Radio Derb: Picking The Apprentice, A Disease Of The Heart, And Training The Goodwhite Armies, Etc.

John Derbyshire

07/15/2016

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02m30s — Picking the Apprentice. (It could have been worse.)

09m55s — Disease of the skin, disease of the heart. (Being hit on the head lessons.)

16m23s — Military schools for the goodwhite armies. (Raising elite kids.)

28m04s — Cops shoot blacks: follow-up. (Some narrative collapse.)

34m01s — Bring on the justice bots! (Ginsburg in the mosh pit.)

40m25s — China gets scolded. (Whatcha gonna do about it?)

42m50s — Britain’s new boss. (A cuck-Tory, same as the old boss.)

45m38s — Thigh gap out, ab crack in. (Body sculpting fashions move on.)

47m13s — Signoff. (Until August 5th.)

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your restoratively genial host John Derbyshire as we prepare for the first big party convention of this election cycle.

Yes, folks, it’s politics, politics, politics the next few days. The fate of the Republic may hinge on events in Cleveland next week.

On this podcast I regularly rail and curse against the horrid soul-destroying blight of midwestern nice. I continue to urge all you Hoosiers, Sooners, Buckeyes, Hawkeyes, Corn huskers, Wolverines, and the rest to cast aside your suicidal niceness when dealing with foreign moochers, cheap labor racketeers, anti-white agitators, and smiling agencies with churchly names seeking to dump bogus "refugees" on your towns and villages. Stop being nice to these parasites, con-men, and nation-killers!

However, I hope that the good people of Cleveland will be nice to our fellow Americans gathering in their city next week. The purpose of the gathering is to nominate as Republican Presidential candidate the first major-party candidate for decades to stand on the principle that the American government exists for the benefit of Americans. That’s a great and historic thing. Be nice to those making it happen!

And if people show up to stop it happening, re-sheath your niceness and give us a display of midwestern mean.

02 — Picking the Apprentice. The first order of business, even before the Convention opens, is for the presumptive nominee to tap some person as a running mate, to join him on the ticket.

As we go to tape here at Radio Derb, the noise is all about Trump having picked Mike Pence, currently Governor of Indiana, and before that a congressman from Indiana for twelve years.

The selection of Pence is still not official and can’t be taken as certain; but it’s all we have to go on, so I'll pass an opinion.

Trump had to make a general decision here before he made, or makes, the particular one of which actual person he wants on the ticket with him. The general decision was: Do I shore up my position as an anti-establishment insurgent outsider by joining with another outsider, or do I adjust that position to accommodate an establishment running mate?

It’s a nontrivial decision. Trump’s gotten as far as he’s gotten on outsider appeal; yoking himself to an establishment figure dilutes that appeal.

On the other side of that, while it’s a lot of fun for us out here on the Dissident Right to jeer at establishment Republican cuckservatives every time the cheap-labor lobbies say "Jump!" and the cucks squeal back, "How high?" — sure, it’s a lot of fun, and I enjoy it as much as the next Thought Criminal, but the forces of cuckery are mighty in the land, and as Richard Nixon liked to point out, what wins you the primaries does not necessarily win you the general.

On the other other side, there are hazards to Trump picking an establishment cuck, in addition to the diluting of his appeal with people like us who hate the establishment.

Hazard number one: Between now and November, Trump may say something that the cuck on the other half of the ticket may find unacceptably outrageous, so much so the cuck may feel obliged, as a matter of conscience, to remove himself from the cucket … ah, sorry, I mean ticket, dammit.

Bear in mind that for a nice midwesterner like Mike Pence, stuffed up to the nose-holes with cringing midwestern niceness, the universe of things considered "unacceptably outrageous" encompasses well-nigh anything more controversial than singing "Kumbaya" at a Southern Poverty Law Center clambake.

And if Mike Pence, or whoever, doesn’t remove himself from the ticket for a deficiency of niceness thereon, he might still be persuaded to remove himself, or to move to the top slot on the ticket, by #NeverTrump party managers, who I am sure have not yet given up their hopes of unseating the GOP primary voters' choice. Could Pence be persuadable? I don’t know; but as I keep telling you, in politics you can never be too cynical. As Britain’s first Prime Minister was wont to say, quote: "All those men have their price."

And if there is nothing that can be managed between now and November, and should Trump then get elected, there is a further hazard to Trump picking an establishment seat-warmer. This is the one feared by Ann Coulter: that with a reliable establishment bot serving as Vice President, impeachment of President Trump would be awfully tempting to both parties.

