10/30/2020
04m00 Brace for impact. (Into the Singularity.)
11m03s Towards the beggars' democracy. (They'll take your bank account.)
19m11s SCOTUS back to nine. (The Nice White Lady menace.)
25m14s Philadelphia story. (A Darwinian winner.)
32m01s More on Mongolia! (The Quad goes courting.)
38m13s Importing social problems. (Murder in the cathedral.)
41m53s Owning the insult. (Kazakhs get it right.)
44m57s Red Guards target Grease. (Evolution fires back.)
48m15s Signoff. (With Halloween music.)
NOTE: We usually wait until Wednesday to post the transcript, but as a public service, we're posting it now.
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. This is of course your tirelessly genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you commentary on all the latest news from home and abroad. I'd tell you the name of the broad who helps put these bulletins together; but she is a VDARE.com employee and prefers anonymity.
Before I begin, a little gentle chiding. Listeners sometimes email in to chide me for something or other, usually some point of grammar or error of fact. Fair enough, and if I judge my error to have been of sufficient gravity, I'll correct it in a later podcast. Turnabout is fair play, though. If it’s OK for listeners to chide me, I can chide back. So here I go counter-chiding.
There’s a subset of listeners — a small subset, I should say — who seem unable to distinguish between thoughts and feelings. When I try to prognosticate and say that, based on the facts I've seen and my own powers of reason, I think X will happen, they somehow take that to mean that I wish for X to happen. That I can believe something will happen without at all wanting it to happen — perhaps in fact desperately hoping it won’t happen — is a thought some people cannot think.
Please, members of that subset, reflect on how elementary your error is. I have been saying for a year and a half that I think President Trump will lose his bid for re-election. I don’t want him to; I voted for him in 2016; I shall vote for him on Tuesday; I regard control of our government by the Democratic Party with fear and apprehension; It just looks to me like the more probable result.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. We should examine the facts that are available to us, apply our powers of reason, and draw what conclusions we can. If the conclusions go against our wishes, we should bear the disappointment stoically.
All the evidence tells me I shall die one day; but I don’t want to die. Wishful thinking is the enemy of sound good sense, as our social policies this past few decades show all too clearly.
So please don’t email in to complain that I’m rooting for a Trump loss. I’m not; I think it would be a disaster for the U.S.A. It’s just the best deduction I can make from the best data I can find. I hope for a different result, but I don’t expect one.
02 — Brace for impact. Four more days to go as I speak: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. And then, Heaven only knows how many weeks of rancor and lawyering before there’s a clear result.
The way voting arrangements have been set up this year, twenty-two states, plus D.C., allow mail-in ballots to arrive after Election Day, so long as they're postmarked no later. Washington State will count mail-in ballots that arrive as late as November 23rd. That’s almost three weeks after Election Day. State election officials over there expect less than fifty percent of their votes to be counted on Election Night.
Unless there’s a landslide — a clear and undeniable sweep for either Biden or Trump — we're going to be stuck in noisy uncertainty for a while. And if you're a Trump voter like me, you'd better hope there is not a landslide, because on all the indicators we have, it would more likely be a landslide for the other guy than for ours.
It doesn’t look good for the President. Tim Alberta did a round-up of the prospects at the Politico website on Wednesday. Alberta’s column is organized as sixteen ways that this election differs from the one four years ago.
Alberta is a center-left millennial, so you need to discount for some bias. He’s comparatively sensible, though: not a shrieking radical but a seasoned political observer who’s done the legwork. Most of his points strike me as sound.
Some of them are the same ones I've been making this past year and a half. Point number three, for instance: the quality of the opposition. Mrs. Clinton was generally disliked and distrusted; Joe Biden is regarded much more favorably by the American public at large.
Point thirteen: Four years ago the Establishment — I mean, the Uniparty, the media-corporate-academic-political-intelligence alliance that holds all power in our nation — four years ago they didn’t take Trump seriously. He slipped by them while they were partying. They understand this; they won’t be caught napping again.
