Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the death of college athletics, a post about building a workbench, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

If you were to imagine the ideal human community, you would probably assume “ideal” meant peaceful and cooperative. There may be people who think the ideal society is one that it is something like a prison exercise yard, but most people think of the idyllic society as one in perfect harmony. Everyone cooperates with one another in order to overcome the natural challenges that come with human society. Disagreements are worked out through the free exchange of ideas and compromise.

Everyone understands that even on a small scale, such a thing is not possible, but it has always been a useful metric. We often measure society against this standard of what we conceive of as the ideal society. It is why every year there are studies posted listing the happiest countries or the least corrupt countries. These are ways to see how the country stacks up against that ideal. Happy people have less crime and corruption than people in quarrelsome, uncooperative societies.

This is not a Christian concept as many assume. People have noticed since the ancient times that societal health correlates with cooperation. Aristotle talked about the concept of philía, which roughly means friendship or affection. It is the glue that holds a people together, which is a requirement of the polis. It is the natural desire to cooperate with others, not just from personal interest, but for the sake of the polis. The “politics” of a society, therefore, arise from friendship and affection.

The 14th-century Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun wrote about this thing he called asabiyyah, which is something like social cohesion or group solidarity. It is the natural desire to cooperate that arises from family and the tribe, which allows for the construction of increasingly complex social structures. The more asabiyyah a society possesses, the more it is able to accomplish. This, Khaldun noted, is also why complex societies inevitably collapse.

The thing that makes it possible for one people to dominate other people is that which eventually erodes their social cohesion. It is social cohesion that facilitates cooperation, which increases the prosperity of the society. That prosperity then brings expansion and the incorporation of new people, who begin to drain that social cohesion. The cost of acquiring new people is the loss of social cohesion. This then raises the cost of governing the society, which further erodes asabiyyah.

There are many famous theories as to why human societies rise and fall, but all must contend with this central truth of human society. It can only exist when people are able to trust and cooperate with those outside their kin group. The greater the distance from that kin group, the more it costs to maintain cooperation. The reason empires always fall is they end up including people so distant from one another that they are unable to form any sort of cooperative relationship.

Look around the West and you see two things. One is the cost of the state is spiraling upward as it becomes increasingly incompetent. An unsaid truth of many American cities is they lack a genuine police force. The police are just a state sponsored gang that keeps the less organized gangs in check in order to maintain some safe areas for the elite and the tourist areas. Parts of cities like Baltimore can no longer be included in the concept of “civilized society.”

European cities are struggling with the same issue, but for different reasons. Instead of an unassimilable population from an old economic model, they imported millions of people who are genetically distant from the native population. Many of these people are hostile to other people imported into Europe. This alone has eroded social cohesion, but the efforts to maintain order are also eroding social trust. Every man jailed for speech crimes is a loss of European asabiyyah.

This may explain the sudden lurch in elite opinion in the United States away from unlimited immigration to what may be open hostility to it. Every day the window on the issue seems to move from the long-held position of open borders to what is now called remigration, the return of migrants to their homelands. The State Department has announced it is opening an office of remigration to facilitate this. A year ago, uttering the word “remigration” in many places could get you jailed.

This change is elite driven, which is what matters. Instead of an elite responding to public opinion, it is the elite now trying to drive public opinion. When the CEO of JPMorgan Chase speaks dismissively about immigration, as he recently did on the left-wing cable channel CNBC, something big is happening in the clouds. Conventional wisdom among the elite on immigration has swung to the opposite side. There is a reason for it, and it is not a sense of shame.

This gets back to those old concepts about what makes society possible and how best to measure the prosperity of a society. Decades of mismanagement due to the needs of the American empire have drained the West of its asabiyyah. As a result, the cost of maintaining order in the West is reaching a danger zone. All one has to do is look at the budgets of Western governments and then look at the condition of society. In many places, no government at all would be an improvement.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that it is the money men who are the first to sense something is seriously wrong in the West. They may not understand the cultural issues, but they see the gap between the cost and the results. The world’s richest man was not tasked with finding trillions in waste by accident. With $19 Trillion in debt rolling over in the next year, the money men are right to be worried that they have drained the last drops of asabiyyah from the Western world.

While it is tempting to see this sudden realization as a positive, Ibn Khaldun was not optimistic about a society’s ability to rebuild its asabiyyah. This is a theme with all writers who examined societal decline. Once a society hits that inflection point, it no longer has the capacity to reform itself. Social cohesion is not something that can be rebuilt, not even through shared struggle, as it is something that naturally occurs. Once it is drained it is gone and the society it produced is gone with it.

Perhaps this is a necessity as the West finally escapes the age of ideology. The decline of the West will open the ground for new social cohesion to form organically among the European populations that remain in Western lands. The new, post-ideological societies, growing up in majority-minority lands, will place social cohesion and asabiyyah at the top of their social hierarchy. The new asabiyyah will grow out of the wreckage of the ideological society.

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!

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 02m24s Open the pod bay doors, Hal
• 06m46s AI scrapes Grub Street
• 14m06s Trump 47 report card: (1)
• 19m14s Trump 47 report card: (2)
• 23m00s Trump 47 report card: (3)
• 28m29s Cooking the data at Harvard
• 30m34s The LGBTQ+ Community Month
• 31m51s Smartphones are a human right
• 33m15s Signoff with Carousel

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! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is of course your provocatively genial host John Derbyshire with commentary on the news this penultimate day of May 2025.

Just a wee housekeeping note before we start. I took my signoff music last week from a YouTube clip of two Chinese ladies playing Chinese music on Chinese instruments in a big public square. The people passing by in the square who stopped to listen didn’t look Chinese; neither did the buildings around the square. I surmised that it was a European city, and noted that someone in the YouTube comment thread thought it might be Munich.

A friend more resourceful than myself emailed in to tell me he had copied and pasted a couple of screenshots from that YouTube clip into Grok. Grok, he said, seems confident the video is shot in Milan, identifying the Castello Sforzesco and the Piazza del Duomo. Thank you, Sir!

Grok describes itself as, quote, “your truth-seeking AI companion for unfiltered answers with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing,” end quote. In other words, it’s an Artificial Intelligence chatbot. Let’s have a starting segment on AI.

02 — Open the pod bay doors, Hal.     AI sure can be handy, as my friend’s use of Grok there illustrates. I’ve never engaged with Grok myself, though. In fact I confess that I’ve never engaged with AI at all.

That’s a bit odd considering that my favorite reading matter in my late-childhood, young-teen years was science fiction, which of course had plenty of smart robots in its stories. It’s even odder when I recall that the first opinion piece I had published, back in my 1960s college days, contained the following prediction, quote:

The problem of the twenty-first century will be the death of science, in the sense of man’s achievements through science. Advances in automated labour and information-processing will result in men having nothing much to do but gaze in awe and incomprehension at the works of the superior intelligences we are creating.

End quote.

AI still scares me. Perhaps adolescent Derb read too much sci-fi. Or perhaps we really should be scared.

If you put the words “Artificial Intelligence” into the YouTube search bar a high proportion of the results you get are AI scaremongering. The first time I noticed that I wasn’t surprised, let alone scared. YouTube leans hard towards negativity. I guess that brings in the clicks. That’s especially true if you search by nation.

Russia is facing a demographic collapse; China has already had one; South Africa is collapsing. Britain? Fuhgeddaboutit. That, apparently, is what people like to read. I’ll admit I get a tingle out of it myself, even while the angel sitting on my right shoulder is whispering: South Africa’s been collapsing for twenty years, but it never happens. China’s been around for four thousand: they’re not going anywhere …

The clips you get from putting “Artificial Intelligence” into the YouTube search bar have an extra dimension of scariness, though, in that a high proportion of the scariest speakers and interviewees in the clips are themselves pioneers in the development of AI: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever, Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, and yes, Elon Musk.

Browsing through some of those clips, in fact, I turned up one in which actual AI bots were asked about the prospects for homo sapiens surviving the AI revolution. Their first estimate was, quote, “I’d give humanity a 30 percent chance of surviving,” end quote. Later in the clip we were offered revised estimates, but none of them was good.

If all those pioneers and experts in the field, and the AI itself, think we are doomed, perhaps it’s time to stock up that bunker under the back yard.

03 — AI scrapes Grub Street.     As a footnote to that, here’s a phrase you may not be familiar with: “content provider.” In the last few years it’s been elevated somewhat to “content creator,” but to-may-to, to-mah-to.