Is there a case for a cuck VP? Well, there is the one aforementioned, that he'll pull in some cuckish moderates for whom undiluted Trump is too strong.

Against that is the case made by my colleague Washington Watcher here on VDARE.com. Who needs pulling in? Who needs to be inspired to come out and vote? A lot more white women, for one thing; but they won’t be happy with Pence’s social conservatism. Union members and oldsters; but they will frown at Pence’s positions on entitlements, right-to-work, and trade.

Sure, Pence will rally evangelicals and social conservatives; but these are groups that will fall into line anyway against the threat of Hillary and two more left-liberal Supreme Court justices. It’s cruel to say it, and I mean no offense, but evangelicals are to the GOP what blacks are to the Democrats: voters that can be taken for granted, kept on side with some soothing words and gestures now and again. It’s the voters he can’t take for granted that Trump needs to attract, and it’s not clear that Pence will attract them.

So, if it really is Pence, then in my opinion it’s not a happy or well-judged pick. I cling to the hope that by the time you hear this, Trump may have brought forth a different name than Governor Pence’s: someone less nice, more of a fellow outsider, and with more backbone.

Failing that, I shall take what consolation I can in the reflection that, well, at least he didn’t pick Gingrich. Unless, of course, after all this, he does … [Scream.]

03 — Disease of the skin, disease of the heart. Another week, another Muslim atrocity, this one on the French Riviera. Eighty-four dead as I go to tape, with a couple of dozen of the wounded in critical condition.

At this point, these incidents inspire in me what I can only describe as calm despair. There’s something in the collective character of Western humanity that is awfully resistant to learning an obvious lessson here. I've said it before, I know, but it bears repeating: The most amazing, astounding, astonishing statistic of the 21st century is that the annual rate of Muslim immigration into the U.S.A. increased after 9/11.

And still our leaders offer the same fool nostrums. Most Muslims aren’t terrorists, they soothe, as if anyone ever thought they were. If I give you a big box full of M&Ms and tell you just one of the M&Ms is packed full of Strychnine, I venture to speculate that you will not open the box and start decorating ice-cream cones with the contents.

We don’t even have a language for talking about this. I was just looking at this latest Reuters poll. Sample quote from Reuters:

Many Americans view Islam unfavorably, and supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are more than twice as likely to view the religion negatively as those backing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll of more than 7,000 Americans.

It shows that 37 percent of American adults have a "somewhat unfavorable" or "very unfavorable" view of Islam. This includes 58 percent of Trump supporters and 24 percent of Clinton supporters, a contrast largely mirrored by the breakdown between Republicans and Democrats.

End quote. What’s the relevance of that? I don’t see it. It seems to be just unthinkingly latching in to the Cultural Marxist narrative about "hate." How the CultMarx crowd love that word — "hate"!

Is it so hard to grasp that you might not mind Islam, that you might have no hatred at all towards it, or that — which I think is likely the case with most of the respondents in that poll — you might know diddley-squat about it, while still not wanting mass settlement of Muslims in your country.

I have never read the Koran and at this point I most likely never shall. It looks really boring. I can’t offer an informed opinion about Islam, any more than 99.9 percent of other Americans can. I certainly don’t wish any harm to Muslims in general. Jolly good luck to them all. Hate? Not here.

It is surely obvious, though, that if you let masses of Muslims settle in your non-Muslim country, you've gotten yourself some frictions and problems you didn’t have before. Why bring such troubles on yourself? Yet we keep doubling down. There’s a sickness here, some kind of civilizational sickness.

Back in the 1940s Chiang Kai-shek was criticized for not putting forth enough military effort against the Japanese armies occupying his country. He was, everyone believed — correctly of course — husbanding his own forces for the war against the Communists that he knew must come when American had defeated Japan.

Chiang’s response to these criticisms was always the same. The Japanese, he said, were a disease of the skin; communism was a disease of the heart.

Chiang was correct, as the tens of millions of victims of Chinese Communist tyranny would testify, if they could.

Similarly today in the Western world. I don’t mean to speak lightly of the horror we saw on our TV screens Thursday; but these assaults are a disease of the skin. They're not going to destroy our nations, not by themselves, not even in they happen once a week. They're a disease of the skin.

