00:55 The Empire strikes back. (Those New Year cyberattacks.)
06:58 The Prime Directive. (Open borders!)
15:10 A fait accompli? (Can the Great Replacement be reversed?)
21:41 The Yemeni enemy. (Let's own the insult.)
29:20 What does it mean, Claudine? (Hail and farewell.)
38:00 More illegals than native births. (Demography, destiny.)
39:18 Trump goes to SCOTUS. (Just an opening scuffle.)
41:04 Car burnings down in France. (Old customs in decline.)
42:15 Michelle Wu for the Gold. (Olympic-level wokeness.)
43:57 Signoff. (With Eartha Kitt.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! A very happy New Year, listeners, coming here from your earthily genial host John Derbyshire, looking forward to celebrating the podcast's twentieth anniversary on the airwaves in May this year.
For VDARE.com it was not a happy New Year; so much so, the source of our unhappiness is newsworthy by itself. I shall give over my first segment to it.
02 — The Regime strikes back. VDARE.com lives by voluntary donations from readers and listeners who like what we do. Which is: promotion of patriotic immigration reform, served with a side helping of solidly data-based commentary on human nature and human society, in opposition to the denial and wishful thinking that currently dominate in those topics.
These few weeks of Christmas and the New Year are a season of good will and generosity. New Year's Eve in particular is, as Lydia Brimelow posted last Sunday, quote, "the most significant charitable giving day of the year," end quote.
As Lydia also tells us in that same post, electronic methods for donating to VDARE were shut down by a series of massive cyberattacks that began in early December. You can still donate the old-fashioned way, by mail or phone; but the more advanced methods, for example by bank transfer, were swamped by bogus applications.
Some of these cyberattacks may have been one-off lone wolf efforts. When Lydia posted the VDARE office number to our website to facilitate phone-in donations, she tells us she received, quote, "harassing calls to the office, weird voice messages, and old men on the line with foul language," end quote.
Fortunately Lydia is a Texas gal who doesn't scare easily. She thinks foul scorn that potty-mouthed cranks should dare to invade the borders of her realm. "Dial away if it makes you happy," she has posted.
So yes, some lone wolves; but the scale and timing of these cyberattacks strongly suggest a high level of organization. We are bound to wonder: Is this a government operation, perhaps supervised by Joe Biden's communist Attorney General Merrick Garland or one of his agencies — the FBI, perhaps?
The current American ruling class does not look kindly on what we do. They are ideologues, and are enraged to hear their ideology contradicted. They are enraged even when the contradiction is presented in calm, reasoned tones and backed by good data.
Ideology is a very powerful psychic force; when an ideologue hears doubt cast on what he believes, he feels personally threatened. If he is in a position of political power, he feels his power threatened. Rage ensues, and the abuse of power.
There is therefore much hatred directed against VDARE.com, some of it openly and unashamedly by the ruling class in all its institutional power. If you have followed the ongoing saga of the lawfare being waged against us by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, you know what I am referring to.
Might there be some alternative explanation for the scale and timing of these cyberattacks — one that does not involve the federal regime?
Yes, there might be. It could be a state-level operation, perhaps an expansion of Letitia James' lawfare campaign. New York is a very progressive state. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether its law-enforcement apparatus is as seething with ideological fury as is A-G James herself.
And it's possible there is no governmental initiative here at all. State and federal power centers, dominated as they are by ideological fanatics, could just be cheering on a private assault. Plenty of wealthy private institutions in line with regime ideology — the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADL, and so on — would be happy to see VDARE.com brought low.
Someone should investigate. What has happened here is a direct, shameless assault on the First Amendment.
VDARE.com puts out ideas, commentary, and news stories neglected elsewhere. We pick nobody's pocket and break no-one's leg. If you don't like our output you are free to ignore it. This is the right to freedom of speech guaranteed in our nation's Constitution.
Someone should investigate.
03 — The Prime Directive. OK, the New Year podcast. As is customary, I'll take a quick glance back, and then one forward. I shall strive to be a little more upbeat than Robert Burns addressing his mouse.
[Pips.]
[Voice of Donald Douglas: Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!]
[Pips.]
For immigration patriots the year just past, 2023, and indeed the two preceding years, have indeed offered prospects drear. Our federal government, as its very first priority, threw the nation's southern border wide open. Foreign invaders have been pouring in ever since, unhindered and unchecked, in defiance of our laws.
The total for these three years is generally given as more than eight million. That's two point seven million a year, at least; so if the flood continues, a year from now that total will be over ten million.
