03:30 The inversion of all values. (Cops bad, criminals good.)
09:10 Country music outrage. (Whites can′t sing about violence.)
14:52 The oldest social divide. (Country bumpkin, city slicker.)
20:55 New York City′s bumpkin mayor. (A man with no plan.)
26:37 Was COVID a race-targeting bioweapon? (Speculate carefully.)
31:55 From the Halls of Congress. (Clear and elegant.)
38:26 Tony Bennett, RIP. (My one encounter.)
39:49 Xi spurns Kerry, hugs Kissinger. (Wormwood and gall.)
42:08 Ukraine war: a succinct summary. (Needless, bathetic, disgusting.)
43:01 Signoff. (What happened to whistling?)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a clip from Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 1, which I occasionally open with as a change from No.2; and this is of course your urbanely genial host John Derbyshire, surveying the week's events from a National Conservative point of view.
July 20th came and went with some scattered lamentations on its being the 54th anniversary of our landing on the Moon.
The occasion for lamentation was, that if you compare our progress in manned space flight across those 54 years, 1969 to 2023, with our progress in manned air flight across the 54 years from the Wright Brothers first venture in 1903 to the mass-market international air travel of 54 years later, 1957 … well, there is no comparison. All else equal, we should by now be taking summer vacation breaks on the moons of Saturn, but … we're not.
All else has not of course been equal. There's much to be said on the other side of the subject. I've said some of it myself, so spare me the emails. Then, if you don't currently own a copy of Mr & Mrs Charles Murray's 1989 book Apollo: The Race to the Moon, go to Amazon or AbeBooks and get one: it's definitive.
For us Old China Hands this year's July 20th has another melancholy aspect: it marks exactly fifty years since Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong at age 32. Given that Lee was one of the fittest people on this planet, was not ailing in any obvious way and did not suffer an accident or act of violence, his death has been a bit of a mystery.
Radio Derb had a lengthy comment on the matter five years ago; you can read the transcript on my website. Executive summary: Lee most likely died from heat stroke. It was awful hot in Hong Kong at the time.
It was awful hot here in Long Island five years ago when I passed that comment; and it's been awful hot recently all over the U.S.A. People die of heat stroke when it's this hot — more people than you'd think. Stay cool, listeners.
02 — The inversion of all values. How d'you feel about public acts of violence, listener?
In our currently prevailing state ideology, public violence is deplorable, the perps to be hunted down and savagely punished, only when the act is committed by bad people against good people, as defined in that state ideology.
When good people are violent towards bad people, though, that is commendable — righteous resistance against systemic injustice.
The category of bad people, as thus defined, embraces all working-class white men living in the countryside or in small towns. Let's call them "good ol' boys" for short. It embraces a lot of others, too. Even a college-educated city-dweller is a bad person if he holds the wrong opinions. Cops are pretty universally bad, although white cops are a degree badder than minority cops.
The category of good people embraces most blacks, with some singular exceptions like Clarence Thomas and Larry Elder. It also embraces leftist radicals, especially those willing to go to the streets breaking, burning, and assaulting in defense of the state ideology.
Petty criminals are good by default, since their petty criminality — things like shoplifting — is obviously something they're driven to in desperation by their poverty and hunger in our unjust society. On some similar principle, illegal aliens are all good. Lunatics are also good if they direct their lunacy at bad people.
These patterns have been in unusually plain view the past few days. Two adjacent pages — pages ten and eleven — in my New York Post this morning illustrate the fact.
Page ten informs me that New York City has agreed to pay thirteen million dollars to Black Lives Matter demonstrators who were arrested by police during the 2020 George Floyd riots. This is the end result of a lawsuit against the city, a lawsuit with around thirteen hundred plaintiffs; so the average payout per plaintiff will be ten thousand dollars.
Also on page ten, but bleeding over into page eleven, we got a witness statement in the case of a cop who punched a shoplifter. The originating event was back in October 2021. The shoplifter — we don't know his name or race — was highly aggressive. When the cop tried to arrest him, he resisted. This witness says the cop acted reasonably.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office indicted the cop on a third-degree assault charge, worth a year in jail on conviction. The cop pleaded not guilty this Wednesday. We don't know why it took two years to get to arraignment.
In both cases the cops used minor violence to restrain difficult perps. That's a thing cops do; they're trained to do it.
The perps in both cases were good people, though: angry communists and a shoplifter. The latter I'll assume to be black on the general principle that if he was white the authorities would have told us. Being a shoplifter in any case makes him a good person: just trying to feed his family, poor soul.