I’m very familiar with the phrase “content provider,” having actually been one for forty-some years. The phrase is useful for fending off enquiries about the work — I mean, the work of content provision — that I don’t want to answer. Asked about VDARE.com’s business plan, for example, or, further back, office politics at National Review, I would smile innocently and murmur: “Sorry, don’t know: I’m just a content provider.”

Content providing is an ancient and honorable profession. Homer, if he actually existed, was a content provider. So was Shakespeare; so were the translators of the Bible (although they were generating new content from content provided to them by earlier content providers).

What’s this got to do with Artificial Intelligence? Well, content provision is a form of work, albeit a low one by comparison with heart surgery or the building of cathedrals. A worker should be paid for his labor. Before settled copyright law came up in the nineteenth century, a content provider was paid — if he was paid — just once, by contract with the printer or bookseller.

Nowadays there is a complex body of law concerning a content provider’s rights regarding the copying, distribution, and translation of the content he’s provided, the rights sometimes limited by “fair use” rules and usually lapsing after some set number of years. I still get a small but welcome check for content I provided twenty years ago.

Now here comes AI. How does it work? By scraping. That’s the word they use, scraping. It means using specialized software — scraping tools — to extract and interpret data from the internet. There are many, many such scraping tools with names right off the kindergarten brochure: Octoparse, Diffbot, Scrapy of course, ScrapingBee, AnyPicker, Apify, Gumloop, ScrapeStorm, …

Here’s the thing, though. A lot of that data being scraped is content provided by, yes, content providers to some publishing outlet. The texts of entire books — perhaps millions of them — are on the internet.

I don’t think you’ll be astounded to hear that the content providers who provided that content are not being remunerated by the AI firms who are scraping it up — copying it — for use by their bots.

With a personal publication record going well back into the last century, AI scraping has probably left me several thousand dollars poorer than I ought to be. Copyrighted content that I’ve provided has been stolen by — to name just one billionaire thief — Elon Musk. Lawsuit!

In fact lawsuits are under way. The inspiration for this segment of my podcast was an op-ed in todays’ New York Post by Danielle Coffey, CEO of something called the News/Media Alliance. Quote from that Op-Ed, edited quote:

To protect their work, over a dozen members of the News/Media Alliance recently sued [AI platform] Cohere, Inc. for unauthorized use of their content. They joined other publishers, including News Corp and The New York Times, that are suing various AI companies to enforce their rights.

Some in Big Tech are beginning to recognize the problem. We’ve seen a proliferation of licensing agreements in which AI companies pay publishers to use their content, over the last year. A News/Media Alliance collective is currently licensing content at scale.

But without reinforced legal protections, bad actors will continue to exploit publishers and creators — undermining America’s creative industries to further tech’s commercial interests.

End quote.

Content provision has never been much of a living, other than for a few big names or strokes of luck. Sure, Dr Johnson got fifteen hundred guineas for his Dictionary — worth $300,000 today — but that was after years of poverty.

Unless the lawyers pull off some big, permanent courtroom victories, content provision will be even less of a living in the Age of AI than it currently is.

04 — Trump 47 report card: (1).     I make today, May 30th, the 131st day of the Trump 47 presidency. How’s our guy doing?

A mixed report from me. On immigration, I’ll grade A-minus. The minus is for that dumb investor’s gold card, which with any luck will never become reality. Trump has delivered elsewhere on immigration, though. Federal law-enforcement officers are actually enforcing federal laws, to screams of outrage from the open-borders nation-wreckers.

He’s even going after student visas, as I’ve been urging him to. Until recently he was wont to blather about stapling a green card to the diploma of every foreign student who graduated from one of our colleges. We haven’t heard that from him recently … or at any rate, I haven’t. Perhaps he’s been spending time with Stephen Miller.

Once again, repeat after me, please: Higher education is a precious, finite national resource. Our own citizens should have first call on it.

In this, as in everything else he’s trying to do, Trump is being resisted by our lefty judiciary. Thursday this week, in fact, a federal judge in Massachusetts — an Obama appointment, natch — issued an injunction blocking Trump’s efforts to freeze Harvard University’s extravagant admissions of foreign students — currently more than 27 percent of students enrolled.

Law professor Jonathan Turley has coined the phrase “chronic injunctivitis” for this swelling flood of “national or universal injunctions issued by federal district courts against the Trump Administration.” These are district courts, mind. Their proper scope is ruling on whether Daisy Dickerson’s parking ticket is valid or not. They have no business rapping the President’s knuckles over the issuance of visas.

On the fuss over tariffs, I’ll grade B-plus. The case for major tariff reform seems to me sound, but I think Trump went at it too fast and loud. A slower and more deliberate approach would have worked better.

I do understand the case for speed. Congress is on a knife-edge and the mid-terms come next year. On seriously disturbing issues like this, there needs to be time for the dust to settle. Sure; but I just think the President was too fast, too abrupt.

Had you ever heard of the Court of International Trade before this week? Me neither; but on Wednesday a three-judge panel of that court tried to stop the implementation of Trump’s tariffs. Latest I have on this is that an appellate court has just put a hold on that ruling, so the tariffs will go ahead while the lawyers argue it out.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote in a column on Tuesday, quote:

Clearly, a significant portion of the federal judiciary is hostile to Trump’s policies and is happy to thwart them in any way it can.

End quote.

As Glenn also points out, though, the doctrine of separation of powers was never intended to mean that unelected judges have final authority on every point of policy. If they did, in what sense would we still be a democracy? Presidents from Thomas Jefferson on have been defying judicial rulings. I hope Trump will join the list.

05 — Trump 47 report card (2).     Foreign policy? I wish we didn’t have one. Can’t we please pull out of NATO, Mr President?

In the matter of the war between the world’s two most corrupt white nations, our President has, to put it gently, not distinguished himself. Vladimir Putin has treated him with frank contempt. Putin has grudgingly allowed that if negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are satisfactory, he might then agree to include Trump in the next round.

Translated from the Russian that means: “Don’t call us, we’ll let you know.” Trump is fuming; Putin is sniggering quietly to himself and his aides while stepping up the war.

He seems to be getting plenty of support from China in the war. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out long-term. China will of course want something in return for her trouble. How about … Siberia?

The other war — the one Israel is fighting against Iran and Iran’s proxies, all openly dedicated to Israel’s annihilation — that war is currently revolving around Iran’s nuclear weapons.

They don’t actually have any. At least, that’s what we’re told, and we can only hope the intelligence is good. Iran’s been working on nuke development for at least twenty years, and it’s not that difficult.

The Trump administration at any rate doesn’t want Iran to nuke up. They’re in negotiations with the Ayatollahs to open up the country’s nuclear research labs to full inspection, in return for us lifting trade sanctions and unfreezing Iranian funds.

Last week, we’ve been told, Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and warned him against striking Iran’s nuke-development sites.

My guess is that Netanyahu will consider that restraint a fair price to pay for being allowed to continue his war against Hamas in Gaza. Whether Trump sees it the same way is not clear. Relations between the two leaders are … cool, especially since Trump backed off from helping Israel fight the Houthis of Yemen, who are still lobbing missiles at Israeli targets.

My grade for foreign policy is B-plus. The B is for us still being in NATO, which Trump used to tell us he himself was against. The plus is for zero American combat casualties in this administration so far — I don’t think we lost anyone in the Campaign against the Houthis.

06 — Trump 47 report card (3).     On presentation, I’ll grade Trump 47 a plain A.

To be honest, I don’t watch the President’s public performances much. That A grade is based pretty much entirely on his Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, which I thought a good stirring speech.

It had some Trumpish braggadocio in it, to be sure, but no surprise there. After praising our country, he called it, quote:

… a republic that I am fixing after a long and hard four years. That was a hard four years we went through.

Who would let that happen? People pouring through our borders, unchecked, people doing things that are indescribable and not for today to discuss. But the republic that is now doing so very well …

End quote.

If they’re not for today to discuss, why mention them, Sir? But hey, that’s Trump for you.

Later in the speech the President congratulated himself on the 2026 soccer World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics both being scheduled to happen in his term of office, along with next year’s celebration of 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. He added, quote:

Can you imagine? I missed that four years, and now look what I have. I have everything. Amazing the way things work out. God did that. I believe that too. God did it.

End quote.

The audience laughed and applauded. They didn’t seem to mind. Whether or not God minded, I shall not venture to speculate.

I minded somewhat. A Memorial Day address in the national cemetery, with loved ones of those who died for our country present, along I guess with some veterans who were maimed in the nation’s service — a speech given in such a place, on such an occasion, should be solemn all the way through.

