[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

See also: JOHN DERBYSHIRE: “Civil Rights”? After Breonna Taylor, SESAME STREET Lynchings—I SPIT ON THEM

We like to think that we make progress from a less fair, less just society to one that is more fair and more just. Indeed, our loudest and most powerful political faction flatters itself with the adjective ”Progressive.”

But on the evidence of last week’s news we are not progressing but regressing, to something coarser, stupider, and more primitive. The phrase ”banana republic” has been given a good airing this week. Yes, that’s where we’re headed. In fact, on this week’s evidence, we’re pretty much there.

The week’s greatest outrage—even more than Merrick Garland’s raid on Mar-A-Lago, because Trump can defend himself—was of course the sentencing on Monday at a federal court in Georgia of the Brunswick Three: Gregory McMichael and his son Travis, and their neighbor William Bryan. The two McMichaels were given life sentences; Bryan, who is 52 years old, was given 35 years.

What federal crimes did they commit? The Brunswick Three, who are all white, allegedly interfered with the civil rights of a black man, Ahmaud Arbery. So judged the court. They were also judged to have attempted to kidnap Arbery; and in the cases of the two McMichaels, to have carried guns during a crime of violence.

These were federal charges, mind. The Brunswick Three were tried on state charges last year. All three were given life sentences then.

So now they effectively have two life sentences apiece: one state, one federal.

This is a monstrous miscarriage of justice: two miscarriages if you count the state and federal trials separately. These were three honest, hard-working citizens, none of whom had any criminal record. Both the McMichaels had in fact served in law enforcement. Their intentions in confronting Arbery were plain: to defend their neighborhood against a likely thief who, whether or not they knew it, did have a criminal record.

Travis McMichael shot Arbery in plain self-defense when Arbery

The FBI shocked America this week by raiding Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. This unprecedented move astonished Republicans and conservatives and united them behind Trump. Even the average Fox News Talking Head sees the raid as an outrageous abuse of power [Supporters, GOP lawmakers rally behind Trump amid FBI search, CBS News, August 10, 2022]. But Trump is not the only victim of America’s ongoing  communist coup. The Biden Regime increasingly uses its legal powers at the bidding of its hysterical coalition of activists, who demand that it imprison their enemies. American patriots must awake to the danger posed by the communists’ control of the Department of Justice.

The @FBI raid on President Trump was approved by Director Wray, who also claimed that the illegal FISA warrants used to spy on Trump were constitutional.

Today’s raid is outrageous and unjust, but predictable.

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 9, 2022

The GOP/GAP must revolt against the FBI and curtail its abuse of power.

Democrats’ reflexive reaction has long been to indict, convict, and, if possible, jail Trump. They were discussing impeachment as early as April 2016—before Trump was nominated! Then they ramped up the Russia Collusion Hoax—and impeached Trump, twice but for completely different pretexts.

It’s obvious to everyone that the primary purpose of the January 6 commission is to find the smoking gun to indict POTUS 45. President Biden and other powerful Democrats have pressured Attorney General Merrick Garland for months to prosecute

Earlier (2003!) by Steve Sailer: The Wind from the South—Anti-White Populism

A loyal VDARE.com reader recently sent me Michael M. Rosen’s piece in the Washington Examiner that tried to explain Venezuela’s economic and political collapse [How Venezuela was destroyed from within, July 14, 2022]. Rosen blamed corruption and the socialist economic policies of successive regimes. And indeed, this Conservatism Inc. take on the matter contains a sliver of truth. But as a Venezuelan myself, I can say with certainty that Rosen is only half right…and maybe not half. As the VDARE.com reader reminded me, the rise of a mixed-race elite, most notably the late president, Hugo Chávez, and the immigration of non-whites from neighboring countries explains a lot more.

Granted, as Rosen wrote, the fiscal policies of Chávez and his successor, strongman Nicolás Maduro, have wrecked a “once-great country”:

At the height of the economic crisis in 2018, inflation surged to an astronomical 130,000%. Between 2013 and 2019, according to the International Monetary Fund, Venezuelan GDP plummeted by a staggering 65%. By 2020, more than 5 million Venezuelans, out of a total population of 30 million, had fled the country. 

Venezuela's central bank has shared a rare glimpse into the economic turmoil in the country, admitting that its GDP contracted by 22.5% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2018.

