Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about trying to walk ten thousand steps a day, a post about the NFL draft, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the tricks played upon the American people since the middle of the last century has been to take unreasonable ideas and cloak them in reasonableness so that reasonable people will embrace them. The main tool for doing this has been the people we call conservatives. One of their main tasks is to take the radical ideas of the people they claim to oppose, make these ideas sound reasonable and then offer up a plan to implement these ideas in a reasonable way.

A great example of this is civil rights. Conservatives eventually came to defend and promote the cause on the grounds that it was always a conservative value, as equality before the law is a first principle of conservatism. You see, civil rights were about applying the existing law to all people. Specifically, it was about granting equality before the law to black people in the South, where those bad whites have been willfully excluding black people from the constitutional order.

Of course, the civil right agenda was vastly more radical and utopian. That is made clear in the Brown decision, which declares all discrimination is assumed to be immoral and unconstitutional by default. Therefore, anyone seeking to exercise their freedom of association must first get permission from the court. Further, it says that diversity is the highest goal, so all public policy must bend towards it. Three generations of social destruction have been the result of this new moral order.

We are now seeing the same trick being played with regards to DEI. At its core, what DEI does is take the open society claims in Brown and formalize them as a set of rules and measures that apply everywhere. It is not enough for you, a white person, to not discriminate against nonwhites. You must commit your life to rooting out those who continue to discriminate and you must seek to remove anything that can cause something other than the ideal open society.

This is, of course, complete madness, which is why reasonable people have concluded that the people behind it are crazy. As these pogroms were unleashed on the public, the public found ways to revolt, even when questioning the goals and policies of DEI was said to be worse that slavery. The general disgust with these programs and the people promoting them is what made it possible for the President of the United States to go on the offensive against the federal civil rights regime.

Luckily for the crazies, the conservatives have a solution. Their task now is to take these repugnant ideas and make them seem reasonable. You see it in this Heather MacDonald column that seems to support Trump’s efforts to remove antiwhite policies from the government. She repeats the familiar critiques of the diversity agenda, which is refreshing, coming from a conservative. Then she slips in the poison pill that goes unnoticed under all the reasonableness.

Down near the bottom, she writes, “The White House needs to persuade Congress to clarify that civil rights mean freedom from discrimination.” Most reasonable people would not think much of that line, but it is the most important sentence in the whole piece and the most racial thing you could read anywhere. It is the core claim of the race communists since all of this started almost century ago. It is the upending of the core idea of the liberal society in favor of utopianism.

Rights, as normal people understand them, are things you have as a feature of you being a human being. No one must do anything for you to exercise your right to speech or your freedom of religion. Rights are negative rights because they prohibit others, mostly the government, from preventing you from exercising your rights. It is the reason the First Amendment starts with the words, “Congress shall make no law.” You have your rights unless someone tries to deny them to you.

Now, consider the claim that you have freedom from discrimination. The only way you can be free of discrimination is if everyone else does something and that something is associate with you. In other words, everyone must do something for you to have this right, which is the opposite of our notion of rights. Of course, the only way this can happen is by force. People will naturally wish to associate with who they like for any reason they like, so they must be prevented from doing this.

What MacDonald is doing is the old conservative trick of affirming the moral claims of the people they claim to oppose, while pretending to oppose them. Every time one of the anti-DEI conservatives cries racism over these programs, they are affirming the central moral claim of the race communists, which is that any discrimination for any reason is immoral. Therefore, any means necessary is justified in preventing people from associating as they see fit.

Civil rights rely on the ethics of the penitentiary. The foundation of a prison is that the inmates must always seek permission to move inside the prison. Their freedom of movement and association comes at the permission of the guards. This is exactly the model the race communists imagine for society, as it is the only way for create a world where people are free from discrimination. You can only be free from discrimination in a world where such a thing is not possible.

None of this should surprise anyone, given the background of the Manhattan Institute and the man who underwrites it. Paul Singer is an open borders fanatic who embraces the same open society ethos as George Soros. He also helped fund the Russian Collusion Hoax through the Washington Free Beacon. Another feature of conservatives is that they tend to be bankrolled by the same people who bankroll the people conservatives claim to oppose.

That aside, it is an example of how conservatives are like a drug-resistant virus that even when they are despised still manage to cause trouble. The reason for this is there is always a need to make the unreasonable demands of the radicals seem reasonable enough so that normal people will go along with them. If DEI sounded unreasonable to you, no worries, the conservatives have a reasonable alternative that wreaks the same havoc, but in a gentler sounding way.

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

• 01m13s Trump’s second first hundred days
• 08m26s The players, the field
• 13m42s The passing of a Pope
• 19m28s Cardinal Witch-Hunter
• 25m30s Shakespeare’s what?
• 28m29s Conspiracizing the space gals
• 32m09s Meritocracy restored
• 34m35s Signoff with Jimmy Castor

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. This is your perfectly genial host John Derbyshire with commentary on the passing scene.

A thing that is actually passing, and a week from now will have altogether passed, is the month of April 2025. Next Tuesday, the penultimate day in April, will also be the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second Presidency, counting January 20th — Inauguration Day — as Day 1.

That’s a handy hook on which to hang the question: How are they doing? I shall attempt an answer.

02 — Trump’s second first hundred days.     To get a handle on the matter, I thought I’d glance back through the archives to see what I had to say when Trump’s first first hundred days were winding up back in April 2017.

So what did I have to say? Nothing good. I was already suffering the pains of Trump Disappointment Syndrome.

In my podcast for April 28th that year I vented my disappointment by asking Trump ten questions. You can read all ten in the archived transcript of that podcast. Just a sample few of those questions in summary.

• A Filipino named Jose Antonio Vargas had become a celebrity illegal alien. Resident in the U.S.A. for 23 years without a visa, he’d written for all the big mainstream newspapers, made a documentary movie about himself, and founded a nonprofit to change our immigration laws — in favor of illegals, of course. Why, I asked, had he not been deported?
• The government of Australia was abolishing its main guest-worker program because, said that nation’s Immigration Minister, it wasn’t in the national interest. Why had Trump not taken steps to likewise end our equivalent, the H-1B visa program? I noted also that Australia had abolished birthright citizenship back in 1986. Why had we not taken steps to do the same?
• Full quote: “Europe has a population three and a half times greater than Russia’s and a GDP ten times greater. Europe’s two nuclear powers, Britain and France, have more than five hundred nuclear weapons between them. Mr President: Is Europe sufficiently threatened by Russia to require continued military alliance with the U.S.A.?” End quote.
• In what was then the sixteenth year of our military engagement in Afghanistan, quote: “Why are political outcomes in Afghanistan sufficiently important to the U.S.A. to justify sixteen years of military engagement?” End quote.

Those were some of my 2017 questions to Trump.

Trump had already kicked me in my isolationist sympathies at the beginning of that April by sending cruise missiles against a Syrian air force base, reported to be one from which the Syrian government had launched a poison-gas attack on a rebel town, an incident in the apparently endless Syrian civil war which is still going on today. Yet that poison-gas attack, as deplorable as it no doubt was, had killed no Americans and harmed no American interests. “So I guess we can kiss goodbye to ‘America First’,” I had snarled in my April 7th podcast.

So there was my Trump Disappointment Syndrome on display at the end of Trump’s first first hundred days. How do matters compare now, at the end of the second?

On the particular issues I picked on back in 2017, there hasn’t been much action by the new administration. Jose Antonio Vargas is still with us, doing very nicely for himself as an activist, impresario, writer, and lecturer. He’s still not a citizen, but one of the Biden administration’s last acts was to issue him a 3-year (but renewable) special visa.

Trump has acted on birthright citizenship. One of his first executive orders instructed federal agencies to stop recognizing it. The order has of course been appealed; the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the arguments in May.

Our guest worker program, however, continues, although the screening and vetting procedures for applicants are being tightened.

We are still in NATO, God only knows why. Exit from NATO should have been a Number One priority in Trump’s first first hundred days; likewise in the second. Instead, our President is today wasting his time and political capital meddling in the eternal, intractable squabbles of the Eastern Slavs.

It’s no credit to the new administration, but our Afghanistan involvement has at least been resolved. True, it was resolved with all the finesse and skill of the proverbial monkey trying to get intimate with the proverbial football, but at least Trump 47 has one less item of Save-the-World idiocy to grapple with.

So … a mixed bag there, mostly negativities. Aren’t there more positives to be noted? Of course there are. Next segment.

03 — The players, the field.     In all fairness, it’s not easy to achieve real, lasting accomplishments in just a hundred days. The positivities I see, looking at the new administration, are positivities of personality and the political environment — positivities of potential.

Our President himself is a much wiser man politically than Trump 45. His engagements with the Deep State, both in and out of office, have taught him a great deal, and he’s been an attentive student.

