11/11/2016
01m03s — Derb goes to the mattresses. (Hallelujah!)
07m22s — Mony a mickle maks a muckle. (Sharing the joy.)
10m55s — The greatest show on earth. (Foreigners take an interest.)
16m33s — The Patriot Spring. (Trump inspires Europe.)
23m22s — Mourning in America. (Hysteria on the Left.)
33m05s — Better dead than rude. (Remember: political correctness kills.)
34m23s — Lame duck mischief. (A pardon for Mrs Clinton?)
37m53s — ChiComs do Everest. (High-altitude tourism.)
40m11s — Signoff. (Note the day.)
[Music clip: From Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.]
01 — Intro. Yes, Hallelujah! brothers and sisters in dissidence. It’s morning in America, or at any rate well past midnight, and the Republic may yet be saved to bloom and flourish as so often before.
This is of course your ebulliently genial host John Derbyshire with the weekly summary of news here on Radio Derb. I am a little hoarse, as you may perceive; but I am a very happy little horse [neigh] and I’m going to share my happiness with you.
Let the festivities begin!
02 — Derb goes to the mattresses. Who will ever forget where he was and what he was doing when the news came through?
I’m embarrassed to report that I was in bed sleeping. It had been a long weekend: Friday and Saturday in Baltimore for the Mencken Club conference, Sunday an event in D.C., Sunday night with friends down in Maryland, Monday the long ride up to New York, home in time for dinner and bed, then on Tuesday I had to ride into Manhattan for a TV spot. By dinner-time Tuesday a drowsy numbness was paining my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past.I was ready to sink Lethe-wards, or at any rate mattress-wards, so I did. I actually had mattresses on the brain. At the D.C. event a young patriot had said that should Mrs Clinton win the Presidency, we of the Dissident Right would have to, quote, "go to the mattresses." I took his point; but by Tuesday evening I was ready to go to my own mattress in a more conventional way, at least for a few hours.
I was still in the mood I reported last week, of calm fatalism as to the election result. Nobody knows how these things will turn out. The polls were discouraging; but as I also pointed out last week, they'd been wrong on the British election in 2015 and the Brexit vote in June this year. Anyone who had a strong opinion on the outcome of this election was deceiving himself and anyone that listened to him.
None of that prevented me from picking up some street cred. At the monthly meeting of my gents' dinner club back in October, we had followed a club tradition and gone round the table, every member saying aloud who he thought would take the Presidency, regardless of the member’s own preference. Of the twenty or so New Yorkers present — professional men, several with very distinguished careers of achievement — only myself and two others had said "Trump." Everyone else had said "Clinton."
I'd like to say it was some flash of insight or divine inspiration that caused me to say "Trump" on that occasion; but most likely it was just a natural contrarianism and a couple of glasses too many of wine. That won’t of course prevent me accepting the credit for my prediction. If club members want to look upon me henceforth with awe and reverence, as a sage gifted with prophesy, I shall not discourage them.
So, anyway, I went to bed around ten on Tuesday and immediately fell into a deep and blissful sleep. Mrs Derbyshire stayed up to watch the results coming in.
At some point in the small hours I awoke to take a bathroom break. Stumbling along the landing, I heard the TV downstairs saying that some state or other had taken Trump over 260 Electoral College votes. That’s pretty impressive, I mumbled to the toilet cistern; but the pull of sleep was still strong, so I went back to bed.
When I finally came down around seven a.m. Wednesday and switched on the TV, there was The Donald giving his acceptance speech. That was when the skull orchestra struck up The Hallelujah Chorus.
Hallelujah, indeed. It’s been many a long year since patriots had much to hope for from the Chief Executive.
It happened that on the day of the election we heard the news that Janet Reno had died. Ms Reno was Attorney General in Bill Clinton’s administrations. Different opinions about her are certainly possible, and one should of course not speak spitefully of the recently deceased; but I disagreed very strongly with her actions in the child-abuse hysterias of the nineties, and the repatriation to Cuba of Elián González.
The news of her death got me mentally scanning back across the past 23 years at the people who have occupied her position, and the Presidency. I've only actually met one of the Attorneys General: Michael Mukasey, who served briefly at the end of George W. Bush’s second term. He seemed like a sensible fellow in person, but only held office for a year. John Ashcroft was a decent sort, but happily on board with Bush’s invade the world / invite the world stupidity. The rest, including Ms Reno, were affirmative-action hires and Social Justice Warriors of one stripe or another, who did immeasurable harm to our nation.
Now there is the possibility of real change. Hope, too: yes, hope and change. I am ebullient.
