02/03/2017
00m46s — The smack of firm government. (Statecraft and the mobs.) 11m42s — One small step for national security. (One giant leap for SJW hysteria.) 21m37s — Supreme hysteria. (Meet the PWASHM.) 28m41s — Hollywood goes Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitler. (So does Sir Ian.) 34m27s — Pulling a fast one on the Yanks. (Venting at the Aussies.) 39m11s — Sticking it to The Man at Berkeley. (But who is The Man?) 42m56s — Commander-in-Chief Trump. (We lose one of our best.) 47m56s — Four Groundhog Administrations. (Let’s hope it’s Spring.) 49m36s — Dressing for Trump. (And dodging a bullet.) 51m19s — Get ready for Trayvon Martin Day. (Not yet a national holiday.) 52m46s — Signoff. (Hope you're in agreeance.) [Music clip: From Haydn’s Derbyshire Marches, organ version] 01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your ingenuously genial host John Derbyshire, here with your weekly news roundup from VDARE.com’s well-appointed sound studio on the bosky North Shore of Long Island. Much to report, so let’s go straight to the news wires.02 — The smack of firm government. There was no abatement of lefty hysteria in this, the second week of the first Trump administration.
The principal eruptions this week were:03 — One small step for national security, one giant leap for SJW hysteria. Friday last President Trump issued an executive order with the title, "Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States."
The order was long — nearly three thousand words — and complex, with eleven sections divided into thirty subsections. I read the whole thing with careful attention, and I have no doubt — no doubt at all! — that the people protesting it did the same. Here’s the bit that caused all the fuss. I'll read the whole thing out for you, with an apology in advance for inflicting so much bureaucratic Esperanto on you. Section 3, subsection (c), Quote:I hereby proclaim that the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from countries referred to in section 217(a) (12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12), would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order (excluding those foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas).End quote. Some brief translations. That phrase "immigrant and nonimmigrant entry" is worth a moment’s attention. The word "immigrant" gets thrown around very loosely, but strictly speaking it refers to someone admitted for permanent settlement, like the foreign spouse of a U.S. citizen. Nonimmigrant visas are for people who are required, at least in theory, to go back home at some point: tourists and guest workers, for example. So last Friday’s order is excluding both kinds. The exceptions at the end of that quoted passage are for military and diplomatic types. "INA" refers to the Immigration and Nationality Act, up to and including its latest amendments. The particular reference here is to amendments made by the Obama administration pertaining to Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Libya and Yemen. So entry of aliens from these countries is suspended for ninety days. Those are indeed very chaotic countries. At least two of them, Syria and Yemen, have full-scale civil wars going on. Sudan actually split into two countries in July 2011. I’m surprised that nobody among our government’s innumerable highly-paid lawyers has thought to go into the INA and make the appropriate amendments to Paragraph 1187. I guess just saying "Sudan" is good enough for government work. Importing other countries' civil wars into your own country is not a great idea, so this executive order seems pretty sensible. Some people were inconvenienced, and some waivers had to be issued — for Iraqis who've helped us in our little military adventure over there, for example — but you're always going to get snags like that. Once again, this is government work. Basically this was a minor and reasonable adjustment to the way we let in foreigners, affecting just seven — or eight if you count the Sudan break-up — of the world’s 196 countries, three percent of the world’s population. The hysteria was deafening none the less. It was so totally out of proportion to the content of the order, it made me think of those anecdotes from Chaos Theory, where the beat of a butterfly’s wing in Mongolia causes a hurricane in Brazil. The executive order was widely denounced as a "Muslim ban." This was nonsense on two grounds. Ground one: it applied to non-Muslims in the seven nations just as much as to Muslims. Ground two: Only seven of the world’s 49 Muslim-majority nations are affected. In fact, if you count the 2011 split of Sudan into two countries, and assume the bureaucrats are including South Sudan under the order, there is one non-Muslim majority country in the list. Reference sources list South Sudan as mainly Christian and animist. And Muslim-majority countries aside, Muslims from countries like Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium are not covered by the order. Given what happened at the Louvre Museum in Paris a few hours before I sat down to record this, you might be forgiven for thinking this is an oversight on the part of the Trump administration. This executive order is not a Muslim ban, but it ought to be. There’s an excellent case for banning all Muslims, including those from European countries like France and Britain. Daniel Greenfield made that case very eloquently at his blog last Sunday. The current trend, he argues, is towards "lone wolf" terrorism, like the recent truck killings in France and Israel, and apparently this attack at the Louvre. There are no groups that our security services can monitor or infiltrate, just lone crazy jihadists. The only defense against that is to keep Muslims out. Greenfield also, in a different column, debunks the quite exceptionally stupid argument we've been hearing from what he calls "a chorus of the