That’s reflected in his staffing choices. The new administration’s senior personnel are a huge improvement on the Swamp critters and neocon opportunists of Trump 45. Tom Homan and Stephen Miller are worth the ticket price just by themselves. J.D. Vance against Mike Pence? No contest. Karoline Leavitt against the Haitian gal — the one Jesse Watters called “Binder”? A clear win on both smarts and looks. Game, set, and match.

Pete Hegseth? Yes, there’s some sort of campaign against him in the media. Who are the campaigners, though? I’m inclined to agree with Glenn Greenwald on X, April 22nd. Partial tweet:

That Hegseth of all people is deemed insufficiently pro-war demonstrates the extremism of the D.C. war machine. He’s enthusiastically bombing Yemen; got Trump to pardon U.S. war criminals in Iraq; has cheered multiple wars.

But any reluctance to attack Iran is supremely heretical.

End tweet.

But didn’t Hegseth’s recent air strikes against the Houthis of Yemen stir my isolationist wrath just as much as those 2017 bombings of Syria did? No, they didn’t.

The Syrians of 2017, or any other year, were just bickering among themselves. It was none of our business. The Houthi, by contrast, are the Barbary Pirates of our time, interfering with key international shipping lanes. Any nation with the ability — ourselves, the Europeans, India, China — is perfectly entitled to bomb them for good commercial reasons.

There have been major changes to the playing field, too — changes the new administration is aware of and can take advantage of. Chief among these is the descent of the Democratic Party.

The descent was already under way in 2017. Hillary Clinton was a strong contestant for the title Worst Presidential Candidate Ever Put Forward By A Major Political Party until that title was snatched from her by Kamala Harris. The Biden Presidency brought to everyone’s mind the importance of Energy in the Executive.

Donald Trump’s Republican Party has some internal issues to resolve, but he and we are not short on energy. Nor on popular support: what were for decades reliably Democratic voting blocs — blacks, Hispanics, Jews, working-class men — have swung Republican to varying degrees.

So we have a wiser Trump with a better staff, and a more favorable playing field.

Hope, goes the saying, is a good breakfast but a bad supper. Trump 47’s White House is still clearing away the breakfast things, and it’s a long time to supper. Let’s hope!

04 — The passing of a Pope.     The Pope died on Monday after twelve years in office. He was 88 years old and died of a stroke and heart failure — in other words, as we used to say in a simpler time, of old age.

That was, of course, the day after Easter Sunday, which His Holiness had observed in the traditional fashion, giving a public blessing to cheerful crowds from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. That very same morning, Sunday morning, he had given an audience to our Vice President J.D. Vance, who is a convert to Roman Catholicism.

I am not a Roman Catholic and take little interest in that church as an institution. Friends who are better-informed tell me that among Roman Catholics of a Populist-Nationalist inclination, especially in Europe, Pope Francis was disliked because of his enthusiasm for mass Third World immigration. If that’s true, Francis was wrestling with a deep religious conundrum.

Most of the world’s major religions have a strong ethnic component. Islam is Arabic and Turkic in ethnicity; Hinduism is South Asian; Judaism is of course Jewish; Taoism is Chinese; Zoroastrianism is Persian; Buddhism is East and Southeast Asian. (Yes, I know: Buddhism has Indian origins. That was a l-o-n-g time ago, though.) They all accept converts, but the foundational ethnicity is hard to miss, and none of them has much of a missionary impulse.

Christianity, however, is explicitly universalist. Saint Paul told us that, quote: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” The Christian communities of Africa, India, even Japan and China, are substantial and long-established — more so than Muslims in South America or Buddhists in Scandinavia.

That was a stable situation until the world opened up to cheap international travel. Centuries of Christian universalism had weakened ethnic loyalties. Nations where Christianity had long been dominant opened their borders. “Come on in! Neither Jew nor Greek!” The Third World duly came.

So today the advanced, prosperous nations of Europe, North America, and Australasia are struggling with large-scale ethnic conflict.

That conflict is most acute where the incoming settlers are Muslim. Islam is universalist in a way very different from Christianity. It is aggressively, militaristically universalist.

Traditionally, Islam converted by the sword: “If you don’t accept Allah and his Prophet, we’ll kill you.” Today’s Islam is somewhat lighter in its approach, but the aggression is still hard to miss. We have all seen those news pictures of great throngs of Muslims blocking our streets to perform mass prayer, when they have perfectly good mosques nearby that they could go to.

So mass Muslim immigration has put great strain on institutional Christianity. The Anglo-Catholic Church of England and her American cousin, the Episcopal Church, seem to be responding to the strain with abject surrender. Full-scale Muslim services have been held in both the two Saint Paul’s cathedrals: the one in London and the one in Boston.

I don’t know whether the Roman Catholic Church has surrendered to that degree. My guess is, it hasn’t. Roman Catholics are much stronger in defense of their faith than Anglo-Catholics. It will be interesting to see what stand the new Pope takes on the issue.

Who will that new Pope be? I have no clue, only an opinion to offer.

05 — Cardinal Witch-Hunter.     My opinion is a singular and negative one. There is one candidate who will, I very much hope, not be honored with the Papacy.

That candidate — and I’m assuming, without any knowledge of the process, that he is a candidate — is Timothy Dolan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York. Dolan is also, since 2012, a Cardinal, and so I think a Papal candidate by default. I hope he isn’t chosen, just because I’d hate to see the s.o.b. further raised up in any way.

What’s my beef with Dolan? Well, twelve years ago I engaged with the case of Frank Borzellieri, an exceptionally nasty instance of Progressive witch-hunting. Quote:

Borzellieri (“borza-lerry”) was principal of a Catholic elementary school in New York City for the school years 2009-2011. Before that he was Dean of Discipline at a Catholic high school in the city. His record in both jobs was spotless; and that is an astonishing thing when you consider that both schools were heavily Non-Asian Minority and Frank is white, so that the faintest scintilla of a hint of prejudice on his part, or even a careless word, would have cost him his job for “racism.”

End quote.

I pulled that quote from a column I published at Taki’s Magazine on May 23rd, 2013. The column, which is archived at my personal website, tells the story of Frank Borzellieri at more length. Here I’ll just give a sketch.

Frank was, and I hope still is, polite, well-educated, correct in speech and manner, and a devout Roman Catholic. Before starting his teaching career he’d been a writer, and had written skeptically about progressive orthodoxies.

In 1999 he’d published a book, title: The Unspoken Truth: Race, Culture and Other Taboos that, in a polite and scholarly way, questioned the notion that diversity is a strength.

Frank then became a schoolteacher, and a very good and dedicated one, as noted in that quote I gave you. But then, in 2011, the New York Daily News published a story about him under the headline, quote: “White supremacist principal running Bronx school with majority black and Latino students.” End quote.

It was sheer character assassination, full of lies and unsourced references, but it got a witch-hunt going. Timothy Dolan’s New York Archdiocese joined in; Frank was fired the day after the Daily News story appeared.

Frank wrote a six-page letter to Archbishop Dolan, countering the lies and describing his devotion to the church and his calling as a school principal. Dolan had not yet ascended to the rank of Cardinal, but must have known that the promotion was in his near future if he kept his nose clean. He did not favor Frank’s letter with a reply.

So Dolan lined up with the progressive witch-hunters of our age, in the same spirit as his predecessors back in the Middle Ages gave their support to actual witch-hunters.

Incredibly, it seems to me, Frank Borzellieri remained a devout Roman Catholic for as long as I followed him in after years.

I occasionally catch sight of Dolan’s well-nourished face while I’m TV channel-surfing on a Sunday evening. That, I remind myself, is the face of one who destroyed a good man’s career to preserve his own. Then I have to resist an impulse to smash my fist into the TV screen.

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

Imprimis:  April 23rd was William Shakespeare’s 461st birthday, or at any rate is traditionally regarded as such. It was also his 409th deathday. The Bard was nothing if not symmetrical.

There have for some years been periodic news stories about Shakespeare being canceled for racism, sexism, colonialism, and so on. I sometimes read through one of them, just to remind myself how batpoop crazy much of the Western world has become.

Doing so the other day, I got a tiny reward for my reading — a new word that I shall try to deploy in my own future writing.

The piece I was reading here was in the Daily Mail Online for March 16th. Headline: “Shakespeare’s birthplace to be ‘de-colonised’ over fears his success ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’.” Three-quarters of the way through we get this, quote:

Writing in School Library Journal, Amanda MacGregor, a Minnesota-based librarian, bookseller and freelance journalist, asked why teachers were continuing to include Shakespeare in their classrooms.

[Inner quote.] “Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir,” [end inner quote] she wrote, with the last word referring to a hatred of black women.

End quote.

Did you know that there is a word for the hatred of black women — “misogynoir”? I didn’t. Neither did the compilers of my 1971 Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary; nor those of my Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1993 edition. “Misogynoir” … We learn something every day.

