01:01 Republicans debate. (Even Christie talks strong on immigration.)
06:48 Where Trump failed. (Laws not passed, Swamp not drained.)
12:58 Staffing a Trump cabinet. (Good luck with that.)
20:16 What's the matter with Georgia? (Trump may join the Brunswick Three.)
25:50 States push back … (against administrative lawlessness.)
27:35 National Review goes monthly. (Particular decline, or general?)
30:59 Anti-whiteness in the U.K. #1 (Women's soccer team too white.)
34:02 Anti-whiteness in the U.K. #2 (London's mayor lets slip.)
36:04 A new pronoun problem. (Learning from the South.)
37:36 Signoff. (With Perry Como.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings here from your irreproachably genial host John Derbyshire with some observations on the passing charivari.
The big political event of the week was of course the televised debate Wednesday evening from Milwaukee, in which the eight leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination faced off against each other and two Fox News moderators. I'll take that for my opening segment.
02 — Republicans debate. The fact of this debate happening on Wednesday was a blessed gift for your Friday night host here. Pundits all over had the late hours of Wednesday, all of Thursday, and most of Friday to offer their opinions and interpretations, while I have had all that time to compose my own thoughts and the opportunity to plagiarize theirs. Snivelling apologies from Radio Derb for anything unkind I have ever said about Fox News!
Among the aforementioned pundits there have of course been our own here at VDARE.com. If you haven't already done so, I urge you to check out
Washington Watcher II notes encouragingly that while all these candidates' positions on immigration left something to be desired, the general tone of remarks on the topic was much more forthright than it was back in the days when mass amnesty for illegals was the preferred option of most politicians, including most Republican politicians. Even Chris Christie, for goodness' sake, when the moderator explicitly asked if he would deport all the illegals, said he would.
I have my doubts about Christie's sincerity there; and I'm speaking as someone who sat across a table from Christie prior to the 2012 election and tried without success to get him to say something halfway intelligent about immigration while my immigration-shy National Review colleagues around the table scrutinized the ceiling or pretended to consult their interview notes.
But hey, perhaps Chris Christie's seen the light. We have it on good authority that joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over nine and ninety just persons, which need no repentance. Come join us at the next VDARE conference, Governor! Yeah, right …
Both of those VDARE.com postings I referred you to there include coverage of Donald Trump, who of course was not present at the Wednesday debate. That's entirely fitting as Trump's spirit hovered over the proceedings.
Nor does Trump's physical absence seem to have affected his popularity ratings. The New York Post commissioned a post-debate survey of 1,800 people. We're not told how many of the 1,800 self-identify as Republican voters; but of those who did, 61 percent want to see Trump as the GOP nominee. That's nearly seven times the support for Ron DeSantis, second in the poll at nine percent.
There are some mixed messages here, mind. Setting Trump aside, just on the debate itself, when people were asked who won the debate, Ramaswamy emerged slightly ahead of DeSantis, 23 percent to 21. In a sample of this size, that's a statistical tie. And on the other other hand the Post also reports that DeSantis pulled in a million dollars of campaign donations in the 24 hours after the debate.
Bottom line here post-debate: As things stand today — which, going by historical precedents, may be nothing like the way they stand six months from now — prospects for the GOP nomination read like this: Number One, Trump; Number Two, DeSantis; Number Three, Ramaswamy; Number Four, A.N. Other.
As previously stated I am not ill-disposed towards Trump and I hate all the people who hate him; but I don't want him as president. Permit me to enlarge on that.
03 — Where Trump failed. So what's not to like about Donald Trump? What are we grumbling about, those of us afflicted with Trump Disappointment Syndrome?
Aren't Trump's proposals on immigration just what we're asking for? And didn't he, when in office, enforce immigration law and drastically reduce levels of both legal and illegal immigration, as we pointed out at the time?
Yes, he did. There were, however, two huge, lethal shortcomings to Trump's approach.
The solutions here are legislative and administrative. Laws need to be passed: the Swamp needs to be drained. Donald Trump fell down, flat — splat! — on his face, in both these aspects.
