01:15 Trump in court again. (A wound that will not heal.)
04:35 The Nice White NPR Lady. (Is there an Irish factor?)
17:38 Minding other people’s business. (What’s Gaza to them?)
25:29 A constructive suggestion. (For crowd control.)
29:48 Voyager voyages on. (A miracle of 1970s tech.)
34:07 You mustn’t say ”illegal alien.” (A schoolboy finds out.)
35:46 Africa invades. (Guineans mob City Hall.)
37:32 Ladies’ bottoms worldwide. (Miss Bum Bum in Sweden?)
39:21 Ilhan Omar’s daughter homeless. (Plenty of suggestions.)
40:44 Signoff. (With the King.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! And no, this is not yet another freeze-dried podcast. This week's is farm-fresh, totally up to date.
I am in fact recording it at the VDARE Castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, as the annual VDARE Conference gets under way. The Friday evening dinner, socializing, and speeches have all been done. The tumult and the shouting have died, the Captains and the Kings have departed. Still stands thine ancient sacrifice: Derb's Friday evening early bedtime.
Yes, this is your crisply genial host John Derbyshire, glancing a cold eye over the week's news.
02 — Trump in court again. I should of course commence by saying something about the latest show trial of Donald Trump, which got properly under way this week in New York City.
Yes, I should; but words fail me. The whole thing is disgusting in the extreme — and to a patriot, shameful.
The disgust is inspired by the brazenness of our ruling class, the perfect shamelessness with which they stage these preposterous spectacles, as if daring us to laugh.
And then, their unquenchable anger and resentment at what happened in 2016, when their chosen presidential candidate lost to an upstart from outside the smug, snug world of professional politics; an upstart who had courted and won the votes of all the gap-toothed cross-burning Deplorables with their guns and their Bibles and their absurd conceit that this country is better than any other.
The ruling class just can't get over it. It's a wound that will not heal, like the one in Parsifal. I shudder to think what it will drive them to at last.
In conversation I've sometimes heard someone say, in regard to Trump: "Eh, they'll probably off him like they did Jeffrey Epstein." To which someone else quickly says, "Oh, come on! This isn't North Korea. We're not like that."
Are we not? I wish I could feel sure. The Donald should stay alert, even with his Secret Service bodyguard. They are government employees, after all, answering ultimately to Comrade Merrick Garland and his apparatchiks.
Just look at the glee with which the ruling class are tormenting Trump. The judge in that previous case, the one brought by Letitia Lard-butt, was bad enough, smirking and cackling while Trump sat there helpless. This one seems to be even worse, keeping Trump basically a prisoner in the courtroom so that he can't be out there campaigning for office.
To anyone who loves this country, who is proud of our constitution, who wants to look to our judges and our courts as models of civilized jurisprudence, it's all unbearably depressing.
It's double and triple depressing when you look at the polls and see that nearly half the population is fine with it and will vote for the ruling-class candidate in November. Democracy, eh.
So yes, I'm depressed. I'm going to talk about something else.
03 — The Nice White NPR Lady. Four podcasts ago — March 29th — I alerted listeners to the menace of the Nice White Lady.
My particular target there was Nice White Lady MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos' ex-wife. She came out of their divorce with boxcar-loads of money, which she is now showering around on groups and causes dear to the hearts of Nice White Ladies.
It goes without saying that we are not one of those causes. VDARE.com has not received a nickel from Ms Scott to assist us in our lawfare struggle against Letitia Land-whale. No: all that lovely Bezos boodle is going to Disabled Black Transgender Palestinians Against Climate Change and similar outfits. It's a tragedy.
Two podcasts before that — March 15th — I covered the Irish referendum on amending Ireland's Constitution. The idea of the amendments was to make that document more woke in matters relating to marriage and the family.
I took the opportunity to air once again the opinion of a friend from Southeast Europe who currently lives in Ireland, an opinion I formed myself when I lived there, that, quote: "Women are far less charming and far more bossy around here." End quote.
So could it be that, nestled within the Nice White Lady menace, there is a cadre even more menacing made up of Nice White Irish Ladies? I frame no hypotheses, I only pose the question.
