Note #1: Behind the green door, there is a post about why deporting anti-Israel protestors is a good start, a post about the dangers of the Ukraine tarpit, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. I was also on the J. Burden show last week and you can listen here.

Note #2: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

One of the stranger things about the first months of the Trump administration has been the reaction of Europe to his peace initiatives. The European “leaders” are, on the one hand, horrified by his peace push, and on the other hand they have rallied themselves to various schemes to stop them. The latest scheme is to create a peacekeeping force that they will insert into Ukraine, something the Russians have repeatedly said is a deal breaker and perhaps even an act of war.

On the surface this looks insane. There are about twenty million Ukrainian refugees in Europe with more trickling in daily. Social welfare rolls are now littered with refugees, who do not speak the local language, so they cannot work. Of course, the EU has been shipping Ukraine billions of Euros plus all its military gear. The war has become another factor eroding social trust and most importantly, trust in the political elite that insists the war must go on forever.

None of this makes any sense until you think about what it means to be in the European political elite in 2025. It means a lifetime of having been very good at winning favor with America or winning favor with the politicians close to America. The dominance of the United States since the war, but especially since the end of the Cold War, has turned the European elite into a slave class. They are the house slaves, who defend the master’s prerogatives against the field slaves.

The surest way to getting yourself exiled in European politics is to speak poorly of the Americans in favor of European interests. Even now, when they all agree Trump is a big meanie, they are obsessed with getting his attention in such a way that it reasserts their position as the loyal house slave. With respect to Ukraine, they feel like they have been sent out of the room as the master talks to another master. They all have their ear to the door, hoping to hear what is being said.

What we are seeing is the result of long subjugation. When one people come to dominate another people, the subjugated will inevitably look to survive and that means finding leaders who are good at currying favor with the master. After the war, Europe was a mess and needed the United States to stave off communism and rebuild the economy of Europe. After the Cold War, the United States was the lone superpower, and Europe became its chief flunky.

It is why there will be no European Donald Trump anytime soon. The idea of such a character terrifies the typical European, who has been conditioned since birth to look up to the house slave. Since a Donald Trump like figure must come from the field slave population, this sort of figure is not just feared by the European house slave population but despised by the field slaves of Europe. They would rather been hacked to death by a machete wielding African than taste freedom.

This also explains the absurdity of the European political class. It is a freak show of carnival acts rather than people with some idea how the world works. You see the same thing in the United States among the black population. Every black congressional district has a ridiculous person as the representative. The newest version is Jasmine Crockett, a representative from Houston, who had to learn how to sound like a ghetto queen in order to rise up the ranks.

The reason Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers had to hire the actor Barry Soetoro to play Barak Obama was that the black community is not able to produce such a figure, so they had to manufacture one. The reason Obama has so quickly disappeared from the conversation is that he was always just an actor playing a role. The show ended and he left the stage. Like a typecast actor, he can only play this role and no one has much interest in the character, so he has sunk into obscurity.

We seem to be seeing something similar with other minority communities in the United States, despite the demographic changes. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is a fast-rising Asian politician, but she is also an Asian version of Maxine Waters. The reason anyone knows her name is she is willing to perform in front of the cameras, aping the most absurd politics of upper middle-class white people. She is the East Asian version of the Sambo, dancing for her primarily white audience.

A main difference between the minority populations in America and Europe is the United States is actively trying to set Europe free. If Trump could do it, he would leave Europe entirely but he will settle for a reduced role. No one is seriously thinking about creating a black homeland or Asian homeland in America. The Trump administration actively talks about Europe standing on its own two feet again. This is why the current European elite is in such a panic. They do not want to leave the master’s house.

The question with regards to Europe is can it regain itself and do so in a way that does not require the great powers to supervise it? The glimmer of hope is the nationalist parties emerging, but they are often as clownish as the establishment. That or they exist to prevent an alternative elite emerging. Nigel Farage is an entertaining political clown whose main role is to prevent any sort of organized resistance to the nation-wrecking policies of the UK political class.

The answer may be that Europe will have to go through a dark age, so to speak, before it can produce a genuine alternative elite. Given the current demographic trends, what would emerge would be non-European. Alternatively, the nationalist movements gain power and simply ruin the existing political elite and their slave mentality. There is a period of chaos, like the end of communism in Russia, that provides the conditions for a new elite to emerges to rule Europe.

What we see in Europe and America is a good example of how success sets the conditions for decline. Conquering people makes them into dependents and eventually, their dependency becomes too much to carry. The United States is about to cut the Europeans loose for this reason. What suffering comes from the newly liberated house slaves of Europe will seem unfair to them, but three generations of dependency are the cause, not their impending liberation.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• 02m19s Foreigners behaving badly
• 09m28s Our anti-Trump judiciary
• 17m36s The shock troops of lawfare
• 25m38s Separation of powers 2025
• 34m02s The genocidal St. Patrick
• 36m01s YouTube kowtowing?
• 38m05s TDS and MIM
• 39m40s Signoff  with Gracie

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. 2 played on, of course, the piano; and this is your contritely genial host John Derbyshire with commentaries on the week’s news.

Before I commence commenting, just a short housekeeping note. I have been remiss in keeping my personal website properly tended.

If you go to the home page at johnderbyshire.com you will see in the “Navigation” box over at the right-hand side there an entry for “Recently published.” Clicking on that will send you to a page listing everything I have published, in print or online, for the past three months, with links to the individual publications.

That “Recently published” page relies on me adding items to it as I publish them — or, in the case of most print items, after a decent interval to let the print outlet get printed, distributed, purchased, and read.

I have been forgetting to do that, so that the “Recently published” page has been getting out of date. Some readers rely on it for access to my output, and they’ve been grumbling.

I am sorry. I shall strive to do better. The “Recently published” page is now up to date.

02 — Foreigners behaving badly.     We — our federal government — have been having trouble with foreigners.

Exhibit A; Thirty-year-old Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian who came here in 2022 on a student visa to attend Columbia University in New York City. The following year, 2023, he married a U.S. citizen, the daughter of immigrants from Syria. They are expecting a baby next month. Last year, 2024, Khalil was granted a Green Card for resident alien status.

After the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 Khalil became a busy activist in the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel student demonstrations at Columbia. March 8th he was arrested at Columbia under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which lets the feds remove a foreigner whose presence they think is a national security threat.

That’s the outline of the Khalil story. There are some unknowns, though, and stuff in Khalil’s background that we only partly know. He apparently has Algerian citizenship, but nobody knows how he acquired it. Living in Beirut in the years prior to 2022, he worked for either the British Foreign Office or just for the British Embassy, it’s not clear.

He was also employed in some capacity by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. UNRWA has been sued umpteen times over, and still is being sued, for helping to fund Hamas.

In less than a week following Khalil’s arrest nineteen lawyers had signed up to defend him and funds were pouring in to pay for them. The head of the defense team is another Syrian immigrant, a law professor at City University here whose legal studies were financed by a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship. Yes: that’s “Soros” spelled “S-O-R-O-S.”

So there is stuff in the background that we don’t know as well as we might like to. As I’m speaking here, Khalil is being held at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana after a federal judge from New York Southern District blocked his deportation pending judicial review. He’s whining to the media that he’s a “political prisoner,” but that’s nonsense: he’s free to leave the country any time he wants to.

Exhibit B is the 250 or so Venezuelan and Salvadoran gangbangers deported last Saturday to El Salvador in defiance of a hold order from a different federal judge, this one from the Washington, D.C. District.

This deportation was made under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which gives our government authority to deport foreigners who are dangerous to the public peace or safety of the United States. The deportees are now residents at CECOT, El Salvador’s famously strict Terrorism Confinement Center.

That Washington, D.C. judge who tried to stop the deportations is not pleased. He’s demanding that Trump’s Justice Department provide full, detailed documentation on how the deportations were conducted, presumably so that one or more of Trump’s people can be charged with contempt, or Trump himself impeached.