The first failure is generally considered the less forgivable. With his party controlling both houses of Congress for two years, Trump's administration made no substantive changes to our immigration laws.
Yes, that was a grave failure; but I'm not sure it was worse than Trump's failure to Drain the Swamp. The Swamp looks to me to have been darker, deeper, and muddier in 2021 than it was in 2017 — just steaming away there waiting for the radical left to regain power and come wallow.
This current crop of GOP hopefuls up on stage Wednesday evening showed some glimmers of awareness about all this. There was, for example, Vivek Ramaswamy's spirited declaration that, quote:
The only war that I will declare as president is the war on the federal administrative state.
End quote.
That was a direct translation into 2023 language of Trump's 2016 promises to Drain the Swamp.
Will it, if Ramaswamy wins the White House, lead to consequential reforms, as Trump's version failed to do? I can't judge. Trump's failure, though, leaves a cloud of doubt hanging over the head of any political outsider promising a serious institutional overhaul. Perhaps it's not as easy as these guys from the business world think.
For sure — well, it seems sure to me — Trump's failures were those of a guy who had no clue how to deal with Swamp dwellers. Here I fall back —as, yes, I know, I always do — on those horribly revealing televised meetings from early 2018 when Trump, in a room full of Swamp critters, agreed with the last person who spoke.
All that said, there's no avoiding the fact that issues of personality are in play. When Trump failed to work his will on the Swamp and its denizens, his usual reaction was to blame one of his own appointments. Not just mildly to blame, either, but to curse, insult, belittle, and defame someone that he himself had appointed with much praise.
Twitter followers got an inspired illustration of that earlier this week from a tweeter — "X-er," whatever — I know only by his Twitter handle AGHamilton29. This is worth a segment of its own.
04 — Staffing a Trump cabinet. I agree with every reputable analyst I've seen on 2024 election dynamics that a second Trump term is unlikely.
Stranger things have happened, though, so let's suppose this one does. Imagine that Donald Trump has swept away his challengers in the GOP primaries and got himself elected President once again.
The first thing he then has to do will of course be to assemble a cabinet. As head of the federal government and Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces he'll need to tap twenty or so of the most accomplished, serious, mature, and capable people from relevant professions to head up the executive departments and agencies, and the military.
Trump might just run into some problems there. Why? Well, if you've seen this 3½-minute video montage that's been going around social media, you'll easily figure out why.
The video clip consists of eighteen brief clips of Trump speaking about people he put in those positions during his presidency from 2017 to 2021. The clips go in pairs, each pair of clips a before-and-after of Trump speaking (or someone quoting something he's said) about one of his hires.
So there are nine hires being talked about here, each hire in a before clip followed by an after clip.
First hire: Jeff Sessions, before and after.
[Clip: Jeff understands that the job of Attorney General is to serve and protect the people of the United States, and that is exactly what he will do, and do better than anybody else can …
Jeff Sessions was a disaster as Attorney General. Should have never been Attorney General. He's not qualified; he's not mentally qualified to be Attorney General …]
Second hire: William Barr, before and after.
[Clip: We hope Bill Barr is going to be as good as we think because Bill is a good … he is a great gentleman, a great man …
And by the way, when Bill Barr — who is, you know, a coward. Bill Barr was a coward; Bill Barr didn't do what he was supposed to do. I fired him and he has great anger …]
Third hire: Mark Milley, before and after.
[Clip: In his new role as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley will serve as my top military advisor. I have absolute confidence that he will fulfill his duty with the same brilliance and fortitude he has shown throughout his long and very distinguished career …
Milley frankly was incompetent. The last one I'd want to attack with as my leader would be Milley …]
Fourth hire: John Kelly, before and after.
[Clip: John Kelly will do a fantastic job. General Kelly has been a star, done an incredible job thus far, respected by everybody — a great, great American …
I know John Kelly. He was a … He didn't do a good job, had no temperament, and ultimately he was petered out [sic]. He got … He was exhausted. This man was totally exhausted. He wasn't even able to function …]
Fifth hire: Jerome Powell, before and after.