That’s Trump for you, though, warts and all. Before I could form my features into a proper frown I recalled the quality of national leadership we had this time last year, and the frown turned into a smile of relief.

As a lover of numbers, I did do a full wince when the President referred to, quote, “us, an American nation, 325 million strong,” end quote.

Way back in my monthly Diary for October 2016 I looked forward to the day when the U.S. population would reach one-third of a billion, 333,333,333. I estimated that day would be January 25th, 2020. I think in fact it was slightly later, in February 2021. Whatever: On Monday this week, Memorial Day, our population was just short of 342 million. It had passed the 325 million mark about eight years ago.

Please, Mr President, if you’re going to quote numbers at us, try to make sure they’re the right numbers. If you need a fully numerate assistant to help out your speechwriters with these issues, I can make myself available at a few days’ notice.

But for those few slight negativities, I would have graded the speech A-plus. Room for improvement, Sir.

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

Imprimis:  Back to Harvard for a moment. Last week a professor at Harvard Business School was stripped of her tenure and fired for having fabricated data in a study she published. She was the first Harvard professor to lose her tenure since the 1940s.

The defenestrated professor there was 47-year-old Francesca Gino. She’d been a permanent faculty member at Harvard since 2010.

Would you like to know her field of specialization? Wait for it: … her research focused on honesty and ethical behavior.

The particular study for which she cooked the data claimed to show that requiring individuals to sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form rather than at the end significantly boosts honest responses.

You might further be interested to know that Professor Gino was, before she fell under suspicion, one of Harvard’s highest-paid employees, actually the fifth highest from 2018 to 2020. In that last year she pulled down $1,049,532, according to Wikipedia.

What portion of that salary was paid out of grants to Harvard from the American taxpayer? We have not been told.

Item:  June is of course Pride Month. Quote from its website, quote:

[A] vibrant and inclusive celebration that honors the LGBTQ+ community, their history, achievements, and ongoing struggle for equality.

End quote.

That gives me an opportunity to once again promote my call for dumping the ugly, clumsy, and all-too-mockable expression “the LGBTQ+ community” for the much briefer, neater, and totally non-abusive alternative “the prouds.”

Alternatively, of course, those organizing the festivities could follow their own logic and rename Pride Month as “The LGBTQ+ Community Month.”

Item:  It isn’t just in the U.S.A. that the judiciary leans heavily to the crazy left. Things are just as bad in Britain.

In March 2022 the High Court of that nation (or former nation) ruled that it was unlawful for border law enforcement to seize the mobile phones of illegal alien boat people arriving across the English Channel from France. It was, the court ruled, a violation of the invader’s human rights.

That was three years ago. There’s a new Border Security Bill currently before Parliament, actually going to the upper chamber — that’s the House of Lords — next week. I haven’t been able to find out whether it includes a clause restoring the right of border officers to seize invaders’ phones. If anyone can enlighten me on this, or knows an AI bot that might, I’d be much obliged.

08 — Signoff.     And that’s it, boys and girls. Thank you yet again for your time and attention.

Yes, the VDARE Foundation is still with us, and planning (I think) for a conference at the castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia later this year. Please give us your support by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check payable to the VDARE Foundation at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options listed at my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine, who publish my stuff. Thank you!

To sign off with, here’s something a day or two ahead of the calendar. It’s an old favorite of mine, though. Just listen to the word-play in the lyrics; these guys really knew their business.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

While everyone is enjoying a bit of a respite from the crazies flying their freak flags in our faces, it is important to remember that they have not gone away. Like cicadas, they have merely gone into hibernation. There they will rest up and conjure some new versions of their egalitarian lunacy. A decade from now they will spring forth and start the cycle of madness over again.

In the interim, the people who orchestrated the freakshow will be busy gnawing away at the fibers of society in an effort to prevent regeneration. They can still use Trump to generate support and get money from soulless oligarchs, who think underwriting this stuff will bring them peace. The lawfare we see against the Trump admin is a good example of what will be the norm now.

The crazies will also refit their image by disposing of the old freaks and finding new freaks to be the face of their craziness. Expect new faces in the media saying the same old things but with new language. Just as the New Democrat was the old crazies in new baby boomer wrappers, the next round of freaks will be the same freaks but dressed up in the garb of the new generation of millennials.

That is the show this week. It is a vacation week for many and a slow week in general, so I am trying to keep in light. Even though it is fun to mock these people now that the tide has turned against them, it is important to remember that the freaks never change, and they never quit. The coming peace in the culture war is a false dawn. True peace only comes when freaks are permanently forced to the margins.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• The Freak Show
• The Freaks
• Shadow Freaks (Link)
• Death To Freaks

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Note: This is the five year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, peace be upon him, so I will be part of a Twitter space discussing the life and legacy of one of our nation’s greatest heroes. You can listen here.

The general assessment of Trump 2.0 so far, by those inclined to support him, is that his domestic operation is doing great, but his foreign policy operations is a work in progress, to be generous. It is still early, and the primary focus should be on domestic policy, but foreign policy is not unimportant. Thirty years of horrific domestic policy has often been justified on foreign policy grounds, so they are not entirely divorced from one another.

The reason the Trump foreign policy operation is struggling can be understood by looking at the team assigned to implement his policy. The top foreign policy job was given to Marco Rubio, a guy with zero experience in this area, other than sitting on Senate committees. A pawn of the Israel lobby, he also sided with the neocons for his entire career in the Senate. During the transition, this nomination was counted as the worst of Trump’s cabinet picks.

Rubio seems to have had some sort of epiphany when it comes to politics that went unnoticed as he no longer sounds like a neocon. In fact, he sounds like a critic who has been reading dissident websites. His commentary on South Africa, for example, is the sort of stuff that used to get your bank account closed. Even so, Rubio is without experience, so he is learning on the job, a job that traditionally sets the tone for the administration’s foreign policy approach.

Things get more unconventional with the national security team. Mike Waltz was the National Security Advisor until it was revealed that he was playing footsy with far-left radicals in the media. Then there are Michael Anton and Sebastian Gorka as Deputy National Security Advisors. Both are best described as media personalities with close ties to the neocons. Eli Lake loves Anton and Lake is firmly in the paranoid anti-Russia social network of neocon media activists.

Then you have Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, two people with no experience in their areas of responsibility and zero experience running big, complicated organizations. Gabbard’s claim to fame is breaking with Washington on Syria and her party on social issues. Hegseth was a popular Fox News star with unconventional opinions on the military. These are Trump’s most out of left field foreign policy picks.

The two defining features of Trump’s foreign policy team is a general lack of experience on foreign policy issues, and they have earned the trust of Donald Trump. That last part gets attacked by the media, but it is important if you are looking to redefine and revitalize the foreign policy community. Trump needs spear catchers who will do what must be done to implement policy. What sunk Trump’s first term were all the people thinking they could use Trump to boost their career.

The main problem is the experience. This is not always a bad thing as fresh eyes are certainly needed in all of these areas. Old hands would never think to ask why things are done the way they are done, especially in how information is selected and filtered before it is presented to the President. The intelligence people in Trump’s first term gave him the mushroom treatment. Most of the time, he was left with choices he did not want but was forced to pick from them.

The real issue here is these people are not just tasked with implementing Trump’s vision of a new foreign policy, but they have to figure out what that is and then figure out if they agree with it. It is not all that clear if Trump’s vision is merely dovish within the context of the standard Wilsonian model that has dominated America since Wilson or if it is a rejection of that framework entirely, in favor of the 19th century conservative approach embodied by the famous quote from John Quincy Adams.

Added to this is the fact that it is not all that clear if most of the people have thought much about this until this point. Seb Gorka is mostly known for being rude to people on Twitter and being a guest on conservative chat shows. Michael Anton is best known for one essay in 2016 and his love of fashion. Tulsi Gababrd is the only member of the team that has offered original thoughts on foreign policy. For the most part, Trump’s team is a blank slate when it comes to foreign policy.

This may be a good thing, as at least he has a team that is open to questioning the status quo, even if they have not formulated an alternative. The foreign policy community is stuffed to the gills with people who have been carefully vetted by the Israel lobby and the neocons. Trump had little choice but to reach outside of that world for people he could trust and who would try to think for themselves. The result is an odd squad of neophytes and eccentrics.

It remains to be seen if this works but it explains why foreign policy is so uneven at the start of this term. It also explains why Trump has been so reliant on Steven Witkoff, as his personal emissary. He may be the one guy who understands what Trump is thinking with regards to foreign policy. There again, we see a man with zero experience in foreign affairs, outside of business dealings. Like everyone else in the Trump foreign policy team, he is learning on the job.

