01m15s Electoral gold: the anti-anti-white vote. (Prospects for the midterms.)
11m53s A transatlantic Camp of the Saints? (More African boat people.)
17m07s Europe's populist bloc. (From sea to shining sea.)
12m14s The blackety-black royal wedding. (A festival of Progressivism.)
31m04s Another school shooting. (Two suggestions.)
32m50s Then they came for Morgan Freeman. (The Coalition of Victims eats its own.)
34m46s Religion crumbles. (Christians, Buddhists.)
38m05s Wrong way round. (A pesky illegal alien.)
39m38s Signoff. (With the First Lord.)
[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire Marches, kazoo version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome to the show, listeners, from your elegiacally genial host John Derbyshire.
Yes, I'm afraid these are glum days chez Derb. Our little dog Toby, loyal and affectionate companion this past ten years, is in terminal decline, and will soon leave us. We're doing our best to keep the poor little fellow comfortable, and he doesn't seem to be in any distress, but his condition has cast a pall over our normally cheerful domestic mood.
Ah well, the cycle of life. Kipling of course supplied the verses: "Why in Heaven (before we are there) / Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?"
02 — Electoral gold: the anti-anti-white vote. The midterm elections this coming Fall are shaping up to be really interesting, culturally as well as politically.
The political question is of course whether the Republican Party will lose control of the House and/or the Senate. Current pollster wisdom is: Yes, the GOP will likely lose the House, but probably not the Senate. There are plausible alternative scenarios, though, that have Republicans holding on to both chambers, although with a reduced majority in the House.
That would be interesting. As you've heard if you pay attention to party politics at all, the first midterms generally go badly for the party of a new President. For Republicans to maintain control of Congress would be a surprise.
The political rules are not what they once were though: "once" there meaning prior to … oh, let's say, November 8th 2016. Donald Trump's victory rewrote the rule book. Surprises are no longer as surprising as they used to be.
The issue raised by a Republican victory in the midterms would be: Is the Sailer Strategy now seriously in play?
The Sailer Strategy is the one proposed by our own Steve Sailer back in November of 2000. That year's presidential election, George W. Bush v. Al Gore, had culminated in a very narrow win for Bush in the electoral college, followed by a messy squabble over vote recounts in Florida.
W's main problem, Steve argued after crunching the numbers, was that he had only won 54 percent of the white vote. If he had got just three percent more, 57 percent, he would have won in an electoral college landslide, even allowing for some alienation of the nonwhite vote.
Money quote from Steve:
The GOP could win more elections by raising its fraction of the white vote minimally than by somehow grabbing vastly higher fractions of the minority vote.
End quote. Of course that is only true while whites are a big majority of the electorate, as they still were in the year 2000. They are still a majority, although less of one than eighteen years ago. The Sailer Strategy is still viable; and with sensible, patriotic immigration reform it will continue to be so.
The underlying cultural question here is: Is the worm turning? Are an electorally significant number of white Americans fed up with the anti-white propaganda, the appeals to white guilt, that have dominated public discourse for the past generation? If so, are they sufficiently fed up to swing an election? The 2016 result suggests that they may be.
Back of that is a larger question. One of the most under-appreciated books of the past twenty years has been Eric Kaufmann's The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, published in 2004. Kaufmann argues that there has been a tension in the collective American psyche between, on the one hand, the universalist ideals implicit in the founding documents, and on the other, the ethnic self-awareness of the WASP ascendancy. That tension was resolved, he says, in the middle twentieth century by a decisive rejection of white-European ethnonationalism in favor of cosmopolitan universalism.
Nothing lasts for ever in human affairs. Hence the larger question: Is white America, or some politically consequential portion of it, now alienated from that universalism? If so, what will they turn to?
The Social Justice Warriors of course have a ready answer for that. Unmoored from cosmopolitan universalism, they tell us, white Americans will revert to being cross-burning, hood-wearing, neo-Nazi yahoos.
All that illustrates is the utter poverty of imagination on the political left. In their minds, the only possible future is a reprise of the past.
A revival of the WASP ascendancy is likewise out of the question. That ascendancy was anyway undermined from the middle nineteenth century on by the great waves of non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant Europeans settling in the USA.
Perhaps a more generalized white-identity consciousness will take hold. That would be better than the white ethnomasochism we are currently awash in, but not something I personally would welcome whole-heartedly. A nation of endlessly-squabbling identity groups would, it seems to me, be a dismal thing.