clueless," including at least three U.S. Senators, that the executive order will encourage recruiting to ISIS. Quote from Greenfield, quote: "'Let us in or we'll kill you' is the least compelling immigration argument ever," end quote. It surely is. Second in stupidity, I think, is the argument that to exclude Muslims would violate the First Amendment’s prohibition on "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." We have no problem with people in Iraq, Syria, and the rest freely exercising their religion; and if a U.S. citizen is a Muslim, or becomes one, jolly good luck to him. We just don’t want to import any more Muslims. I’m not a constitutional scholar, though, so I might be missing something here. I'll be glad to hear the case for admitting Muslims. I’m going to insist, though, that your presentation of that case begins by explaining the following thing to me. At one point around 1990 our laws preferentially permitted entry of Soviet Jews, awarding them refugee status even though they weren’t significantly persecuted in the late U.S.S.R. I don’t recall any controversy about that. OK: If it was all right preferentially to permit entry of Soviet Jews, why wouldn’t it be OK preferentially to forbid entry of foreign Muslims?
04 — Supreme hysteria. Tuesday evening, President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch for the seat on the U.S. Supreme Court left vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death last February.
Gorsuch seems like a pretty good egg. He’s literally a WASP — white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Just being Protestant will distinguish him among the Supremes if approved: the eight sitting justices are three Jews and five Roman Catholics. If you add in Gorsuch’s full credentials, in fact, he’s a PWASHM: Protestant, White, Anglo-Saxon, Heterosexual Male. To the CultMarx left, or course, that’s like garlic to vampires. They've been screaming and swooning all over the place. First out of the gate, I think, was U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, who gave a long honking address to the Senate within minutes of Gorsuch’s nomination. The gist of it was that Gorsuch is way too friendly to capitalism. Sample:[Clip: Judge Gorsuch has consistently favored corporate interests over the rights of working people. He repeatedly sided with insurance companies that wanted to deny disability benefits to employees. In employment discrimination cases, Bloomberg found he has sided with employers the great majority of the time …]You don’t say. Anyone who has worked in the productive section of the economy — a category that does not include lifetime career politicians like Schumer — can tell you that practically all "employment discrimination cases" are bogus, as are a high proportion of disability claims. The employees aren’t always to blame: Lawyers whip up these cases in our over-lawyered society to cream off fees and settlements for themselves from corporations — or, as they are known in trial-lawyer-speak, "deep pockets." If Schumer is right about this — I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the scaly reptile is lying through his taxpayer-funded dental implants — but if he’s right, I like Gorsuch all the more for standing up against the trial lawyer scams that drain so much of our nation’s commercial energies. Next up was America’s Sweetheart Nancy Pelosi, who is either the 12th or the 15th wealthiest member of Congress, depending on your source, but who in either case is a living, breathing definition of the term "limousine liberal." If you yourself are living and breathing — and drinking, eating, and medicating yourself — you better watch out for this Gorsuch guy, says Nancy.
[Clip: So it’s a very hostile appointment. Hail, fellow, well met; lovely family, I’m sure. But as far as your family is concerned, and all those … If you breathe air, drink water, eat food, take medicine, or in any other way interact with the courts, this is a very bad decision, way outside the mainstream of American legal thought.]Note the subtext there. If you thought Chuck Schumer was an apologist for Trial Lawyer Totalitarianism, listen to Nancy. Americans may not breathe, drink, eat, or medicate without a court having something to say about it. Ah, liberty! On her last point, in fact, she may well be right. America’s law schools have been pumping out Social Justice control freaks for thirty years. That is "the mainstream of American legal thought" nowadays. Barack Obama taught law at an American university: what more do you need to know about "the mainstream of American legal thought"? If Justice Gorsuch were to stand athwart that mainstream crying "Stop!" a lot of us would be cheering him on. The New York Times piled on with an editorial, title Neil Gorsuch, the Nominee for a Stolen Seat. Say what? "Stolen"? Who stole it? Why, the congressional GOP, that’s who, by shutting down the confirmation process for Barack Obama’s pick to replace Justice Scalia. I guess we're supposed to believe that congressional Democrats wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing in the converse situation. Joe Biden in fact came close to endorsing such a move in a previous election year, 1992, speaking on the Senate floor in June of that year. Quote from Joe:
It is my view that if a Supreme Court Justice resigns tomorrow, or within the next several weeks, or resigns at the end of the summer, President Bush should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not — and not — name a nominee until after the November election is completed.End quote. All right, it’s not precisely congruent with what happened to Obama’s nominee, who was not considered at all by the Senate even after the election, but it’s in the ball park. As I said, if you think the jellyfish of the congressional GOP are capable of acting more ruthlessly than the Democrat jackals, I have a bridge to sell you.
