Radio Derb: Witch Hunt — "Bad People Making Trouble", Amy Wax And Bourgeois Norms, Etc.

John Derbyshire

08/18/2017

Download

01m22s — Bad people making trouble. (Charlottesville and the media.)

15m43s — No enemies on the left! (United States of Hysteria, cont.)

25m55s — The retreat of law. (Who needs it?)

35m09s — Let’s hear it for bourgeois norms. (Though it’s not all "culture.")

46m58s — Civil War memorials elsewhere. (CultMarx ♥ monarchy.)

50m13s — Krauthammer hammered. (I got him right the first time.)

52m51s — Antifa capitalism. (Our virtue-signalling corporations.)

55m12s — Dropping the pilot. (It was Bannonism that got you elected, Sir.)

56m46s — Signoff. (Long live the King!)

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, from your sesquipedalianly genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you VDARE.com’s weekly roundup of the news.

The headlines as we go to tape here are of a terrorist attack by Muslims in Barcelona. I won’t be covering that in the podcast. The slow destruction of Europe is something I view with calm despair. The Western half of the continent is too far gone now to be saved. For the sake of those who come after us, I shall do what I can with my one small voice to stop my country, the U.S.A., from following our home continent into the darkness.

And there is plenty to be done along those lines, as events here this week have illustrated.

02 — Bad people making trouble. I’m sure listeners all know the backstory by now.

Saturday, though, their rally at the Lee Park was opposed by leftists and there was some fighting.

Saturday afternoon, as the protests were breaking up, one of the white-identity guys drove his car into a crowd of leftists, killing one woman and injuring several other people. He’s been arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

To add to the mayhem, although it doesn’t seem to have been anyone’s fault, two Virginia State police officers died when their helicopter, on its way back to base after monitoring the demonstration, crashed in the woods outside Charlottesville.

My first take on the news comes right after I get out of bed in the morning, when I've retrieved my paper copy of the New York Post from the driveway to read over my breakfast oatmeal.

The Post’s not bad, as mainstream media go. Their Op-Ed pages occasionally run pieces in support of President Trump, or exposing the lunacy that’s rampant on college campuses; and there’s a fair spread of opinion in the Letters columns.

Last Sunday’s issue was straight-up CultMarx narrative, though. "TERROR IN VIRGINIA," screamed the front-page headline, "Car plows into protest, killing one." "CAR-TERROR MOW-DOWN AT VA. PROTEST," said the main headline to the story on Page 6.

At this point it wasn’t actually known whether the car driver, James Alex Fields, was acting with terrorist intent, or just panicked, thinking he was the lone guy in the lone car in a street full of brick-throwing antifas and club-wielding Black Lives Matter ghetto hoodlums.

In fact it’s still not known. As our own James Kirkpatrick has pointed out, when the car incident is studied to courtroom standards of evidence, Fields may turn out to be another George Zimmerman, doing the only thing he could think of doing to save his life. We'll have to wait for the trial. Don’t be very surprised if this turns out to be another case of Narrative Collapse.

Be that as it may, Sunday’s Post, and the rest of the media, were straight Narrative.

Thirty-five years ago, when I was living in Communist China, I saw a headline in Reference News, a newspaper for Party cadres that had some actual news in it, as opposed to the newspapers for the masses, which were all propaganda.

This headline was on a story about an unauthorized demonstration by coal miners in the next-door province against their appalling work conditions. It was unusual to see a story about any kind of civil unrest, which is why this one caught my eye. It was the headline that stuck in my mind, though. Translation, quote: "BAD PEOPLE MAKING TROUBLE."

Our own news outlets haven’t sunk to quite that level yet, but they're getting there. "HATRED ON THE MARCH," said the headline across pages 8 and 9 of Sunday’s New York Post. Subhead: "White supremacists spew their bigotry and turn violent."

Note the compulstory "sp — " word. I've been remarking on this for at least, looking in my archives, fifteen years. Can some neurolinguist — Professor McWhorter, perhaps — explain why an "sp — " word is compulsory when reporting dissident speech?

Look at the threadbare formulaic diction there. "Hatred": The word "hate" and its derivatives are being corraled off so that in a decade or two they will only be applied to dissidents from state dogma, just as a whole generation has grown up thinking that the word "pride" refers to something only homosexuals have.

(Steve Sailer has quipped that if you tell an American teenager nowadays about the 1942 movie Pride of the Yankees he'll assume it’s the story of Lou Gehrig coming out of the closet.)