03 — Mony a mickle. Before continuing, just a shout-out here to the many listeners and readers who took the trouble to email in thanking me for my own contribution to the Trump victory.
Speaking as an old quant, I am pretty sure my contribution was minuscule. Still, as the Father of our Country told us, "mony a mickle maks a muckle." My mother expressed the same notion less Scottishly: "Every little helps."If I helped to any degree, I am proud and glad to have done so. All of us here at VDARE.com have done our best to press the case for rational public policies, especially on immigration, and against lies and nonsense, especially those lies and that nonsense that seek to humiliate and marginalize white Americans.
Hostility to lies and nonsense doesn’t imply hostility to people. We're hostile to individual people we think are wrong; but we're not anti-black, anti-Asian, or antisemitic. We are anti-antiwhite. We want to redress the balance that’s been so badly disturbed these past few decades, and conserve the historic American nation by conserving its demographics.
What happened on Tuesday opens up wonderful opportunities to do that, most especially through proper enforcement of the people’s laws on immigration and citizenship, to the benefit not of foreigners, but of us, the American people.
Probably some of those opportunities will be lost. Likely the incoming administration will botch some of its initiatives — most administrations do. Regardless, we'll be here at VDARE.com, nagging, prompting, suggesting, and complaining.
We know that our President-Elect sees things much the way we do, and is willing to appoint like-minded people to key positions — people like Kris Kobach. Whatever our small role in making Tuesday’s result happen, I think we can be sure that what you hear and read here at VDARE.com will, at least some of the time, be read and pondered in the Trump White House.
With that in mind, I’m going to redouble my efforts to offer useful, realistic, well-informed advice to anyone that cares to listen. I've no doubt my colleagues here feel the same. Onward and upward! Excelsior!
And many thanks once again to all the people who emailed in to share their joy. Appreciation like that is the fuel that keeps us going.
04 — The greatest show on earth. Peter Brimelow remarked to me the other day that an American election is the greatest show on earth.
He’s right of course, and there’s some hope in that for the human race at large.I mentioned back there that Mrs Derbyshire sat up late to watch the election results. My lady was raised in mainland China and attended college there, graduating 1983. She keeps in touch with her college classmates through WeChat, a sort of Chinese equivalent of Facebook. These are fiftysomething Chinese professionals, some of them very successful in various fields.
They were all following the election very keenly, she told me. WeChat was in fact the main way they were doing this, as China’s official state media were doing their best to ignore our election, telling their people very little about it.
Still there’s great interest and enthusiasm over there. I asked my lady which way her classmates were inclined. They were all for Trump, she told me, "except for Wu Ming — he likes Mrs Clinton." Wu Ming is not his real name; in fact it’s the Chinese word for "anonymous." Wu Ming’s a bit of an Eeyore, with Social Justice Warrior tendencies.
That doesn’t necessarily mean a rise of Trumpism in China. Probably Trump appeals to those classmates because he’s colorful and newsy, and not much interested in waging missionary wars. Still, the fact that Chinese people are so engaged can’t be bad.
No, I’m not going to go all neocon save-the-world on you. I’m not much interested in waging missionary wars, either, especially as my son will be one of those doing the waging. The Chinese people are going to have to work out their own destiny, as all nations must.
It is, though, a tragedy of our age that this great nation, this clever, industrious people with such a long history and so many marvelous cultural achievements, has made no advance towards rational, constitutional government.
The gangster-despotism of the Chinese Communist Party is a blot on civilization. It would be wonderful to see progress towards an open society under rule of law. If the spectacle of our own election prompts some yearnings in that direction among the Chinese people — which it surely must do, and which is the reason the ChiComs are showing as little of it as possible — that is all to the good.
When I was studying Chinese in London, 1979-80, the election of Margaret Thatcher was a recent memory. One of our lecturers, T.C. Tang, marveled at the peaceful handover of power. Quoting him, from memory: "That could never happen in China, never! Even if we had an election and the other party won, those in power would barricade themselves in the Prime Minister’s residence, with sandbags all around and a machine-gun nest on the roof, and say: 'If you want us out, come and get us!'" End quote.
I know what he meant. Still I hope one day China will change. If it does, spectacles like Tuesday’s election — whose key results came through in early afternoon Chinese time — will surely have played a part.
I’m not very susceptible to the narrative of American exceptionalism: shining city on a hill, light unto the gentiles, and all that stuff. It has lead us into too many follies. My preference is to live in a normal country with modest, sensible approaches to public policy. I don’t want to save the world; if the world needs saving, I’m all for encouraging them in their efforts, but with as little involvement as possible. I’m with John Quincy Adams' vision of America as "the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all … the champion and vindicator only of her own."