My own ideal is a racial and ethnic super-majority, tolerant and hospitable to small minorities of others: what I call "salt-in-the-stew diversity." A little salt in the stew improves it; too much spoils it. Numbers, numbers, numbers.
Here's a commentator who agrees with me: the guy — we know it's a guy — who dwells anonymously in Château Heartiste. Now, Heartiste isn't to everyone's taste. His language is rococo, often crude, sometimes antisemitic. If you are not too repelled, though, and persevere with him, there are pearls of wisdom in there.
Here was Heartiste in a May 23rd post, quote:
Personally, I don't relish a society structured solely around identity politics. It's gauche, claustrophobic, miserably stressful, and a mockery of the transcendent. But damned if I'm gonna idly sit by as every other group looks out for themselves at my group's expense. That's a suicide pact. But the only way out of this inevitability is to restore Whites to demographic primacy in their homelands, from which perch Whites can safely and confidently eschew identity politics without risk of parasitic infection.
My idea of a great country to live in: One that's so explicitly homogeneous that these implicit identity conundrums never need addressing.
End quote. I'll sign on to that.
That's taking the large cultural view of things. To return to immediate politics, what we likely have is a swelling number of white Americans who, while not locked into any real kind of white-identity mindset, are definitely anti-anti-white — sick of hearing themselves, their families, and their ancestors belittled and insulted.
While the Democratic Party is committed to anti-white positions, that swelling number of anti-anti-white whites is electoral gold for the Republican Party.
Whether the Republican Party — also commonly known, let me remind you, as the Stupid Party — whether the Stupid Party has enough sense and skill to mine that gold, is an open question.
There are some hopeful signs from the White House, although that is of course not the same thing as the Republican Party. Hopeful signs, none the less: Senior presidential adviser Stephen Miller, in an interview with Breitbart News this week, promised that Trump will go into the midterms with an aggressive strategy on immigration both legal and illegal.
The National Question is, as I said last week, a hundred-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk for the GOP to pick up. Will they have the wit and courage to pick it up, in the teeth of opposition from their donors in the cheap-labor lobbies? We shall find out in November.
03 — A transatlantic Camp of the Saints? Overshadowing all discussions about race and the National Question nowadays, at any rate for those of us with foresight and some basic numeracy, is the coming tsunami of black Africans fleeing their benighted homelands to seek a life worth living in majority-white countries — to seek, if you don't mind my being blunt about it, the blessings of white supremacy.
This is always addressed as an issue facing Europe, which of course it mainly is. You've seen those pictures of the jam-packed boats trying to get across the Mediterranean. You probably haven't seen so many of them recently as the Europeans have been busily bribing North African countries to stanch the flow.
As the numbers build and grow more desperate, the bribe strategy will ultimately fail. Other things will happen, too.
One of those other things is a development that, so far as I know, I am the only observer to have given any space to. This is the likelihood that whatever Europe does to stop the incoming flood of black Africans — and I assume they will do something — will increase the numbers heading across the Atlantic to the Americas.
I noted seven years ago that four years before that — so it happened in 2007 — the USA received its first African boat people. Quote from Radio Derb, March 11th 2011, quote:
What's vexing the Europeans today will vex us tomorrow. The Atlantic is a tougher sail than the Mediterranean; but with cheap hand-held GPS gadgets, it's not that tough any more. In fact the U.S.A. has already received boat people from sub-Saharan Africa. Four years ago a catamaran with fourteen young men from Senegal on it was picked up by the Coast Guard off Long Island. They were interned in New Jersey. Probably they were then deported back to Senegal — I haven't been able to find out. There will be more, you can bet on it.
I may have been somewhat premature there, but I doubt I was wrong.
Here's an article from The Guardian, May 23rd, headline: No food, no water: African migrants recount terrifying Atlantic crossing.
What happened was, 25 people — all apparently young men — from the West African nations of Senegal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau paid $700 each for passage on a boat, a 40-foot catamaran, to Brazil, where they were told the living is easy. Forty foot divided by 25 is one point six feet; so even allowing for the boat's width, it was pretty crowded on board.
The voyage did not go well. The two Brazilians in charge on the boat seem to have skipped some of the lessons on their seamanship course. They mixed kerosene and diesel, blowing the ship's motor. The mast broke when they tried to rig it. Food and water ran out. After 35 days at sea the boat was rescued and towed to port in Brazil by some Brazilian fishermen.