Exhibit C:  And I just saw that yesterday, Thursday afternoon, yet another federal judge, a Biden appointee working Virginia’s Eastern District, has blocked the deportation of Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national here on a student visa. Suri, like Khalil, is married to a U.S. citizen of Palestinian origins. Both husband and wife have been active in support of Arab terrorism. The wife’s father, according to an Indian newspaper, served as a senior political adviser to the Hamas leadership.

I’m no kind of legal scholar, but some things are basic common sense. Here’s one of those things.

If a foreigner living in my country is making a nuisance of himself to citizens, by engaging in gang activity or by helping to organize events that seriously disrupt learning in institutions of higher education, I want that foreigner expelled and banned from returning. If he’s married to a U.S. citizen they must decide between themselves whether the spouse will remain here — as of course she has every right to, as a citizen — or go to his country with him.

As I said, basic common sense: so basic that I believe some such opinion must have been prevalent in every nation for as long as nations have existed.

03 — Our anti-Trump judiciary.

Those stories I just told are only three skirmishes in the new style of anti-Trump lawfare being waged by the ruling class through the federal judiciary. Here are some more, not related to the issue of misbehaving foreigners.

Exhibit D:  Tuesday this week another federal district judge — also from Washington, D.C. — blocked Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from enlisting or serving in the U.S. military.

Exhibit E:  Yet another federal judge, this one from the Maryland District, ordered Elon Musk to stop dismantling the sleazy USAID money racket and restore email and computer access to USAID employees.

Exhibit F:  Thursday, yet another federal judge, also from the Maryland District, blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing social security records as part of its hunt for fraud and waste.

This judge granted a temporary restraining order to prevent staff at the Social Security Administration from giving DOGE access to records that contain personally identifiable information.

Exhibit G:  Exhibit G has not actually materialized yet, but it’s totally predictable.

Thursday the President signed an executive order that he said would, quote, “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all,” end quote. Eliminationg the DOE was one of Trump’s campaign promises last year.

The Department of Education can’t actually be closed without the approval of Congress; but a great many of its functions can be lawfully eliminated, yielding major savings.

It was the Jimmy Carter administration that gave us the Department of Education back in 1979. It had been one of Carter’s promises in his campaign for the Presidency, to get the teachers’ unions on his side.

(Allow me just a brief aside. The political power of the teachers’ unions — their power in organizing voting blocs and funding campaigns — is immense. In 2003 Peter Brimelow wrote a very good book about this, The Worm in the Apple. It’s the same in Britain. One of the first pieces of advice I got when I started writing opinion pieces for British outlets in the early 1980s was this, from a seasoned old Fleet Street veteran, quote: “You can write what you like about the government, the Prime Minister, the Royal Family, the Church, the Pope, the IRA, … write what you like. There’ll be a few angry letters to the editor, that’s all. If you criticize the teachers’ unions, though, you’ll be needing one of those mirrors on a long handle to check for bombs under your car.” End quote. End of brief aside.)

So yes, the Department of Education. In the 46 years since it was created the Department has, according to President Trump, quote, “spent over $3 trillion without improving student achievement as measured by standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores.” End quote.

I haven’t checked that number but it’s easy to believe. In my paradigm-shattering 2009 bestseller We Are Doomed I had a whole chapter on education, Chapter Six. That chapter included a three-page section on the experiment conducted forty years ago in Kansas City, Missouri.

What happened, in very brief, was that after long litigation in the years up to 1985, a federal judge ordered the Kansas City school system and the state of Missouri to dramatically raise their spending. Quote from We Are Doomed:

Over the next twelve years the district spent over two billion dollars, most of it from the state of Missouri, the balance from increased local property taxes. Fifteen new schools were built and 54 others renovated.

End quote.

I went on to describe some of the expensive wonders that were added to the Kansas City school system: olympic-size swimming pools, and so on. After all that I tell my reader that, quote:

The whole project was a comprehensive failure. After twelve years, test scores in reading and math had declined, dropout rates had increased, and the system was as segregated as ever, in spite of heroic efforts to lure white students back into the system.

End quote.

There have been similar attempts elsewhere, inspired by orders from federal judges, to raise educational achievement by spending public money. They have similarly failed. That the Department of Education has spent three trillion dollars over half a century with the same result is, as I said, very easy to believe.

I am none the less certain that following Thursday’s executive order from Trump, federal district court judges will very soon swing into action with injunctions to block any reduction in Department of Education spending or staffing. Exhibit G will then be a reality.

04 — The shock troops of lawfare.     In these assaults on the President’s orders by federal district judges, it’s not hard to see the spirit of lawfare. Our nation’s ruling class are determined that there not be a successful Trump Presidency. They have declared war, and the federal judiciary is the vanguard of their army, their shock troops.

The guiding principle of lawfare is: “The process is the punishment.” Might some of those judicial blockings and annulments I’ve been talking about get overturned on appeal? Yes, they might: but how long does the appeal process take? While it lumbers on the President’s orders can’t be executed and elections approach.

The prospects for eventual overturning may anyway not be bright. Appeals end up at last in the U.S. Supreme Court.

One of them did end up before SCOTUS two weeks ago. This is in the context of Trump’s efforts to shut down USAID. One of the federal judges involved there had ordered the administration to unfreeze $2 billion of so-called “foreign aid.”

Most of that money will, if unfrozen and distributed, end up in the Swiss bank accounts of Third World corruptocrats, or being spent by Hamas and Hezbollah to feed and arm their troops and dig their tunnels; but this judge — his name is Amir Ali and his district is, guess what, Washington, D.C. — this judge insisted it be unfrozen.

Trump’s people directly petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to rebuke Judge Ali. The Supremes put the judge’s order on hold while they pondered the case. Having done so, on March 5th they ruled against the administration, so Judge Ali’s unfreezing of that $2 billion has taken effect — a loss for the administration, not to mention the American taxpayer, but a mighty gain for worldwide corruption and chaos.

The Supreme Court ruling against Trump there was five to four, the five being: Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson of course, plus Amy Coney Barrett (who I think at this point we can actually put in the “of course” column), and — whoops! — Chief Justice John Roberts. So much for the conservative court supposedly gifted to us by Trump 45.

Of the district court judges I have mentioned so far, you probably noticed that three out of the seven sit for the Washington, D.C. district. The other four are for New York South, Maryland, Maryland, and Virginia East.

Where general political orientation is concerned, those locations speak for themselves. If not precisely in Washington, D.C., they are in easy commuting range of our nation’s capital. I notice also, browsing the maps, that they contain counties that regularly show up in lists of the U.S.A.’s wealthiest.

These districts are populated by the Government People. They are as blue as it’s possible to be: not merely cerulean blue, they are ultramarine.

And if the districts are blue, the judges themselves aren’t exactly Johnny Appleseed. I’ve already mentioned Judge Amir Ali in the USAID matter. Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, in the case of deporting an Indian, is a black female, while Judge Ana Reyes in the transgender case is a Hispanic female.

I’d supposed, based on his names —his middle name is “Emanuel” — that Judge James Boasberg, who tried to stop those deportations to El Salvador, is Jewish, and so is in the regrettable old line of Jewish-American left-liberalism. However, he’s not included in Wikipedia’s “List of Jewish American Jurists,” so I don’t know.

It does seem, though, that his wife, his sister, and his daughter are all very active in leftist causes and the NGO money rackets.

So I’m ready to hazard a guess, without researching further, I’m ready to go out on a limb and say that Judge Boasberg is not a Trump voter and nor are any of his family or friends.

Yes: in the war to destroy the Trump Presidency, the federal judiciary is the vanguard, the elite troops at the front of the advance.

They’ve been bold in assault. At her presser on Wednesday, Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us that 67 percent of all injunctions against a President issued this century have been against Trump, with 92 percent of the judges issuing appointed by Democrats. There’s been some questioning of her numbers, but they sound plausible to me.

Wait, though. There are only a few hundred of these district court judges. They can’t win the war all by themselves, surely. Who are the bulk of the anti-Trump army — the squaddies, the doughboys, the cannon fodder? Next segment.