05 — Hollywood goes Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitler. This next segment, about Hollywood glitterati gasping and sputtering over the changes to Customs and Immigration rules, will be short and sweet.
Actually more like short and sour. I don’t have much patience with these bubblehead celebrities, and I don’t care what they think. I have a rather strong preference for smart people who know what they're talking about. One of my personal heros is the 1950s British TV personality Gilbert Harding, who was described by one of his obituarists as having been famous for his inability to suffer fools gladly. I think that’s a marvelous thing to be famous for. I want to be famous for that. If anybody is working on my obituary — newspapers start assembling obituaries years in advance — I'd like them to take a note of that. "He was famous for not suffering fools gladly." If I ever get famous for anything, I want it to be that. Put it on my tombstone. My attitude to actors and such is actually pre-modern. I look on them as vagabonds and strumpets, good for a half-hour’s entertainment but otherwise to be locked up if found wandering loose in respectable neighborhoods among honest working people. So there we were at the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards Sunday night. The first award went to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who I recall finding quite funny in Seinfeld, in a snippy metropolitan kind of way. Anyway, there was Julia:[Clip: I want you all to know that I am the daughter of an immigrant. My father fled religious persecution in Nazi-occupied France, and I’m an American patriot, and I love this country; and because I love this country I am horrified by its blemishes; and this immigrant ban is a blemish, and it is un-American. (Applause.) So I say to you this: Our sister guild, the WGA, made a statement today that I would like to read because I’m in complete agreeance with it …]I'll spare you the rest. What’s the WGA? I don’t know, and I can’t be bothered to look it up. White Girls of America? Welcome Grungy Aliens? Women Getting Awards? Willing Glad Agreeance? It was downhill from there. At one point, it says here, the entire cast of Captain Fantastic stood up and shouted, "Stick it to the Man!" I have no clue what Captain Fantastic is — some kind of movie, I suppose — but the cast members obviously don’t listen to Radio Derb. As I keep telling listeners, these Social Justice Warrior types are the Man. Nobody cancels their hotel bookings. Well, obviously I’m not in agreeance with the sentiments expressed at the SAG Awards. Showbiz airheads are not the worst for this Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitler stuff, though. This week’s Radio Derb award for hyperbolic Hitlery actually goes to an academic, British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, who has written a shelf-full of books about Hitler. When you're holding a hammer, goes the saying, everything looks like a nail. Some similar principle seems to have been at work on Sir Ian this week. Here he was talking to a German TV interviewer, who asked him: "Stehen wir angesichts der vielen Krisen erneut an der Schwelle eines Höllensturzes?" For non-speakers of German, Google Translate renders that as: "Are we in the face of the many crises once again on the threshold of a cave crash?" Well, I suppose we might be. Replying, Sir Ian said that the apparent similarities between the United States today and Germany in the 1930s cannot be overlooked. That’s a deeply-credentialed historian speaking there. Better suit up, Americans: We'll be invading Poland any day now.
06 — Pulling a fast one on the Yanks. Before I leave the issue of immigration, a few sidebar notes on this week’s developments.