The Africans are now being "evaluated" by Brazilian authorities. The two Brazilian crewmen have been arrested for promoting illegal immigration. Seems to me a miracle they didn't get eaten.
Yes, these stories are still outliers, oddities. We're not looking at a transatlantic Camp of the Saints, nothing on that scale.
Shall we be, though, five or ten or fifteen years from now? I wouldn't be surprised. If the Europeans get their act together and really, permanently cut off the flow across the Mediterranean, journalists may soon be setting up the phrase "transatlantic boat people" as a single-key macro on their word processors.
You heard it here first.
04 — Europe's populist bloc. Just a follow-up on that. I just said: "If the Europeans get their act together and really, permanently cut off the flow across the Mediterranean." Are there signs the Europeans will actually do that?
Yes, there are some hopeful indications. Most hopeful recently has been the election result in Italy this month. As Radio Derb went to tape last Friday, the two populist parties who dominated the election results, the Five Star Movement and the League of the North, announced they had formed a coalition government, the first real populist government in a West European country.
That was after lengthy horse trading among Italy's political parties. The actual election was held on March 4th. With a multiplicity of parties, though, joined by twos and threes in a tangle of alliances, there was no party or alliance with a clear majority, so eight weeks of wrangling ensued. You can get the flavor of Italian politics by noticing that not only does the election have a long Wikipedia page, the subsequent weeks of horse-trading have a separate page all their own.
Well, it looks like Italy has a government, a populist government. They have pledged to, among other things, deport the estimated half-million illegal aliens currently living in Italy.
That should certainly be popular. Big news stories in Italy during the weeks preceding the election were, one, the gruesome murder of an 18-year-old girl in Macerata, east-central Italy, by illegal alien drug dealers from Nigeria, and two, the revenge attack, wounding six black Africans, by an outraged Italian in that same town shortly afterwards.
This result in Italy — assuming it stays a result: this is Italian politics we're talking about here — follows the previous advance for populism in Europe, the victory by Sebastian Kurz's People's Party in next-door Austria last fall.
You can now walk across Northern Italy from the French border, into and across Austria, into and across Czechia, into and across Poland to the Baltic, in populist-governed territory the entire distance — a populist bloc reaching right across Europe, sea to shining sea.
The leaders of these populist movements aren't reactionary, wrinkly old geezers, either. Matteo Salvini, who heads the Northern League, is only 45, just a tad older than Jack Kennedy was when elected President among swooning tributes to his youthful vitality. Luigi di Maio, who heads the Five Star Movement, is only 31. He's just a few weeks older than Austria's Sebastian Kurz, also 31, and currently the youngest leader of any significant nation.
It's not all striplings. The Czech Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš, is 63; his Polish opposite number Mateusz Morawiecki, is 49; Viktor Orbán, Hungary's populist Prime Minister, turns 55 this coming Thursday. It sure is encouraging, though. It's also a contrast with Europe's globalists: Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, is 61; Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, is 63; German Chancellor Angela Merkel is also 63.
So the odds on Europe pulling up the drawbridge when bribery fails? I'd say pretty good. Good for them: with the previous segment in mind, perhaps bad for us.
05 — The blackety-black royal wedding. Things are looking up further north in Europe, too. Sweden has an election coming up in September, and the nationalist Sweden Democrat Party is polling well: 20 percent, up from the 13 percent they got in the last election four years ago.
The equivalent in Denmark, the Danish People's Party, is the second biggest party in parliament, with a fifth of the seats. For complicated reasons that doesn't make them an official component of the center-right coalition government, but they're considered an ally of the government and get consulted on legislation.
Most recently they've been in talks with the government on new, more restrictive rules for Danish citizenship. Quote from party spokesman Christian Langballe:
Our key demand is an annual limit of 1,000 persons on new citizenships, whereby there will be a premise that people from Western cultures are given a higher ranking.
End quote. Imagine the leader of a major American political party saying anything like that!
Or a British one. The Brits are way behind Italy and Eastern Europe; judging by Sweden and Denmark, they are even behind the Scandinavians.
Last weekend's royal wedding was illustrative. The whole thing turned into a festival of Progressivism. Major themes were feminism, and the wonderfulness of black people.