You want hate? I got hate. Here’s a tweet from Wes Bellamy. No, I beg his pardon, I should have said "Wes Bellamy, M.Ed." The guy holds a Master’s degree in Education. Here’s his tweet.

I don’t like whit[e] people so I hate white snow!

I hate seeing White people in Orangeburg.

White women = Devil RT.

Why am I telling you about this guy? Because he’s Deputy Mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia. Did I mention that he has a Master’s degree in Education? And he’s totally free of hate — yes, Sir! No hate here!

If you want hate, you need to head off to the Dissident Right. Your guide here should be the Southern Poverty Law Center, who will direct you to the merchants of hate.

To me, for example. Actual quote from the SPLC’s dossier on me, referring to my 2012 article "The Talk: Nonblack Version," quote:

[Derbyshire’s] article, presented as conversation between a white parent and their child included lines like, [inner quote] "A small cohort of blacks — in my experience, around five percent — is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us."

And how the media love that phrase "white supremacy"! I earned everlasting infamy two years ago by writing — or "spewing," "spouting," whatever — that white supremacy is terrifically popular with black Africans and brown Middle Easterners, to judge by the numbers of those folk willing to spend their families' savings and risk their own lives to escape from nonwhite supremacy across the Mediterranean to Europe, where whites are supreme.

On what economists call "revealed preference," the whole world — most especially black Africa — loves white supremacy. Yet in the pages of our newspapers, and on the lips of our TV presenters, white supremacy is evil. Hard to figure.

I doubt in any case that even on the CultMarx meaning of the phrase "white supremacy" — which is, wanting to boss nonwhite people around, beat them up at will and lynch them when they get uppity — even on that meaning, I doubt there were many white supremacists at the original rally. Probably there were some; but it was a rich pudding.

Richard Spencer was there, for example, and he’s a white separatist, not at all a white supremacist. He doesn’t want to boss nonwhites around, he just wants the freedom to live apart from them. You can agree or disagree with that, but I can’t see that it’s malign. Nor is it "hateful."

You can believe that it’s not possible for whites and nonwhites to live harmoniously together, without hating anyone. Practically all 19th-century white Americans did so believe, including Abraham Lincoln and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Another big element among the original Charlottesville rally was the Three Percenters, concerning whom even the CultMarx website Buzzfeed allows, quote:

The group’s views align more with libertarianism — fundamentalist interpretations of the Constitution and an emphasis on personal liberty — than with the alt-right.

An example would be the demonstrator quoted by The New York Times on Sunday, re-quoted by me here at VDARE.com on Tuesday, who said, re-re-quote: "I’m tired of seeing white people pushed around," end quote. A great many Americans feel the same way. A few of them are white supremacists, in the CultMarx sense; the overwhelming majority are not.

Were there neo-Nazis and KKK types at the rally? I wouldn’t be surprised, although I’m not going to believe anything the mainstream media tell me on this point. As Ann Coulter asked rhetorically in her column the other day: Was the rally one percent Nazi or 99 percent? We can’t know because the rally was shut down before anyone could make speeches.

And of course nobody, certainly not my New York Post, was calling out the opposition fringe elements for what they were: anarchist, communist, anti-white, anti-American.

Well, almost nobody. A singular exception was … the President of the United States.

03 — No enemies on the left! President Trump’s first comments on the Charlottesville rioting came on Saturday, at an event billed as a press conference but where he didn’t take any questions. Partial quote:

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.

The President — you can hear his eyes rolling at this point — knew he had to pour oil on the congressional waters, given how much his party hates him, so on Monday he put out an official statement from the White House that, quote:

Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

The driver of the car is a murderer. What he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.

What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? …Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do …

You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. But I'll say it right now … You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent …

Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee … you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.

The President’s remarks at this presser were delivered with his usual verbal clumsiness. Don’t look to our President for "the sweet smoke of rhetoric." Not many of us are rhetorical athletes, though — I know I’m sure not. The President’s remarks were factual and fair, except for the remark about James Fields being a murderer, which remains to be proved to the standards demanded by our legal system.

Factual and fair the President’s remarks may have been, but they were not narrative-compliant.