[Clip: I am confident that Jay has the wisdom and leadership to guide our economy through any challenges that our great economy may face …
I knew I had my own situation with Powell and I beat the hell out of him. I was not a big fan of Powell. I was rec … He was recommended by some people; I didn't like him.
Sixth hire: James Mattis, before and after.
[Clip: We are going to appoint "Mad Dog" Mattis as our Secretary of Defense. They say he's the closest thing to General George Patton that we have, and it's about time, about time …
Mattis was a highly overrated General; didn't do the job, didn't do good on ISIS. Mattis was fired, as you know, by President Obama, and I fired him also …]
Seventh hire: Rex Tillerson, before and after.
[Clip: Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State … (applause) … gonna do a great job. He's respected all over the world, and I think he's going to go down as one of our great, great secretaries …
(TV anchor): "In an angry tweet this morning he called Tillerson, quote, 'as dumb as a rock, and totally ill-prepared and ill-equipped to be Secretary of State' …"]
Eighth hire: Mark Esper, before and after.
[Clip: Mark Esper is a highly respected gentleman with a great career — West Point, Harvard, er … a tremendous talent, persisting(?) acting Secretary of Defense …
(TV anchor): "He has said, quote, you, he would, you were 'a lightweight, a figurehead' … He said Mark Esper was weak, totally ineffective. Er, he said that 'he would do anything I wanted' …"]
Ninth hire: Elaine Chao, before and after.
[Clip: Secretary Chao, you've been so fantastic in so many ways. Transportation? — It's just moving along, and you, er, you've done a fantastic job for me and for the country, and I appreciate all, all that you do
(TV anchor): "In his post on Truth Social Trump said McConnell, quote, 'has a death-wish and must immediately seek help and advice from his China-loving wife (guest snickers) Coco Chao.' Oh my God!"]
End of clips.
A couple of points about all that.
First point: If Trump is the Republican nominee next year you'll be seeing that video a lot. You'll likely be seeing longer, more professionally-produced videos along the same lines. It's perfect campaign propaganda for the Democratic Party.
Second point: With that in mind, who's going to want to serve in a Trump administration?
05 — What's the matter with Georgia? Meanwhile Donald Trump has been in the news on his own account; or rather, on the account of Fani Willis, the District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia.
Ms Willis, a mulatto and a Democrat, is prosecuting Donald Trump for unlawfully trying to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results. Trump and eighteen other persons were indicted August 14th on total 41 charges of racketeering and conspiracy.
Who are all these people supposedly involved in an illegal racket with Trump?
Some are people who have provided legal services to Trump, most notably of course former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Others are staffers, officials, and consultants from the Georgia election campaign. One is former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. They are all supposed to have conspired with Trump in dirty tricks to get the Georgia election result overturned.
What dirty tricks? What exactly are all these people supposed to have done? What, for example, did the White House Chief of Staff do?
Well, he called a member of Congress seeking to get the telephone number of the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives so Trump could call him.
That's it? Yes, that's it. It was a "predicate act," defined in my legal dictionary as, quote, "A crime, which is composed of some of the elements of a more serious crime and which is committed for carrying out the greater crime," end quote.
What on earth is the point of wasting Georgia taxpayers' money on such absurdly trivial charges?
It's not hard to figure. The point is of course to get Donald Trump in jail.
How does indicting a guy who made a phone call to ask for a phone number help with that? Let me explain.
This is basic Soviet justice. To get the big guy you scare the hell out of the little guys. No, DA Willis can't pull out their fingernails; we haven't gone that far … yet. She can, though, drag them through a lot of lengthy legal proceedings that will cost them tens of thousands of dollars in attorneys' fees.
With eighteen names on the charge sheet with Trump, some of those eighteen will break, and sign whatever Fani Willis puts in front of them. Whatever they've signed will be enough for DA Willis to get a conviction.