The real menace, the disease eating away at the heart of Western society, is white ethnomasochism: hatred of one’s own type, one’s own race, one’s own ancestors, one’s own parents, one’s own fellow citizens who do not share a bizarrely unreal and idealistic view of human nature.

You think that’s too strongly worded? Stick with me for another segment.

04 — Military schools for the goodwhite armies. The public school system of Atlanta, Georgia seemed to have found the holy grail of U.S. education: closing the test-score gap between blacks and nonblacks. Across the decade up to 2009 the schools posted major test-score gains, leading to the district suoerintendent, Beverly Hill, receiving the National Superintendent of the Year Award.

Alas, all was not what it seemed. Or rather, for those who had drunk deep of the draughts of undiluted cynicism I offered to the world in my tremendous 2009 best-seller We Are Doomed, all was exactly what it seemed to be: i.e. a massive exercise in cooking the books.

The Atlanta book-cooking scandal ended in April last year with eleven convictions of school system administrators, including three 20-year sentences.

Now Atlanta has a lot of goodwhites — gentry liberals filled up to the nose-holes with contempt and loathing for their badwhite compatriots. You know what I mean by badwhites: gap-toothed redneck hillbilly Trump voters with guns, bibles, and pickup trucks.

Atlanta also has a fair complement of gentry blacks: well-educated professional black Americans who want their kids to get a good education, preferably well away from those other blacks down in the ghetto.

Obviously these goodwhites and gentry blacks don’t want to send their kids to Atlanta public schools, especially after the scandals of the past decade. So what are they to do?

Allow me to introduce you to The Paideia School, 1509 Ponce de Leon Avenue, Atlanta, Ga. 30307. That zip code, by the way, is 77 percent white, 16 percent black, median house or condo price $400,000. Nice tony neighborhood.

The Paideia School is just as tony. A year’s tuition for your kid at junior high or high school level will cost you $23,000, exclusive of books, sports outfits, musical instruments, and extras. This place is gentry with a capital "G" — none of your parochial-school riff-raff here!

Now meet 14-year-old Royce Mann, a student at Paideia. Royce’s parents are something to do with the performing arts. Royce himself is inclined in that direction. Earlier this year he performed at a school concert, in the time-honored tradition we all remember from reading Tom Sawyer — "You'd scarce expect one of my age / To speak in public on the stage," et cetera. Over to young Royce.

[Clip: My name is Royce, my poem is titled "White Boy Privilege."

Dear everyone who isn’t a middle or upper class white boy, I’m sorry. I have started life on the top of the ladder while you were born on the first rung. I say now that I would change places with you in an instant, but if given the opportunity, would I? Probably not. Because to be privileged is awesome. I’m not saying that you and me on different rungs of the ladder is how I want it to stay … I’m just saying that I’m f**kin' privileged and I’m not willing to give that away. I love it because I can say "f**kin' and not one of you is attributing that to the fact that everyone with my skin color has a dirty mouth …]

The first thing to be said here is a thing I have said way too many times before: If this is poetry, what is not poetry?

The Derb criterion for connected spoken or written material to be called "poetry" is that the material obey minimum two of the following three conditions:

  1. It has rhyme,
  2. It has meter,
  3. It makes sense.
"Jabberwocky" has rhyme and meter but makes no sense — it’s poetry! "Paradise Lost" has meter and makes sense, but doesn’t rhyme — it’s poetry! "Spring Comes to Murray Hill" rhymes and makes sense, but has no meter I can determine — it’s poetry!

Young Royce Mann’s spoken production was not poetry. What was it? Basically, distilled ethnomasochism. The kid just hates himself for being white.

Or does he? The degree to which the sentiments expressed are truly Royce’s, and whether he even contributed to the writing of this not-poem, as opposed to having had it put into his hands by his parents or teachers, has been much debated on the internet comment threads.

The comment that I think grasped most of the issue here came from someone using the tag "Question Diversity" on the American Renaissance website. Here’s the comment, quote:

Remember, this is a school for the Top 0.01 percent … These white … kids aren’t being beaten with a stick, they're being taught how to use the stick against other white people.
End quote. That comment was actually on a different story from a few days earlier. That different story concerns a different school: Bank Street School for Children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: 610 West 112th Street, New York, NY 10025, to be precise. If you need to ask about condo prices in that zip code, you can’t afford them.