The core credo of our media and elites is the slogan popularized by an old French radical: Pas d'ennemis à gauche! — "No enemies to the left!" That’s why it was considered very bad taste to mention Barack Obama’s long and fruitful friendships with communist terrorist Bill Ayres and anti-white radical Jeremiah Wright. That’s why no media or establishment figure holds it against New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio that he chose Fidel Castro’s communist dictatorship for his honeymoon.

There are no enemies on the left! For violating this article of Establishment faith, President Trump spent the rest of the week having bitter insults hurled at him from every point of the political compass. Except that, of course, when it comes to defending the left, even the furthest, craziest extremes of the left, the political compass has just the one point. Pas d'ennemis à gauche!

The Establishment here included of course the whole menagerie of GOP cucks. Marco Rubio tweeted on Tuesday that, tweet:

The organizers of events which inspired & led to #charlottesvilleterroristattack are 100% to blame for a number of reasons.

We haven’t sampled the full menu of cuckery until Mitt Romney’s been heard from. Yep, here he comes. Tweet:

No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.

So: The senior statesmen of our Republican Party have now endorsed "anarchists, communists, socialists across the political spectrum," to quote an antifa representative, as well as the anti-white, anti-cop radicals of Black Lives Matter. Those people are, says Mittens, in a morally different universe from the guy quoted in The New York Times who said, re-re-re-quote, "I’m tired of seeing white people pushed around."

If you favor the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, the liquidation of the Kulak class, and the abolition of private property; or if, like the Black Lives Matter crowd, you think the only good cop is a dead cop; or if, like the Deputy Mayor of Charlottesville, you just don’t like white people; if you belong to any of those categories, you are morally superior to a person who thinks statues of Civil War generals ought to be left alone, according to the Republican Party’s 2012 Presidential candidate. Good to know.

I've got a Romney story for you.

The other day I wrote about how, in election years, GOP hopefuls would stop by at National Review for a chat. I mentioned that I was always the only person in the room ever to ask these candidates about immigration policy.

Romney did one of those stop-bys sometime in the year or so before the 2012 election. Sure enough, after a round of questions from other editors, I asked Romney a question about immigration. Now, I won’t say Romney went totally deer-in-the-headlights; but there was a longer-than-should-have-been pause.

It was plain that Romney had never in his life given five seconds connected thought to the topic of immigration — the topic, more than any other, that shapes the country your grandchildren, and mine, and Mitt Romney’s, will live in.

He mumbled something at last about how that was definitely something he'd be looking into, and the talk moved on to other things — to the immense relief of the other National Review editors, who were no more keen to discuss immigration than Mittens was. Why would anyone want to bring up a topic like that? Someone might call you racist! [Scream.]

At week’s end here the hysteria has abated somewhat; and the atrocity in Barcelona has distracted the media.

It'll be a long time, though, before our media and political elites forgive the President for so brazenly violating that central article of their ideological faith: No enemies on the left!

04 — The retreat of law. One of the problems underlying our present discontents — a problem that looms larger and larger in my mind the more I think about it — is what I think of as the retreat of law.

Only some proportion on each side were up for a fight, though. What proportion is hard to say, but we're probably talking merely dozens.

City and State Police and National Guard numbers were at least equal to the total number of demonstrators — I heard a thousand law enforcement officers altogether. If you subtract out the suit-and-tie Alt Righters, and the love-the-world church types and cat ladies on the other side, the numbers inclined to fight were way outnumbered by law enforcement.

So why wasn’t the law enforced? Why weren’t the streets of Charlottesville made safe for ordinary citizens? If I’m right about the fighting element numbering dozens, why weren’t there dozens of arrests?

The question arises even more starkly in the destruction of a monument to Confederate soldiers in Durham, North Carolina Monday evening. The whole thing was filmed at leisure as it progressed, with no police anywhere in sight.

Watching the jeering crowd kicking and stomping and spitting on that fallen statue of a Confederate soldier, I’m sure some of you listeners were thinking the same thing I was thinking: How gratifying it would been if that fallen statue had sprung to life! What fun it would have been to watch these gentry-liberal snowflakes, lifestyle pansies, and pampered affirmative-action toy poodles running screaming in terror from an actual Confederate rifleman!

Although, judging by the amount of morbid obesity on display there outside the County Courthouse, Johnny Reb would have had a target-rich environment to practice his marksmanship on …

As Radio Derb goes to tape here eight people have already been charged in connection with the Durham vandalism, the charges ranging from misdemeanor defacing a public monument to felony riot, the perps identified from video footage.