That is the first update of the country's key economic data in four years. https://t.co/jbmfbebPlS pic.twitter.com/9M9GAskW4O

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) May 29, 2019

As a report on CNN Espanol put it, “runaway inflation has decimated Venezuela. As the value of money and wages has become worth less and less, the despair on the population has deepened” [Venezuela gives a rare look at its economy. It’s an ugly, ugly picture, by Jorge Luis Pérez Valery and Abdel Alvarado, CNN Espanol, May 29, 2019]. Venezuelan emigrants are impacting many host countries: “[E]stimates suggest that public spending related to growing migrant populations could reach around 0.6 percent of GDP in Colombia by 2023, 0.3 percent in Ecuador and Peru, and 0.1 percent in Chile” [For Venezuela’s Neighbors, Mass Migration Brings Economic Costs and Benefits, by Emilio Fernandez Corugedo & Jaime Guajardo, IMFBlog, November 21, 2019].

But punching buttons on the adding machine to reckon the financial disaster that Chávez caused doesn’t get to the bottom of the problem. As the VDARE.com reader’s letter said, since 1999, when Chávez (who was partly black and indigenous—BIPOC, in the terminology of Left Twitter) took over, Venezuela has been ruled by a mixed-race elite that is vastly more corrupt and incompetent than its corrupt and incompetent white elite, which had governed from the late 1950s through the 1990s.

He writes

[T]he mixed race [herders] finally took over the government. For the first time, [Venezuela] was not ruled by a corrupt and incompetent white government, but by a vastly more corrupt and incompetent mulatto government. Now most of the educated whites have left the country, and it will never return to white rule. Someday this will happen in Brazil, the only other substantial country in South America with a large population of people who are partially African. 

Say what you want about the Bolsheviks

Earlier by Ann Coulter: Breonna Taylor—The True Story Of A BLM Hero

Subscribe to Ann Coulter‘s Substack UNSAFE.

Let’s hope Merrick Garland’s search of Mar-a-Lago is based on more evidence than his indictment of the Louisville, Kentucky, police officers involved in the raid on Breonna Taylor’s house.

That passive construction I just used—“involved in the raid on,” instead of “who raided”—is not sloppy writing: It’s the facts. The officers who actually shot Taylor have not been charged, apparently on the flimsy grounds that they were being shot at when they fired.

Instead, our lunatic attorney general has indicted officers who prepared the affidavit used to obtain the warrant to search Taylor’s home. In the words of the indictment, the affidavit “contained information that was false, misleading and out-of-date…and that the officers lacked probable cause for the search.”

Further, the indictment also alleges that the officers knew they were providing false information.

Breonna Taylor, you will recall, was the moll for drug dealer Jamarcus Glover, one of Louisville’s biggest suppliers of cocaine and fentanyl, and therefore by definition a murderer. On March 13, 2020, the police executed

The FBI’s raid on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate—ever so conveniently timed as the White House occupant’s approval numbers sink, the Swamp prepares to shovel a whopping $5.5 billion in foreign and military aid down the bottomless Ukrainian black hole and the American economy keels over like Biden on a bike—gives us a national teachable moment.

Armies of MAGA supporters who had never previously been engaged in politics are only now beginning to fathom the depths of corruption in the bowels of the (In)Justice Department. Cries of ”banana republic,” ”Stasi” and ”Gestapo” flooded conservative social media channels on Monday night. But a weaponized goon squad of armed and unaccountable Feds Behaving Incorrigibly is nothing new.

Let us count a few of the FBI’s nefarious ways:

• Since the Jan. 6 Capitol rally, untold numbers of peaceful American citizens and their families have been harassed in their homes over their constitutionally protected exercise of free speech and assembly. As America’s Frontline Doctors founder Dr. Simone Gold told me in March 2021 after 20 armed FBI agents broke down her door:

”I was paid a visit by the FBI in a Roger Stone kind of take down moment, which is quite uncalled for. You know, if anybody wanted to get a hold of me, they could have picked up the phone and called. I’m very easy to find. But there were literally twenty guys with guns blazing, (and they) broke down my door.”

The Stanford-trained lawyer and Chicago Medical School-trained doctor’s ”crime”? Following a crowd