Also by Robert Dierks: CPAC Attendees Wanted Orban And Immigration Patriotism, Not Abbott Or McCarthy (Who Didn’t Attend)

President Trump held his first political rally of his 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas at the Waco Regional Airport this past weekend. [Video here, transcript here]. I have attended over a dozen Trump events and his speech covered many of his regular talking points. However it also debuted some new second-term policy proposals, such as baby bonuses and building new cities.

Rally Atmosphere

This Waco rally was similar to many of his other airport rallies. It was very heavily attended, with most vehicles sporting Texas plates, although I did see a plate from Georgia. But still, many had traveled many hours to attend (this is Texas). There was a lot of walking to get to the venue—a mile and a half in my case. But rally attendees do get to see his plane land and take off.

The atmosphere was different from Trump rallies when he was President. The biggest difference that I noticed: the lack of protesters. This could be because of the rally was located in a county that gave over 60% of its vote to Trump in 2020, or because the Left and their proxy groups have gotten lazier during the Biden regime.

Crowd Response

The crowd at the rally was largely white and had many attendees sporting cowboy hats and Western apparel. However, as with all Trump rallies, there is a contingent of black, Hispanic and Asian attendees.

Still, it does seem that President Trump may be recognizing the demographics of his base: “A lot of us come from Europe; directly and indirectly—so we love Europe.”  With American becoming increasingly less white, it could be that a candidate openly courting the white vote will become more politically feasible.

President Trump's biggest applause lines came from his

See also: No, Emily Oster, We Don’t Need A COVID Amnesty—We Need A COVID Nuremberg

I know it’s gone out of fashion since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine (meaning there was a brand-new shiny thing for everyone to virtue-signal about), but let’s go back to the days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve been inspired to take this nostalgic journey by a new study that highlights some fascinating new racial differences in the U.S. in the response to the virus [Significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on race/ethnic differences in US mortality, by Jose Aburto et al., PNAS, 2022]. Bottom line: I was right to stress the importance of honest reporting of the data on racial incidence. The Ruling Class was wrong to suppress it. And because the Ruling Class did suppress the data, people died—especially, in an ironic twist, the very minorities that the Ruling Class claims to care so much about. (See VDARE.com’s reporting on Race and COVID-19 here.)

But let’s go on a little journey before we turn to that. You may remember—and this is back in the days when the disease definitely emerged from a Chinese wet market and anyone who suggested otherwise was spreading fiendish “misinformation”—that COVID-19 did not “discriminate by race,” even though the U.S. health system was already showing “familiar biases” in who got ill [The Coronavirus Doesn't Discriminate, But U.S. Health Care Showing Familiar Biases, by Blake Farmer, NPR, April 2, 2020]. Even so, it absolutely, definitely didn’t discriminate by race.

Now, it occurred to me that COVID-19

[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]

The more our understanding of genetics advances, the stiffer becomes the resistance in the public sphere to any suggestion that the adult human being is created mainly by nature, and only secondarily by nurture.

As an example of the stiffening of that resistance, check out this report at the New York Times: Not Your Daddy’s Freud [by Joseph Bernstein, March 22, 2023]. It’s about psychoanalysis making a comeback.

I wrote about the resurgence of traditional Freudian analysis — both as a contested cultural symbol, and as rediscovered form of therapy. Enjoy! https://t.co/CBNJkWCq8j

— Joe Bernstein (@Bernstein) March 22, 2023

If you haven’t kept up, Sigmund Freud was an Austrian physician who, in the years around 1900, developed a system of talk therapy for mental disturbances and built an elaborate metaphysical theory in its support.

A lot of Freud’s ideas and the words he used to describe them entered common usage in the middle decades of the last century: ”complexes” of various kinds (Oedipus, inferiority, castration), ”denial,” the ”id,” ”projection,” ”repression,” ”super-ego,” ”transference,” and others.

You still sometimes hear these words and phrases, but nothing like as much as we did fifty or sixty years ago. Back then great numbers of people in the Western world, and probably a few outside it, believed that Freud had accomplished a scientific breakthrough. He had, they believed, figured out how the adult human personality is formed.

The biggest factor in its formation, he taught, was the influence of other human beings, especially in the family during childhood. Biology hardly entered into it; genetics was barely even a science when Freud was writing. On the nature-nurture spectrum, Freud was way over on the nurture side.

