Note: On Tuesday nights, I participate in a Twitter space where we discuss spicier topics than you find in the news. The replay of last nights episode here

Generational politics is one of the cruder forms of politics as it generally reduces to members of one age cohort hurling slurs at other cohorts. Ironically, the origin of this form of politics is the baby boomer generation, who were the first group of Americans to form an identity around their birth cohort. Baby boomers have since been synonymous with the post-war cultural trends and the radical politics that came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.

These days, of course, “boomer” has become an epithet due to their children using it to describe degenerate or materialistic culture. Boomers are selfish old people who only care about their stock portfolios and their lawns. They are the “greedy geezers” of this age, which is ironic in that the term first gained traction decades ago as the baby boomers started to take over politics. This is another example of how the universe has a sense of a humor and cruel streak.

Of course, thirty years ago when terms like “greedy geezer” were getting tossed around, the culture was undergoing a generational shift. The WW2 Generation was giving way to the baby boomers. Bill Clinton came to be seen as the typical boomer, ushering in a new set of morals and sensibilities to politics. For the last thirty years, baby boomer politics have been American politics. Now they are seen the out of date politics of a quickly fading era.

We are about to experience another generational culture shift as the children of the baby boom generation begin to push their parents over the side. This is why the term “boomer” has become an epithet. The derogatory use of the label is a signal that the user is not into conventional culture and politics. To reject “boomer politics” is to reject the old-fashioned dichotomy of left-versus-right, as is defined by cable news programs, talk radio and the mainstream media.

We are getting a glimpse of this in the Trump administration. Donald Trump is technically not a baby boomer. This must be said because otherwise you get six million messages explaining that the baby boomer generation starts with those born after noon on June 30th, 1946, and Trump was born on June 17, 1946. It is this sort of hairsplitting that makes generation politics so mind-numbingly stupid. It makes the blue pencil crowd seem stable minded by comparison.

That aside, Trump is emblematic of the politics and culture that we generally associate with the baby boomer generation. He is materialistic, hedonistic, and jarringly superficial in his politics. For example, his main interest in ending the Ukraine war is so we can do business deals with the Russians. The history and geopolitical import of what he is doing is never mentioned by him. For Trump, it often seems like that the only thing that matters is the acquisition of stuff.

Contrast this with J.D. Vance, the millennial man in waiting. His story is centered on his cultural journey from the underclass into the managerial class and then as a critic of the managerial system that made him possible. He is the most articulate critic of managerialism to ever hold office in Washington. It remains to be seen if he wins the White House on his own, but he is clearly setup as the heir to Trump. He will take the baton on behalf of his generation from the boomers.

Despite the millennial disdain for baby boomer culture, they are the results of it due to the fact they were raised in the product of it. Things like helicopter parenting and structured play time were boomer creations. Millennials are the first generations raised by people who used the word “parenting”, so it is no surprise that the millennials are the first to use the word “adulting.” They were raised to expect a highly structured and safe environment where everything is clearly labeled.

There is far greater cultural intensity with millennials than prior generations. For the boomers, generational politics was mostly about marketing cultural items like clothing, lifestyle choices, and music. For millennials, culture is tangled up in the structure of life, so they are more keenly aware of themselves as a cohort. They are the first generation to sense that their identity is entirely exogenous. Individually and collectively, they are who they are because of taxonomical reasons.

This shift in generational identity can be seen in how millennials react to generalizations versus how baby boomers react. Make a generalization about baby boomers and you get flooded with boomers telling you that they are not like that. Make a generalization about millennials and they will agree and amplify it. Because conformity has always been a part of millennial cultural awareness, conforming to generational stereotypes does not bother them. It is their normal.

This is another thing with millennials that is different from boomers. They expect the systems they inherited to work as described on the box. The two sides of millennial politics are from those raised on the mother’s milk of post-Marx culturalism and those raised on civic nationalism. The former is perpetually angry that things are not fair, and the latter is determined to make things work as described to them. Vance versus AOC is a duel between competence and anxiety.

That brings up something else about millennial culture. It is focused on the present, but in the context of what was promised. This makes it backward looking. The Vance side is determined to remake things, so they are what he expected, rather than something new that is a break from the past. The AOC side is similarly determined to remake the present to fit the promise, but the promise came from the New Left politics that sunk roots in the culture when her parents were kids.

Generational politics can only take you so far in getting a sense of what lies ahead for the culture and politics. Reality is the great restraint, and the millennials are inheriting an enterprise in decline, while their parents inherited one that was at its peak. This is the heart of the millennial critique of the boomers. They see their parents as living off the profits of the past and they see themselves as tasked with cleaning up the mess after a long generational party.

This is why the millennial age could turn out to be quite conservative. Necessity will mean relegating luxury beliefs to the fringe. No one has time for the hysterical and childish politics of the AOC side when there is work to be done, debts to be paid and institutions to be restructured. Millennial politics could be the domination of the organizational men, who take pride in making the machine operate and have no tolerance for throwing sand in the gears.

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!

Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She noted that Eichmann was not the cartoonish villain one expected, given the accusations against him. Instead, he appeared to be a normal man who performed the tasks assigned to him, without having any ideological or emotional attachment to them. This led Arendt to argue that evil could be the result of the work of ordinary people who were not inherently malicious.

Her formulation turned out to be useful to generations of evil people who used this framework to accuse ordinary Americans of being evil, for the crime of living their lives as white people. That was probably why the line became so popular, but that does not strip it of its truth value. Human systems are capable of turning the ordinary acts of the people in the system toward evil ends, even though the people themselves may not be evil in the ordinary way we think of it.

This is the subtext to the broad indictment of managerialism. The fascists, understood through the lens of managerialism, created a ruthless machine, animated by ideology, that dehumanized their society. The Soviets were close behind in creating a communist machine that forced everyone into the moral framework of the ideology. Those who could not fit into the ideology were destroyed. This is what made fascism and communism evil. They mechanized and normalized brutality.

Of course, that view of fascism and communism was from the perspective of people on the cusp of post-liberalism. The paleocons, sensing that America was succumbing to the same managerial forces as Europe, were warning about what lies ahead for managerialism as an organizing political order. They were wrong in their analysis, as America ceased to be a liberal society in the 19th century. Progressivism, the unique American ideology, was filling the void in the 20th century.

This turned out to be the great innovation of progressivism. It appropriated the language and forms of liberalism in order to present itself as the antithesis of ideology. It was the broad conclusion of reason. Progressivism, repackaged as liberalism in the Cold War, was not about how the world ought to be, but about how the world would be if only people allowed it to be so. Man, liberated from superstition and ignorance, would naturally settle into liberal democracy.

The result, however, was what the paleos predicted. The managerial revolution that began in the first quarter of the 20th century got going for the same reason it got going in communist and fascist societies. Ideology is not enough. It needs a practical application that takes the moral claims and turns them into an ethical system administered by a priestly class. The role of the priest in a Christian society is filled by the manager in an ideological society.

It is why America is awash of moralizing. Every politician eventually turns himself in an Old Testament prophet, warning that we must comply with the tides of history or face certain destruction. Every product is sold as a sacrament. Buy this widget in order to tell the world you are a righteous man. Middle managers in corporations are sent off to leadership class, so they can properly evangelize to their cubicle jockeys. The most trivial things are attached to great moral crusades.

This brings us back to Arendt’s observations about Eichmann. The crimes against civilized life we have observed over the last years were done by people, who like Eichmann, did not present themselves as evil. They could not imagine themselves as evil because they were on the right side of history. The proof of that is everyone they know is on the same side and everyone they know is a good person striving to make the world a better place.

It is this system of thought that made Joe Biden president. He was the smiling face of a machine that rewarded affable, useful dullards, as long as they served the needs of the system, which was the endless hunt for enemies of the system. The peak of the woke terror produced President Joe Biden, the guy who was supposed to normalize the terror by making ordinary people accept it as normal. How can “Working Class Joe” be a bad guy when he is always telling jokes and smiling?

It is why it is right to think about Joe Biden as the Eichmann of woke. Just as Eichmann and many men like him were the banal face of the underlying evil of the system, Joe Biden was the avuncular, jovial face of the American managerial system. He is not unique, but typical, the good example of the type that has come to dominate the political class, which is the fig leaf for the managerial class. The smiling, backslapping pol is what stands between the citizen and the machine.

Stripped of the charming rogues and pitchmen, the evil of the machinery is made plain and therefore easy to resist. That is the part of Arendt’s observations about Eichmann that applies to us now. Even if neither man can be accused of evil on the individual basis, their talents were put to use by an evil system. Even if one can show that their intent was not evil, it does not matter. They helped normalize evil and that is arguably worse than the evil itself.