Trump will get an orange jumpsuit; Fani Willis will get a speaking slot at the next Democratic Party National Convention — maybe a well-paid, well-cushioned berth in President Gavin Newsom's Department of Justice.
Or this particular prosecution may fall apart. It doesn't matter, there are others under way. No doubt there'll be even more, now that Georgia's shown the way. Sooner or later something will snag Trump, and he'll spend the rest of his life in jail.
Our ruling class will never forgive nor forget what Trump did. He won the 2016 election against their preferred candidate. He wasn't of their party; he hadn't even submitted himself to them for their stamp of approval as controlled opposition. He just came in from nowhere and took the White House. This must never happen again!
Is there something about the state of Georgia, that they're leading the charge here? It was in Georgia, I recall, that the Brunswick Three were tossed into the volcano last year, in what I have called — and still call — "the most appalling anti-white horror of recent years," in retribution for the death by stupidity of Ahmaud Arbery.
What's the matter with Georgia?
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: I mentioned back there the Biden administration's gross abuse of the parole authority granted by the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. In perfect fairness I should note that previous administrations have stretched the Act's parole provisions some, although none on anything like the scale of the current administration.
This current misuse of parole is not going unchallenged. Texas and twenty other states have challenged it in the federal courts, and hearings began this week in Victoria, Texas. Latest I've heard is that the feds, which is to say the U.S. Justice Department, wrapped up their arguments today, Friday.
The judge in the case — it's a federal case, remember — is U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee. That's good.
Not so good is that the Supreme Court back in June reversed one of Judge Tipton's rulings in a similar case, on the grounds that states don't necessarily have standing to challenge federal law enforcement in cases like this.
We shall see. It's at least encouraging that 21 out of our 50 states are pushing back against administrative lawlessness.
Item: I mentioned National Review magazine back there. This week they've been in the news, in a minor kind of way. August 20th they announced that instead of publishing every second week — which is to say, fortnightly — as of the November issue National Review will be a monthly.
There's some historical overlap with VDARE.com here, of course. Peter Brimelow used to be an editor at National Review. I myself was a Contributing Editor, with a monthly stipend but no salaried status. Steve Sailer published in the magazine back in the 1990s.
None of us would be allowed back in National Review's pages today, of course, on account of our race realism. That's OK: a magazine has the right to include or exclude as it pleases. Where magazine editorship is concerned, I favor totalitarian despotism. That is certainly how I would run a magazine if I got the chance.
The control is of course that magazine readers are likewise gifted with total power over what they choose to read or not read … and the free market sorts it all out.
Is something like that going on here? Is there less and less of a market for what National Review is selling?
I honestly have no idea. An occasional idle browse aside, I haven't read National Review for years.
If magazine readers are turning away from late-20th-century conservatism, I would guess that factor is at most giving a slight assist to a more general trend: declining interest in magazines in general.
Doctors' and Dentists' waiting rooms no longer put magazines out. In other venues where you once saw people reading magazines you now see them tapping away on their smartphones.
Even in the magazine room at my local municipal library, where you can browse any number of magazines for free, I am usually the only person doing so. If anyone else is sitting there, like as not he's absorbed with his smartphone.
Something's being lost here, but it's no use complaining. Technology is carrying us forward to a magazine-less, newspaper-less, eventually no doubt book-less world. Personally I think it's a loss; but Technology doesn't care what I think.
Item: Across the Atlantic in the U.K., anti-whiteness waxes ever stronger. Two items here.
First item: In the Womens' World Cup Soccer tournament, you'll recall, several members of the U.S. team stood mute when the band played our national anthem. To the delight of American patriots everywhere, they were then knocked out of the tournament on August 6th before reaching the quarter-finals.
England's team did reach the quarter-finals; then the semi-finals; then the final, where their opponents were Spain. Alas, England lost that final game.
