Radio Derb: Trump Does Race, Burkini Ban Banned, Etc.

John Derbyshire

08/26/2016

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01m14s — Trump does race. (Why not citizenism?)

07m37s — Mrs Clinton rallies the Goodwhite troops. (Bring out the boogeymen.)

14m55s — Italy backs up. (The humanitarian apocalypse.)

19m14s — Burkini bans banned. (Liberty, multiculturalism: pick one.)

24m26s — The election in international context. (From Nigel.)

32m18s — Funding the college playpens. (Alumni wake up.)

39m03s — Lifesaver Derb. (If you'll only listen.)

42m00s — Sologamy. (The perfect match for narcissists.)

45m04s — Where are our Nigels? (In a safe space, perhaps.)

46m49s — Manbang. (Thank you, Kim.)

48m25s — Emigration’s end point. (El Salvador empties out.)

51m24s — Signoff. (Weird but lovely.)

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your audaciously genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you VDARE.com’s weekly podcast of news items and commentary from the viewpoint of what Mrs Clinton is pleased to call the "paranoid fringe."

Yes, the wife of our serial rapist ex-President features in this week’s podcast, along with Donald Trump of course, and some ladies in burkinis, several thousand Africans, various boogeymen, a couple of British Prime Ministers, Niue, Nigel, Manbang, Ouagadougou, sologamy, and a Welsh songbird.

Let the festivites commence!

02 — Trump does race. If Donald Trump won’t think it impertinent of me, I'd like to offer him a few words of advice. Three words, to be precise. Here they are: "Don’t do race."

Thursday this week the candidate was at it again. He had a roundtable meeting in Trump Tower with something called the Republican Leadership Initiative — the GOP’s latest effort to recruit influential blacks and Latinos to help with what is hopefully called "outreach" to minorities. Ben Carson is representative of the group, and was actually present at the Thursday meeting. Quote from Trump, speaking across that roundtable (which seems actually to have been rectangular), quote: "I've always had a great relationship with the African-American community," end quote. Wince, groan.

For another thing, I doubt there are many votes in this strategy. When politicians talk like this, they are not of course talking to blacks and Latinos. Black and Latino proportions in the voting population are small, their turnout rates on polling day are low, and they vote pretty monolithically Democrat anyway. So who cares what they think?

No, the appeal here is to whites. The hope is to peel off a few Goodwhite votes — the votes of nice white people, women especially, who want to be reassured that the candidate has correct views about minorities.

Are there really that many Goodwhite votes to be swung Trump’s way, though? I think a better strategy would be to fortify his appeal to us Badwhites, while carefully avoiding stirring up Goodwhite and minority hostility.

The way to do that is to ignore race. Just don’t do it. If it comes up in interviews and debates, just brush it away. Don’t say, "I love Hispanics!" or "I have a great relationship with the African-American community." Just look the interviewer in the eye and say: "I’m not running a race-based campaign. My policies are for all Americans — putting their interests first, ahead of the interests of foreigners. That’s what I’m about."

One minor advantage of this approach is that you don’t have to promise to do things that you can’t actually do. As the inimitable Fred Reed says, "It is apparent that nothing of any use is going to be done and probably that nothing can be done" to bring black Amerians collectively into social and economic equality with whites. Similarly with Latinos. So don’t promise to do it. Just keep shtum.

You might even — now I’m going to be really audacious — you might even try a stronger version of this strategy. Declare yourself the candidate of equal opportunity and meritocracy. Promise to abolish affirmative action throughout the federal government, to appoint to the Supreme Court only justices who are hostile to racial favoritism, and to reinstate written examinations for entry to federal civil service jobs.

Meritocracy! — and let the statistical chips fall where they may. I think you'd be surprised how much appeal such an approach would have, even among Goodwhites, even among minorities. Heck, we've tried everything else this past fifty years. Let’s try meritocracy plus strict equality under the law.

No, it wouldn’t equalize the races, because you can’t equalize the races. They're different races, yo. We're all citizens of the same Republic, though. We should be treated equally by our government; and inequality of outcomes is not proof of inequality of treatment.

Come on, Mr Trump, give it a try. Steve Sailer calls it "citizenism." You could float that word. Citizenism; meritocracy; equality under law. There’s a great country to be built on those principles.

