The great exploding pager psy-op Israel pulled on Hezbollah yesterday is a great example of how the focus of all politics has shifted from the practical world of doing things to the virtual world of saying things. Owning the information space in an effort to win the information war has taken precedent over accomplishing real things in the world of real things, even when it comes to war. Every operation, even those with practical goals, has a public relations element at the center of it.

As is always the case, time will tell if the initial reports are close to reality, but there is no doubt that pagers were exploding, and Israel was responsible. The questions not asked by Western media, much less answered, are why Israel would do this and what did they think they would achieve by it? That is the first clue. The media and their audience just assume it is a good thing and will result in more good things. What those things are and why they are good is not a topic of interest.

It is a clever caper, for sure. The Israelis accessed the supply chain that delivers these devices to Hezbollah. They most likely bribed an official at the Taiwanese plant that makes these things. This gave them access to the shipment, which they then sabotaged with some form of explosive. Then they waited until the devices were deployed and sent the signal to them. The sheer cleverness of it is admirable, so it is easy to see why that is the focus.

That is the thing about this caper. It is mostly a public relations caper, with little practical impact on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Sure, Israel won the news cycle for a day or two and the Hezbollah side feels stupid, but by Friday any practical impact is gone, and everything is back to where it was pre-caper. Hezbollah now has a new step in the process, where they inspect their communications devices, something they should have been doing all along.

This is where certain people insist that it was a great scheme because it affected important people. The reality of communications devices is that the closer you are to one, the lower you are down the status ladder. Low level people display their device on their person because that is all they have. Important people have someone who manages the communications gear. You do not call Warren Buffett. Your people reach out to his people to set up a call.

That aside, the shift in focus from practical reality to the abstract reality of public relations is something we see everywhere now. Washington’s war on Russia has mostly been about winning the information war, on the assumption that losing the information war would have a practical impact on Russia. Instead, Russia has lost every round of the media war, often failing to attend the fight, but Russia has seen its economy boom and its standing in the world rise.

In fairness, the schemers in Washington were reasonable to think “wrecking Putin on social media” would be a big win. In their world, getting wrecked on Twitter can have practical consequences. We have gone through a decade of “cancel culture” where people lose their jobs and their lives for imaginary crimes like using anathematized words or holding impure thoughts. In a world where being cancelled is a serious concern, cancelling Putin makes a lot of sense.

That was certainly the thinking inside the Israeli brain trust when they were cooking up this exploding pager scheme. They surely understood that sabotaging pagers would have little impact on Hezbollah. On the other hand, blowing them up like this would make for great memes on social media. The sheer cleverness of it would impress their American audience, who they sense might be bored with them. This caper got the crowd back into their seats for more of the Israel show.

The Roman poet Juvenal famously criticized the Roman people for caring more about the “bread and circuses” than their freedom. This is often twisted around to mean that the rulers relied on bread and circuses to trick the people out of their freedom, but Juvenal was focusing his critique on the people. Radicals of the ideological age have made a similar complaint. Marx famously called the peasants a sack of potatoes because they could not be politicized.

This narcotic of entertainment that troubled Juvenal is now corrupting the political class of the West. They care more about the show of which they are a part, or the show being put on for them by others, than the practical reality of their position. The manufactured reality of politics obscures political reality, not because the political participants cannot see it, but because they do not want to see it. They prefer their manufactured, abstract reality, over the practical reality of their position.

This is why Israel invested in the pager scheme. They understand that practical arguments about the reality on the ground in the Levant will have no impact on Washington or the American public. Similarly, Zelensky understands that he has to keep producing new acts to keep Western politicians amused enough with Project Ukraine to keep the money flowing. Like a Hollywood producer, he tells his generals he needs bigger explosions and bigger drama.

Objective reality has always been the substrate on which human relations operate, so there has always been a gap between the human drama and reality. Human relations, especially politics, are more often than not about what we think ought to happen, rather than what we think will happen. However, necessity has always kept the gap narrow, but that seems to be changing. In fact, it seems that politics is often about broadening that gap between itself and reality.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it, so this turn from reality will eventually end. Israel cannot stay at war forever with its neighbors, no matter how good the show. The West cannot remain at war with the world, no matter how many times they cancel people they do not like. At some point the theater of politics, the theater of Western public life, must give way to reality and people who prefer reality over self-generated fantasy.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The war in the Ukraine grinds on, despite claims that the Ukraine army is collapsing at various areas of the front. The fact is large industrial age armies do not break and run like armies of the past. This was true in both world wars when the German army was able to fight effectively in certain areas right up to the end. We are seeing the same with the Ukraine army, which maintains some offensive capacity, despite losing ground in many areas due to a lack of men and material.

There is a new element in the mix that changes how a large industrial army, like the Ukraine military, succumbs to a superior opponent. The drone has become a ubiquitous element of the battlefield, and it has not only changed how armies fight, but also how they retreat and get destroyed. We are seeing this in the Donetsk region, where the Ukrainians are struggling to find units to man fortified positions, but the Russians are struggling to overrun these positions.

It has been said that a good sniper team can defeat a battalion, which is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it. Snipers have been a highly effective way to slow down an opposing force. This is especially true for an army facing a much larger opponent, as was the case for the Finns in the Winter War. Finnish snipers harassed the Red Army to the point where they could not advance, despite having an enormous advantage in men and material.

The drone is something like the high-tech sniper. A competent drone team can harass an opponent from a distance, forcing the opponent to find cover. Unlike the sniper, the drone operator can target equipment. An armored unit advancing toward an enemy position can be knocked out by a drone unit, without taking fire. They attack the column to stall it, pass on the geolocation to their artillery units, then move to a new spot in order to repeat the process until the column is destroyed.

In the past, an attacking army would soften up the fortified position with artillery and air power and then use overwhelming numbers to overrun the enemy position. Defenders would likely fall back before the assault, understanding the math. Today, the defenders can attack the enemy as he is forming up for the attack and at every step he makes toward the defender. This radically increases the cost to the attacker, in men and material, without increasing the cost to the defender.

This is why the NATO counterattack on the Russians in 2023 failed. NATO doctrine is pre-drone, so it assumes the attacker can organize superior numbers to attack a narrow part of the defensive line, thus creating a gap. Reserves are then poured into the gap to break the line and force the defender into a chaotic retreat. This was the plan General Milley devised for Ukraine in 2023. Ukraine would pierce the Russian defenses with a big arrow offensive and the Russians would flee.

What happened is the Ukrainian attackers never got to the line, as drones attacked the advancing columns. The vehicles at the front of the column were hit with drones, which stalled the column. Then precision artillery strikes using geolocations from the drones attacked the rest of the column. The Ukrainians were forced off the roads into the mine fields where they were finally destroyed. The drone allowed the Russians to create a kill box before the Ukrainians could see the front.

The Russians learned from this, which is why their 2024 offensive has been moving at a snail’s place along many points on the front. They use their drones to find weak points on the front, send in small units to develop their attack close to the Ukraine positions, thus avoiding large accumulations of men and machines. This forces Ukraine to move in reserves, which the Russians attack as they are on the move. Then the Russians repeat this in some new area of the front.

This is why the Russian advance has been a creeping affair, rather than the big arrow offensives Western analysts still think is the norm. Even when the Russians open a sizable gap, they avoid pouring in large numbers of troops until they can clear the area and create their own fortifications to protect their men and machines from Ukrainian drone operators. The drone has not only changed the battlefield, but it has also changed the rear areas that support the frontline troops.

The main advantage of the drone is it is cheap, even cheaper than the legendary sniper team that could stall a battalion. Snipers are expensive. It takes a lot of skill and practice to become an effective sniper team. Drone operators, on the other hand, can be created from raw recruits in a short period of time. Most young people have grown up with the technology, so they quickly pick up the skills to effectively operate drones on the modern battlefield.

Of course, the drones themselves are cheap, relative to the other sorts of weapons we see on the modern battlefield. A modern anti-tank system like the Javelin costs about a quarter million dollars. This is the launcher and missiles. New missiles are about one hundred thousand per copy. Compared to a tank, which costs tens of millions, this is a cost-effective weapon, but compared to a drone, that costs ten thousand dollars, it is a wildly expensive white elephant.

The low cost of drones is what has kept the Ukrainians in the war. They can manufacture tens of thousands of these a month using readily available supplies they buy using some of the money they get from the West. They have been able to prevent a large-scale rapid collapse anywhere on the front by slowing down the formation of Russian troops and slowing down Russian advances after they create a gap in the lines or take over some key positions.

The next shoe to drop in the drone revolution is the use of drones in guerilla war and urban combat scenarios. We are getting a glimpse of this in Ukraine. The Russians are using fly-by-wire drones to attack Ukrainians inside buildings. They do this to avoid electronic warfare systems. Surveillance drones looking down on an urban accommodation will detect movement in a building and then drone units will get close enough to fly a drone through the window.

The next step in the evolution of urban combat drones is to cut the wire and program the drone to navigate its way to the target without the use of GPS. The Russians are starting to adapt cruise missile technology, which relies on terrain matching to navigate the missile to the target, to their drones. It will not be long before drones are able to operate without radio communications. Thus, the jamming technology currently used to defeat drones will become ineffective.

