00:46 Jailhouse justice? (It happens.)
05:22 Schadenfreude in Bed-Stuy. (Yes, they are communists.)
14:20 Oh, Canada, cont. (”A society wallowing in unutterable ignorance.”)
19:33 How black was the Black Prince? (U.K. makes stuff up.)
27:57 Biden builds wall, deports illegals! (But SCOTUS saves OPT.)
38:10 Meet Miss Southern Rhodesia. (A triumph of Diversity.)
40:36 Our criminal justice system. (Eh, let ’em out.)
42:48 Justice at last. (27 years on Death Row.)
44:36 The ChiCom memory hole. (”Who controls the past …”)
47:04 Brits ban smartphones. (Alas, only in schools.)
48:16 Signoff. (With Hank.)
01—Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners, from your vituperatively genial host John Derbyshire.
Lots to tell you this week, so lets' proceed. First, a segment on jailhouse justice.
02—Jailhouse justice. A couple of weeks ago I passed comment on the stabbing to death in a Texas prison of serial murderer Billy Chemirmir. Chemirmir, a black man from Kenya, was serving two life sentences for murdering two elderly women, aged 81 and 87, apparently in order to steal their jewelry. He almost certainly murdered twenty more other old ladies, mainly in retirement homes, for the same reason.
Chemirmir was killed by a cellmate September 19th in an East Texas prison. The comment I passed was that none of the news reports that I saw mentioned the fact that Chemirmir was an illegal alien.
So Chemirmir was killed by a cellmate, 39-year-old Wyatt Busby, also serving a prison sentence for murder: fifty years, for a fatal stabbing in 2016.
Why did Busby kill Chemirmir? We haven't been told and I don't know. I only want to record that I have been reading David Skarbek's 2014 book The Social Order of the Underworld, which is about prison gangs, mostly in Texas and California.
Skarbek opens his book with a true story from Marin, California. In 2009 a drunk motorcyclist named Schaefer, blood alcohol at twice the legal limit, with a dozen prior convictions, hit and killed a nine-year-old girl and seriously injured her father. Convicted of second-degree murder and gross vehicular manslaughter, he got 24 years to life.
Ten days after arriving at San Quentin Schaefer was stabbed to death by a fellow prisoner, name of Frank Souza. Why? Quote from Skarbek's book:
When authorities asked him why he did it, Souza responded, [inner quote], "All I got to say, nine-year-old girl," [end inner quote]. In court, he explained, "The innocence of a child will be defended at all costs." …
Schaefer's death was no accident, nor was Souza's role in the murder. The prison gangs that control California's inmates carefully orchestrated the events on that brisk July morning.
End quote.
I should add that there was no race angle there: Schaefer and Souza were both white; in fact Souza belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood. Nor was there any race angle to the Chemirmir and Busby case: both of them are black.
So perhaps the September 19th killing of Billy Chemirmir by Wyatt Busby was another case of jailhouse justice. Perhaps Busby, like Souza, felt that old ladies in retirement homes, just like nine-year-old children, should, quote, "be defended at all costs," end quote. And perhaps he was encouraged, and the killing orchestrated, by a prison gang.
I have no idea if that is the case. After reading David Skarbek's book, though, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
03—Schadenfreude in Bed-Stuy. And here, on Monday this week, was another death by stabbing. This was 4 a.m. Monday morning. A young white man named Ryan Carson was sitting on a bus-stop bench with his girlfriend, name of Claudia Morales, white-Hispanic. Carson was 31 years old, would have been 32 today if still alive. I don't know the age of Ms Morales.
An 18-year-old black man named Brian Dowling was making noise and trouble a few yards away on the otherwise-deserted street, kicking over parked scooters. Dowling had no actual criminal record, but a paper trail of "incidents" suggesting mental instability.
Dowling saw Carson and Morales looking at him. He yelled at them. Ryan Carson got up and walked over with the apparent intention to calm him down. Dowling stepped forward to confront Carson, then stabbed him to death.