03 — Mrs Clinton rallies the Goodwhite troops. And then, Mrs Clinton’s speech in Reno on Thursday, in which she went full Hitler on Trump, linking him to all the demon figures and organizations of the Progressive imagination.

You're durn tootin we are. If the candidate has any accomplishments other than having married a guy who became President, I’m not aware of them.

The nation of my birth is currently on its second female Prime Minister, Theresa May. Both she and Margaret Thatcher had husbands whose careers were unconnected with politics. Policy-wise I liked Thatcher, I don’t much like May; but both came by supreme political office honestly, and they get a respect from me that Mrs Clinton will never get.

Mrs Clinton came into prominence on the coat-tails of her husband, himself a scoundrel; and she has the nerve to present herself as an icon of successful feminist striving.

What a fraud! Demean her? Mrs Clinton is highly demeanable. If constantly being referred to as "Mrs Clinton" vexes the candidate and her supporters, I shall keep on doing it — shall try, in fact, to be more consistent about doing it, though I may let slip the occasional reference to "Hillary."

OK, so the Reno speech. Most of my work has been done here for me by the VDARE.com editors, who did a splendid point-by point deconstruction of the speech on our website Thursday night. I just want to add my own two pennyworth on the mental and social environment of the speech, the underlying assumptions and intentions.

Who, for example, was it for? Since it dwelt at length on race issues — "prejudice," "bigotry," the Klan, and so on&nbsp — you might suppose it was targeted at blacks. I seriously doubt that, for the reasons given in the previous segment. Blacks vote ninety-something percent for the Democrats under any circumstances. Mrs Clinton is too smart to waste her breath on them.

No, this was a general in the Cold Civil War rallying her troops. The target audience was Goodwhites, who need to be inspired, the more so as a lot of them don’t actually find the Democratic candidate very inspir-ing. "Never mind that," Mrs Clinton is saying. "You may not like me, but if you stay home on November 8th the Badwhites might pull off a victory. Then next thing you know they'll be driving over your lawns in their pickup trucks, with their bibles and guns and chewing tobacco!"

The candidate fortified her message by bringing out all the demons that inhabit the dark side of Goodwhites' imaginations: the Klan, David Duke, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, racism, and that all-encompassing standby hate …

Some of this just sounds quaint to a person not in the Goodwhite cult. I mean, really, the Klan? When was the last time they were a consequential force in our national life — 1928, was it?

The Klan is about as politically significant at the American Communist Party. Sure, the Klan is still around. So is the CPUSA: matter of fact, they have declared support of Mrs Clinton.

Given that communist ideology caused the deaths of over a hundred million people in the last century, compared with the Klan’s murder toll of, what? a couple hundred?, you'd think there would be calls for Mrs Clinton to repudiate CPUSA support. So far I haven’t heard any.

It was widely rumored before Mrs Clinton’s speech that she would speak about the Alt-Right. She did indeed give us a mention in passing, but without naming any names or engaging with any Alt-Right ideas. My own faint hopes to hear my name spoken in a speech by Mrs Clinton were dashed. I imagine my colleagues out here on — what did she call us? — the "paranoid fringe," I imagine they are similarly sunk in disappointment.

But then, you don’t want Goodwhites slipping off to see what crazy people out on the paranoid fringe have to say. Best to stick with the familiar boogeymen names. David Duke! — dark master of a vast empire of activists, its tentacles spreading into every corner of American life. Rally to the flag, Goodwhites! Let your voices be heard! [Clip: The Internationale.]

04 — Italy backs up. The current focus of attention for the ongoing invasion of Europe is Italy. In the month of July twenty-five thousand illegals arrived in Italy from Africa. Twenty-five thousand in one month. And that was a twelve percent increase on July last year.

Most of those July numbers came from Nigeria and Eritrea. Not many of them actually want to stay in Italy. They are aiming for the nations of northwest Europe, with their higher levels of prosperity and lusher welfare systems. That accords with the wishes of the Italians, who would prefer to just shunt them northwards.

Unfortunately the nations to the immediate north of Italy — Switzerland, France, and Austria — don’t want these invaders in their countries, even if they're just passing through. Those nations have been fortifying their borders. So Italy is now experiencing what your plumber would call a nasty backup.

Thousands of the illegals are camped by a railway station in central Rome. They are fed, housed, and supported by humanitarian volunteers, while local people complain about the smell and disorder.