This is really a very astonishing thing. Our federal government — the President, Vice President, and their cabinet secretaries — are conducting a huge criminal enterprise, in plain violation of their duty to see the people's laws faithfully enforced.
Not only is this criminal in itself, it places our government and its employees in collaboration with even more indubitably criminal enterprises: the foreign crime syndicates organizing the smuggling of drugs and people into our country. Our government is plainly, unapologetically, on their side.
Are senior members of our government being paid off by the cartels? I have seen no evidence of it; but from the evidence a-plenty we do have about the Biden family's international dealings, it wouldn't be a surprise.
If there is no such straightforwardly monetary motive, there are only two other possibilities: One, a powerful ideology driving the perpetrators, or Two, some style of collective insanity.
Americans have no real idea why these revolutionaries are destroying our border.
Are they nineteenth-century anarchists who want to undermine the United States itself? Are they cynical "Demography is Destiny" and "The New Democratic Majority" leftists who need new dependent Democrat constituents to find votes for agendas that most Americans reject? Do they want to create billions of dollars in new entitlements and subsidies to grow government, hike taxes, and make the upper middle class pay, as Biden puts it, [inner quote] "their fair share?" [End inner quote.]
End quote.
I lifted that quote from a very good piece of commentary posted at the American Greatness website, January 2nd. The author is Professor Victor Davis Hanson, with whom I have had some slight personal acquaintance. I don't always agree with what Professor Hanson says, but he has a first-class mind that I respect and admire.
He's right on target here. The title of his piece seems to favor the insanity defense, title: "The Utter Insanity of Joe Biden's Open Border."
He offers some illustrations: His home state of California, for instance, which, while facing a $70 billion annual budget deficit, has just extended free health care services to illegal aliens. Fiscally, socially, medically, any way you cut it, that's insane.
As Prof. Hanson's argument develops, though, it's clear he believes, as I do, that our ruling class is in the grip of a powerful ideology — one that sees human affairs entirely in terms of who-whom, oppressor and oppressed, supremacist and victim.
For a while back earlier in this century we called this "Cultural Marxism," and I still think that's an apt description. Karl Marx certainly saw things in those terms, with capitalism as the oppressor and labor as the oppressed.
The phrase "Cultural Marxism" has fallen out of fashion in favor of the rather vacuous — to my ear, anyway — term "woke." It's an ideology, though, whatever you call it; and as evidence of that, it's world-wide … or at any rate First World-wide.
The British Isles and most European countries have borders as wide open as ours. Electoral politics has done nothing to stop the flow, as witness the many-years failure of Britain's ruling Conservative Party to conserve something as basic as border integrity, or the hapless flounderings of Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, chronicled here at VDARE.com by Steve Sailer and myself.
So yes, it's an ideology. Its precepts look insane from the perspective of a smart, thoughtful, well-read person like Professor Hanson (or me …); but their grip on the mentality of the afflicted is mighty and unshakable.
Open borders is the strongest, the most unshakable of those precepts. It is the Prime Directive that all right-thinking people must hold dear.
How do we counter this? Must we, after looking back on those prospects drear, look forward guessing and fearing?
Well, guessing, yes; nobody can be sure of the future. Grounds for fear? Yes: but there are also grounds for hope.
04 — A fait accompli? First, the fears.
Looking at the situation right now, the fear must be that the Great Replacement is a fait accompli — that it's done, and irreversible.
Once again: If the flood continues through this year, as it likely will, there will have been a total inflow of over ten million during Joe Biden's term. That's on top of a big population of illegal aliens already living here: eleven million was the figure usually given, but it's hard to believe it was static at eleven million all through the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations.
We could, I believe, easily end this year with more than thirty million foreigners settled here illegally — close to ten percent of the entire population.
An illegal population of that size could indeed be an irreversible fait accompli. How, after all, would we reverse it?
True, there has been some talk of mass deportations. GOP Presidential cadidate Vivek Ramaswamy told us back in August, according to the Washington Post, that he would deport all illegal aliens.
A few weeks later, at the end of September, rival candidate Donald Trump pledged to enact "the largest deportation operation in the history of our country" if re-elected.
On the same day, at a different gathering twenty miles away, Ron DeSantis told his audience that he would deport, quote, "everyone that has come illegally under Biden," end quote.
Easily said, but the logistics are formidable. Even on Ron DeSantis' plan to just deport those who arrived in Joe Biden's four years, we're talking more than ten million people. That's a lot of school buses.
