse tristesse.)
09m30s Lawfare in Virginia. (The rich & connected crush free speech.)
14m08s A catch-phrase for the Cold Civil War. (Inspired by John Ball.)
16m31s Narrative sustained in Georgia. (A monstrous miscarriage of justice.)
23m57s Waukesha killings. (Fruit of the D.A.’s efforts.)
32m05s What’s the difference between James Fields and Darrell Brooks? (We all know.)
34m49s Mistrial in Dallas. (Lone holdout juror.)
36m45s National Border Security Chiefs without borders. (U.K. madness.)
39m07s New victim group: the neuro-diverse. (Equity! Equity!)
40m58s Triggered by "trigger." (Infinite regress looms.)
42m49s Black Friday? Eeek! (But students show sense.)
45m12s Signoff. (With thanks.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your moderately genial host John Derbyshire, here with some ruminations on our current national ruination.
Last week’s podcast leaned heavily on two narratives:
This week’s Radio Derb likewise takes those two narratives as frames, although using a different battle to illustrate the Cold Civil War. First, though, some general remarks about this week’s events.
02 — Too soon made glad. Last week’s podcast opened with an upbeat segment. The verdicts in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial had been announced, and I was jubilant.
This, I said, referring to Kenosha, Wisconsin, this was small-town America at its best. The old values still stand, I said; yes, the old procedures still work; and yes, justice can still be found in places like Kenosha. If there is hope for our country, I further exulted, it lies in such places.
Alas, my heart had been too soon made glad. Yes, the forces of light had prevailed against the Dark Powers there in that one small battle. This week, however, as we were still savoring our triumph, Satan struck back — not once, but twice.
On Tuesday verdicts were delivered in the Charlottesville trial. This is a civil trial launched by a coalition of rich and powerful progressive lobbies against organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally. The jury was hung on a few of the charges, but found for the plaintiffs on most, with massive fines both against those organizers personally and against their organizations.
Then on Wednesday we got verdicts in the Arbery trial in Brunswick, Georgia: 27 of them, nine counts against each of the three defendants. All but four of the 27 verdicts were "guilty."
And those calamities followed on the Sunday attack by a crazy white-hating black criminal on a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Six paraders were killed, all of them white, ages from eight to 81.
So, was I just being a cockeyed optimist last week, taking such encouragement in the Rittenhouse verdicts? My deduction was that, "If there is hope for our country, it lies … in Kenosha, Wisconsin," which is to say, in red-state communities where common sense still rules, far from the big blue cities all poisoned by ideology. Was that deduction just wishful thinking, extrapolated from one lucky win?
Plenty of Dissident Right commenters think so. David Cole at Taki’s Magazine, November 23rd, had a stern piece against what he called "conservative cocooning." I don’t think he had my podcast in mind. He seems to have been responding most particularly to a November 10th tweet by Breitbart commentator John Nolte, tweet:
I don’t give a F*** if Democrat-run cities burn.I live in MAGA country where it’s clean, safe, tolerant, and people of all races live together in harmony.
Shithole cities are not my problem.
Rage on, morons.
You get what you vote for.
End tweet.
Thus John Nolte. David Cole tossed and gored that at length, sample quotes:
Leftists want the entire country; there’s no town too unimportant to merit their concern … You can build a wall to keep out humans, but no wall can keep out an idea. The woke brain disease can hit anyone, anywhere. Young people, and white women, are very susceptible to it. So your 94 percent white town is not safe.
End quote.
The Z-man takes a similarly scornful view of people who believe that what I called "the old values … the old procedures … still work"; and that yes, "justice can still be found in places like Kenosha."
Maybe they can, says Z, but not for much longer. The radicals are coming for them, backed by the full power of the administrative state. Quote from Z, November 23rd:
The Left is waging total war on society. The only rational response is to respond accordingly. The compromise is that our commitment to civic nationalism must give way temporarily in order to deal with the threat in the same way chemotherapy is an exception to deal with cancer.
End quote.
I’m not sure what Z wants civic nationalism to give way to; and having been through chemotherapy, I don’t look forward to anything analogous. Should we take up arms against the radicals? And, after our victory, feed them all into wood-chippers? Z does know — doesn’t he? — that they have already captured the military.
So who’s right here? Can we preserve a rearguard of good sense and civic nationalism in small towns and red-state communities while the big national centers of power and wealth succumb to a crazy ideology?