It is tempting to think this is an inappropriate comparison, given the death sentence that has been handed to Biden. In 1961, however, when Eichmann was given his death sentence, the system which he served was long gone and the damage it wrought was gone with it. Joe Biden is still causing damage. His cancer diagnosis is now removing the last bits of trust in the system. The life of Joe Biden and now his looming death, has been in service to the destruction of social trust.

It was hard to hate men like Eichmann, even after their actions had been universally condemned, because they were not obviously evil men. That was always the point of Joe Biden and why the managerial class loved him. He was a simpleton and braggard, but he would ruthlessly execute his instructions and do so in a way that was hard for the people to hate. He normalized evil by making it feel like the way things were done and had to be done. Joe Biden is the banality of evil.

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, The Maltese Falcon, a post about my trip to the Old Glory Club, and no Sunday podcast. I got back too late on Sunday to do a show, but I will post something extra this week about the conference or maybe a second video. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

One of the realities of the late managerial age is that the sorts of numbers managers love and therefore produce in volume, are increasingly unreliable and often manufactured to fit an agenda. Good data is usually too late to be actionable or is simply the accurate version of the previously reported fake data. Economic data is the most obvious example of this trend. It used to be central to the news cycle but has now become so corrupt the media will ignore it.

In the Biden years, much like the Obama years, it became popular with the reporting agencies to produce fake economic numbers and then come back at a later date to “revise” the previous data so they could pretend they were being accurate. It was always a cycle where new data contained information about how the previous data was revised in a way negative to the administration, but often made the new data look like the administration was doing a great job.

Peak managerial mendacity was Covid. The CDC stopped reporting deaths as a real-time number so they could report fictionalized accounts of bodies in the streets, always somewhere not where you live, which explained why you did not see the bodies in the streets, but they were somewhere! Old metrics that relied on hard data, like dead people showing up in morgues, were massaged to the point where you could no longer get the number of actual dead people.

We are getting a version of this now that Trump is back. His tariff plan has kicked off a new genre of managerial horror stories. These come in the form of economic reports that, like the bodies in the streets phenomenon, always focus on a part of the country where you do not live. Somewhere there are empty Walmart shelves due to the trade war with China. There are people you do not know who are shocked by the rise in prices, even though your prices have declined.

The cycle for management is always the same. First, they produce reliable numbers from trusted sources to measure their performance. Then they create models from those numbers to justify their continued employment. This is when they begin to reimagine how the old data is collected and before long, we have theories about how best to manage information, which always underscores the need for management to keep a tight control on the narratives.

Bankruptcy usually follows that last phase, or at least an economic crisis great enough to warrant restructuring. That is because reality is indifferent to the model makers and will eventually break every model. We are living through a version of this process in the twilight of managerialism. Since the Obama, years the choice has been between your lying eyes and the model of reality presented by management. Enough people picked the former and we are now undergoing a change in management.

For example, during the Biden years we were told that the economy was going great and those grumbling about egg prices were ingrates. Now that Trump is in power, the media say we are in a depression. Go on the roads right now and you will be confronted with miles of RV’s and campers. This week, which leads to Memorial Day weekend, the nation’s highways will be full of the things. So much so that massive traffic jams will be a feature of the weekend.

Why does this matter? RV’s and campers have long been a useful metric for the economy and the public perception of the economy. The more people hitting the roads for campgrounds and parks, the better the economy. In 2023, the industry went into a deep recession to the point where many companies shut down production. Then it started to slowly bounce back in 2024. Now it is undergoing a boom with the highways now flooded with happy campers.

This used to be a metric discussed in public, but like so many of these things, it fell out of favor in the Obama years. Management and its marketing department, what we call the media, decided that the customers really did not know best, so they scrapped those numbers in favor of metrics that flattered management. The reason they are in the jam that they currently find themselves is they started to believe their models of reality instead of facing reality. Now there is a hostile takeover underway.

A cruder and more hilarious version of this process is the recent reporting of Joe Biden’s health and fitness. The data in this case was our eyes. Everyone not blinded by their own models of reality saw a frail, doddering old man. Management’s model, however, showed that he was a model of fitness and virility. Now that model is being revised to show he was actually suffering from dementia and has aggressive cancer. The new model is now converging with reality.

The Biden story is a version of the basis trade, which pits models of a point in the future and the models are continuously updated until the point is reached. It is a way for the model makers to think they can control the future, so it makes sense that the people running America Inc. would think in these terms. They just forgot about the part that says in the end, reality always wins. That is what you see on the road. America is happy with the state of things, so they are going camping.

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

• 03m31s Welkom in Amerika!
• 12m28s A church that won’t help white people
• 20m45s Death of a church
• 27m48s SCOTUS ponders citizenship
• 30m34s Latest from Woke Academia
• 32m34s For the boys in blue
• 34m28s Date-appropriate Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners and readers. That was some of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is of course your significantly genial host John Derbyshire, with observations on the news at precisely the middle of May 2025. Fifteen days gone, fifteen still to go.

It sometimes happens, by sheer good fortune, that one week’s lead segment follows naturally from the previous week’s lead segment. That’s what has happened this week.

In last week’s podcast my lead segment was headlined “The decline of Jim Snow.” I defined Jim Snow as, quoting myself:

The social dogma on race that has prevailed since the 1960s … characterized by white guilt and favoritism towards blacks (a/k/a “affirmative action”) and by deference to what I have called “the romance of American blackness” — narratives about cruel leering white people beating up on helpless pleading blacks.

End quote.

My thesis was that the case of Shiloh Hendrix, the young white Minnesota lady who made a pile of money via crowdfunding following a heated exchange with a black man that the man posted on social media — that case, I argued, was yet further evidence that Jim Snow, as a social dogma, is losing its force.

I think one of the lead news stories this week may further reinforce that thesis; so that is my first segment today.

Before proceeding with it, I’ll just note as a matter of general interest, following on that segment from last week, that as I speak here on Friday afternoon the crowdfunding site for Shiloh Hendrix shows donations now up to $779,158. This time last week they were $759,786; so that’s a one-week increase of $19,372, damn near twenty thousand dollars.

02 — Welkom in Amerika!.     So what’s my follow-up story that, according to me, may offer further evidence that the Jim Snow dogma is losing its force? The follow-up story is the arrival on Monday of 59 white South Africans as refugees.

The backstory here is that back in late January, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted a new law, the Expropriation Act, that allows authorities of the state to take private land without compensation so long as it’s done, quote, “in the public interest,” end quote. The definition of the public interest in the nation’s Constitution includes the redress of historical discrimination.

The Expropriation Act is obviously aimed at white farmers, most of whom are Afrikaners — that is to say, they are descended from Dutch settlers, not British ones, and speak Afrikaans, not English.

President Trump reacted to that in early February with an Executive Order that that halted all foreign aid to South Africa and declared that American officials should do everything possible to help, quote, “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” End quote.

Hearing of that, close to seventy thousand South Africans asked the U.S. embassy or its website for more information.

What are the rights and wrongs here? Historically, of course, from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, racial discrimination was institutionalized in South Africa in the system of Apartheid — racial discrimination that favored whites over blacks. So if today the government seizes the land of some white farmer without compensation so that some nephew of the President can have it, that will be legal under this Expropriation Act — the redress of historical discrimination.

All right, it’s legal; but is it just? I guess you could argue it either way, is or isn’t; but that’s deeper into the internal affairs of foreign countries than this isolationist wants to go. Let South Africans sort it out.

Same response to Trump’s declaration that “It’s a genocide,” by which he means it’s an effort on behalf of black South Africans to altogether exterminate white South Africans.

For sure there are some blacks who have that in mind — the ones chanting “Kill the Boer, the farmer,” at rallies of South Africa’s fourth largest political party [sound clip]. We have blacks like that in the U.S.A. too, as I have previously remarked.

What are the numbers, though? What are the prospects of an actual genocide? We know the numbers who called the U.S.Embassy to ask about refugee status: seventy thousand. The white population of South Africa is about four and a half million, so that seventy thousand represents one and a half percent. Not really a rush for the lifeboats.

From what I have gathered from news reports and from speaking not long ago with an actual white South African — a middle-aged male college professor — the country’s a mess. Crime is at appalling levels; and yes, a lot of it is targeted by blacks against whites. Public utilities are all failing, the economy’s in the tank, and so on.