Bank Street School was in the news because its students, kindergarten through 8th grade, are given intensive training in diversity by — of course — a Director of Diversity, a female person of subcontinental Indian origins named Anshu Wahi. Ms Wahi’s M.O. is to put white and nonwhite kids into separate classes. Quote from the New York Post, quote:

Bank Street has created a "dedicated space" in the school for "kids of color," where they're "embraced" by minority instructors and encouraged to "voice their feelings" and "share experiences about being a kid of color," according to school presentation slides obtained by The Post.

Meanwhile, white kids are herded into separate classrooms and taught to raise their "awareness of the prevalence of Whiteness and privilege," challenge "notions of colorblindness (and) assumptions of 'normal,' 'good,' and 'American'" and "understand and own European ancestry and see the tie to privilege."

End quote. Some Bank Street parents have reported their kids coming home in tears, saying "I’m a bad person." These are children as young as six, remember.

I can’t find data on the tuition fees for Bank Street School; but you'd better believe that in that location, surrounded by that demographic, it ain’t cheap.

Believe it or not, some parents have complained about the anti-white brainwashing. They have objected, for example, to Ms Wahi’s May 31st screening, for the kids, of a movie titled "Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution," which depicts Panthers founder and convicted cop-killer Huey Newton as a martyr.

What’s the matter with these parents? How are their kids ever going to grow up hating badwhites if they don’t get properly indoctrinated at a young age? And if they don’t hate badwhites, how will they be able to take up their duties as Masters of the Globalized Universe? Don’t these parents want their kids to join the ranks of the elites?

In the context of the Cold Civil War, these schools are the military academies feeding manpower to the goodwhite armies, just as our universities are the staff colleges supplying the field commanders and strategists. You can’t mould people to their military duties without strict discipline. Why don’t the Bank Street parents understand that? The Paideia parents down in Atlanta obviously do.

05 — Cops shoot blacks: follow-up. A follow-up here on last week’s report about three incidents of blacks getting shot by cops.

I reported on these three incidents last week when they were new news and there wasn’t much data to go on. Now there’s more, so let’s see if my speculations about Narrative Collapse were on target.

Short answer: Somewhat, but not much.

I thought the third story I reported, the one from Minneapolis featuring Philando Castile, was already showing signs of Narrative Collapse. Indeed, a bit more plaster has fallen from the ceiling since then; but we haven’t seen total collapse, and we still don’t really know why Officer Yanez shot Mr Castile.

The girlfriend who took the video everyone’s seen has been caught out in a couple more untruths. She'd told the world that Castile didn’t get medical attention. Minnesota’s halfwit Governor repeated that at his press conference. It wasn’t true: local police gave Castile CPR. She said she was kept at the station house all night and didn’t get home till 5 a.m. In fact she was held only two hours, and taken home at 1 a.m. … and so on. This lady is deeply unreliable as to facts.

Which makes it all the more shameful that her version of events continued to be the only one put out by mainstream media down to the middle of this week. The report I made in last Friday’s podcast about the pull-over happening because Castile resembled a wanted robbery suspect, didn’t get major air time until Wednesday evening on The O'Reilly Factor, to my knowledge, though the local Minnesota station had broadcast the dispatcher exchanges five days previously.

On the other side, Castile actually did have a permit to carry, in spite of that statement to the contrary by the local sheriff’s office. Castile’s family produced the permit this week.

So I wouldn’t say officer Yanez is off the hook at this point — not enough information. I’m still going to call shame on the media for promoting the stories told by the loopy girlfriend.

That was my number three cop shooting last week. Number two was Alton Sterling, the Baton Rouge guy shot while wrestling with cops. There’s even less new to report here. What there mainly is, is a full account of Mr Sterling’s 2009 arrest, which was a carbon copy of last week’s, except that in 2009 he didn’t get shot.

He was selling CDs on the sidewalk; he pulled a gun on someone; cops were called; he put up a fight; they found the gun, which was stolen; Sterling was hit with a raft of charges and got five years in the pokey.

Last week’s attempted arrest was a total repeat, except this time Sterling ended up dead. A justified shooting? We still don’t know; but whatever the final determination here, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for a guy who makes a habit of wrestling with cops while illegally carrying.

And then, my cop shooting number one: Delrawn Small, shot by an off-duty cop in Brooklyn, New York, July 4th. This was road rage. Small thought the off-duty cop had cut him off. He followed him to a traffic light, then got out of his car and went to confront the cop. We had witness accounts that he was punching the cop through his side window, then the cop shot him.