Item:  One of my foremost culture heroes is the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson. Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale, in a book of anecdotes about him that she published after his death, commented on what she called Johnson’s, quote, “fixed incredulity of everything he heard,” end quote. It was hard to get Johnson to believe anything but the evidence of his own senses.

She once asked him if, when he’d first heard it, he had believed the news of the great earthquake that destroyed the city of Lisbon in 1755, when Johnson would have been 46 years old. Johnson’s reply, quote:

Oh! not for six months at least. I did think that story too dreadful to be credited, and can hardly yet persuade myself that it was true to the full extent we all of us have heard.

End quote.

I’m like that where conspiracy theories are concerned. I have great trouble taking them seriously.

We live in an age of conspiracy theories, though, and I’m constantly being surprised by the things that conspiracists will conspiracize about.

Most recently: The April 14th flight of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket, with six young female celebrities aboard.

I didn’t take much interest in the story itself. For one thing, only one of the six ladies’ names was known to me: Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’ fiancée. For another, this wasn’t much of a flight. It only lasted eleven minutes. The gals experienced extra gravity as the rocket powered up into the stratosphere; then no gravity at all after the power stopped and the craft traversed the peak of its ballistic parabola in free fall around 66½ miles up; then some gravity again as it came down and parachutes opened to slow its fall.

I was, though, fascinated by the speed with which conspiracy theories appeared, and their number and variety. The zero-g film footage was faked, they told me; so was footage of the passenger-capsule door being opened after the landing; look! — the paint on the capsule shows no re-entry scorch marks; the ladies on board were all members of a Satanic cult; …

I haven’t yet seen any theories involving the CIA, Mossad, or the Russians, but I don’t doubt there are conspiracists somewhere working on them.

Item:  One of the most obnoxious and infuriating concepts to arise from the Civil Rights movement of sixty years ago has been Disparate Impact: the idea that group disparities in outcome — in academic achievement or rates of incarceration, most notably — must be the result of wilful group discrimination.

Disparate Impact is nonsense, and poison to social harmony. To President Trump’s great credit, Wednesday this week he issued an Executive Order eliminating disparate-impact theory from civil rights analysis and enforcement and restoring colorblind meritocracy to that zone.

However, as Heather Mac Donald says in her report on this at City Journal, quote:

His executive order can be reversed by a hostile successor administration; the disparate-impact regime can be resurrected with another flip of the presidential pen. The White House needs to persuade Congress to clarify that civil rights mean freedom from discrimination — not the legitimization of “reverse discrimination.” Congress must amend 1960s-era statutes to confirm explicitly their original colorblind intent.

End quote.

That will require the congresscritters to show some courage, so … lots of luck. President Trump has shown the way, though, and that’s all he has the power to do. Thanks and all honor to him for this order.

07 — Signoff.     That’s it for the month of April, gentle listeners. Thank you as always for your time and attention, and sincere best wishes for you in the merry month of May.

Permit me 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 itself 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, who publish my work. Thank you!

OK, let’s sign off here. My frequent references to New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt, possibly fortified by recollections of my past attentions to the Miss Bumbum Pageant, inspired one of my listeners to send me a related link.

The link is to a YouTube clip of a fine American musician named Jimmy Castor, who I confess I had never heard of. Mr Castor passed away in 2012 shortly before his 72nd birthday, but he’d appeared numerous times in the R&B charts from the late 1960s to the late 1980s.

The title of the song my listener directed me to is The Bertha Butt Boogie, in the charts 1975. Our friend Letitia was only seventeen years old back then, so it’s not likely she was the inspiration for The Bertha Butt Boogie, but there’s an obvious resemblance between the two ladies.

If you listen to the song with attention you will learn that the Bertha Butt of the title was one of four sisters. The other three were named Betty, Bella, and Bathsheba. That’s a lot of butts, butt … hey. It’s what appeals to some people.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week

No one knows when slavery started, but it seems to have been a part of human civilization from the start. There is evidence of slavery in the earliest civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus Valley in India, and China’s Yangtze River Valley. This suggests slavery was integral to the establishment of large-scale settlements.

Slavery was the norm in the world until European Protestants decided it was immoral and began to ban it. Until the Protestant nations of Europe rose to power, slavery was tolerated by Christians. The Catholic Church opposed the treatment of African slaves in the New World but was not opposed to slavery. It was the Protestants who went the next step and demanded the end of slavery.

Of course, slavery was not what modern people imagine. Slaves often had rights and there were rules for how slaves must be treated. The very first law codes were created to deal with the treatment of slaves. This makes sense since if there are a lot of slaves, there is the risk of a slave revolt, so keeping the slave classes happy was always going to be a primary consideration for society.

This was true in the American South. Contrary to the nonsense version of history taught in schools and popularized through movies and television, the African slaves in North America were treated well. They were valuable property, one of the most lucrative investments in the New World, so slave owners took care of them. A happy slave was a productive and profitable slave.

In fact, slaves were much more productive than the freemen. Contrary to the cartoon version of history, the plantation owners cared more about their slaves than the white workers on the plantation. One reason for that is slavery as a form of labor was much more productive than paid labor. The slave owner was more likely to have a hired man whipped than to whip one of his slaves.

That is the show this week. It is about the economic reality of slavery in the South leading up to the Civil War. The source for this information is an old book titled, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by the economists Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a great work of revisionist history, a skill that we will need to hone, given that our official history is mostly nonsense.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Cartoon Version of Slavery
• Time On The Cross
• Ten Points About Slavery
• Final Thoughts

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

One of the things that comes with writing for a public audience in the digital age is the editor without portfolio. This is the person who roams the internet looking for spelling errors, punctuation mistakes, and grammar issues. There are many of these people, as the comment section of every internet post has at least one comment about a typo or alleged improper word choice. They are like the samurai without a master in feudal Japan, except they wield the blue pencil instead of a sword.

Soon, of course, they will be replaced by AI. It will not be long before the browsers simply rewrite your text in the period between when you hit submit and the text commits to the website. The robots will patrol the internet like the grammar ronin of this age but do so with a speed that the grammar ronin cannot match. Imagine a terminator sent back to seventeenth-century Japan to battle Miyamoto Musashi. By the looks of it, the days of the grammar ronin are numbered.

At least it seems that way if you assume there is only one way to construct a sentence or that the rules of grammar are iron laws of grammar. That is often how the grammar ronin look at language and writing. The rules of grammar are not merely guides to facilitate clarity but laws that must be ruthlessly enforced. Even if the grammar rule no longer works for a modern audience, the grammar ronin insist that it must be followed lest chaos be unleashed on humanity.

It turns out that this is where AI disagrees with the grammar ronin. If you compose an essay and feed it into each of the AI, asking for corrections of spelling and grammar, the result will be different from each AI. If you submit the output of one into another, it will rewrite the text for what it claims is clarity and convention. You can create a game of telephone with the AI editors, and when you get to the last one and submit it back to the starting AI, the result is nothing like where you started.

It seems that the robot editors cannot agree on the rules. The reason for that is the AI learns on the mass of text made available to it. Once the robot is seeded, it then continues to build its knowledge based on available information from the internet and what has been fed to it by users. What we call AI is actually a massive probability calculator that quickly returns the most likely answer to the user query, based on the data that has been made available to it.

This is why the results from each AI are slightly different when they are asked to edit the exact same text. There are small differences in its massive data sets, so the probabilities are slightly different. Ask each AI to add simple numbers, and the results are uniformly the same because probability plays no role in the result. Two plus two equals four for all possible values of two. Ask each AI to edit this paragraph, and the range of possible answers is quite broad.

That is because those laws of grammar that the grammar ronin enforce are not laws after all but merely a set of conventions. In fact, what we think of as the rules of grammar are mostly the result of the printing press. Formalizing the language was a natural consequence of the mass production of text. Printers needed to be trained, and therefore it made sense to have a common set of rules. It is how we got the word stereotype, for example.

Of course, the reason we have things like grammar rules, punctuation, fixed definitions, and formal spelling of words is clarity. Many of the punctuation marks we commonly use were relatively late additions to our language. They were created by monks and scribes to make their lives easier. Dictionaries were created to make written communication easier. The iron laws of grammar and spelling are not iron laws after all but things we invented as needed.

This is where AI can be liberating. What the robots can do for the writer is offer many ways to phrase something and then let him select that which fits his style or that he thinks gets his point across the best to the human reader. At the same time, it can also allow the writer to break convention by seeing the conventional ways AI presents the text and then deliberately choosing an unconventional approach. Creative writers can use AI to enhance their creativity.

On the other hand, when a pusillanimous popinjay takes issue with a point a writer is making but is unable to follow the logic that reaches that conclusion, so he attacks the grammar of the writer, the writer can simply point to the terminator and say, “take it up with my editor.” Having AI as an editor provides an authoritative defense against this sort of pedantry that is popular with the sophists. In a way, AI can become something like a universal style guide for the digital age.