It’s not Haiti, though. South Africa’s been a mess for years and citizens have adapted or left. There’s a flourishing tourist trade — the climate is superb. You want to talk immigration? The country has an estimated five million illegal aliens in residence, three million just from Zimbabwe.

So what with one thing and another, I think Trump’s February Executive Order was a bit of a stretch. I welcome it none the less, and I welcome these 59 Afrikaners who landed on Monday. I welcome it, and them, as further portents of the decline of Jim Snow — of institutionalized anti-whiteness here in the U.S.A.

If Trump 45 had tried this eight years ago, when Jim Snow was riding strong and anti-whiteness was the order of the day, the elites would have been howling blue murder. All I’ve heard so far has been some genteel negativity from the BBC and a slightly more combative version of the same from The New York Times.

To be sure, social media’s been lighting up. One black American female posting on X has openly threatened the Afrikaners, quote: “I just want to let you know that our President, he has Secret Service protection and you will not.” End quote.

Several others have jeered at us immigration restrictionists along the lines of, quote: “You’re against the asylum and refugee programs, aren’t you? So why are you smiling at these white South Africans coming in?”

I’d amend the wording there to “asylum and refugee rackets,” which is what they mostly are — more on that in the next segment. That aside, why would I object to well-dressed, well-mannered white Europeans getting some help to settle in the U.S.A.? Why should I not object to the uncouth, lawless, ignorant dregs of Somalia, Venezuela, and Pakistan being ushered in?

I live just twenty miles from New York City, which — as the song says — was once New Amsterdam. Why would I object to the assisted arrival of farmers with Dutch ancestry?

I won’t. I don’t. [Attempting Afrikaans.] Welkom in Amerika!

03 — A church that won’t help white people.     The arrival of those Afrikaners has supplied me with yet another link between last week’s podcast and this one.

Speaking about the newly-elected Pope, I made some side comments about the Anglican church, my childhood introduction to institutional Christianity.

The Episcopal Church here in the U.S.A. is closely related to the Anglican Church of England. There was a spot of bother after the War of Independence when the Church of England priests and worshippers already settled here were no longer sure what to do with themselves in this new country.

They didn’t have any bishops to guide them — Britain’s colonial policy hadn’t allowed it — and they could no longer accept the authority of the bishops over the water because that would put them, at one remove, under the authority of the British monarch whom their fellow-countrymen had just defeated in war. They could elect themselves a bishop, but the English church wouldn’t consecrate him.

American Anglicans squared the circle in 1784 by electing Samuel Seabury of Connecticut as bishop and sending him over for consecration by bishops in Scotland, where the church was separated from the English King. Once he was back in the U.S.A., we had a Protestant Episcopal church under Anglican rites … and we still have it.

It now has lots of bishops — around 140 currently active. One of them, the Presiding Bishop, is supreme. That title is currently held by a chap named Sean Rowe: fifty years old, born in Pennsylvania, married with one daughter.

Well, the Episcopal Church has been in the news this week. They run an outfit called Episcopal Migration Ministries, EMM for short, which works with the federal government on resettling refugees. The Church gets a nice big federal grant for that, of course.

At the end of last month the feds informed EMM that they’d be expected to help out with resettling those white Afrikaners. Monday this week Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe sent a letter back telling the feds that the Church had decided not to comply. Key quote:

In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.

End quote.

So: “No,” says the bishop, “We’re not here to help white people.”

There’s actually a bit more to it than just plain woke anti-whiteness. That reference to the Anglican Church of Southern Africa offers a clue.

During the heyday of the British Empire, Anglicans didn’t just set up an offspring church here in North America, they set up such churches all over, from the Episcopal Church of Sudan to the Shèng Gōng Huì in Hong Kong … Although, while I hate to pick nits, if that latter one is in Hong Kong it ought to be spelt as Cantonese, not Mandarin: Sing Gùng Wúi.

Today there are 46 of these churches, spoken of collectively as the Anglican Communion. And yes, that includes one in Southern Africa, first bishop appointed 1847.

With that in mind, and scrolling through the faces of worshippers at the Anglican Communion website, you can see where Presiding Bishop Rowe is coming from.

In the previous segment I referred to the “asylum and refugee rackets.” EMM was one of them. Now it is apparently one no longer. That, if you set the race issue aside, is at least a small moral advance on the part of the Episcopal Church.

If you were interested in immigration issues from 2007 to 2022 you probably remember the website called Refugee Resettlement Watch, run by a doughty Maryland lady named Ann Corcoran. Ann’s self-appointed mission was to expose the scandals, lies, and injustices inflicted on the people of the U.S.A. by the refugee agencies. The website remains online although Ann no longer posts to it.

At the center of the resettlement racket are a handful of NGOs, most with reassuringly churchy names. If you scroll down some on Ann’s website she gives a list: Church World Service, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, and yes, Episcopal Migration Ministries.

These NGOs drive the refugee and asylum rackets, taking in great scads of taxpayers’ money from the federal government while doing so, paying their operatives handsome salaries of course, and imposing all kinds of problems on American communities, as documented by Ann Corcoran. Also, of course, giving the finger to the principle of church-state separation.

If the Episcopal Church has given up its involvement in this sleazy business — well, that is, as I said, a moral advance, balancing out the anti-white message to some degree.

04 — Death of a church.     Just a footnote to that last segment.

If the Anglican Church is spread all around the world like that, shouldn’t it have a Pope, like the Roman Catholic Church?

Eh, it does have … sort of. In England, where of course Anglicanism got its start, there are arch-bishops with authority over the bishops, and one of those archbishops is supreme above the others. That’s the Archbishop of Canterbury.

As it happens, the position is currently vacant. The last Archbishop of Canterbury, a bloke named Justin Welby, resigned in January. There’d been a sex scandal: a leader of church youth camps who’d been abusing young boys for years. Welby wasn’t directly involved, but he’d failed to take sufficiently strong action against the abuser when he knew about it and should have acted.

So there was a spell there when both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican one were without a head — the first time that had happened since 1691.

The Roman Catholics got themselves a new Pope pretty briskly, but it’ll take months for the Anglicans to install a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Meanwhile the Archbishop of York is carrying out Welby’s duties, notwithstanding there’s a fuss about him not acting forcefully enough when he should have in a separate child-abuse case.

(If you’re getting the impression that senior Anglican clergy are kind of limp, well … they are.)

While the Archbishop of Canterbury is head cleric in the Anglican Church, he himself has a superior he must report to. That would be the British monarch, one of whose ceremonial titles is “Defender of the Faith.”

So you’d think that King Charles would be exerting himself to sort out the mess in the Church he presides over. Perhaps he would be if he wasn’t so busy kissing up to Islam.

Does any of this matter? Will there even be a Church of England five or ten years from now? Not if it depends on involvement by the ruling dynasty, the Windsors. Charles, as we’ve seen, finds Islam more to his taste. He’s 76 years old, though, and not in good health.

His first son, heir to the throne Prince William, may not be much more use to the Church than Charles is. Quote:

England’s heir, Prince William, does not go to church every Sunday and was said by a palace insider to feel [inner quote] “not instinctively comfortable in a faith environment” [end inner quote] — ominously weasel words for someone who will bear the title of “Defender of the Faith.”

End quote.

I took that quote from a column about the Church of England in last week’s Economist magazine, column title: “The Church of England is dying out and selling up.”

Things really don’t look good. Three thousand five hundred churches have closed just in the last decade. Sixteen thousand remain open; so if the rate of church closures stays constant, the Church still has forty-five years of life in it. That’s a big “if,” though, with Muslims pouring into the country unchecked and taking over Britain’s cities and towns … and monarchs.

In 2012 the late Roger Scruton, a conservative philosopher, published a book about the Church of England, title Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England. I reviewed that book for the American Spectator. Closing sentence of my review, quote:

I liked this book. However, I was raised, like Scruton, in mid-20th century England, in a culture now as comprehensively extinct as that of the Moabites. Whether Our Church will find favor with, or even be comprehensible to, readers of different nativity, I would not venture to speculate.

End quote.

Yes, it made me sad. Watching the old country die makes me sad. Sorry, sorry: I shouldn’t inflict my sadness on you.

The sadness is widely shared, though, even among unbelievers. Where the national Church is concerned, it was all foreseen 71 years ago by Philip Larkin, one of the best British poets of the 20th century.

Larkin was a complete atheist; but one of his best-loved works, by believers and unbelievers alike, is the poem Church Going, written in 1954. YouTube has a recording of Larkin himself reading the poem. I strongly recommend it to your attention.