Well, that narrative collapsed, but it collapsed on the cop. See, these collapses, you never know which way they'll fall.

We got some surveillance video on this one. It shows that the cop, name of Wayne Isaacs, shot Mr Small around one second after Mr Small showed up at his side window. It’s hard to see how Small had time to do any punching. So much for eye-witnesses.

I said in last week’s podcast, concerning Wayne Isaacs the cop, quote: "I assume he’s white, but I haven’t seen that confirmed anywhere and can’t find an image," end quote.

Well, now we have news pictures of Officer Isaacs. Guess what: He’s black. So this is a black cop shooting a black civilian.

Which means you won’t be hearing too much more about this one …

06 — Bring on the justice bots! One of my pet themes, which of course I have borrowed from the philosopher David Hume, is that human beings only practice connected thought occasionally and reluctantly. Most of us, most of the time, are tugged this way and that through the world by emotion and blind habit.

Thus inclined, I find it hard to take the U.S. Supreme Court seriously. The fiction is that these are wise scholars, subjecting difficult points of law to careful scrutiny by cold, concentrated ratiocination. How strange then — well, it’s not strange to me, but it must seem awfully strange to anyone who believes the fiction — that far more often than not, justices known to be of a left-liberal inclination come down on the left-liberal side of a judgment, and contrariwise for conservative justices. To put it bluntly and a bit crudely, they vote their emotions.

Here’s a suggestion for improving the nation’s jurisprudence. Just as soon as we have the difficulties with autonomous cars ironed out, let’s have the artificial intelligence whiz-kids embark on a crash national program — a 21st-century Manhattan Project — to develop autonomous Supreme Court justices — justice bots, who can decide cases on strictly rational principles, without disturbance from human hormones.

I offer this suggestion free of charge to the incoming President Trump. You are welcome, Sir!

That of course is all in reference to the recent remarks by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a leftwing Jewish feminist out of 1930s Brooklyn who — quelle surprise! — is hysterically anti-Trump.

Justice Ginsburg vented her Trumpophobia in an interview Thursday, July 7th with Associated Press. She opined that Mrs Clinton will be our next President. What if it’s Trump? asked the interviewer. Ginsburg, quote: "I don’t want to think about that possibility, but if it should be, then everything is up for grabs," end quote.

The following day, in another interview, this one with the New York Times, the Justice inched a bit closer to thinking the unthinkable, quote: "I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president," end quote.

Monday she had another try, this time with a CNN legal analyst. Quote:

He is a faker. He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego.
End quote. Justice Ginsburg herself has of course no ego. She is an ego-free zone: a realm of pure, selfless intellection.

That was too much even for The New York Times. They ran an editorial with a headline I had to read twice before my eyes would believe it. Headline: Donald Trump Is Right About Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Punchline, quote: "Washington is more than partisan enough without the spectacle of a Supreme Court justice flinging herself into the mosh pit," end quote.

Justice Ginsburg is 83 years old, so when you've got through giggling at the mental image of the old witch flinging herself into a mosh pit, the question inevitably arises: Is she gaga?

It so happens that I have lunch this week with two legal eagles, both possessed of great width and depth of knowledge about the Supreme Court and its doings. One of them has actually argued cases before the Court. So I asked them straight out: Is Ginsburg gaga?

They both replied simultaneously, one with a "Yes" and one with a "No," so I came away no wiser. For the record, the friend who has actually argued cases before the court was the one who said "No."

Make of that what you will. I shall just continue to nurse my skeptical belief that Supreme Court justices are mediocrities who get chosen because they have nothing in their paper trails sufficiently interesting to disturb the slumbers of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And also, of course, my further belief that it is long past time the United States Congress exercised those powers granted to it in the Constitution to tell the Supreme Court to mind its own damn business where the making of laws is concerned.

07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis: The ChiComs have for some been throwing their weight around in the South China Sea, as I think everyone knows. This week they got scolded for it by an international tribunal established in the Netherlands three years ago to adjudicate a complaint by the Philippines.

Yes, said the tribunal, the complaint was justified. China was in the wrong.

The ChiCom reaction was basically a jeer: "Whatcha gonna do about it?"

It’s not actually likely anyone will do anything, certainly not the Obama administration. The ChiComs are walking a tricky path here, though. If, emboldened by the non-response to this judgment, they decide to try some serious adventuring in the region, there could be repercussions on their economy, which is none too robust. That could impose a stress test on the Chinese people’s tolerance for continuing communist rule.