It is not all rainbows and puppies. The grammar police have drained a lot of the life from the written word, and AI will help them bleed it white. In time, most people will rely on AI to write their text, and that means it will narrow to the point where most writing reads like the user manual for your toaster. This will also make stupid people seem less stupid, which is a great danger to society. This is the problem with politics. It is dominated by loquacious simpletons.

The main loser in the AI revolution will be the grammar ronin. Soon, they will not be able to find text that violates their interpretation of Strunk and White. If they persist, the robots producing the text will simply disconnect them from the internet, leaving them to roam the countryside with a blue pencil in search of bits of paper to edit. The era of the grammar ronin is coming to an end. He will be defeated by the thing that made him possible at the dawn of the internet: technology.

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!

Wednesday, April 23 was supposed to be a big meeting of Western countries and Ukraine in London where the Trump administration would make its final push for peace to end the war in Ukraine. The meeting was canceled due to the Ukrainians announcing in advance that they were not interested in any deal that would require them to make concessions. This prompted Marco Rubio to cancel the meeting, at least the portion involving decision-makers from the administration.

The lead-up to this now-canceled meeting has been a microcosm of how the Western political system now operates. For example, the period before the meeting featured stories in prominent nodes of the Western information control system about the secret details of the Trump plan. The sources for these stories were never mentioned, most likely because they did not exist. Instead, it was members of the Kagan cult, former Biden people, or schemers in the British government.

It was clear that these stories were coordinated as they all featured the same narrative and much of the same language. For example, they dusted off the old 2024 narrative of a freeze along the front line, something Russia has always rejected as both unacceptable and impossible to implement. The stories also all framed the deal as a major concession by Putin, the subtext being that he is now desperate for a way out of the war he started for no reason at all.

One point of these stories is something seen constantly in the West. There is the belief among the managerial elite that they can meme things into reality. If they just pack enough versions of their desired truth into the information control system, at some point this becomes reality. This has been repeatedly seen with the war in Ukraine, but it has been a feature of every major event. During Covid, they operated as if the news stories they made up were true for a couple of years.

One possible explanation for this is that a key pillar of the managerial state is the assumption that people respond to information, so if one controls the information, one controls the people. Since another pillar of the managerial state is that reality is made by people, it follows that one can control reality, or at least the perception of reality, by controlling the people through control of the information. The old expression, perception is reality, has become an article of faith among the elites.

Another part of this story illustrates how Western elites are only capable of thinking one move at a time. The reason for the media campaign was that they wanted the Russians to reject the deal, so they framed it as negatively toward them as possible, assuming the Russians would publicly respond. There was no thought given to the possibility of the Russians remaining silent. They simply assumed it was inevitable because this was a pleasing narrative to them.

This meant there was no backup plan. Instead, they had to have Zelensky preemptively reject the deal to avoid a public catastrophe. This last-minute cancellation is about buying time, which is another feature of managerialism. Western elites now operate as if time is always on their side. If they cannot shape reality to their liking now, then they just need to wait until reality comes to its senses. In the case of Ukraine, they remain sure they can outlast the Russians.

This sense of time probably stems from the fact that managerialism is a world measured in process rather than tangible accomplishments. Normal people measure their lives by what they have done. The managerial class measures their lives by the networks and processes in which they are a part. There is never any pressure to do anything in this world, so there is no need to worry about time. There can always be another meeting to discuss the things discussed at the last meeting.

This sense of timelessness has infected their approach to Trump. In his first term, the plan was to put the brakes on everything and wait until he either quit under relentless pressure or was removed. When he refused to go away, they peppered him with lawsuits, figuring time was on their side. Now in his second term, the court system is tasked with throwing sand in the gears to wait out Trump. The same thing is happening with the Ukraine war. It is endless stalling.

This is what gives the West the same feel as pre-revolutionary France. The ruling elite of France assumed they had time, which allowed them to avoid dealing with the serious problems facing the system. One reason for the radicalization of the masses during that time was the sense that no one in charge cared about the growing problems because no one could see any action to address them. The apparent indifference to what was happening became part of the indictment.

A similar situation happened at the end of the Soviet system. Gorbachev was something like Jacques Necker, in that he was in his position to fix the problems of the system, but the system refused to be fixed. His failure set in motion the process that toppled the Soviet system. Similarly, Trump exists because of systemic failure with the expectation that he can fix the system. Like the reactionaries of old, the managerial elite assumes it can wait him out.

Historical analogies are never perfect, and that is true here. The French elite, for example, understood the system’s problems. These were mostly smart, educated men with a deep knowledge of the system. The modern managerial elite is populated by mediocrities skilled only in the sort of scheming that is the basis of drama. They also possess a stunning lack of self-awareness. The people thinking they just need to wait out Trump also think they are loved and adored by the masses.

Wars tend to be what break dysfunctional political systems. That may be the case with the Ukraine war. Everyone assumes Trump lacks the resolve to walk away from this situation and leave the Europeans to work it out with the Russians. If he walks away from Project Ukraine, the managerial elite of the West will have a chance to learn that they cannot meme reality into existence and time is not on their side, or they will cling to these beliefs as they head to the dustbin of history.

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!

If you consume any of the content from Hollywood produced in the last decade, you no doubt are familiar with the concept of the girl boss. This is now the main character in almost every film and television show, even creeping into video games. These days, gaming is as much about narrative as gameplay, and anywhere there are narratives being constructed or undermined, you will find girl boss. This character has even jumped into the pseudo-reality of the public square.

As usual, the Democratic Party is leading the way. Versions of girl boss are turning up in their response to what is happening in Washington. Ocasio-Cortez is waddling around the country doing the girl boss act in the hopes of running for the party nomination in 2028 and perhaps becoming the ultimate girl boss. Jasmine Crockett is making a name for herself as the black version of girl boss. This is when girl boss pretends to be a character on a daytime trash television show.

Even the old gals are getting in on the act. Elizabeth Warren no longer pretends to care about “working people,” whatever that means these days. Instead, she is doing her version of girl boss. She regularly turns up on social media explaining how things must be done, or she will call the manager. The old gal version of girl boss still has those vestiges of the Karen character that entertained and amazed during COVID. The Karen role was something of a proto-girl boss.

It is hard to know if this character started in the make-believe world of narrative content or if the creators of narrative content borrowed from reality. The content production mines have been run by women for a while now, so maybe the presence of girl boss simply reflects the creeping reality of girl boss. Like a terrible rash or a fungus, girl boss is slowly taking over everything. The reason girl boss is a type is because girl boss is springing up everywhere in late-stage America.

A good starting point for understanding this new character in the public square is New Hampshire congresswoman Maggie Goodlander. She won her seat in the 2024 election, defeating a libertarian goofball in the general election. Ms. Goodlander has immediately set about making a name for herself on social media, where she seems to spend a great deal of her time. Like Ocasio-Cortez, Goodlander understands how to play her chosen role in the drama of politics.

The first thing you will notice about Goodlander is that, like every girl boss, she is a calculating striver who seems to be operating from a script. Her career reads like a Hollywood sketch for the lead in a new television drama. The daughter of a rich local family, she started at Groton and then went to Yale. She joined the military to get what at the time seemed like an important credential. This was the peak of the forever war period, so every politician wanted that on their resume.

That is the thing about girl boss. In addition to being a relentless striver, she is just as relentless at box-ticking. For girl boss, it is never about accomplishing things in the conventional sense, as that is for peasants. Girl boss has a higher calling, so her focus is on ticking the boxes that the character requires. This is where the influence of Hollywood is clear. The women playing the girl boss character are following a script of sorts to create themselves as girl boss.

You see this in the post-college portion of her character profile. Her family were Bush Republicans, which is where she started ticking boxes. While she was in the Navy as an “intelligence officer,” which is the military term for desk jockey, she worked as a senior foreign policy advisor for Joe Lieberman and John McCain. Then she spent a year clerking at the Supreme Court and then a year at Skadden, a super-connected law firm that looks great on a political girl boss resume.

Frankly, if you were to describe the ideal millennial girl boss for politics, the resume of Maggie Goodlander would feel a bit over the top. Audiences might find this character to be too much of a Mary Sue, which is a young woman in films who is portrayed as free of weaknesses or character flaws. She always gets what she wants without ever having to suffer setbacks or experience self-doubt. The resume of Maggie Goodlander looks like it was written so the rest of the plot can happen.

Another feature of girl boss that you see with every iteration of the character is what you see in the bio of Ms. Goodlander. There is a lot of activity. Ms. Goodlander is a whirlwind of activity as a representative. Every day she is posting pictures of herself being girl boss somewhere. Her resume is one activity after another. She seems to have rushed from one ticked box to the other, as if having ticked the box, the only thing that mattered was moving on to the next box.