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

Imprimis:  One of Trump 47’s first Executive Orders after he took office in January was to end the birthright-citizenship interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Local judges from coast to coast promptly issued nationwide orders of their own blocking the President’s order.

Yesterday, Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for and against both issues: birthright citizenship, and the power of a single local judge to temporarily block a president’s agenda nationwide.

On birthright citizenship, the President posted the following thing at X yesterday, quote:

Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the “SUCKERS” that we are!

End quote.

Like too many of the President’s posts, that doesn’t actually make much sense, but he’s surely right that foreigners are taking us for suckers. Trump’s next assertion, however, is just plain false. Quote:

The United States of America is the only Country in the World that does this, for what reason, nobody knows.

End quote.

In fact about thirty countries, including most of the Latin American ones, have birthright citizenship.

Whether or not birthright citizenship is constitutional depends on which interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” you favor. The writers of that Amendment should really have been more explicit.

The Supreme Court’s term ends in late June; we’ll likely get a decision about then. On birthright citizenship I’m betting they’ll leave it as is, telling us if we want it changed we should lobby Congress to amend the Amendment. Which of course they never will.

[Permalink]

Item:  Whatever is changing out here in reality, academics are still deep in the world of woke, where there is no such thing as sex and no such thing as race. Latest news from that strange world: pregnancy is just a social construct.

The academic here is Carlo Sariego, a Ph.D. student at — wait for it — Yale University. I’ve stared at Carlo Sariego’s picture for a couple of minutes, but I still have no idea whether he or she is male or female. For pronouns I’ll go with “it.”

It has just recently put out a paper with the title “Transfeminist Pregnancy: Reproductive Speculation, Genre, and Desire.” Sample quote from the introductory abstract:

I argue that pregnancy is not to be defined by biological phenomena but instead as a genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience and expectation. As a multidimensional genre of experience, rather than merely a biological datum, pregnancy can potentially establish a shared ground between trans and cis women.

End quote.

Yale University was once one of our foremost seats of learning. Can we call in the U.S. Air Force yet?

Item:  Did you know — I bet you didn’t — that this week has been National Police Week? Whether you did or not, I recommend to your attention Ryan Zickgraf’s May 14th article “The Fading American Police Officer” at UnHerd.com

New York City Police Department headcount has fallen by eleven percent since 2019, the author tells us. Nobody wants to be a cop any more. Why is that, I wonder?

To cheer myself up, and as a personal tribute to the boys in blue, I’ve pulled down one of my favorite books: Connie Fletcher’s 1990 classic What Cops Know. Sample passage from page 83 in the paperback. Quote:

There’s something we call the “Guilt Indicator.” Over and over and over again we see it. I can’t tell you how many scores of times I’ve seen it myself. This is it: We have three suspects for murder. You throw them all in the interrogation room, handcuff them to a wall. Come back later, one guy’s asleep. That is an absolute indication of the person’s guilt.

End quote.

I love this book. Cops really know stuff.

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

I have some date-appropriate signoff music for you, but first I’ll just give my customary 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 spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine. Thank you!

Signoff music. We’re coming up to high school graduation time, with its accompanying events. Those events of course include the prom, with all its teenage joys, pains, stresses, and ambiguities. For us in the geezer cohort, watching the young folk frolicking at their graduation prom is also of course an occasion for nostalgia.

Back in the Mother Country there was actually no tradition of a high school prom, or indeed of anything ceremonial about graduation. We seniors finished classes, sat our final exams, then spent the tail-end of the term goofing off — playing card games in the science lab until the school shut down for summer vacation. That’s how I remember things, anyway.

We had our teenage years, though. We had dances, and we had those joys, pains, stresses, and ambiguities. Nothing brings them back so clearly as the popular music of that time — in my case, the early sixties. A character in one of Noel Coward’s plays remarks, quote: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” end quote. Indeed it is.

I’ll sign off with what is, for me, one of the most potent examples, nostalgia at the max. Eh, where did all those years go? You younger listeners, gather ye rose-buds while ye may, and don’t be put off by the fact that rose-buds come with thorns.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

After finishing the show last week, I thought I left too much on the cutting room floor, so I picked up those scraps to make a follow on show this week. With next weekend being Memorial Day, there may not be a show on Friday, so I figured a sequel to the original while the ideas were fresh in my mind made some sense. If I do a show next week it will be on short topics, so send your suggestions.

The thing I wanted to get to last week, but spent too much time bashing the Protestants, is that we are in an age in which we not only have a fractured morality, but we also have a fractured metaphysics. The extreme example is we have some people who think their sex is assigned to them at birth. If they wish hard enough, they can change their sex and transcend the two-sex paradigm.

Crazy people are a part of every society, so while these people are fringe weirdos, they get support from a large and powerful segment of society. Many of our ruling class question the basics of reality. They are open to sex being imaginary because they are open to reality being a shared delusion created by the pale penis people to dominate the nonwhite population.

It is exceedingly difficult to have a society composed of people with differing opinions about how society ought to be organized and how we ought to live in it. If the differences are not too wide, then some compromise can be made. It is not possible to have a stable society when large parts of it have a different conception of reality from other parts of society, which is the present situation.

This new paganism is in some way an effort to create a new universal morality to replace the old one and use it to clear the decks of the alternatives. In another way it is an acknowledgement that the differences in how these different groups understand reality is too different to ever have a shared morality. Attempts to impose a new morality just highlight these differences in how we perceive reality.

The Gaia worshippers, for example, are not dealing in practical issues like the physical world when they demand sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. These are not real things that can exist in the physical world as most people understand it. Therefore, it is probably not possible for them to share the same society as those who think we should exploit our resources to advance our material existence.

The race issue is where the differences in morality and metaphysics make clear that the gaps are two large to traverse. If you think magic is why black people commit so much more crime than whites, you can never find a compromise with those who think behavior is rooted in biology. There can be no agreed upon ways to deal with black crime that are satisfactory to both camps.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Paganism Review
• The Moral Society
• Unifying Morality
• The Great Disaster
• New Paganism
• Metaphysics & Morality

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The professional commentators and amateur experts have been highly critical of the Trump foreign policy, but despite his unorthodox approach, Trump seems to be making progress that those experts claimed was impossible. The recent trip to the GCC countries is the most recent example. Lost in the shuffle is Iran stating they are ready to do a deal with Trump on their nuclear program. Today, the Russians and Ukrainian will meet in Istanbul to talk peace.

This meeting is remarkable mostly because a key element to Project Ukraine from the start was that there could be no negotiations with Russia. Without saying it, the Biden admin and the Europeans would only accept the unconditional surrender of Russia and even then, the terms would be harsh. The Ukrainians were happy to say the quiet part out loud, going so far as to declare it unlawful to deal with the Russians. In a few months Trump has them talking in Turkey.

It may be dumb luck that has got Trump to this point. A week ago, the Europeans were scheming with Zelensky on a set of ultimatums. The Russians either surrender and withdraw from Ukraine or else. On top of that, Keith Kellogg was peddling his scheme to insert Western troops into Ukraine as part of a peace keeping force. The Russians offered to meet with the Ukrainians in Istanbul and Trump seized on this to pressure Zelensky to agree to talks with the Russians.

Again, it may be dumb luck, but success is mostly about making the most of the available opportunities and Trump took advantage of the Russian offer to get something that everyone agreed was never happening. Again, not talking to the Russians has been a central pillar of Project Ukraine. It is the key to keeping the project running and that pillar has been toppled. Even if the talks do not produce much of anything immediately, this meeting changes everything.

The main thing it changes is it forces Zelensky and his European backers to abandon their maximalist position. Once you agree to negotiate, you have to be willing to offer something in return for what you want. Zelensky, of course, cannot concede anything because of the internal politics of Ukraine, so the new framing of the war is one side, the Russians, willing to make a deal, and the other side, the Ukrainians, unwilling to negotiate in good faith to end the war.

Zelensky understands the problem. He has now been put into a very dangerous position, which is why he chose to lead the delegation to Istanbul. He is not there to make a deal, but to orchestrate some way to blow up the process. His life literally depends on keeping the war going in such a way that the West remains engaged and supportive of Ukraine. He cannot reject talks outright, but he cannot engage in them in good faith, so he needs to find a third way.

The Europeans understand this as well, but they also have the added problem of the reality on the ground. The Ukrainian army is in serious trouble right now. They are steadily being pushed back while losing men and material at an alarming rate, one that is not sustainable for much longer. This write-up on the condition of the Ukraine army is about as positive of a spin as you will get before going into fantasy land and the author gives the Ukrainians six months to a year.