This happened in Bedford-Stuyvesant, "Bed-Stuy" for short, a neighborhood of Brooklyn borough in New York City, with a history I think could be fairly described as "colorful." When I first lived in New York City in the early 1970s Bed-Stuy was a stinking black slum, known around town as "Little Harlem." Everyone told me to stay well clear of Bed-Stuy.
However, the neighborhood has been considerably gentrified since then. Current demographics are roughly half black, a quarter white, the other quarter Asian and Other.
There are complications within that demographic. This is New York City: property is expensive. Most of the white population and a good share of the blacks are young professionals renting their apartments, or sometimes entire houses. They are woke as all get out.
There's a big underclass, though. Most of it's black, left over from "Little Harlem" days, living mainly in public housing. There's a poor white element too: bohemian types scraping along as best they can with loans from what my personal accountant calls "M and D Bank."—the Bank of Mom and Dad.
Politically, Bed-Stuy is solid blue. It's represented by Hakeem Jeffries, a Mulatto-Mafia type who is current Minority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. There may be one or two Republican voters in Bed-Stuy but you'd need special equipment to detect them.
So that's the incident: who, when, and where. Why is it particularly newsworthy?
The young man who got stabbed, Ryan Carson, was a very active and busy Social Justice Warrior. Here's the opening paragraph from the New York Post report of his death, quote:
The 32-year-old Brooklyn man fatally stabbed by an unhinged suspect in a "horrific, brutal murder" Monday was remembered by friends as a big-hearted activist and talented poet—who once talked a mugger down from trying to rob him.
End quote.
Further down the Post report we read that Carson once walked 500 miles across New York State to raise awareness of the need for legislation to set up a drug overdose prevention facility in the state.
So yes: a real Social Justice Warrior, who, uh, walked the walk.
Not surprising, therefore, that social media have been heavy with Schadenfreude this past week—with anti-wokesters jeering that Ryan Carson reaped what he had helped to sow.
All that Schadenfreude has generated its own reaction: commenters, including some who are also anti-woke, scolding the jeerers for being vindictive, anti-Christian, cold-hearted, and so on.
Where is Radio Derb on this? I'm anti-woke, of course, but with the scolders. Sure: Ryan Carson's misguided idealism did much harm—including, finally, to himself. He was a victim of his own luxury beliefs.
Yet who knows? He seems to have been smart enough that he might have seen the truth at last. I myself was considerably woke into my mid-twenties, just five or six years short of Carson's age at death. "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee."
All that said, I hope I may be excused for extracting one small VDARE point from this regrettable incident.
I mentioned Claudia Morales, the girlfriend Ryan Carson was with when he got killed. She's been getting a lot of social media coverage herself, based on her own online postings for a couple of years back. A picture of her wearing a sleeveless top emblazoned with the slogan "ACAB" has shown up all over. That's from the anti-cop crowd: "ACAB" stands for "all cops are bastards."
That's not the picture that makes my point, though. The picture that makes my point is one of Ms Morales kneeling behind her car—it's a late-model Volvo—to advertise her custom license plate. The plate reads "K-MARX," K-hyphen-M-A-R-X.
So here's my point. We here at VDARE.com sometimes refer to far-left persons as "communist." We get some pushback on that, along the lines of: "C'mon, Derb; these people are nuts but they're not communists. Nobody believes that old Marx-Lenin stuff any more."
Well, there in that license plate is evidence to the contrary. Yes: these extreme wokesters are communists. They believe what Marx and Lenin believed, and Mao Tse-tung's Red Guards, and the enragés of the French Revolution and millenarian fanatics back through history. This stuff never dies; it will always be with us.
04—Oh, Canada! In last week's podcast I covered the resignation of Anthony Rota, Speaker of the Canadian parliament, after he'd urged the house to applaud a 98-year-old Ukrainian guy who'd fought against Russia in WW2. Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined in the applause.
