05/29/2020
05m28s Panic in the park. (The way we live now.)
11m56s Turbulence aplenty. (What’s wrong with white women?)
18m26s Peak hypocrisy? (My Least Surprising Story of the Week.)
25m12s Riots and elections. (Politicians helped and hurt by the riots.)
32m17s Joe lets rip. (Man of the peep-le.)
33m47s Death by Zoom. (The ultimate in judicial efficiency.)
35m58s Overdue mail. (Possibly an all-time record.)
37m19s Signoff. (With a musicological treat.)
01 — Intro. Yes, listeners: Radio Derb turned sixteen this week, on Wednesday to be precise. Our first podcast was on May 27th 2004.
That may — I don’t know any way to check, but it may — make us the longest continuously-running podcast on the internet. I’m pretty sure we're the longest-running Dissident Right podcast, anyway. So Happy Birthday, Radio Derb! [Clip: More Neil Sedaka.] All right, Neil, all right, that’s enough.
Today’s podcast is Radio Derb number 742. All 741 previous podcasts are archived at johnderbyshire.com under "Opinion," along with all the transcripts: a total of 481 hours, 31 minutes, and two seconds of hate-filled ranting, for your instruction and enjoyment — nearly three weeks of continuous listening, if you do it all at once. Give it a try!
I know that precise figure because I keep a running log of the podcasts, listing podcast number, date, duration, opening and closing music, number of segments, geniality modifier, and a note if there is anything of interest. I haven’t formatted this log as a web page; it’s just an Excel spreadsheet. You can probably download it from the link on my Radio Derb web page. If that fails, send me an email care of VDARE.com and I'll email you back with a copy.
You will then be able to satisfy your curiosity as to which has been the longest ever Radio Derb (#502 at 1h6m38s), which adverb has most often modified my geniality ("irrepressibly," ten times), how many times I've signed off with a Jim Croce clip (three), when we first covered the Miss Bumbum Pageant (#467), and so on.
My topics back in May 2004 were: niceness, Iraq, genetically-modified blue roses, angry divorced men, illegal aliens, and Gwyneth Paltrow’s baby. Can I today, sixteen years later, squeeze any continuing relevance out of those topics?
Well, a little. Not on niceness, which has been wellnigh outlawed as we snarl and spit at each other across the barricades of the Cold Civil War. Iraq I'd rather not talk about, having initially supported the damn fool war there. By 2004 I was wising up; but I'd still prefer to skip over the whole thing. I anyway don’t have a clue what’s happening in Iraq currently, and couldn’t care less.
Blue roses seem not to have won much of a market share; I can’t recall seeing any. Men are still getting shafted by the divorce industry; but we now, after the Great Awokening, understand that men bring it upon themselves with their Toxic Masculinity, so sympathy for them would be hateful.
Illegal aliens seem to be a permanent feature of the landscape, since nobody in authority is interested in enforcing the people’s laws; so that at least is still relevant.
The Paltrow baby, a daughter named Apple, was actually born May 14th that year, and so is a couple of weeks older than Radio Derb; but I’m going to wish her Happy Birthday! anyway. The parents, you may recall, consciously uncoupled six years ago.
Well, well, Postumus, the years glide swiftly by. Let’s take a glance at what’s been gliding by this week.
02 — Panic in the park. America’s most enduring problem, the problem of the blacks, has been dominating the news this week.
The attitude I bring to these stories is one of weary despair. They are reported and discussed publicly in language that bears very little relation to reality, so that most of what is said and written is worthless. To speak honestly about race is in fact taboo, and deeply shocking to most Americans.
Here’s an example. Back in 2016 a black man in Charlotte, North Carolina was shot dead by a cop, also black. There were protests, riots, vandalism, and looting. A local congressman, Robert Pittenger, said the following thing, quote:
The grievance in their minds — the animus, the anger — they hate white people, because white people are successful and they're not.
End quote.
Nailed it, Congressman. But of course, Pittenger was denounced by all the Great and the Good, and to save his career, issued a groveling retraction.