This may explain why the Russians are willing to talk to the Trump people. They see the effort to break from old patterns. It may also be why the Iranians have agreed to talks with Trump people, despite Trump breaking their deal in the first term. People who spend a lot of time studying American politics sense an opportunity to break from the past with regards to dealing with the Americans. It also explains why the Russians are so patient with the Trump team.

Again, it is too soon to know how this ends. It is an odd collection of people held together by a desire to head in a new direction, even if they have no clue as to which direction they will be heading. Perhaps for now a desire to break from the past is enough to get the ball rolling. If they managed to avoid being outflanked by the Europeans and subverted by the Washington establishment, they might finally create a plausible alternative to Wilsonian democracy.

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!

Note: Tonight Paul and I will be taking a victory lap on the Covid topic, so use the time to think about how you will congratulate us on being right about everything. You can tune in on Twitter, YouTube or Rumble.

The first four months of the Trump restoration have exceeded everyone’s expectations for no other reason than it has shifted the conversation. The bad guys are still battling everything in the courts and Congress, but unlike the first time, Trump seems to have a plan, and he has been aggressive in executing it. As a result, he has been setting the agenda rather than the bad guys. The one place where he is failing is with Ukraine, where it looks like he has painted himself into a corner.

When Trump came to power, the choices with regards to Ukraine were to either abandon the whole thing and get blamed for tanks in Kiev or continue the Biden policy and get blamed for tanks in Kiev. To his credit he tried to shake things up by talking directly to the Russians and bypassing the snakes in the foreign policy community while doing it, in an effort to reset the board. Clearly, the snakes and the bad guys did not see that coming, so they were unprepared for it.

The problem is that the facts on the ground have not changed, so there is no deal Trump can make with the Russians to end the war. Zelensky will never do any peace deal as that means the end of him. The nationalists in Ukraine will never accept a deal, which is why Zelensky cannot do a deal. The Europeans seem convinced that peace in Ukraine means the withdraw of America from Europe, so they are fighting like hell to keep the war going, even as it harms their positions.

Now it seems clear that the Russians have understood from the start that Trump was never willing to break with the Europeans or take on the crazies in Washington who created the Ukraine mess. They were happy to talk with him, but they knew there was nothing he could offer them, as he was simply unwilling or maybe unable to do what is necessary to get a deal done with them. That means peace comes when Ukraine can no longer fight and the Russians dictate terms.

That is probably why Trump is so angry. He probably understood his dilemma, but for some reason thought he could charm his friend Putin into yielding on some things in order to get a deal done. This was a serious error. Russians have been known for centuries as unyielding negotiators. They never trade what they have for something they already have or are about to have. They always deal from their interests, never personal vanity or out of a need to get along.

The best example of this is the Hitler-Stalin pact. Stalin was a Bolshevik, and he detested the fascists, but Russia was not ready to fight the Nazis, so Stalin did a deal to buy time, even if it meant doing a deal with the hated Nazis. Stalin was also willing to make deals with the capitalists, because it served Russian interests. The point here is even at the peak of their ideological fervor, the Russians still did diplomacy like Russians, which means in the interest of Russia.

For some reason Trump and Witkoff seemed to have thought they could talk the Putin government out of being Russian, but now they are finding out that their charm offensives changed nothing. The position of the Russians has not changed with regards to Ukraine and the West. They want Ukraine as a demilitarized, deradicalized neutral state with no connection to NATO. They will get that at the bargaining table, or they will get that on the battlefield.

Trump also suffers from the fact that the rest of the world no longer trusts Washington, no matter who is in the White House. The thing many Americans struggle with when it comes to foreign policy is that the same people who have been lying to us for decades have been lying to the world. The people who ran the Biden admin were not suddenly honest when it came to diplomacy. The American political class lies about everything to everyone, even themselves.

In a way, Trump and his team are the new management of a company that used to be a dominant player in the market but after years of mismanagement is now in trouble, which is why there is new management. They can go to their customers and promise things will change, but the customers are under no illusions that new faces will solve the problems of the company. In fact, the new promises after years of broken promises just raise more suspicions about the company.

That is probably part of Trump’s frustration. He is being treated by world leaders as a guy who lies all the time, when he is not the guy who did the lying. It is the other side of being an American. There are good things that are associated with being an American, things like confidence and risk taking. The other side of the coin is the bad things, like dishonestly and unreliability. It is why the only thing worse than being the enemy of America is being the friend of America.

Even though there are hints of realism creeping into official foreign policy discussions, we remain a long way from a realistic foreign policy. Trump and his team are still making the mistake of thinking the world looks at America as the good guy, the white hat trying to make the world a safer place for democracy. In reality, the rest of the world views America as either a thumbless clod or a perfidious troublemaker. The Russians lean heavily toward the latter type.

Ironically, Trump finds himself in the inverse position as his hero Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War. Regan would say, “Trust but verify” when dealing with the Soviets, on the grounds that the West kept its word. It was assumed that the communists would cheat, just like they did at the Olympics. Now the roles are reversed, and it is the Russians who assume they will keep their end of the deal, but it is the West that will eventually break the deal.

This is the reality of late empire America. The emerging world order where major regional powers work to keep the peace is the result of the lone superpower failing to hold up its end of the bargain. The alien weirdos who gained control of foreign policy traded American respect and credibility so they could seek revenge on their ancient enemy to the east. The result is America has a lot of work to do in order to restore her reputation and that will require a mighty dose of realism.

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!

Note: This is the five year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, peace be upon him, so I will be part of a Twitter space discussing the life and legacy of one of our nation’s greatest heroes. You can listen here.

This is the time of year when entertainers, politicians and famous rich people are asked to deliver commencement speeches. Inevitably they deliver tirades against normal people and in favor of the latest trends. This season, the popular chant with this sort is the “rule of law” which is ironic given that the people chanting it spent the last decade obliterating the concept. The question that is rarely asked is why is it that rich people are so eager to support this stuff?

It is not just the ditzy actors who are prone to this. A part of getting rich in America is adopting the politics of the rich, which is hostile to normal things. Rich people, until very recently, were solidly behind open borders. They backed the street violence and chaos of the last decade through donations to the thicket of not-for-profits. The billionaires underwrote the entertainment content that preached the bizarre social theories at the root of their deranged politics.

On the surface, it makes little sense. If you are a rich person, you should not want to undermine order, as it is the rules that make you rich. You got your wealth because of the system, so the system is your friend. Think a little further, however, and you can see why the rich might want to make the rules more opaque. It is a form of pulling up the drawbridge behind them so new schemers cannot get in on the action. They got theirs, so it is time to keep you from getting yours.

In this regard these strange opinions about how we ought to act and how we ought to organize society function as a selection mechanism. The rich use the willingness to adopt these opinions as a test of your willingness to obey. This is very clearly how they select politicians. The more suggestable the person, the more likely they are to find success in politics. No master has ever wanted a slave who thinks outside the box or is willing to question authority.

That said, many of our rich people believe in this stuff. For actors, the answer probably lies in the fact that merit plays a small role in their success. Pretending to be someone else, singing a catchy tune and being funny are not uncommon skills. Restaurants in Los Angeles and New York are full of people capable to being good at those things in movies and television. Taylor Swift does not possess skills uncommon in her trade, but she is a megastar and everyone else sings for their supper.

Randomness plays an enormous role in carny life. Hollywood is full of stories about women who were spotted by a talent scout and turned into a star. Then you have the many actors who landed a role in a film that turned out to be a huge success, despite the studios thinking otherwise. Sally Field hit it big in Smokey and the Bandit, for example, despite the studio not wanting her or the film. Carny life is more about random chance than talent and hard work.

In a world where success and failure are random chance or perhaps decided by hidden forces unseen by the players, it is no surprise that these people are in the sort of paranoid politics that define carny life. It is not a huge jump from thinking shadowy figures behind the scenes determine your fate as an actor to thinking that an invisible army of Hitler fans secretly control society. Their lived experience tells them that the rules are a facade for the real power structure.

Randomness explains carnies and politicians, but what about the oligarchs? Why are so many of them fond of these paranoid politics? The last ten years of woke madness would not have been possible without the support of the oligarchs. In fact, the story of Trump’s return to power cannot be understood without noticing how the nation’s richest men lined up behind him. Most opposed him just five years ago, but then they changed teams and now support his reform efforts.