Yes, it's a complete inversion of normal values. As Seth Barron remarks, commenting on these two cases, quote:
District Attorney Alvin Bragg has sent the strongest signal yet that public disorder in New York City is a protected activity and official efforts to contain it will be treated with harsh sanction.
End quote.
There's nothing special about New York City here, of course. This upside-down value system prevails all over the country.
Wait: did I just say "country"? Ah, yes, country. Next segment.
03 — Country music outrage. Country … Country music … the Jason Aldean flap, of course. If you haven't heard about it, here's the intro paragraph from Thursday's Washington Post story on it. Quote:
Country music star Jason Aldean is facing immense backlash over his new music video "Try That in a Small Town," which combines news footage of Black Lives Matter protests, violence and crime with lyrics such as …
End quote.
The Post then gives us sample lyrics. I'll give you a few more than they give you. Lyrics, quote:
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk,
Carjack an old lady at a red light,
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store.
Ya think it's cool, well, act a fool if ya like.
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face,
Stomp on the flag and light it up —
Yeah, ya think you're tough.
Try that in a small town.
See how far ya make it down the road.
'Round here, we take care of our own.
You cross that line, it won't take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don't …
End quote.
The song was actually released in May but didn't go on YouTube as video until last Friday. The video has news clips of the Floyd rioters trashing stores and assaulting police. Other clips show an attempted convenience store robbery and other apparent crimes.
The video also uses the courthouse of Maury County, Tennessee as a backdrop. A black guy suspected of having raped a white girl was lynched there, from the courthouse balcony, back in 1927.
What a banquet of good ol' boy stereotypes for good people to feed on! They've been clutching their pearls and shrieking from coast to coast. More from Thursday's Washington Post, quote:
A channel devoted to country music videos has pulled the video out of rotation after accusations that it promotes racism and violence. But "Try That in a Small Town" has also leaped to the top of many streaming charts, and top Republicans are defending Aldean, who insists the song has nothing to do with race.
End quote.
As if there is anything in today's U.S.A. that "has nothing to do with race"! But I guess Aldean is just saying what his recording-company handlers tell him to say.
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk; carjack an old lady at a red light; pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store; if I had the patience and skill with criminal-justice databases that Steve Sailer has, I would be able to give you a total number, aggregate of all those crimes, for a recent year in the U.S.A.
If I did that, what proportion of the perps would be black? Ninety percent? Ninety-five?
For goodness sake: We all know that to a fair first approximation, all street crime in the U.S.A. is committed by blacks.
As for that lynching: Is a Country singer supposed to research the history of a building a hundred years back before he poses in front of it?
And as I've told you before, lynching was no respecter of races. Blacks lynched blacks, whites lynched whites. In Clarksville, sixty miles north of the infamous courthouse, a white man thought to have raped a black woman was lynched by a black mob in 1914. The coroner's jury decided it was a justifiable homicide and freed the black lynchers.
Truly, the past is another country. To appreciate that fact, you need some imagination — some ability to think about things in other than state-approved cookie-cutter stereotypes. The good people don't rise to that standard.
04 — The oldest social divide. The fuss over Jason Aldean and his song is in a long, long line of descent from one of the oldest social divides in human history: the one between town and country. Storytellers have been making fun of country bumpkins and city slickers all the way back to the ancient Greek dramatists, at least.
That's enough time for some peculiar twists and turns to have developed. Consider for example today's U.S.A.
Our big cities now are dominated by good people: blacks, progressive whites, petty criminals oppressed by poverty, and lunatics in need of community care.
There's a seasoning of bad people: cops, of course, some wealthy non-progressives like Donald Trump, a petit-bourgeoisie of small storekeepers and franchisees. They have no weight, though; it's good people — blacks and progressive whites — who call the shots.
The problem here is that not many of those good people are smart — for sure not smart enough to think through the consequences of their policies.
For example: Petty criminals are good people just struggling to put food on their families. It follows that punishing them for their petty crimes is wrong, wrong. Ergo, they're not getting punished.
And the cops who once deterred and arrested those good people no longer want to do so because they fear ending up in the dock themselves, like that New York City officer in my opening segment — or worse yet, like Derek Chauvin.
Here's a story from CBS News last October. Headline: "Chicago Police Department struggles as burnt-out cops quit, with some heading to suburbs. Since 2019, the story tells us, 3,300 officers retired, resigned, were discharged, were killed in the line of duty, or were fired. From that date up to last October, around 1,600 officers have been hired — half the number of the departures.
It's the same in New York City, we get regular reports in the local news. Probably it's the same in all our big cities.
