11/22/2019
01m10s The grand old Duke of York. (Windsor family travails.)
08m13s A modest suggestion for the royals. (Trying to be constructive.)
12m19s Black privilege: a case study. (A billion dollars for nothing.)
18m47s Virtue signalling didn’t start five years ago. (1960s Massachusetts.)
23m24s Democrat talks sense on foreign policy! (Though not on anything else.)
31m40s Confronting Lady Ann. (The reptilian brain stem.)
34m28s "Groypers," what? (The Alt-Right reborn … and headed the same way.)
38m32s Signoff. (With a pop classic.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a snippet of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 played by organist Peter Gould on the main organ of Derby Cathedral; and this is of course your reliably genial host John Derbyshire bringing you some commentaries on the news.
Listeners have been nagging me that I, as an ex-Brit, should be more forward in saying things about the House of Windsor’s latest travails. All right, I'll give it a shot: some light commentary, then a very constructive suggestion. Never let it be said that Radio Derb is a mere fog of inspissated negativity.
02 — The grand old Duke of York. When I was a wee kiddie back in England we sang nursery rhymes. One that we liked to sing was called "The Grand Old Duke of York."
Sorry, what’s that? Oh, you want me to sing it for you? Glad to! Here we go:
Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.When they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only halfway up,
They were neither up nor down.
[Applause]
By a long tradition going all the way back to the Plantagenet dynasty in the 15th century, Duke of York is a title bestowed on the British monarch’s second son, if the monarch has one. The monarch’s first son is of course the Prince of Wales.
Being Duke of York gives you an excellent shot at becoming King. The present Queen’s father was Duke of York; so was his father; they both became King. King James the Second, who the Brits kicked out in their Glorious Revolution of 1688, was Duke of York and Albany before he was King; the city and state of New York are named after him, as is our state capital, Albany.
So which of the dozen or so Dukes of York known to history inspired that little nonsense song? If you can figure that out, they'll give you a Ph.D. in Folk Life Studies. Quote from Wikipedia:
The most common attribution is to Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany (1763-1827), the second son of King George III.
End quote. I'll leave it at that.
Well, the present Duke of York, Queen Elizabeth’s second son, is 59-year-old Prince Andrew. A divorcé since his only marriage broke up 23 years ago, Andrew has been keeping himself busy in the approved royal style: fronting for charities and promoting his country’s trade interests abroad.
He has also been living the high life: Jetting around the world, relaxing with super-rich folk on their super-yachts, and hobnobbing with Middle Eastern and Central Asian autocrats in their palaces — although not, I hasten to say, with President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov of Turkmenistan, whose spotless reputation remains unsullied by these sordid reports. There is some evidence the Prince has been confusing Britain’s trade interests with his own personal portfolio.
And then, he was friends with the late Jeffrey Epstein up to, according to him, 2011. Perhaps they found a common bond in the fact that nobody could figure out how either of them had so much darn money to spend.
Epstein is famous of course for his taste in teen, and possibly just-preteen, girls. At least one of the girls has claimed that Andrew shared that taste, and that Epstein pimped for him.
I wouldn’t be surprised, but there is no material evidence, only the word of women of low repute scripted by scuzzy trial lawyers, supplemented by a couple of photographs. Concerning which — the photographs, I mean — if you haven’t kept up with photoshopping technology, just fortify yourself with a couple of stiff drinks, then go to Google Images and put "Hillary Clinton nude" into the search box.
[Pause.]
You back from the bathroom? Good. Well, last Saturday Andrew gave an interview to BBC TV about all these topics. This event went so badly, it has gone down in the royal annals as "the car crash interview."
The grossest part was where the interviewerette mentioned a report by a lady claiming to have been one of Epstein’s girls that at an encounter with Andrew he had perspired excessively all over her.
Not true, said Andrew. Because of a disorder he'd acquired while on military service in the 1982 Falklands War, he can’t perspire. The New York Post front-paged this with the caption, quote, "HIS ROYAL DRYNESS."
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth was not amused. She has suspended Prince Andrew from all royal functions and stopped part of his allowance. Yes: When you're a royal prince, you still get an allowance from Mom at age 59.
