06/23/2023
02:29 How deep have we sunk? (Will Biden run?)
11:02 Titanic story. (No, not political.)
18:41 Refugee Week. (London’s Mayor speaks.)
28:02 Our new BFF. (Sell China, buy India!)
35:58 Juneteenth. (More exciting than Kwanzaa.)
38:14 Fatherlessness and poverty. (Black and white compared.)
40:42 Fatherhood frustrated. (What’s the problem?)
42:21 Nottingham killings, cont. (No hate!)
44:29 Signoff. (With bel canto.)
1 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was of course a fragment of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your imperiously genial host John Derbyshire with my weekly report on the passing charivari.
Last weekend’s VDARE conference was royal fun. A castle-full — well, a good-sized and beautifully-appointed conference-room full — of like-minded dissidents exchanged ideas and proposals; there were talks by Steve Sailer, Paul Kersey and others; there was a panel discussion in which your genial host participated; and there was lots of good food and booze. Congratulations to Peter and Lydia Brimelow on the success of the conference, and thanks to them for all the work I know they put into it.
I was curious to see if we'd be favored with a demonstration by regime Brownshirt groups — Antifa, BLM, the American Federation of Teachers, disgruntled Twitter ex-employees, or some other communist outfit.
No, there was nothing at all of that kind, not even the little ragged group of neckbeards and fat girls Jared Taylor has to put up with waving banners and cheering the bombing of Dresden outside his conferences. Acquiring a castle for VDARE was truly a stroke of genius on the part of the Brimelows.
We were ready for any disturbances that might occur — vats of boiling pitch placed strategically around the battlements, and so on — but it all proved unnecessary. So, onward and upward with the Dissident Right!
02 — How deep have we sunk? Chatting with friends and conference attendees about next year’s election, by far the commonest points for discussion now are: Will Biden run? and Will Trump run?
Of those two, the one I find the more interesting is the first: Will Joe Biden run for a second term? The reason I find that so interesting is that I believe the answer to the question, when we have it, will tell us how far we have moved away from a nation of liberty, representative democracy, and the rule of law equally enforced, towards totalitarian despotism.
We all now know that, yes, there really is a Deep State — a monolithic body of bureaucrats, law-enforcement agencies, judges, and politicians who have captured and occupy the commanding heights of power in the U.S.A.
They intend to hold on to that power, and towards that goal they will ruthlessly violate all norms of custom and procedure, not to mention the law itself.
Their ideology is late-20th-century Progressivism, a bastard child of early-20th-century Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyism. Its two most central tenets are:
The degree to which Deep State operators all assent to these central tenets is unknown. Some portion of them are driven solely by the wish to preserve and expand their own power over others — and the wealth that brings — while cynically nodding along with the ideologues.
By declaring and promoting that ideology, though, Deep Staters have won the adherence of key cultural centers — the media, the education system, corporations, even the churches. That’s why our culture now is all aligned with Deep State ideology, and even the mildest, most intelligently-stated forms of dissent are ostracized — canceled.
Plainly the Democratic Party serves as a political front for this monolith. It is still, though, a party in the traditional American style, offering candidates under its name all over this very various nation of ours for elections to everything from local school boards and prosecutors up to the Presidency.
Hence my interest in the question: Will Joe Biden run for a second term? This time next year either he will be running or he won’t. What decides that issue, it seems to me, is the degree to which the Democratic Party has been captured by the Deep State.
If it has been totally captured, Biden will be running. For the Deep State he is the perfect candidate. Well advanced in senility, he is not capable of any independent action or initiative. Heck, he’s not capable of walking across a stage without falling over. He'll read anything the bureaucrats put in front of him, although I’m guessing they give it to him printed in an extra-large font.
For the Deep State, in short, Biden is the perfect glove puppet. They will have him run if they can.
Among Democratic Party activists, though, there is a cadre of mostly-older people who are still idealistic. They still cherish their party as the national political representative of the Little Guy, the ordinary working-class American.
That used to be Biden’s selling point. He was Average Joe, standing up for the Little Guy. Probably a lot of American voters still think of him that way.
Most people don’t make any deep study of politics. Their votes are based on vague remembered images and slogans, or stories their grandparents told them. Political allegiances are, as the social-scientists say, sticky.
A lot of Democratic Party activists, though — older ones whose thinking was shaped before the leftist takeover of our schools and colleges — pay more attention than that. They know that while Joe Biden was able to pose as champion of the Little Guy for all those decades, he was meanwhile enriching himself as the Big Guy in his son’s emails.