Not everyone was impressed. In 1967, when public acceptance of Freud’s theories was at its height, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov told an interviewer that

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.

[Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, Spring 1967]

Science popularizer Martin Gardner, writing in the year 2000,

Earlier: It Was Never Going To Stop With Confederate Statues... WASHINGTON POST Calls For Renaming George Washington University Because Of ”Racism”

This is yet another tale about the left’s erasure of American history, akin to changing the name of Fort Bragg, or taking down statues of Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee.

Once upon a time I dropped out of a law school in California (because I didn’t like it). But I decided to stay in the state for a year or two longer, get California residency, and then apply to one of a couple of University of California law schools where I believed I had special connections. One was Boalt Hall, the law school at Cal Berkeley. The other, across the Bay in San Francisco, was a smaller, older school called Hastings School of Law. An old friend of mine had just become director of admissions at one of these places, while the father of another friend was dean of the other school.

In the event, I never bothered to apply to either. Because I thought I’d make a lousy lawyer. But every once in a long while I’d check up on Boalt or Hastings—just to see how they were ranking, you know. And now I’ve discovered that Boalt Hall is no more! They pulled the signage off the school three years ago, and now the school goes by the nondescript moniker of ”UC Berkeley School of Law,” or some variant thereof.

The reason for the name change is that the school now has a lot of  ”Asian” students, and old Mr. John Henry Boalt is partly blamed for the anti-Chinese immigration campaign back in the 1870s. Boalt once had the audacity to deliver a speech called ”The Chinese Question” [PDF], a long-forgotten essay that he read out before the Berkeley Club in 1877. It was later read on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and is said to have contributed to passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act a few years later (1882).

Leader of the anti-Boalt charge was one Charles Reichmann [Email him] [Anti-Chinese Racism at Berkeley: The Case for Renaming Boalt Hall, by Charles Reichmann, 25 Asian Am. L. J. 5 (2018)], a lecturer who claims

Earlier: The Murder Of Mollie Tibbetts: A Perfect Storm

Forgiving murderers has become a public spectacle these days. But a peculiar dynamic is at play when the families of white victims swiftly or unconditionally forgive non-white murderers or other attackers. Indeed, Western whites now accept levels of criminality no other well-established people in the world would tolerate and would have been unthinkable in the U.S., for instance, just a half century ago. And Christian moral teaching aren’t the reasons. Rather, a kind of mind virus has infected brainwashed whites desperate to avoid placing blame where it belongs. The consequences are self-destructive and anarchic.

Consider the following cases:

• After two black youths murdered 17-year-old Elijah DeWitt while he was on a date with his girlfriend, DeWitt’s father and girlfriend almost immediately forgave the killers, both speculating about their presumably poor “backgrounds”:

DeWitt’s father, as well as [girlfriend Bailey] Reidling, have expressed their desire to forgive the suspects.

“Just like his dad said, you don’t really know. You don’t know how those kids were raised — you know, what they were going through,” Reidling told Fox News Digital. “It’s not right. It never will be right. But you know…this is not the only crime, this is everywhere. And it’s horrible.”

[Georgia high-school football star Elijah DeWitt's murder suspects to appear in court for preliminary hearing, by Danielle Wallace, Fox5 Atlanta, November 18, 2022]

• Kari Hoffman forgave Emmanuel Aranda, who threw her 5-year-old son, Landon, off a three-story balcony at the Mall of America. Aranda told police he was “looking for someone to kill” [Man who tossed 5-year-old from Mall of America balcony gets 19 years, by Max Jaeger, New York Post, June 3, 2019].
  
  The boy was in intensive care for four months. Aranda remains remorseless.

But Hoffman forgave Aranda because “it’s a decision that you have to make so that God can do what he needs to do in your life … and that was to save Landon” [‘Angels caught him’: Mom recalls moment son was thrown off Mall of America balcony, by Isabel Keane, New York Post, December 14, 2022].

• After an illegal alien murdered 20-year old Mollie Tibbetts, her father (pictured with Mollie below) even published an op-ed, unbelievably enough, decrying and apologizing for the “racism” of those who thought Tibbetts’ death might warrant a re-examination of U.S. border policy.

“At the outset, politicians and pundits used Mollie’s death to promote various political agendas, he wrote. “We appealed to them and they graciously stopped. For that, we are grateful.”

But “others have ignored our