Here in its entirety is Alberta’s Point Eight, quote:
Four years ago, the polls were … actually pretty darn accurate, at least at the national level. The final RealClearPolitics average projected Clinton winning the popular vote by 3.3 points; she won by 2.1 points. If the average is off by an identical spread this year — if Biden beats Trump by 7.1 percentage points nationally, instead of the 8.3 points he’s leading by in the current averages — then he clobbers Trump in most if not all of the battleground states and carries somewhere north of 350 votes in the Electoral College.
End quote.
One new negative that hadn’t occurred to me, Alberta’s Point Sixteen, is that four years ago we had just lost Antonin Scalia. The election would decide whether his replacement would swing the Supreme Court right or left.
That motivated a lot of people who weren’t crazy about Trump — a lot of evangelicals, for instance — to vote for him anyway. This year we have a 6-3 conservative court, or a 5-4 one if you take the dark view of John Roberts. Mission accomplished! — so, no need to vote Trump.
I’m no happier about these prospects than you are, but it really doesn’t look good for our President.
There are some straws we can clutch at. Tim Alberta notes that eight million voters went for third-party candidates in 2016, hurting Trump more than Clinton. That won’t happen this year; the third-party vote is negligible; Alberta thinks a lot of that eight million will come home to Trump.
For another clutchable straw, my colleague James Kirkpatrick offers the so-called "shy Trump voters" — Trump supporters who don’t tell pollsters about their voting intentions. Tim Alberta pooh-poohs that one in his Point Nine, quote:
Local GOP officials will be the first to tell you about the folks who were too nervous to put a Trump sign on their lawn four years ago but now have five of them plus two bumper stickers.
End quote.
Well, all we can do at this point is speculate. Four days from now the wave function will collapse and we'll be looking at some kind of result. Get out and vote, if you haven’t already. Then: brace for impact.
03 — Towards the beggars' democracy. Supposing Biden and Harris take the Presidency next week, and their party gains the Senate and holds the House. What is the worst that might then happen? I can think of a great many things.
A big war, for example. As I implied last week, there is a definitely nonzero probability that the ChiComs will attack Taiwan at some point in the next four years. Are they more likely to do that with Biden in the White House?
I think so. At the elemental level, they are just more scared of Trump, who they see as hostile to them and slightly crazy, than they are of Biden, who looks to them to be senile and unthreatening.
It’s also clear from the revelations of the past few days that they have stuff on Biden that would be very damaging to him if aired publicly. Would our media allow it to be aired publicly? Possibly. With Trump vanquished, the left might turn on Biden, and the ChiComs would be happy to supply them with ammunition.
Having that threat to deploy, the ChiComs would be more confident than ever that they face a weak opponent — a paper tiger. Bombs away!
War aside, a Democrat sweep would be a catastrophe for immigration patriots. The borders would be thrown wide open and enforcement of the people’s laws on immigration would cease. Probably the laws themselves would be repealed.
The Department of Homeland Security has this month published a "Homeland Threat Assessment," analyzed by Todd Bensman over at the Center for Immigration Studies. In among some dubious stuff about the terrorist threat from white supremacists, there are dire — and very credible — warnings about a huge surge in illegal immigration next year.
Why? Well, number one, the lifting of pandemic-related border restrictions by Latin American and Caribbean countries releasing pent-up pressure from border-jumpers.
Then, number two, there will be economic distress in those countries from the pandemic, amplified perhaps by U.S. economic recovery.
Number three: a surge in illegals from outside our hemisphere taking advantage, losing themselves among the Latin American masses.
And then, number four: yes, what Todd calls The Biden Effect, quote from him:
Aspiring border-crossers around the world will rush the border if Biden wins because they have heard his promises to end deportations, limit detentions, reopen the asylum system and its loopholes to all comers, end all Trump-era asylum initiatives, provide free healthcare, and prioritize a "pathway to citizenship" for millions of illegally present people already in the country or who can get here in time to get it.
End quote.
War and an immigration surge are scary enough. What we should be even more worried about, in my opinion, is the loss of our civil liberties.
This has already been such a quiet, creeping process, it’s easy to forget how far it’s gone. Gavin Haynes over at the very useful British website Unherd.com, posted a reminder on Thursday.