05 — Separation of powers 2025.     Reading up for our naturalization interview, we immigrants all learn about the Separation of Powers, a fundamental principle in the American system of government.

There are three of those powers, we learn. The Legislative Branch makes laws, the Executive Branch enforces the laws, the Judicial Branch interprets the laws. Right?

Yes, Mr Derbyshire, absolutely right. If you just take a seat outside I’ll print up your appointment letter for the oath ceremony. Congratulations! You’ll be an American!

I held to that simple truth for twenty-three years, until reading the March issue of Harper’s Magazine the other day. That issue includes an essay by Andrew Cockburn, the Washington, D.C. editor of Harper’s.

I can’t say I’ve read much of Cockburn’s output. He is, like me, a septuagenarian British immigrant, but he’s published way more books than I have. When I’ve thought of him at all it’s been as the son of offbeat journalist Claud Cockburn, whose name murmured in the background when I was growing up in Britain.

Cockburn Senior was not taken very seriously by serious people, so far as I could see. He was an open card-carrying member of the Communist Party. His pro-Stalin mis-reporting in the Spanish Civil War enraged George Orwell. I had vaguely supposed, the way a lazy mind does when not directly engaged, that his son Andrew Cockburn was a twig off the same ugly tree.

Whether that’s the case or not I still don’t know; but a stopped clock is right twice a day, we must always make allowances. This column in the March Harper’s is first-rate. Title: Rage Against the Machine. Subtitle: “Trump’s second attempt at dismantling the bureaucracy.” It’s a long piece — more than four thousand words — but well worth the trouble of reading if you don’t mind some brief lapses into kill-the-rich old-style leftism.

What does it have to do with the Separation of Powers? Just that it left me convinced that there are not three powers, but four. In addition to the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial, there is the Bureaucratic Power, and it may be mightier than them all.

Can Trump triumph over that power? Cockburn notes that the war against bureaucracy isn’t at all a new thing, and he runs through some depressing history. Reagan? Quote:

In office, Reagan duly set up a commission to root out waste and inefficiency. But the national debt almost tripled during his two terms, while the federal workforce expanded by more than three hundred thousand employees.

End quote.

Bill Clinton, you may remember, announced that, quote, “the era of big government is over,” end quote. No, it wasn’t.

Even Obama fired off a few shots. Another quote from Cockburn’s piece, quote:

In 2012, Barack Obama announced an ambitious plan to merge six federal economic departments and replace the Department of Commerce, all in the interest of an “effective, lean government,” but the scheme died out.

End quote.

All those precedents notwithstanding, Cockburn suggests Trump might have a chance. Quote:

Among Trump’s principal targets is the so-called administrative state, meaning the power of federal agencies to interpret legislation, essentially giving them lawmaking powers. Thanks to a recent decision by the Supreme Court that struck down essential features of the Chevron doctrine (the outcome of a 1984 Supreme Court decision upholding the legitimacy of delegating policy interpretation to government agencies), the new administration could have a potent weapon in pursuit of this goal. Instead of agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services or the Environmental Protection Agency having the power to determine how laws are enacted, such authority will now be in the hands of the courts.

End quote.

Hm, well. That authority is only any use if the courts are on Trump’s side — which, as I have been explaining, is not the case.

And Cockburn’s final conclusion is pessimistic. He identifies a fifth power, or at any rate a four-and-a-halfth power: what he calls “the contractor state,” quote: “all those, led by the giant defense contractors, who are dependent on government spending.” End quote. An estimated four out of every ten people working full-time for the government are not federal employees, Cockburn tells us.

I think I detect Cockburn Senior’s Leninism showing through when Junior talks about the contractor state. Quote:

The most tangible result of Trump’s depredations will likely be the further enrichment of his ultra-wealthy supporters.

End quote.

So we’re back to Kill the Rich. All right: Andrew Cockburn’s no more a likely Trump voter than Judge Boasberg is. It’s a good engaging essay he’s written, though, and I recommend it to your attention.

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

Imprimis:  Last week I had some comments distantly related to St. Patrick’s Day, which was of course Monday the 17th.

There were St. Patrick’s Day marches and celebrations all over, of course, but also … demonstrations against the saint.

Here was one in Toronto: a crowd of fat ugly women wearing those checkered dish towels that signify allegiance to Arab terrorism …

Wait a minute: “a crowd”? We really need a new collective noun there. “A kennel,” perhaps? All suggestions gratefully received.

Sorry. Back to Toronto. So there were these bowsers out in the street in Toronto wearing their dish towels, howling that St. Patrick was a mass murderer. Actual quote:

F**k St Patrick. He’s a killer. He killed people. He got rid of people. He genocided people.

End quote.

From my own engagements with the Irish, I think someone should warn these ladies about saying things like that when Irishmen are nearby in any numbers. That might lead to genocide, at any rate a small local genocide. I’ve almost come to blows with Irish people just by telling them St. Patrick was British, which is true.

Item:  How hard do I work at keeping up with events in China? Not very hard at all, I confess. I do subscribe to The China Journal, an excellent scholarly publication from the University of Chicago Press.

And when my brain’s too tired for academic reading, as is increasingly the case, I go to YouTube for the latest from my favorite commentators on China there.

Who are they? They are:

1. Winston Sterzel, a.k.a. “Serpentza.”
2. Matthew Tye, a.k.a. “Laowhy86.”
3. Chris Chappell at China Uncensored.

These three guys all know China really well and they can all put together a good professional-quality video. None of them is a ChiCom stooge; they are all China critics.

Someone at YouTube seems to have noticed. A few days ago the three did a joint vidcast to tell us that their viewerships — all three of them — had suffered a sudden and serious collapse. “YouTube Doesn’t Want Us Talking About China” was the title.

I haven’t made any attempt to get to the bottom of this — I wouldn’t know how — but I’ll be watching with interest to see if Winston, Matthew, and Chris have.

Item:  I’ve been a great admirer of Elon Musk since reading the biography of him by Walter Isaacson. He’s super smart, engagingly witty, thoughtfully self-critical, and supernaturally energetic.

It’s that last one, I believe, that really separates the achievers like Musk from idlers and bumblers like me. I wish Elon all the luck in the world at countering the legions of morons and zealots who’ve suddenly decided he is Public Enemy Number One.

I was going to try coming up with a nifty abbreviation for all this anti-Musk lunacy, something similar to “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but Scott Jennings has beat me to it with “Musk-Induced Madness.”

The mathematician in me, though, can’t help wondering what the Venn Diagram looks like, or if there even is one. Are there TDS sufferers who are not also afflicted with MIM? Are there vice versa? I’d really like to know.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all I have, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening or reading. I’m going to remind you, as I always do, that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account.

And having mentioned the boss’s name twice in this podcast, let me draw your attention to Peter’s plaintive post at X yesterday, tweet:

How come a dozen judges can rush to interdict Trump while VDARE couldn’t find one judge to stop NY AG Letitia James wrecking its 1A rights with an “investigation” costing $1MM and counting, although not charging, let alone convicting it, of anything?

End tweet.

How, indeed? A thoroughly politicized judiciary? Oh yeah.

You can also of course write a check to the VDARE 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. And, as you will see from my flawlessly up-to-date “Recently published” page, you can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine. Thank you!

There will be more from Radio Derb next week. Here’s Gracie to sing us out.

Joe Sobran is arguably the first person hurled into the void in a process that eventually was called cancel culture. His primary sins were skepticism about Israel as our greatest ally and suspicions about the motivations of the neocons. It was the neocons who successfully campaigned to have Sobran branded a heretic and run out of the conservative movement.

Looking back four decades on, you see all the ingredients for what became a widespread form of domestic terrorism in the last decade. Interestingly, all of it is in what Bill Buckley thought was his best book. It is a collection of his essays on the topic of antisemitism, as well as his famous finking on friends like Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan at the request of his new benefactors.