Military tech has a habit of finding its way to the streets, which is why police departments all over the West have tanks, armored personnel carriers, and elite tactical units to arrest hate-speakers. This means Western cities will be thick with drones monitoring the behavior of the citizens. It also means gangsters and rival political factions will be using FPV drones on one another. The next shot at Trump could very well be a drone attack and then the drone revolution comes home.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the demographic collapse playing out in the workforce, a post about how the Tenet Media case looks like a political op and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Would Jesus hate the cat memes that have spread across the internet in response to the Haitian problem in Springfield Ohio? Some people think so. Progressive cranks have responded to this by claiming it is your Christian duty to welcome these people into your homes. Granted, these people are not sincere but people who claim to be Christians of some sort often agree with them. They claim Scripture requires the faithful to treat everyone equally, as God’s children.

This is the official position of the Catholic Church. The Pope is a big fan of open borders and mass immigration. It is not just for theological reasons. One argument is that the migrants from the global south are Catholics or could become Catholic. Protestant churches make similar claims. Immigration is seen by main stream churches as a solution to their empty pews. Some claim that the Haitian migrants have revitalized the churches in the Springfield Ohio area.

Of course, the people making these claims can find in Scripture what they need to support their position as the morally correct one. Ephesians says, “you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people.” Leviticus says, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself”. Hebrews says you must show hospitality to strangers and modern Hebrews say you should never notice this.

The most popular and probably the most effective argument from faith used in favor of open borders is that all men are created in God’s image. Since we are all God’s children, we have the same duty to cat-eating Haitians as we do to the Irish guy who drives the UPS truck and helps coach the local football team. Since immigration is an issue because it is the movement of nonwhites into white areas, it is a racial issue, and the Christian is prohibited from seeing race.

The obvious counter to this is that Jesus was fine with slavery, so he surely would not oppose the deportation of illegal aliens. This never registers with the Bible-quoting immigration enthusiast because much of what makes up modern Christianity in the West is cherry picking verses from Scripture that just so happen to support the secular morality of this age. For the most part, what passes for Christianity in the West is just a loyal servant at the foot of neo-liberalism.

That still leaves the question as to whether Jesus would be on the side of the people important pet-eating Haitians into your town or on the side of the people making AI-generated memes of Trump defending the house cats. The logic of Christianity says that Jesus would be pumping out those cat memes. He would not be making overtly racial claims about Haitians, most likely, but what we understand about Christian faith tells us he would be opposed to mass migration.

The place to start is where Christianity starts. The “open borders Christians” are correct when they say these Haitians are God’s children, no different from the fifth-generation Irish guy or the guy who traces his line to the Mayflower. Fundamental to the Christian faith is that we are God’s creation and humans are made in God’s image. Our ability to understand God at all rests on the assumption that he possesses all the qualities we possess as human beings.

From this we can draw one obvious conclusion. We have reason and free will, thus God intended for us to use our reason and free will. God does not make mistakes, at least this is true for the New Testament God. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not as confident, so maybe he was still prone to error. Regardless, God gave us, and only us, free will and reason, so it must have been on purpose and for a reason. The only possible reason is to use them.

The other thing that we know, if we are all God’s creation, is that all men are God’s property for the same reason man can have property. God owns himself, so God owns that which he has created. He gave man dominion over the earth and all of the living creatures on it, but he did not grant ownership. God may be an absentee landlord, as many have asserted, but he is still the landlord, which means he still owns what he created, including mankind.

This is the basis of Christian ethics. What we ought and ought not do is based on the idea that we are all God’s property. Theft is wrong because when you steal the labor of another man, you are harming God’s property. On the other hand, punishing someone for theft, is acting on God’s behalf to right the wrong done to God. It is why we think hunting for food is perfectly acceptable. Man needs to eat, and God gave us domain over the animals. Hunting for sport, however, is complicated.

The logic of Christianity tells us that Jesus would be appalled by what is happening in towns like Springfield Ohio. Rounding up Haitians and dumping them into unsuspecting towns around North America does nothing to reduce the damage done to God’s most precious property, mankind. In fact, it increases the damage. Worse yet, this damage is done for the benefit of the money changers responsible for it. What we see happening with immigration is a deliberate offense to the Christian God.

This is even more obvious when we remember that we have reason and free for the sole purpose of using it. If we wanted to help Haiti, there are ways we could improve the conditions on the island without harming cat owners in Ohio. We could take over the island, set up a local dictator tasked with distributing food and medicine. We could round up the Haitians and send them to Africa, where they have the minimum infrastructure needed to maintain an African population.

The point of all this is that Christian ethics is about reducing the damage to God’s property, which is primarily mankind, but also that which mankind has been granted dominion, the earth, and its inhabitants. Mankind has reason and free will in order to figure out the best way to act in order to minimize the damage to God’s property, so we are free to debate the issue. We must be free to debate the issue. Cherry picking lines from Scripture to shut down debate is therefore immoral.

More important, cherry-picking lines from Scripture so that you can claim a sense of compliance with the will of God, at the expense of God’s property, as in the damage done by immigration, violates the foundational logic of Christianity. If Jesus were here today, he would not only flip over the tables in the offices of the people responsible for unchecked immigration, but he would also whip the people waving around their Bibles in support of it. Jesus would hate them.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m44s Haiti comes to Ohio
• 10m22s Population doubles, employers leave
• 18m04s Towards the immigration singularity
• 24m39s The Trump-Harris debate
• 35m47s Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your superabundantly genial host John Derbyshire, currently convalescent after watching the Trump-Harris debate Tuesday evening.

I shall of course have things to say about the debate later in the podcast. Recording these words at midday on Friday, however, Tuesday’s debate is already old news. I shall offer my opinion, but I don’t have anything original to add to what has already been said. That’s the disadvantage of a weekly podcast.

Before I get moving in earnest, permit me my weekly reminder that the VDARE Foundation is still accepting tax-deductible donations by check earmarked to yours truly and sent by snail mail to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

That’s the intro. And now … [Clip:  Ethel Merman, “Let’s go on with the show.”]

02 — Haiti comes to Ohio.     The Caribbean nation of Haiti has figured prominently in this week’s immigration news. The main focus has been on the town of Springfield, Ohio, a small place 45 miles west of Columbus.

Four years ago Springfield’s population was 40,000. Today it’s nudging 60,000 — a fifty percent increase. Well-nigh all those 20,000 are from Haiti, the poorest and most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere with, since the assassination of the President three years ago, essentially no functioning government or law enforcement.

The Biden-Harris administration has shown special favor to Haitians. Back in early June they gave Temporary Protected Status, TPS, to any Haitian then present in our country, including those present illegally. TPS gives them permission to remain and work here.

Strictly speaking that permission is only valid until February 2026; but any attempt to deport the Haitians after that would of course encounter a massive barrage of litigation from NGOs and human-rights groups. The word “Temporary” in “Temporary Protected Status” is a bare-faced lie, and has been for many years.

Even before that granting of TPS Haitians were pouring in by applying for asylum on their cell phones using an app the Biden administration supplies for that purpose.

And in addition to that, the feds have been allowing up to 30,000 settlers per month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly directly into the U.S. for two years if they have financial sponsors. That “two years” limit is, you may be sure, just as bogus as the “Temporary” in “Temporary Protected Status.” Immigration jargon is a banquet of bogosity.

For Springfield, having their town’s population increase fifty percent in four years, with almost all the increase coming from such a poor, backward, violent place, has meant a lot of strain on property and services.

The schools and the healthcare and welfare systems have been badly affected. So has housing. Flush with generous handouts from the federal government — which is to say, from your taxes and mine — the Haitians are paying as much as $3,000 a month in rent, more than many citizens can afford.

There’s even more of a strain on Springfield’s social cohesion. The roads are now very unsafe, with Haitians driving automobiles for the first time, often unlicensed. One such, name of Hermanio Joseph, crashed his minivan into a school bus last August, killing an 11-year-old boy and sending more than 20 other children to the hospital.

Another Haitian settler, Robensen Louis, drove into 71-year-old Springfield grandma Kathy Heaton last December while she was taking in her garbage bins, hitting her with enough force to throw her body right across the street. The authorities won’t prosecute Robensen Louis, even though was driving with expired license plates.

No-one seems to know why Louis hasn’t been prosecuted. Reading these stories, my first guess was because Kathy Heaton was white. However, the eleven-year-old boy killed in August was white, too, yet the driver in that case has been prosecuted, so it’s a mystery.

Here was another senior Springfield lady who we know only as Noelle, addressing the City Commission August 27th.

[Clip:  I live at 426 Northwestern Avenue. Miss Skinner, who I’m not trying to put on the spot, is my neighbor.

(Chair:  Just talk to me, Ma’am. Thank you so much.)

And I’m done with what I’m seeing. It is so unsafe in my neighborhood any more. I have the homeless that were trying to camp out and I have … I have made concessions with them and I try to help them the best I can to keep them from trying to squat on my property. But it is so unsafe.

I have near me that cannot speak English, in my front yard screaming at me — throwing mattresses in my front yard, throwing trash in my front yard. And I can’t … Look at me. I weigh 95 pounds. I couldn’t defend myself if I had to.

My husband is elderly and last night after living in this home for forty-five years he said: “Noelle, guess what? It’s time to pack up and move.” He said: “We can’t do this any more.” He said: “It’s killing both of us mentally.”

I don’t understand what you expect of us as citizens. I mean, I … I understand that they’re here on a Temporary Protected Status and you’re protecting them, and I understand that. Our city services are overwhelmed and understaffed.

But who’s protecting us? If we’re protecting them, who’s protecting me?

I want out of this town, I am sorry. Please give me a reason to stay. Thank you.

(Chair:  Thank you.)]

A different resident, name of Anthony Harris, told that same meeting that Haitians are grabbing ducks from the park, killing, and eating them.