Even worse than the physical logistics are the legal obstacles. What about illegals who already have a date booked to go before immigration court? "The poor guy just wants his day in court," we'll be told by sympathetic media. Illegals with kids born here? Pending asylum claims? Temporary Protected Status overstayers? Country of origin unknown, or just unwilling to receive them?
And then there's the time limit on Expedited Removal, spelled out for us here on VDARE.com January 1st by our correspondent "Federale." I hope he won't mind my quoting him, quote:
By the time Donald Trump returns to office, most illegal aliens who entered under the Biden Regime amnesties will have been here more than two years, which is the current time limit for use of Expedited Removal. After two years, illegal aliens are no longer eligible to be removed expeditiously and have the right to a hearing before the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which has a current backlog of over three million illegal aliens.
End quote.
So a mass deportation program would be a feast for immigration and human-rights lawyers, with endless ways to block or thwart removals. It would be a feast, too, for bleeding-heart media lefties: heartstring-tugging stories about families being torn apart, and so on.
It's possible that a vigorous Congress could cut the Gordian knot, legislating all the obstacles away. Given the Congressional record on forceful, patriotic immigration reform, though, that's not something I'd pin my hopes on.
All that notwithstanding, there is hope, if only of a partial and incremental kind. That hope was expressed at length, very eloquently, by another colleague here at VDARE.com, "Washington Watcher II," posting here January 2nd.
The Republican Party, says our correspondent, is at last showing movement on the immigration issue. Quote: "Every GOP presidential contender wants Birthright Citizenship eliminated." End quote.
I'll leave you to read "Washington Watcher's" column for yourself; it will lift your spirits. Here is just the closing short paragraph, quote:
2024 looks bright for immigration patriotism. A win on Capitol Hill and a win in November will bring major opportunities for the GOP to reverse the Great Replacement. It just requires the party to remain focused on immigration and not get distracted by trivial issues.
End quote.
Here's hoping, pal.
05 — The Yemeni enemy (cont.). Back in mid-December, passing comment on the demonstrations against Israel, I said the following:
Pips.
I always smile at the second line in that slogan: "Palestine will be free." Under Arab rule Palestine would of course not be free. It would be another corrupt trashcan gangster despotism like all Arab states, ruled by some amoral thug like Gaddafy, Assad, or Saddam Hussein. My old colleague David Pryce-Jones wrote a good book about this twenty years ago, title: The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. I recommend it to your attention.
Pips.
So yes, I'm inclined to negativity about the Arabs. Or is it Muslims I'm negative about? Eh, nobody should take it personally. I have a dear old friend and ex-neighbor, a Christian Arab from Lebanon, who I am very fond of. And in a long career of office work in Britain and the U.S.A., I've had three or four colleagues I knew to be devout Muslims, all sensible and well-socialized.
So let's restrict ourselves to Arab Muslims at the level of actual nations. Those blessed with huge reserves of fossil fuel under their territory have built some stable, modern societies you or I wouldn't mind living in, if we could afford to. Outside that zone, though, the territories of Arab Muslims are uniformly awful: violent, corrupt, mis-governed where there is any coherent government at all.
The poster territory here is Yemen, one of the worst places in the world. Here is the Economic Overview offered at the CIA World Factbook, quote:
Low-income Middle Eastern economy; infrastructure, trade, and economic institutions devastated by civil war; oil/gas-dependent but decreasing reserves; massive poverty, food insecurity, and unemployment; high inflation.
End quote.
The Wikipedia coverage is even worse, sample quote:
As of 2020, Yemen ranked highest on the Fragile States Index and second-worst on the Global Hunger Index, surpassed only by the Central African Republic. Additionally, it has the lowest Human Development Index out of all non-African countries.
End quote.
The Total Fertility Rate is 2.9 children per woman and the population pyramid is one of those that looks like a Hershey's kiss.
Radio Derb has been glancing at Yemen from time to time over the years. Here I was in 2014, following a suicide-bomb atrocity in the capital city that killed 47 people.
Pips.
The news from Yemen is that the conflict between Sunni Islam and Shi'a Islam seems to be particularly acute there. Sunnis are two-thirds of the population, Shi'as one-third. The Shi'as feel discriminated against, and they've thrown up a fierce rebel movement, the Houthis. The Sunni majority has enlisted al Qaeda to help put down the rebels; and of course neighboring powers are stirring the pot — Iran on the side of the Shi'a Houthis, Saudi Arabia on the side of al Qaeda and the Sunnis.
Pips.