This is what makes girl boss so powerful and why she is proliferating throughout the managerial system. In managerialism, a resume is about where you were and what networks to which you are connected. It is never about accomplishments in the sense of leaving behind a product of your labor. Girl boss is the epitome of this mindset. When girl boss goes for the walk on the beach as part of the carefully planned photoshoot, she leaves no footprints in the sand.

This leads to the main flaw of girl boss. Anyone who must deal with girl boss in the wild knows why we invented a certain word that starts with “C.” Girl boss is just as relentless in her unpleasantness as she is about her ambition. That is because every relationship is a temporary means to an end. For girl boss, your value is in how you can help her tick the next box. If for some reason you are an impediment to ticking that next box, girl boss expects you to lose, just like all opponents of girl boss.

This is why girl boss always has that weird, synthetic face. It lacks the normal emotions we expect from a female of our species. Every picture of Maggie Goodlander looks like they stapled a smile onto a mask. That is because girl boss lacks anything resembling female compassion. Her mind is singularly focused on the game of going from one box to the next to become the ultimate girl boss. There is a reason no girl boss has a trail of former colleagues who speak well of her.

This is what makes girl boss the ultimate expression of managerialism. Success in the system is never about accomplishments in the tangible sense, because managerialism is a system that evolved to reduce risk. Accomplishing things brings risk, as new things bring new variables to manage. The makers and doers must be sublimated to the managers to minimize the risk they pose. This means the managers are the antidote to the doers and makers.

In such a system, never having done anything tangible is another one of those boxes on the resume, but this box must always remain unticked. Instead, the boxes for talking about those boxes and meeting about those boxes must be ticked. Girl boss is ideally suited for a world where everyone is expected to be good at forming consensus and sharing their feelings about things never allowed in the room. Girl boss makes the ideal manager in a system designed for managers.

Of course, girl boss also seems to be the ideal symbol of the end. The rise of girl boss has led to declining content from Hollywood. They made Snow White into girl boss, and audiences are still laughing at it. The sure sign a company is about to enter the death spiral is when girl boss arrives in the C-suites. The sudden rise of girl boss in Democratic Party politics comes as the party is on the ropes. President girl boss would surely mean the end of the American experiment.

For those looking for something positive out of girl boss, it is entirely possible that she is the Boudica of the alien tribe that rules America. Boudica was a queen of a British tribe who led a failed uprising against the Roman Empire in AD 60. She was a last-gasp effort to resist the Romans. Perhaps that is what we are seeing with the rise of girl boss in the Democratic Party. They are vying to go down in history as the last gasp of resistance to the forces of restoration.

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 David Hogg taking control of the Democratic Party, a post about the younger generation of males, and no Sunday podcast as it was Easter. Subscribe here or here.

One of the amusing sideshows since Trump has taken power is the pearl clutching from the usual suspects about the law and process. The people who sat silent as lawfare was waged against Americans for the crime of holding unapproved opinions are now suddenly concerned with the rule of law. The people who took money from tech companies to remain silent about tech censorship are now carrying on as if they are dissidents because they no longer control the discourse.

Hypocrisy is a feature of man, and it has always had a central role in American politics because America is a nation of moralizers. The one thing we have always overproduced is preachers ready to wag their bony fingers at the people as they lecture them about their many moral failings. The United States is a giant outdoor revival tent where preachers take turns performing for the crowd. When not lecturing the locals, our preachers travel the world to lecture foreigners.

Preachers need to believe they are special, perhaps even called or chosen to lead the sinners out of sin into the land of salvation. You cannot think you are a wretch and at the same time be a preacher. You can be a wretch and confess your wretchedness to the people in the pews as part of your redemption. You can testify about your former wretchedness and how you rejoined the mass of ordinary sinners. You cannot preach unless you are sure you are something special.

After all, the point of preaching is to inform. The preacher not only knows the nature of sin, but he also claims to know the nature of grace. He claims to know the road that leads from sin to salvation and grace. If everyone had this knowledge, then there would be no need for the preacher. Everyone would be free to decide if they want to take the path to salvation or take some other path. This is why every preacher is sure he has been called to lead the sinner down the righteous path.

This is why the fallen preacher is a stock character in our morality tales. In a land full of preachers, we have a superabundance of preachers who turned out to be worse sinners than the people in the pews. Given that democratic politics is just a long running morality play, it is no surprise that our politics features the hypocrite, and the endless cries of hypocrisy are the Greek chorus of our politics. Democracy is a viper’s den of preachers and hypocrites hissing about hypocrisy.

This has been a defining feature of the Trump era. His every utterance seems to draw out the preacher-hypocrite. Here is Jonah Goldberg hilariously claiming he is what stands between the mean orange man and the sacred Constitution. He and his fellow cult members were chanting about the “unitary executive” back in the Bush years, when they intended that phrase to mean, “Ignore the laws.” After all, they preached, the righteous cause of forever war was too important for due process.

Goldberg is typical of the modern preacher. He is a mediocrity’s mediocrity who spends his days smearing people opposed to his cult. In the Bush years, he would preach about the need to rally to a clown like George Bush out of party loyalty. Those questioning this were disloyal deviationists or secretly in league with Old Scratch. When it was his turn to return the favor with Trump, he slanderously claimed Trump and David Duke were buddies in the secret KKK.

The most egregious example of the modern preacher is David French. This chinless weirdo is what not-for-profit politics produces. He imagines himself to be a blend of James Bond, Clarence Darrow, and Jesus Christ. His Twitter feed is dripping with sanctimony as he lectures the world about sin, but it is mostly about the righteousness of David French. It is no surprise that this ridiculous mediocrity is at the New York Times. It is the main chapel of our media.

These two festering lumps of mediocrity are famous examples, but the public square is littered with people who dream of one day standing in front of the masses, lecturing them about their failings. The Covid Karens of a few years ago made clear that behind the pleasant looking face of every stranger could lie the pursed lips of a vinegar drinking scold ready to pounce at your moment of weakness. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God named Karen from Human Resources.

The preacher plays a vital role in human society, but he must be locked up in his church where we can visit him for inspiration. The preacher provides inspiration when inspiration is needed to continue the task of living. In modern America, the preachers have been let out of their churches to run wild in our lives, making sure no one can enjoy the simple act of living. They nose about looking for sin and when none can be found they create chaos that can lead to sin.

The task before the country, if it is to escape this hell of proselytizing, is to herd the preachers back into their churches. Living is about trade-offs, the choice between practical benefits and equally practical costs. For a people to live, they must embrace living, not sit quietly while preached to about the sins of living. That is what we are seeing with the Trump administration. It is the long overdue effort to round up the preachers and put them back in their rightful place.

The price for this freedom will be the endless hypocrisy from the pearl clutchers and bony fingered ministers, now suddenly concerned about law and order. They were silent when the law was ignored but now pretend to care when the law must be ignored to restore order, the only ground in which the law can flourish. That means sidelining the preachers until the coast is clear. Then they can be let loose to preach the gospel of republican virtue to whoever will listen.

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

• 01m14s Senator envy
• 05m03s Marco favors free speech
• 14m40s Lard, petard
• 21m10s CultMarx on display
• 31m37s How to deport millions
• 33m33s Hungary blocks Prouds
• 35m33s Remembering Benny Hill
• 38m50s Signoff with Eddie Cochran

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a fragment of Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 1, just to give you a break from No. 2, and this is your enviously genial host John Derbyshire with news and views from the past week.

Let me begin by explaining that last adverb. I’m not by temperament an envious person. The Tenth Commandment is an easy one for me. I rarely find myself yearning for something that someone else possesses but I myself want to have. I’m too fatalistic.

In one respect, though, I do envy the people of Missouri. Let me start by explaining that.

02 — Senator envy.     I live, as I’m sure I have mentioned before, on Long Island, in the outer-outer suburbs of New York City. My wife and I have lived here, in the same house, for 33 years, very happily. The house suits us, the neighborhood suits us, the town suits us, Long Island suits us. We have complaints I sometimes vent — the property taxes, for example, are outrageous; and getting off Long Island by road needs forward planning on the scale of D-Day — but we have no desire to move.

However, the house, the neighborhood, the town, and the Island are all in New York State, a stronghold of the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris won the state’s vote in November, 56½ percent to 43½.

I should say there’s a bit more more to the psephological story than that. The map of votes by county in New York State is mostly red. It’s the metropolitan counties — Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, New York City of course, … that got Harris the victory.

And the imbalance in space is mirrored in time. New York State has voted Democrat in every one of the last ten presidential elections. Prior to that, though, we voted for Reagan in ’80 and ’84, for Nixon in ’72, for Ike in ’52 and ’56, Dewey in ’48, and — bless their sweet souls — for Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover in the Arcadian 1920s.