More crime, fewer cops. Add to that the closing, because of unrestrained shoplifting, of retail drug stores that city inhabitants depend on for their daily supplies.
Stupid policies, bad outcomes. Along with normal values, another thing being inverted here is those ancient tropes of stupid country bumpkin and sharp-witted city slicker. At any rate, looking at our major urban centers today, you have to think that what we have in charge there are city bumpkins.
The city bumpkins are doubling down, though. We here at VDARE just retweeted a post from one of them at Reddit. It's an extract from a longer post you can read here, posted in all seriousness so far as I can judge. I'll just quote the part we retweeted. Quote:
So what is to be done? The Democrats should pursue policies that crush rural voters and make rural life as miserable as possible. Things like refusing federal flood insurance to rural areas, leaving rural roads wanting for federal dollars, not using federal money to build bridges or expand electric or sewer, ending federal ethanol subsidies and other farm subsidies, etc. — all of that can make rural life even less attractive than it already is and force that population of irredeemables into the cities where they can be reeducated and turned into citizens with something to contribute. With Trump, they let the mask drop and all of the country can see: There is no reason for the United States to ever spend another dime on rural America, and the sooner rural America is just a memory, the better.
End quote.
Hmm … a sort of reverse Khmer Rouge policy. I hope it works out better than the original.
05 — New York City bumpkin. If you want an example of this strange new genus, the city bumpkin, I offer you the current Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams.
His Honor is clueless to a degree that it's hard not to find comical. Mayor Adams might indeed have stepped out of a play by Aristophanes. In my May 12th Radio Derb I related the humiliation he suffered at the hands of New York's suburban counties — country slickers, near enough — when he tried to unload thousands of illegal aliens on them.
That's Mayor Adams' most pressing problem right now: not how the city can afford a thirteen-million-dollar payout to Antifa rioters who got their hair mussed, not his dwindling police force, not neighborhood drugstores closing all over because of shoplifting. No, it's the illegal aliens swarming into the city: more than ninety thousand since last Spring, fifty-five thousand of them still resident.
Fifty-five thousand is more people than can be got into Yankee Stadium. Where can the Mayor put them all? The city does have shelters for homeless people, but they were already full when the illegals showed up: fifty thousand native vagabonds right there, for a total hundred thousand city residents with no place to live but what the city provides for them.
Most of those citizens living in shelters are crazy people or addicts. Under a rational government they would be in asylums or jails. All good people believe, however, that it is wrong — wrong! — to lock someone up against his will, unless of course he's a bad person with wrong opinions.
The Mayor is playing it by ear, desperately juggling his tiny stock of options in hopes of looking effective. Balls in the air this week have included:
This mess is all a plain, foreseeable consequence of New York having proudly designated itself a Sanctuary City. Many of us are still wondering after many years why Congress has not acted to ban Sanctuary Cities. Personally I'm just glad I don't live in a Sanctuary Suburb.
Nicole Gelinas, writing in the New York Post, July 19th, spelled out the cost of all this.
Executive summary: New York can afford all these illegals only by cutting back on every other kind of spending — schools, sanitation, police, Medicaid, etc. And in fact Adams is already doing that. Soon the city will be being run mainly for the benefit of people who have no proper legal right to be here.
What if there's a recession? Katy, bar the door.
Quote from Ms Gelinas:
[Mayor Adams'] refusal to acknowledge that New York City cannot take on the burden of housing an undefined, open-ended number of migrants has created an entire new issue, one we haven't seen since the welfare-reform days: a long-term social-services spending burden we can't easily get out of.
Adams has never offered an answer to the obvious question: What's the strategy to move migrants out of temporary shelter?
End quote.
That question may be an obvious one to you, Ma'am, but to a City Bumpkin like Adams it's way down the obvious list.
06 — Was covid a race-targeting bioweapon? A deeply un-advertised fact about covid-19 is that it affects different races differently. Our own Lance Welton has spelled out the reasoning and some of the sources for this here at VDARE.com. It's not scientifically controversial.
As to the reason for the differences, we get here into one of those hairy old nature/nurture puzzles.
Obviously different races have different frequencies of some genes. That's what makes them races, duh.
Perhaps both are. Perhaps one or other totally isn't.
Lance, with a respectable professional journal as his source, actually names some suspect genes. Looks like nature is definitely in there.
Once the genetics of epidemiology is in play, though, there looms up the specter of the Mannichon Solution.