Here is where we see chance again. Look at the oligarchs and what you rarely see is people with unique talents for anything other than exploiting a bottleneck or monopoly that was often the result of chance. The PayPal mafia, the fifty or so people who founded PayPal, got super rich by exploiting special access to the banking system in order to facilitate online payments. Many went on to exploit new bottlenecks and monopolies to get even richer.

This is not a novelty of this round of oligarch formation. The oligarchs that emerged in the industrial age were similarly fortunate. A common story of that period was one where the guy who got super rich from a new idea was not the guy who came up with the idea, but the guy who bought the idea and then exploited it. The industrial oligarchs were good at gaming the system of the time, much in the same way that the modern oligarch was the product of gaming the system.

One of the truths about capitalism and market economics is that it does not select for virtue or even talent in the conventional sense. It selects for the ability and willingness to find gaps in the rules and the ability to ruthlessly exploit them. The tech barons found a gap in property laws, for example, that allows them to steal your information and then sell it to government and business. Without this loophole, the giant social media platforms collapse overnight.

The result of this system that randomly awards people with opportunity and then lavishly regards those who are willing to ruthlessly exploit the opportunity is an oligarchy composed of sociopathic lottery winners. The weird social politics that defines the attitudes of our elite are both a defense against similar lottery winners lurking below and a justification for their position. They are not just lottery winners, but members of an elect, fated to hold positions in the elite.

It has been noted that the creation of new oligarchs of the industrial era ended in the early 20th century. This came with the rise of managerialism, but also with a narrowing of the economic class. The overclass faded from the scene, retreating into philanthropy and public service roles. From the perspective of the typical American, the gap between the rich and poor narrowed and the middle-class came to dominate. Getting rich came to mean doing slightly better than middle-class.

This current revolt against managerialism led by some of the oligarchs is coming when the fruit of the technological revolution has been harvested. There are no new billionaires being minted from new technology. Similarly, the financial sector that experienced a parallel boom has consolidated as well. The one exception may be AI, but this is why the current oligarchs are desperate to wrestle control of it from the managerial class.

What we may be experiencing is another period of consolidation similar to what happened after the industrial revolution. The weird social politics are no longer useful as a defense of the oligarchy, so they are seeking to reorder the managerial system to lock in their positions and marginalize the sorts of politics that come with the boutique beliefs that define the woke phenomenon. They are tapping into populism as a useful way to pressure their fellow oligarchs into compliance.

The bulk of the 20th century was determined by elites who acted like elites and operated from the shadows. That was peak America, from the perspective of the typical American in this age. There was strong family formation and a strong middle-class that defended moderate morality. A nation full of normal middle-class people happy with the rules is not going to cause any trouble for the elites. Perhaps that is what the current elites are trying to recreate in this age.

This could explain the growing war on credentialism. The managerial class is festooned with people with little practical knowledge but festooned with credentials that they think make them a genius. This is why they think they can tell the rich guys what to do and where to do it. Breaking the spine of the managerial class will necessarily mean breaking their belief system. The sudden anathematization of woke culture is an effort to kill their gods and therefore their sense of authority.

In the end, the thirty or so years of bizarre social politics that have proliferated among the elites may be ending due to the consolidation of the oligarchy. Whatever benefit there was to these luxury beliefs has been consumed. What is left is a rallying point for members of the managerial class who refuse to bend the knee. Restoring normal social order is another step in shoring up the position of the oligarchs by removing any of the remaining threats to their position.

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!

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a post about conservative corruption, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

When you look at lists of the best science fiction movies, what you see is a mix of recency bias and popular nonsense. Star Wars gets placed near the top because the lists are usually targeted to people who consume corporate slop. Back to the Future is another one on these lists that does not qualify as science fiction. It is a comedy where time travel is the MacGuffin. Of course, this raises the question as to what qualifies as science fiction and what makes for good sci-fi.

Science fiction is speculative fiction that relies on science to create scenarios where questions about the human condition are more easily explored. Artificial intelligence, for example, is useful in telling stories about what it means to be human. We instinctively know a computer program is not human, even if it is able to speak with us like a real human being. That gets to the issue of what separates flesh and blood humans from the artificial versions we are creating.

Heinlein said that science fiction takes what we know now, what we thought we knew before now and then speculates about the future based on a solid understanding of how science advances. Asimov famously said that science fiction is about how humans react to changes in science and technology. Together they make for a good definition of science fiction, which is as much about the science as the fiction. In other words, it is not just drama in space or in the future.

That is why Back to the Future is not science fiction. The time travel business is just a way for the main characters to be funny in unusual situations. The point of the film is to make people laugh, not challenge their views of humanity or technology. Time travel is a MacGuffin, which is a thing or event that moves the story along. The point of the time travel business is to put Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox in wacky situations so they can be wacky and funny together.

Similarly, Star Wars is not science fiction. This has become a controversial statement because the adult children who consume the modern iterations of the franchise like to imagine themselves as science geeks. George Lucas has always described the franchise as a space opera, because it is space opera. Star Wars is consciously melodramatic and formulaic. It could just as easily be set in the Middle Ages or the Old West, but he chose to set the story in space.

In fairness, the Star Trek franchise can also be called space opera. The stories in the television series are the definition of melodramatic and formulaic. While the original series tried to think about the impact of interstellar travel on humanity, subsequent series were standard televisions dramas set in space. The main appeal of the original series was the relationship of the three main characters. That could just as easily have been done on a pirate ship in the 17th century.

That goes to what Heinlein said about science fiction. It has to try to  project scientific progress into the future in a plausible way. We can assume we solved the problems of humans in space, for example, but it must do so in a way that is plausible. For example, we figured out how to shield spacemen from radiation and mitigate the effects of zero gravity on his muscles and bones. That means the humans still struggle with limitations, just different limitations than current humans.

This is why the girl boss phenomenon has killed modern sci-fi. The demand that the main character be a girl boss who never has to struggle to get what she wants and is never allowed to fail defeats the whole purpose of the genre. If science makes it so that girls can beat up men three times their size and they are able to solve every problem with minimum effort, there is no story worth telling. The girl boss turns the genre into a lecture on gender set in space.

That comes to the other part of the formula. It is not enough for the science to make some sense, leaving humans in a familiar conflict. The story has to be compelling. It is why Blade Runner can be called great sci-fi. The science is compelling as it suggests that material progress does not guarantee human happiness. It also delves into the question of what it means to be a human. The ambiguity of Deckard’s true nature and how his story plays out is gripping storytelling.

Of course, films have another aspect and that is the visuals. World building with the written word depends heavily on the reader. With movies, the maker has to do all of the work in order to get the viewer to suspend disbelief. This is another area where the girl boss ruins the project. By definition, girl boss lives outside the physical constraints of the world created for her. This makes that world absurd and pointless. The film becomes a study of girl boss rather than storytelling.

The visuals are why films like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey are always at the top of these lists. The science is great, and the fiction is great, but they are also visual masterpieces that have come to define the genre. Many of the common things in space shows were invented by Kubrick. A film about a dystopian future will always mimic the visual sense of Blade Runner. It is why Star Wars works. The look and sound are great, despite being formulaic drama.

One final piece of the puzzle is what the stories are telling us about the current mood regarding science and culture. When Kubrick make 2001: A Space Odyssey, America was optimistic about space on the surface, but also anxious about the ramifications of technological advance. By the 1970’s, that anxiety had subsided only to return in the 1980’s when the microprocessor revolution hit normal Americans. Good science fiction holds a mirror up to the age in which it is produced.

In the end, what matters most is that Star Wars is not science fiction and anyone who argues otherwise should be sent to a camp. Further, there is a debate as to whether Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey is the best science fiction film, with some room to argue for Alien. The argument against Alien is that it is also a monster movie, so there is a category dispute. Otherwise, your choices for the greatest sci-fil film are down to two and there is no point in debating it.

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!

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m22s Mortalism in the news
• 07m04s Regretful mortalism
• 13m52s A clumsy Commencement
• 20m18s A joyful Commencement
• 26m11s Hesperophobia (cont.)
• 36m47s That pesky semicolon
• 38m53s Romania’s new President
• 41m32s Rotherham’s new Mayor
• 43m40s Signoff with cultural appropriation

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 of course Franz Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your indigenously genial host John Derbyshire. What does it mean to be “indigenously genial”? I’m not sure, but give me a break here, I’m running out of adverbs.

I’ll open today with a segment on a peculiar way of thinking which I shall call “mortalism,” although I’m not at all sure that’s the correct descriptor.