This came to mind while I was reading about Katherine Maher, the CEO of National Public Radio. Our Steve Sailer did a good ethnicity check on the lady and yes, she's Catholic Irish, on both her father's and mother's sides.
And whatever her ancestors may have been doing in the cabins of Connemara, Ms Maher is today American ruling class. More precisely, to state it in the language of George Orwell's masterpiece: If not Inner Party, Katherine Maher is very well placed high up in the Outer Party.
Katherine Maher has a golden résumé, with stints and affiliations at UNICEF, the Atlantic Council, the World Economic Forum, the State Department, Stanford University, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She was chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. And, as of last month, she is CEO of National Public Radio.
End quote.
Ruling class, or what? I took that quote from an April 17th article by Chris Rufo in City Journal.
It is actually the opening paragraph of that article. Rufo goes on to give a very detailed account of the lady's outlook on human affairs, based on a survey he's done of her very prolific output on social media in recent years — nearly thirty thousand tweets.
It's a very good article, one of Rufo's best. I'd read you the whole thing, but this is not the place. Just allow me one more quote, from near the end. Quote:
The new CEO of NPR, then, is a left-wing ideologue who supports wide-scale censorship and considers the First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to sanitize the world of wrong opinions.
Maher is no aberration. She is part of a rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers who dominate the departments of university administration, human resources, and DEI. They are the matriarchs of the American Longhouse: they value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.
Each social gambit is designed for smothering the institution in ideology.
End quote.
Don't take it from me taking it from Rufo; listen to the lady herself. Here she is in one of the video clips Rufo captured in his exploration. Recall that before taking over NPR, Ms Maher ran Wikipedia.
[Clip: For all my love for Wikipedia, I'm not here to sell you on its perfection.
I do view it as pretty flawed. It is mostly accurate, yes; but it can also be inaccurate and incomplete at times. More importantly, though, it's as biased as we all are.
As a source built on other sources, it reflects the world that we have built. And its omissions reflect the world we could have lived. Its policies of sourcing are for preference to European models of reference to the written word — excluding, for example, oral traditions.
It is famously written by men — about eighty percent of its contributors — which means that there is so much missing from the other half of the human experience … Not just the other half; the inclusivity, the entirety of the human experience. It's not just that women and other nonbinary and non-gender-conforming individuals are missing from who writes Wikipedia, it also means that they're missing from the history and the experience of how society has been shaped and formed.
And of course it has been written by the victors — all of the peoples and the countries and the cultures that have historically not dominated our understanding of world history are also missing, in many ways, from the written word.]
Notice how her ideological orthodoxy slipped there for a moment. "The other half of the human experience …" So there are just two halves, men and … women? Only two sexes? [Scream.]
That is totally against the Party Line. Ms Maher quickly corrected herself, though: "the entirety of the human experience … women and other nonbinary and non-gender-conforming individuals …" That's better. You can keep your Party card, Comrade.
Why is Katherine Maher in the news? Well, because of an article posted at The Free Pess April 9th by Uri Berliner.
Who he? Berliner was a senior editor at National Public Radio, a 25-year veteran of that organization. While himself an old-line left-liberal and Trump-hater, he deplores the total loss of objectivity at NPR this past few years, the complete slide into ideological orthodoxy.
That phrase "this past few years" bears examining. Berliner gives audience-survey numbers for the years 2011 and 2023. Respondents were asked to identify themselves as very or somewhat conservative, middle of the road, very or somewhat liberal. Across those thirteen years self-identified conservative NPR listeners dropped from 26 percent to eleven; liberals soared up from 37 percent to 67.
Making fun of NPR's knee-jerk leftism has of course been a national sport for decades. Here, though, is a 25-year professional at the institution — which, please recall, gets funding from the federal government — here is Berliner lamenting that ideology has now totally taken over there. Quote from him:
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America.
End quote.
And what was it about that thirteen-year span, 2011 to 2023, that completed the ideological takeover? Another quote:
The rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair.
End quote.
Whether Donald Trump gets a second term or not, you can already make a case that where our national culture is concerned, he is perhaps the most consequential person of our time.