And of course it may not have been just ducks. You have surely heard the stories from social media about domestic pets, particularly cats, being killed for food by the settlers.

It’s not clear — well, not to me — how much evidence there is for these stories about pets. Apparently there really was a lady arrested last month in Ohio for killing a neighbor’s cat and eating it. However, that was in Canton, a hundred miles from Springfield; and the suspect, although black, is not a Haitian settler.

I guess it’s possible that some Springfield residents, on hearing that story, let loose their imaginations on the town’s Haitians. However, given what we know about conditions and customs in Haiti, it’s also entirely possible — very possible — the stories are true.

Whether they are or not, people have been having great fun with these stories online. A favorite of mine was the Babylon Bee, September 9th, running the headline, quote: “Ohio Chinese Buffet Forced To Close After Haitians Decimate Food Supply,” end quote.

03 — Population doubles, employers leave.     At week’s end we are learning that Springfield is not unique in having a problem with Haitians. The Daily Wire ran a report on Thursday about Charleroi, PA, just south of Pittsburgh. They say, quote:

Charleroi, a small town in Pennsylvania, has seen a 2,000 percent increase in its immigration population in the past two years, with the majority coming from Haiti. The small town had a population of about 4,200 in 2022.

End quote.

I’m not sure what to make of that. A 100 percent increase means that your number is now twice as big as before; a 200 percent increase means that your number is now three times as big as before, so an N hundred percent increase means that your number is now N+1 times as big as before.

Two thousand is twenty hundreds, so they are saying that Charleroi’s settler population is now twenty-one times as big as it was two years ago. If there was just one Haitian settler in Charleroi two years ago, today there are twenty-one. If there were a hundred, today there are twenty-one hundred. We don’t know which, they don’t give us proper numbers.

Trying to get a handle on the numbers here, I turned up a Charleroi church website that tells me, quote: “an estimated 2,000 Haitians have found a new home,” end quote.

If that’s twenty-one times what it was two years ago, then the immigrant population was 95 back then.

If, on the other hand, as I think more likely, I’m dealing here with writers who don’t know the difference between one Haitian and one percent, I resign in frustration. Is it too much to ask that paid journalists understand third-grade arithmetic?

To further confuse the numerical issue, here is Charleroi Council President Kristin Hopkins-Calcek talking to The Daily Wire. The actual topic here is a whopping great increase in the police budget that the Council’s had to push through. Quote from her:

We want to keep the public safe. We are having issues we have never had before. Our population has doubled and we have our police enforcing everything that citizens have demanded over time that they enforce.

End quote.

“Our population has doubled.” My 2018 Rand McNally Atlas gives the population of Charleroi six years ago as 4,120. If it’s doubled since then, it must now be more than eight thousand; and a good part of that additional four thousand — likely all of it — is Haitian settlers.

Wait, what’s this? Mon Valley Independent, September 5th. The Mon Valley, I should explain, is the region south of Pittsburgh watered by the Monongahela River. Charleroi is in that region. The Mon Valley Independent is a newspaper serving the region.

OK, here’s the news report from them, quote:

Charleroi glass factory to close

About 300 jobs at Corelle Brands will be affected

By TAYLOR BROWN, Senior Reporter

A glass factory that has been part of the fabric of the Mon Valley — and the Magic City — for nearly a century is expected to close by the end of the year.

It’s a devastating blow to the hundreds of employees who work at the Corelle Brands facility and for the economy in the Mon Valley that has struggled to recover for years since the closure of the steel mills in the 1980s.

Charleroi officials said Wednesday was a sad day for the borough when Anchor Hocking — the current maker of Corelle, Pyrex and CorningWare — announced the impending closure of its Charleroi plant.

End quote.

So here are a couple of small, quiet, working-class American towns: Springfield, Ohio and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. Springfield seems to be doing OK economically, but Charleroi is losing a major employer. It’s not likely, not at all likely, that either will be improved by mass settlement of people from one of the world’s most dysfunctional nations.

Mass settlement is what they’re going to get, though, courtesy of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Alejandro Mayorkas, and the NGOs and churchy-sounding resettlement agencies that live high on funds from federal taxpayers.

“Public affairs vex no man” said my literary hero Samuel Johnson. I’ll admit they don’t usually vex me much — not as much as a neighbor’s dog getting into my yard.

However, when I’m reading these stories about small, quiet American towns that are homes to non-elite working or retired American people being destroyed by mass settlement of unassimilable aliens, and then I see the smug, smirking faces of the clowns and crooks who manage our public affairs, I do feel vexation rising.

I wish no-one harm. If, however, I were to find myself in a room with Alejandro Mayorkas and some large, heavy, sharp-cornered, throwable object, I don’t think I’d be able to restrain myself.

04 — Towards the immigration singularity.     The late great British Conservative Party Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was fond of the word “ratchet,” possibly because it is a near-anagram of her name. She spoke of British politics suffering from a “ratchet effect.”

When Progressives hold power, she would say, they can turn the wheel clockwise to a new position. The ratchet is no hindrance to them because it is shaped to permit turning in that direction, clockwise.

When conservatives are in power, though, and want to turn the wheel counter-clockwise to a better state of affairs that prevailed before Progressives fouled thing up, the ratchet won’t let them. The best they can do is, to not turn the wheel any further clockwise — to just leave it where the Progressives put it.

In fact — and I don’t actually recall Mrs Thatcher saying this, although it surely occurred to her — in fact the ratchet effect is worse than that. OK, so the wheel can’t be turned counter-clockwise. Politicians like to look busy, though. They don’t want their opponents to say they are sitting around idle doing nothing. The temptation therefore is to give the wheel a clockwise nudge.

Sure, that advances the Progressive program and annoys conservative voters, but at least you look busy. Perhaps this explains marginal phenomena like the later Conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron pushing same-sex marriage through Parliament.

These reflections came to mind on Tuesday when I was reading Noah Carl’s opinion column on immigration in the online magazine Aporia. Titled Winning the argument on immigration, it’s a really good, forceful piece.

I’ve been an immigration buff for ages, and have the bookpile to prove it, so an opinion column on the subject has to be better than the average to snag my attention. This one did.

To win the battle for demographic stability, argues Carl, winning elections is not enough — nothing like enough. OK, you won the election; but one day, probably four or eight years later, you will lose power and the other party will be at the wheel — turning it clockwise. Quote from him:

The ratchet effect of electoral politics, whereby “your guys” put the brakes on demographic change and then “the other guys” slam the accelerator, is particularly intractable for two reasons.

End quote.

Carl spells out the two reasons. Much abbreviated they are: (1) immigrants vote Progressive more than natives do, and (2) immigrants support immigration more than natives do.

A little further on he coins another phrase I intend to plagiarize when no-one’s looking: an “immigration singularity.” Quoting Carl again:

This is the point where the process [he means the process of bringing in ever more foreigners and giving them the vote] becomes self-sustaining because immigrants tend to support pro-migration parties, and once they reach a critical mass in the population, restrictionists can no longer win elections.

End quote.

Is there any solution to this — any way to avert that “immigration singularity”? The only hope, writes Carl, is to win over elites, or at least enough of them. Edited quote:

You need to win over enough judges, journalists, policy wonks, high-level bureaucrats, and indeed, politicians. There must be a general consensus on the issue … Supporting mass immigration should be seen as quirky and eccentric — like being an anarchist or an Austrian-school libertarian.

End quote.

Carl doesn’t underestimate the difficulty of up-ending the elite narrative like that. He offers some leverage points, though. High-skilled immigration, for example, just strip-mines developing nations of their best and brightest. How does that square with left-liberal affinity for the care/harm axis of Moral Foundations Theory? Isn’t it obviously harmful?

Carl’s bottom line, quote:

Getting into power isn’t enough: winning the argument is necessary.

End quote.

Well, he’s proved that to my satisfaction. Getting into power surely makes winning the argument easier, though.

05 — Trump-Harris debate.     OK, the Tuesday night Presidential debate, Trump v. Harris.

I steeled myself to my duty and watched the whole thing. When I rose from my armchair at last I was … well, no, not vexed, but … depressed. I’m a Trump voter and Trump plainly lost that debate.

There are at least three public Trumps. There’s the smart, wry, sarcastic Trump we saw in his debate with Joe Biden on June 27th. Then there’s the tribune of the common man, the blood-streaked guy we saw raising his fist in defiance on July 13th. And then there’s the narcissistic blowhard we got on Tuesday.

Harris performed well. We’d been snarking for weeks about how she’d been closeted away with experts on debate prep, being coached by them. I don’t know how much the DNC paid those experts, but they sure got their money’s worth. Harris was, if you’ll pardon an expression I heard down in Texas once, slicker than snot on a doorknob. I think Trump sprang every trap she set.

She, and the so-called moderators. Yes, it was three against one. Still, an experienced politician prepped up to the eyeballs is one thing; a couple of midwit college Media Studies majors should have been easy meat for Trump. Yet they tripped and tangled him as thoroughly as Harris did.

The information content of the show was close to zero. What should we expect from a second Trump administration? What should we expect from a Harris administration? Content-wise, nobody watching the debate came away any wiser.

But that’s not what the debate was for, not what it was about. It wasn’t about content, it was about form.

Where form was concerned, we did learn something. We learned that with sufficient coaching, a cackling ignoramus with a race card and with media assistants on hand to help her, can present as mentally agile. And we learned that a smart, wry, sarcastic tribune of the people can, with no coaching at all, present as a blustering doofus.