That being the Eastern Front of the war, the Ukrainian gent was of course fighting in a German unit—in fact an SS unit. I remarked, concerning those applauding Canadians, quote:
How could they have been so dumb as not to check the historical background there? It took me twenty minutes on the internet. Why didn't Trudeau have someone do that? Or Speaker Rota? Or one—one, at least—of the host of parliamentarians who applauded Mr Hunka?
End quote.
I felt a bit guilty about that. I consider myself pro-Canada, to the degree that it makes sense to favor something that big and varied. Visiting eight years ago, Mrs Derbyshire and I experienced only courtesy and kindness from Canadians. On reflection it seemed a bit churlish of me to have described their entire parliament as dumb.
Well, now I feel much better. That is after reading Douglas Murray's very spirited op-ed in the Canadian newspaper National Post on Tuesday. Title of the op-ed: Canada's descent into ignorance shocks the world. Subtitle: "An unbearable stupidity has trickled down from the Liberal government."
Murray is unsparing. Canada is, he says, quote, "a society wallowing in unutterable ignorance," end quote. The rest of the world, he says, now finds Canada, when it thinks of it at all, as, quote:
a country that used to be renowned for its liberalism now most noted for its proto-authoritarianism. A country whose leaders think they can root out nastiness wherever they find it and are not even informed enough not to give a standing ovation to a former member of the SS.
End quote.
I could go on quoting Murray's op-ed all day, but I'll just urge you to look it up for yourself. Just go to "nationalpost.com, slash, opinion." Talk about "the vituperative arts"—oh yeah. Fans of dissident Canadian psychologist Professor Jordan Peterson in particular will enjoy it.
If, after reading Douglas Murray's National Post op-ed, you are still not convinced that the entire nation of Canada has gone bonkers, the following is a press release from Ontario Principals' Council. I picked it up on Twitter. That's "Ontario as in "most populous and second-largest province of Canada" and "principals" as in "school principals." Here's a quote from Ontario Principals' Council, quote:
In October we celebrate 2SLGBTQQIA+ Month, recognizing the history of the diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender & queer communities. We encourage our schools &' students to become allies & stand up against discrimination, bullying & harassment.
End quote.
Oh, Canada!
05—How black was the Black Prince? Meanwhile in Britain, the U.S.A.'s cultural colony across the Atlantic, October is Black History Month. The Brits are going nuts over it. The general belief over there nowadays seems to be: However loud those Yanks shout, we have to shout louder.
Where race is concerned the Brits are at a disadvantage in that shouting match, in that blacks have played only a very insignificant role in British history—no role at all, really. Until the middle 20th century there were never more than a handful of blacks in Britain, and race slavery was never legal there.
Race slavery was legal in some of Britain's transatlantic colonies, although on nothing like the scale it was practiced in the colonies of Spain and Portugal. It was there in Britain's colonies, though, up to the 1830s; so present-day Brits can feel pleasantly guilty about that.
So how can today's Brits prove their moral worthiness to be subjects of the great imperial power across the sea? Well, they can make stuff up. That's what they're doing.
The BBC, Britain's state broadcasting system, has taken the lead. Two years ago they put out a music video titled "Been Here from the Start," which you can watch on YouTube. The thing is two minutes long, if you don't mind sacrificing that much of your time to ignorant idiocy.
And then there's a best-selling book for kids, title Brilliant Black History, telling the little Britkids that, sample quote, "Britain has been a mostly white country for a lot less time than it has been a mostly black country," end quote.
A favorite of all these anti-white propaganda productions is Cheddar Man, the oldest human fossil yet found in Britain. DNA analysis has found that Cheddar Man had dark or darkish skin. "See?" crow the anti-white crowd, "We've been here from the very beginning!" (You can see Cheddar Man around twenty seconds in to the BBC YouTube production I mentioned.)