Mortalism isn’t crazy in itself; it’s actually quite logical, although in my opinion misguided. Like so many other ways of thinking, though, it has a lunatic fringe. This week we encountered that lunatic fringe. Here we go.

02 — Mortalism in the news.     A story that particularly snagged my attention in this week’s news was the one about the attempt last Saturday to destroy an IVF clinic in Palm Springs, California.

This was a one-man operation, or attempted operation. The actual one man was 25-year-old Guy Bartkus. His plan was to blow up the clinic with a car bomb. However, he screwed up somehow. The bomb went off before he could get the vehicle properly positioned, the explosion wiping out himself and the car but leaving the clinic, which was closed at the time, damaged but by no means destroyed.

IVF, if you’re not up-to-date on your reproductive abbreviations, stands for “in vitro fertilization.” In vitro is Latin for “in glass.” A human female egg is fertilized by a human male sperm in a glass apparatus — there you go — instead of in the more conventional way. The fertilized egg is then closely watched until it has definitely become an embryo, at which point it is transferred to a human womb for gestation to birth.

So the zone of lunacy we’re in here is something to do with reproduction. Most of the cultural warfare waged in this zone is pro-abortionists versus anti-abortionists. Since an IVF clinic exists to produce viable embryos, it sounds as though Guy Bartkus was some particularly crazy kind of pro-abortionist.

I bet he was pro-abortion, but his lunacy went way deeper than that. From quoted remarks of his, together with an online manifesto he posted, it appears that Bartkus was a mortalist, the opposite of a natalist.

Natalists believe in encouraging human procreation — urging people to have more children to keep the human stock replenished. Elon Musk is a natalist. I am another one, at least so far as civilized nations are concerned.

Mortalists go the opposite way. They believe human life is a big negative and want to do what they can to shut it down.

There are different schools of thought within mortalism. The most common and longstanding one is driven by concern for the environment.

Here’s an edited extract from the mission statement of VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, one of the oldest mortalist associations — it was founded in 1991. Quote:

The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth’s ecology.

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens …  us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

End quote.

Weird? For sure; but dedicated to persuasion, not violence. To the best of my knowledge, no-one belonging to VHEMT has ever, in the movement’s 34 years of existence, tried to car-bomb a natalist clinic, or any other establishment.

These are sober, thoughtful citizens who just believe that Mother Earth would be a better place without human beings — a defensible position on strictly logical grounds.

There’s another school of mortalist thinking that’s more personal and introspective. I’ll do a segment on that, if you don’t mind.

03 — Regretful mortalism.     Here’s that other school of mortalist thinking. There doesn’t seem to be a name for it, but it sometimes crops up in literature and biographies. I’m going to call it regretful mortalism.

Whether they care about ecological issues or not, regretful mortalists believe that since human life is more pain than pleasure, procreation is unethical and unjustifiable because, by increasing the quantity of human life in the world, it can’t help but increase the quantity of suffering.

Regretful mortalism is, from a strictly logical point of view, just as valid philosophically as ecological mortalism.

Guy Bartkus seems to have belonged to the regretful mortalist school of thought — or more precisely, to have been out on the lunatic fringe of that school. Most people who take that rather negative view of life don’t go in for car-bombing.

Regretful mortalism in fact has a long and respectable pedigree. The ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles, in one of his plays, has the chorus tell us that the greatest blessing of all is to not have been born.

A milder version of this line of thinking is to look back across one’s life to some earlier spell of happiness or fulfillment and wish one could have died right after it.

The other day I was reading a review of Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain. Chernow, according to the reviewer, tells us that Mark Twain, who of course invented the boys Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, had no interest in exploring them as adults, as if he couldn’t bear to imagine them stripped of their youthful appeal. Twain once wrote the following thing, quote: “I should greatly like to relive my youth. And then get drowned.” End quote.

Another case that I recall from my own reading is the late British politician and classicist Enoch Powell. Powell’s classicism went very deep indeed. In his high school years, to win a Divinity prize Powell memorized the whole of St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians in the original Greek. He must surely have been well-acquainted with Sophocles.

Powell, who was born in 1912, had a distinguished military career in World War Two. He advanced from Private First Class to Brigadier in five years, although without ever being in combat.

Much later, giving a radio interview at age 73, Powell was asked how he would like to be remembered. He answered, quote: “I should like to have been killed in the war.” End quote.

That answer considerably upset his wife and daughters. However … and here I’ll quote from Simon Heffer’s biography of Powell, page 901, quote:

After broadcasting that remark, he [inner quote] “received dozens of letters from people saying I’m glad you said that because I felt the same and I’ve never known it before. There’s a secret guilt about those who served and were not killed that they too … were not killed.” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

I think the pro- and anti-abortion activists have drowned out a whole lot of other views about life — both one’s own life and human life at large — that are worth pondering.

I’ll add my two-pennyworth here. I’m not a mortalist. I’m a natalist, at any rate where the civilized part of the world is concerned. Nor am I in that box with Mark Twain and Enoch Powell, looking back at some golden spell in my life and regretting having gone on living after it.

My childhood was happy, with playmates and books and loving parents. My adolescence, however, was a bit of a disaster, best forgotten. My young-adult years were nothing to write home about, either, although I did write home about them.

What, looking back over my life, I think of as the meaningful part started when I got married at age 41, and continues down to the present day, and I hope will continue for many more days.

Not only do I hope that I myself will continue to exist, I also hope the same for Western Civilization, with which I strongly identify. History shows us that a slide back down into barbarism, either by outside assault or internal rot, is always possible. Today, even here in the United States, there are some disturbing signs.

04 — A clumsy Commencement.     The most dependable source for those disturbing signs is our institutions of higher education — our universities and colleges.

In my May 9th podcast I took a swipe at Columbia University in New York City. Quote from that:

I don’t know how Columbia has fared in Trump’s campaign to cut back on federal funding for well-endowed Ivy League universities, but if the stinking place is getting any of my tax money, I strongly resent every damn penny.

End quote.

I see that in fact Columbia was stripped of $400 million in federal funding back in March, in response to last year’s campus riots. The Trump administration might be contemplating further penalties, it’s not clear.

A leading foreign activist in those riots, Algerian Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested, also in March, and is awaiting deportation at a detention center in Louisiana.

Those campus riots last year were so bad, Columbia canceled its main graduation ceremony, scheduled for May 15th. In the year since, and especially after that federal funding cutback, administrators at the university have made some grudging concessions to the feds, in hope of getting their funding restored of course. I was interested to see how they’d manage this year’s graduation ceremony.

Answer: clumsily. The ceremony was held Wednesday this week. Claire Shipman, Acting President of the university, gave the Commencement Speech. It wasn’t very long, less than twelve hundred words. One quarter of the way in the speech included this, quote:

More than 6,800 of you represent 141 countries outside the United States. And let me say — we are glad you chose to be here. We need you. We draw strength from our identity as a global institution. And we firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to freedom of speech as everyone else, and should not be targeted by the government for exercising that right. And let me also say that I know many in our community today are mourning the absence of our graduate, Mahmoud Khalil.

End quote.

A couple of things struck me about that. First, 6,800 foreign students? There were nearly sixteen thousand students graduating on Wednesday. Six thousand eight hundred is more than 42 percent of that. I’ve said it before — many, many times — and I’ll say it again: higher education is a precious, finite national resource. American citizens should have first dibs on it.

A few foreign students, sure; but forty-two percent? Of course they are paying full tuition, to Columbia’s great financial advantage. End of explanation.

And then, “freedom of speech”? So if student groups at Columbia invite Jared Taylor to address them on white advocacy, or Peter Brimelow on immigration patriotism, or Charles Murray on race realism, or J.K. Rowling on sex realism, or Douglas Murray on the Israel-Hamas War, students who try to shut down those speakers will be disciplined, right? Ri-i-ight … Sure.

And then, mourning Mahmoud Khalil’s absence? The guy’s not dead. He’s awaiting deportation for making an almighty nuisance of himself in our country. The detention center he’s in is a humane facility, giving him three hots and a cot while lefty judges allow his case to be lawyered to death.

Acting President Shipman’s speech wasn’t altogether well-received by the graduating students. There was loud booing and chanting of Mahmoud Khalil’s name and “Free Palestine!” all through the speech. Meanwhile, outside the ceremony, a cluster of graduates gathered to burn their diplomas.

That was Commencement Day at Columbia University, where a four-year course for a bachelor’s degree will set you back about $360,000.

05 — A joyful Commencement.     Turning from barbarism to civilization, I’m glad to report that not all of this week’s Commencement ceremonies cast such dark shadows.