You might think that a nation whose head of state for the past 66 years has been a woman, and whose most consequential Prime Minister in the past 60 of those years was a woman, would not need lessons in female empowerment.
Wrong! The Duchess of Sussex, formerly Meghan Markle, will set you straight. In her first statement as a member of Britain's royal family — that is, following her wedding last weekend — she declared herself, quote, "proud to be a woman and a feminist," end quote. We are told that the Duchess will, quote, "will continue her work campaigning for social justice and women's empowerment," end quote.
The fearless Duchess then put her righteous principles into action by walking part-way down the church alone instead of, as is customary, on the arm of her father. This was making a virtue of necessity, as Dad was either in hospital recovering from heart surgery or lying dead drunk in a Baja California ditch, depending which gossip column you read.
Did I mention that the Duchess is black? She's black — blackety blackety black black black! To impress this fact on us, the wedding was blackety-black too. Meghan's much blacker Mom showed up, wearing dreadlocks and a nose ring. Oprah Winfrey was there of course, and Serena Williams, and Idris Elba, whoever that is — don't ask me: I'm just reading names off a news wire here, but I have it on good authority that he's black.
Louis Farrakhan apparently couldn't make it, but there was a black gospel choir and a black teenage cellist, a Coptic archbishop and a black Church of England priestess, and a demented black American preacher who started off with a quote from — can you guess? — the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, then rambled on for what seemed like a couple of hours about slavery, gospel music, slavery, and the wonders of combustion.
Quote from the Daily Mail:
Keeping on the theme of fire, he discussed human's ability to harness fire which gave us everything from the Bronze Age right through to the ability to "text, tweet, email, and otherwise socially engage one another due to fire."
End quote. Yeah, great stuff, that fire. Would it be tactless to point out that it also gave us burning crosses? It would? Sor-ry.
The Mail quoted several encomiums from tweeters and pundits, closing with, quote:
Others were pleased that Rev. Curry had brought up such a controversial subject [i.e. slavery] at the wedding.
End quote. Slavery, yeah, that's a real controversial subject. Is slavery a good thing, or a bad thing? Controversy rages.
How bogus it all is! This young woman, now the Duchess of Sussex, has risen from the West Coast lower-upper-middle classes to great fame and influence by the oldest female method of all, what in the French royal court was referred to as the horizontal method. Now she can pretend to be a member of a victim class — of two victim classes, in fact — and pose as a champion of the poor and oppressed, like Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess.
Well, well, perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on her. We all find our opportunities where we can.
And politically she's in a respectable British tradition. The royals, at least since the Glorious Revolution that threw out the Stuarts, have been masters of the sandwich strategy, playing top and bottom against the middle.
The Tory party was the top and the bottom: the monarch at the top allied with low-ranking country squires and penniless Anglican clergymen. The Whigs were the landed gentry and urban mercantile classes. Peasants and urban proles had no vote until well into the nineteenth century, no representation in parliament, and so didn't count; but many of them identified with the monarchy anyway. Once they did get the vote, that faction morphed into the working-class Tory, immortalized on TV in 1960s Britain by sitcom hero Alf Garnett, who crossed the Atlantic to become Archie Bunker.
Still, I have to say, all that virtue signaling had me grinding my teeth. It's one thing for the British royals to show some noblesse oblige to their own native British proles and peasants. It's another for them to truckle to crazy black American preachers and postmodernist college fads. I liked the royals better when they were stuffy and traditionalist.
As for the Duchess of Sussex following Marie Antoinette's example; Watch out, young lady. That didn't end well.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: There was another nasty school shooting, ten high-schoolers dead in Santa Fe, shot by a deranged classmate.
I don't have a solution for school shootings. All the same issues about gun availability and the treatment of mental illness are being chewed over as before, with nobody's mind being changed on any of them.
I would only add two points to the discussion. Point one: If you have guns in your house, and a teenager who is even slightly, occasionally flaky, for goodness' sake keep the guns locked up and the keys inaccessible. It's not difficult.
And point two: Can't we get some debate going about single-sex schools? I really don't know how adolescents cope in co-ed high schools. I'm not sure I could have. Thank goodness, my secondary school was boys-only.
There's some circumstantial evidence — I don't know if it's been confirmed — that this Santa Fe killer was mainly out to get a female classmate who'd rejected him. As an explanation for the dreadful thing he did, that's not implausible.