That's just scientifically illiterate. All the nonwhite people singing along in that BBC video plainly have some, at least, sub-Saharan black ancestry. There's no evidence that Cheddar Man did. So far as we can tell, he or his ancestors walked into Britain from Northern Europe, across land that has since been submerged by the North Sea. He was no more related genetically to today's sub-Saharan Africans than I am, or Joe Biden is, or Vladimir Putin is, or Xi Jinping, or the President of India …
Cheddar Man lived around 8000 B.C. His people were hunter-gatherers; in fact paleoanthropologists refer to them and their relatives in Europe as "WHG" for "Western Hunter-Gatherers." The men went out hunting fauna; the women stayed home gathering fruit and nuts.
The single greatest revolution in human history took place in the Neolithic, the New Stone Age, when mankind went from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming. That revolution was brought to Britain from Europe around 4000 B.C. It seems not to have been kind to the WHG descendants of Cheddar Man. The genetic evidence suggests a Great Replacement, if not a genocide; the European farmers just annihilated the hunter-gatherers, or near enough.
These Neolithic farmers, by the way, had lighter skin than the WHG and often blonde hair. One and a half thousand years later they suffered their own Great Replacement when the so-called Bell Beaker people arrived, again from Europe, bringing the Bronze Age with them, and another genocide.
It's fascinating stuff, but sub-Saharan Africans played no part in it.
All this Black History Month propaganda is as bogus as that. It either finds some insignificant black person in British history and inflates them to a figure of tremendous importance, or it seizes on some casual witness remark and inflates it to mean something it couldn't possibly have meant.
Example of the first: Mary Seacole, a free black entrepreneur from Jamaica who ran a British officers' mess in the Crimean War.
Example of the second: Philippa of Hainault, who was the wife of King Edward III of England back in the 14th century. As well as being Queen of England, she was a great-granddaughter of the King of France. Her genealogy can be traced back for centuries; none of it is sub-Saharan African.
However, the marriage with Edward was arranged before he was King, when he and Philippa were in their early teens. Edward's father thought an alliance with Hainault, sealed with a marriage, would be a good move in the chess game of medieval alliances. He sent a bishop over to Hainault (in present-day Belgium) to check out the daughters of the ruling family there. The bishop reported of Philippa that, quote, "she is brown of skin all over, much like her father," end quote.
So now they're telling us she was a negress. If you scoff, they play their trump card: "Don't you know she was the mother of the Black Prince"? For goodness' sake!
06—Biden builds wall, deports illegals! Strange things are happening on the immigration front. The Biden administration is going to build a wall! Before you start cheering, please note that they're only going to build a 20-mile section in Starr County along the Rio Grande in Texas. That's one percent of our two-thousand-mile border, so … yeah.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas told us on Thursday that, quote:
The United States Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley Sector is an area of high illegal entry. Therefore, I must use my authority … to install additional physical barriers and roads in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.
End quote.
Hey, that's great, Mr Secretary, but … hasn't there been "high illegal entry" for, like, coming up to three years now? You only just noticed?
Not content to stun and confuse us with that, the DHS also told us yesterday that it will start deporting Venezuelan illegals. This, they said, quote, "follows a decision by authorities from Venezuela to accept the return of Venezuelan nationals," end quote.
Well, isn't that special. Presumably we leaned on the Venezuelan government in some way to extract that favor—in some way we were never able to lean on them before. We, the U.S.A.: a third of a billion people, the world's greatest commercial, financial, and military power, versus them, Venezuela, a craphole excuse of a country with thirty million people not yet starved to death or murdered, ranked 159th in the world on per capita GDP.
What's going on here? Has the DNC discovered that even Democrat voters are getting wise to the Great Replacement? Did the Mayors of big-blue cities like New York and Chicago vow to commit collective seppuku if Biden didn't give them a break?
Or has some new universal principle kicked in, a principle saying that henceforth every U.S. President, when 68 percent of the way through his first term, must build a few miles of border wall? After all, this is about the point in Donald Trump's presidency when he started building wall.