This is why Keith Kellogg, and the Europeans programmed Zelensky to demand an immediate ceasefire before negotiations. The plan is to get the ceasefire and then drag out talks while the Ukraine army is reorganized and reequipped for what they hope is the next round of the war on Russia. It is also why the Russians have rejected the idea and instead offered the talks in Istanbul. One way or the other they plan to finish Project Ukraine within the next year.

This is why Trump wisely jumped at this opportunity. No doubt his people are telling him how things are for Ukraine. If Trump can broker a peace deal, any peace deal that avoids images of Russian tanks in Kiev, it is a win for him. He will declare himself the savior of Ukraine. On the other hand, if Zelensky and the Europeans prevent a negotiated settlement, then Trump can lay the blame for those Russian tanks in Kiev on Zelensky and the Europeans.

What Trump has managed to do, perhaps without realizing it, is wriggle free from the trap left for him by the prior administration. He was left with two choices. One was continuing the proxy war by sending money and arms to Ukraine and take the blame when Ukraine finally capitulated. The other was to end the support for Ukraine and get blamed for “losing Ukraine” to the Russians. Now that he has brokered peace talks, he can shift the blame to others when Ukraine capitulates.

Again, much of this may be luck, but serendipity plays an enormous role in human affairs, so it is always part of the result. The reason for the expression, “Chance favors the prepared mind” is for exactly this reason. In order to succeed, it often means being prepared to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. When the Russians offered direct talks with Ukraine last week, it was a rare chance for Trump to change the order of things, and he jumped on it.

All of this now signals the start of the end game for Project Ukraine. What Trump has wanted from the start is to end the war and withdraw from this proxy war with the Russians and now he is one step closer to his goal. The question now is whether it is an orderly end or a disorderly end. If it is the latter, then the question is who gets the blame and judging by the maneuvering, the White House is betting it will be a disorderly end and so they are maneuvering to lay the blame on Europe.

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!

President Trump has wrapped up his trip to Saudi Arabia and the Western media is trying hard to ignore it. The main reason is they hate Trump, of course, but a secondary reason is they do not understand the importance of the trip. To them, it just looks like another foreign trip by a president. In reality it is a glimpse of how the large share owners of America Inc. are restructuring the company. The deals signed in Saudi Arabia are the first step in that restructuring.

For fifty years, the United States and Saudi Arabia had an agreement primarily centered around oil trade and the use of the U.S. dollar. The formal part of the agreement committed the Saudis to investing their profits from energy into U.S. Treasuries in exchange for American military commitments. The result was the Saudis priced everything in dollars, which led all other OPEC members to work in dollars, thus establishing the petrodollar concept.

The reason the dollar is the world’s reserve currency is it is backed with energy, the one thing everyone needs. The gold bugs like to say the dollar is “fiat currency” and is just colorful bits of paper, but that was always false. The dollar, like all real money, represents power. From the 1970’s to the present, the dollar represented the power of the United States and the power of hydrocarbons. Instead of money backed by shiny bits of metal, the dollar was backed by energy.

Another consequence of this arrangement is it provided an unlimited demand for dollar-denominated debt, especially treasuries. Because that debt is created within the American banking system, it made the United States the global bank. In effect, the petrodollar arrangement made the United States the world mint and the world’s banker, with the oil producing countries as the miners. With only one mint, it meant that the United States also controlled the mines.

This system has been under great pressure of late for a few reasons. One is the abuse of the system by the neocons in their foreign policy schemes. No one cared that much about using the financial system against small, nuisance countries like North Korea, but when the system was turned against big countries like Russia, one of the important mints, then people did care. The rise of BRICS as an off-dollar trading system was a response to the abuse of the system.

Another reason for the faltering dollar scheme is the Saudis decided to let the fifty-year-old agreement lapse. One reason for this is the abuse of the system by the neocons during the Biden years. The neocons were deliberately trying to destabilize the region in their war against Russia. This is not what the Saudis want. The other reason is the world is changing, and the Saudis need to adapt. They cannot continue to be a gas station in the desert. They need to diversify.

The biggest reason for the pressure on the petrodollar system is it hollowed out the American economy. It is not just the decline in manufacturing, which gets most of the attention, but also the decline in the nation’s infrastructure. This is becoming acute as the demand for electricity climbs. Artificial Intelligence may be oversold, but it is a real thing that will spike demand for electricity. Without trillions in new investments, the United States will not keep up with the world.

That last bit is the what the Saudi deal addresses. The Saudis are not going to plow their profits into treasuries, but into direct investments in the United States, while the United States provides support for Saudi Defense and infrastructure. This means the Saudis will be investing in American companies that are doing work inside the United States to build factories and infrastructure. The Saudis are not just a mint serving the American bank, but an investor in America Inc.

That is another thing easily missed about this trip. In the past, presidents went to Saudi Arabia to talk about military cooperation and the local politics. Business was delegated to Treasury and Commerce. The Treasury Secretary might make a trip to the region and meet his counterparts to discuss money. When a president visited these countries, money was not on the agenda. It was politics and the military situation in the places where America had stationed soldiers.

Notice on this trip that Scott Bessent was on the trip. Notice also that Bessent turns up in all of these foreign policy events. He led the charge on the so-called mineral deal with the Ukrainians. For the first time in a long time the bankers are now part of the foreign policy discussion. In fact, Bessent is involved in everything. He is part of the effort to root out some of the massive waste in government. What we are seeing is the return of political – economy to America Inc.

For several decades, at least, the managerial class has separated economics from politics, leaving the latter to the elected officials. Economics was too important to let the politicians get involved, so it was handled by experts. The result has been the perversion of economic policy. Instead of economic policy that benefits the people of the nation, we got policy that satisfied the theorists and the tiny minority that was able to arbitrage their access to the experts.

What this trip to Saudi Arabis represents is the return of political-economy where political decisions, including foreign policy, is measured against the standard of the national interests. Trump made that clear in his speech. He declared that foreign policy would no longer be about nation wrecking but about making deals that benefit the American people. Much as economics is being dragged from the abstract to the practical, foreign policy is being brought back to reality.

This trip also symbolizes the return of American Inc. The United States has never been a country in the traditional sense. It was always a business, something like a conglomerate containing many regional companies. The post-Cold War years were a monopoly phase, where managers stopped worrying about profits and focused on pet projects and social schemes. That time is done, and the company needs to be radically reformed to become competitive again.

Like all corporate restructurings, this one will fall far short of the dreams of the reformers, but whatever the result, it must be better than the alternative because the alternative is bankruptcy. In the case of empires, bankruptcy usually ends with the shareholders swinging from trees. The oligarchs of American seem to get this, which is why they are backing Trump and his turnaround team. Time will tell if American Inc. re-emerges as a strong company or a failed experiment.

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!

American progressivism in its current form can be summarized as an ideology that claims, “we must do A or B will happen.” The A in this formula can be just about anything and often flips from positive to negative. There are times when doing A reverses and the warning is to stop doing it. On the other hand, the B factor is always a negative consequence of the first term. Usually, it is a vague suggestion that it is not just bad but the end of civilization as we know it.

The obvious example is the weather. On the grand scale, the first term will be something like driving cars or heating our homes, while the second term is climate change, which means climate disaster. If we keep driving cars the climate will change in such a way that earth dies. They never make that second term explicit, but the extinction stuff is assumed. After all, climate changes all the time and has often been to our benefit, but that just muddies the waters.

That gets to the other aspect of this formulation. The person or people involved assume that their normative evaluation of both terms is correct. They may be justifying their prejudice against A on the grounds that it leads to B, but they always assume that B is a bad thing that moral people should seek to avoid. You see this with climate change, which is recast as a moral condition, rather than an observation. It is a bad thing not a simple observation of earth’s behavior.

The Gaia worship stuff is easy, but it turns up everywhere, even in mundane things like foreign policy. For a few decades now the American foreign policy establishment has been warning that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, then it will be a disaster. It is in the title of this post at one of the Claremont sites. The post is a veiled argument in favor of going to war with Iran on behalf of Israel. The post is in response to another post on the subject that dismisses this progressive formulation.

What we see with Iran are two variations of the same theme. One is “If we do not do A then B will happen.” The other is “If they are able to do A, then B will happen.” Sometimes they are linked together to get something like, “If we do not do A then they will do B and then C will happen.” The point of this formulation is to avoid examining the second term. The debate must center on the first part, what we ought or ought not do, while accepting the general badness of B.