Well, recall that Katherine Maher became CEO of NPR last month. Uri Berliner posted his article at the beginning of this month. The new chief was not happy. She suspended Berliner from work for five days. On April 17th he resigned. That's the end of the story.
This segment has been much longer than usual for Radio Derb. Have I made too much out of a trivial controversy?
I don't think so. Aside from highlighting what a seismic shift took place in The U.S.A.'s political culture when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, there is also enough material here for a Ph.D. thesis on the differences between women and men: between the sex that leans more towards feelings, wo wo wo feelings, and the one — the only other one: you got it right first time, Colleen — that prefers facts, wo wo wo facts.
04 — Minding other people's business. I hope I haven't been coming across as a cranky misogynist with my comments about Nice White Ladies and the Irish subset. Cranky, maybe, but I'm not a misogynist.
I know women. I was raised by a loving mother, along with a smart and capable sister. I've studied alongside women. I've worked with women, and for women, and had women working for me. I married late, after dating and cohabiting with a fair range of women. I've now been married to the same woman for close to forty years, and I love her more than I love my life. I know women. I am not a misogynist.
We are two different sexes, that's all; biologically different. That includes the "BIP traits" — behavior, intelligence, and personality, all of which are rooted in biology.
(And I should add in parentheses, regarding those BIP traits, that there are ongoing disputes about the fine details, but I don't think any serious researchers doubt that there are differences.)
Men and women complement each other in all kinds of ways so that we can co-operate in keeping the human race going. I'm fine with it, okay?
So let's have no eye-rolling, listeners, when I observe — as many others have — that a surprising number of the students and professors demonstrating on-campus these past few days about Israel's war against Iranian-backed terrorists have been … women.
Which is highly surprising if you think about it. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis: they are all trained, funded, and encouraged by Iran, which is a strong contender for the title Most Misogynist Regime in the World.
A website posting on human rights in Iran says, quote:
Iran is the world's top executioner of women, with at least 22 executed in Iran in 2023.
End quote.
You may have heard of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was arrested in September 2022 for not wearing her headscarf. She wasn't formally executed; but she died in police custody, probably from a severe beating. Something to think about, girls, as you carefully adjust your Palestinian-headscarf fashion accessory?
Islam in all generality is misogynistic, and seems always to have been. The 19th-century Islamophile Sir Richard Burton reported that a pious Muslim man, in his prayers, thanks God that he was not born a woman.
So what are all these young American women doing, swarming Ivy League campuses to shriek "I AM HAMAS!" Are they nuts?
Well, some high proportion of them are stupid. If you sample video clips of them on social media, being asked why they support Hamas, the main thing that jumps out at you is how clueless they are about the events that have prompted their demonstrations. "From the river to the sea"? Not one in ten of them could name the river.
And why should they not be clueless? What is Gaza to them, or them to Gaza?
Genocide? The Washington Post used exactly that word this week in a report on the ongoing civil war in Sudan, where Arab armies are engaged in a Final Solution of the problem they have with non-Arab Sudanese people. That's real genocide and it's been going on for months. Where were your protests?
So why is Gaza such an issue? Because our country, the U.S.A., gives money to Israel? We give money to Hamas, too.
In 2023 the U.S.A. federal government sent $422 million dollars in donations to UNRWA, the United Nations welfare agency for Palestinians. Hamas was the official government of Gaza; they got a huge wad of that money … and spent it on guns, bombs, and missiles — the part that Hamas leaders didn't just shovel off into their Swiss bank accounts or grudgingly hand out as welfare to their subjects.
We were UNRWA's — which is to say, the Palestinians — biggest donor by far. The second biggest, Germany, only gave half as much. Palestinians have been dining out on your taxes and mine, and committing mayhem with them, for seventy years. And you're protesting aid to Israel?
As an America First isolationist I would like my federal government to concentrate on its duties to the American people: to keep our country strong, prosperous, and as harmonious as possible. My ideal would be for us to have nothing at all to do with brutal squabbles elsewhere in the world — to mind our own business.