Yes, I’m still going to vote for the guy. As frustrating and disappointing as another Trump Presidency is likely to be, it will do far less damage to our country, and do a far better job keeping us out of other people’s wars, than a Harris Presidency. As dire as Trump’s Tuesday night performance was, I’ll still be voting for him.

I’m encouraged to find myself with plenty of company there. The pollsters seem to agree that the debate did very little to change minds.

We Trumpsters know our man. We sigh, shrug, and put up with him. Progressives remain convinced, no more or less than before, that Trump is the reincarnation of some Austrian painter while Harris is an apostle of joy and social justice.

All that said, I’m going to confess to some post-debate uneasiness, something I didn’t think about until Tuesday. To put it as briefly as I can: Trump is old.

The uneasiness arises from the fact that he is one year younger than me, plus a few days. If he’s old, I’m older. If Trump’s age is a negative, mine is something negativer.

Yeah, yeah, I know: people age at different rates. We can be senile at sixty; or we can be writing books at age 99, like Henry Kissinger. Generalizing in this zone isn’t very fruitful.

Yet still I know that aside from the quantifiables of intelligence, alertness, and memory, there are matters of attitude. I don’t look on the world, on life, on other people, or — apologies to Dr Johnson — on public affairs as I did at seventy or sixty or fifty. My annual checkups with our family doctor show, year by year, ever higher levels of the hormone fukitol in my system, apparently self-generated by my metabolism as I age.

And when watching TV or social media and I see one of the younger, brighter, sharper Trumpists talking — DeSantis, Ramaswamy, or, yes, Vance — I can’t help thinking: Why isn’t it one of these guys on the ticket? Why Trump?

By way of illustration, let me give you the GOP Vice Presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, dealing with a snippy CNN interviewess on the Springfield cats issue. Listen, and compare with the way Trump handled that issue Tuesday evening.

After listening, just ask yourself the question I’m asking myself: Isn’t there some way we can flip the ticket: Vance as President, Trump as Vice?

[Clip:  CNN:  The other thing he brought up, which I was kind of surprised by, I guess I would say, is, he brought up this misleading false claim that you yourself have talked about in recent days, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are abducting people’s pets and eating them, which officials there have said is not true.

You yourself acknowledged it may be false on Twitter, you still told people to keep spreading it. But Trump just amplified it to tens of millions of people who were watching. Why push something that’s not true?

Vance:  Well, first of all city officials have not said it’s not true. They’ve said they don’t have all the evidence

CNN:  They’ve said they have no evidence.

Vance:  We’ve heard from a number of constituents on the ground, Kaitlan, who — both first hand and second hand reports — saying this stuff is happening, so they very clearly — meaning the people on the ground dealing with this — think it is happening, and I think it’s important for journalists to actually get on the ground and uncover the stuff for themselves when you have a lot of people saying: “My pets are being abducted,” or geese at the city pond are being abducted and slaughtered right in front of us.

This is crazy stuff. And again, whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true, … whatever the case may be, Kaitlan, This town has been ravaged by twenty thousand migrants coming in. Healthcare costs are up, housing costs are up, communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town. This is what Kamala Harris’s border policies have done.

And I think it’s interesting, Kaitlan, that, that the media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats. And that speaks about the media’s failure to care about what’s going on in these communities. If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep on because the media could … should care about what’s going on.

CNN:  I saw you say that. I think the media does care about it. I just heard a very lengthy report in the New York Times on it. PBS News Hour did a whole story on it. But can I ask you …

Vance:  All [inaudible] by us, talking about it and bringing it up. Nobody cared about this until we raised this issue.

CNN:  Senator, you talked about that your office has gotten a lot of reports. I mean, if someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot. I mean, why … You have a sense of responsibility as a running mate and he certainly doesn’t as the candidate to not promote false information, right?

Vance:  Could be. That is a totally fair point. But nobody’s calling my office and saying that they saw Bigfoot. Look: what they’re calling and saying is, we’re seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats and city officials aren’t doing anything about it.

Now again, I have a responsibility as a United States Senator. I think the media has a responsibility as an institution that cares about truth to actually take people seriously when they say their lives have been ruined by this migrant crisis.

And again: If every single thing that the media says about this story is false, the verifiable facts are that this community had their lives destroyed by twenty thousand migrants coming in and uprooting life.

CNN:  Again: officials said no credible evidence for the claim. But Senator J.D. Vance, thank you for joining us with your [inaudible] reaction.

Vance:  Thanks, Kaitlan.

CNN:  Jake, back to you.]

Compare the way Trump, in the debate, handled a regime stooge on the Springfield cats story with the way Vance handled the same situation there.

Trump got into an unproductive joust with the stooge — “Well, I’ve seen people on television …” Vance nimbly steered talk to the real issue: American small towns destroyed by uncontrolled mass settlement from primitive cultures, decorating his argument with some nicely barbed remarks about the media not doing their job.

Is it really too late to flip this ticket?

06 — Signoff.     I’m afraid I am running way over my time, ladies and gents. I told you I am an immigration buff from way back. Once I get going on that topic it’s hard to apply the brakes. I shall therefore forgo my usual miscellany of brief items and proceed directly to signoff.

Thanks as always for your time and attention, your emails and donations. Once again: you can donate tax-free by check earmarked for me to The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

For signoff music I shall make amends for a mild slight I committed in my August Diary. Concerning the need for a male voice, baritone or tenor, in the worship team at my local church I said, quote: “Baritone for preference; tenors too often want to steal the show.”

That was of course a gratuitous slight against the tenor community, which includes many modest and self-effacing individuals. To make amends, I shall sign us out with the voice of a fine English tenor.

To make double amends — demonstrating that not only am I free of real anti-tenor prejudice, I also hold no negativity towards the female sex — the voice here is that of a female tenor. Yes, there really is such a thing … or was; I don’t think any lady is currently marketing herself as a female tenor. A hundred and some years ago, it wasn’t totally unknown.

Here then to see us out is Ruby Helder, a female tenor, singing Ciro Pinsuti’s melancholy valediction “The Last Watch.”

Watch with me, love, tonight!
This is the last time we meet,
For I must leave thee, O my sweet,
Our fate is fixed, our dream is o’er,
Our ways lie parted evermore!

Ms Helder, I cannot forbear noting, was, until she drank herself to death in 1938, married to Chesley Bonestell, who did the illustrations for The Conquest of Space, one of the favorite books of my childhood.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

The term “woke” started turning up in mainstream discourse about a decade ago as part of the cultural revolution from the top. When this current phase started is debatable, but the term “woke” started circulating around social media in the Obama years, which means we are into the second decade of the woke phenomenon. In fact, it has been around long enough to become a bit dated.

Interestingly, the word and the concept did not originate inside the academy. A century ago, a black blues singer calling himself Lead Belly urged his listeners to “stay woke” in a song about blacks being falsely accused of rape by whites. The term and concept caught on among blacks as a warning about accepting the reality of white America as advertised and instead accepting the lived reality of black Americans.

In the middle of the last century, upper-middle-class white feminists culturally appropriated the term to criticize what they called the white patriarchy and then woke was off and running in the academy and then society. As with so many things, the managerial class, devoid of any creative or critical thinking, pilfered an idea from black culture in order to pretend to have a culture of their own.

It is why the concept of cultural appropriation was so easily adopted by the people flying the woke flag outside their mansions. They could easily imagine the damage done by frat boys wearing sombreros at their Cinco de Mayo party because they themselves have been pillaging the cultures over which they rule. The culture of the ruling class is a self-critique projected onto the masses.

Putting that aside, the appeal of “woke” to the managerial class, as well as the adjunct professor living in her car, may be caused by something other than cultural barrenness and ideological fervor. When you get past the lunacy, there are traces of the same impulse found in the transcendental movement. There are some strong parallels between the main concepts in both.

That is what the show is about this week. In the first half we cover the two main concepts of what most mean when they use the word “woke”. The second half of the show is a very brief discussion of Emerson and his classic lecture to the Harvard Divinity School, along with a reading from Thoreau. The idea is to see if “woke” is just the current manifestation of the American moral imperative.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Introduction
• What is Woke?
• Lived Experience
• What Is Going On Here?
• Emerson
• Woke As Deformed Americanism

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

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An often-ignored lesson of the Roman Empire is that exhausted institutions can stagger on for a long time on inertia. As long as there is nothing ready or able to replace it, the thing can carry on like a shuffling zombie. The Crisis of the Third Century should have collapsed the Roman Empire, but there was nothing around to replace it, so it could finally right itself enough to stagger on for another two centuries. Even a terrible imperial order was better than no order at all.

The same can be said for American conservatism. It has been dead as an intellectual endeavor for a long time, but it staggers on, trying to play the role for which it evolved in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. The audience for its content is limited to the nursing homes and retirement villages of America. Even in Washington, where it has functioned as a usefully idiotic opposition to the people we call the left, it has fallen on hard times. Conservative Inc. no longer has a raison d’etre.

Superficially, the decline of American conservatism is a remarkable thing, given its status at the turn of the century. Despite the Clinton years, conservatism still seemed to be driving the conversation in Washington. The failure of the first two years of the Clinton administration looked like proof that America was a conservative country and Conservative Inc represented the center of American politics. Today it is a terminal patient living out its last days as relatives look at their watches.

A level below the surface, there is the claim made by the people we still call the left that conservatism lost its reason to exist at the end of the Cold War. The argument they made back then was that Conservative Inc primarily existed as an opposition to communism, at home and abroad. The death of the Soviet Union meant conservatism no longer had an enemy. It was the dog that caught the car. Unless it could find a new purpose, it was following communism into the dustbin of history.