My main contribution to the commentary on Prince Andrew’s woes is of course an updated version of that childhood nursery rhyme. You ready? Here goes.
The grand old Duke of York
Was Jeffrey Epstein’s pal.
He made Mom frown
By going down
On a 17-year-old gal.Or so she claims, and swears
He left her soaking wet;
"Not so," says he
"Because, you see
I cannot break a sweat."
[Applause]
03 — A modest suggestion for the royals. I have a word of advice for the British royal family. Literally a word: The actual word is kafes. Let me explain.
My feeling about the royals when I was British was that the monarchy was a good stabilizing influence, a focus for patriotic sentiment and so on, and the Queen herself was a pretty good egg: modest, sensible, strong sense of duty. The junior royals, though, were an unnecessary expense, and frequently an embarrassment. I thought Britain would be a better place without Princes, Princesses, royal Dukes and Duchesses cluttering up the pages of the tabloid press.
That feeling seemed to be widespread, and likely still is today. What Britain needs is a kafes. Permit me a short excursion into history.
The Ottoman Empire came up around a.d. 1300 and lasted down to 1922. The Ottomans were Muslims speaking a Turkic language — the language that became modern Turkish. They were ruled by an emperor, the Sultan.
Being Muslim, the Sultan had many wives, and many many children. This caused problems of succession. When a Sultan died, there were generally a good number of healthy sons ready to fight among themselves for the throne.
The fighting didn’t end the bloodshed, either. When one of the company had come out on top and seized the throne, he would have all his brothers garrotted to make sure they wouldn’t raise any challenges to his rule. The garrotting was done with some ceremony: manually, using a silk cord.
As time went on the Ottomans softened somewhat, and the ritual garrotting of a new Sultan’s couple of dozen brothers came to be thought somewhat unfraternal. This — we are in the late 16th century now — this was when the kafes took over.
Kafes is just the Turkish word for "cage." Instead of ceremonially strangling all a new Sultan’s brothers, they were confined to a kafes. It wasn’t actually a cage, just a part of the imperial palace, well furnished but under very strict guard — a sort of oriental Club Fed. The Sultan’s brothers — and soon also his cousins and nephews — were kept shut up there until the Sultan died and one of them could succeed to the imperial throne.
So that’s my suggestion to the British royals. You need a system of kafes. Let the monarch and his consort enjoy their palace; keep the rest of the royals out of sight, under lock and key, carefully watched and supervised, until time comes for one of them to be plucked out and put on the throne.
This would not only save the royals a lot of embarrassment, it would save their country’s treasury a lot of money too.
04 — Black privilege: a case study. Radio Derb listeners all know about New York City’s communist mayor Bill de Blasio. Those of you in the great windswept spaces west of the Hudson River are probably much less familiar with Mayor de Blasio’s wife, a black lady named Chirlane McCray.
Ms McCray is a piece of work. She exhibits all the pathologies of educated black Americans in concentrated form, all the points very highly developed. She is a communist, of course, like her husband — they took their honeymoon in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. She has been a writer and a poet — Radio Derb actually offered listeners a sample of her poetry back in 2013, when Bill was first running for mayor of New York.
Although I have sampled Ms McCray’s poetry, I have not ventured into her prose. Since her verse is without rhyme, meter, or even rhythm, and betrays no acquaintance at all with traditional poetic forms — is in fact verse merely in a typographical sense — I wouldn’t expect to find anything in her prose I didn’t find in her poetry.
And googling around for commentaries about the prose, it’s clear that it is indeed just like the verse: semiliterate solipsistic vaporing about her blackness, herself, her blackness, her sexuality, her blackness, her childhood, her blackety-blackety-black-black-blackness.
And as I said, McCray ticks all the boxes for educated black American pathology. Along with the foregoing, she has allowed herself to be wafted up on thermals of white guilt into a position where she can make decisions about the disbursal of public funds.
Lots of public funds, in her case: a quarter of a billion — yes, that’s "billion" with a "b" — a quarter of a billion dollars a year. That’s the budget for ThriveNYC, a program to overhaul New York City’s mental-health welfare services, launched four years ago in 2015.