I've been living in America since the second Nixon administration, with some intermissions. For many years I assumed that this clinging to unreality could not be stable; that truth and honesty would eventually prevail; that we'd learn to speak to each other openly and frankly, citizen to citizen.
To my despair and dismay, the opposite thing has happened. As the years pass we drift further and further from reality and truth, deeper and deeper into fantasy and denial. It’s very depressing; like being in a plane that’s lost all power and is just going down, down, down.
I love this country; I have two kids who will live out their lives here; yet it’s hard to see any hope for America when the landscape of social commentary is smothered in shallow lies and infantile delusions.
Well, here was the first episode this week. A professional young white woman took her dog to New York’s Central Park. In a secluded area called the Ramble, much favored by bird-watchers, she let her dog off the leash, which she shouldn’t have — there are posted signs against it.
A large black man, a bird-watcher, took objection to her breaking the rules. She took objection to his having taken objection. He responded with the words, quote: "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it."
Scared, she called the police on her cellphone, telling them a black man was threatening her … except that she didn’t say "black," she used the cant descriptor "African American." She seems to be a standard-issue New York City Goodwhite.
The black man had departed without further incident by the time the cops arrived, and they took no action. He had filmed the encounter, though, and the video was posted on social media. The white woman was fired from her job and gave up the dog. She is now probably unemployable.
You get the impression from the video that the woman is somewhat highly-strung, the man somewhat obnoxious. Neither thing is a firing offense, though.
To the main point, she was quite right to be scared. A small white woman, alone in a secluded place with a large black male stranger using threatening words: of course she was scared.
Black men commit sexual assault and rape against white women with such frequency, the federal government ceased publishing the numbers some years ago, when the slide into denial accelerated under the Obama administration.
I am told that the Bureau of Justice Statistics still collects those numbers, but dare not publish them. Still, even with the media trying their best to hide the facts, it’s hard not to be aware of them, especially in a big city with lots of blacks and single young white women.
So a young professional woman was justifiably scared. Because it was a black man that caused her to be scared — deliberately, you can’t help thinking, based on those words he spoke — the young woman’s life has been wrecked.
Like Congressman Pittenger, she has done a full grovel, whining that she is not a racist. It hasn’t helped her. Her fellow Goodwhites have expelled her from the charmed circle of right-thinking citizens. She dwells in outer darkness, and will for ever.
This is how we live now.
03 — Turbulence aplenty. And then there were — and at the time of recording here, still are — the black riots over a black suspect fatally manhandled by cops in Minneapolis. The suspect, George Floyd, was 46 years old and had a long rap sheet.
On a first glance at what’s happening in Minneapolis itself, it looks like a regular black riot, a replay of what we've been seeing over and over since Detroit 53 years ago. So again comes the despair. It seems like nothing ever changes.
Fifty-three years! — five and some decades of pontificating, agonizing, prescribing, legislating, twisting the Constitution into pretzels in efforts to quell the rage that Congressman Pittenger identified so accurately. Fifty-three years, untold billions of dollars, endless repetitive cant prescriptions that are tried, and tried, and tried, and tried yet again, but get us nowhere at all. "Let’s fix the schools!" "Save the black family!" "End institutional racism!"
Nineteen sixty-seven, Detroit; 2020, Minneapolis. Fifty-three years from now, in 2073, will some other American city be going up in flames so blacks can vent their rage at being a failed race? Will nothing ever change?
On closer inspection, there are some key differences between then and now. The one I've mostly been noticing is that a high proportion of the protestors, many of the rioters, and even a few of the opportunistic looters, are white. This is almost as much an Antifa riot as a black riot.
Where the protesting has metastasized to other cities  — we had a modest riot in New York Thursday evening — the activists seem to be majority white, with white females strongly represented.
I naturally want to ask these fired-up white anarchists where they were in July 2017 when Justine Damond, a white woman, was shot by a black cop for no reason at all, also in Minneapolis. The cop is currently serving a 12-year sentence for 3rd-degree murder. Yes, I know: there was a vigil in Ms Damond’s honor, and a public memorial service. I don’t recall any rocks getting thrown, though, or any precinct houses being burned down.