"The Mannichon Solution" is the name of a short story that ran in the December 1967 issue of Playboy magazine. I gave a full account of the story in my Diary for July 2018. To the best of my knowledge it was the first appearance in fiction of a bioweapon that targeted specific races. I was reading sci-fi and imaginative fiction all through my teens and early twenties: I can't recall another example.
Is such a bioweapon actually possible? I don't know enough of the science to judge. But then, nor do the politicians of China, Russia, India, Iran, and elsewhere — those politicians, I mean, who are ultimately responsible for decisions about military research spending. Most of them don't even know as much science as I do.
Once the idea of a race-targeting bioweapon has entered their awareness, though, they will surely get their researchers working on the issue. They will tell themselves it would be foolish not to, given that nations they regard as hostile may be doing the research.
So to the question: Are China, Russia, the U.S.A., and other nations working on a Mannichon solution — a race-targeting bioweapon? it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the answer to a better than ninety percent probability is "Yes."
OK, next question: Was the covid outbreak a consequence of such research? To that, I have no idea what the yes-no probablities are. It's not crazy to speculate, though; and if important people speculate out loud, they may prompt journalists and other professional inquirers to dig around and see what they can find. We really ought to know what our, and their, military researchers are up to.
That is of course all much too grown-up for such a dense forest of infantilism as the U.S. mainstream media. "Race-targeting? But … there's no such thing as race! Unless you're a … racist. [Scream.]
That said, it's also an area on which professional politicians should not venture opinions without very careful preparation. That goes double strength for politicians with a long paper trail of sympathy for conpiracy theories and other wackiness.
Some things not even a Kennedy can get away with.
07 — From the Halls of Congress. I'm going to give my voice a rest. This segment, other than this introduction, consists entirely of someone else speaking.
She is addressing a hearing this week of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
I'm giving her speech to you intact and whole because I think it's a clear, elegant statement of important facts.
Over to Ms Morris.
[Clip.] Chairman. Thank you. Thanks so much for inviting me. My name is Emma-Jo Morris. I am the Politics Editor at Breitbart News.
I am here today because I published a series of news stories three years ago, in October, 2020, about Hunter Biden's now infamous laptop — also known as the "laptop from hell" — which is seen as some of the most scandalous reporting of the last decade. What was more scandalous than the reporting itself though was the fact that it exposed the unholy alliance between the Intelligence Community, social media platforms, and legacy media outlets.
At the time, I was deputy politics editor at the New York Post. My reporting showed that, despite then-candidate Joe Biden's repeated and furious denials, he was apparently involved in the foreign business deals of his family.
Over several days, just weeks before Americans would vote for their next president, I revealed verified authentic emails from the Biden scion's hard drive showing Ukrainian business partners receiving leaks from the Obama White House, I documented an off-the-books meeting between then-Vice President Biden and a Ukrainian energy executive, and introduced the world to "the Big Guy," who got action on a deal with CEFC China Energy Co.
The Post published exactly how the material for the reporting was obtained, even identifying the sources, as well as a federal subpoena showing the FBI was in possession of the material the story was based on, and had been since December of 2019.
But when the stories appeared on social media that morning — the venue where millions of Americans go to find their news, and editors to get their angles — within hours, the reporting was censored on all major platforms, on the basis of being called "hacked" or "Russian disinformation."
Twitter refused to allow users to share the link to the stories, banned the links from being shared in private messages — a policy typically used to clamp down on child porn distribution — and locked the Post out of its verified account. Facebook said it would curb distribution and reach of the links on its platform.
However, the stories were not based on "hacked materials," nor were they "Russian disinformation." And despite those claims appearing to come out of thin air at the time, we would eventually learn that they actually didn't come out of thin air at all.
On October 19th, five days after the Post first began publishing, Politico ran a story headlined, "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say." Politico printed a letter, completely uncritically, from veteran members of US intelligence falsely claiming the Post exposé "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."
Most notable among the signatories of the letter were Jim Clapper, former DNI, and John Brennan, former CIA — despite having such damaged credibility following their participation in the Russia Collusion conspiracy theory.
A few days later, on October 22, when Biden appeared in the second presidential debate, and was confronted with the facts of the Post's reporting, he said to Trump, "Fifty former national intelligence professionals said this: what he's accusing me of is a Russian plot."
But it was not.
Now, fast forward to this year, three years later. Just last spring, House investigators revealed it was a call by now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell that prompted the spy letter published by Politico, which bypassed agency approval processes that would have been normally applied.
It is also now known that ahead of my reporting, federal agencies were priming social media companies to execute an operation to discredit it.