They can’t be happy with Biden — with his age, his condition, his corruption. And as idealists with principles, they surely can’t be happy with Deep State cynicism — with the idea that winning is the only thing that matters, even if you win by encumbering the nation with an octogenarian empty suit as our Chief Executive and, God help us, Commander-in-Chief.
And they are asking themselves whether Biden could win next year against a younger, sharper Republican candidate with less baggage.
For Deep Staters the winnability factor doesn’t loom so large. They have bought and paid for all the major media outlets; and they have the Justice Department and all its agencies in their pocket, so that news of any further Biden-family shenanigans can easily be stifled for the necessary few months. They're confident that if they run him, he'll win.
So whether or not Biden runs next year will give us an index of how deep we have sunk. If he’s running, the Democratic Party no longer exists as a proper political party. It’s just a front, a political façade, for the Deep State.
If Biden doesn’t run, that will mean the Democratic Party is still a thing of political substance, so we still, to some degree, have a functioning representative democracy.
So, how deep have we sunk? We shall see.
03 — Titanic story. My reference to how deep we have sunk of course brings to mind this week’s biggest non-political story: the loss of that tourist submarine on a trip down to see the Titanic where she rests on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
The tourist submarine belonged to a firm named OceanGate Expeditions. When I googled them on Friday the website was still up and advertising a list of options: Titanic Expedition, Azores Expedition, Bahamas Expedition, and Bespoke Expeditions. For a fee they will take you on one of those expeditions, down underwater.
The fee is pretty stiff. For the Titanic expedition you'd hire a seat on a five-man pocket submarine named Titan. The fee was $250,000 per seat.
Titan would then take you down twelve and a half thousand feet to the wreck of the Titanic 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland in a trip lasting up to ten hours. And yes, there was a tiny little toilet on board the Titan.
It sounds pretty darn exciting. If I had that kind of money to spend on idle pleasures I might well have signed up with OceanGate for the Titanic expedition.
Too late now, though. Last Sunday the OceanGate mother ship, up on the surface, lost contact with Titan an hour and forty-five minutes into its dive. With only seventy hours of breathable air left on board the sub, coastguard ships and planes — both American and Canadian — were out looking for signs through the early part of the week.
That came to an end Thursday when robot subs spotted debris on the ocean floor that was plainly from the Titan. The debris was, the director of the salvage operations told us, quote: "consistent with … a catastrophic implosion," end quote.
It turned out that last Sunday, early in the search operation, the U.S. Navy had detected an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion. They'd told the guys running the operation, but the sound was determined to be "not definitive."
So the sub imploded under pressure and five people died. Their death would have been instantaneous. At those depths the water pressure runs about three tons to the square inch; so the effect of that implosion on the human frame would be like having a hundred-ton boulder dropped on you. No time to feel any pain.
I understand of course that this is a sad story, a tragedy for loved ones of the deceased. I’m only saying there are worse ways to go. These guys were having an adventure; and danger is part of the excitement of adventure.
In what I guess some people will take to be cosmic justice, one of the five dead was sixty-one-year-old Stockton Rush, chief executive and founder of OceanGate Expeditions, who was piloting the mini-sub. The other four were a British billionaire explorer, a French Titanic expert, and a Pakistani businessman with his nineteen-year-old son.
Even a story like this doesn’t get aired without people wanting to add political coloring.
When it became known in midweek that the U.S. Navy had detected that acoustic signature some commentators — including the normally sensible Miranda Devine of the New York Post — wondered aloud whether that meant the authorities had known on Sunday that the sub imploded but wanted to keep the search in headlines as a smokescreen for the House Ways & Means release of testimony about our Justice Department sabotaging the Hunter Biden investigation.
Come on, guys. Not everything is political … thank goodness.
As well as political coloring, there were references to our Cultural Revolution. Reporters dug up an interview, unfortunately undated, that the afore-mentioned Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, had given to a marine-exploration website. This is the late Mr Rush speaking, sample quotes:
When I started the business, one of the things you'll find, there are other sub-operators out there, but they typically have, uh, gentlemen who are ex-military submariners, and they — you'll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys …I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational …
So we've really tried to get, um, very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we're doing things that are completely new.
End quotes.
Could it be that in the matter of designing, setting up, and operating something like the ill-fated Titan, it may be, it may just possibly be, that fifty-year-old ex-military white guys know things that 25-year-old civilian not-white guys don’t know?
Could it be? I leave it to your judgment.
04 — Refugee Week. I’m not done yet with tragic sinkings. There was one last week off the coast of Greece, with many drowned.