As Gavin tells us, it’s now routine over there for people on the Dissident Right — thoughtful, nonviolent people who just have heterodox opinions — to have their bank accounts and credit cards canceled. White identitarians Laura Towler and Mark Collett, co-founders of the Patriotic Alternative movement over there, have both had their bank accounts closed, by two different banks.
Here in the States a different Laura, Laura Loomer, holds some kind of record for cancellations. Gavin notes that, quote:
In addition to Chase [bank], she is banned from PayPal, from VenMo, from The Cash App, Airbnb and Instagram, from Lyft, Uber and UberEats, from the blogging monetisation platform WordAds and the t-shirt print-to-order site TeeSpring, from Twitter and Facebook — obviously — and from any one of a half dozen other platforms for digital congress.
End quote.
Laura Loomer may not be your cup of tea, but she’s not breaking anyone’s windows. Heck, she ran for a GOP primary race in Florida last year, and won. Donald Trump voted for her!
This process of cancellation has been creeping forward even under Trump’s Presidency, but with a Democrat Supremacy it will advance in leaps and bounds.
The end point will be what sinologist Karl Wittfogel, describing Imperial China, called a "beggars' democracy." The only opinions permitted to be voiced in government, corporate, academic, and media outlets will be those conforming to the state ideology. Dissent will be tolerated at a very low level — among beggars — but not allowed to rise above that level.
Imperial China wasn’t all bad. There were some interesting developments in cuisine, for example. There was no room in it for political liberty, though, or for jurisprudence independent of state power, or for constitutional development.
If that’s the kind of nation you want to live in, a Democrat sweep next Tuesday will give a mighty boost to your wishes.
04 — SCOTUS back to nine. Judge Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed by the Senate 52-to-48 Monday and sworn in as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday morning.
In my October 16th podcast I was somewhat scathing about Judge Barrett’s response to the Senate Judiciary Committee when asked how she'd felt seeing the video clip of George Floyd being kneeled on.
The lady had replied that it’s obvious seeing the clip that, quote, "racism persists in our country." I countered that it has not been proved — not to any standard of evidence a judge ought to respect — that racism was a factor in the death of George Floyd.
I wondered later if perhaps I'd been a bit too stern. Judge Barrett is obviously a very nice lady; and she has sworn to apply the law without regard to her own political inclinations, which is what I want in a judge.
So I wondered if I'd been too negative … until I read Colin Flaherty’s October 24th piece over at American Thinker. Colin gives it to Judge Barrett with both barrels.
If you don’t follow Colin’s work, you really should. Nobody has done more to chronicle the outrageous levels of black-on-white criminal violence, and the strenuous efforts that guilty white ethnomasochists put into lying about it.
Colin’s October 24th piece is a gem. I hope he won’t mind if I just quote you the last three paragraphs. These follow nine hundred words describing black-on-white violence in Washington, D.C. — where Judge Barrett and her family will soon be living — and the idiot jurists who excuse it and fail to punish it. Quote from Colin:
This is a very long list of black crime, violence, murder and denial in Washington D.C. on hiking and biking trails, restaurants, parks, homes, stores, restaurants, schools … you name it.All wildly out of proportion. All ignored by Judge Barrett as she focuses on the minuscule percentage of white-cop-on-black violence and ignores the tsunami of victims of black violence.
We call that the Greatest Lie of our Generation. And it is troubling to see how eagerly Judge Barrett has swallowed it hook, line and dangerously delusional sinker.
End quote.
As I said, Judge Barrett seems like a nice lady, a nice white lady. Do you sometimes find yourself thinking, as I do, that nice white ladies are a much bigger part of the problem than they are of the solution?
Judge Barrett, like all President Trump’s judicial picks, comes from a list supplied by the Federalist Society. Now, I would much rather have my judges chosen by the Federalist Society than by, say, the progressive faculty of some Ivy League law school.
It has to be said, though, that on the division that really matters in American society today — the globalist/nationalist, metropolitan/provincial, Anywheres/Somewheres, Cloud People/Dirt People — on that division, the Federalist Society is firmly on the side of the globalist-metropolitan-anywhere-Cloud People. They like the Chamber of Commerce much more than they like Donald Trump, and they gasp and swoon in horror at any hint of race realism.