Again, the Gaia business is an easy example. Every debate on climate policy centers on that first term and never debates the second term. It is always assumed by all sides allowed in the debate, that climate change is bad. In fact, a condition of getting into the debate is that you accept that climate change is morally bad. Your reason for accepting Gaia as your lord and savior may be different from others who accept Gaia, but accepting Gaia is the only way into the debate.

Note that Spivak in his response to Dobson spends a lot of his time smearing Dobson as immoral or otherwise out of bounds. One point of the Spivak post is to anathematize Dobson and anyone who dares question B. Central to the claims of Spivak is that everyone must accept his normative claims about Iran going nuclear. That way, the debate is reduced to the ways to prevent it, since a nuclear Iran is assumed to be a disaster for the world.

It is the natural way progressives control public debate. This is the heart of the debate between those two posts on Iran. Dobson, the author of the post at the start of the exchange, is questioning the veracity of B. He is correct that there are no arguments to support the claim. The evidence we have says that if Iran gets the bomb, they will become even less aggressive toward Israel. We see this with India and Pakistan where nuclear weapons keep the peace.

Spivak, on the other hand, simply cannot accept Dobson’s questioning of B in the well-worn formulation, so he repeats all of the ways people have said, “If A then B” over the years regarding Iran and nuclear weapons. The reason for this is that any change in B invalidates the formula. Suddenly, A does not necessarily lead to B, which then causes a revaluation of the set of choices in A. It also removes the necessity of the person warning, “If we do not do A, then B will happen.”

If there are a set of conditions in which Iran gets the bomb, but like all but one other nuclear country, does not use it, then the debate over American relations with Iran shift from various forms of war with Iran to include peaceful relations with Iran. Suddenly, the war mongers move from being one voice in a choir preaching some form of war, to being war mongers in a room with people calling for peace. They lose their moral high ground and become the high-risk position.

In this regard, progressive ideology inherited the basic formula from Christianity but stripped it of all Christian references. Heaven is just the assumed destination if we follow the progressive formula. If we follow the tides of history, then we will reach the egalitarian paradise. On the other hand, if we do not stop doing a long list of things that meet the requirement of A, then some version of Hell awaits us. The reason our politics is so preachy is that it is dominated by preachers.

Progressivism is secular Christianity of the Protestant variety, which is why all progressive arguments reduce to “Repent or burn in Hell!” You must ride a bike to work, or you will burn in Hell for angering Gaia. We must make war with Iran, or we will burn in Hell for letting her get the bomb. The madness of America stems from the fact that all doors now lead to Hell. There are no choices in the first term that do not lead to the second term and the second term is always Hell.

It is why the antidote to progressive polemics is not facts and reason. Those facts neatly arranged in a chart do nothing to alter the basic progressive formula. Instead, the solution is a revaluation of the values contained in the formula. If the value of B is open to debate, then there is no debate over A. If any part of A is morally questionable, then B ceases to be a consideration. You do not defeat moral claims with facts, but with the dismissal of those moral claims by challenging the underlying assertions.

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 progressive echo chambers, a post about old televisions and old ways to watch them, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the paywall side, there are now weekly videos, which are getting better, for those who like video. Subscribe here or here.

A topic that comes up regularly is why the Southern states produced so many terrible Republican politicians. Many of the most perfidious elected officials in Washington come from states that are solidly Republican. The most obvious is South Carolina, which seems to have a political class as corrupt as Massachusetts. Lindsey Graham might be the slimiest politician in America. Now Thom Tillis of North Carolina is making a run at Graham’s crown.

The voters in the South are some of the most conservative in the country, but they elect most of the unreliable pols in the GOP. If elections worked as people insist, a guy like Graham would not exist. Instead, the state’s senators would reflect the majority of the state’s voters, which are very conservative. The South Carolina delegation would be the fire-eaters of the Republican Party. Alabama and Mississippi would be working hard to set the edge in Republican edginess.

Last week, Thom Tillis finked on the President by pulling his support for Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney in DC. Maybe Tillis took a bribe, which happens so often in Washington now that it is the new normal. More likely, he simply agrees with his friends in the Democratic Party. He agreed to be the Republican who finked on the base this time, taking one for the team so to speak. Next time, another Southern Senator will suddenly decide his principles require him to be a fink.

In states dominated by the left-wing crazies, the pols tend to be even more fanatical than the typical voter in the state. Oregon politicians, for example, are reliable spear catchers for the far-left. One of their Representatives is now living in El Salvador to protest Trump’s deportation of MS-13 gang members. Ocasio-Cortez is now calling for violence against federal immigration officials. In progressive states, the elected officials are always to the left of their voters.

In so-called conservative states and districts, the opposite is true. The defining feature of Republican pols from the most conservative states is their willingness to bend their knee to the people they claim to oppose. They live in fear of being called one of the scary words the crazies use to control their conservative pets. Thom Tillis would urinate himself in public if he were ever called a mean word, so he makes sure to be ahead of all of these things, which means surrendering on every issue.

The main reason for this is the local elites in the South live in shame of their heritage and of the white people they represent. Like booshie people everywhere, they want nothing more than to be invited to the cool kid’s table. Since Gettysburg, the cool kid’s table has been where the progressives sit. The winners get to define what is and what is not cool and that remains true to this day. The United States is a Yankee imperium, and the South is a conquered land.

It is a good example of how control of the centers of cultural production can alter the behavior of the people. The managerial elite is not going to gaslight people into thinking a man in a dress is normal or trick people into embracing black sociopathy, but they can set the cultural tone for the elites. If you want to be popular in the centers of power, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, or Silcom Valley, you better conform to the cultural norms of the trend setters who control those power centers.

It is why Patrick Buchanan once quipped that when Southerners send one of their own to Washington, he quickly goes native. He goes from being his district’s representative to Washington to being Washington’s representative to his district. If you look around at the biggest finks of the Republican Party, they fit that role perfectly. Lindsey Graham hates the people he represents. They are not his people. It is his burden that he was born in such a backward state as South Carolina.

The question is why the voters tolerate it. People like to blame the voters, but when your choice is Graham and a guy with a bone in his nose, you cannot be blamed for voting for Graham. That is the other side of this master – slave relationship. For his loyal service to his friends in Washington, they make sure he never has a serious primary challenger or a serious general election opponent. The loyal colonial official, like Graham, gets the protection of his lord.

It is not just the machinations of the parties that account for this. There are enough white people in the South who are ashamed of themselves to make forming a majority of the proud impossible. The same cultural pressures that make a Thom Tillis ashamed his people work on the locals. Fashionable people in the provinces always ape the ways of those in the big city. Many booshie South Carolinians are as revolted by Southern culture as the typical Manhattanite.

William Faulkner described a South undergoing a transition, where the old elite with roots in the antebellum South, the Compsons, was giving way to a new class, the rapacious, vermin-like Snopes clan. The old elite had a natural superiority about them, but they were ill-suited for the new South. The new elite, on the other hand, was without virtue, so perfectly suited for the new age. They were willing to say anything and sell anything to get an advantage.

Faulkner’s description of the Snopes clan is exactly what you would expect from the ruling elite of a conquered people. They exist not as a genuine elite but as way to prevent the formulation of a genuine elite. The conqueror always wants the conquered to remain conquered and the most efficient way to do that is to make sure their leaders are loyal to the conquerors. Just as the house slaves keep the field slaves from revolting, Southern elites keep the South pacified.

In a democracy, this process is subtle and natural. No one in Washington worries about a revolt against the Yankee imperium. They only have to make sure that the politicians in the provinces are their sort of people. The same sorts of selection pressures that exist in the high school cafeteria exist in official Washington. The social pressures are all one way and as a result, the compliant representing Southern states have long careers, while the difficult drop out of politics.

It is why remedying this at the ballot box is impossible. Efforts to depose Lindsey Graham always fail, because he is the product of a system that is designed to not just defend his kind but produce them from the raw material of popular resistance that might get lucky and beat him in a primary. A populist who beats Graham will go to Washington, and before long he will go native. He will sound just like the other house slaves who serve their masters in the Yankee imperium.

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

• 01m29s The decline of Jim Snow
• 12m40s Somalis all over
• 18m29s Habemus Papam
• 28m20s Lock ’em up!
• 31m15s Not a penny for Columbia
• 34m25s Yet another Indo-Pak War
• 36m04s Signoff with Tom Lehrer

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01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. I am your impressively genial host John Derbyshire, here with commentary on the week’s events.