Reading Buckley’s version of the Sobran affair, what comes through is that all politics in a democracy are theater. Buckley felt he had to debase himself, his friends and even his own family in order to remain on the stage. The reason for that is the stage managers had an agenda that agenda was anathema to the human spirit and traditions conservatism allegedly represented.

In the show I take a much tougher tone with Buckley, but upon reflection I do not think he was a soulless political operator. Even though he treated Joe Sobran horribly, Sobran thought well of Bill Buckley until the end. It is a good reminder that you can think well of someone in the whole, even though they have done you wrong, in your view, over a particular issue. Even the best men have terrible flaws.

All that said, it was Buckley’s decision to cancel Sobran that gave us this now familiar model for controlling the public square. Even today, public officials feel they must publicly swear loyalty to Israel for fear of being cancelled. This noxious effluvium even hangs over the tribe we call the left. The great terror that haunts public discourse got started with Buckley hurling Joe Sobran into the void.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• The Past Is Prologue
• Joe Sobran
• The MacGuffin
• Bill Buckley & Antisemitism
• The Cancel Process
• Sobran The MacGuffin

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Full Show On Odysee

If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.

Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.

Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.

One reason for this change in popular music is money. The music industry, like every industry in America, is fully financialized. This means everything about it is driven by factors like interest rates, return over time and investment opportunities. A “new act” is not judged on musical ability, novelty, or the personal tastes of the industry people, but by the accepted financial models of the industry. Just as wind tunnels made all our cars look the same, finance homogenized popular music.

For example, now that Taylor Swift is packing on pounds and years, the search is on for a singer who will do the same act for the same audience. The “same audience” in this context is age, sex, race, and economic model. The next wave of that demo is not going to get excited by a portly spinster, so they will find a younger model with a slightly different look to do the role. Even if she is not as popular with the target demo, the math of the model is predictable and safe.

The same sort of math affects the live show business. The people hosting the show want predictable sales and returns. The people producing the tour also want predictable sales and returns. The reason for that is the investors want predictable sales and returns, so the live shows follow a proven model. Since the money comes from the same source in terms of expectations, the effect has been a narrowing of the music industry around highly predictable products.

Another reason for the narrowing of the business around controllable solo performers is the market has changed. People spending hundreds of dollars on live shows want a predictably good time. They are not going to invest in an unknown, because that might mean not having the expected good time. In a culture that prizes safety and security above all else, bands are a high-risk proposition. The culture they represent in popular music is an affront to the culture of the modern audience.

Another fact is the death of radio. Once all the pop music stations were consolidated into a few massive corporations, the result was corporate slop. The first to go were the music directors, then the disc jockeys were chopped. The soundtrack to the modern age is the monotony of corporate radio. The legendary “shock jock” Anthony Cumia talked about this in a speech he gave at American Renaissance. Corporate radio is now as dead as the garage band.

Young people still want to play instruments and make music and the tools for producing good music are now freely available. The days of needing a studio are pretty much over as far as producing professional audio content. That means interested people can create bands and put their content out to the world. In theory, the same democratizing process that we have seen in other forms of content applies to music, but for some reason it has not democratized pop music.

This suggests there is something different about popular music compared to writing, podcasting, or livestreaming. Anyone can make music if they desire, just as anyone can publish a book or create a political talk show, but the latter forms have been vastly more successful compared to the music variety. Music needs social proof to gain an audience and that is manufactured at the same place the music is now manufactured. Without corporate, it is impossible to be a pop star.

There also may be a larger cultural issue at work. The concept of the pop star is a 20th century phenomena. Prior to that, entertainers existed on the fringe of society, generally regarded as low status. The 20th century is when this flipped around, and we got big stars from the entertainment world. We may be reverting to the norm as entertainment declines in both quality and status. The disappearing band phenomena is not just an American thing. It is thing everywhere.

What we may be seeing with pop music, and maybe movies and television as well, is the end of a peculiar cultural phenomena. These forms of entertainment were spawned in the 20th century. As that time recedes into the past, the culture of that time follows with it. The important parts of that culture, like the rock band, are fading away as well, to be replaced by whatever the next culture desires. As the West finally leaves the 20th century it is leaving behind its culture.

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!

One way to look at the last ten years is as the struggle of the United States to finally close the books on the Cold War and the 20th century. The reason Trump exists, and the managerial system has reacted in such a violent way toward him, is that he represents the end of the conditions that made it all possible. The return of a strong executive and the normal functioning of government is the end of the managerial system and everything around it.

The comparisons to the late Soviet times are compelling because the Russians went through a similarly violent process to escape their own managerial system and the ideology that controlled it. Like the Soviets, America is now run by old people trapped in the past, lacking the talent to adjust to new realities. Like the Soviet system, the American system barely performs basic functions. Like the Soviets, American political actors can only break things.

That last part is important. Reform by its very nature calls into question the legitimacy of current processes. The reason for reform is that the system is not working to the satisfaction of the users, so it must be changed. Good reformers, however, do not attack the core logic of the system, but focus instead on the parts of it that implement that core logic to maintain the legitimacy of the whole. Maybe it means new people or possibly changes to parts of the system.

Reforms in the late Soviet period undermined the core logic of the Soviet system, resulting in poorer outcomes. We see the same thing in America. The response to Trump in 2016 by conservatives and their party only served to sap the legitimacy of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Trump started as a vanity candidate, but by January of 2016 he had become the champion of the party voters against the ossified party leadership.

Similarly, the behavior of the media cratered trust in the media. Their efforts to cajole, convince and intimidate people into going along with the managerial class eroded all trust in the media. By the end of Trump’s first term, trust in the media had collapsed to the point where only regime toadies trusted it. The same could be said for the people it was defending. Trump won in 2024 because the main tools of his enemies had been delegitimatized by his enemies.

We are now seeing another phase of this as district judges claim authority over vast parts of the executive branch. The last month has seen these inferior court judges claim to have power over the hiring and firing of personnel, the budgets of executive agencies and the conduct of foreign policy. A judge just ordered the military to enlist mentally unstable people. To stop the future, the managerial class is now destroying the credibility of the courts.

Public trust in the courts was already at a nadir because of the abuses we saw in the Obama years and then the Biden years. When the court ruled that mandating medical insurance was right there in the constitution, the rule of law took a sharp turn into absurdity, but when the Supreme Court ruled that two men sharing rent and bed is the same as your parents, then trust in the law was in free fall. It only got worse in the Biden years with the lawfare against Trump supporters.

What we are seeing from the courts now is the breaking point. No one would dare poll on it, because they fear the result, but there is certainly a majority in favor of the Trump administration telling the courts to pound sand. The whiffs of Sulphur the usual suspects are always sure they detect are not real, but rather they are the floral aroma of Caesarism in response to the reckless behavior of the courts. When the rule of law fails, the people always choose the rule of men.

While this may feel like a positive omen, there is another lesson from the end of Soviet Russia to keep in mind. Russia at the end of communism was a poor country, but a lawful country. It had rules that the people tried to respect. It then entered a period where it was a poorer country and a lawless one. When trust in the system collapsed, trust in the rules collapsed with it. It was only when a new elite emerged to impose a new system and new rules that lawfulness returned.

In other words, this dip into lawlessness we are seeing could very well portend a general descent into lawlessness. Like post-Soviet Russia, we could very well be entering a period where we get poorer as the rule of law collapses. Unlike Russia, America is not a homogenous society with a thousand years of history. America is a diverse country which is a polite way of saying it is a collection of people who would just as soon not share a country with one another.

If the elites backing Trump’s reforms wish to avoid a terrible end to their reform effort, they are going to need to deal with these hothouse radicals on the bench who cannot grasp the danger of their actions. The challenge, as with all reforms, is in dealing with the problem while not undermining the legitimacy of the system. These judges think they are heroes defending the system against the monster, when in reality they are a cancer threatening the last functioning part of the system.