The context here is the ongoing flood of Third Worlders heading northwards across the Mediterranean looking for a better life in Europe than the one they're enduring in Africa or the Middle East.
The boat in the story here was traveling from the coast of Libya to Italy when it capsized off Greece.
Sad for all concerned, but useful material for those propagandizing on behalf of unlimited mass immigration. Here’s one of them: Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London.
June 20th — Tuesday this week — has been designated by the United Nations as World Refugee Day. This whole week is in fact Refugee Week, although that — the Week, not the Day — seems to be just a British thing.
Using one or other of those as a hook, the Mayor delivered a speech. Over to His Honor.
[Clip: Just a few days ago we saw the consequences of draconian and immoral immigration policies across Europe where we discovered dozens of people who had died as a consequence of the Greek ship that we know about, that floundered [sic] a few days ago. And we also discovered that many asylum seekers, refugees and migrants were stowed below the deck. They had no chance to escape, no chance to survive.And the reason why asylum-seekers, refugees, and others are risking their lives, their childrens' lives to find a safe haven is because our country and other countries in Europe, in the global north — wealthy countries, who prospered from these countries where people are coming from over centuries — there’s no safe passages.
The most successful Olympian this country’s ever had — a double Olympic gold medallist — Mohamed Farah, was an asylum-seeker and refugee. Many of us were asking the question: "What is the most British shop on the High Street?" Who knows that Marks from Marks and Spencer, was a refugee, somebody who first was seeking asylum. One of the most famous musicians, artists, in the world at the moment, a British North Londoner, Dua Lipa — her parents fled Kosovo twenty or so years ago.
All I want to say to you is this. Look, I won the golden ticket, I won the lottery, because I was born in London. My grandparents were refugees. They left India to go into Pakistan when the British Empire decided to carve up India. If you were a Muslim and you were living in India you had to seek asylum to Pakistan, where people were more Muslims thsn they were Hindus. My parents were migrants who came to this country. I always had the humility to realise that you could have been … that I could have been born somewhere else.
We've got to educate people about why this country is great, why this city’s the greatest city in the world, and the history of immigration, asylum seekers and refugees.
Have a great refugee week. As log as I’m there London is open and you are welcome.]
I shall leave aside His Honor’s not knowing that "foundered" and "floundered" are two different words. I'll tackle that when I've finally persuaded the English-speaking world that the expression "to lay down" is ungrammatical unless you are covering something with goose feathers.
I shall mention in passing that there seems to be a definite bias in Mayor Khan’s choice of immigrant heroes for our admiration: Mohamed Farah and Dua Lipa are both from Muslim families, as is Mr Mayor. (The Michael Marks in "Marks & Spencer" was, I'll allow, not from a Muslim family, and might, if he were still among us, object to being placed in such company.)
Just look at the mentality on view there in the Mayor’s speech. The immigration policies of European nations are, he tells us, quote, "draconian and immoral," end quote.
Why? Because, quote, "there’s no safe passage," end quote.
The underlying idea there, if you unpack that, is that all the billions of Africa and the Middle East have every right to migrate safely to Europe, so the European countries are immoral for not enabling safe transit for them.
Also that Europeans, quote, "prospered … over centuries," end quote, from exploiting those countries. As we can see from places that never had European overlords — Ethiopia, say, or Afghanistan — they would have done so much better if left alone.
Oh, yes, and, quote: "the British Empire decided to carve up India," end quote. In the absence of that heartless carving-up, majority-Hindu India and majority-Muslim Pakistan would have cohabited harmoniously in a single nation. Uh-huh.
One more on immigration into the U.K.: Yesterday, Thursday the 22nd of June, was the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the ship Empire Windrush in London’s Tilbury Dock, bringing five hundred black immigrants from Jamaica. This was the beginning of large-scale black immigration into Britain. Britain’s Royal Mint has released a coin to commemorate the anniversary.
The blacks were not universally welcomed back then in 1948. Eleven Labour Party Members of Parliament wrote to the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, that, quote:
An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life.
End quote.
What bigoted, narrow-minded attitudes — from Labour Party members, indeed — which is to say, socialists. Good grief!
Oh wait, what’s this? From Sky News, June 19th, quote:
Black men make up six percent of London (thirteen percent if you include women) but commit almost fifty percent of the city’s murders
End quote.
That’s as much as I can bear to say about Britain’s immigration issues. As you can see, they come garbed in just as much sentimentality, dishonesty, idiocy, and cuckery as our own.