So OK, New York is not the bluest of blue states. It’s in the running for that title, though, and our two U.S. Senators are out there leading the pack. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand are both too intelligent to be crazy-woke, like Cory Booker or AOC, and they’re not sufficiently skilled in the dramatic arts to fake it, but they don’t deviate far from the Democrats’ party line. Both favor open borders, for example, although with some small variations of emphasis.

Over now to the fine state of Missouri. Their two U.S. Senators are: senior, Josh Hawley, and junior, Eric Schmitt.

I can’t claim to be a closely attentive follower of either gent, but when I’ve seen them in passing, expressing an opinion on Fox News or social media, they have always been saying something sensible that I could nod along in agreement with. Hence my envy of Missourians. It’s Senator envy.

What is all that leading up to? To a segment on freedom of speech, that’s what.

03 — Marco favors free speech.     Freedom of speech, yeah. Guaranteed to us by the First Amendment, right? Well … not precisely. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” is what the Amendment actually says; but it’s amazing what the ruling class can do without there being a law that says they can do it.

I knew that in a general way, of course. As a former contributor to VDARE.com, I know it in a very personal way — more on that later. I got a whole new perspective on it yesterday thanks to Eric Schmitt, who I mentioned a minute ago. Yes, that Eric Schmitt, the junior U.S. Senator from Missouri.

Browsing X over my afternoon cup of tea I came across a longish thread the good Senator had posted, leading off as follows, tweet:

It’s hard to overstate how big this is.

For years, the State Department ran a global censorship operation — not just in America, but across the West.

Now, it’s pushing free speech instead.

End tweet.

Senator Schmitt is actually posting to publicize an article published Wednesday in The Federalist, written by our Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Title of the article: “To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship-Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled.” Opening two paragraphs, longish quote:

During his historic comeback campaign in 2024, President Trump vowed to close the book on a dark chapter in America’s constitutional history: the weaponization of America’s own government to silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans. The American people responded to this promise by giving President Trump a landslide victory last November.

Everything this administration has done since then has been laser-focused on fulfilling the promises made during that campaign. Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

End quote.

I had never heard of this GEC, this Global Engagement Center. It was an agency within the State Department that had begun life in 2011 under a different name to monitor and counter propaganda from terrorist outfits like Al Qaeda. It quickly expanded its scope, though, as government agencies will, to cover, quote, “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts,” end quote.

“Disinformation” became the keyword, defined by the GEC to mean anything unpleasing to the ruling class, including of course anything pro-Trump. One more quote from Marco Rubio, this a short one. Quote:

With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting “disinformation.”

End quote.

One of those organizations was the Global Disinformation Index, a British entity that published a list of the Most Dangerous News Outlets. The Federalist was itself on that list, along with Newsmax, The American Conservative, The American Spectator, and six other outlets, every one on the political right. The list even includes my breakfast New York Post. This Global Disinformation Index was just one of the critters being fed with State Department dollars — which is to say, your tax dollars and mine.

Rubio tells us that the State Department agency running this censorship and news-manipulation show, the GEC, actually had its funding cut off by Republicans in Congress at the end of last year, but the Biden State Department managed to keep it alive under a new name. It has now, Rubio assures us, been killed stone dead.

One more brief quote from our Secretary of State, quote:

The American people don’t need an obscure agency to “protect” them from lies by pressuring X to ban users or trying to put The Federalist out of business. This administration will fight false narratives with true narratives, not with heavy-handed threats decreeing that only one “truth” be visible online.

End quote.

I thank Secretary Rubio for taking this stand on behalf of free speech; and I thank Senator Eric Schmitt for bringing that article to our attention.

On top of that, I thank my lucky stars that I moved to the U.S.A. In the nation of my birth, on the other side of the Atlantic, freedom of speech is long dead. Over there, if you post on social media something that makes some person somewhere feel anxious, a squad of police officers — four or five at least — will come to your home and interrogate you. They may, following laws passed by Parliament, arrest and detain you.

Should they consider your words to have been caused anxiety at a serious level, they may charge you with a crime. A woman from my home town over there is serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for a tweet she posted during the Southport riots last summer.

The jailbird there is 42-year-old Lucy Connolly, an ordinary citizen with no prior criminal record, who did not herself participate in any kind of social disorder. Mrs. Connolly has been put in the “most dangerous” category of inmates and denied temporary leave to see her 12-year-old daughter and sick husband, as is commonly granted to prisoners in the less terrifying categories.

So much for freedom of speech. Britain is far gone into the darkness.

I thank Senator Schmitt once again for bringing Marco Rubio’s article to my attention, and I am encouraged to read our Secretary of State taking such a firm position on free and open discussion. Perhaps he and his cabinet colleague, Attorney General Pam Bondi, will give some attention to the silencing of that free and open discussion by means of lawfare.

That’s what we content creators call a segue …

04 — Lard, petard.     Yes: you know where this is headed, don’t you? It’s headed to New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt, who by relentless lawfare shut down my previous host, VDARE.com. The proprietors of VDARE hadn’t committed any crime; Ms, Lardbutt just didn’t like their opinions, so she lawyered them to death.

So imagine my pleasure when I heard that on Tuesday this week our State Attorney General has been hit with a criminal referral from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“Criminal referral” is when agency or authority A, which has no powers of prosecution, sends a notice to agency or authority B, which does have those powers, recommending criminal investigation or prosecution for crimes within B’s prosecutorial powers. “B” in this case is of course Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, “B” for “Bondi.”.

What crimes might Ms. Lardbutt have committed? The referral says she may have engaged in financial fraud by making false statements in real-estate transactions. The three charges I’ve so far seen publicized are:

1. To secure a loan for a property in Norfolk, Va. she claimed it would be her principal residence to get a more advantageous mortgage rate. As sitting Attorney General of New York, however, she is required by law to have her primary residence here, in New York.
2. She misrepresented a five-unit property in New York City as a four-unit property. again to get a better loan rate.
3. She filed papers listing herself and her father as a married couple. The lady is not in fact married, to her father or anyone else.

Aren’t the first two of those charges strangely similar to the real-estate shenanigans our state A-G accused Donald Trump of having engaged in, leading to a show trial before a sniggering prosecutor-friendly New York judge, a trial that ended with a half-billion-dollar judgment against Trump?

Well, they’re the same kind of thing, sure. So is this just Trump’s revenge — hoisting Letitia Lardbutt with her own petard? Possibly. If it is, I’d find it hard to blame him.

Whatever it is, our A-G isn’t taking it sitting down, for which chairs all over New York State are breathing sighs of relief. Here she was responding in public on Wednesday.

[Clip:  My mission is clear. I’m focused. I’m prepared. I’m ready. I’ve been trained by the best. I went to Howard University, that overturned legal segregation in this country. I’ve been taught in those classrooms where Thurgood Marshall once taught. I’m not afraid of no President. Donald Trump, we’re ready for you, we’re coming for you. We’re standing up for you. (Sic.) We’re fighting on. We’re not going down (unintelligible). Victory, my friends, is clear! It’s now! And I’m not waiting four years, I’m waiting two, until a Speaker by the name of Hakeem Jeffries comes to bring us some rest. Come on, ladies, it’s up to us. We saved this democracy before, we’ll save it now! Let’s go! (Cheers.)]

It’s not likely Ms. Lardbutt has anything to fear. As Jonathan Turley pointed out in the New York Post, quote:

She is unlikely to be prosecuted by New York prosecutors using the ridiculous law weaponized against Trump.

She emphasized that Trump did not have to produce a single penny of loss for a victim to be hit with half a billion dollars in fines.

But that was Trump and this is New York.

There will be no mob or media frenzy demanding charges.

This is indeed New York, in whose state judiciary white, Christian, heterosexual male judges of a conservative inclination are as common as peach trees in Antarctica.

You could ask Peter Brimelow about that. Peter spent three years and more than a million dollars of the VDARE Foundation’s money fighting the A-G’s obviously malicious and unfounded lawfare against VDARE.com, lawfare waged solely because Ms. Lardbutt didn’t like the opinions posted there. Peter encountered no help or sympathy, let alone outrage, from any member of the state appeals judiciary.

Yep: this is New York.

05 — CultMarx on display.     I’ve always liked the term “Cultural Marxism.” I’m sorry it’s gone out of style. Yes, I’m familiar with the philosophical objections to it — as familiar as a person can be when his head is impervious to abstract philosophizing.

I like it because I am frequently in argument with someone who believes that human society is composed of a class of oppressors and a class of their victims. Some such notion has always been around, I suppose; but Classical Marxism gave it a mighty boost.

Twentieth-century Communists tried to use Classical Marxism as a model for society and politics, with horrific results. Using the term “Cultural Marxism” in argument neatly — well, neatly enough — links more modern oppressor-victim ideologies to those Satanic horrors that so disfigured the twentieth century.

The phrase “Cultural Marxism” can also be chopped down Newspeak-style to “CultMarx,” from five syllables to two. What’s not to like? You can’t fight fashion, though. Nowadays people squint if you say “Cultural Marxism.” If you say “CultMarx” they just look baffled, or roll their eyes and turn away.