A few weeks ago in this podcast I was cheering on the armed white citizens at the Michigan state Capitol, protesting that state’s crazy lockdown rules. Those citizens were, I said, a hopeful sign that we have not yet altogether lost our turbulence.
Well, there’s been turbulence aplenty in Minneapolis this week. Most of it was just blacks doing their black thing, which I suppose they always will. A lot, though, was white radicals venting their anger at the Man.
This seems nuts to me. As Ramzpaul famously told a bunch of these anarchists back in 2017, "You are the Man."
If "the Man" means all the power centers of American society — Harvard University, the New York Times, the social-media billionaires, the law schools, every corporation’s Human Resources Department — then the Man believes in everything the white anarchists believe in: Institutional Racism, Toxic Masculinity, White Privilege, the whole package.
So … what are the anarchists protesting about? I think the impulse is totalitarian. They know there are still some pockets of resistance to their ideology, and the knowledge enrages them. Enemies of the people, and that certainly includes white cops who manhandle black perps — not to mention white women who call the cops on threatening black men — must be hunted down and destroyed, to the last one.
Why are white women so prominent in these riots, though? I generally close gloomy segments like this one by asking rhetorically: "What the hell is the matter with white people?" Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and — as an elderly Jewish friend of mine is wont to observe resignedly — shvartzes gotta shvartz; but what’s with all this white hatred of one’s own race, one’s own ancestors, one’s own culture?
Watching the video clips of this week’s eruptions, I think I'll change that closing question to: "What’s wrong with white women?"
04 — Peak hypocrisy? As our society sinks ever deeper into reality-denial, the level of hypocrisy rises to ever new heights.
If that Central Park incident had never been recorded, the white woman never publicly shamed, might that same woman on Thursday evening have been down in Union Square with Antifa shouting "No justice, no peace!" and "F*** the police!"? She certainly might. It would be rank hypocrisy on her part; but hypocrisy is now so normal, I doubt she'd notice.
Every so often I see some Goodwhite or nonwhite talking head on TV telling me sternly that "Nobody is above the law," usually in relation to something President Trump has said or done. The thought that crosses my mind every time is that there ought to be some kind of international trophy for brazen, shameless hypocrisy that we could award to the speaker.
Both our big political parties, with a handful of brave but despised and marginalized exceptions like Rep. Steve King, want illegal aliens to be above the law — to be left alone, or actually subsidized, rather than prosecuted or deported.
Antifa thugs control the streets of major cities, and do as they please, flagrantly ignoring the law; nobody prosecutes them. Citizens who try to stand up to them are prosecuted, and dealt with harshly.
Now, under cover of the coronavirus epidemic, and propelled by a tailwind of progressive sentiment against incarceration, felons are being released from prison early.
Stories about felons thus released who promptly return to their life of crime are now so frequent, news outlets probably have the headlines set up as single-key macros. Googling to find such a story, so I can add an illustrative link to the Radio Derb transcript, I found one in less than thirty seconds.
"Nobody is above the law"? It is to laugh. The law in America is just a sad joke, when it isn’t an instrument of totalitarian repression.
The other big zone of hypocrisy is education. Standardized tests — every single one that anyone has ever been able to devise — consistently, stubbornly show race differences in mental ability. That’s way too much reality for 21st-century Western sensibilities, so standardized tests have to go.
This is playing out in New York City as a big push by the communist mayor, Bill de Blasio, and his Hispanic-supremacist Schools Chancellor, Richard Carranza, to eliminate the Specialized High Schools Admission Test. That’s a standardized exam for 8th and 9th graders. Those who pass are admitted to one of eight specialized public high schools: Brooklyn Tech, Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High, and five others.
Would you be surprised to learn that Mayor de Blasio’s son Dante graduated from Brooklyn Tech? Or that Chancellor Carranza, when Superintendent of San Francisco schools, sent his daughter to one of that city’s specialized high schools? Surprised? Of course not.
The late Joe Sobran famously said that, quote:
In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.