Here I was a few months later, January 2015, returning to the topic. This time I was quoting resource analyst David Archibald.
Pips.
What is happening in Yemen is symptomatic of the whole [Middle East / North Africa] region. The population was semi-starved until oil production began in the 1980s, when oil production began and wheat imports rose to feed a population doubling every 25 years. The situation now is that oil exports will cease in the next couple of years, the capital is being besieged by rebel groups and Islamists of various types, and groundwater is close to complete depletion …
Pips.
So, Yemen, yeah: You should definitely cross Yemen off your vacation list.
Yemen's been in the news again. Those Houthis I mentioned, the Shi'a side in Yemen's everlasting Sunni-Shi'a civil war, have been attacking merchant ships heading from or to the Suez Canal via the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. That has spooked the big merchant-shipping companies into sending their boats all the way round Africa, with corresponding delays and cost increases.
I'm an America First isolationist, strongly opposed to the U.S.A. getting mixed up in barbarian tribal squabbles. Freedom of navigation on the high seas is an important national and commercial interest, though, and I don't think we should stand idle while these Yemeni savages interfere with it.
So I cheered the news from Sunday last that when Houthi pirates tried to hijack a big commercial container ship, helicopters from two of our own warships sank three Houthi boats and killed ten of the buggers.
Sure, there might be consequences. The Houthis themselves are illiterate no-accounts, but they are working as cats-paws for Iran, and Iran isn't happy about the sinking. Too bad; sometimes we just have to do what's right.
How does Iran expect us to behave, anyway? They call us the Great Satan, don't they? Let's own the insult.
06 — What does it mean, Claudine? My acquaintance with Claudine Gay was short — less than two months.
I first mentioned the lady in my November 10th podcast, where I chided myself for having been surprised to see that the President of Harvard University was a black woman.
[Pips.]
I really shouldn't have been. Black women zoomed to the top of the status ranks when I wasn't paying attention. Educated black women are in terrific demand; every organization wants one. President of Harvard? Oh, definitely — got to be a black woman.
[Pips.]
I think I mentioned the plagiarism business in passing somewhere. Then in mid-December I noted Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of the leading scholars in the field of blackety-black, telling us that the entire Harvard fuss was racist racist racist.
And now here, the first week of January, I see that Claudine Gay has resigned her Presidency of Harvard and returned to the humble ranks of the professoriat at an annual salary of, if the New York Post can be believed, "just short of a million dollars."
So … ave atque vale, Claudine Gay: hail and farewell. We hardly knew you.
I had unkind things to say about Ms Gay in my December 15th podcast. Quote from myself, slightly edited, quote:
President Gay is … just another Affirmative-Action mediocrity, wafted up into the academic stratosphere on thermals of white ethnomasochism.
End quote.
Was that fair to Ms. Gay? I looked up her publication record on the Scholia website.
By number of pages per year, far and away her most productive year was 1997. She only published one paper that year, but it was her Ph.D. thesis, title: "Taking charge: Black electoral success and the redefinition of American politics," which ran to 205 pages. Note, however, that according to the Washington Free Beacon, quote:
Some of the most clear-cut cases [of plagiarism] come in Gay's 1997 dissertation … which copied two paragraphs almost verbatim from Palmquist and Voss.
End quote.
Runner-up in number of pages was Ms Gay's 2001 paper titled "The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California," which was 114 pages and has been her most-cited work. That same year she published another paper, title "The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation," but it was a mere fourteen pages, for a 2001 total of 128 pages.
Aside from those two bursts of effort twenty-some years ago, Scholia records only one year that broke the 40-page barrier and six years each logging only twenty pages or fewer.
I'm not an expert on scholarly productivity, but that doesn't look very impressive to me. And of course it's all blackety-blackness; or, as Ms Gay says in her January 3rd New York Times op-ed, quote:
The substance of my scholarship … focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics.
End quote.
All right, I know: I'm a STEM snob. If you're not solving partial differential equations, I find it hard to take your work seriously.
I did try reading one of the lady's papers, that 2001 most-cited one, but my eyes quickly glazed over. I'm sure that Political Science is a worthy field of inquiry with many earnest scholars toiling away in it; I just doubt that Claudine Gay is among the best of them, or even close.
Whether or not Ms Gay ranks high as a political scientist, she is a nasty piece of work. For evidence of this I refer you to an article at Quillette dated April 15th 2022, nearly two years ago. Title of the srticle: Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors?"