If our example gives heart to lovers of liberty in other countries, though, I see nothing negative in that. I hope it does. I hope that when my own kids are fiftysomething professionals, they'll follow free and open elections in China with the same keen interest our friends over there have followed ours.
05 — The Patriot Spring. In the same spirit, while I’m hoping for my country-in-law to get rational government, I’m hoping that our ancestor nations in Europe will be able to hold on to it.
In that regard, too, our election will surely have been an encouragement to them. In many European nations, just as here, a smug, entrenched political elite has been pushing a sentimental globalist ideology whose benefits to their own people have long since passed the point of diminishing returns.We see this in the great crisis of illegal immigration from Africa and the Middle East. We've been chronicling the crisis here at Radio Derb and elsewhere on VDARE.com: the great floods of illegals into Germany, France, Greece, and most lately Italy. We've told you about the sneaky euphemisms: "refugees," "asylum seekers," "migrants," and so on. No doubt some small proportion of the numbers are genuinely fleeing from something. The great majority, though, it’s plain from the news pictures, are middle-class young men from sub-Saharan Africa and reasonably stable places like Pakistan, looking for a Western lifestyle.
It’s overwhelmingly a problem of illegal immigration, and rising numbers of Europeans are mad as hell that their governments, far from doing anything to stop it, are actively encouraging it.
There you see the commonality with Trumpism in the U.S.A. Illegal immigration has been a signature Trump issue. Trump’s success in the election this week has given heart to Europeans fighting for the sovereignty of their own countries and the integrity of their borders.
Here’s a relevant quote from one of those Europeans. I'll give you the source in just a minute. Longish quote:
[Ronald] Reagan spoke of "Poland’s struggle to be Poland." And today, three decades later, history is about to repeat itself in the United States and in several West European countries. Of course, I am not comparing our current political elite with the Communist dictatorships with their prison cells for dissidents, but the fight of a nation to be itself, remain itself and defend its identity, that fight is also being waged today.End quote. That was Dutch dissident Geert Wilders, in an invitation piece at Breitbart.com. Wilders is the leader of a political party over there, the fifth-largest in the Dutch parliament, with twelve seats in the House and nine in the Senate. That hasn’t stopped the establishment bringing Wilders to trial for "hate speech" after he promised an election rally that there would be fewer North Africans in Holland under a government run by his party. Wilders' trial is ongoing.We are witnessing America’s struggle to be America, and the struggle of several European nations, among them the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany and many others to preserve their identity and liberty, to remain the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany. Everywhere, patriots are on the march. We are living the Patriot Spring.
Patriots in European nations — the counterparts to those of us who write and broadcast on websites like this one — live under real threat. It’s not just the threat of show trials, either; Wilders has 24-hour police protection and sleeps at undisclosed locations.
That’s the fate of honest patriots in societies under the soft totalitarianism of political correctness. This week’s election in the U.S.A. has given them new hope. Let me just quote once more from Geert Wilders' stirring article. Quote:
My hope — and expectation — is that Donald Trump will follow in Reagan’s footsteps, that he will stand firm, speak the truth, concede nothing and, in doing so, inspire Western Europe to protect its freedoms against Islamization.End quote.America has just liberated itself from political correctness. The American people expressed their desire to remain a free and democratic people. Now it is time for Europe. We can and will do the same!
The key takeaway here is Wilders' phrase "the Patriot Spring." I don’t know if he coined that himself or borrowed it, but it’s something to watch out for across the pond in coming months. There are elections all over in Europe next year: Germany in February and September, the Netherlands itself in March, France in April, May, and June, Hungary in May, Norway in September, Czechia in October. It could be that we're looking at not just a Patriot Spring over there, but a Patriot Year.
If that comes to pass, it will have been partly under the inspiration of Donald Trump and our country, the U.S.A. — "the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all."
06 — Mourning in America. St Thomas Aquinas told us that one of the pleasures enjoyed by the blessed in Heaven was to contemplate the sufferings of the damned in Hell. Apparently if you get to Heaven there is a sort of balcony you have access to where you can stand and watch the sinners down below being prodded, scorched, and flayed.
Far be it from me to bandy theology with the Angelic Doctor, but I've always thought that divine justice should have a bit more charity in it than that. Whatever: Down here in the terrestrial sphere, there’s no doubt that one of the pleasures of winning an election is seeing the torments of the losers.One of the first losers out of the gate, on Wednesday morning, was the curiously named Steven Thrasher of BuzzFeed. It’s not the "Steven" that excites my curiosity, it’s the "Thrasher." Mr Thrasher is a homosexual; indeed, he basks in the glory of having received the 2012 Journalist of the Year award from the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. I know it’s Neanderthal of me, but I can’t help wondering whether "Thrasher" is an assumed name, meant to signal something to those in the know … but that’s idle speculation on my part.