Also on Wednesday, as it happens, was the graduation ceremony at the Jane F. Shearer School of Nursing in Suffolk County — my own county, here on Long Island.

Why do I care? Because my beloved daughter Nellie was among those graduating into the nursing profession there, and the rest of us Derbyshires were in the audience: myself, my wife, our son Danny, and Nellie’s three-year-old boy Michael.

The ceremony is actually known as a “pinning.” As the school website explains, quote:

A nursing pin is worn in order to identify the school from which a nurse has graduated. Pins often have a symbolic meaning, illustrating the history of the nursing program.

End quote.

There is a picture of the actual Shearer pin at that website, with an explanation of all its symbols.

This was, I should say, a historic ceremony for the school. The nursing program started up in 1963 and the first graduation ceremony was in 1965 — exactly sixty years ago. Thanks to the Jane F. Shearer School for generating so many trained nurses over so many years!

The Derbs — well, the three adult Derbs — of course shouted with joy as Nellie stepped up for her pin. For me there was also a surge of deep sentiment almost bringing me to tears.

My own dear mother was a professional nurse all her adult life. She loved her work, and would have swooned with happiness to see her grand-daughter take up the torch.

To add to all the happiness, there was nothing at all political in the pinning ceremony to subtract from it. On a civilizational level, with Columbia University scoring about three out of ten, the Jane F. Shearer School hit a clean ten.

There were a lot of speeches from the platform — a lot:  administrators, alumni, local notables, and of course representatives of the graduates themselves. All were plainly congratulatory, full of good-natured optimism.

None of the speakers mourned the absence of alien troublemakers or congratulated the school on having excluded Americans from forty-two percent of the graduating class. Nobody in the audience shrieked out “Free Palestine!” I’m pretty sure, although I didn’t do a thorough check, that no graduates of the school gathered outside to burn their diplomas.

Nellie’s classmates there on Wednesday gathered to get their nursing pins were not scowling, shrieking misfits graduating from courses in Critical Race Theory and Gender studies, their heads swathed in Arabic kitchen towels, looking forward to careers as Community Organizers or Establishment mouthpieces in media or the academy, or to government jobs handed to them by their uncles in corrupt Third World kleptocracies.

No:  The graduates getting pinned at our graduation ceremony were happy, cheerful young Americans, already smart in their nursing uniforms, ready to embark on necessary, useful, often difficult work to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. God bless them all!

Here’s a modest suggestion from me to the authorities at Columbia University.

Get in touch with your counterparts at the Jane F. Shearer School of Nursing in Suffolk County Community College. Have them explain to you the right way to assemble a student body, and to supervise student affairs in such a way that the graduation ceremony is an occasion of joy and pride, not embarrassment.

You can find the Jane F. Shearer School’s address, email address, and phone number right there on the school website. No need to thank me; I’m glad to be of help.

06 — Hesperophobia (cont.).     Atrocity of the week, not altogether unconnected to the foregoing, was the Wednesday night murder of two young Jews in Washington, D.C.

This happened just outside the Capital Jewish Museum in central D.C. The victims were a young man, 28-year-old Yaron Lischinsky, and a young woman, 26-year-old Sarah Milgrim. They were in fact a loving couple, just about to get formally engaged.

Lischinsky was Israeli, born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother. He himself was a devout Christian. He’d moved to the U.S.A. in 2022 to work in the Israeli Embassy there in D.C.

Sarah Milgrim was American. She grew up in Kansas City. She was Jewish, had spent summer vacations in Israel. She was also employed at Israel’s D.C. Embassy.

The couple had a trip planned this weekend to Jerusalem, for Sarah to meet Yaron’s family for the first time, and for Yaron to formally propose to her. He’d just this week bought the engagement ring.

So on Wednesday they attended a reception given by the American Jewish Committee at the museum. The purpose of the reception was to discuss how more aid could be brought into the Gaza Strip. Sarah and Yaron were both keen activists for peace between Israel and her neighbors.

As they came out of the reception to the street outside they were shot by 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez, an American from Chicago wielding a 9mm handgun. Police tell us he fired 21 rounds, reloading twice. The second reload was to finish off Sarah, who — already mortally wounded — was trying to crawl away along the sidewalk.

I would not have been the least bit surprised to read that the killer, Elias Rodriguez, is a graduate of Columbia University. In fact his bachelor’s degree, in English, was from the University of Illinois. He works writing content for the American Osteopathic Information Association.

After killing the two lovers, Rodriguez ran into the Museum. People in there had heard the shots and assumed he was seeking refuge from the shooter. He was agitated. They tried to calm him, sat him down and brought him a glass of water.

When the cops arrived to arrest him, Rodriguez cheered up. He took the Arabic kitchen rag from his bag and declared, quote:

I did this. I did this for Gaza. Free, free Palestine! From the river to the sea and there’s only one solution, intifada revolution.

End quote.

Those are of course the cant slogans of far-left anti-Zionists. Far-right anti-Zionists have different slogans, but I forget the details …

Rodriguez, it has turned out, is far-left from way back, with connections somehow to an outfit called the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He’s been well-known to Chicago law enforcement for at least ten years as a prominent figure in every kind of lefty street demonstration.

Now of course he’s a hero to the anti-Zionist mob. Their commentary has been captured by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. Random sample: This is from a media outlet called Gaza Now, quote:

In a moment of courage, he [that is, Rodriguez] decided to make his voice heard and boldly confront the killers. He opened fire, killing an Israeli employee, and stood defiantly, handcuffed, to raise the banner of justice in the face of injustice as he shouted free Palestine.

End quote.

I guess we should brace ourselves for a new outbreak of hybristophilia, with ditzy females all over sending love letters to Rodriguez in his jail cell. You have to feel sorry for Luigi Mangione; now the hybristophiliac fangirls will forget all about him.

In an editorial on the shooting of Lischinsky and Milgrim, this morning’s New York Post concluded thus, quote:

Old-school right-wing antisemitism is still real and periodically deadly, but it’s astonishing how far the global left has interpenetrated with Islamist antisemitism: Hamas, after all, imposes sharia law in Gaza.

It’s not just the lust for violence that unites them, but a hatred for Western civilization.

End quote.

That jogged my memory. Way, way back, just three days after the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center towers, I wrote a column for National Review Online under the title “Hesperophobia.” I explained that title thus, edited quote:

This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words έσπερος (hesperos), which means “the west” and φόβος (phobos), which means “fear,” but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning “hate.” Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West.

Here is the news: a lot of people out there hate us …  In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa and in the Arab countries, European civilization — the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.

End quote.

If anything much has changed in the 24 years since I wrote that, it’s been the quantity of hesperophobia here in the U.S.A. This week’s poster boy: Elias Rodriguez.

[A footnote to that. Five and a half years later I had another try at floating the word “hesperophobia” in the title of a column. Here are the concluding sentences of that 2006 column. quote:

The Hun is at the gate. In the case of most European countries, in fact, the Hun, the hesperophobe, is inside the gate. We can dream on for a while, dream that our cultural superiority, our technological superiority, our political superiority, will preserve us against all assaults. Perhaps we should remember that the Huns were cultural illiterates, technological ignoramuses, and political incompetents. It doesn’t take much in the way of culture, technology, or statecraft to deliver a crippling blow to a weary, sybaritic, over-governed civilization that is near the end of its allotted span and has lost all faith in its own founding values. Time is short.

End quote.

Today, nineteen years on, time is shorter.

That 2006 column, by the way, was spiked by National Review for being too race-realist — a portent of things to come. It survives in my archives.]

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

Imprimis:  From the London Daily Mail, May 18th, quote:

The age-old semicolon is dying out as Britons admit to never or rarely using the punctuation mark, a study has found.

End quote.

Interesting. However, the story fails to note that George Orwell disliked the semicolon. He so disliked it that he wrote his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, without using a single semicolon.

He then recanted, though, and put semicolons in his later novels. Or perhaps his publishers just nagged him. Publishers generally get their way in such matters.

Back in my wasted youth — this was the early 1980s — while living in London I dated a German girl. It didn’t last long before I broke it off. She was a nice girl: pretty, honest, plain-spoken. She was, however, very very German.

In a conversation about writing once I mentioned that I felt insecure with the semicolon, never quite sure if I was using it properly. “Ach!” she responded. “In Cherman zere are exactly tventy-seven vays to use ze semicolon correctly.”

I wouldn’t swear that the number was twenty-seven; but it was some exact, and remarkably large, number.