The black professor in that title is the brilliant economist Roland Fryer, Jr. In 2007 at age 30, Fryer became the youngest black professor ever to be granted tenure at Harvard.
He got into trouble with his colleagues when he turned his attention to data-driven studies of differentials in crime and law enforcement. The last straw was when, in 2016, he published a study showing that black suspects were less likely to be shot by police than white suspects.
Fryer seems to have passed some insensitive remarks in the presence of female colleagues. This was used to get going a sexual harassment investigation, although — quote from the Quillette report, quote:
Harvard's own investigators ultimately found that Prof. Fryer had never sexually propositioned or touched anyone.
End quote.
The allegations were none the less pumped up to destroy Fryer's standing at the university.
Claudine Gay was one of the lead pumpers. Another quote from Quillette, quote:
One of the administrators behind his punishment, Arts and Sciences Dean Claudine Gay, even reportedly went so far as to ask Harvard's president to revoke Fryer's tenure. Thankfully, the president declined. (There's no known case of the university stripping a professor of tenure even once in the last hundred years.)
End quote.
This was, in other words, an ideological lynching, with Claudine Gay at the head of the lynch mob.
This horrible person — this bogus, merit-less, semi-literate poseur — was President of Harvard University. This is the Academy in our country today.
I must say: personally, I would have demanded her resignation just for her choice in eyeglasses …
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: On the "Demography is destiny" theme: late December a Substack account called Datahazard told us that since last August there are officially more illegal aliens arriving each month than there are children being born to American mothers.
The post, which I saw on X and which came with an illustrating graph, notes that these are just the official encounters. We don't know how many illegals entered without being detected.
Top of the comment thread on that X post was Elon Musk himself, comment: "This is insane."
As per my own remarks earlier in this podcast, and with all due respect, Sir: not necessarily insane, just ideology.
Item: Wednesday we heard that Donald Trump has now petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the recent ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court declaring him to ineligible as a candidate on the 2024 presidential ballot.
It's well-nigh certain that SCOTUS will take the case; and legal pundits — at any rate, the ones I listen to, which I'll allow is not a representative cross-section of legal punditry — legal pundits say there's a high probability SCOTUS will rule in Trump's favor, striking down the Colorado ruling, and by implication the similar rulings enacted or contemplated by other states.
This is just a minor opening scuffle in the 2024 presidential race. The ruling class really really hate Trump, and they'll stop at nothing to keep him off the November ballot. With the Justice Department, the media, and any number of state Attorneys General on their side, there's a good possibility they'll succeed.
Which makes it all the stranger that the Democratic Party still seems intent on Joe Biden as their candidate. Sure, Trump would beat Biden one-on-one, but then so would pretty much anyone else.
What is the ruling class's strategy here? I'm not getting it.
Item: Every nation celebrates the New Year in its own way. In France, the tradition is to riot and burn cars. At any rate, that is the tradition in the urban areas where France's ten percent Muslim population is concentrated.
This year's celebrations were comparatively low-key. There were only 745 car burnings, down ten per cent on last year.
This relative calm was not mere good fortune. Because of the ructions in the Middle East, French authorities clamped down on the festivities. Paris got 100,000 police and military and a half-past-midnight curfew.
I guess the French authorities know their country best. Still, it's a bit sad to see these fine old folk traditions in decline.
Item: As I told you way back in this podcast, the Prime Directive of the Western World's current ruling ideology is Open Borders.
Here is an exceptionally frank statement of that Prime Directive from one of our elected politicians.
[Clip: Every human being has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum or shelter and, um, those policies have been in place for a long time …]
That was Boston Mayorette Michelle Wu, whose name you may recall in connection with a news story of mid-December. That story concerned an invitation that Mayor Bimbo sent out to a Christmas Party exclusively for, quote, "electeds of color," end quote.
Less well-publicized has been Mayor Dingbat's refusal to allow police officers into Boston public schools since their exclusion in the anti-cop hysteria of 2021. Excluding cops from schools has of course led to an increase in school violence; but that is of no importance compared with anti-police signaling to one's fellow ideologues.
If wokeness were an Olympic event, Michelle Wu would be a sure bet for the Gold.
08 — Signoff. That's all I have for you, ladies and gents, from this first podcast of 2024. It's already shaping up to be an interesting year. Radio Derb will be with you all along the bumpy road to 2025.
If you read my December Diary you will know that I nurse a longstanding affection for the late Eartha Kitt. I haven't quite got that out of my system yet, so here is the lady to sing us out.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Eartha Kitt, C'est Si Bon.]