It was beginning to look as though the Italian authorities just had no clue what to do, and would let the illegals just pile up until their numbers were great enough to take over the country — helped, of course, by those kind humanitarians.

Then, Thursday this week, we read that Italy has started deporting the illegals. Forty-eight of the invaders have been flown back to the Sudan on flights chartered by the Italian government. Forty-eight! So to clear than backlog from the one month of July will only need another 520 charters. Hey, bambino steps.

And of course the humanitarians are up in arms about it. Quote from the newspaper report, August 25th:

Alessandra Ballerini, a lawyer in Caritas Ventimiglia and expert in immigration law, said: "This is a mass deportation to a country where fundamental rights are violated and where their lives are in danger. With this operation, our country becomes an accomplice."

05 — Burkini bans banned. Burkina Faso is a country in West Africa. Get yourself to Ghana, head up-country, and keep going. The capital of Burkina Faso is Ouagadougou.

So, the burkini. What’s up with that? Well, several jurisdictions in France have banned the burkini — which, I should have explained, is a total body-covering garment that strictly observant Muslim ladies wear when bathing in the sea or some other public place.

The towns of Villeneuve-Loubet and Cannes, on the French Riviera, got the ball rolling, instituting burkini bans in the second week of August. The French Riviera, you'll recall, is where on July 14th a Muslim driving a truck massacred 85 people on the waterfornt at Nice.

Shortly after these bans there was a major brawl on the nearby island of Corsica between local French people and Muslim North Africans. A local lad was taking photographs of Muslim women on the beach in Burkinis. The Muslim men took umbrage, locals gathered, rocks were thrown, heads were broken, cars were torched, and an army of 200 locals marched on the housing project where the Muslims live. The mayor of the town of Sisco, where this happened, issued a burkini ban the following day.

Tuesday this week, on the beach at Nice, the gendarmes were out on patrol issuing violation tickets to burkini-clad women, and in at least one case ordering a woman to remove the offending garment. It’s reported that in that latter incident, French people on the beach were applauding the police and shouting at the women to "go home!"

Meanwhile human-rights lawyers had swung into action. This Friday the issue reached France’s highest court, which struck down the first of the burkini bans, the one at Villeneuve-Loubet. By this point around thirty municipalities have bans; the status of these other bans is not yet clear.

What does Radio Derb think of burkini bans? We're against them. Outside reasonable and conventional norms of modesty, I don’t think government should be telling people what they can wear at the beach.

We do, however, think that governments have every right — have in fact the duty — to be careful about who they allow to settle in their country in large numbers. It has been the neglect of that duty by Western governments across recent decades that has led to the need to be discussing burkini bans.

As we say on the Dissident Right: That’s what separate countries are for. Go back to Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco, and wear the burkini to your heart’s content. Why are Western nations tormenting themselves with such an issue?

The larger lesson as always is that liberty and multiculturalism are mutually exclusive. If you want the liberty to dress as you please, which is what I want, don’t open your country to millions of unassimilable aliens.

It would be interesting to know what kind of comment an incident like this stirs in monocultural nations like Japan. Or how about Burkina Faso? What are they saying about France’s burkini bans in Ouagadougou? Ouagadougou, Ouagadougou …

06 — The election in international context. Wednesday this week, Donald Trump had a rally in Jackson, Mississippi. One of the invited speakers was Nigel Farage, the moving spirit of the U.K. Independence Party and a key player in bringing about the Brexit vote back in June, the referendum in which a majority of Brits voting — and a very solid majority in England — opted for nationalism against globalism.

One thing Farage has always had going for him is likeability. He is, as the English saqy, blokish — he talks and behaves like a bloke, a regular guy. There’s an element of theater in that. Farage actually comes from what Orwell called the lower-upper-middle class. His Dad was a stockbroker; he was educated at a private school, and he made a career in commodity trading.

He has the common touch for all that, and a good sense of humor, including towards himself. He actually had a little fun on Wednesday about the impertinence of coming politicking in a country he’s not a citizen of. Everyone took it in good part. It’s hard to take Nigel any other way, although of course Mrs Clinton did her best in her Reno speech to draw him as a woman-hating child abuser in the pay of Vladimir Putin.

Here is a slightly edited clip of Farage’s address to the Jackson rally. You'll hear a little "blip-blip-blip" where I've edited a part out. The whole address is of course on YouTube.