At the time this seemed true enough, but as we know conservatism easily found new bogey men abroad and the people we call the left were happy to produce new sticks for conservatives to chase domestically. We got the war on terror, the police state, and the old bogeyman of racism. What the fall of communism did was remove the veil of ignorance so we could see the true purpose of conservatism. It was the usefully idiotic opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy.

The trouble is conservatism was too good at the role of easily beatable opponent, which is why Donald Trump rose to power in 2016. It turns out that they got so good at being an easily beatable opponent that a flippant real estate mogul and reality television star was able to steamroll through the party’s A-list candidates and did so in a way that discredited the institution they represented. Conservatism was a house of cards and Trump was able to huff and puff and blow that house down.

While it is true that American conservatism is dead as an intellectual and organizational force, it still maintains its institutions and access to billions in donations. The reason for that is nothing has come along to replace it. There are efforts underway to fill that role either as willing punching bag or loyal opposition, but so far Conservative Inc. has kept a firm grip on the money spigot. As long as they have access to billions, they can play the political version of Blanche DuBois for as long as they like.

Nothing lasts forever and you get a sense of it in this post from one of the minor zombies shuffling about the cobwebbed halls of Conservative Inc. It is a version of the point-and-shriek we got from the usual suspects when Tucker Carlson had Darryl Cooper on to talk about historical narratives. We get the ritualized emotivism these guys always put at the top of their posts to let their masters know they are not going to be any trouble and then it is the standard attack on Candace Owens.

What the post reveals is that these people do not see what is coming next. The reason Tucker had Cooper on his show was not to make the case for why Churchill was a villain, but to open the conversation about the official narrative of the Second World War and by extension the American century. In other words, the point was not to provide an alternative history or answer reasonable questions about important events of the official narrative, but to legitimize questioning of it.

The official orthodoxy of this moment rests on the official narrative of the twentieth century and America’s role in it. It is what permits the toppling of statues and the desecration of graves. The narrative of the American century has allowed for a rewriting of the American story in such a way that it not only justifies the official morality of this age but forbids the questioning if it. Once people start questioning the story, it is not long until they question the point of the story.

Candace Owens is not an intellectual or even a serious political actor, but she is enormously popular with the sorts of people who used to follow the lead of conservative stars and who want to believe they are standing on the moral high ground. People like Candace Owens not only validate their oppositions to the fruits of the official narrative, but she also makes them feel good about questioning the narrative itself. Questioning the official narrative strikes at the cultural heart of the regime.

The writer of that post does not understand any of this because he lacks the intellect and the necessary curiosity. The reason conservatism got so good at being an easily beatable opponent is they selected for the type of people who enjoy being on the losing end of every fight. Critical to the slave morality of conservatism is a blinkered shortsightedness focused only on the immediate goal of currying favor with the master, or at least gaining her sympathy.

Like the Roman Empire, conservatism staggers on, mostly on the fumes of past glory, but the signs of collapse are showing. In the third century, it was the slow decentralization of power that foreshadowed the end of empire. In this age, it is the slow awakening from the myth of the twentieth century that foreshadows not only the end of conservatism but the end of the regime itself. That is the thing about collapse. The master does not see it coming, but neither do the slaves.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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“War is a continuation of politics by other means” is a famous quote attributed to Carl von Clausewitz, a 19th century Prussian military theorist. This line is often used to end discussion about the causes of a war, rather than to understand the motivations of both sides, but that is the way to use it. Wars are not just about geopolitics, the disputes between the combatants, but the internal politics of the parties. In most cases, the parties to a war are in the war due to internal political reasons.

We see this with the Ukraine war. For Russia, decades of meddling around the border of the Russian Federation had reached a critical point internally. The pro-Western wing of the Russian political class had maintained that they could deal with elements in the West to address the concerns of Russia. The realist wing argued that there was no dealing with Washington, as they were implacably anti-Russian. The oligarchs sided with the former for financial reasons.

The provocations by the Biden administration along with the superheated rhetoric aimed at Putin changed the internal dynamics of Russian politics. On the one hand, this vindicated the position of the realists. They said all along that there was no way to make a deal with Washington, because Washington was not honest. It is impossible to deal with people who come to the table in bad faith. Any deal you make with them will fall apart because they will never abide by it.

Proof of this was when Angela Merkel said in an interview that the Minsk agreements over the disputed areas in eastern Ukraine were just a stalling tactic so the West could arm Ukraine for a war with Russia. This statement was done to humiliate Putin within the Russian political elite. This was when the West was sure that sanctions would topple the Russian state, so it was a bit of anticipatory celebration expecting that Putin would be out of power at any minute.

Instead, it had the opposite effect. The reason for this is both wings of the Russian political class wanted a peaceful solution to the Ukraine issue. They just disagreed about the best course. Western behavior leading up to the war and throughout the war has convinced both wings that peace can only come through the defeat of the NATO backed army in Ukraine. In other words, Russian politics brought war to their border, but now Russian politics control the prosecution of the war.

That should have been clear to the West in 2022 when the Russians reorganized their army and military industrial complex in response to the collapse of the Istanbul negotiators that were skuttled by Washington. The competition with the West had changed, so the war with the West was changing. The Russians settled in for a long war of attrition against the Ukraine army, society, and the West. The Ukraine war was now part of a larger global conflict with the West.

This is where the war reveals things about politics in the West. It was clear by the end of 2022 that there was no scenario in which the Ukrainians defeated the Russians militarily, so the set of possible outcomes was limited to a total defeat of Ukraine or some sort of negotiated settlement. This is what realists like John Mearsheimer argued even before the war started. The trouble is, there are no realists in Washington or the European capitals, at least none with influence.

Instead, foreign policy is controlled by a coalition of ideological zealots and infantilized managers who are easily led by the zealots. They do this by creating pleasing narratives that always end with the managerial elite coming out as Churchill in this new version of the last world war. Every new scheme to win the war always ends with some Western political figure giving the great speech announcing the triumph of the forces of good over the forces of evil.

As an aside, it is why the usual suspects broke out in hives when Tucker Carlson had on his show a historian who questions the role of Churchill. They immediately started calling Cooper and Carlson Nazis, not because either of them defended Hitler or the Nazis, but because they questioned the archetypical hero of the modern political narrative, the figure every managerial striver sees in the mirror. Cooper did not just question the narrative, but the point of the narrative.

That aside, we see this political dynamic in the conduct of the war. The Western political class is the audience, demanding a good war narrative. The ideologues are the producers, who collaborate with the writers and show runners in Ukraine. Together they create narratives like the Great Ukraine Counter Offensive of 2023 or now The Great Kursk Offensive for the fans in the political class. The military logic of these schemes does not matter, because it is all about the politics of the West.

Now that The Great Kursk Offensive has turned into a military disaster for Ukraine, the series will be cancelled, so the usual suspects are busy working on a new show to put on for the Western political class. This time it will probably include firing long range missiles into Russia to “humiliate the Putin!” You see, despite it all, the main plot line says that in the end, someone in the West will be the idealized Churchill, triumphing over Putin, who they have bizarrely cast as their Hitler.

This war has also altered geopolitics. The Chinese, who had a similar dynamic in their political elite as the Russians, experienced a similar evolution in thought about how they deal with the West, especially Washington. The Chinese have been quite blunt in their assessment of Washington. They have repeatedly told high ranking Biden officials that the constant lying is an impediment to good relations. If the Chinese think your candor is a problem, you have a serious problem with honesty.

Returning to Clausewitz, this war has allowed Russia and China to reorient global politics away from the unipolar, post-Cold war arrangements toward a multipolar world based in regional interests. This has been made possible by the war exposing the superciliousness of Western political leaders, but also the childish ignorance of the people allegedly making policy in the West. The world is starting to see the West as a setting sun and men close their doors to the setting sun.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The first and possibly last presidential debate of this cycle is scheduled for tonight in Philadelphia between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Given the result of the last Trump – Biden debate, this one should get a good audience. Despite the massive marketing campaign on her behalf, people know little about Harris. She has been a colored ornament on the Biden administration and the butt of jokes on the internet, but most people have no genuine sense of her.

That is the reason it could be the last debate of this cycle. Harris has a poor reputation as a public speaker. Her only real debate experience was in the 2020 Democratic primary and she was horrible. Despite having millions in tech money and a favorable media, she used the debate to alienate every constituency in the party and dropped out soon after it. Her recent CNN interview, which was heavily edited, suggests she has not gotten better over the last four years.

It is possible this may be the last presidential debate we see at all. It is assumed that debates are part of the show, but for most of the country’s history debates were not a part of our political process. The first general election debate in our history was the 1960 debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Prior to that, there were a few debates between members of the Democratic party on specific issues like foreign policy, but those were a rarity.

After the Kennedy – Nixon debates, which were a great success in the sense that they captured the attention of the public, there were no more debates until 1976 when Gerald Ford debated Jimmy Carter three times. The logic behind this series of debates was that neither of the candidates were well known. Carter was the surprise winner of the Democratic nomination and Ford fell into the Oval Office after Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate coup against him.

Since then, we have had debates every cycle, but they stopped being debates in the normal sense, devolving into choregraphed media contests. The candidates come equipped with canned one-liners they practice before the event. They hope to use one of them to win headlines. The moderators do the same thing, usually in collaboration with the Democratic candidate. No one remembers the content of these things because there is no content to our debates. They are emotive gibberish.