According to internal documents released by Elon Musk upon his acquisition of Twitter, the FBI and other intelligence community members essentially directed the platform's censorship operation in part externally, by working with top management; in part internally, by social media companies hiring eye-popping numbers of agency-alumni.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported, based on documents he obtained from Musk, that "during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed" Twitter executives "to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden's laptop as a Russian 'hack and leak' operation."
Feds arranged for Top Secret security clearances to be granted to Twitter management, and even had an encrypted messaging network set up, which they dubbed a "virtual war room."
To this day, hundreds of people from the intelligence community work at social media companies.
Over the last few years, my reporting has been confirmed by virtually every mainstream news outlet, from the Washington Post, to the New York Times, to Politico. No one denies that the laptop is real, that the origin story is exactly what I told you it was in the first place.
This elaborate censorship conspiracy wasn't because the information being reported on was false. It was because the information was true, and a threat to the power centers in this country.
What this relationship between US government officials and American corporations represents is an unprecedented push to undermine the First Amendment — the right to think, write, read, and say whatever we want — and how we respond will determine whether we see a free press as inalienable, or as optional.
08 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Just as I was preparing this podcast for the airwaves I saw the news of Tony Bennett's death. To anyone who loves the Great American Songbook, it was sad news indeed.
I only saw Tony Bennett in person once. That was sometime in the mid-1980s.
I was walking along a street in midtown Manhattan — and I'm darned if I can remember which street, except that it was in the neighborhood of Radio City Music Hall, although I don't think it was Sixth Avenue — I was walking along when I encountered a huge crowd, spilling over the roadway.
Working my way round the back of the crowd, I saw that some kind of stage had been set up over the sidewalk. On the stage was Tony Bennett, singing. I can't remember what he sang, but I do recall thinking that he looked to be thoroughly enjoying himself.
So I very briefly attended a free performance by one of the great American Songbook artists. Thank you, Sir.
Item: Early this week John Kerry, President Biden's climate envoy, went to Peking in hopes of getting the ChiComs on board with the climate-change cult. There were, Kerry said as he boarded the plane home, quote, "very frank conversations," end quote.
Translated from Diplosperanto, that means: "They blew us off." And indeed, in a speech following the visit, Chinese president Xi Jinping told the world that China would pursue its goals to phase out carbon dioxide pollution at its own pace and in its own way. Presumably that means continuing to build coal-fired power plants at the rate of two a week; and if the foreign devils don't like it they can go pound sand.
Kerry's visit was so unsuccessful he didn't even get to meet President Xi. For a guy whose most famous utterance is "Don't you know who I am?" that must have been wormwood and gall.
Doubly so when, later in the week, Henry Kissinger flew over on a goodwill visit. He did get an audience with Xi. In fact, Henry got the full Imperial treatment.
The ChiComs like Henry. For one thing, he helped liberate them from the icy embrace of Leonid Brezhnev's U.S.S.R. fifty years ago. For another, Henry is 100 years old and Chinese people have a thing about longevity.
Plus, I'm guessing, they wanted to stick a finger in John Kerry's eye one more time. Who wouldn't?
Item: Just one more — I'm over my time budget here.
This is David Goldman, one of the smartest guys I know. Here was David on Twitter July 20th, tweet:
The Ukraine war is a needless, bathetic, disgusting tragicomedy. The US/UK could have stuck to Minsk II and kept US missiles far from the Russian border; Putin made a huge blunder invading. Now we're stuck with a war of attrition that will leave Ukraine depopulated and in ruins.
End tweet.
09 — Signoff. That's all I have, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and try to stay cool in this heatwave. Don't let what happened to poor Bruce Lee happen to you.
As an aid to keeping cool, I recommend a neck fan. My daughter Nellie bought me one for my birthday — from WalMart, apparently. I scoffed at the thing at first. Mrs Derb, when out of earshot of Nellie, did worse than scoff: She said it was dorky. As if I would ever associate with anything dorky! Now, however, I'm addicted and take my neck fan everywhere. Give it a try.
We're currently hearing a lot about whistleblowers. Good luck to them; and let's give thanks we live in a country where people blowing whistles on government misbehavior don't get hustled away and shot.
Hearing the word so much, though, has got me thinking about whistling: not the sort you do with any instrumental aid, just whistling with your lips, teeth, and tongue. People used to whistle a lot. Now I never hear it, I don't know why.
Whistling even made the pop music charts once or twice. Here's a specimen from 1967: Whistling Jack Smith whistling "I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman." It was a major hit in Britain and Germany; you can't get any more hip than that.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Whistling Jack Smith, "I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman."]