It is not an easy task, which is why most reform efforts fail. In the end, it turns out to be easier to scrap the old and replace it with something new, but the problem is no one can predict who will win and who will lose in that process. It is why the reform is always the safe choice, despite the dismal record. It promises predictable winners. If today’s reformers want to be winners, then these judges need to be made into losers, without making the rule of law a loser as well.

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!

Prior to the start of the Ukraine war, it was assumed that the Russians, if they desired, could quickly smash the Ukrainian army. Russia is a big country with a big army and Ukraine is not as big, but few understood that it had a big army. At the start of the war, it had an army of 350,000, with a similar number in reserve. Fewer anticipated the hundreds of billions in NATO weapons and money. Everyone, including the Russians, expected a short war, but instead it is a long war.

One main reason for this is technology. The Russians badly miscalculated how the war would unfold, but they also failed to adapt to new technology, specifically the use of drones in frontline battles. Their first taste of drone warfare was the Bayraktar TB2 drones supplied by the Turks to the Ukrainians. This is a medium-altitude long-endurance vehicle that allowed the Ukrainians to precisely aim their artillery at Russian formations, as well as directly attack those formations.

The Russians have proven to be quick learners. They rushed to embrace the new technology and have now taken it in directions few anticipated. First person video drones are now the primary weapon in the Russian arsenal, used to not only attack Ukrainian men and material, but used to shape the battlefield. This new use of drones came to the fore in the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, which concluded last week with a stunning Ukrainian defeat.

The “Kursk incursion” as the Ukrainians called it, was an attack across the Russian border to gain control of the nuclear facilities in the Kursk region. There is a nuclear power plant there and a storage facility for nuclear weapons. It is unclear what weapons, if any, are stored there, but Ukraine wanted to gain control of it as well as the power plant for the purpose of nuclear blackmail. The Russians would either surrender or Ukraine creates another Chernobyl.

The Russians managed to stop the Ukrainian offensive, but instead of it becoming a stalemate or requiring the Russians to spend men and material to keep the Ukrainians bottled up, it became a killing field for Ukraine due to the Russian use of drones to police every square meter of the region. The air over the Ukrainian formations was full of drones twenty-four hours a day. Any effort to move men and material at any scale was detected and attacked by drones.

To understand how drones are now used by the Russian army and to a lesser extent the Ukrainian army, this Turkish YouTube channel provides video of drone attacks with a AI generated voice over. There are three things to notice. One is that the drone operators can fly these things into the tightest of spaces. This allows them to hunt for assets inside of buildings and hidden in wooded areas. These things are like a swarm of birds that have cameras and explosives.

The other thing is they can now operate at night. This is a Russian innovation that Ukraine has not matched. Russian FPV drones have night vision and infrared cameras, so they can spot men moving around at night. The “solution” to constant drone surveillance during the day was to move men and material around at night, but now there is no hiding from the drone swarms after dark. In Kursk, the Ukrainians were under twenty-four-hour surveillance and attack.

The third thing is the drones are essentially networked together either through the tether to the drone operators or through the over-the-air system. Fiber optic drones rely on a fiber optic cable to communicate with the operator. The operator is then connected to the Russian command and control system. The effect is that the drones in the sky have created a twenty-four-hour-a-day information space over the battlefield. This massive data collection system is then used to anticipate changes.

These parts of the evolving use of drones all came together in the stunning rout of the Ukrainians in the Kursk region last week. The Russians could accurately predict where Ukrainian men and material will be at all times, so they could plan the stunning move through the gas pipelines to put troops behind the Ukrainians in Sudzha. They could also be ready for when the Ukrainians reacted to hit them with drones and drone-controlled artillery and glide bombs.

Kursk has become a model for drone attritional war. Filling the sky with networked suicide and surveillance drones is the first step. This prevents the enemy from gathering their forces for an attack. Instead, they are required to spread out and hide everything from the ever-present drones. The next step is to use the drones to shape the activity of the enemy in order to create an opportunity. The final step is to use the drones as part of combined arms assault on the enemy.

Of course, the same rules apply to the attacker. Even though the Ukrainian drones are not as good and numerous as the Russian drones, they still have lots of them, which means the Russians must disperse their resources as well. The battle for Kursk quickly turned into two armies spread thin across a wide area in order to avoid becoming an easy target for drones. This is why it took seven months for the Russians to dislodge the Ukrainians from the area.

To understand how this changes war, imagine if two armies are only equipped with long bows and crossbows. One the one hand, the longbowman can attack any grouping of men on the other side and vice-versa. Everyone must hide in buildings and underground bunkers. On the other hand, small assault groups of crossbowmen go out to hunt the enemy in close quarter assaults. Once they secure an area, more men come into to take up positions.

This is the battlefield in the drone age. Tanks and armored personnel carriers still operate, but they are easily spotted by drones. Even those equipped with electronic warfare countermeasures are vulnerable. Often, they are simply used to transport men on a one-way trip. As soon as the vehicle is disabled by the drone, the men scatter before the drones finish off the machine. Armor is often just an expensive delivery mechanism for small groups of men.

This is why the Ukraine war drags on. On the one hand, the Russians are unwilling to lose men and machines on big assaults due to the threat of drones. On the other hand, they have adapted the new technology to slowly hunt small groups of Ukrainians and individual pieces of equipment. Since Ukraine is fixated on holding territory, this attritional drone war lumbers along at a snail’s pace. In Kursk, the Ukrainians lost about four hundred men a day to these small-scall attacks.

We are, of course, at the cusp of drone war, but it is not hard to imagine how this could change the nature of war. At the start of the technological revolution, technology was the great dis-equalizer. It gave America a massive edge over the rest of the world in terms of military power. Now, at the end of the technological revolution, technology is becoming a great equalizer. Cheap drones are turning expensive, high-tech weapons into liabilities and returning war to a battle of men and wits.

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 #1: Last Wednesday was the fourth edition of a show I am doing with Paul Ramsey every Wednesday at 8:00 PM which you can watch live on Rumble and YouTube and, of course, watch at your leisure after the fact.

Note #2: Behind the green door, there is a post about why deporting anti-Israel protestors is a good start, a post about the dangers of the Ukraine tarpit, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note #3: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

Over the weekend there was a poll released that said only seven percent of Americans have a high opinion of the Democratic Party. It also said that the party is enjoying its lowest approval rating ever recorded. The events of last week suggest that the party is a disorganized mess at the moment. This is due in large part to the fact that what we call the left has collapsed into chaos. They no longer can explain what they oppose, much less what they claim to offer.

This is due to the transformation of the left over the last thirty years into a grab bag of conspiracy theories and grievances. The American left has always been a conspiracy theory, of sorts, owing to its roots in American Protestantism, but it had a positive agenda through most of the twentieth century. The long list of things it opposed stood in the way of the things it desired. Over the last thirty years, those desires have largely faded, leaving just a list of enemies.

The most obvious example is the antifascist conspiracy theory that was dominant with self-identified leftists for the last decade. The fact that there are no fascists in this age has been used as an opportunity to create them. The same thing happened with conspiracy theories around race. Instead of Hitler hiding behind every bush, it is men in white hoods ready to pounce. The dominant subcultures of the left over the last few decades are all conspiracy theories of some sort.

Another defining feature is that the progressive coalition is all driven by something called ressentiment. This is a sense of hostility towards something or someone that is viewed as a cause of one’s diminished condition. It is frustration at the sense of inferiority and hatred at a perceived external cause. This blend of envy and hatred results in a moral code which delegitimizes the cause of the person’s failure and elevates the status of the alleged victim.

This is what lies behind tabloid news of the rich and famous. The primary appeal is to people who feel they should be rich and famous. The failings of the actual rich and famous allow these people to feel as if they are living better lives or are better people, despite the fact they do not have what they desire. On the one hand they envy the people they follow, but on the other hand they relish their suffering as it allows them to feel morally superior to them.