That’s nice, I guess; but where was law enforcement while the riot was going on? Why didn’t the city of Durham act to protect their property?

The answer in both cases is that there are whole large areas of our public life where we just don’t do law enforcement any more.

As Charlottesville and Durham illustrate, that certainly includes street-level police work by municipal and state level cops. These foot soldiers of everyday law enforcement know that in the age of smartphone cameras and Black Lives Matter agitators, their careers and even their liberty are in peril any time they confront a black malefactor. Better to stay in the donut house as much as possible.

This is commonly known as the Ferguson Effect. In a season when naming things after people is much under discussion, though, I think it would be more apt to call it the Obama-Holder-Lynch Effect.

And police report to local politicians who are always looking to leverage incidents like Charlottesville and Durham to their own advantage. When antifas and Alt Rightists square off, best just let 'em go at it. The pols can be confident the media will report it as "a white supremacist riot," whatever the actual details, so public obloquy is directed at the Alt Right, not at the pols.

If they were to enforce the law, some black heads might be broken. Police brutality! Hands up don’t shoot! You know the script. From the point of view of a mayor, governor, or police chief, no action is the right action.

What I’m calling the retreat of law goes much deeper than just weak policing, though. Our entire Constitutional structure of law and law enforcement, the very underpinning of our social order, has been allowed to crumble and decay.

The common American understanding was, that the people elect representatives, who form legislatures and enact laws. Executive powers at municipal, state, and federal level then enforce those laws. Where disputes about interpretation arise, judges settle those disputes.

That’s all out of kilter now. A hundred years ago the long public debate about whether women should have the right to vote was framed as a Constitutional Amendment and offered to the states for ratification. The states ratified it and it became law.

We would never go to so much trouble nowadays. As we saw with same-sex marriage two years ago, Supreme Court justices just meditate a while then find some new right lurking there in the Constitution somewhere, unnoticed by anyone for two hundred years. What need for laws and legislators? What need to consult the citizenry? Why, some of them haven’t even been to law school!

Likewise with war. Our Constitution reserves the right to declare war to Congress, the national legislature. Congress last exercised that right in 1942 (against Bulgaria, I think it was). Been a long, peaceful 75 years, hasn’t it?

Or take affirmative action. The 1964 Civil Rights Act declared among its purposes, quote: "to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs." Wellnigh all institutions of higher education take federal assistance; wellnigh all of them practice racial preferences in admissions.

And then of course there is immigration. We have lots of laws governing immigration. Those laws are so feebly enforced, we have millions — probably tens of millions — of foreigners living illegally in our country. They actually form a massive, well-financed political lobby. Congressmen agitate on their behalf. States offer them cut-price college tuition. So-called "sanctuary cities" turn a blind eye to their misdemeanors.

Laws? Law enforcement? Feugh!

The law is in retreat, has been for decades.

05 — Let’s hear it for bourgeois norms. I don’t actually know that much about the law, being one of those clueless wretches who never went to law school. When obliged to apologize for my ignorance I summon the spirit of King Charles the First of England.

I do not know the forms of law; I do know law and reason, though I am no lawyer professed: but I know as much law as any gentleman in England.

Here, though, are two persons who know a very great deal about the law. They should do, anyway; they are both law professors at prestigious universities. One is Professor Amy Wax, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The other is Larry Alexander, the Warren distinguished professor — no mere Professor, a distinguished Professor! — at the University of San Diego School of Law.

On August 9th these two worthies published an article over both their names in the Philadelphia Inquirer, title: Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

The piece is strictly Culturist, in the sense given in Chapter Seven of We Are Doomed. That is to say, there is no slightest hint of race realism, of the notion that there might be innate statistical differences between the races that prevent them having equal social outcomes.

All these two law professors are saying, though very eloquently and clearly, is that we don’t sufficiently promote and enforce the bourgeois norms that give most citizens their best shot at a happy and useful life, and that help to keep a society stable and reasonably harmonious.

Sample quote:

[The country’s bourgeois culture] laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

You might think that’s pretty bland stuff. On the University of Pennsylvania campus, though, it had the snowflakes running for their safe spaces.

From the comment thread, quote: "This is revisionist racist thinking triggered by Trump empowering redneck right wing ideology," end quote. Wow. Another commenter responded with the single word: "Troubling."

Professor Wax, who has obviously never heard the old axiom: "Don’t trouble the troubled until the troubled trouble you," troubled down … I’m sorry, I mean doubled down in an interview with the college newspaper August 10th. Sample quote:

I don’t shrink from the word, "superior." Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify these values. Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.

Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people. The irony is: bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.

You can imagine the reaction to that. "Just when you thought the Ivy League elitist culture couldn’t get more racist or out of touch," sighed one commenter. Another one told the interviewer that, quote: "You should be ashamed for promulgating such racist tripe." Yet another channeled Susan Sontag, quote:

Somebody should tell this lady that anglo-protestant culture is the worst ever as it has led to planet heating, wrecked the planet, and guaranteed the 6th extinction. The worst culture in the history of humanity.

That’s the kind of reaction you get nowadays for stating the obvious.

I'll add my view to the "bourgeois values" discussion, if you don’t mind.

I grew up on a public-housing estate in 1950s England. Bourgeois values were pretty uniformly observed among our working-class neighbors. Most people got married and stayed married, tried to raise their kids as good useful citizens, performed military service as required, worked doggedly at thankless, often degrading, jobs, rarely got drunk and very rarely committed acts of unprovoked violence.

I said "most people." There was a delinquent minority on whom bourgeois values didn’t "take." They got in trouble with the law, and in one case ended up in jail.

After observing this through childhood and adolescence, I concluded that there is some irreducible portion of white working-class English humanity that can’t be made bourgeois. They are just incorrigibly unsocializable. On the statistics of my neighborhood in that time and place, I'd say the portion was in the range two to five percent.

I don’t altogether discount the culturist aspect. We are social animals. If everyone around me is behaving with bourgeois propriety, I'll be pressured to do the same, so if not really hard-core incorrigible, I will. Contrariwise, if my neighbors become loose and undisciplined, then I, with the same body and brain as before, might let go too. That is the argument our two law professors are making.

Under any circumstances, though, short of the most rigid totalitarianism, there’s a hard core of incorrigibles.

Since then I've lived all over the world, among people of all races. It’s plain to me that, other social factors all equal, the proportion of incorrigibles is different in different races, most likely just because of biological differences arising from the different paths they've taken through evolutionary space.

Among working-class whites in England today, to judge by the newspapers I read and reports from relatives, I believe the proportion of incorrigibles there may have risen, perhaps to over five percent.

I’m speaking of people who can’t be socialized to bourgeois values because their traits of personality and intelligence don’t allow it in the society they find themselves in.

Among blacks the proportion is much higher everywhere, as you can see reflected in statistics for crime, noncriminal misbehavior, and corruption. Among American blacks today I'd peg it as in the range twenty to twenty-five percent. I of course wish nothing but health, happiness, and prosperity to the other seventy-five or eighty percent.

Would firm promotion of bourgeois values lower the incorrigible proportion? I’m sure it would, among all races, although without affecting the differential; just as a strict school environment raises all test scores, but leaves the black-white gap unchanged; just as a rising tide lifts all boats, those that ride low in the water as well as those that ride high. There’s something innately different about the boats. The tide can’t fix that.

So a big YAY! to bourgeois values from Radio Derb. We do indeed need more of them. I totally agree with Professors Wax and Alexander about that.

I don’t believe, though, that in a free society, you will ever get bourgeois values to penetrate all the way down. And I don’t believe that the depth of their penetration will be the same for all races.

We are living creatures, branches on the great Tree of Life. We dwell in the realm of biology. There is a real world and it really exists, independent of our wishes. That’s all.

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

The English, like any other old nation, have had their own civil wars. Freshest in memory is the one fought through the 1640s between partisans of, on the one hand, King Charles the First, whom I quoted earlier, and on the other, Parliament. The casus belli was a constitutional point: Should the King be supreme, or Parliament?

As any English schoolboy will tell you, the King’s men were Wrong but Wromantic, while the Parliamentarians were Right but Repulsive.

Well, the Parliamentarians won that war. Their leader, Oliver Cromwell, eventually became head of state with the title Lord Protector.

But then, after Cromwell died, my ancestors decided the whole Civil War and Protectorate thing had all been a regrettable mistake, so the monarchy was restored.

Once things had settled down, Cromwell’s corpse — at this point it had been buried for two and a half years so presumably it was kind of gamy — was disinterred and hanged in chains. So it’s fair to say that Cromwell and his Parliamentarians lost the Civil War at last, though the old boy went to his grave thinking he'd won it.