Whatever, it's delicious to see the open-borders crowd moaning and squirming. Here was the response from Mexico front man and U.S. Representative—and, I can't resist mentioning, recent carjacking victim—Henry Cuellar, quote:
A border wall is a 14th century solution to a 21st century problem. It will not bolster border security in Starr County. I continue to stand against the wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars on an ineffective border wall.
End quote.
Having some acquaintance with actual history I can, if he likes, tell Rep. Cuellar what an actual 14th century solution to a mass invasion across a nation's border would have looked like. He can get in touch with me at VDARE.com.
Meanwhile, far from the southern border, a sheriff in Michigan is ringing the alarm on well-organized gangs of illegal aliens from South America coming in to the U.S.A. to commit burglaries. It's happening all over, says the sheriff. Quote from him:
Usually, it's two or three people working together, with one of them stationed outside as a driver … around the country, in some situations, they've been caught in areas with no bail anymore, and they get out and then get arrested again. The prosecutor in one case I happen to know about, in Nassau County, New York, said they actually laughed at her as they walked out of court.
End quote.
Nassau County? Hey, that's the next county to mine! Time to get down to the indoor range for some handgun practice.
And there's been some more bad news on the legal immigration front. This concerns a program called OPT, that's Optional Practical Training, a gift to the U.S.A. from the Obama administration.
The deal is that foreign students in American colleges can work here in the U.S.A. for one year after college on terms hugely advantageous to employers. The employer doesn't have to pay them any fixed minimum wage. They don't have to pay them any wage; they can hire them in as unpaid interns. If the foreigner's degree is in STEM—science, technology, engineering, or math—they can work for three years on these terms.
Of course, employers love this. Did I mention that the employer doesn't have to pay any social security taxes on OPT workers?
What's in it for the foreign worker? To get the employer to sponsor him for a future real work permit. Then, green card and citizenship. It's back door immigration.
The colleges love OPT too, of course. Foreign students pay full tuition, see?
So there's something to like here for everyone; well, everyone except U.S. citizen graduates. Why hire those suckers when you can get an OPT from the Philippines for next to nothing—a worker who'll be desperate to please you so you'll sponsor his green card?
OK, here's the bad news. Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, which represents STEM employees in the U.S., has been challenging the OPT program since 2014 on the grounds that it harms citizen graduates and is anyway illegal, having been created by regulatory fiat by the Department of Homeland Security, not by law passed in Congress.
The litigation eventually got to the U.S. Supreme Court. Monday this week the Court refused to hear the case, so … it's dead.
Quote from one of the legal websites reporting this, quote:
This is good news for the foreign nationals who highly value the post-graduation programs and companies in the STEM industries who continue to struggle to find enough highly skilled workers.
End quote.
Yo, counsellor: Perhaps if STEM graduates could look forward to a job market that is hospitable to them, instead of to one that favors low-paid—or even un-paid—foreigners, those companies would have all the job applications they need from American graduates.
Cast down your bucket where you are!
Listener: Any time you think that illegal immigration is an intractable mess, take a look at the legal variety. It's every bit as bad; but in a way that's less visible, more insidious, and at least as destructive.
07—Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Yes, I know: I haven't given you news about the Miss Bum Bum beauty pageant for a while. I shall look into what's happening there and bring you a report.
Speaking of beauty pageant news, though, I do have an item from Southern Rhodesia. This is kind of interesting. I, er, … Sorry, one of the sound technicians is gesticulating … Oh yes, right; it's not called Southern Rhodesia any more. It's called … what? Remind me, please. I can never remember …
[Voice: Zimbabwe!]
Oh, right: Zimbabwe. Thanks, Mohamed. And about sponsoring your green card: we're still looking at it. I'll let you know.
Yes, Zimbabwe. September 16th they crowned 21-year-old Brooke Bruk-Jackson their national beauty queen, Miss Universe Zimbabwe. She will be representing her country, Rhodes … I'm sorry, Zimbabwe at the 2023 Miss Universe pageant on November 18th in El Salvador.