What we call the left operates the same way. They often target people who are living good lives but hold opinions that the left does not like, and this is what triggers their envy and resentment toward that person. On the one hand, the person “exposing” the bad person is a loser in the conventional sense, while the person they are harassing is successful by conventional measures. Doxing is a formalization of a process by which the loser flings her poo at the winner.

The recent spate of vandalism directed at Tesla automobiles is a good example of how this blend of righteousness and anger works. These people are attacking cars because on the one hand, they envy Elon Musk and what he is doing. He is the man of action they wish they could be, but they are losers, so they hate him for his success as a way to justify their low status. The attacks on the cars themselves are like a child throwing a tantrum when frustrated by a toy.

This is not a surprising development as what we call the left in America is a manifestation of certain aspects of American Protestantism. The progressive ideology is popular Christianity stripped of its Scriptural foundation. What was supposed to console the weak and downtrodden with a promise of everlasting life now seeks to comfort losers with the claim that their betters are not really better. They are bad people because the believers have declared them to be bad people.

The trouble for the people we call the left is that Christianity is a life-denying religion in that what matters is what comes after this life. The faithful navigate this world of sin to reach everlasting life after death. For those who care only about this life, this cannot work, so those Christian ethics at the core of what we call the left quickly curdled into a bundle of resentments and hatreds. The American left is a workshop of resentment staffed by the ugly who live to oppose beauty.

The genius of Christianity is that it offers an image of beauty, the perfectly beautiful, that allows the faithful to catch glimpses of it in the fallen world. Resent and envy toward these glimpses of beauty are sins. Instead of cultivating these qualities among the lower classes, it celebrated those glimpses of beauty to motivate the faithful toward a Christian life with the promise of eternal life after death. Failure in this world was turned into a motivation to strive for success in the next.

The modern left lacks all of this. Instead, it offers the faithful nothing but a sty in which they can wallow in their own crapulence. As a social and political force, it is nothing more than a bundle of incoherent hatreds. While those hatreds provided a rally point for a period, no movement can exist only on hatred. This is why what we call the left is falling to pieces and taking its party with it. The last ideology, American Progressivism, is sinking into the mire of its own hatreds.

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

• 01m04s Ireland’s new troubles
• 16m39s Something to dress up for
• 27m51s Free Puerto Rico!
• 31m05s Vance socks it to them
• 32m13s Too many foreign students?
• 32m27s Too woke for Disney!
• 36m11s Signoff:  As Irish as it could be

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is of course your gratuitously genial host John Derbyshire with a look at the news.

This week’s podcast is more than usually self-indulgent. Inspired by the coming St. Patrick’s Day, I got talking about the home islands over the water there and couldn’t stop. I beg your pardon, and hope you find something interesting here — I mean, as interesting to you as it obviously is to me.

Here we go.

02 — Ireland’s new troubles.     Monday, March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day, a sort of ethnic pride day for the people of Ireland and the Irish diaspora. That diaspora, if you include all levels of consanguinity, includes almost one in ten Americans.

In recognition of the event, I thought I’d record my own acquaintance with the Emerald Isle, slight as it is, and give a quick survey of recent events, events that have left Ireland today a not very happy country.

The first things I ever heard about Ireland were from my father. As a British soldier during World War One, before the Republic of Ireland was founded, Dad was stationed there briefly — in County Cork, I think it was — before being shipped to the Western Front.

I don’t know the precise dates Dad was there, but those were the years around the 1916 Easter Rising, with much anti-British agitation. “They shot one of our lads coming out of church,” Dad remembered.

These troubles notwithstanding, Dad seems to have liked the Irish in general. The place was very poor at that time, and Dad sympathized. Quote: “People, pigs, chickens, all living together in one falling-down hut; but they’d always share a drink with you.” End quote. He reported ordinary Irish people as being non-hostile — friendly, in fact.

Dad, who was a stone-cold atheist, blamed the troubles of those times on the Catholic church. Quote: “We’d see them of a Sunday going to mass. They’d wave at us and call out to us, cheerful as you like. But then the priest would work on them and they’d come out an hour later howling blue murder.” End quote.

Forward half a century to my college days in the mid-1960s. Ireland was an independent republic by this time, but still very poor. Young Irishmen, mainly peasant lads from the poorest counties in the far west, would come over to England and work as construction laborers. I worked construction myself in the college vacations, and most of my co-workers were Irish.

Like my Dad, I found them easy to get along with in the generality, good-natured and humorous. They were of course much more experienced than I was in common laboring work. They gave me much patient, helpful instruction on things like the right way to wield a shovel or control a jackhammer. (That sucker will jump up and jackhammer your foot if you don’t hold it right.)

I particularly admired the way they always knew the precise location of the foreman, so that we could slacken off working when not visible to him.

From being among them I learned things not generally known about their country: that it was plagued by criminal gangs, for example — the Sicily of the British Isles. I don’t know if that is still the case.

Everything changed in the 1970s. The biggest change for the Irish came in 1973 when they joined the European Economic Community, which was incorporated into the EU twenty years later. This had major economic consequences. It took Ireland’s governments a while to take full advantage of them; but the following years were the infancy and childhood of the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s and early 2000s.

I got a glimpse of it myself, on a one-month contract as a computer programmer in Dublin, 1981. Ireland wasn’t rich yet, but she was no longer dramatically poor.

The other big change was the Troubles — paramilitary groups fighting and killing over whether Northern Ireland should remain under the British Crown or be united with the Republic. The Troubles generated a lot of headlines but only occasionally spilled over the border into the Irish Republic, which went on steadily climbing out of its ancient poverty to become a modern European nation.

The social transformation of these later years was fascinating to watch; so much so that in 2002, when I had been settled in the U.S.A. for seventeen years, I published a column arguing that, quote: “I believe Ireland to be the most interesting place in the world right now.” End quote.

To give you the flavor, here is the closing paragraph of that 2002 column. Longish quote:

[Inner quote.]  “All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born,” [end inner quote] remarked Yeats at the time of the Easter Rising. What has actually been born in Ireland during this past 20 years has been a modern, secular, hedonistic welfare state with a globalized economy, a Marxified Academy, a crime problem, a drug problem, an immigration problem and a terrorist problem. Is that terrible? Or beautiful? Your answer is probably a good indicator as to whether or not you are going to enjoy the first half of the 21st century.

End quote.

Ireland’s people did enjoy the years around 2002. The Celtic Tiger strode through those years confidently until the crash of 2008 when Ireland, at this point very globalized indeed, took a bad hit.

She made a fair recovery through the 2010s; but some economic trends — the financialization of the housing market, high-tech foreign multinationals dominant but short of skilled labor — made Ireland an expensive country, hard to live in for the working- and lower-middle-class legacy Irish population.

A cultural gap opened up, or widened, along with the economic one. While on the path to globalized wealth, the nation acquired a big educated class with luxury beliefs imported from America and Europe — wokesters.

There is something in the Irish national character that made this easier than it might have been elsewhere. The world-saver impulse has always been strong among the Irish. Their missionaries have been credited with keeping Europe civilized after the collapse of Rome.

(My private opinion, based on personal encounters, is that the male-female balance also has something to do with it. Women are, as Orwell told us, the shrillest and most true-believing adherents of any ideology. Ireland seems to be cursed with an unusually large number of such women, of whom Irish men are terrified. Was Mother Machree in fact a ruthless tyrant? Were those civilizing missionary monks of the Dark Ages fleeing from her? I leave this topic for future discussion.)

So in today’s Ireland we see an amplified version of the blithe attitude to Third World settlement now common all over Europe, including Britain. Most of that settlement is undocumented, and so can’t properly be called “immigration.”

The losers here — rural and working-class Irish people — have been protesting and demonstrating for years, most sensationally in the Dublin riots of November 2023 following a knife attack by a foreigner on some schoolchildren. The perp in that case turned out to be a legal immigrant, but that only came out later, after George Floyd-scale rioting.

For a nation of just over five million — a nation once best known for e-migration — the numbers for immigration (with or without quotation marks) are striking, although they need some qualification.