If you want a frank prediction, I doubt we can. There are many futures, though, and there is honor in fighting, even if it means going down fighting. Having sobered up some after last weekend’s euphoria, I am back to my base state of calm despair. That is not the same as surrender, though.
03 — Lawfare in Virginia. So on Tuesday we got verdicts in the civil trial with defendants Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler, Christopher Cantwell, and others who organized or participated in the Unite the Right rally four years ago in Charlottesville, Virginia. That rally, which was lawful and had a permit, was attacked by an anarchist mob. The police stood aside on the orders of state and city authorities, and violence ensued.
The plaintiffs in this case are a collection of people who claim to have been hurt or distressed by these events. Four of them say they were injured by James Fields, the young man now serving two life sentences plus an additional 419 years for causing injuries and one death while trying to drive away from the anarchist mob.
These plaintiffs were assembled, and the case filed, by a coalition of far-left organizations determined to shut down any public speech or display displeasing to them and their ruling-class financiers. As our own correspondent James Carson Harrington here at VDARE.com explained a few weeks ago, quote:
Note that this a private prosecution because law enforcement authorities didn’t think the case was strong enough. In a classic example of lawfare, wealthy Leftists are trying to buy injustice — specifically, by beating down poorer political enemies to deprive them of their First Amendment speech protections.
End quote.
Well, as I said, we got verdicts. The defendants were found liable for $26 million in compensatory and punitive damages altogether. More than $14 million of that $26 million was assessed against James Fields, the guy serving two life sentences plus an additional 419 years. Lots of luck collecting that.
More realistically, each of the defendants was ordered to pay half a million dollars, and five organizations responsible for the Unite the Right rally were assessed a million dollars each.
That was just for engaging in a so-called conspiracy; for engaging in racial, religious or ethnic harassment or violence, five of the defendants were ordered to collectively pay two plaintiffs $500,000 in compensation for their injuries as well as $1 million in punitive damages.
Since most of the plaintiffs, all of their enablers, and of course all the defendants were white, this counts as a battle in the Cold Civil War.
It was a battle in which the combatants were very unevenly matched. On the one side were front organizations for the ruling class: superbly well-financed, politically well-connected, lawyered up the Wazoo. On the other side were a scattering of individual dissidents.
So the result here was a foregone conclusion. Miracles do occasionally happen, as in Kenosha; but two miracles a few days apart is too much to hope for.
04 — A catch-phrase for the Cold Civil War. Just a footnote to that. I happened to be reading something about medieval England, with a mention of the Peasants' Revolt in the summer of 1381.
A catch-phrase of the revolutionaries were these lines of the radical preacher John Ball:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
The meaning there was, that when the human race began with Adam and Eve — Adam working the soil and Eve spinning cloth at her loom — there were no distinctions of class. In 1381 England there were of course very great distinctions of class: lords, serfs, and many in between.
Our current Cold Civil War, the narrative to which I pinned that last segment, is likewise fundamentally a class war, with wealthy highly-educated types in place of lords, and the working class, small businessmen, and white people of no power in the role of peasants.
In an idle moment I tried to work up some lines parallel to John Ball’s to protest our current situation. Not many Americans nowadays take the early chapters of the Book of Genesis seriously, so the origins of our species need to be Darwinized to bring us up to date. The best I could come up with was this:
When monkeys first came down from trees,
Who were then the Ph.D.s?
If any listener can do better, I shall publicize his effort.
05 — Narrative sustained in Georgia. And then, pivoting to the other of my two narratives, the Mean Lynching Crackers narrative: on Wednesday the verdicts were announced for the Arbery trial in Brunswick, Georgia. As I've already mentioned, all but four of the 27 verdicts were "guilty."
This was a monstrous miscarriage of justice. I reported at length on the history of the case back in my October 22nd podcast. Jared Taylor has posted a much more detailed post-verdict account here at VDARE.com.
Last week I noted how perfectly this story fits the Mean Lynching Crackers narrative that is so dear to so many Americans, not all of them radical fanatics. Greg Gutfeld at Fox News, for example, applauded the verdict. I then said the following thing, quote from me:
So the question hanging over the Arbery trial is: Can it be kept within the narrative, the narrative of mean, ignorant, gap-toothed rednecks hunting blacks for sport? If it can, then it’s just a show trial, run by the Goodwhite establishment to terrorize and humiliate Badwhites.On the other hand, if too much reality leaks out into the courtroom, there might be an instance of narrative collapse, as there was with the George Zimmerman trial over the shooting of Trayvon Martin. We might get a hung jury, or even an acquittal.