That's an ideal. Its purity, as is common with ideals, has to be set aside now and then. We have trade routes to protect and civilizational affinities tugging at us. If some hostile power harms us we have to hit back.
We should be as aloof as we can, though, and stay out of other people's conflicts.
What's that you say? "We should promote worldwide democracy and human rights?" For goodness' sake: Haven't we learned anything since the Wilson administration?
05 — A modest proposal. Radio Derb, as regular listeners know, is not all negativity. We do have constructive suggestions to offer. Here's one of them.
I spent a lot of time at Columbia University twenty years ago, when I was writing books about math. Columbia has a very good math library. I plundered it for my data. I didn't explore much else of the university's buildings, but I crossed the campus a lot. I thought it well-tended and easy on the eye.
It hasn't been easy on the eye this past few days, with the pro-Hamas protests going on. The grassed area has been covered in cheap tents, strangely uniform in their appearance and placing.
Across town in Brooklyn, meanwhile, a mob of pro-Hamas demonstrators shut down the Eastern Parkway. The same thing happened in Seattle: a pro-Hamas mob shut down one of the city's main streets.
Shutting down highways is a big thing for demonstrators nowadays. These Hamas nitwits aside, we've seen it with the climate cultists sitting down in the roadway, sometimes gluing themselves to it, in hopes of persuading us to stop using oil.
In Europe and the British Isles there's a different style of street-blocking: Muslims gathering in hundreds, sometimes thousands, to pray together in some main road. This is now a major nuisance.
Don't they have mosques for community prayers? you may ask. Of course they do. In Birmingham, England, where I spent some of my childhood, there is now a mosque on every corner.
So why are they praying in the streets like this? you ask. Why do you think? To advertise their numbers, their strength, and their invulnerability.
Yes, they are invulnerable. The police in London don't dare touch them. April 23rd is the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England. A group of English patriots, waving — and some of them also wearing — the flag of St. George, assembled near the Prime Minister's residence in Downing Street, waving their flags and singing. The cops moved in with billy clubs swinging. When Muslims hold a demonstration, the cops stand by and watch.
All right: demonstrators, unwanted and unpopular, defiling college campuses and blocking highways. Isn't there anything we can do about it?
There certainly is, if we have the will. Here's my constructive suggestion: water cannon.
I don't know how many American and European police precincts have water cannon in their armories, but it should be a lot more. They are great for crowd dispersal. They'd be even greater if fitted out with refrigeration units so the water they're firing is icy cold.
I don't understand why we don't see water cannon in use more often. The mob is dispersed, nobody gets hurt, and water doesn't cost much. If I were mayor of a city — especially a city with a lot of Muslims — I'd have water-cannon units on permanent patrol.
06 — Good news … from space. The problem with news is, most of it's bad. Not all, though. Here's something to warm your heart and make you smile. Well, it warmed my heart and made me smile.
Since childhood I've been a science geek, and particularly an enthusiast for the exploration of space. I followed the U.S. space program keenly, rejoicing at the triumphs and weeping — well, shaking my head sadly — at the disasters.
Here is Voyager 1, an unmanned spacecraft that we — I mean, NASA — launched 46½ years ago to explore the outer Solar System. The little critter worked beautifully, sending back to us clear pictures of Jupiter and Saturn. Then it headed on right out of the Solar System into interstellar space, where it is still voyaging on.
Right now it's far, far out. How far? Well, the furthest member of the Solar System family you know by name is most likely Pluto. At its furthest from the Sun, Pluto is about 4½ billion miles out. Little Voyager 1 is more than three times further away than that. And it's still in the news.
Why is it in the news? Because it stopped sending back data to us last November. A chip in one of its onboard computers had failed. With terrific ingenuity the flight team figured out a work-around and implemented it, sending signals to Voyager to get it working again.
April 20th Voyager responded. It can now resume its mission, perhaps to the fifty-year mark. A repair job, done across fifteen billion miles of space! Incredible!
And Voyager is 1970s technology. Did those guys build to last, or what? Note the Voyager launch date: September 1977, shortly after the first Apple personal computer was sold. Bill Gates was 21, Steve Jobs was 22, Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even born until seven years later.