It goes without saying that Ms McCray was not elected to run ThriveNYC, nor even selected on any kind of meritocratic job-interview basis. She was just appointed by her husband the mayor. She has never in her life managed anything, let alone anything spending a quarter billion a year.
So: four years at a quarter billion a year, that’s a neat billion dollars dragged from the pockets of working and property-owning New Yorkers by force of law. What does the city have to show for it?
Nothing that anyone has been able to identify. The actual situation for mental health issues in New York may actually be worse today than it was four years ago. Quote from the de-Blasio-friendly New York Times, March 22nd this year, quote:
The biggest challenge for Mr de Blasio and Ms McCray has been to identify concrete results. A spreadsheet of nearly 500 data points tracked by City Hall included almost none related to patient outcomes.
End quote.
For the annual conference of ThriveNYC, held on Monday and Tuesday this week, 200 mayors of American cities were invited. Just seven RSVPed in the affirmative, and all but two of them were small local sub-municipalities.
So … how was that billion dollars of public money disbursed? Well, of course, there was the organizing of the annual conference, postage paid on all those invitations that went straight into mayoral waste-paper bins from sea to shining sea. Beyond that, nobody really knows, as no records of spending are kept. Oh.
So after ticking the boxes labeled "communist," "blackety-black solipsist," and "meritless beneficiary of white liberal guilt," you can tick the ones that say "managerial incompetence" and "carefree approach to spending public money."
Ms McCray is of course totally immune from any consequences for her irresponsibility with other people’s money. The forces of law cannot touch her; neither can public disapproval, if anyone of importance dared to voice it. She’s black; and so, like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, of no interest to the people who will hunt you down and jail you for failing to report your new loft extension to the IRS.
Black privilege — taste it!
05 — Virtue signalling didn’t start five years ago. A footnote to the previous segment. I’m not quite through with Ms McCray yet. Hey: There are entire university departments, with buildings and professors and deans and teaching assistants and reading lists, talking about white privilege. You can spare a couple minutes more of Derb talking about black privilege.
So Monday this week saw the opening of the annual conference of ThriveNYC, this billion-dollar boondoggle worked up by our communist mayor to get his wife out of the house.
Ms McCray herself opened the conference with a talk about — can you guess? — yes: her own wonderful, ineffable, endlessly fascinating blackety-blackety-blackety-blackety-black-black-blackness. Quote from the New York Post, November 18th:
McCray described to the audience the torment she endured as one of the only black children growing up in Longmeadow, Mass., in the 1960s: Her classmates mocked her skin color, teachers refused to have her in their classrooms, and construction workers spit [sic] at her as she rode her bike."I didn’t know how to handle all that," she vividly recalled Monday during her keynote at the Thrive conference at New York Law School.
"I was afraid, I was lonely, I was anxious and so often I just wanted to die," she said, pausing before continuing her 15-minute address.
End quote.
Her family was, according to Wikipedia, only the second black family in the town of Longmeadow, whither her family had moved in 1964 when Ms McCray was ten years old. That could very well be true. Even today, Longmeadow’s only one percent black.
I call b-s on the lady’s tales of being mocked and spat on, though. "Teachers refused to have her in their classrooms"? Please. She’s lying.
For one thing, this was Massachusetts, inhabited by people of earnest northeastern Puritan stock. These people weren’t spitting on ten-year-old black kids, not even in 1964.
For another, we all know the relevant sociology. Neither the first nor the second black family in town gets spat on and mocked, nor the third nor the fourth either. Everybody’s glad to see them. They're an emblem of the town’s tolerance and inclusivity. Virtue signalling didn’t start up suddenly five years ago. Hit movie of 1967, when Ms McCray was thirteen: white-guilt-porn classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Sure, if two hundred black families move in, you're looking at a different situation. That wasn’t the case with the McCrays, though.
So I say Ms McCray’s lying. Prove me wrong. Name the "teachers who refused to have her in their classrooms" — just one name will do. Bring forward some witnesses to the spitting and the mocking.
Then I shall make public repentance for my shameful skepticism towards New York City’s saintly, spotless, untouchable, and wonderfully black First Lady.