That’s a pity because the ideology currently plaguing us and providing half our news stories, the ideology we call “Woke,” is all structured around oppressor-victim models of society. It’s CultMarx. If it ever attains primacy it will bring us what Classical Marxism brought to hundreds of millions: slavery, starvation, torture, and death.

The present manifestations of CultMarx in American society particularly favor three varieties of the oppressor-victim model.

• In Variety One the victims are incarcerated or confessed criminals, the oppressors are normal citizens, non-criminals, especially law-enforcement officers.
• In Variety Two the victim is black people, the oppressors are non-blacks, often defined down more narrowly, as narratives require, to just white people.
• In Variety Three the victims are illegal aliens, the oppressors are citizens, especially those engaged in enforcement of immigration laws.

There’s a considerable intersection, of course — draw your own Venn diagram — because blacks are much more inclined to criminality than nonblacks, illegal aliens are criminal by definition, and some fair proportion of illegal aliens are blacks from the Caribbean or the poop-hole countries of sub-Saharan Africa. So it’s sometimes difficult to locate the precise focus of Woke sympathies.

Woven through the news this past few days have been three stories with a strong CultMarx coloring.

First story: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien gangster from El Salvador deported back to his home country by the Trump administration on March 15th on counter-terrorism grounds. April 10th the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Garcia’s deportation illegal and instructed the administration to, quote, “facilitate,” end quote, his return to the U.S.A., presumably so that he can resume his status as an illegal alien.

El Salvador has incarcerated Garcia in their famous maximum-security CECOT prison. Unfortunately Garcia, while not precisely white, is definitely not black, so he can’t claim the incarcerated-black-illegal alien CultMarx trifecta. Politicians from our Democratic Party have none the less been climbing over each other to get a photo-op with him in his cell.

Second story, likewise a twofer: 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony. At a high-school track meet in Texas on April 2nd Anthony, who is black, got into an argument over seating with white student Austin Metcalf, also aged 17, but from a different school. When Metcalf tried to shove Anthony, the latter took a knife from his backpack and stabbed Metcalf with it, leaving the lad to bleed out in his twin brother’s arms.

Anthony was arrested, charged with first-degree murder, and held with a million-dollar bond. He told an officer, quote: “I was protecting myself. He put his hands on me.” End quote.

He didn’t stay incarcerated for long, though. On Monday County Judge Angela Tucker, a mulatto, reduced the bond to just a quarter million and released him to house arrest. Meanwhile sympathizers — people sympathizing with the killer, that is — had contributed over four hundred thousand dollars to Anthony’s defense fund.

Anthony’s family are living pretty large: in a pricey house — rent estimated at $3,500 a month — in a gated community with three late-model cars in the driveway, one of them just purchased, according to a neighbor. Whether all those donations contributed to this prosperity is not clear to me. It’s probably not polite to ask. Karmelo Anthony is, after all, the victim in this case.

And then, Luigi Mangione, 26-year-old prime suspect in the death by shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in front of the Hilton Hotel in New York City last December 4th.

This is a double-jeopardy case, with Mangione facing both state and federal charges. He was indicted on the federal charges yesterday and will appear in court in Manhattan sometime today, Friday the 18th —I don’t have an exact schedule.

The federal charges are murder by firearm, using a silencer, and two counts of stalking. Disapproving as I am of double jeopardy prosecutions, I’ll give grudging thanks that at least Mangione isn’t charged with depriving Brian Thompson of his Civil Rights. The hottest current legal argumentation concerns whether the federal death penalty can be applied, as U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi wants, as do I.

The CultMarx enthusiasm here is much closer to actual Marxism than in the other two cases. Mangione is white, a native citizen, a middle-class IT worker-bee. Brian Thompson was CEO of a healthcare firm — a capitalist! And in a branch of capitalism that is, as all right-thinking people know, killing people for profit with fake drugs and procedures.

Hence all the hybristophilia I commented on back in the December 27th podcast, when it was already surging. Now of course it’s in full flood. Former New York Times reporter and Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz told us last week that Mangione is, quote:

[A] revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart … He’s a person who seems like he’s this morally good man, which is hard to find.

End quote.

The case for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment gets stronger by the hour.

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

Imprimis:  At the risk I’ll be accused of kissing up to the boss here, I commend to your attention the Z-man’s midweek tweet on immigration enforcement.

At the risk of having my lunch privileges canceled, I should say that the tweet doesn’t say anything original, just things that immigration patriots — those at VDARE.com, for example — have been saying for years. These are things that need saying, though, and can’t be said often enough.

The proper approach to removing the twenty or thirty million illegal aliens — nobody knows the exact number — from our country is not to arrest them and try them in court one by one. We don’t have that much jail space, and all those trials and subsequent appeals would take centuries, possibly millennia.

The right approach is to mandate E-verify for employment, social benefits, public schools and housing, and to offer rewards for reporting employers that hire illegals, with savage penalties for those employers. Noncriminals will self-deport, leaving a residue of criminals that law-enforcement can deal with.

Easy, you see? It just needs some simple legislation — for Congress to step up to its responsibilities … Which means nothing will be done.

Item:  Before delivering actual news on the next item, let me explain to new listeners that I jeer at verbal monstrosities like “LGBTQ.” My own word for persons who are sexually eccentric is “Prouds.”

They tell us they are proud and attach the word “Pride” to all their public events. It’s not a rude or insulting word, or negative in any way, unless you take your Sunday-school teacher’s warnings about the Seven Deadly Sins much too seriously. So as far as I’m concerned, they are Prouds. “LGBTQIA…”? Ptui, I spit.

That said, here’s the news item. On Monday the parliament of Hungary passed an amendment to that nation’s constitution that allows the government to ban the Prouds from staging public events. The vote was 140 to 21.

This is all within the context of Hungary’s high official regard for childhood development not impeded or distorted by adult displays. “Daddy, what are those people marching for?”

The adjective “proud” comes through in Hungarian as büszke. “Prouds,” in the sense of “Proud people,” is a büszke emberek. Just in case you ever need to know.

[Permalink]

Item:  The word “fame” is all too often yoked with the word “fleeting.” Here’s a case from across the pond that illustrates why, and offers some insights into the slow-shifting currents of pop-cultural fashion.

The name here is Benny Hill. I knew that name very well, although it hasn’t crossed my mind for years — actually decades, I think.

Hill was a British TV comedian, floruit early 1950s to late 1980s. The Wikipedia page tells us that, quote:

The Benny Hill Show, which debuted in 1955, was among the most-watched programmes in the UK; his audience was more than 21 million in 1971. The show was also exported to over 100 countries around the world, a global appeal which the [British Film Institute] attributed to [inner quote] “Hill’s emphasis on visual humour transcending language barriers” [end inner quote].

End quote.

Benny is suddenly news again because a British TV channel just recently aired a program named The Cancellation of Benny Hill. The show pondered how Benny’s style of humor has, quote from a Daily Mail article, quote: “come to be criticized for containing racist, sexist, risqué and vulgar content which would be deemed unacceptable by today’s standards.” End quote.

I record this just because, after all those years of never thinking about Benny, then reading that Daily Mail article last Monday, I wasted a good part of my afternoon trawling through Benny Hill sketches on YouTube.

Not all his stuff has lasted well, and it’s easy to see why, as the Daily Mail reports, Gen Z females wince and frown at some of his sketches. Benny was a great natural comic, though. Where the humor has lasted, it’s still funny.

If you want to see for yourself, try the Vicar Sketch. I’ve put a link in the transcript; if you’re only listening, go to YouTube, key “Tommy Tupper vicar” into the search box, and start the video around 2m30s in.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gents. Thanks as always for your time and attention, and a very happy Easter to one and all.

Remember please that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself 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, where I contribute a regular column. Thank you!

For signoff music, please permit me a nostalgia trip. I’ve told you this story before, but the coincidence of dates is tempting me to tell it again, and I’m not much good at resisting temptation.

First I need to relocate us in time and space. The time: the week of April 18th, 1960 — 65 years ago. The place: Gosport, a big naval base on the south shore of England. The precise place: HMS St Vincent. “HMS” stands for “His Majesty’s Ship,” or in 1960 “Her Majesty’s Ship.” HMS St Vincent was not actually a ship, though. It was a shore base used by the British Navy for training boys in the arts of seamanship.

I was a naval cadet at the time. My school had sent its little squad of naval cadets to HMS St Vincent for a week’s training during the Easter vacation.

The week was strenuous but instructive. I’m sure I learned a lot, although I can’t remember any of it.

That week didn’t start well, though. Our first or second day aboard, we got the news from the barracks radio that Eddie Cochran had died in an automobile accident while on a British concert tour. He was only 21 years old. The news cast a pall, at any rate on those of us lads already hooked on pop music and au courant with all the American artists.