This will become clear in the opening statements tonight. Harris will repeat the abracadabra words and phrases that are supposed to trigger good feelings for the target audience of her campaign. She will quickly chant the abracadabra words and phrases that are supposed to get these same people angry at Trump. In his unscripted way, Trump will attempt to do the same thing. Both candidates could be replaced with lights that flash green for good and red for bad.

If Harris is terrible again in this debate, then they most likely pull the plug on the rest of them, including the Vance – Walz debate. Trump would have no need for a rematch and Harris would have no reason to take another beating. It also may be why the whole general election debate concept ends this year. From the perspective of the regime, there is nothing to debate, so why have debates? It was clear over the last month that the regime was not excited about having these things.

The debate concept we have now was a response to the chaos of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which was created by the ruling class, and then the Watergate coup to remove Richard Nixon. The presidential debates were designed to turn the page on the prior decades of cultural chaos and convince people that the political class had regained its mental stability. The ruling class had settled its difference in the wake of the civil rights revolution and was ready to discuss the new consensus.

Prior to the Carter – Ford debate, there was nothing to debate, at least nothing that required public attention. The legal and cultural battles that often played out on the streets in the 60’s and 70’s reflected the debate within the ruling class. Those first presidential debates reflected the new consensus. Once the issues had been settled, then the public could be allowed to see the results. The result was the presidential debate format within the new moral order.

Something similar to the revolutions from above in the middle of the last century has played out in the post-Cold War period. The triumphalism of the Clinton and Bush years gave way to the collapse in confidence of the Obama years. The chaos of the last decade reflects the collapsing confidence of the ruling class. The abolition of rights, the pogroms and censorship all point to a time when the regime simply decides there is nothing to debate and puts an end to all public debate.

Another way of putting it is that after the radicals within the ruling class won the fight, the debate concept emerged as part of a strategy to normalize their victory. Note that in the first debates, none of the major issues of the prior decade were discussed. Both sides were ready to move on to practical issues like the economy and how best to deal with the Soviet Union. No one mentioned the riots and the violence, much less questioned the new civil rights regime.

At the other end of that story arc which began with the Brown decision, the regime is in full control, but paranoid and insecure. The response to Trump and populism was not to confidently confront it and “set it straight” but to use any means necessary to avoid exposing the logic of the regime to the crucible of reason. If Trump wins in November, you can be sure the response will be a renewed pogrom against white people and the rights they assume to be their inheritance.

Win or lose, the lesson the regime will take away from this election is that there is no reason for debates anymore. There is nothing to debate. More important, maintaining the idea that it is acceptable to question the prevailing orthodoxy just leads to misinformation and disinformation. The only thing left to do is to create a narrative that explains why ending debate is vital to our democracy. If they can say free speech is a threat to democracy, ending debates is no great challenge.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about bringing back penal colonies and exile to deal with crime, a post about how the fight with Old Scratch continues among the people we call the left and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Was Jesus rational? If you are a modern Christian, this is a question that probably sounds intentionally offensive or unintentionally ignorant. It suggests the person asking the question thinks Jesus was insane. Calling Jesus a crazy person therefore could sound deliberately provocative. On the other hand, someone asking the question could simply be ignorant. Only someone unfamiliar with Scripture or Christian theology could suggest that God’s only son was a lunatic.

This is not a question that would have offended early Christians, however, because they had a different relationship with faith and reason. The gods of the ancient world were not the defenders of logic and reason. Often, the gods were the greatest offenders of logic and reason, using tricks and magic to bring down the hero, even though the hero was acting rationally. After all, the tragic hero is often the man who does the rational things but is brought low despite his reason.

The ancients did not look at reason like modern man. They had to solve problems like all humans, but they did not worship reason like a god. In fact, reason was often viewed as a hinderance to understanding the gods. Understanding the gods and their relationship to man started with the understanding that the gods operated outside of the rationality of mankind. They had their rules, man had his rules, and the story of man was the interplay between these two worlds.

Of course, there was that sense that the fate of men and the individual man was controlled by things beyond human comprehension. It was not just the capricious gods who tripped up men, but that sense that there was something else going on to determine the outcome of life, something that was well outside the domain of man, a thing called fate. Just as the tragic hero was undone by fate, the hero was the man who recognized and submitted to his fate.

For most of human history, the key to making any sense of life was in accepting the mystery of the natural world and man’s place in it. That acceptance never meant understanding it, much less conquering it. The natural world was not a thing to be conquered or even challenged. It was a thing to be accepted. Therefore, for the early Christians, the irrationality of Jesus and his life would have made far more sense to them than the far more rational version of this age.

The phrase, “Athens and Jerusalem”, which turns up in certain parts of American conservatism has its roots in this question about the rationality of Jesus. The second century Christian writer Tertullian famously asked, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem” in response to those trying to make sense of faith. The absurdities within the story of Jesus are what gives power to faith, because the truly faithful believe the message despite the absurdities.

As an aside, “Athens and Jerusalem” was reintroduced to us by Strauss, who used it for a series of lectures and essays. No one knows what he meant by it as the main project of his students is to make themselves and their mentor as incomprehensible as possible on the assumption that “Straussian” is code for incoherent. Others have picked up the phrase as a way of weaving their ancestors into your family tree, thus making Western civilization the fruit of the Greeks and the Jews.

It is debatable as to whether Strauss clipped this phase from Tertullian in order to open the gates to ideas outside of Christianity. In the hands of lesser minds, it has led to idiotic concepts like “Judeo-Christian.” Tertullian would have happily lit the fire underneath the heretics promoting such an idea. Like the other Christian writers of his age, he was hostile to the Jews and wrote polemics against them. For their part, the Jews have never forgiven him for it.

That aside, there is little doubt that Christianity, as it spread throughout Europe, became a vehicle to introduce Greek thought to Europe. Not only did the Church preserve and reproduce ancient works, including the Greeks, it began to absorb the rationality that Tertullian would have found difficult in the organization of the Church and its relationship with the secular authorities that evolved in the Middle Ages. The irrationality of faith planted the seeds of the rational rejection of faith.

Therein lies the problem for the modern Christian. He has grown up in a world that worships reason to the exclusion of mystery. The point of human thought is to locate every mystery and strip from it all of its irrationality, so that it is reduced to a mechanism explained by mathematics. Reason is the hunter who poses with his kill for a picture he can use on his internet profile, because the beauty he sees in the image is him posing next to the kill, not the bit of nature he harvested.

The Christian who bristles at the “absurdity” the question posed at the beginning is a Christian forced to explain faith by the rules of reason. It is a hopeless project, which is why the churches have emptied out across the West. If the churches are to fill up again or new churches are to be founded, the modern Christian must confront the fact that the god of this age is rationality. That god must be overcome in order to be restored to his proper place alongside the mystery of life.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 02m11s Two types of isolationism?
• 09m21s (Some) Germans vote
• 17m41s Scrambling the poles of good and evil
• 27m51s Temporal isolationism
• 32m26s Much ADOS about nothing
• 37m37s The innumerate imagination
• 40m38s No Chi spy here!
• 41m55s The Bell Curve at 30
• 43m19s Hwæt!
• 44m55s Signoff: Remembering Blair Tindall

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a fragment of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your generically genial host John Derbyshire covering the week’s news.

Before I begin the podcast proper, I should clarify the matter of donations.

VDARE is no longer posting at the website, but the VDARE Foundation is still a going concern and you can still make tax deductible donations to your genial host by sending a check via snail mail with a note on the memo line of the check saying the donation is earmarked for me.

The address for donations is, as before: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield, CT 06759. (That “Litchfield” has a “t” in it, by the way — “L-itch-field” — unlike the Lichfield in England that is so dear to the hearts of us Samuel Johnson fans.)

Thank you in advance for your support!

OK, on with the motley. [Clip:  Pavarotti, Vesti la giubba.]

02 — Two types of isolationism?     [Clip:  Hank Williams, Mind Your Own Business.] I am, as I have often confessed, an isolationist. It was therefore with some interest that I saw this heading at the American Greatness website, August 28th, heading: Two Types of Isolationism — Reject Them Both.

This was an opinion piece by Edward Ring, who is, so far as I’m aware, not involved in any way at all with a popular home-security system. Ring is a conservative commentator and activist who posts a lot at American Greatness.

So what, according to Ring, are these two types of isolationism?

Type One isolationism, he says, calls for, quote

America to fortify its southern border and count on the geographically isolated North American continent to provide a measure of security from other nations that is unimaginable in turbulent Eurasia. Let them fight among themselves. With vast oceans separating us from far-flung conflicts, we will stay out of foreign wars.

End quote.

That sounds a lot like my isolationism. Sure, we’re bound to have some interaction with other nations. There are unavoidable matters of international concern: safe trade routes, raw materials we don’t have, disease epidemics, and so on.

Ring says Type One isolationism can’t be made to work under modern conditions. My response: Let’s give it a try, allowing ourselves some minimum leeway on those unavoidables.

What is the author’s Type Two isolationism? It is — and here I quote the author again, quote —

a wish to focus so exclusively on protecting American traditions, prosperity, and freedom, that there is no room to make common cause with like-minded Europeans who face precisely the same threats in their own nations.

End quote.

The whole of the Western world is facing a threat, says Ring, a threat to, quote, “European traditions and values,” end quote; the threat of, quote, “demographic replacement combined with economic repression in the name of fighting climate change,” end quote.

We have to make common cause with other Western nations to counter this threat, he argues. If we don’t hang together we shall all hang separately.

He adds a caution, perhaps for self-protection against cancellation, that our battle, although Eurocentric, is not ethnocentric. Quote:

Millions of thoroughly assimilated immigrants are ready to fight with us and we should welcome them.