End quote.
Something similar applies to their choice of school for their kids.
Now I can offer you my Least Surprising Story of the Week, also from New York City ed-biz. The featured person here is Josh Wallack, who is one of Chancellor Carranza’s Deputy Chancellors. Mr Wallack heads the Office of Student Enrollment for New York city schools, which, quote from the Department of Education website:
manages … efforts to advance school diversity and equity.
End quote.
Mr Wallack lives in Brooklyn, in a district whose schools are "unscreened," which I think means open admissions: if you live in the district, you go to the school.
That didn’t appeal to Mr Wallack. He’s sending his son to a competitive middle school across the river in Manhattan. The student body is majority Ice People — whites and Asians.
The New York Post reports a local activist as saying, quote: "The hypocrisy is just unbelievable. Truly unbelievable."
I beg to differ, Ma'am. I have no difficulty believing it, none at all.
05 — Riots and elections. Returning to the riots and protests in Minneapolis and elsewhere, there is some discussion on the blogs about how these disturbances will affect November’s Presidential election.
Big civil disorders like this, with underclass blacks running wild, looting and burning, seem historically to have favored strong law'n'order candidates. I mentioned the 1967 Detroit riots back there. They happened a few days after a major black riot in Newark, New Jersey and were followed by the archetypal Long Hot Summer.
Then the following Spring saw the nationwide riots in reaction to the killing of Martin Luther King. And then, that November … Richard Nixon got elected.
On that model, it’s been argued that the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri and the 2015 riots in Baltimore may have helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016.
So, will what we are seeing now — especially if this is just the prelude to another Long Hot Summer — will these events help Trump in November?
Well, we can hope; though it seems wrong to think of all this mayhem and destruction as something positive. And indeed, electors under representative democracy have usually voted against widespread public disorder, or the recent memory of it.
I don’t know, though. Ferguson … Baltimore … 2016 … sure; but we are four years more woke now that we were in 2016, with a big new cohort of voters who get their notions of reality from social media. Just look at those fired-up young white rioters. Try talking to pretty much any white American under thirty. Nixon’s "Silent Majority" they ain’t.
Meanwhile, the oldest voter demographic, more disposed to favor social order over so-called "social justice," has been dropping off the other end of the demographic chart, with an assist from the geezer-hostile coronavirus.
And then there are the blacks. Their lack of enthusiasm for Mrs Clinton in 2016 is generally given as one of the main reasons Trump won. They already like Joe Biden for his eight years' service with Barack Obama. If he names a black as his Vice-Presidential choice, blacks will be all in for Joe.
I've been arguing for Joe to pick Amy Klobuchar as his veep. She is smart, capable, politically astute, and she has two X-chromosomes. Stodgy, dull capability; that’s the way to go. That’s the way to win back some working-class white Trump voters. So I have been arguing.
The Minneapolis riots throw a spanner in the works. Not only do they strengthen the case for a black veep choice, they cast a shadow on Senator Klobuchar.
See, before she was a US Senator, the lady was a county attorney, in charge of prosecutions for the city of … wait for it … Minneapolis. Uh-oh.
Worse yet, quoting here from an article in The Week, May 28th, quote:
While in that position, Klobuchar declined to prosecute multiple police officers cited for excessive force.
End quote.
It gets worse. Among those police officers the lady declined to prosecute was Derek Chauvin, the very officer seen in this week’s video clip kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. Officer Chauvin had at least ten conduct complaints against him before he was fired this week after nineteen years on the force. Some of those complaints, including one where he shot a perp, were prior to January 2007, when Mrs Klobuchar became a Senator. And she didn’t prosecute!
Now of course there are all sorts of reasons a complaint against a cop might not lead to the cop being prosecuted. I imagine very few do, although I can’t find numbers for the Minneapolis force.
Given the openings Senator Klobuchar offers to GOP election propaganda, and black disillusionment with Joe Biden if he picks her, the lady is looking like a liability. I say she is toast, V.P.-wise.