Voyager 1 was the second of a pair, launched a couple of weeks apart. I was living in New York at the time and had a vague plan to go down to Florida to watch one or both of the launches. Something got in the way, though, and I never did. Reading today about the dear little thing — Voyager weighs less than the smallest small car — takes me back to my 1970s self and to 1970s America — a nation no healthy young science geek could help but fall in love with.
Well done, superbly well done, those techies at JPL! Onward and outward with Voyager!
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Here's one I've lifted from American Renaissance, who lifted it from The Carolina Journal of April 15th.
One of my pet peeves, frequently aired in these podcasts, is all the frowning and censoring at the phrase "illegal alien." It's a perfectly good descriptor, used in federal legislation. Patriotic Americans should use it loud and clear at every opportunity.
Here's one who did: a 16-year-old scholar at Central Davidson High School in Lexington, North Carolina.
On a vocabulary assignment in his English class, this young man was assigned the word "alien." Trying to clarify the teacher's instructions, the lad asked, quote: "Like space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards?" End quote.
All the heresy alarms went off. The lad was suspended from school for three days on a charge of "racism."
His parents seem to be getting lawyered up. I haven't heard of any further developments, but I hope they sue and take the school district for a big pile of cash.
Item: This one speaks for itself. I'll just read it off to you. New York Post, April 16th, headline: "Over 1,000 African migrants swarm NYC's City Hall over supposed falsely promised green cards." Opening paragraphs, quote:
About 1,300 African migrants gathered outside City Hall Tuesday morning hoping to appear at a hearing on the black experience in the city shelter system — with some saying they were promised work visas or green cards if they showed.
Only 250 people were allowed inside for the 10 a.m. hearing, while the hundreds of others who flocked downtown were left outside in a park, where footage showed them chanting and cheering.
The crowd was mostly made up of new arrivals from Guinea, in West Africa, and were apparently drawn to City Hall by an activist group, a source told The Post.
End quote.
"Migrants" of course means illegal aliens. From Guinea. In West Africa.
Item: I was somewhat less than complimentary back there about New York State Attorney General Letitia James. I should probably be more careful if I don't want a grueling review of my state tax returns … which I don't.
Here's some related news from the ever-reliable London Daily Mail, April 12th. It reports a world-wide survey on the size of women's butts. Sample quote:
South Africa took the top spot, with an average hip size of 41.73 inches, followed by Argentina (41 inches) and — perhaps surprisingly — Sweden (40.9 inches).
The US failed to crack the top five, while the UK didn't even make the list.
Brazil, long considered the world capital of big rear ends, was not included in the dataset.
End quote.
Note the impish reference to how the U.S.A. failed to crack the top five. Get that?
I look forward to reading that the Miss Bum Bum pageant has been moved to Sweden. Those gloomy Scandinavians could use some cheering up.
Item: Comment threads of the week were those that followed postings about Ilhan Omar's 21-year-old daughter being suspended from her college classes and kicked out of her dorm. The lass had got herself arrested last week at one of the Columbia University pro-Hamas events.
"I'm homeless!" she wailed to Teen Vogue. Quote:
I was a little bit frantic, like, where am I going to sleep? Where am I gonna go? And also all of my shit is thrown in a random lot. It's pretty horrible.
End quote.
The utter scorn and lack of sympathy on social media was a joy to read. One of the most popular suggestions was that she marry one of her brothers and let him look after her.
And excuse me; but if she's 21 years old, why is she talking to Teen Vogue? Your teens end when you turn twenty, don't they? Perhaps not, if you're as well-connected as this lady.
08 — Signoff. And that's it, ladies and gents. Now I shall go to bed. Tomorrow I have the singular honor of introducing Steve Sailer to the conference, and I want to be wide-awake and chipper for that.
Here's an old favorite of mine to see us out. It's so much of a favorite I feel sure I must have used it as signoff music before. Let me check … yep: January 2019.
That's five years ago, though. Time for another airing. Here I offer it in tribute to our president, Joe Biden.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Elvis, "Don't."]