End quote.

Uh … okay. Speaking as the husband of a thoroughly assimilated non-European immigrant, I won’t take issue with that, except to repeat the words of the great Enoch Powell, quote: “Numbers are of the essence,” end quote. Let’s remember how we salt our stew.

I’ll admit I’m not altogether clear on the difference between Ring’s Type One and Type Two isolationisms. Type One: We stay out of foreign wars in places like “turbulent Eurasia.” Type Two: We have “no room to make common cause with like-minded Europeans.”

What’s the difference? If we did get involved in a foreign war, wouldn’t we have to make common cause with one side or the other?

I read Ring’s column twice but came out by the same door as in I went. I mean, I am as much of an isolationist after reading it as I was before.

Jolly good luck to the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Italians, and the rest of the Euros in shutting down the “climate change” rackets in their countries and deporting their illegal aliens. I really don’t see how we can help, though.

We are much better supplied than they are with domestic energy sources, for a smaller population with, overall, a warmer climate; and while we have issues with nations to our South, those issues pale by comparison with Europe’s situation, separated as they are from the African continent by just a few dozen miles of easily-navigable water.

Let’s push ahead with our own fight against globalist lunacy and leave the Euros to deal with their considerably different one. They are in fact, after a slow start, not doing too badly, in some respects better than we are. I’ll give over my next segment to an illustration of that.

Minding our own business looks to me like good policy.

03 — (Some) Germans vote.     The news here is from Germany. A little basic political geography before the news.

As you know, Germany is, like us, a federal republic. There are sixteen states in the federation. Before reunification in 1990 the country was divided into East Germany and West Germany, under separate central governments. Six of the sixteen states made up East Germany; the other ten of course were West Germany.

Federal elections to the national parliament are held every four years, give or take a few weeks. The system, as in most of Europe, is proportional representation, giving small parties a chance but usually obliging the bigger parties to form a coalition if any actual governing is going to get done.

The last federal election was in 2021. After the usual haggling, a coalition was formed with Olaf Scholz as Chancellor. Scholz’s party, the SPD, is center-left, roughly equivalent to our own belovéd Democratic Party. On the four-year cycle, there’ll be another federal election next year.

So much for federal elections. Each of the sixteen states has a government of its own, just like in the U.S.A., each with some autonomous authority and its own electoral timetable for seats in its own legislature.

Last Sunday, September 1st, two of the states held elections. The results were a fair-sized kick in the groin for the big old centrist parties that dominate German politics, like Scholz’s SPD.

The two states holding elections were Saxony and Thuringia. The headline news was that the national-populist party AfD, Alternative for Germany, won a solid victory in Thuringia, 33 percent over the next party’s 25, and only lost by a hair’s breadth in Saxony, 31 percent against 32.

Neither of the other parties sharing the top-two slots with AfD was Chancellor Scholz’s SPD, by the way. The SPD actually placed fifth in both Saxony and Thuringia. AfD’s companion in the top two slots was CDU, the center-right Christian Democrats, approximately our own dear GOP.

AfD, although increasingly popular, is not entirely respectable. This is Germany, remember, and AfD is national-populist. [Scream.] Any time AfD scores a win the shrieks of “Nazi! Nazi! Nazi! Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!” go up, inside Germany as well as outside.

That’s tiresome and silly; but there, as here, some big subset of the population knows no history at all other than what happened in Europe from 1933 to 1945, and they have only a fuzzy understanding of that.

Seats in these state elections, as in the federal ones, are assigned by proportional representation, so there’s going to be some busy negotiating to put coalitions together, the more so as most other parties have sworn not to join AfD in coalitions. Next year’s federal election, and any state elections in the interim, should be … interesting.

It’s not just populism of the right that won there. There’s a new radical-progressive party called BSW that also did well on Sunday. Interestingly, while far left on economic and foreign policy issues — they favor Russia over Ukraine — BSW also wants a big crackdown on immigration.

These are small states: Saxony only five percent of Germany’s population, Thuringia only 2½ percent. Chancellor Scholz isn’t running for the exits. Still, as I said, these election results are a kick in the groin for the big old centrist parties.

Like our own Republican Party, though, Germany’s center-right is adapting. Germany’s Christian Democrats, a fair equivalent of our Republicans, have, quote:

started to advocate closing Germany’s border to people who have requested asylum in another EU country, a blanket ban on Syrian and Afghan refugees, indefinite detention for migrants earmarked for deportation and — listen to this — emergency powers to suspend European law where it interferes with a robust response to migration.

End quote. I took that from a report by Andrew Neil in Monday’s Daily Mail.

That shift to immigration populism by the Christian Democrats surely helped elevate them to the top-two slots in Sunday’s state elections.

This is just one little instance of how the familiar political positions are shifting and changing all over. The days of the Uniparty are numbered, in Europe as in America.

I’m tempted to give you Yeats’ lines about how

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, …

That’s probably what it looks like to long-serving old-line politicians. I doubt it will end with anarchy, though. There will be a rearrangement, that’s all.

The center will hold; it’ll just be a different center, with more respect for widespread popular feelings and correspondingly less respect for special interests and ideological fads out of college sociology departments. Well, that’s my hope.

04 — Scrambling the poles of good and evil.     A few weeks ahead of us, November 30th, is Sir Winston Churchill’s 150th birthday. Social media — well, X, the only social medium I follow — have come alive with opinionating about Churchill, a good proportion of it negative.

That’s nothing new to me. As I mentioned in my podcast on the fiftieth anniversary of the old boy’s death, my father was a Churchill-hater.

Part of that was that Dad, a WW1 veteran, blamed Churchill for the fiasco at Gallipoli in 1915, which Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had urged on the British government’s war council.

That wasn’t altogether fair. The general in command of the Gallipoli expedition, Sir Ian Hamilton, was operating above his level of competence. Training and provisions were poor. Wrote historian A.J.P. Taylor, quote:

Their generals lacked drive, and Hamilton failed to provide it. He was too polite to be a successful commander. He drifted helplessly up and down the coast on a warship, refusing to interfere with his subordinates. The Turks recovered from their surprise and pinned Hamilton’s men to the shore.

End quote.

Churchill’s political enemies kept blaming him for the Gallipoli debacle anyway. They were still doing so even after a postwar committee of inquiry found him not at fault.

Following the Gallipoli failure Churchill went off and served with a combat regiment on the Western Front, presumably in hopes of restoring his reputation. I’m trying to imagine one of our own politicians atoning for, say, the Afghanistan debacle in a similar spirit, but … I can’t.

My Dad, a working man of not much education, absorbed all the anti-Churchill slanders and added them to his dislike of Britain’s upper classes, to which Churchill indisputably belonged. In the first British election after WW2, Churchill’s party lost in a landslide. I have no doubt my father was one of the millions who voted against him.

When I grew up and got out into the world, and read some books — including some written by the man himself — I acquired other perspectives on Churchill.

Thoughtful, well-educated people — schoolmasters, college academics, veterans both civilian and military of WW2 — mostly gave positive reports, although 1945 voters often ended their reports with: “…  but I didn’t want him for our peacetime Prime Minister.” (Presumably some number of them changed their minds six years later; Churchill was elected to a second term as Prime Minister in 1951.)

So far as I can gather from reading what he wrote and growing up among people who voted for or against him in elections, I believe I would have liked the man. He was worldly, witty, well-mannered and well-read.

Now here I am browsing social media and learning that he was a drunken brute and war criminal controlled by evil Jews.

The evidence offered is not very persuasive.

• He initiated the aerial bombing of civilian populations. Citizens of Guernica and Warsaw might have something to say there.
• He declared war on Germany. No, that was Chamberlain in September 1939. Churchill didn’t become Prime Minister until eight months later.
• He was a tool of the Jews. Strange, then, that in the five thousand pages of his WW2 memoir Churchill doesn’t even mention the Holocaust. (The Jew-haters have jiu-jitsued (jew-jitsued?) this to be proof that the Holocaust never happened.)
• Gallipoli. Uh-huh.
• He did nothing to relieve the terrible 1943 Bengal Famine in what was then British India. There was nothing he could do. The Brits needed all their shipping for the North Africa campaign. Churchill tried to get the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia to help with relief, but they couldn’t spare shipping either. Historian A.J.P. Taylor again, quote: “A million and a half Indians died of starvation for the sake of a white man’s quarrel in North Africa.” End quote.
• He launched the project to destroy Britain by mass Third World immigration. Really? Quote from The Guardian, August 4th 2007, quote: “On 3 February 1954, under the agenda item ‘Coloured Workers,’ Churchill is quoted, with abbreviations, by Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook as saying: [inner quote] ‘Problems wh. will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK? Attracted by Welfare State. Public opinion in UK won’t tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits.’ [End inner quote, end quote.] Churchill believed, and said, that the U.K. should maintain a white super-majority … and he was of course right.

This denigration of Churchill is part of a larger project to convince us that everything we thought we knew is wrong — to take a sledge-hammer to the myths and legends that normal citizens carry around in our heads.

I saw this sentiment expressed very crisply and clearly the other day by Melissa Chen of The Spectator. I hope the lady won’t mind if I quote her at length. quote:

In rehabilitating Hitler and villainizing Churchill, the Right has its 1619 Project and the goal is the same: moral inversion.

Scrambling the poles of good and evil and destroying the entire foundation upon which the post-WWII order is built is to decimate Western civilization and to ensure that everything good about our way of life shall no longer endure.

The stakes are very high.