(And before you ask: Yes, this is the England team, not the Britain team or the U.K. team. There is also a Scotland team and a Wales team, but both were knocked out in the pre-tournament qualifying rounds. Ireland? It gets complicated …)
So commiserations to the English gals. What does any of this have to do with race, though? Oh, don't be obtuse. Everything has something to do with race nowadays. You been living under a rock?
Meet 65-year-old Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, an entrepreneur and one of Britain's few black commercial farmers. Born in Jamaica, Mr Emmanuel-Jones moved to Britain as a child, and has been very successful there — so much so that three years ago he was elevated to the Order of the British Empire for services to British farming, so he can now write "MBE" after his name.
Mr Emmanuel-Jones was on a TV program discussing front page stories in the day's newspapers. When he came to a photograph of the women's team on the front page of the Daily Mirror he opined that, quotes:
What jumps out at you is that this doesn't represent diverse Britain. It's all these blonde blue-eyed girls — and I wish them well — but I do think we need to ask ourselves questions about why it is that there is a lack of diversity.
End quote.
I dunno, Mr Emmanuel-Jones, MBE. Perhaps they just picked the best players.
Item: Second item: London's mayor is 52-year-old Sadiq Khan, British-born to parents from Pakistan. Khan is not a bad sort: progressive leftist, of course, but not Ilhan Omar-level crazy. He does, though, have the unfortunate habit of saying things that people of his background instinctively think but, if they have any kind of public profile, mainly keep quiet about.
So it was last week when the mayor's official website published a picture of a family — Dad, Mom, boy, girl — strolling along the River Thames embankment, the parliament building in the background. All four members of the family were white. Above the picture was the title, presumably authorized by His Honor, quote: "Doesn't represent real Londoners." End quote.
There was a minor fuss in the comment threads, as indeed there was after Mr Emmanuel-Jones' remarks.
What do we learn from these two incidents? If you are an optimist you will take consolation in those comment threads showing there is still some resistance among white English people to their replacement.
If, on the other hand, you are a pessimist, you will conclude that Britain's colored settlers can less and less be bothered to hide their feelings about the legacy population they are replacing.
Item: Here's an opinion piece I liked in the August issue of Chronicles magazine. It's by Jack Trotter, title: Bye-bye, "Y'all."
Apparently — I hadn't noticed this myself, but I'll take the author's word for it — to address a mixed-sex group as "you guys," or even as "folks," is nowadays, quote, "sexist and binary," end quote. To fend off social ostracism, Americans in the Northern states are borrowing the term "y'all" from the folks … sorry, I mean from y'all, down South.
Having spent time in Texas this Spring, I'm perfectly familiar with "y'all." I can't see the inhabitants of New York City taking it up, though — not in the outer boroughs, in any case.
New Yorkers already have a perfectly good second-person plural pronoun of their own, suitable for assemblies of either sex, or both. Youse know what I mean, right?
07 — Signoff. That's all I have this week, listeners. Thanks as always for your time and attention, for your emails, suggestions, and donations.
Now I am going to unmask myself as … a homebody. After the wanderjahre of my youth I settled at last with my wife in a small one-family house on the North Shore of Long Island, the house we still occupy thirty-odd years later.
We have no wish to live anywhere else. We've raised our family here, and have all the associated memories to cherish. We love our house. We love our town. We love our neighbors … well, most of them.
It's an old house, though, and there's always maintenance to be done. Right now I'm repainting my garage; that's what brought these household thoughts to mind.
As a matter of fact the house is coming up to its centenary. I still have the realtor's brochure from when we purchased it in 1992; they listed the place as 65 years old. That would mean it was built in 1927, when Calvin Coolidge was President. I tell you: this house and me are a perfect match.
I have it in mind, sometime in the next year or so, to spend a day in our local town hall looking up the land-purchase and construction documents from when the house was built, so I can nail down the precise date. Then in 2027 we'll have a centenary party.
Am I working up to some signout music here? Of course I am; to a lovely sentimentsal old song, a favorite of mine from far back; a song that, like my house, was created even further back, in — yes! — 1927.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week. Here's Perry Como.
[Music clip: Perry Como, "Bless This House."]