End quote.
There was no such leakage. The narrative was sustained, in defiance of all fact and reason.
For example: Malice murder, which was charged against Travis McMichael, the son in the father-son McMichael duo, is defined in Georgia state law as when a person, quote, "unlawfully and with malice aforethought, either express or implied, causes the death of another human being," end quote. He was found guilty.
Why? Travis and his father, who had both had law-enforcement training, honestly believed they were protecting their neighborhood against a criminal. Travis tried to hold the suspect in place until police arrived. He used a shotgun for that purpose, on the reasonable suspicion that Arbery might be armed. Arbery tried to wrest away the gun. If he had succeeded, Travis would surely have been shot, and he knew this. What was he supposed to do? Where is the malice, express or implied?
Likewise with the felony murder charges. Felony murder, in Georgia law, occurs when someone commits a serious or inherently dangerous felony, and someone else dies during the course of committing or attempting to commit the felony. What felonies did McMichael, Senior and William Bryan commit?
The judge, Timothy Walmsley, was partly at fault, whether deliberately or not. He made a pig’s ear out of his instructions to the jury on the critical matter of the citizen’s arrest law that pertained when Arbery was shot.
None of this really mattered. The case was such a good fit for the narrative, neither judge nor jury had to do any thinking. They just had to follow the narrative. Mean Lynching Crackers chase down and shoot angelic black jogger? Guilty!
And concerning the jury, this result supports David Cole’s case against "conservative cocooning." Let me re-quote David, re-quote:
The woke brain disease can hit anyone, anywhere. Young people, and white women, are very susceptible to it. So your 94 percent white town is not safe.
End quote.
Brunswick, Georgia was only 33 percent white in the 2010 census. Glynn County, of which Brunswick is the county seat, was 68 percent white. A lot of fuss was made about there being only one black man on the jury. If David Cole is right, it’s much more relevant that there were only two white men. The other nine jury members were all white women.
So: narrative sustained. Oh, and there was a lesson for any other peasants who find themselves at the sharp end of a popular narrative.
The video shot by William Bryan, which shows Travis McMichael and Arbery struggling for Travis’s shotgun, was not known about until the defendants voluntarily gave it to the authorities, on the assumption that it would help prove Travis was acting in self-defense.
With their narrative spectacles firmly in place, the jury somehow saw it differently. White guy shooting black guy! Guilty!
So here’s the lesson, fellow peasants: Don’t help the authorities!
06 — Waukesha killings. These two downers, the Charlottesville and Brunswick judgements, came after Sunday’s horrific mass killing in Waukesha, Wisconsin. A 39-year-old black man named Darrell Brooks drove his SUV into the town’s traditional Christmas parade, killing six people.
Brooks seems to have no regular employment. The only description we get in that area is "aspiring rapper." He’s been accumulating a criminal record since age 17, and has a long internet trail of anti-white and anti-cop fulminating.
The fact of Brooks being black caused acute distress at the regime media outlets. MSNBC and CNN referred to the event as "a parade crash." The New York Times reported it on page 22.
The Washington Post issued a tweet under the headline, tweet:
Here’s what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by an SUV.
End tweet.
That was on Wednesday, when the perp had long since been identified and his homicidal intentions were plain.
Twitter followers had much fun with that tweet. One wit, with this week’s anniversary of the JFK assassination in mind, put out a mock tweet from the November 1963 Washington Post, tweet:
Here’s what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the President Kennedy tragedy caused by a bullet.
End tweet.
To be fair to the Post, even they realised how embarrassing that tweet was. They deleted it, and on Thursday issued an amended version with a brief notice attached, quote: "We've deleted a previous tweet for this story that included language that was changed after publish." End quote. And yes, it says, "after publish." I guess The Washington Post can’t afford grammar checkers.
It turned out that Brooks had been charged on November 2nd with felony assault for beating up his baby momma and, wait for it, running her over with his SUV. He was freed on $1,000 bail put up by his Mom. A few months before that, in February this year, he'd been freed on $500 bail after a felony rap in July last year, for reckless endangerment by shooting at his nephew, and for possession of a firearm by a felon.