This is not to say that one can’t apply a critical eye to discuss the missteps of even our cherished historical figures. This is not to say that the West is not in decline.

But to obfuscate the moral vectors of these characters that played an outsized role in shaping our history is a huge existential risk that tears at the very foundation of our society, of civilization itself.

End quote. Thanks, Melissa.

05 — Temporal isolationism.     Wait, though. Shouldn’t we prefer facts and truth to myths and legends?

Well, yes, we should; but facts and truth about past events are hard to disentangle. Outside the Academy, few of us have the time or talents to do the necessary research.

A decade or so ago, just home after spending a week in Russia, I wrote the following thing, with that country in mind. Quote from self:

A nation, certainly a big nation that’s been around for a century or two, is an impossible thing for a non-native to know fully. This is even the case with “cousin” nations like Britain and America, sharing a common language. After 30 years in the U.S., I am still banging my shins against peculiarities of the American national character. With a nation culturally more remote from the one you grew up in, the case is hopeless. I can only shake my head in wonder at the arrogance of State Department and military types who claim to have fathomed the Afghan or Iraqi national character.

End quote.

Now I’ll form a syllogism. Just yoke that observation I made there with the famous line that L.P. Hartley wrote a half-century earlier, quote: “The past is a foreign country.” End quote. (Often misquoted as “the past is another country.” End quote.)

If the past is a foreign country and foreign countries are ultimately unfathomable, then the past is ultimately unfathomable, at any rate to those of us who can’t give over their entire lives to studying it.

I do believe that. I’m not a trained historian. My knowledge of the past has accumulated from a few decades of random reading. Where the early-to-mid twentieth century is concerned, those readings have been seasoned and colored somewhat by things I’ve heard from adults that I grew up among, some of them older than Churchill.

Do I understand, for example, the origins of WW2? Well: better than Condoleezza Rice understood the Iraqi national character, I hope, but … not much better.

In that spirit, and looking back to my first segment, I’m going to suggest what seems to me a sensible outlook.

That first segment was about isolationism, about the virtue of not giving much of a damn what’s happening in foreign countries. I’m going to call that “spatial isolationism.”

The sensible outlook I want to introduce is similar, but in the fourth dimension: “temporal isolationism”: not giving much of a damn what happened in times past.

As with spatial isolationism, we can’t help but give somewhat of a damn, but we’d be wise not to make a hobby of it unless some university will pay us a salary to do so.

With apologies to Edward Ring, that is my Two Types of Isolationism.

06 — Much ADOS about nothing.     Two weeks ago, in the August 23rd podcast, I wondered aloud why we’ve never had an ADOS candidate for President. ADOS, A-D-O-S, there stands for American Descendant Of Slaves.

There is more to that than I reckoned. For one thing, as I noted in the transcript of that podcast, Ann Coulter improved ADOS in a nationalist direction by reshuffling the letters to DOAS, D-O-A-S. That’s “Descendants of American slaves.” Not Haitian slaves, not Moroccan slaves, … not anyone else’s slaves.

For another thing, I failed to notice that there is an ADOS Movement, founded in 2020 by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore. The movement has a website, a podcast (I think), a Wikipedia page, a hashtag, and I’m guessing, from what I know about black-activist outfits in general, a handsome real-estate portfolio.

Note that the ADOS Movement takes Ann Coulter as its inspiration, although I’m sure they would rather die than admit it. They represent only descendants of American slaves.

I have learned, in fact, that by touching on this topic I have landed on a mighty iceberg, nine-tenths of which was utterly unknown to me.

For example: Let me introduce you to GAASA. No, that’s nothing to do with current ructions in the Levant. GAASA is G-A-A-S-A. It stands for “Generational African American Students Association” at Harvard University. GAASA takes the Coulter view of authenticity. To join, you have to be descended from enslaved black Americans.

You can read all about it in an articled published by the Harvard Crimson in October 2020. I’ve just been browsing that article, and a couple of things stopped my eye.

Thing One, quote:

Harvard has over fifteen Black organizations.

End quote.

That seems like a lot to me. “Over fifteen”? How much over? Why so many? Is it a departmental thing: Black Math Students Society, Black Anthropology Students Society, and so on? Or an identity thing: Disabled left-handed black trans male students, and so on? Or what?

Thing Two, quote:

As a first-year, I once heard from a teaching fellow of the Introduction to African American Studies course that GAA students make up 10 percent of Harvard’s Black population. For the Class of 2022, that would mean roughly 17 students.

End quote.

“GAA” there means “Generational African Americans,” what Ann Coulter — who gets a passing mention in this Crimson piece, by the way — would call DOAS. If they are only 10 percent of Harvard’s Black population, presumably the other 90 percent are foreign blacks or the offspring thereof, not descendants of American slaves.

As I said, a mighty iceberg. Would you like to hear about HASA, the Harvard African Students Association? You wouldn’t? Eh, I can’t say I blame you.

07 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  Another follow-up here. In last week’s podcast I told you, with supporting evidence, that Kamala Harris is seriously innumerate.

Innumeracy on the Kamala scale is not just a matter of being bad at arithmetic. For all I know, the Vice President might be a whiz at long division … I make no judgments there.

The problem — her problem, which her high office makes our problem — is a problem not so much of calculation as of imagination. People who are innumerate like that have no feel for numbers, no imaginative grasp of what they mean.

Veterans of the immigration-restriction movement like your genial host here are all too familiar with this particular deficiency. “Let them come!” say our opponents. “They will bolster our workforce and enrich our culture!” To which we reply wearily: “Do you know HOW MANY OF THEM THERE ARE?”

It sometimes turns out that, yes, they do know. At any rate, they know the words for the numbers. They just have no imaginative feel for what the numbers mean.

Visual aids are useful here. When I was a high-school math teacher I bought a book of graph paper ruled in millimeters and got to work with scissors, paste, and a big board of plywood. A million is a thousand times a thousand, so a million square millimeters fits into a square one meter on each side, which is to say a little over 39 inches.

My students could then see, every day, on the classroom wall, a million on plain display. I hope it stayed with them.

For the immigration issue in particular, a classic visual aid was the Gumball presentation given by Roy Beck of NumbersUSA back in 2010. It’s on YouTube: just put the words “gumball immigration” into the YouTube search box. If you fear that you may be down there in the innumeracy swamp with Kamala Harris, I urge you to check it out.

Item:  Browsing on X the other evening I suddenly found myself looking at Mrs Derbyshire in a post by the intrepid Andy Ngo.

My thoughts shot off on a tangent. Andy? He’s gay, isn’t he? Then I looked at the accompanying text. No, it wasn’t Mrs D, just a lookalike, a doppelganger.

The lady in Andy’s image was in fact Linda Sun, charged the other day in a New York City federal court along with her husband for acting as an undisclosed ChiCom agent.

In case anyone else spotted the resemblance, let me make it perfectly clear that the John and Rosie Institute for the Study of Xi Jinping Thought receives no funds whatsoever from the ChiCom government, and that our monthly visits to the New York City Chinese consulate are strictly for social purposes only.

Item:  Last Sunday, September 1st, marked thirty years since publication of The Bell Curve, the book co-authored by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein on intelligence and class structure in American life.

In case you never heard of it, The Bell Curve shamelessly peddles the totally discredited pseudoscience of so-called “intelligence testing” and purposefully trashes our nation’s Declaration of Independence by asserting that all men are not created equal. Some of us, these mountebanks claim, are smarter than others.

To his everlasting shame, Charles Murray has never apologized for this disgusting screed. He is, quite rightly, shunned by all respectable people. If you see him coming towards you on the sidewalk, cross to the other side of the road. You will thereby deliver a small blow for truth and justice!

Item:  Hwæt! Over the pond in England the University of Nottingham are expunging the term “Anglo-Saxon” from their courses. This, we are told, is part of a move to a move to “decolonise the curriculum.”

Quote from a report in the Daily Telegraph, August 31st, quote:

Teaching staff at Nottingham also ensure that module content aims at [inner quote] “undercutting nationalist narratives” and “essentialist ideas” [end inner quote] about nationality, meaning the belief that English identity is distinct and confers fundamental characteristics.

End quote.

Heaven forfend that students at an English university should stray into the belief that English identity is distinct!

Oh, and if you’re wondering what that syllable was that I barked at the beginning of this item, it was a “Hwæt!” If you have ever tried to study Anglo-Saxon — oh, I beg your pardon: “Early medieval English” — you will understand.

08 — Signoff.     That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention, for your emails and donations. And concerning the latter, let me just repeat the mailing address for checks earmarked to your genial host: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

To see us out, I thought we’d hear some oboe music. I opened my August Diary with a long segment about Blair Tindall’s 2005 book Mozart in the Jungle, which gives a vivid account of the underside of life as a concert musician. Ms Tindall knew all about it, having made her living playing the oboe in orchestras and concert ensembles.

Ms Tindall died in April last year aged only 63. Browsing on YouTube I found a rather touching tribute to her there on William Wielgus’ channel.

The visual component here is still pictures of Blair Tindall progressing through life from infancy to her later days — the kind of things that funeral parlors do for a photo display. Of course you are not getting visuals on a podcast, but there’s a link in the transcript.

The soundtrack is Blair Tindall playing Carlos Franzetti’s Oboe Concerto. It’s 26 minutes long in the YouTube tribute. Here on the podcast I’ll just give the first two and a half minutes. That’s longer than usual for my signoffs, but it’s a lovely piece of music. And come on, confess with me: when was the last time you listened to a performance in which an oboe was the main feature?

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.