06 — Democrat talks sense on foreign policy! OK, I tuned in to Wednesday evening’s Democratic candidates debate. I didn’t stay long, though. Nor, to judge from the viewing figures, did many other voters. There are somewhere north of 150 million registered voters; only 6.5 million watched the show. That’s four percent.
Almost the first words uttered by a candidate in the event were Elizabeth Warren saying, actual quote: "No-one is above the law."
Is the Senator not aware that the entire Democratic platform rests on the proposition that twenty or thirty million inhabitants of our country are above the law? I mean of course illegal aliens — people with no lawful right to be here.
Do any of the candidates on Wednesday night’s platform want the law enforced against these people? No. So how are they not "above the law," Senator? Would any of the candidates even say a word in support of ICE, the federal agency charged with enforcement of immigration law? Of course not.
Those are the kind of challenging questions you'd want moderators to hurl at the candidates. Fat chance of that here. The so-called moderators were all female Cloud People, and selected with exquisite sensitivity to matters of diversity and inclusion: one lesbian, one Jew, one mulatto, and one Jeff Bezos sock puppet. The political center of gravity here was a tick or two to the left of Williams College Whiteness Studies Department.
These weren’t moderators, they were facilitators. Doesn’t anyone understand what the word "debate" means any more? Oh, right.
[Clip: 2014 college debate competition.]
In case you didn’t recognize that, it was a random extract from the 2014 Cross Examination Debate Association’s national championship, held at Indiana University that year. And that wasn’t just anyone at the mike there; that was a member of the winning team. Perhaps that’s what televised Presidential candidate debates will sound like after a few more years of civilizational collapse.
The actual content of the debate was so drearily predictable, I found myself focusing on the candidate’s mannerisms. Elizabeth Warren, for example, practices the superfluous "so." If you ask her a question, she begins her answer with the word "So …"
I've been grumbling about this little mannerism — in general, I mean, not just in Senator Warren’s case — for an entire decade. Why don’t people listen? So I think it’s because they want to sound professorial.
The only candidate who returned an echo from my bosom was Tulsi Gabbard. And before you start snickering: No, it’s not because I’m a dirty old man and Rep. Gabbard was the only person on the set who looked like a fully-functioning female. I am a dirty old man, but Tulsi is a bit too stocky and butch for my taste. I bet lesbians think she’s a perfect ten. I’m surprised Rachel Maddow didn’t give her more air time …
Sorry, sorry, my mind’s wandering. Coming up with commentary about a lead balloon like this candidates debate is taxing. What was I saying about Tulsi Gabbard? Oh yes: U.S. foreign policy.
It so happened that the previous night, Tuesday, I was at dinner in Manhattan with a roomful of extremely smart gents — professionals, business, finance, academic types — talking mostly about our country’s foreign policy. The sense of the meeting was, that it’s been an utter screaming disaster for thirty years now.
I am with that consensus. Historians of the future, looking back on America’s response to the end of the Cold War, will scratch their heads in disbelief and wonder what the hell we were thinking.
Germany was reunified in August 1990. The Warsaw Pact was wound up the following February. Nine months later the Soviet Union ceased to exist. From America’s military and diplomatic posture in the years that followed, you'd never know any of that happened.
You'd hardly know it from the Democrats in last week’s debate talking about the Russian threat: Amy Klobuchar on our President, quote, "sucking up to Vladimir Putin"; Joe Biden saying that, quote, "Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be President"; and so on.
Let me just interpolate a couple of follow-ups to those before returning to Rep. Gabbard. I vaguely recalled, and a quick google confirmed, that in the October candidates debate Senator Klobuchar only said Trump was coddling up to Putin. Now she says he’s sucking up. I guess after a few months on the campaign trail, that Midwestern Nice can’t help but suffer some erosion.
And on Joe saying Putin doesn’t want him to be President; trust me, Joe, Putin would l-o-v-e you to be President. Now that we've made an enemy of the guy — quite unnecessarily — he'd naturally prefer we'd put in charge a ditzy old geezer whose pockets he can pick without being noticed.
All right, Tulsi Gabbard. I know, she’s an open-borders, open-the-jails lefty. No way I'd vote for her.
Rep. Gabbard does, though, understand one thing that no-one else in that debate showed any slightest sign of understanding: that U.S. foreign policy is radically FUBAR, and has been for an entire generation.