So here was Mr Thrasher on Wednesday morning, quote:
This is a terrifying moment for America. Hold your loved ones close.End quote. It goes on — or thrashes on — for another six hundred words in the same vein.People of color, women, Muslims, queer people, the sick, immigrants: all are threatened by Donald Trump. They need your love, your warmth, your support.
Hold tight to the ones you love, America. Hold tight to the ones you love living in black and brown and yellow and native skin. Hold tight to us, because we will have to face white people who think we are rapists. We will have to face a nation that wants to stop-and-frisk us. Hold tight to us, because mass incarceration is actually going to get worse, and more of our brothers and sisters are going to be disappeared …
Homosexualists were very much to the fore in this kind of hysteria, although I can’t recall anything Donald Trump has said on the subject, and I doubt on a priori grounds that homosex bothers him in any way.
For another example, here was lesbian writer Cathy Renna at Huffington Post, November 10th. Headline: A Vote for Trump Was A Hate Crime. Sample text, quote, and get yer hankies out:
This election was a hate crime. Not physical but psychological, and one that may well lead to legal and physical manifestations that would very much be categorized as hate crimes.End quote. That one also continues for over 600 words.I saw and heard about such pain and fear on social media and personally as we realized Trump would take the election. And it has not let up. I checked on several people who were expressing a level of fear that seem like it could lead to self-harm.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is not homosexual, although he does have eccentric tastes. According to Wikipedia, he once dated Maureen Dowd. I’m afraid that brings to my mind a limerick the late Robert Conquest wrote about Ms Dowd’s approximate U.K. equivalent, Brigid Brophy. The limerick is much too vulgar for a family podcast, so I'll leave you to look it up for yourselves.
Mr Sorkin unbosomed his feelings about the Trump victory in the form of a letter to his 15-year-old daughter, published in Vanity Fair magazine, November 9th. Sample quote:
The Trumpsters want to see people like us (Jewish, "coastal elites," educated, socially progressive, Hollywood …) sobbing and wailing and talking about moving to Canada. I won’t give them that and neither will you.End quote. Ms Sorkin can of course make up her own mind about moving to Canada. It’s not actually an option for her Dad, though. He’s a convicted drug felon, and Canada doesn’t give settlement visas to felons.
Casting around for targets on which to vent their spleen, the CultMarx crowd didn’t even spare the celebrity fluff magazines. Here’s a gal named L.V. Anderson, an associate editor at Slate, breaking a butterfly on the wheel, the actual butterfly in this case being People magazine. Headline: Amoral People Magazine Is Already Fawning Over How "Cute" Trump’s Family Is.
"Amoral"! People, you see, has done what they habitually do when someone gets elected President: they've posted pictures of Trump’s family, actually of his daughter Ivanka Kushner and her kids, who the magazine describes as "cute."
That has Ms Anderson sputtering, sputter:
Trump and Kushner both played key roles in the most hate-filled presidential campaign in modern history. They worked tirelessly to elect a demagogue …End sputter. Are the Kardashians really harmless, though? Discuss among yourselves.Trump and Kushner, more than anyone else, normalized Donald’s patent unfitness for the presidency.
And now, People is normalizing their moral bankruptcy by pretending that they are just average celebrities, as harmless as the Kardashians.
And then of course there was the Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitler brigade. British lefty historian Simon Schama on BBC Radio November 8th, quote: "Democracy often brings fascists to power. It did so to Germany in the 1930s. And so in my view it has done this evening." End quote.
It’s all been wonderfully delicious to watch. In a simile that I like very much, one of my email correspondents, who lives in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, told me that, quote:
There are few in my zip code with whom I could share the joy of this moment. I can report that the apparatchiks are all walking around dazed and despondent, like Japanese schoolkids who have just heard the emperor announce the capitulation on the radio.End quote.
Added to the pleasure of hearing such wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Left is the spectacle of establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan falling into line behind The Donald. The English language has the idiom "rats deserting a sinking ship." I can’t think of a phrase that expresses the reverse thing, rats scampering to get back on the ship as she hoists sail and starts to pick up speed, but there really ought to be one.
If St Thomas Aquinas got it right, and Heaven is half as much fun as this, I’m going to be very good indeed from now on in hopes of getting there at last. If you go before me, save me a space on that balcony.