Waukesha is in suburban Milwaukee, and Milwaukee’s District Attorney John Chisholm is an all-out progressive, obsessed with eliminating racial disparities in conviction and incarceration.
This is not easy, given the very high proportion of crime in the U.S.A. that is committed by blacks, especially in cities like Milwaukee.
Highly relevant here is Chapter Four of Charles Murray’s recent book Facing Reality. Murray does a careful, very meticulous crunch of such reliable numbers as he can find for arrests by race in violent crimes. He takes the number of black arrests per hundred thousand and the number of white arrests per hundred thousand, and divides the first by the second to get a ratio.
Murray is so careful, he can find only thirteen city police departments that have posted downloadable databases of arrests by race. Milwaukee unfortunately is not one of the thirteen, although nearby Chicago and not-so-nearby Urbana are. Their ratios are: Chicago 14.5, Urbana 11.3.
Murray concludes that, quote:
Across thirteen American cities, including four of the nation’s most important ones, the African arrest rate for violent crime was usually around 9 to 11 times the European rate.
End quote. Murray uses "African" to mean "black" and "European" to mean "white," for reasons he justifies at length.
Unless Milwaukee is extraordinarily exceptional, D.A. John Chisholm’s goal of ending race disparities in arrests and incarcerations must inevitably, on Charles Murray’s numbers, mean releasing 89 to 91 percent of black violent offenders.
D.A. Chisholm actually boasts of having done this. At a March 11th conference of progressive prosecutors he boasted that, quote: "In some areas there is almost no disparity."
D.A. Chisholm is also on record as telling the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in 2007 that, quote:
Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.
End quote.
With people like that in power, the fact of homicidal psychopaths like Darrell Brooks wandering free in Milwaukee and environs is not the least bit surprising.
And please remind me, Mr D.A.: What was it that invalidated the overall approach we had until a few years ago? The approach, I mean, of locking up violent criminals in prisons and mentally ill people in asylums.
07 — What’s the difference between James Fields and Darrell Brooks? Just a brief footnote to that segment.
Looking forward while recalling the prosecutions, state and federal, of James Fields, what kind of sentences might we expect from the state and federal trials of Darrell Brooks?
I assume there will be a federal civil-rights prosecution of Brooks, as there was for Fields. White people have civil rights too, don’t we?
Fields, for one fatality, got two life sentences — one from the state, one from the feds — plus 419 years. On a straightforward linear proportion Darrell Brooks, if convicted for all six Waukesha homicides, should get twelve life sentences plus 2,514 years. Is that what he'll get?
What’s that you say? James Fields deserved what he got? He’s a Nazi, an admirer of Hitler?
So is Darrell Brooks. The New York Post reported November 25th that, quote:
The ex-con charged over the deaths of six people at a Wisconsin Christmas parade shared social media posts calling for violence against white people — and suggesting "Hitler was right" for killing Jews.
End quote.
So what have we got here? Two guys, both Hitler fans, driving their cars into crowds of people causing fatalities. What is the difference between James Fields and Darrell Brooks?
I’m just screwing with ya, of course. I know perfectly well what the difference is. It’s in plain sight.
And that difference will make all the difference in our sick, perverted, radicalized, anti-white justice system.
08 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Speaking of juries, here was another one, at a mass homicide trial in Dallas, Texas.
The accused here was Billy Chemirmir, who arrived here from Kenya on a tourist visa in 2003, stayed as an illegal alien for four years, then married a U.S. citizen and was given lawful residence.
Chemirmir was charged with murdering 24 elderly Americans, ages from 75 to 94, average 85.1, from 2016 to 2018. He'd break into their residences, smother them with a pillow, and steal their belongings to sell online — a pretty straightforward business model.
The trial began November 15th, proceeded through that week, the jury went into deliberations, and … a mistrial was declared. The jury was deadlocked eleven to one, and that one was proving absolutely immovable.
We've been told the sex of the holdout: female. We haven’t been told the race. Given that Chemirmir is black, I think the universal Derbyshire Rule applies: She must be black too. If she’s white, they would have told us.
Item: We all know about Doctors Without Borders. Americans are by now quite familiar with the concept of Politicians Without Borders. Here’s a new one, though: National Border Security Chiefs without borders.
The name here is Paul Lincoln, until last month director general of Britain’s Border Force, which is a uniformed service guarding Britain’s borders.