In commemorations, the highlight of the week was Thursday, May 8th, the eightieth anniversary of V-E Day. I can’t think of anything original to post about the anniversary. However, anyone who was of enlistment age in 1945 is aged today in the upper nineties, so there must be many veterans still among us. I offer my thanks and respect for the victory they won, and for the sacrifices they and their comrades and their families made.

Now to lesser matters. First, the decline of Jim Snow.

02 — The decline of Jim Snow.     So how are we doing with the black-white business? What is the state of race relations in the 2025 U.S.A.? We’ve been vouchsafed a glimpse of the answer this past few days.

Thursday last week, May 1st, a 49-second video was posted on X of a young white woman carrying a small diaper-age white child on her hip in a children’s play park in Rochester, Minnesota, about ninety minutes south of Minneapolis. The voice of an unseen man was behind the camera; the video recorded a heated conversation between him and the young woman.

We’ve since learned their names: the young woman is Shiloh Hendrix, the man recording is Sharmake Omar. We’ve also learned that Omar is Somali. He’s in charge of another child, also Somali, and like Omar also out of sight behind the camera. This child is not Omar’s; the child’s Somali parents were supervising their three other children elsewhere on the playground.

The age of this unseen child in Omar’s custody is much disputed, with estimates up to ten years old. He seems to have tried to plunder the diaper bag that Shiloh Hendrix was carrying for her child. The lady was of course angry about this. Those 49 seconds of heated exchanges with Omar then followed.

A key element of the exchanges was a word that Hendrix had apparently used when abusing the unseen child, and which she repeated loud and clear in her videoed exchanges with Omar. I was going to say “a taboo word,” but this word is only semi-taboo. It’s taboo for white people, but blacks use it freely.

Am I going to utter the offending word in violation of taboo? No, I’m not. I don’t need the aggravation. I went through that aggravation thirteen years ago, after posting some true but unwelcome facts about black-white race relations.

That post, which did not even include the semi-taboo word, got me cancelled from my writing gig at a respectable magazine; that cancellation in turn made me the subject of news stories in mainstream media; and those stories brought in abusive email, mail, and phone calls, and possibly other cancellations. Where loyalty to truth in racial matters is concerned, I’ve paid my dues.

Along with all the abuse back then I also got plenty of support, although most of it insisted on privacy. It’s possible that, had I kept up-to-date with trends online, I could have parlayed my temporary notoriety into a nice bundle of money: GoFundMe had launched two years previously. Coulda, shoulda, woulda, …

I only said “it’s possible” I could have cashed in, though. The possibility has become reality for Shiloh Hendrix. After Sharmake Omar posted that 49-second video of his exchanges with her, she got reactions similar to those I received back in 2012. Encouraged by those that were supportive, she signed up with crowdfunding website GiveSendGo. As I record this on Friday afternoon her donations have reached $759,786.

Might I have done that well? I actually doubt it. For one thing there are key differences between our two cases. Shiloh Hendrix is an attractive young woman defending her infant child; I was a nondescript sixty-something blowhard just sounding off. She uttered that semi-taboo word, repeatedly; I didn’t use it.

And 2025 is not 2012. Fashions in social dogma are not static, any more than fashions in footwear, hair styles, or home decoration. The social dogma on race that has prevailed since the 1960s is the one often called Jim Snow, characterized by white guilt and favoritism towards blacks (a/k/a “affirmative action”) and by deference to what I have called “the romance of American blackness” — narratives about cruel leering white people beating up on helpless pleading blacks.

The condition of that particular dogma, of Jim Snow, is not today what it was in 2012. If you mentioned Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion back then, people bowed their heads reverently; today they more often just roll their eyes. DEI reigned supreme then; today it is being dismantled all over.

Some of this dogma decline has been accelerated in short bursts by antiwhite outrages like the George Floyd riots and the witch-burnings of the Brunswick Three.

Some other of it is just natural decay. We are thirteen years further away from the earnest hopes of the Civil Rights era, hopes that with sufficient investment of money and effort, black rates of criminality and corruption would dwindle down to white levels while black scores on standardized academic tests would rise to equality with white scores. Neither thing has happened; the hopes were futile.

So the Jim Snow social dogma, with its strictures and taboos, has lost force. White people are more willing to say what was once unsayable, and to support others who do so.

Setting aside those differences between Derbyshire 2012 and Hendrix 2025, Ms Hendrix’s crowdfunding has also surely benefited from the precedent set by 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony, who is black.

On April 2nd Anthony fatally stabbed Austin Metcalf, who was also 17 years old, but white and unarmed. This was at a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas. Anthony has been charged with murder.

Anthony’s family quickly established a GiveSendGo fund for him. This was declared to be for the boy’s legal defenses, although … there have been questions …

As I speak, donations to Karmelo Anthony’s GiveSendGo fund have reached $526,514. They were well on the way there, and extensively publicized, last week when Shiloh Hendrix’s encounter with Sharmake Omar occurred. When Hendrix announced her fund, people outraged by the Anthony case saw it as a suitable way to vent their feelings.

Before there was Jim Snow there was Jim Crow. That dogma began to decline in the 1950s, with feelings of national solidarity lingering from World War Two, desegregation of the military, and migration of blacks out of the South, all combining to generate the rise of a sturdy black middle class. The mid-1960s Civil Rights movement was kicking at a rotting door.

Now the wheel has turned and Jim Snow itself is in decline. Shall we at last attain true equality: the colorblind meritocracy so many of us yearn for? I guess we can dream.

03 — Somalis all over.     Just a footnote to that. I mentioned that Sharmake Omar, the fellow who filmed his exchange with Shiloh Hendrix, is from Somalia. So is the child he was minding; so are that child’s parents and their other three children.

There’s nothing surprising about that in southern Minnesota. According to Wikipedia, 94,000 residents of Minneapolis-Saint Paul spoke Somali at home in the year 2018.

The best-known Somali-American is of course Representative Ilhan Omar, champion of antiwhite, anti-American, low-IQ Progressivism. I am sure that among those 94,000 in the Twin Cities there are Somalis more worthy of respect than Representative Omar. It’s hard to imagine anyone less worthy. Reports are not encouraging, though.

Some years ago I wrote a column about the general awfulness of Somalis, title: “Somalis All Over.” I took my reader on a tour of the Anglosphere to check what Somali immigrants were contributing to Britain, the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, even New Zealand. My conclusion was, quote:

[A]ny population has a lot of variation, and I have no doubt there are many law-abiding and industrious Somalis. When you take in 4,000, or 16,000, or 100,000, though, the law of averages is going to kick in — as of course it kicks in unmistakeably in Somalia itself. Human-capital-wise, the Somali averages are simply terrible.

Things are rough in Somalia: chronic civil war, recurrent famine, disease, piracy. Private persons who are distressed by the plight of the Somalis should by no means be discouraged from doing anything they can think of to relieve the distress over there.

The reason nations have governments, though, is to protect and advance the interests of their own citizens. How the interests of Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders have been advanced by having thousands of Somalis settled among them, is not clear to me. Perhaps the State Department could send someone round to explain.

End quote.

That was me back in 2011. Pundit Matt Walsh has just this week caught up with me. Wednesday he posted the following thing on X. Quote:

The real conversation that should come out of this week is why places like Minnesota are importing Somalians en masse. Somalia is one of the most impoverished and dysfunctional countries in the history of the planet. Somalian immigrants bring poverty and dysfunction everywhere they go. Nobody can explain how this country is improved or enriched in any way through mass Somalian migration. Nobody wants to live in a community that’s predominantly Somalian. Nobody can factually dispute any of the things I’ve just said, though they can act offended by it. So why are we doing this?

End quote.

Why indeed? I guess it’s been something to do with Minnesota Nice.

Last time I looked that post of Matt’s had 2,500 comments, a high proportion from people with personal experience of Minnesota’s Somalis. Check them out for yourself.

Here’s my suggestion for President Trump’s next Executive Order: ban the entry of Somalis into the U.S.A. I’d even extend the ban to diplomatic representatives. Private charity aside, why should we, as a nation, have anything to do with Somalia at all? Let the stinking barbarous crap-hole go to hell.

04 — Habemus Papam.     The Roman Catholic Church has a new Pope, and he’s an American, a native of Chicago. Robert Prevost is the first American Pope ever.

I’m not a Roman Catholic. My family weren’t churchgoers; but I was educated by Anglicans, in schools that conducted a daily act of worship — prayers, hymns, Bible-reading — and a weekly lesson of Religious Instruction, all as required by law in mid-20th-century England (and still today, although the law is now widely ignored).