If Colin Flaherty — or Peter Brimelow, or your genial host — were to walk into a gathering of the Federalist Society, people would be trampled to death in a rush for the exits.
Conservatism is a big tent. There’s plenty of room in it — plenty of room! — for nice white ladies loaded down with liberal WASP guilt and innumerate delusions about black crime.
05 — Philadelphia story. Black crime, right. Monday afternoon cops in Philadelphia shot dead Walter Wallace, a black man, after he came at them brandishing a knife and refused to drop it when told. The whole encounter is recorded on the officers' bodycams.
Refusing to comply when two armed cops have guns pointed at you and are yelling for you to drop your weapon, I should think qualifies Mr. Wallace for a Darwin Award. From the strictly Darwinian point of view, however, he went out a winner: Although only 27 years old, he had either eight or nine children, depending on which source you read.
He also had a long rap sheet, of course. Assault; resisting arrest after punching a police officer in the face; robbery; more assault; possessing an instrument of crime after kicking down a woman’s door and putting a gun to her head; … At the time of his passing Wallace was awaiting trial for allegedly threatening to shoot a woman — a different woman, not the one whose door down he'd kicked. Quite a charmer.
I should say that Walter Wallace was not actually responsible for any of those deeds. They were caused by systemic racism, of which he was merely the helpless plaything. Any nice white lady will be happy to explain that to you.
What did Walter Wallace do for a living? [Laugh …] Sorry, sorry, I really have to retire that clip. Well, his Wikipedia page — yes, of course he has one — describes him as, actual quote, "an aspiring rapper." Major news outlets likewise: aspiring rapper (that’s the Philadelphia Inquirer), aspiring rapper (NBC), aspiring rapper (Fox News), aspiring rapper (The Guardian), …
Good grief! Is the sense of irony altogether dead? Do these reporters read their own copy? Perhaps it’s all computer-generated nowadays. I'd go googling for phrases like "gentle giant" and "turning his life around," but I kind of know what I'd find.
Not that the descriptor "aspiring rapper" is utterly empty in Mr Wallace’s case. He did have a social media account containing videos of him rapping. Quote from the ABC News report, Wednesday, quote:
Guns are a central theme as he rhymes about shooting people, including police.
End quote.
Did Mr Wallace’s musical output include any gentle love songs, any melancholy reflections on the change of seasons, any hymns? We have not been told, but I’m sure it did.
Once the news of Wallace’s shooting got out, the usual happened. White supremacists were bused into Philly from all over to hold marches and demonstrations.
Older black citizens cowered in their basements as their windows were broken and crosses burned on their lawns. Younger blacks showed more spirit, tagging along behind the demonstrators like the peasant camp followers of a medieval army, looting stores and beating up any lone white stragglers they encountered.
Somewhere in there, a Vietnamese Baptist church was deliberately torched and burned to the ground — the work of those rampaging white supremacists, no doubt.
The Governor of Pennsylvania was asked by a reporter on Tuesday to respond to the looting, and to the fact that thirty police officers had been injured by rioters Monday night. The Governor, a white invertebrate named Tom Wolf, said he hoped things didn’t escalate beyond, quote, "the peaceful protests that this kind of thing brings out."
Radio Derb will always give credit where it’s due, though. Governor Wolf may have replied like a spineless pussy to that reporter’s question, but he then went back to his office, called out the National Guard, and announced a 9pm curfew.
I doubt anything much will come of this. The Guard won’t be allowed to shoot looters, as they ought to be, and looters seem not to be bothered much by the curfew, but it’s better than nothing.
Philadelphia’s cops are still in evidence on the city’s streets, too, although to judge from video footage they haven’t been doing much to protect life and property.
Again, it’s better than nothing: better for sure than just standing cops down and letting anarchists rule the streets as has happened elsewhere, ever since the Mayor of Charlottesville showed how it’s done three years ago.
06 — More on Mongolia! One great advantage to following Radio Derb is that you get to hear about cutting-edge geopolitical trends way before anyone else has heard about them.
Two cases in point: One, the Quadruple Entente. Two, Mongolia.