This is Zimbabwe's first crowned beauty queen in 22 years, and … she's white! Her skin isn't even brownish, like Cheddar Man's or Philippa of Hainault's; it's as white as snow, as white as a Barack Obama campaign team.
Since only two percent of Rhodes … sorry, sorry: of Zimbabwe's population is not black African, this has caused considerable grumbling.
What's the matter with people down there? Don't they know that diversity is their strength?
Item: Our criminal justice system is way, way too lenient. If you don't know this, I offer you the case of 32-year-old Jason Dean Billingsley.
Billingsley, now in custody, was arrested September 27th for the murder of tech CEO Pava LaPere in her Baltimore apartment building five days earlier. Billinglsey had tricked her into admitting him, raped, mutilated, and killed her, leaving her body on the building roof.
Just two days before that Billingsley had tricked his way into the apartment of a couple who he then beat and tied up. He raped the female, then set them both on fire.
All this happened less than a year after Billingsley had been released from prison on good behavior. He was in jail for a violent rape in June 2013. For that he got a 30-year sentence, but 16 of those years were suspended on probation. The other 14 years should have kept him locked up until 2027; but as I said, he was released on good behavior.
I dunno about "suspended on probation"; this critter should have been suspended on a rope. We could still do it, if we had the sense … which unfortunately we don't.
Item: On the same theme: goodbye, Michael Duane Zack. Zack was executed by lethal injection in Florida for murdering two women in 1996. An anti-death-penalty group has posted a final testament from him expressing remorse and forgiveness—forgiveness, that is, of Governor DeSantis and the state Clemency Board for having turned down his appeals.
As I have said before, execution by lethal injection is a thoroughly dishonest practice. If the state can lawfully take a felon's life—and I think it should be able to—that is a violent act. It should look and sound like a violent act, not pretend to be some kind of medical procedure. What cowards, what liars and pussies we are!
And twenty-seven years between crime and punishment? I hereby propose a Constitutional Amendment, thus: If, one month after a capital sentence has been handed down, the felon has not been dispatched, he should be set free with a cash award equal to twenty times the national median household income at the time of sentencing.
Item: Here's a little gem. At the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China this week, the women's 100-meters hurdles race was won by a young lady named Lin Yuwei. News sources showed a very touching picture of Ms Lin embracing one of her competitors.
In the picture we see the embracing hurdlers sideways on. Each, on the hip, is wearing a large black-on-white label showing the number of her lane. Ms Lin was Lane 6; the lady she's embracing, Lane 4. So the picture shows a 6 and a 4, prominently, in that order.
Within just a few hours that picture was purged from all Chinese media and social media.
Why? Because Chinese people remember key moments in their history by the numbers of month and day. So 6-4 indicates June 4th. That was the day in 1989 when tanks went in to crush the protests in Tiananmen Square.
The ChiComs permit no mention of, or reference to, that in any published materials. It has been very comprehensively flushed down the memory hole. No Chinese person under the age of thirty knows anything about it.
Petty? Sure; but that's how totalitarians keep control. My guess is, we'll find out.
What's that you say? I included this item just in hope of stirring up interest in my novel about 6-4? Now that would be petty of me. Shame on you for thinking it!
Item: Just one more. The Brits have banned smartphones in schools. This is from an official government website, quote:
New guidance from the Department for Education will back head teachers in banning mobile phone use throughout the school day, including at break times, to tackle disruptive behaviour and online bullying while boosting attention during lessons. It aims to support the wider work the government is doing to raise standards in schools by increasing students' focus and reducing distractions.
End quote.
Well, it's a good start. Smartphones should of course be banned from many, many places: restaurants, sidewalks, buses, subways, and planes, … many, many. But baby steps, baby steps.
08—Signoff. That's all, listeners. Thank you for your time and attention, your emails and kind donations.
I see I haven't played any Hank Williams music at signoff since January 2021. That's way too long. Here's Hank with something nice and cheerful. Let's just pause to wonder how a guy with such a train wreck of a life managed to come up with happy music.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Hank Williams, "Hey, Good Lookin'."]