Anglicans are also called “Anglo-Catholics”; there’s not a whole lot of difference with the Roman variety. Anglicans actually recite the Nicene Creed, including the line, quote: “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church,” end quote.

So the Anglo-Catholics I was educated by and the Roman Catholics who just got themselves a new Pope are cousins in religion. And the Baptist Church I now belong to is of course also Christian; so Baptists are cousins to Roman Catholics too, just more distantly related.

In that spirit of family connection, I offer my sincere congratulations to Roman Catholics everywhere on this week’s election.

That said, I’ll raise again the issue I raised two weeks ago: Can Christian universalism — all men are brothers! — survive in Western countries subjected to mass Third World settlement, especially when the settlers are militant Muslims, as a great many are?

It may indeed be the case that all men are brothers in some deep spiritual sense. It does not follow — it obviously does not follow: use your eyes — that big numbers of people from widely different cultures can live together in harmony under the same laws and customs.

To put it another way, and mildly: universalism and nationalism don’t mix well.

This will be a problem for the new Pope. Journalists have of course been trawling through his recorded opinions to see where he stands. Executive summary:

• Strongly against abortion, assisted suicide, and the death penalty.
• Definitely “green”:  quote: “The faithful have a responsibility to take care of the planet,” end quote.
• Against homosexuality and, quote: “practices that are at odds with the gospel.” End quote.
• For stronger gun control.
• Universalist? Oh yeah. Longish quote from the London Daily Telegraph, quote: “It appears he was directly critical of Vance’s insistence that Christians should put people of their own country first, apparently tweeting: [inner quote] ‘JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.’ [End inner quote.] ” End quote. (Vice President Vance is a convert to Roman Catholicism.)

The Pope gets to choose his own Papal name. This new pontiff has chosen “Leo,” and commentators have been reading signs in that.

Of the thirteen previous Leos, the last one — in office 1878-1903 — was somewhat of a social justice warrior, although in the thoughtful 19th-century style, not the nutty shrieking 21st-century one.

The best-known encyclical of that last Leo, Leo XIII,issued in 1891, opens with the Latin words Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine, variously translated as either, quote, “The burning desire for change,” end quote, or, quote, “The spirit of revolutionary change,” end quote. Leo expressed sympathy with that desire or spirit. Presumably this new Pope Leo shares that sympathy.

If so, that could be bad news for his church. The great issue in the Western world today, the issue casting its shadow on all other issues, is the mass settlement here of people from poorer, more backward parts of the world, most especially of militant Muslims. Christian universalism crashes right up against this, making a huge problem for any figure of religious authority.

Religious people are more conservative than the average. Twenty-first century conservatism in the West has swung away strongly from globalism to nationalism. Universalism is of course close kin to globalism. If the Roman Catholic Church takes a stong universalist line it may lose a lot of adherents, as the Anglican Church already has.

Will the new Pope be able to solve that problem? I seriously doubt it.

For myself, I’m with J.D. Vance. The idea that all men are brothers may have some truth in it at a high metaphorical level, but it doesn’t mean I should treat every guy in the world the same way I treat my brother.

Our affections and our human ties are organized in concentric circles. The innermost circle with the strongest loyalties is family; then friends, colleagues, neighbors; then outwards, with decreasing intensity, to larger organizations — our church, friendly societies, political parties.

A little way out beyond those is our nation, which we should cherish and try to keep stable and harmonious. Bullseye quote from the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn (concerning whom there is a long, eloquent commentary in the May 2025 issue of Chronicles magazine), quote:

Nations are the wealth of mankind, its generalized personalities; the least among them has its own unique coloration and harbors within itself a unique facet of God’s design.

End quote.

The universal brotherhood of man is out beyond that — way out beyond. Whatever this new Pope thinks Jesus taught, we always have, we everywhere do, and I hope we always will “rank our love for others.” It’s our nature to do so: deep, deep in our human nature.

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

Imprimis:  Sunday President Trump told us he wants to restore Alcatraz, on that rocky little island in San Francisco Bay, as a modern maximum-security prison. Alcatraz hasn’t functioned as a prison since 1963. Nowadays it’s just a tourist spot.

The President’s intention has been pooh-poohed by public figures all over. Nancy Pelosi sneered at it as, quote, “not serious,” end quote. People outside the political realm have noted that to get the place back up to standard as a secure lock-up would cost a ton of money. Sixty-plus years of salt air corrosion has done a lot of damage, and some structures have fallen into ruin.

I don’t have a strong opinion about Alcatraz, but I would like to see the Feds take the lead in building more big, secure prisons. I say “take the lead” because imprisoning criminals is more a state than a federal issue.

The CECOT prison built by President Bukele of El Salvador should be an inspiration. If they can do it, why can’t we — we, our nation, and we, our states? We put up with way too much crime, and our courts let loose way too many criminals to prey on us.

As with prisons, so with asylums. Dangerously crazy people should be kept apart from us normies. We don’t have to be cruel about it — and shouldn’t be, either for criminals or lunatics. The object should just be the safety of normal law-abiding citizens. Give them private cells, TV sets, soft mattresses and fluffy pillows, personalized meals, I don’t care. Just keep them away from the rest of us.

Let’s build these places, and let’s recruit and train up capable, disciplined personnel to man them, firmly but humanely. Why don’t we do this?

Item:  Up there in Morningside Heights in northern Manhattan Island is Columbia University, the fifth-oldest institution of higher education in the U.S.A.

I never attended Columbia but I have fond memories of the place none the less. It has a splendid math library. Twenty-some years ago, writing my books about the history of math, I spent many happy, productive hours in that library, walking to it across the university’s serene, well-tended campus.

Nowadays I wouldn’t go near the place. It’s a hell-hole of leftist agitation — even the libraries. Wednesday one of those libraries, the Butler, was stormed by an antisemitic mob — this, while serious students, of whom there still are a few, are trying to prep for their final exams.

And the news about Columbia keeps getting worse. I didn’t know, until I read my New York Post this morning, that the famous Pulitzer Prize for journalism and other serious writing is administered and awarded by Columbia.

Writing in this morning’s Post, columnist David Harsanyi notes that the 2025 Pulitzer for Commentary went to Hamas Supporter Mosab Abu Toha, who has mocked victims and hostages of the October 7th raid in his articles for The New Yorker magazine.

That award was, says Harsanyi, par for the Pulitzer course. Last year’s Pulitzer for “public service” writing went to a lefty outfit called ProPublica for a series of articles claiming to expose misbehavior by Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Other Pulitzer Prizes for journalism last year went to The New York Times and The Washington Post. Uh-huh. ProPublica scored again this year for some pro-abortion reporting.

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.

Item:  Abroad, India and Pakistan have been fighting over Kashmir again — a disputed territory on their border. They’ve been fighting over the place since they separated following Britain’s withdrawal from her Indian Empire 78 years ago.

Both countries have nuclear weapons: 170 or 180 warheads each is the usual guess. Pundits have been prophesying for years that the first nuclear war will be Indo-Paki, but Mutual Assured Destruction seems to be working as well over there as it did in the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. Cold War.

The two countries have fought three actual wars, the last one in 1999, just after they had acquired nukes. Now we’re 26 years further on. They’re fully nuked up, and there have been major advances in military technology — drones, satellite guidance, et cetera. Will the pundits be proved right?

My guess is, anything could happen here. For sure this is not a smart time to book a vacation in either country.

06 — Signoff.     That’s it, ladies and gents. Thanks yet again for your time and attention; and to mothers everywhere, including the mother of my own children, a very happy Mother’s Day.

Please let me remind you again that the VDARE Foundation, which is down but by no means out, would greatly appreciate your support in the causes of free speech and patriotic immigration reform. Subscribe to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or send a check to the Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. You can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine, who publish my ramblings. Thank you!

For signoff, I’m in the mood for something silly. Bearing in mind this week’s Papal election, silly songs about the Roman Catholic church came to mind.

The best of this genre, in my opinion, is Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag.” I was surprised to find, in a gathering of middle-aged Americans the other day, that none of them had heard it. Were the 1960s really that long ago? Yes, I guess they were.

I was surprised all over again when, looking up Lehrer’s Wikipedia page, I learned that he is still among us, having turned 97 last month. Happy belated birthday, Sir, and many more.

I was not surprised to be reminded that he was an academic mathematician as well as a writer of silly songs. I also knew that he was a lefty. So was I, back in the sixties.

I of course intend no offense to anyone, least of all the new Pope, by playing “The Vatican Rag.” It’s too silly to be offensive. Just enjoy the clever rhymes and vigorous ragtime piano.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.