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: You probably saw video clips of Ann Coulter arriving at Berkeley College to give a talk. In case you didn’t, here are the sound effects. Warning: They contain shouted obscenities.
[Clip]
That gives you the idea. For the full force of the barbarism on display here, watch the video. Not the clips from local TV that you see on YouTube; those are edited to make the protestors look tame. View the clips recorded by people present, that mainly ended up on Twitter.
They're scary. Yeats' lines came to my mind:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yep, those protestors are full of passionate intensity all right. It’s not a high form of passionate intensity, either; it’s a low, base, animal form. Did you hear what they were screaming there? The F-word, they can’t utter a sentence without using the F-word.
That word comes out of the reptilian brain stem. A neurologist will tell you that people with severe brain injuries, who have lost the power of coherent speech, can still cuss, and do so loud and endlessly.
My boss Peter Brimelow here at VDARE.com sometimes says, "It will come to blood." I've always resisted that line of thinking. Surely we're not that far gone; surely we can sort things out somehow, citizen to citizen, with goodwill, however grudging. Can’t we?
Watching those capering figures, their faces all twisted with righteous rage, and hearing their obscene shrieking voices, I’m starting to see Peter’s point.
Item: My new word of the week is "Groyper." I’m a bit behind the curve here. The Z-man has been using "groyper" for a couple of weeks now, and knowyourmeme.com tracks it all the way back to May of 2017.
Groypers, as far as I can gather — and my researches are still in progress — are a new instantiation of the Alt-Right. That is, they are young, irreverent towards Conservatism, Inc., and amuse themselves by showing up at meetings addressed by the likes of Ben Shapiro and asking taboo questions.
The prime mover here seems to be a young chap named Nick Fuentes. When I went looking for some background on him, this came up.
[Clip: "Mack says if I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and Cookie Monster has fifteen ovens working 24 hours a day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make six million batches of cookies? I don’t know. That’s a good question. It’s certainly (laughing) Oh no, no. It doesn’t really sound correct to me. Wait a second. It takes one hour to cook a batch of cookies, and you have fifteen ovens — probably in four different kitchens, right? — doing 24 hours a day every day for five years, how long would it take you to make six million … Hmm. I don’t know. It certainly wouldn’t be five years, right? The math doesn’t seem to add up there …"]
Hoo-kay. So this Nick Fuentes guy seems to want to cast doubt on the figure for deaths in the Holocaust, generally given as six million. Couple of things about that.
First thing: I don’t think any questions should be out of bounds to scholarly investigation. Was the number of Holocaust deaths actually six million? I have no idea, and no problem with scholars making inquiries. This isn’t a scholar making inquiries, though; it’s a sniggering kid making jokes.
Second thing: I don’t mind bad taste humor, but there are limits, and Holocaust jokes are well outside the limits. The greatest human catastrophes are not proper topics for humor: not the Plague of Justinian or the Black Death, not the Irish Potato Famine, not the mass killings by Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, the Kim family and Pol Pot, not the Holocaust. Get a sense of proportion, guy.
Third thing: How does this kind of foolery advance any cause that’s dear to me? It’s just dumb and self-indulgent.
If this Nick Fuentes guy is representative — and as I said, I've so far only done superficial researches — the Groypers are headed down the same plug-hole the Alt-Right disappeared into. Like the Alt-Right, they will be easy adversaries for the CultMarx establishment and their Conservatism, Inc. enablers to out-strategize, out-mobilize, out-think, out-spend, out-wit, then chew up and out-spit without breaking a fingernail.
08 — Signoff. That’s it, ladies and gentlemen; I’m over my time. Thank you for your time and attention; and may you enjoy your Thanksgiving turkeys as much as we mean to enjoy ours.
Here’s a pop classic to see us out. It’s always associated with WW2, for reasons not hard to figure out, but I see it was in fact written in 1938. The common opinion seems to be that Billie Holliday’s recording is the best interpretation. Always the contrarian, I’m going to disagree. I find Ms Holliday’s singing style too mannered and her enunciation too distracting. It’s "in all," lady, not "i nall." So here’s Jo Stafford.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Jo Stafford, "I'll Be Seeing You."]
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