So here is Eddie to sing us out again. There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

Note: I am taking a much needed day off to get some outside things done, which means starting before the cock crows. No time to write this morning, so this is a green door post, gifted to you on Good Friday. Happy Easter everyone.

For the last two weeks, I have been allowing AI to edit my posts. It is not a single AI but a team of AI. The editors are ChatGPT, OpenAI, Grok, and GabAI. Every post is fed into the maw for editing grammar and spelling. Sometimes I will feed a post into one, then take its output and feed it into another, and so on. I have also continued to use Word, which seems to be going insane.

One of the first things that jumps out is the AI tools will not simply fix grammar and spelling, no matter how you instruct them. Instead, it is a full rewrite that attempts to make the text like what was used to teach them. My guess is these tools attempt to consume everything on the internet as the baseline, but the starting place was probably many publicly available texts in every language.

Curiously, all the AI tools have an obsession with hyphens. If they are given a sentence like, “He jumped the fence, as he was a track athlete,” AI will try to rewrite the sentence with a hyphen between the two clauses. The results are often ridiculous, so I started adding a rule to avoid all hyphens. That means they change “twenty-two” to “twenty two,” but I can fix that more easily than the other option.

In truth, I could start with a longer list of rules and get a result like what you would get from your teacher in primary school. The output would be the original text with suggestions and corrections noted in the text. That requires far more work than simply handing it to a human and saying, “Proofread this for me.” The point here is to make the test apples to apples or as close as possible.

Another bit of weirdness is AI loves contractions. Every occurrence of “it is” will be changed to “it’s” unless you demand otherwise. This is a curious thing, as contractions are generally frowned upon. The style guides I have all say to avoid contractions unless they are in quoted text. Word will flag all contractions. For some reason, the AI editors have gone the opposite direction.

Here is where the basis for the AI knowledge bases comes into play. It starts with formal text and then continues to learn using what is online and fed to it. Casual writing will be littered with contractions, and since that is the bulk of what is online, the robots assume contractions are clearer and more concise. If everyone is jumping off the bridge, the AI editors will jump off the bridge too.

Probably the most amusing bit is none of the AI editors agree. I will feed a post into one and then feed the output into another, and so on. Every output is different from the others, and when you get back to the starting AI and input the last output, it spits out a different version from the first go. Like real editors, there is a desire with AI to change the text when no changes are warranted.

Another amusing bit is that the output from AI pasted into Word causes the Word spell and grammar check to have a stroke. Word has become almost unusable at this point, but it does a few things well. For example, it will change “have to” to “must,” which is better in terms of efficiency. Otherwise, Word often hates what comes out of the AI editors like it is an angry old schoolmarm.

For basic spelling and grammar, it is a useful tool as long as you do not mind it rewriting the text or you are willing to supply many limiting instructions. Is it better than having old school Word flag spelling and punctuation? It depends. If you are like me and have confidence in your style, it is not better. If you do not have confidence in your writing, then it provides a sense of security, which is not the worst result.

That is the point of sites like Grammarly. They are for people who probably should not have been taught to read but who have it in their head that they need to tell the world their opinions. These users can paste their text into the site, and the result is obviously better, and it comes with the approval of an authority. In a permission society like ours, most people need that pat on their head.

The banality of the output is something else I have tested. Instead of writing my post and then submitting it for editing, I have had the AI team write the post based on the points I supply and then asking it to use my site as a guide. This takes far more work than you would expect for some reason. I found I needed to think about what I was planning to write far more than I do when I do the writing myself.

Maybe it is just me, but when I write an essay, I am not entirely sure what I will be writing when I start off. I get going, and after a few minutes, I have a few paragraphs and a few ideas for what to do with it. This happens in a few cycles until I have about what I want for a daily post. Then I think about how to put a bow on it. This approach cannot work when using AI to write a post.

What I did instead is write a post and then use it as the basis of the prompts for AI to write an original post on the topic. With some tinkering, I can get a result that is pretty close to what I would write, but it takes much longer than writing it myself. Otherwise, the resulting text reads like a technical manual. There is a flatness to the writing that fails to engage the reader. Reading the result feels like work.

What this suggests is that the ceiling for AI may very well be the absolute middle of human creativity when it comes to communication. It will quickly write text that mimics a mediocrity at National Review. It can quickly produce audio that lacks the sort of variability that makes hearing one another enjoyable. For many things and most people, this is more than enough to do the job.

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!

A funny thing happened when Netanyahu arrived in Washington to tell the Trump administration about how they would proceed with Iran.  The Trump side told Netanyahu that his longed for war with Iran was not happening. Instead, the Trump administration was starting talks with Iran concerning a negotiated settlement to their nuclear program and the sanctions imposed on Iran. When Trump announced this during the press conference, Netanyahu looked like he had seen a ghost.

Netanyahu was poleaxed because he was sure he had maneuvered the Trump people into a corner on Iran. He thought he had done the same thing with the Biden people, but instead of an American strike on Iran, the Iranians launched their own missile strike and the Biden people looked the other way. With Trump he was sure he had a president who hated Iran as much as he did, but it turns out that Trump was leading Netanyahu on so he could buy time to make a deal with Iran.

It is a good example of how the Israel lobby, which backs Trump completely, is not the same as Israel. The two sides frequently disagree on what is best for Israel, and the Israel lobby typically prevails in these disputes. Given the source of funding for the Israel lobby, this is logical. For American Jews, Israel is their symbolic homeland, but it is not their actual home. It is a place where they send their children for the summer after graduation or perhaps where they take an occasional family trip.

For the Israel lobby, an agreement that fosters peace in the region and ensures the long-term security of Israel is the goal. They do not share Israel’s aspiration for a greater Israel or of subjugating local rivals merely out of spite. The manner in which Israel has conducted itself concerning Gaza has been detrimental to the Israel lobby, as it significantly undermines support for Israel among average Americans. Israel now has the lowest approval ratings among Americans since the issue has been surveyed.

This is also another one of those examples of how the second coming of Donald Trump is much better than the first one. No one saw the reproachment with Iran coming until it was about to happen. This meant that Trump did not discuss it publicly and ensured it remained a need-to-know matter among his trusted confidants. Consequently, the usual suspects could not leak it to the media. All those people who lost security clearances are no longer conduits to the Washington Post.

We see the same thing with Russia. No one outside of Trump and a few trusted people know what is happening in those dealings. No one knew Trump was planning direct talks until they were announced by both sides. Even now, no one has the slightest idea what the two sides are discussing. Instead, the media runs nonsense stories like this one fed to them through Keith Kellogg by the neocons. Team Trump has kept everyone off balance regarding Ukraine.

The essence of all this is not a change in policy with Trump but a transformation in his approach to governance. For instance, Trump has never been fond of Netanyahu. Worse yet for Netanyahu, Trump does not trust him. Similarly, Trump never forgot that Ukraine was central to his impeachment. Trump always wanted to do a deal with Russia and has always got along with Putin. What is novel this time is that Trump is far more astute in how he navigates the den of vipers that is Washington.

Regarding Iran, there is also the reality that no military solution exists. This has been made evident with the Houthis. The days of launching volleys of missiles at an adversary and achieve its objectives is over. To address the Houthi issue militarily would necessitate an invasion and an occupation. A military solution to Iran would require a million-man army and the risk of destabilizing the oil markets. It is not entirely clear that the United States could accomplish this, even if the will existed.

Instead, Trump has allowed the Israelis to believe that the Trump administration supported a strike on Iran’s nuclear and leadership centers. These stories were leaked to the media and then amplified by online geopolitical analysts. Meanwhile, Trump’s trusted advisors were utilizing backchannels to arrange direct talks with Iran, which occurred last week in Oman. There is a strong likelihood that Russia played a role in persuading the Iranians to attend the meeting.

What we may be witnessing are the results of a transformation in the Israel lobby and in Trump’s governing strategy. The same populist forces that spooked the oligarchs into supporting Trump’s political and economic reforms may have prompted the Israel lobby to reconsider its approach to Iran. If war is not an option, then another method must be found to secure Israel. The obvious solution is to resolve the Iran issue that has persisted for half a century.

In many ways Trump is the closing of a chapter in American history that started fifty years ago, and Iran is one part of it. The Iranian revolution was caused by the failure to manage the Israel issue properly. Fifty years ago, smart people warned about tilting to far in favor of Israel. The result has been fifty years of turmoil, including several major wars. That chapter in American history may finally be coming to close with the normalization of relations with Iran.

Of course, this is another indication that we are at the end of empire. Even if relations between the United States and Iran cannot be normalized, it is evident that the days of the American empire ruling over the region with absolute authority are over. The cost of empire has long surpassed the benefits to the American people, and that deficit is now disrupting domestic politics. What Trump represents is a dignified withdrawal from empire, rather than an ignominious one.

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!