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Last Saturday, November 5th, was the seventh anniversary of the Fort Hood massacre. That’s a good point of reference for remembering that political correctness is not just silly, stupid, and annoying, it can also be fatal.The Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, killed fourteen people and wounded thirty on behalf of his religion, which was of course Islam. All through his military career his inclinations were known. Even his college classmates, before he joined the military, knew he was an Islamic radical. Yet he was waved through, promoted up the ranks, because of political correctness.
PC is not a joke, it’s a scourge, often a lethal one. If Tuesday’s vote was indeed motivated in part by citizens pushing back against this nonsense, our country is better and safer because of it.
Item: When I worked on Wall Street, the rule on the trading floor was that if a trader was let go, as soon as the decision was made, and before he himself was told, two security guards would be posted by his desk, to watch him pack and escort him to the door. It’s only common sense. A trader with a grudge against the firm could do massive damage in a few minutes at his console.
Perhaps we should have some similar protocol for our outgoing Presidents. From November 9th to January 20th is 72 days — plenty of time to booby-trap the White House closets and make hoax phone calls to Vladimir Putin.
The thing being most talked about in this context is a pardon from Obama for Mrs Clinton. Personally, I'd have no objection to that, although I think in fairness he should simultaneously pardon the several other people currently in jail for doing what we suspect she did.
On the morning of the election result I posted a blog about the morality and decorum of gloating in which I recycled my argument for targeted gloating.
Certainly there are people who deserve to be gloated at: in this case, George Soros, Michael Moore, Bill Maher and his fellow nitwits in that marvellous clip of Ann Coulter predicting the Trump victory back in June of 2015, and others you can no doubt think of yourself. Honest citizens should feel no shame in gloating at these fools. Gloat away! — you totally have my approval.
I wouldn’t put Mrs Clinton in that category, though. It is of course impossible for any person of feeling to like the Clintons, but Hillary’s concession speech was decent. I'd go so far as to say that nothing in her career became her like the leaving it.
And that’s actually the major point. Chelsea Clinton is talentless and not very bright, which means she may well show up in Congress one day. Even allowing for that dire possibility, though, we've heard the last of the Clintons for many years — by God’s grace, perhaps, for ever. That’s a sufficient boon in itself; gloating adds nothing.
To see Mrs Clinton doing weedwhacker duty on I-95 in an orange jumpsuit would certainly be very satisfying; but if the price for that is seeing her name in the papers for another year or two, the price is too high.
Let them crawl away to their well-padded burrows. Goodbye, Bill; goodbye Hill. It was really great knowing you … NOT!
Item: Browsing the China news, I see they have great plans for Mount Everest.
The precise tippy-tip peak of the mountain is on the border between Nepal and Tibet, the latter of course under Chinese military occupation. Until recently the assumption was, if you wanted to climb Everest, you headed to Nepal, as Tibet was an unreliable place for getting anything done, and occasionally was closed altogether so the ChiComs could massacre a few hundred Buddhist nuns without any publicity.
Well, the ChiComs have been prettying the place up. They recently completed a proper asphalt road all the way up to the base camp on the Tibet side of the mountain, 14,000 feet up.
That’s pretty damn high. There’s only one peak higher than that in the 48 states, though Alaska has several. And that just goes to the base camp, remember, with 15,000 more feet of altitude still to go to the summit.
It beats Nepal. To get to their base camp is a ten-day trek. The Nepalese are way more corrupt than the Chinese, too … A sentence I can hardly believe I just spoke. You pay for guides, they don’t show up, and so on. For the less rugged kinds of tourists, Tibet is now a better bet.
So there’s a real business opportunity here for the ChiComs in high-altitude tourism; and the Chinese, communist or not, have never been known for turning away business opportunities.
There’s also a restaurant joke here somewhere, but I’m not finding it. I leave that as an exercise for the listener. I have to wrap up now, anyway; Mrs Derbyshire has called me down to dinner. It’s one of my favorites: Yeti Foo Yung …
08 — Signoff. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for listening. Before I leave you, let’s pause to remember the significance of the date stamp on this podcast.
Long before there was 9/11 there was 11/11: the day the guns fell silent on the Western Front — November 11th, 1918, 98 years ago today. In the United States this is Veterans Day, when we remember all those who served in uniform. In Britain we called it Armistice Day, with the same significance, but with America’s Memorial Day tributes to the dead merged in.Here to play us out is the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea singing the lovely Armistice Day hymn "O Valiant Hearts":
O valiant hearts who to your glory came Through dust of conflict and through battle flame; Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved, Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: "O Valiant Hearts."]
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Readings/ovalianthearts.mp3
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