[Clip: Thank you; and Good Evening, Mississippi! …]

There is also a case, though, for reminding people that our vote in November will take place in the midst of a stirring uprising in all the Western nations, an uprising against arrogant eltites telling us what to think and what’s good for us.

We may be Badwhites, but we're not children; and no, we won’t eat our greens!

07 — Funding the college playpens. The campus scene just gets nuttier and nuttier. Just this past few days, the website CampusReform.org logged the following.

• The training for Residential Assistants — that’s administrators who keep an eye on students in college residential dormitories — the training for RAs at Binghamtom University in New York included an event entitled "#StopWhitePeople2K16." The purpose of the course is to teach incoming students about white privilege.
• The University of Florida is now allowing illegal aliens to pay reduced in-state tuition fees, thus privileging the illegals over citizens from out-of-state. The university also offers special annual scholarhships just for illegals, worth $600.
• One campus at the University of North Carolina has switched to unisex bathrooms. Anyone can use any bathroom. You'd think that would make the crazy egalitarians happy, but no. Campus authorities posted a sign outside every bathroom showing a male figure, a female figure, and a wheelchair figure. "What about transgender people?" the activists are screeching.
• Westminster College in Salt Lake City has announced that it will allow men who identify as women to play on female sports teams and use their locker rooms.
• Vanderbilt University in Nashville, originally endowed by Cornelius Vanderbilt with the hope it would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War, has a Confederate Memorial residence hall. It won’t have it for much longer. A college committee has decided to change the name to just Memorial Hall. For legal reasons, this will mean the college has to give up a donation made eighty years ago, present value $1.2 million.
• The University of Mississippi marching band will no longer play the song "Dixie" at football games. Playing "Dixie" at games has been a long-standing tradition at Ole Miss. The university’s Athletics Department announced the decision in a statement August 19th, saying it would make the games, quote, "more inclusive for all fans."
• Also in North Carolina, the student union at Appalachian State University in Boone has erected a "Privilege Board" at the entrance reminding students to check their white, male, able-bodied, Christian, or cisgender privilege any time they enter the union. We all know how privileged those white people in the Appalachians are.

Stories like this, and all the fuss we've been hearing the past year or two about trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, and the rest, it’s all got some of us wondering: Why do alumni of these places still send in donations?

People of my generation — not just conservative people, either — roll their eyes and shake their heads at this stuff. And my generation, I hasten to add, is not the oldest among college alumni. Why do they go on donating, when they know how crazy and anti-intellectual it all is?

Apparently some of them are waking up. The New York Times ran a report August 4th, that I just saw on HeterodoxAcademy.org, another website critical of campus looniness. Headline: College Students Protest, Alumni’s Fondness Fades and Checks Shrink. Sample, quote:

A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints.

There are some signs that it has. Let’s give a round of applause to John Ellison, Dean of Students at the University of Chicago. In his welcoming letter to freshmen, Dean Ellison said the following, quote:

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called "trigger warnings," we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual "safe spaces" where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

08 — Lifesaver Derb. It’s been over four years now since I was the subject of a nationwide Two Minutes Hate for attempting to corrupt the youth of Athens.

On all published statistics, it is of course far more dangerous for nonblack people to be around blacks. So I wrote up a Talk suitable for nonblacks to give to their kids, to warn them about blacks. That’s what got me the Two Minutes Hate spot.

One of my cautions to the kids was, quote: "Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway," end quote. Some otherwise sympathetic readers grumbled at that; but as I said in a follow-up column, quote from me:

The context here is advice to kids. Deciding which situation says, "Stay out of this!" and which says, "Help the guy" requires an act of judgment. Kids don’t have very good judgment; so a blanket "Stay out of this!" is not bad advice in context.

There was a particularly egregious example last week from Charleston, North Carolina, which several listeners sent on to me. Forty-five-year-old Chadwick Garrett, a black man himself, helped two younger blacks, 17 and 19, pull their Dodge Durango out of a ditch. When the vehicle was back on the road, they shot Mr Garrett dead.

May he rest in peace. And may those modest particles of life advice I offered the world four years ago continue to save an occasional life, as I am sure they must have done several times over by now.

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

Further to that, here’s a new trend: self-marriage, sometimes known as "sologamy."