That could mean disaster for America. As progressive as she may be, Senator Klobuchar is at least halfway sane, and seems not to hate white people. You can’t say either thing about Kamala Harris, or Stacey Abrams, or Michelle Obama, or any of the other nonwhite females on Joe’s veep list.
Given that Biden still has a healthy lead over Trump in national polls, and given further that five'll get ya eight Biden won’t complete his first term, we may very well have a crazy black female in the White House four years from now. Heaven help us!
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden continues to amuse and entertain us.
Wednesday this week, in a livestream chat with the Governor of Pennsylvania, Joe audibly cut the cheese. Listen. [Clip: "You don’t have to cut those teachers and firefighters, police officers, cut critical healthcare programs, or stop work on roads and bridges frrrrrt …"]
I’m smirking here, but there’s a twinge of sympathy behind my smirk. Joe is two and a half years older than I am, but I already own a lapel decoration bearing the legend OLD FART, gifted to me by my daughter.
Furthermore, I learned at an early age John Aubrey’s story about Queen Elizabeth the First and the Earl of Oxford, which I'll leave you to look up for yourselves. That story inclines one to a lifelong tolerance for momentary lapses of this particular type.
And when all’s said and done, this tiny incident has no bearing on the thing we really want to know about Joe Biden, which is: Can he squeak out a win this November?
Item: Under Shariah law a man can divorce his wife by uttering the words "I divorce thee" three times. Some years ago, when electronic communications became commonplace, the question arose: Can this be done via email? Islamic theologians had to scrutinize the sacred scriptures and issue a ruling.
A similar conundrum, although this one has nothing particular to do with Islam, came up in Singapore this month. A chap named Punithan Genasan was sentenced to death for dealing drugs, which Singapore takes very seriously. The sentence was delivered by the judge to Mr Genasan via a ZOOM video-call. Singapore has a high coronavirus rate and is strictly limiting all gatherings, including those in courthouses.
Was this acceptable? Opinions differ.
Radio Derb is a strong supporter of capital punishment. Indeed, we are the standard-bearer for the doctrine I call "One Strike and You're Dead." Steal a box of cigarillos from the convenience store, go to the chair. Instead of you smoking them, we'll smoke you. In Singapore, execution is actually by hanging, but the principle could be the same.
We therefore applaud the Singaporeans for bringing a new speed and efficiency to the judicial process, and urge Mr Genasan to accept the verdict of the court in a proper spirit of Oriental fatalism.
Item: Finally, in regard to the US Postal Service: my impression is these couriers have gotten much less efficient at the swift completion of their appointed rounds since this virus came up. There is, though, just as your mother told you, always someone worse off than yourself.
So spare a thought for the relatives of Private Harry Cole of the British Army’s Suffolk Regiment. Private Cole’s last letter to them has just been delivered after being in transit for eighty years.
Private Cole wrote the letter during his regiment’s retreat to Dunkirk in 1940. He was killed in action before he could mail it. It languished in German and British files for eighty years until an archivist, who by chance lives in the same village as Private Cole’s relatives, spotted it and delivered it to them.
I shall never again grumble about my subscription issue of The New Criterion showing up a week late.
07 — Signoff. That’s it, ladies and gents. Not much to be cheerful about in the public sphere. As Daniel Horowitz has pointed out, that sphere is currently an unholy mix of anarchy and tyranny: rioters and looters running wild without restraint here, bossy governors and mayors enforcing strict lockdowns there.
All the more reason to cherish the private sphere. I shall be celebrating my little corner of it next week with my own 75th birthday — I mean, my actual birthday, separate from Radio Derb’s.
An ingenious friend has composed a piece of music covering both birthdays, the 75th and the 16th. Severely edited quote from him:
I managed … to make the main tempo 75 per minute for the quarter note. For the slowed-down portion, I was able to make the dotted half note 16 per minute.
End quote.
My friend, who is way better versed in musicology than I am, actually wrote much more than that; but that is the only part of it I understood. So now prepare yourself for a musicologically sophisticated treat.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: "Derbyshire’s 75th and 16th Birthday Mazurka."]
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