First development: Wednesday this week the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the nomination of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General. Senator Jeff’s nomination now goes to the full Senate for a vote next week. Nobody seems to think he won’t be approved by the Senate; so for the first time in eight years we shall have a U.S. Attorney General who does not hate white people. This will be a simply wonderful development, the best thing to happen so far in the Trump administration. I’m almost afraid to speak these words, on the superstitious fear that some Satanic power may be listening, and find some way to derail Senator Sessions' approval. Please let that not happen. Let’s have a principled patriot in the Justice Department after eight years' drought. Second development, related to the first: Jeff Sessions is wise to the H-1B guest worker rackets, through which U.S. companies replace citizen employees with cheaper foreign workers, sometimes making the citizen’s severance packages conditional on training their replacements. The President also seems aware of the issue, and mentioned it in his campaigning last year. With Senator Jeff at Justice, we can expect action on this. There have already been stirrings in Congress, though. Last month saw a slew of bills that address the H-1B program, by for example raising much higher the floor wage that companies have to pay to H-1B hires. Some of these bills smell of Silicon Valley donor cash, and look as though they're intended to pre-empt real action by the new administration. Whatever: Congress knows the present scams can’t continue, and we have an administration that might just do the right thing on H-1Bs. Third development: President Trump made it known to the Prime Minister of Australia that he’s mad as hell about the deal Barack Obama cut to relieve the Aussies of a thousand-odd illegal aliens. The Australians have taken a robust attitude to illegals, warehousing them on some remote islands and swearing they will never get residence in Australia. Conditions in the island camps are lousy, though — as they should be, to encourage the inmates to repatriate themselves. International human-rights busybodies have been making a fuss, and Australia just wants to get rid of the illegals. "No problem!" said Barack Obama. "We'll take them! Nation of immigrants! Huddled Masses!" An agreeance was duly agreed on, and the new administration is apparently locked in to it, to President Trump’s disgust. The Australian Prime Minister, center-right Malcolm Turnbull, probably feels pleased with himself at having pulled a fast one on the stupid Yanks. Getting yelled at by our President is a small price to pay for the political rewards among his own voters, which is all a politician really cares about. I’m just as annoyed about this as the President is, and I’m glad to hear about his venting on my behalf. Vent away, Mr President; then, have your people come up with some way to keep these illegals in their camps, and stick Malcolm Turnbull’s face in the kangaroo poop.07 — Sticking it to The Man at Berkeley. And then, the ructions at Berkeley over Breitbart.com editor Milo Yiannopoulos addressing a student group there.
This got really nasty: Storefront windows smashed, fires set, graffiti sprayed. Total damage was around $100,000. A particularly shameful aspect of the mayhem was that members of Berkeley faculty were cheering on the mob. Heather Mac Donald reported on this at National Review, sample quote:Déborah Blocker, associate professor of French, reports on the anarchy on campus: (Inner quote) "Mostly this was typical Black Bloc action, in a few waves — very well-organized and very efficient. They attacked property but they attacked it very sparingly, destroying just enough University property to obtain the cancelation order for the [Yiannopoulos] event and making sure no one in the crowd got hurt." (End inner quote.) That’s all right, then. Destroy property but do it to attain another illegitimate end — the silencing of speech you disagree with — and everything is fine.End quote. You can’t overestimate how far the rot has gone in our universities. Here’s another instance of that. I've been watching the Tucker Carlson show on Fox News recently. Carlson’s really been on top of his game — always cheerfully polite and unflappable, but never signing off without leaving you wiser and sadder about the lies and corruption we live amongst. Wednesday Carlson broadcast a phone interview with Milo about the event that led to the riots. According to Milo, what happens with controversial speakers like this booked by student clubs is that the college administration waits until the very last moment before the event, then informs the student group that they, the student group, are entirely responsible for providing security. Adequate security against a mob as large and ferocious as the one we saw this week is of course prohibitively expensive for small student groups, and also for speakers — speakers, I mean, who are not in the Nancy Pelosi league of net worth. So … event canceled. Once again, these rioters — like the featherbrains at the SAG Awards — imagine they are being boldly transgressive, sticking it to The Man. With the college faculty on their side, though, and the administration too, and some large cohort of the students, too, I’m sure, again I ask: Who is The Man here?
08 — Commander-in-Chief Trump. President Trump made the first life-or-death decision of his administration January 25th when, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, he authorized a Special Operations assault on an al Qaeda camp in Yemen. The plan for the operation had originated in the last administration and gone through the usual reviews and approvals as we changed Presidents.