Forward two hundred and forty years to 1899. After some heated public debate — it was particularly heated in Ireland, where the Protestant Cromwell had been beastly to Catholics — a statue of Cromwell was erected outside the House of Commons, where you can still see it.

Have there been politically-inspired attempts to remove the statue? Yes there have; most recently in 2004, by members from the left-wing Labour Party pretending to be upset about Cromwell’s treatment of the Irish.

I know, it’s a bit odd: modern CultMarx equalitarians taking the side of monarchy in the English Civil War. History makes strange bedfellows, though. The equivalent would be some hardcore black leftist faction in the 23rd century calling for the removal of the Lincoln Memorial.

Which, come to think of it, at the speed things are spinning, wouldn’t really be odd at all.

Item: One of the side-effects of these periodic moral panics that sweep through American society — Trayvon, Ferguson, Charlottesville — is that they unmask people — bring out their inner nature.

Well, two weeks ago on the podcast I said some kind words, or at least not un-kind words, about TV talking head Charles Krauthammer. I said that while I'd written him off for years as a, quote, "cucky neocon Israel-first GOP establishment front man," more recently I've been warming to him because of the mostly sensible things he’s said on Tucker Carlson’s show.

Well, I’m biting my tongue. Last Tuesday on Fox News Krauthammer reverted to cucky type, acting scandalized that Trump dared suggest there is anything wrong with masked anarchists throwing rocks at citizens lawfully demonstrating.

Fortunately Laura Ingraham was there to counter him. I have, as I have often noted, a very soft spot for Ms. Ingraham. Not to be shy about it, I would walk over hot coals for her, leap the ice floes of a swollen river for her, wrestle alligators for her. Heck, I would even sit through a corporate Diversity Awareness seminar for her.

Tuesday night she was on great form. She tossed and gored Krauthammer, sample quote:

We have to be honest about the evil of racism and also honest about a far left that is [both] trying to tear down history and intimidate free speech in the country.

So OK, I yield. I got Krauthammer right the first time: cucky neocon shill. Sorry about that.

And Laura, why don’t you answer my emails? …

Item: Another side-effect of these bouts of national hysteria is an all-round tightening of ideological screws.

I’m not sure if the screw-tightening is worse this time around, or if it just seems worse becase we are all now so deep-immersed in the internet consumer economy.

Twenty years ago, regardless of any opinions I may have published, they weren’t going to refuse to serve me at Macy’s, or decline to accept my parcels at FedEx. The equivalent things in today’s economy are all too likely.

Following last week’s ructions, corporate America is virtue-signaling fit to bust; and the approved method of virtue signaling is to deny service to organizations promoting dissident opinions.

You've probably heard that VDARE.com has been dropped by PayPal. So has American Renaissance; and I've just heard that Jared Taylor’s personal FaceBook page has been scrubbed, too.

How this all squares with the courts forcing Christian bakers to bake a cake celebrating buggery, I don’t know. Perhaps one of those law professors could explain.

I do know, though, that I’m going to drop the characterization of our economic system as "anti-white capitalism," which I floated last week. Plainly a more accurate term is the one I tried out before that: "anti-fa capitalism."

That’s the system we're living under. The antifas, and their front organizations like Southern Poverty Law Center, declare who corporations may or may not do business with. The corporations snap to attention and shout, "SIR YES SIR!"

That’s our system, antifa capitalism. Best get used to it.

Item: Finally: Today, Friday, we heard that Steve Bannon has been dropped from the White House staff, not much to anyone’s surprise.

Probably this is something Trump had to do, or believed he had to do, to get himself right with the congressional GOP seatwarmers after he outraged them by condemning the antifa. Fair enough, if he felt himself in real danger. If the choice was a White House without Bannon or a White House without Trump, I'll take Door One.

I really hope, though, the President doesn’t forget that it was Bannonism that got him elected, just as much as Trumpism, and way more than old-style, Romney-style, Bush-style, Rubio-style, McCain-style flaccid donorist GOP-ism.

And I wish I could get out of my mind’s eye that old Tenniel cartoon, "Dropping the Pilot." If you don’t know it, look it up. That didn’t end well.

For sure, though, the internal dynamics of the Trump White House are going to make great reading when the memoirs come out.

07 — Signoff. That’s it, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and … Laura? Just a line? …

Longtime Radio Derb listeners know the answers in my case. Here’s the King to sing us out.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

[Music clip: Elvis Presley, "Don’t."]

< Previous

Next >

This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.