Note "until last month." That’s when Mr Lincoln stepped down from his position amid widespread discontent over there about the floods of illegal aliens pouring in across the English Channel.
Mr Lincoln marked his departure by giving a speech, in which he observed, inter alia, quote:
People are talking about immigration, emigration and the rest of the bloody thing. It’s all bloody crap. … We're all human beings, we're all mammals, we're all rocks, plants, rivers. Bloody borders are just such a pain in the bloody arse.
End quote.
If Mr Lincoln is finding it hard going without his $180,000 annual salary, I have a suggestion for him. He should get in touch with our Secretary for Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. The Secretary’s address is:
Department of Homeland Security
St. Elizabeth’s West Campus
1100 Alabama Avenue Southeast
Washington, D.C. 20032
United States of America
I bet Secretary Majorkas would be delighted to offer Mr Lincoln a job.
Item: Finally, three vocabulary items. Item one: "neuro-diverse"
A friend tells me that this one isn’t new. Well, it’s new to me. I spotted it in The Daily Mail, November 20th, headline: Growing number of Civil Service applicants declare themselves "neuro-diverse" and ask to work from home and have time off to visit therapists.
Apparently "neuro-diverse" — sometimes given as "neuro-divergent" — means "mentally ill." And yes, this is a new oppressed minority seeking "equity."
Quote from the Mail article, quote:
It is estimated that around one in seven people are neuro-divergent, meaning that the brain functions, learns and processes information differently.
End quote.
Right. So let’s strive for equity here. One in seven of our civil servants should be mentally ill. Likewise one in seven of our armed forces personnel, one in seven of our airline pilots, one in seven of our heart surgeons, cops, electricians, child minders, barbers, dentists, chefs, … It’s only fair!
Item: Second vocabulary item: "trigger," as in "trigger warning." This is also from across the Pond: they're living on their nerves over there, poor things.
Following the lead of American colleges, the University of Warwick in the West Midlands of England introduced trigger warnings two years ago, to alert students to any course material they might find upsetting.
However, the University of Warwick has been getting complaints from students who find the word "trigger" in "trigger warning" to be triggering. Ever attentive to the mental well-being of its students, the university has now scrapped the phrase "trigger warning" altogether. Trigger warnings will henceforth be referred to as "content notes."
I dunno, there’s an infinite regress here somewhere. What does the university do when some neuro-diverse undergraduate suffers mental anguish at the term "content notes"?
And let’s savor the irony that the texts currently stamped with "content notes" include George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. That would have got a throaty chuckle out of old George.
Item: Third and final vocabulary issue: "Black Friday." This one is from our side of the Pond, actually from the University of Florida. It follows an anonymous opinion piece in The Chicago Tribune headlined: "Black Friday should be renamed so it is not 'discriminating and profiling against black people'"
The body of the article argues that, quote:
The name of the shopping day after Thanksgiving should not be called by the name of a nationality.
End quote.
I guess that refers to people from the nation of Blackland.
Well, there is an organization called Campus Reform which bills itself as, quote, "a conservative watchdog to the nation’s higher education system." Campus Reform sent a reporter to the University of Florida to go round the campus asking students whether the name "Black Friday" should be changed. You can see video clips of her asking them at campusreform.org.
Most students thought the name should be changed. However, when it was explained to them that the name "Black Friday" had nothing to do with black people but only referred to retailers' balance sheets at last going into the holiday-season black after eleven months in the red, the students changed their minds.
Call me naive, but I find that somewhat hopeful. Florida students are apparently less neuro-diverse than those at the University of Warwick.
Several people I know are moving, or planning to move, to Florida. Maybe they're on to something.
09 — Signoff. And that’s it for this Thanksgiving week, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening, and I hope your celebration was as warm and cheerful as ours.
Next week I shall be at the VDARE.com castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia with Peter Brimelow, James Kirkpatrick, and Michelle Malkin for VDARE’s Giving Tuesday. The event will be broadcast live from 8pm at our odysee.com channel — that’s o-d-y-s-e-e, an eccentric spelling — just go to o-d-y-s-e-e.com and put VDARE in the search box. See you there.
To sign off for Thanksgiving, here is a lovely hymn of thanks from all the way back in the 17th century, sung here by the Classic Christian Hymns Choir.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Classic Christian Hymns Choir, "Now Thank We All Our God."]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