In the year up to April 2024 150 thousand people from abroad settled in Ireland. That was a 17-year high. Of that 150 thousand, however, 30 thousand were returning Irish citizens, 27 thousand were other EU citizens and 5,400 were British. The remainder, nearly 87 thousand, were from the rest of the world, a high proportion of them — I can’t find an estimate — having no documentation. And in that same one-year period almost 70 thousand people left Ireland, the highest emigration figure since 2015.

Carol Nolan, a member of the Irish Parliament, commenting on these figures last August, said, quote:

This is a multi-generational catastrophe unfolding in plain sight; one that is already crippling the capacity of the state to meet current housing and medical need.

End quote.

At about the same time last summer, there were indignant news stories about the village of Dundrum in County Tipperary, population 165, where the Irish government planned to settle 280 “international protection applicants.” That’s an Irish euphemism for “illegal aliens.”

There is now a steady rumble of discontent on social media about illegal settlement. On X, for example, Michael O’Keeffe posts daily, at least. Another Michael, journalist Michael Murphy of the London Daily Telegraph, posted a good 15-minute YouTube clip last year, as also did the immigration-skeptical Hindsight thread.

For all that rumbling, though, it’s not likely Ireland will do anything to stem the inward flow of settlers. In that respect the Irish are behind other European countries, where mass deportation is now a subject for open public discussion. Ireland’s ruling class remains blithe.

Opinion polls show half of Irish voters want immigration reform; but in the general election last November, no major party took a strong position on the issue. Three-quarters of the vote went to the big old unimaginative center-right and center-left parties with the rest going to Greens and far-lefties.

So for Ireland, present trends will continue. Well-educated foreigners will come in to work at high tech in what is today a rich country. Destitute Third Worlders will come in for the freebies. Legacy Irish from the countryside and poorer towns will emigrate, as they always have.

A “multi-generational catastrophe”? Quite possibly; or perhaps it will all be managed somehow. I doubt I shall live long enough to see the result.

If demography is destiny, Ireland will undergo great change in the future; but they will put that change off for as long as they can.

03 — Something to dress up for.     So yes: Monday, March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day. Much less noticed was this past Monday, March 10th: Commonwealth Day.

Say what, Derb? You mean, like, the Commonwealth of Virginia? Or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? Which one?

No, neither of those. Not Kentucky, Pennsylvania, or Puerto Rico either — all of them commonwealths for some purposes. No: this Monday, March 10th, celebrated the British Commonwealth of Nations, formerly known as the British Empire. And yes: Commonwealth Day was originally Empire Day.

I can remember my primary-school class being assembled in the schoolyard on Empire Day to sing There’ll Always Be an England. Heaven help me, I can still sing it. [Sings]:

There’ll always be an England
And England shall be free
If England means as much to you
As England means to me …

No, I’m not drunk, just a little nostalgic. That England, the one I grew up in, has of course been transformed by the passage of time. Some of the changes have been for the better: public health, life expectancy, social equality, technological advance, … There have been losses along with the gains, though.

Most nostalgia-inducing of the losses has been the loss of the national solidarity expressed in that song.

It wasn’t actually much to do with the Empire. A big part of it was having been on the victorious side in World War Two. There was sentimentality about the monarchy, too: the pretty young Queen, her handsome consort and their photogenic children. Back of all that was a sense of kinship, of common ancestry.

Most of that has faded, inevitably. Today’s Britain is no longer a nation of much importance. Ranked by GDP per capita she’s actually poorer than Ireland — ranked number twenty against Ireland’s number three.

Much worse, and less inevitably, that sense of kinship has taken a hit from uncontrolled mass immigration. Opinion polls record widespread resentment about this; but that resentment seems unable to find a political home. The two historically big political parties won’t touch the issue.

A new party, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, seemed for a while to take a more robust approach, but just recently Farage has been scoffing at the idea of mass deportations. As if deliberately insulting his followers, he has also appointed as chairman of the party a bloke named Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf. Reform is imploding and immigration restrictionists are now as homeless as before.

The British Empire is of course long gone. After India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947 Britain’s other imperial possessions followed pretty steadily for fifty years: through to little Belize in 1981, Brunei in 1984, and the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

However, most of those imperial possessions didn’t cut the cultural tie when they cut the political one. Most signed up to the British Commonwealth of Nations: a voluntary association now of 56 countries with total population two and a half billion.

Most populous member nation: India with over 1.4 billion. Least populous: Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation with fewer than twelve thousand citizens. Other big, notable members: Canada, Pakistan, Nigeria, the U.K. of course, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, … there’s a comprehensive list on Wikipedia.

So what does it do, this Commonwealth of Nations? What’s it for?

The Commonwealth is advertised as a goodwill outfit. We’re all friends, right? Different nations of different races, different religions, different history, but we can all get along, right?

So there are educational exchanges, help dealing with each other’s problems, co-operation on international issues like public health, a Commonwealth Games every four years (the even-numbered years in between Olympic Games), and so on.

It doesn’t always work out so nicely. Commonwealth countries have been known to go to war with each other — four times, in the case of India and Pakistan. Cynics point out that there’s an obvious financial angle: poor countries benefiting from association with rich countries.

And then, the Commonwealth makes lots of busy work for the British monarch and his or her family. He — it’s currently King Charles III — need never be bored. He can always arrange a state visit to Sri Lanka, Tanzania, or Fiji: honor guards, banquets, tour of the Presidential Palace … what’s not to like? He probably has to deliver some kind of aid package, but that’s easily arranged.

It’s all a bit lackluster compared with the glory days of Empire, though. That residual glitter of monarchy in fact serves mainly to steer British minds for a while away from the unhappy truth that their country is no longer of much consequence.

Sure, the national story is an amazing one. The people of some damp, foggy islands in the eastern Atlantic somehow spread their language around the entire globe, to have it spoken on tiny Pacific islands and on the frozen mountains of northwest Canada — even, if only very briefly, on the surface of the Moon.

Might Britain be a happier place today if she had never been great? If she’d just stayed on those foggy islands and left the rest of the world alone?

Or suppose she’d quit the Empire business all at once, after World War Two, and totally retreated into small-nationhood, minding her own business all through the second half of that century and developing her own quirky national personality, like Koreans or Hungarians? I sometimes wonder.

Back in 2014 I went a bit further than wondering. I wrote a little alternate-history speculation about how the British Isles might have turned out if they had become Soviet satellites in 1951, like the East Europeans. I’ll read you the closing paragraph. Quote:

Following the fall of the Soviet régime, the British, fortified by returned émigrés — most notably Princess Elizabeth — quickly found their feet, emerging in the early 21st century as a major economic and cultural power. It is amusing to speculate how things might have turned out if the islands had kept their independence from 1951 to 1991. Would they, like the free Western nations, have opened their borders to waves of unassimilable Third Worlders, destroying social harmony and reducing their historic populations to foreigners in the lands their fathers had fought for? We shall never know …

End quote.

But then, of course, Britain’s monarch wouldn’t have had the Commonwealth to dress up for.

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

Imprimis:  Long, long ago, even before there was such a thing as Radio Derb, I posted a column at National Review headed “Necessary But Impossible.” In it I listed ten things that I thought came under that heading: necessary but, for political or social reasons, not possible.

Number nine of my ten things was: Grant independence to Puerto Rico. Here’s what I said, quote:

Who wants Puerto Rico? Well, obviously the Puerto Ricans do. It’s their place. Not “their country” because it isn’t a country. It’s a “commonwealth,” which is a fancy way of saying it’s a US colony.

What are we doing in the colony business? Isn’t this a free republic? Didn’t we get started in the first place as an anti-colonial enterprise?

We can’t offer Puerto Rico statehood because they have nothing in common with us, not even a language. (And, oh, also because any Senator or Representative who voted for such a measure would be lynched on return to his home district.)

What’s that you say? — Puerto Ricans have fought bravely in our country’s wars? Great! Let’s give U.S. citizenship to those who have done so! God bless them! For the rest — give them back their country.

End quote.