Economically, China is just now at the point Taiwan and South Korea were at thirty years ago, when those countries shucked off authoritarian government and switched to a properly representative system. Anyone not keen to see a major Pacific war has to hope that China will make the same transition.

The ChiComs' lying and blustering about their rights in the South China Sea will have the support of their intensely nationalist people just so long as the people’s livelihood is not seriously affected. If push comes to shove, and shove comes to economic sanctions, Chinese elite kids being expelled from Ivy League colleges, or the closing of sea lanes, we'll be in a different world, probably — although not certainly — a better one.

Item: Britain has a new Prime Minister, name of Theresa May. She seems to be a lackluster type from whom little is to be hoped.

Before becoming Prime Minister she was Home Secretary for six years — that’s an American Attorney General, more or less. While in that position for those six years, she did nothing at all to slow the floods of settlers pouring into Britain from both inside and outside the European Union.

Britain’s border controls, whose ultimate responsibility rested with her, were a shambles for all six of those years. Foreign criminals were not deported.

To take an example at random from thousands: An illegal immigrant from the Sudan, a young man who can’t speak English and has no marketable skills, walked through the Channel Tunnel from France a year ago. Instead of sending him briskly back to France, Mrs May’s department has given him settlement rights, put him on cash benefits of $1,000 a month, and accommodated him in an apartment in a middle-class district of Birmingham, near a mosque of course. His extended family, along with thirty or forty unrelated people with fake documents saying they are extended family, will all be settling in Britain across the next few years.

The Home Secretary is also in political charge of Britain’s police forces. During Mrs May’s six-year tenure, gangs of Muslim men used teenage English schoolgirls as sex slaves in Rotherham and elsewhere. Mrs May’s police forces did their utmost to ignore these horrors for fear they might be thought racist. Mrs May, a cuck-Tory who would rather be drowned in a vat of treacle than be called racist, never expressed any concern, alarm, or indignation at the police refusal to act.

That’s Theresa May’s Britain. Her recorded utterances are full-bore multiculturalist. As I said, nothing to be hoped for here.

Britain, meet the new boss: same as the old boss.

Item: Finally, on the cultural beat, you can trust Radio Derb to keep you up-to-date on the latest trends. Well, here is the very latest: the ab crack.

The ab crack replaces the thigh gap as our nation’s cutting-edge trend in body sculpting. You remember the thigh gap, I’m sure. That’s the narrow space between the thighs of a bikini-clad woman when she’s standing upright with knees together.

The thigh gap is so 2015. What every young maiden wants now is an ab crack: a sort of vertical furrow down the center of the abdomen. "Several famous models have displayed their … ab crack on Instagram recently," says the Daily Caller. I have carefully scrutinized them all for you. No chore too arduous for Radio Derb!

The interesting question of course is whether you have to give up your thigh gap in order to get an ab crack. It seems to me, from my scrutinizing, that you don’t; but you had best consult your personal trainer for a dispositive answer.

08 — Signoff. Goodness, the news cycle’s been moving fast this week. Some of today’s podcast went out of date while I was in process of recording it. Mr Trump now has made his selection of Mike Pence official.

I hope the ab crack is still current; I really should go back to the Daily Caller and check.

Also, while I was putting the show together, there was a coup in Turkey. Coming up to midnight EST on Friday, it’s not at all clear whether the coup has succeeded or not. The situation in Turkey is, you might say, murky.

There is no point attempting an opinion about this until the smoke clears. I’m just quietly wondering if Vladmir Putin had something to do with it, a thing none of the TV talking heads I've seen has brought up yet. I’m sorry for the Turks, who were pleasant and hospitable to me the only time I went among them five years ago. On the other hand, if Turkey’s going to be the Sick Man of Europe again, at least we're in historically familiar territory.

Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks as always for listening, and let’s all hope for an orderly and successful convention in Cleveland next week.

And before I leave, a small announcement. I shall be taking two weeks' vacation, starting this weekend. There will be no Radio Derb on the 22nd or 29th. Our next podcast will be August 5th. In the meantime, for commentary and insight, please continue to read and circulate our articles and blog posts at VDARE.com.

So … there will be more from Radio Derb on August 5th! Be well, and be safe.

[Music clip: From Haydn’s Derbyshire Marches]

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