I alerted you to the Quadruple Entente back in July. Here is the relevant clip.
[Pips.]
This phrase is a play on a much older one from European history: the Triple Entente. That was an understanding between Britain, France, and Russia in the early years of the 20th century, motivated by fear of a rising Germany. It wasn’t a formal alliance; but when World War One broke out, it might as well have been, as the Entente countries acted together against Germany and her allies.So who’s in this Quadruple Entente? Well, nobody yet, as it’s not yet a thing, only a speculation. It’s a very plausible speculation, though, it seems to me.
The part of Germany here is being played by China. Moved by fear of China’s fast-rising military power, India, the U.S.A., Japan, and Russia may be headed to a common understanding, perhaps common action, against China. A common understanding: a Quadruple Entente.
[Pips.]
That was, and is, the Quadruple Entente, although there’s been some argument about whether Russia’s place more properly belongs to Australia. The original version of the Entente was, in fact, India, the U.S.A., Japan, and Australia; and that original version has now been so widely discussed, you see it referred to just as "the Quad."
OK; and then, Mongolia. In last week’s podcast I gave you a brief run-down of Mongolian history, by way of passing some commentary on China’s treatment of her minorities.
Outer Mongolia, I mentioned, has been an independent nation since the empire of the Manchus fell apart a hundred years ago. Usually referred to just as Mongolia, it was a Soviet satellite state until the end of the Cold War. Inner Mongolia is a region of China, under ChiCom rule but with a lot of Mongolians still living there.
These two Radio Derb themes — the Quadruple Entente and Mongolia — are yoked together in an October 20th post at Joseph Farrell’s website, gizadeathstar.com. Farrell, I should say, favors Russia over Australia as the fourth member of the Quadruple Entente, and he thinks he’s found supporting evidence for that.
Farrell directs our attention to an Associated Press report of an October 9th visit to Mongolia by the foreign minister of Japan, a chap named Motegi.
Mr Motegi enjoyed a very cordial meeting with his Mongolian counterpart Mr Enkhtaivan. They agreed to cooperate in promoting FOIP. That stands for "Free and Open Indo-Pacific," a scheme that the Quad countries — once again: India, the U.S.A., Japan, and Australia — that the Quad countries are promoting to counter Chinese influence.
If the Quad can rope in Mongolia to their scheme, I guess the Quad will become the Quin. Whatever: Farrell argues that given Mongolia’s 20th-century history as a Soviet satellite, bringing in Mongolia will just be bringing in Russia by proxy.
Yeah, it’s geopolitical inside baseball. I like this kind of thing, but I confess even I am starting to lose track.
Why don’t the Quad just bring in both Mongolia and Russia, making it a Sextuple Entente? Perhaps they just don’t think that something named "the Sex" will be accorded the proper respect due to a grand geopolitical concept.
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: As vexing as the race issue is here in the U.S.A., our nation was born with it and must manage it the best we can. It is of course criminally stupid of us to make things worse by mass immigration, but we were bound to have a race problem at some level, with or without immigration.
The stupidity of Europeans is far greater than ours. Most of their nations had no corresponding problem seventy years ago; so they deliberately imported one.
The context here of course is the dreadful murders in France this week by Muslims. There are 49 Muslim-majority nations, and so no reason for any non-Muslim nation to allow mass settlement of Muslims. A discontented Saudi can move to Malaysia, or Senegal, or Turkmenistan [Clip: Turkmen anthem …] For the French to have allowed mass settlement in their country is beyond stupid: it’s insane.
As it happens, while my TV news program was telling me about the French killings, I was browsing in David Kynaston’s book Smoke in the Valley, one of a set of books he’s written about postwar Britain. This book covers years 1948-51.
One feature of those years was the beginning of black immigration from the Caribbean. In his coverage of that in Chapter 3, Kynaston references a magazine article of the time about black immigration, and some readers' letters prompted by the article. Here’s an extract from one of those letters, quote:
I believe the best solution is to prevent any large number of coloured people taking up permanent residence in this country. Why import a social problem where one did not previously exist?
End quote.
Why indeed? Such plain common sense.