For very full coverage of the Empire Windrush anniversary and all the nonsense it has generated, I strongly recommend the June 22nd piece by the wise, witty, and infallible Ed West at his Substack account. The title of Ed’s piece is: "You Called … and We Came," which is in turn the title of a sappy poem much favored by open-borders zealots over there.
05 — India, our BFF. I mentioned there that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is from a Muslim family.
He was born in Britain but his family were originally Indian Muslims. They lived in the city of Lucknow, in present-day India.
When the Brits wound up their Indian Empire in 1947, however, Indian Muslims decided to have a nation of their own — Pakistan — and Mayor Khan’s parents fled there. It was from there, from Pakistan, that they immigrated to Britain.
(The new nation came in two disconnected parts, one in the East, one in the Northwest. The Eastern part seceded in 1971 after a brief but nasty civil war to become present-day Bangladesh.)
Did you know that London has a Mayor of Indian-Muslim origins? You very likely did know that the U.K. has a Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, of Hindu-Indian family; although like Mayor Khan, he was born in Britain.
On the other hand you may not have known that the lead politician in Scotland — formally the First Minister of that not-quite-country — is a fellow named Humza Haroon Yousaf, Scottish-born to a Muslim family from Pakistan.
To complete the suite there is of course the Taoiseach — which is to say Prime Minister — of the Republic of Ireland, Leo Varadkar, son of an Indian father from Bombay and an Irish mother from County Waterford.
So the politics of the British Isles has been pretty thoroughly Indiacized. You might object that I should be saying "Indiacized and Pakistanified." Remember, however, that today’s India and Pakistan — along with today’s Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, and some other bits and pieces — were all part of British India.
Pakistanis? To paraphrase my friend Jared Taylor in a different context: They look Indian to me.
Recent decades have seen a quite comprehensive Indiacization of the Anglosphere, or at any rate of its northern components. We haven’t yet had a U.S. President of Indian ancestry, although Vivek Ramaswamy is reaching for the brass ring. In the commercial sphere, though, Indian-origin CEOs are definitely a thing, as we at VDARE.com have been documenting.
Wait: I just got my issue of the June 17th Economist magazine. Front cover: "AMERICA’s NEW BEST FRIEND: Why India is indispensible." And the magazine sure is big on India.
Hoo-ee. Is there anything in this issue of The Economist that is not about India? Let’s see …
Well, there’s this in the leaders, headline: "UNDOING BUSINESS IN CHINA." Sub-heading: "The crackdown on foreign firms will deter global business — and undermine China’s own interests."
Oh, and then deeper in the magazine, in the Business section, we get this on Sino-Western commerce. Headline: "SPOOKED." Sub-heading: "China is becoming an impossible place for foreigners to do business."
So I think it’s fair to say that the overall message here could be summed up as: "Sell China, buy India!"
Before you do so, however, you should read those articles with care. There are some off-putting statistics in there.
Did you know, for example, that of India’s 1.4 billion people — they surpassed China in population sometime earlier this year — only sixty million have formal jobs? That’s 4.3 percent, or one Indian in twenty-three. That sounds to me like a problem.
All told, I think India deserves a round of applause for having made it intact through 76 years of independence in spite of being massively multicultural — India’s Constitution recognizes 22 different languages. Sure, there’s an ethnic massacre now and then, but the place hangs together somehow.
I do think, though, that the Anglosphere has imported as much of an Indian overclass as it needs, and then some. Could you guys please stay home and build up your own country?
For all the griping you do about the indignities of British imperial rule, you have to grant this: We did eventually leave.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Monday this week was Juneteenth, a federal public holiday since President Biden signed the fact into law two years ago. Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of enslaved black Americans.
I confess I have never engaged with Juneteenth in any way, shape, or form until this year. Then I noticed that we got no mail delivery on Monday, asked around, and learned about the federal holiday. I didn’t notice the missing mail last year, I don’t know why.
To the degree that I had thought about Juneteenth at all up to then, I had supposed it to be a sort of summer Kwanzaa — a cost-less favor thrown by Goodwhites to blacks in a virtue-signalling spirit, a thing that blacks themselves didn’t much bother with.
Well, I was wrong about that. While it is indeed the case that very few blacks bother with Kwanzaa, they celebrate Juneteenth with great gusto. Already on Sunday — the day before actual Juneteenth — the Daily Mail Online was reporting that, quote:
Four people are shot dead and at least 42 others injured so far this weekend as gun violence erupts across the nation — from Illinois to Missouri.
End quote.