I hadn’t heard of self-marriage until I read an article about it in the August 27th issue of the Spectator — the British Spectator, not the American one. Apparently it’s been going on for a while. The first self-marriage took place in 2003, the Spectator tells us.

The article showcases Sara Starkström, who is — what a surprise! — Swedish, and who married herself seven years ago.

The marriage seems to have been a success. Quote from Ms Starkström — that’s her married name, by the way; the Spectator tells us she legally changed it on marriage, though they don’t tell us what she changed it from — quote:

Every year on the 9th of September I have to honour my vows, and really try to live up to the promises I made.

Higamus, hogamus, Women are monogamous. Hogamus, higamus Men are polygamous.

Item: An afterthought on my mention of Nigel Farage back there. Actually an after-question: Is there any known instance of an American being named Nigel?

George Bernard Shaw said that Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language. I don’t know about that, but there are definitely differences in the naming of offspring.

Is it paranoid of me to wonder whether American avoidance of "Nigel" is driven by the old national race neurosis? All words beginning with "n-i-g" have to be approached very carefully, on tippy-toe. The word "niggardly" is best avoided altogether; and if you must mention that African country between Mali and Chad, be careful to pronounce it "Nee-zhair," in supposed deference to its having once been a French colony.

If that’s right, there should have been a big fall-off in British Nigels since political correctness took hold over there sometime in the 1980s. In any case, as we all know, the commonest name for male children in Britain today is Mohammed in its various spellings.

This item is related to the previous one in some way I can’t quite put my finger on …

Item: The people of North Korea are getting Netflix, or at any rate a Netflix-like video-on-demand service. The service is called Manbang. It will allow viewers to watch five different TV channels in real-time, all featuring state-sanctioned news and educational programmes. Manbang users can also read articles from the Korean Central News Agency.

So, not really much of an opening to the world there. I doubt Manbang users will be able to dial up Team America. [Clip: "I’m So Ronery."]

All right, all right, I confess: I just wanted to say "Manbang" on the air. What does it mean, though? I can’t read Korean, but South Korean outlets helpfully use Chinese characters sometimes. The Chinese reads as "ten thousand fragrances." Apparently this is a Korean idiom for "everywhere" or "everybody."

Man-, -bang; thank you, Kim.

Item: In last week’s podcast I mentioned my 2010 column on diversity in New Zealand. In that column I had mentioned the Pacific island nation of Niue, whose inhabitants have been migrating en masse to New Zealand. Niue, I had written, may be the first nation to be completely emptied out by emigration.

It’s certainly getting there. When I wrote that column six years ago, the CIA World Factbook gave Niue’s population as 2,166. That same source today has the population as 1,190, and that’s a 2014 figure. On a linear extrapolation, the place should be totally empty by sometime in 2018, with the entire population having moved to New Zealand.

I wonder what the nearest equivalent is in the Western hemisphere? I've had my money on Guyana. It doesn’t have many people to start with — less than 740,000 — not many more people than Seattle — and about a third of self-identifying Guyanese live abroad, most in the U.S.A. The country itself is of course a corrupt, poverty-stricken slum.

Well, I may have to change my bet, from Guyana to El Salvador. Quote from Fusion.net:

Salvadorans are fleeing to the United States in massive numbers, and now they're bringing the whole family along. Though the number of unaccompanied Salvadoran minors crossing the border has not returned to the surge numbers seen in 2014, the number of Salvadoran family units apprehended on the southern border has increased by a whopping 96 percent over the past year.

Whatever, Salavadorans are heading north in droves, and it would be shamefully racist to try to stop them, what with their little kiddies and all. That’s not who we are!

10 — Signoff. That’s the news. ladies and gents; thank you for listening.

One small upside of the Olympics is the chance to re-view that rather good 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, about the 1924 Games. It’s quaint, and for an ex-Brit rather sad, to recall that the two British sprinters in the movie are both white; and that a movie exploration of diversity in 1981 invloves a Jew and a Sabbatarian Christian.

A side benefit of that is that the title, Chariots of Fire, reminds us of William Blake’s weird but rather lovely poem from which the phrase is taken, and of the fine lusty song Sir Hubert Parry made from it. It’s properly a choral song; but for a change, here’s Welsh songbird Charlotte Church singing it by herself. If marriage can go solo, why not choral music?

More from Radio Derb next week!

[Music clip: Charlotte Church, "Jerusalem."]

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