Again: "Why import a social problem where one did not previously exist?" That was in 1948. Seventy-two years later, the question still hangs in the air.
Item: One rhetorical strategy that doesn’t get exercised as much as it should is owning the insult.
The canonical example here is the political terms "Tory" and "Whig." A Tory was originally an illiterate Papist peasant from the remotest bogs of Ireland; a Whig was a cattle rustler from the Anglo-Scottish borders.
Somehow these two words became the names of respectable political parties. It’s as if we were to have parties proudly calling themselves the Deplorable Party or the Limousine Liberal Party. Owning the insult, you see?
In Central Asia, at least, they've got the right spirit. You may recall the 2006 movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, in which edgy comedian Sacha Baron Cohen portrayed Kazakhs as crude Jew-baiting rubes speaking mangled English. Kazakhstan actually banned that movie.
Well, Baron Cohen has made a sequel, title Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, just released last week. This time the Kazakhs have wised up. They are in fact owning the insult as a way to promote tourism.
One of Borat’s catch-phrases in the first movie was: "Very nice!" Well, here is a statement the other day from Kairat Sadvakassov, deputy chairman of Kazakh Tourism, quote:
Kazakhstan’s nature is very nice. Its food is very nice. And its people, despite Borat’s jokes to the contrary, are some of the nicest in the world.
End quote.
Owning the insult — I like it. Now, how do we get started with the Deplorable Party?
Item: Some showbiz news here concerning the 1978 hit movie Grease, which starred John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
At the time the movie came out I was spending time with a family that included young children. Grease was PG rated so the kids weren’t taken to see it; but they caught the publicity and the songs, and knew the names of the principals. Or thought they did: one little girl, perhaps destined for a career in the biological sciences, insisted on referring to the leading lady as "Evolution John."
Sorry: that’s not the news item, that’s just me reminiscing. The news item is, that the Red Guards of our current Cultural Revolution are targeting Grease for sexism. Evolution John, you see, plays Sandy, who for the first 98 percent of the movie is a prim, buttoned-up young lady in a cardigan and sensible shoes.
At the end of the movie, however, to get her man — that is John Travolta, of course — Sandy has a complete makeover, coming on-screen with frizzed hair, heavy make-up, a low-shouldered tight black outfit, and heels. If memory serves, she is even smoking a cigarette.
That’s what has the Red Guards screeching and putting up big-character posters. Sandy has totally changed herself to win over a guy, you see. Toxic masculinity!
To her great credit, Evolution John is having none of it. Quote from her:
It’s a movie. It’s a story from the Fifties where things were different.Everyone forgets that, at the end, he changes for her, too. There’s nothing deep in there about the #MeToo movement. It’s just a girl who loves a guy, and she thinks if she does that, he'll like her. And he thinks if he does that, she'll like him.
I think that’s pretty real. People do that for each other. It was a fun love story.
End quote.
So calm good sense and the taking of pleasure in light-hearted fun have not yet been altogether banished from the world.
Thank you for that, Evolution. And by the way, you look great!
08 — Signoff. And that’s it, ladies and gents, as our nation goes hurtling towards the Singularity. Get out and vote if you haven’t already, and pray that there will be some kind of settled outcome before Christmas, without too many of our city centers burned out and looted by BLM and Antifa in the meantime.
Tomorrow, Saturday, is of course Halloween. It seems to me somewhat of an omission in our culture that there isn’t much music specifically for Halloween. Doing an internet search I got things like this: 50 Spooky Halloween Songs You Need to Play at Your Costume Party, but they weren’t specifically Halloweeny. Monster Mash, OK. Ding Dong the Witch is Dead, uh-huh. Phantom of the Opera overture … see what I mean? Spooky, monstery, dark, sure, but just not really Halloween-focused.
Fortunately a Radio Derb listener has come to my aid. He has written a topical number titled It’s Always Halloween, which I think catches the mood of the past few months — demons capering around in the darkness, shrieking and destroying. I'll just give you the first minute or so. If you want to hear the whole thing, go to soundcloud.com, put "It’s Always Halloween" into the search box, and scan down for the Nylophone entry.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Nylophone, "It’s Always Halloween."]
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