As I said, the relationship didn’t last long.

Item:  Romania has a new President: elected in a two-round election earlier in May, he will take the oath of office on May 26th. Name: Nicuşor Dan, 55 years old.

No, I don’t know diddley-squat about Romanian politics. What got my attention about Mr Dan was his mathematical talent.

I commented frequently on VDARE about the International Math Olympiad for high-schoolers, held annually in a different location each year. The point of my comments was to make race-realist observations about the personnel in the U.S. team. This year’s Olympiad will take place July 10th to 20th in Sunshine Coast, a district of Australia.

Romania has an utterly disproportionate share of the world’s mathematical talent. If you have a college library near you, go in there and pull down one of the math journals: AMM Monthly, The College Mathematics Journal, Mathematics Magazine, … there’s any number of them. Open it at the “Problems” page — they all have one — and scan down the pages looking at the names and locations of the puzzle posers and solvers. You won’t get very far before you see a Romanian name.

So I wasn’t terrifically surprised to see that President-to-be Nicuşor Dan won gold medals for himself at the 1987 Finland Olympiad and then again at the 1988 Olympiad in Cuba. He would have been aged 15 and 16 respectively at those events.

That’s quite an achievement. Those Olympiad problems are tough. It’ll be interesting to see how well such a capable mathematician does at running a country.

Item:  The news from the Mother Country just keeps getting worse. Here’s the latest.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the so-called “grooming gangs” in Britain. The expression “grooming gangs” is elite media sugar-coating. They are actually rape gangs: groups of Pakistani Muslim men kidnapping and raping young — sometimes pre-pubescent — English girls for sex.

There have been these rape gangs all over England, but the authorities there have gone to great lengths to hide the truth about them, terrified of legacy English people reacting violently if the facts came out.

The best-known case, and the one most feverishly covered-up, was in the town of Rotherham, in the North of England. The gangs there operated from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, with police, social-welfare agencies, and of course politicians all looking the other way.

Well, guess what: Rotherham just got itself a new Mayor. It’s actually a Mayoress, name of Rukhsana Ismail. She is — can you guess? — a Pakistani Muslim. She gave her opening address to the Rotherham townsfolk in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.

Poor England! Poor, dear old England. She’s gone — gone into the long, sad register of dead nations.

08 — Signoff.     That’s it, listeners and readers. Thank you as always for your time and attention.

Please allow me my usual reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options listed at my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine … which you should anyway, it’s an excellent magazine. Thank you!

For signoff music, a little Cultural Appropriation.

A friend sent me a link to a YouTube clip that caught my fancy. The clip shows two young Chinese ladies playing instrumental music in a large public square. The passers-by in the square who stop to listen don’t look very Chinese, so I think this is in a European city. Someone in the comment thread says it’s Munich, but I can’t confirm that.

One of the ladies is playing the èrhú, a two-stringed instrument played with a violin bow. The other’s playing the pípa, a sort of chinese lute played by plucking with the fingers. They play two tunes, both the work of present-day composer Guān Dàzhōu.

To see us out I’ll give you the first of those two tunes, title Shuĭ Lóng Yín, “Song of the Water Dragon.”

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

This weekend is the official launch of summer in America. It does not feel like the first weekend of summer, but that is probably due to the weather. It has been cool and rainy here for most of spring. Even so, it is the start of the summer season. That means the A-list fabricators will be taking off, leaving the media mendacity to the second string for the next few months. The quality of lies will be low.

It will be interesting to see if the Trump admin maintains the pace. The last four months has been a whirlwind. This week we got the South Africa stuff, which is one of those things that no one thought possible six months ago. The Overton window is moving so quickly it is hard to keep up with it. Now that official Washington is heading off for the summer, it will be interesting to see if the admin takes a break

The other thing to watch for this summer is if the crazies get brought out of storage to riot somewhere. If you scan Bluesky, they are depressed. The money dried up and then the jobs dried up. Now they are left to trade scare stories to one another in the weird echo chamber that is Bluesky. If it is an Orange Man Summer, the fever swamp could be on suicide watch by August.

Normally there would not be a show this week, as the Friday before a holiday weekend is a good time for a break. I had some time to kill, so I threw something together that was light and not too taxing. It is a good time to relax and not think about the madness of this age, so the show is easy listening. I hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day weekend and thank you for reading and listening.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• A Bunch Of Stupid Questions
• Outro

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

For a while, it seemed like the human sciences might finally close the gap between metaphysics and morality that has plagued us for so long. The age of ideology has relied upon the blurry, unclear understanding of human nature to get away with moral systems that are objectively inhuman. If the sciences could clear up certain things about the human condition, then it would force the ideologues to rethink their claims about how humans ought to act and organize.

The ideologues had an answer to this and that was to declare much of the human sciences haram. The crazies were sent out to proliferate the term “race science” which simply means any science that contradicts the one true faith. The human biodiversity guys never got their head around it and as a result that scene has receded into the shadows of the internet. The people in the professional sciences took the path blazed by conservatives and bent the knee to the crazies.

Team science, in their shadowy warrens on the internet and secret gatherings within the institutions, takes solace in the belief that reality is that thing which does not go away when you stop believing in it. Eventually, the reality of the human condition, as understood by science, will prevail over the increasingly bizarre claims that we see from the ideologues. After all, math must eventually prevail over the people who think you are assigned a sex at birth.

That is most certainly true to a degree. The great snapback we are seeing in public attitudes on a range of issues is due to the excesses of the crazies. It is one thing for a man to put on a dress and parade around town in it. It is another for that man to insist everyone play make-believe with him. One of the truths about progressive values is they prevail only where they comport with general Christian values. When they collide with those values or physical reality, they crumble.

That is what we are seeing now. It was reasonable for the crazies to demand that normal people tolerate the guy in the dress. Tolerance has deep roots in Christian ethics to the point where it is a habit of mind for Western people. The crazies could appeal to that deeply held belief in favor of the pervert. When they demanded that the pervert in the dress have easy access to your kids, then things changed. In the fullness of time, it will be the lurch towards the kids that ended the woke terror.

This is not much help to team science, which remains in a defensive crouch, wondering if they will get a reprieve. The answer is probably no, at least not until the egalitarian ideology is defeated by other means. Intelligence studies, for example, are just about banned at this point and will remain so. If you want to do that work, you will find no funding and no support. The best you can do is bundle it up in another area of research that passes muster with the academic clergy.

It is a good example of how facts have no chance against feelings. Facts may not care about your feelings, but feelings are in charge. This has always been so and that is a fact that the fact-people never grasp. You get a sense of it in this hilarious thread by an old HBD guy on Twitter. You get the sense that he is completely baffled as to why people think he is the crazy one in the thread. Despite his “theory of the mind” pretensions, he has no idea how people think.

Another example is this post by Steve Stewart-Williams on the topic of homosexuality and its possible genetic causes. Since the dawn of time, humans have understood that some men are sexually attracted to men, rather than women. It was a problem to be managed, from a societal perspective. This remains true. The causes of homosexuality are not terribly important. Even if team science finally figures out the puzzle, no one will care because it is not important.

What is important, regarding homosexuality, is how society deals with it in the context of social health and fitness. Until recently, we had that worked out, so if science does crack the puzzle, the most likely result will be a eugenic solution to once again solve the homosexuality problem from a societal perspective. Couples will demand tools to make sure their child is not a homosexual. After all, no one has ever hoped their child would grow up to be a happy, healthy homosexual.

The reason science has lost every fight with belief since Galileo is that science is an unsatisfactory replacement for belief. Humans are believing machines, so if you destroy their current beliefs, they do not stop believing. They simply find something new to believe, often something ridiculous, like communism. This is something team science has never been able to grasp. Muttering “but it moves” does not help them and it did not help Galileo either.

That is not to say that science is bunk. Some of it is, for sure. The Covid revelations that are trickling out show how easily science is corrupted. The reason the HBD world is a bit of laughingstock now is they fell for the Covid nonsense. Science is a tool and like all of our tools, it will be used to make our world as we think it ought to be, for no other reason than we believe it should be so. If science is not the right tool for the job, then we find different tools and maybe hang the scientists.

As we enter the final phase of the last great ideology, it will not be the death of belief and the rise of reason. Instead, it will be the death of those old universal believes in favor of more practical and useful beliefs. Science will be a tool in the struggle, but it will not replace the dying ideology. This is not the future. The future will be what we make of it, and “we” will be those who win the great struggle for who rules. In the end, science tells us that it is always who shall overcome whom.

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!