The unit undertaking the assault was the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the same one that punched Osama bin Laden’s ticket six years ago. We're told there were "several dozen" commandos involved, including some elite troops from the United Arab Emirates. The main object of the mission was to capture cellphones and laptop computers that might hold useful intelligence on al Qaeda membership and activities. The opportunity to kill bad guys was of course envisioned as a side benefit. As often happens with military operations, this one was a bit of a mess — you know all the acronyms, I’m sure. The terrorists knew the commandos were coming, probably because reconnaissance drones had been flying lower and louder than usual. What’s more, via a communications intercept, the SEALs knew the element of surprise had been lost, but went ahead with the mission anyway. These are very brave men. Then one of the transport helicopters used for the raid — an Osprey, a craft that’s had mixed reviews from military analysts — developed problems and had to be destroyed on-site. The terrorists holed up in schools, mosques, and clinics as usual, so there were civilian casualties in the fifty-minute firefight. That’s too bad, it’s their tactics that make it happen. Our own casualties were one dead and six wounded. The dead SEAL was Chief Petty Officer William Owens from Peoria, Illinois, a husband and a father. May he rest in peace. President Trump and his daughter Ivanka went to Dover Air Force Base Wednesday to greet the return of CPO Owens' body and meet his family. This is the really hard part about being President of the U.S.A., and I guess it’s as well that Trump got has gotten acquainted with it. I have a son in the military myself, so I think I can imagine the grief and sorrow President Trump faced at Andrews on Wednesday. I've no doubt he and Ivanka faced it with proper gravity and dignity. In mid-morning on 9/11, as the Twin Towers were burning, Kathy Lopez at National Review called me and asked for a couple of hundred words on what was happening. Here are some of the words I wrote, quote:This will not be a matter of great troop movements, of trenches and fleets and squadrons and massed charges. This will be small teams of inconceivably brave men and women, working in strange places, unknown and unacknowledged.End quote. We did in fact try the great troop movements, fleets and squadrons. We all know how that worked out. Now at last, for intelligence that might help avert further attacks against us, we're still depending on those inconceivably brave men and women. Thank goodness our country can still supply them. Thank you, CPO Owens. Sincere condolences to your family.
09 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Thursday this week was Groundhog Day. Punxsutawney Phil came out of his burrow, saw his shadow, and went right back in. That means six more weeks of winter. There was a rumor going around up in the Northeast this week that Punxsutawney Phil is in fact Punxsutawney Phyllis, a female of the species. In this age of gender fluidity, I wouldn’t be surprised; but I haven’t been able to confirm the rumor, and doubt it on a priori grounds. Hibernating animals, assuming there’s plenty of food stashed there in the burrow with them, come out at last with just one thing on their minds; and that one thing is more on a guy’s mind than on a gal’s. We all know the movie Groundhog Day, of course. It’s built around the nightmare of living the same day over and over again. For immigration patriots, these past sixteen years of open-borders fanaticism have been four Groundhog Administrations, the same wretched follies being replayed over and over. Our hope is that the nightmare is now over, and that we have control of our country and its borders again. Item: Apparently President Trump has a strict dress code for the people around him. For men, suits and ties; for women, dresses. That second one has got the feminists outraged, of course. The Twittersphere is abuzz with pictures of women in guy’s clothes, snarling, "What’s wrong with this?" What’s wrong, honey, is, you look like a bull dyke. Mustaches are out, too. At any rate, the rumor is that Trump was considering John Bolton for Secretary of State, but turned him down at last because of that mustache. Personally I’m neutral on mustaches, but rather strongly opposed to militant neocons as Secretary of State. If that rumor is true, we dodged a bullet there — quite possibly a barrage of cruise missiles, in fact. The suit requirement for men reminds us how very conservative menswear has become. The suit-shirt-tie-shoes of today only differ in small details from what men were wearing eighty years ago. That would be equivalent to Abraham Lincoln wearing knee breeches, buckled shoes, and a powdered wig. Funny thing, fashion. Item: Finally, just glancing forward a spell, February 26th will be Trayvon Martin Day — five years to the day since the winsome teen met his end at the hands of "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. That, it seems to me, was the start of this latest spasm of anti-white hatred and agitation we've been living through. So get ready for weepy memorial events, a rash of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and perhaps a riot or two. Trayvon’s parents will be getting some screen time, I’m sure. I've lost track of Zimmerman; but journalists have ways to find people, and I’m sure he'll be making an appearance on some outlet or other. One of the collateral casualties of the Trayvon Martin affair was my semi-career at National Review. Just think: I played a part — although to be sure a very small and inconsequential part — in American social history. Something to tell the grandkids.10 — Signoff. There you have it, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, I hope you found yourselves more or less in agreeance with the views expressed, and apologies to Punxsutawney Phil for having retailed those rumors slighting his masculinity, which I am sure is robust and proud.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week. [Music clip: From Haydn’s Derbyshire Marches]This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.