Single-sex schools are anyway better academic environments than co-ed schools. Can't we just drop the whole co-ed ethos? Do parents really want it?
Item: Then they came for Morgan Freeman, "they" being of course the sexual harassment witch-hunters. Since Freeman is the ultimate Numinous Negro — he actually appears in the credits of one movie as God — the Coalition of Victims is really eating its own now.
I don't know anything about Morgan Freeman the guy, but I must say, reading the news stories, the accusations against him hardly even rise to the level of bad manners. Sample quote from the New York Post, May 24th:
A … woman who worked on a recent movie with Freeman recalled an incident from the wrap party.
"He was looking at my breasts, and I told him, 'My eyes are up here.' Then we went to take a group photo and he pressed himself up against me. It was inappropriate," she said.
End quote. "Inappropriate," I guess, maybe, but not exactly the Rape of the Sabine Women.
Guys can be rude and boorish. Big-name male movie stars come on to attractive young women, sometimes clumsily. This is news? A retaliatory slap on the face is illegal now? Sentences like, "Keep your hands to yourself, Mister," have passed from the language? For goodness' sake. No wonder no-one want to have sex any more.
Item: Here's a sort of honorary Italian guy: Pope Francis.
A few weeks ago a young homosexual man from Chile, name of Juan Carlos Cruz, had an audience with the pontiff. Mr Cruz had been abused as a boy by a homosexual priest. The Pope apologized to him for that.
Then the Pope said to him, according to Mr Cruz, that, quote, "You have to understand that God made you this way and he loves you, and the Pope loves you and you have to love yourself," end quote. That's a quote from Mr Cruz, telling us what, according to him, the Pope said.
There were protests from traditionalist Roman Catholics. Pat Buchanan got a column out of it. Wasn't it a teaching of the Church that homosexuality was a moral failing and homosexual acts sinful? Wasn't the Pope preaching moral relativism here?
Not being a Roman Catholic — nor even a Christian, except culturally — I don't have a God in this fight. As a reactionary and a traditionalist, my sympathies are with the protestors, in a vague and general way.
There doesn't seem to me to be much point in being a Pope if you're just going to promote Progressive ideology, which is based on moral relativism. Why not go into politics instead?
If it's any consolation to His Holiness, other religions have problems, too. Buddhism, for example. Reuters, May 24th, headline: Thailand arrests senior monks in temple raids to clean up Buddhism.
I lived in Thailand for a few months forty years ago. I remember how the Buddhist monks would come down the street in pairs with their begging bowls, and the housewives would come to the door and spoon food into the bowls for them. Everybody looked up to the monks. Now, quote from Reuters:
The raids are the military government's latest bid to reform Buddhism … whose image has been tarnished by money and sex scandals involving monks.
It's a shame. Religion is a social good, supplying structure and consolation to people's lives; but it seems it just can't stand intact against the tide of modernity. When it's gone, all we have left is gimcrack ideology and vapid psychobabble like that we heard from the pulpit at Windsor Chapel last weekend. A shame, a shame.
Item: Finally, a story about an illegal alien. This one is two miles across, and orbits the Sun out in the neighborhood of the planet Jupiter.
In short, it's an asteroid, one of many thousands. The thing about this one is, though, that it's going round the Sun in the wrong direction.
All the planets, including all the other asteroids, go round in the same direction, because they all originated billions of years ago in a huge rotating disk of gas and dust. That this one travels retrograde tells astronomers that it came from outside the Solar System, got captured — probably by Jupiter — as it passed through, and is now with us for ever.
Like an illegal alien, see? I'm tempted to negativity here: to saying that we'll get this critter out of our Solar System before we get the illegals out of the USA.
But no, let's be upbeat. The midterms are coming up and Stephen Miller tells us immigration issues will be to the fore. The GOP still has six months to grow itself a spine. Let's hope.
07 — Signoff. There you have it, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and best wishes for a relaxed but contemplative Memorial Day weekend.
As you can likely tell, I need cheering up. A pretty reliable cheerer-upper for me is the silly light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Here's one of my favorite numbers, from H.M.S. Pinafore.
Sir Joseph Porter is First Lord of the Admiralty. He's in charge of the British Navy; but First Lord is pretty much just a political position, actual naval experience not a necessary qualification … as Sir Joseph explains.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: The D'Oyly Carte Company, "When I was a Lad."]