I’m sure this must be the fault of white people somehow; but I can’t be bothered to figure out how, and I didn’t follow up on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to get the final butcher’s bill.
I’m smarter than I was a week ago, though. At least I now know that Juneteenth is livelier than Kwanzaa.
Item: The root cause of that violence is of course the social disabilities under which blacks labor. The worst of those disabilities are poverty and the lack of a father in the home that is a consequence of poverty.
Or maybe not. Quantitative sociologist Raj Chetty back in 2020 published a study in which he identified four different types of Census tracts. The four types are: high poverty, low father presence; high poverty, high father presence; low poverty, low father presence; and low poverty, high father presence.
The underlying definitions there go like this: a low poverty tract is one in which the overall poverty rate is below ten percent. Worse than that is high poverty. Low father presence is less than fifty percent of fathers present in families among children of the same race; high father presence is more than fifty percent.
Then Chetty broke out the results black/white. This gets you two bar charts — one for blacks, one for whites — with bars in each chart for the four kinds of Census tract.
The black chart shows humongous levels of low father presence in both low poverty and high poverty tracts. For whites, the great big bars are for high father presence regardless of poverty level.
This too is the fault of whites somehow, I’m sure. I’m going to email Professor Ibram X. Kendi and ask him to explain it for me.
Item: If you have internalized the current dogma that there is no such thing as biological sex, see if you can make sense of this news story from Pink News, a homosexual outlet.
Two homosexuals in Los Angeles decided they wanted to have a baby together. They supplied a local fertility clinic with their sperm, and the clinic successfully impregnated a surrogate mother.
So far, so good. However, the guys had made it clear to the clinic that they wanted a male child; but when the surrogate gave birth in 2021, the baby was female.
It has now of course come to a lawsuit, the homosexuals alleging breach of contract, medical malpractice, negligence and fraudulent concealment and violation of the Unfair Competition Law and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act. They want several hundred thousand dollars damages.
I can’t see that there’s a case here. If there’s no such thing as biological sex, all they have to do is change the birth certificate to say "male" and raise the child to believe it’s a boy. What’s the problem?
Item: In last week’s podcast I covered the grisly murders in Nottingham, England. quote: "A man stabbed to death three perfect strangers, took the van belonging to one of them, and ran it into some pedestrians, very seriously wounding one of them." End quote.
We have now been vouchsafed some pictures of the perp. He’s black, 31 years old, a native of the small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, apparently resident in England for some years. All his victims were white. Just pause here and repeat ten times: "Diversity is our strength."
The two younger victims were both 19-year-old students. Their mothers spoke to a large crowd at a vigil held in Nottingham on June 15th. Both made a point of urging the city to, quote, "hold no hate."
The first mother allowed that the killer was a, quote, "monstrous individual," but she declared that he, quote, "will not define us," end quotes.
The second mother echoed that sentiment. She urged the crowd to, quote, "Be kind to each other, look after each other, don’t have hate in your hearts." End quote.
I dunno. Seems to me that raging hate for this murderer is an entirely reasonable and healthy sentiment. Perhaps that’s a guy thing.
07 — Signoff. That’s all I have, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention, for your encouragement and support; and thanks once again to Peter, Lydia, and the VDARE crew for making last weekend’s conference so much fun.
For signoff music, let’s have some bel canto. If you have read my novel Fire from the Sun you will not be surprised to hear that this is one of my favorites in that genre: "Ah! non credea mirarti," from Bellini’s opera La sonnambula, The Sleepwalker.
A little background: It’s a boy-girl story. The sleepwalker is the girl, name of Amina, who has that unfortunate habit. The boy, Elvino, loves Amina, and she loves him back. He doesn’t know about her sleepwalking, though.
They get engaged, with a little ceremony. However, Amina sleepwalks into a gentleman’s chambers and falls asleep on his couch. Elvino thinks Amina has been unfaithful, so he breaks off the engagement.
To change his mind, Amina’s mother and friends arrange for Elvino to witness her sleepwalking. They set it up and here she comes, clearly oblivious to their presence, carrying a bunch of withered flowers that Elvino gave her at their engagement party. She sings to the flowers:
Ah! non credea mirarti
Si presto estinto, o fiore.
Passasti al par d'amore,
Che un giorno sol' duro."Ah, I didn’t believe I'd see you
Die so quickly, O flowers;
You have passed away like love
That lasted only one day."
The voice here belongs to Anna Moffo, a great American soprano of the mid-20th century, who left us for ever in 2006 at age 73.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Anna Moffo, "Ah! non credea mirati."]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