With all President Trump’s talk about annexing Greenland or Canada, the topic of de-annexing Puerto Rico — that is, of giving the place independence — is in the air. It’s not clear that this is a thing the President could do by Executive Order; it probably needs approval from Congress.

Puerto Rican independence activist Javier Hernandez has actually drafted a proposed executive order for the President to look at, and sent a memo arguing for Puerto Rican independence to 30 White House and Cabinet offices as well as to several Republican and Democrat lawmakers.

I took that from a March 13th report at Daily Mail Online. The whole report is rather long; I’ll leave you to read it for yourself. I don’t know what the odds are that anything will come of it, but it’s nice to see the issue being aired.

Item:  Earlier this week, in acknowledgment of St. Patrick’s Day coming up, President Trump played host in the White House to the Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin.

No, if you are reading: I haven’t mis-spelled that. In Irish the “e” comes before the “a.” If you are listening, though, I almost certainly have mis-pronounced it. I have never found enough room in my head to master both Analytic Number Theory and Irish pronunciation.

The two leaders seem not to have found much of consequence to talk about. The main focus of the news stories was on the socks that our Vice President J.D. Vance wore for the occasion: cream-colored and decorated with shamrocks in, of course, green.

Item:  I have been arguing for years that, and here I can just quote from myself — this was May 17th last year — quote:

Higher education is a precious national resource. Our own citizens should have first call on it. No institution of higher education registered as such with state or federal government should have a student body more than five percent non-citizen. Wait: five percent? How about two percent?

End quote.

Now, reading about this Hamas supporter being arrested by ICE, I learn that over half of Columbia University’s enrollment is made up of foreign students.

I want to revise my earlier suggestion. Two percent? How about one percent?

Item:  Back there a way I referenced George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, observing that it is women who are the shrillest ideologues. Here I need to give you the full Orwell quote. Quote:

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

End quote.

In support of that remark, I offer you 23-year-old Rachel Zegler. Ms Zegler is a movie actress. Her latest role is as Snow White in Disney’s new live-action remake of the movie with that name, which is scheduled to be in theaters March 21st.

Ms. Zegler is as woke as it’s possible to be. She signs off her emails with “Free Palestine!” She wouldn’t sing the song “Some Day My Prince Will Come” from the original 1937 movie because, she says, she doesn’t need a man.

Disney’s been pushing DEI initiatives for years, adding content warnings to the streaming versions of their classic movies like Fantasia and Peter Pan, but Ms. Zegler seems to be too much even for them. The movie’s European premiere was held at a remote castle in Spain, with no reporters invited.

Starting to read the news stories about this fuss, I found myself marveling that a movie with the title Snow White could even be made nowadays. If the heroine was black, of course they might get away with it; but Ms. Zegler looks totally white in the pictures I saw. Reading deeper, however, I learned that she identifies as Latina; her mother comes from Colombia. So I guess that’s all right, then …

05 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention, and please allow me to remind you, as is my custom, 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 that excellent monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I am now a regular contributor. Thank you!

For signoff music, something Irish of course. This is an old favorite of my younger years, and as Irish as it could possibly be. If you can sit all the way through it without moving, your powers of physical self-control are supernatural.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week

Lost in all the howling about DOGE, the rogue judges and the Ukraine happenings is the Trump economic policy that is slowly coming into focus. One of the reasons the administration pushed for the continuing resolution was that they needed time to put together budgets and spending priorities based on the cuts they are now making across all agencies of the government.

It is why they were so mad about the grandstanding of Thomas Massie. He is clearly someone who does not understand what they are doing and too addled by the brain-rot of libertarianism to ever understand it. He wanted to waste time and political capital on a pointless fight over pennies. The administration has bigger plans for reorganizing the government that needs time to develop.

The new economic model will be based on cheap energy, cheap money, low taxes on labor, limited regulation, and tariffs on imports. You can hear all of these when Trump seems to speak off the cuff. His plan to eliminate taxes for those earning under $150,000 per year is a good example. That is not just a tax cut for the wage earner, but also a tax cut for the employer.

The point is to make labor relatively cheaper for domestic employers, while using tariffs to make cheap foreign labor relatively more expensive. This is not a lot different from what Reagan tried to do in the 1980’s with Japan. Instead of being limited to trade issues with specific countries, it is to be the general policy. The goal is to boost domestic production in order to lower imports.

That is the show this week. The first part is a summary of the current economic model which no one discusses anymore. Back when it was coming into focus, people debated it and those opposed turned out to be right. The second part is about the schemes to unwind the old model and create a new one. Trumponomics is Abenomics but for a continent sized country with the global reserve currency.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Post-National Economics
• Examples
• Trumponomics
• Will It Work?

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Note: Last night Paul Ramsey and I did a livestream on Reagan, so it is a good companion to this post. YouTube or Rumble.

If you were alive and following politics in the middle of the 1980’s, one of your base assumptions would have been that you were living through one of the great presidencies in American history. Ronald Reagan was a massively popular figure because he was credited with pulling the nation out of the tailspin that began in the cultural and political radicalism of the 1960’s. It was morning in America again and every normal person credited Reagan for it.

Forty years on and the only people who mention Reagan are the yesterday men of what is left of Conservative Inc. In fact, their mentioning of him is usually a trigger for people to heap abuse on them. The same can be said for Bill Buckley, who was similarly famous in the 1980’s. William F. Buckley was the intellectual engine of the conservative movement and Ronald Reagan was the man who made it possible. Like conservatism itself, Buckley and Reagan are fading from our minds.

One cause of this is generational. You must be over fifty to have a clear memory of the Reagan years. That is a lot of people, but younger people tend to drive the debate on the internet. They are going to be much more focused on the present. At the same time, the populist movement is to some degree a revolt against what is viewed as baby boomer culture. This is the singular focus on the economy and the stock market at the expense of cultural and demographic issues.

Another cause is that the big issues of this age have their roots in the 1980’s and may have been caused by Reagan. Immigration is the easy one. Not only did Reagan sign off on open borders policies like amnesty, but he was also instrumental in the romanticization of immigration as a core American value. The same can be said for the toxic individualism that has come to define the white middle-class. Of course, it was the Reagan military buildup that made possible the forever wars.

Of course, recency bias plays a role. In the Clinton years, there were people claiming that Bill Clinton was a great president. These were mostly sociopaths, but there were probably some people who believed it at the time. The biggest example of this is Barak Obama who was treated as black Jesus. Now he is forgotten. The importance of Reagan on the present has faded, so his grip on our minds, even for those alive back then, has loosened a great deal.

While all of this is true, it is generally true for every president. No one alive today remembers FDR. Obviously, no one is reminiscing about Lincoln or Grant, but we still talk about some presidents long after they are gone. Other than the yesterday men of conservatism, you never hear much talk about Reagan. There are far more references here to the Clinton years than the Reagan years. The 1992 election remains an important turning point in our politics.

One possible reason for why Reagan has faded is that the things he ushered in have become so normalized that people just assume they are the natural state of things, rather than an innovation of the 1980’s. Everyone just assumes the stock market is an important part of the American economy. Personal debt is just a normal part of life that one must manage. The dominance of the American military and its respect with the America people is just the way it has always been.

That is why you would have Reagan on the list of great presidents. The things he ushered in have stuck with us and are the new normal. Even though Nixon was president at a critical juncture in the development of what would become the Blob, his policies have had no lasting impact. The same can be said for Clinton, who was the first post-Col War president. While his presidency was an inflection point, no one can remember anything he did while in office¹.

On the other hand, this line of reasoning would put Lyndon Johnson on the list of great presidents because we still suffer from his blunders. The Vietnam war still haunts our foreign policy establishment. The civil rights act continues to torment us. It was Johnson who helped turn the Israel Lobby into the mind-altering force we see today. The fact is, the Lyndon Johnson administration is a nightmare from which we can never awake, so maybe the greatest American of the 20th century was Oswald.

As an aside, Lee Harvey Oswald is another example of how history can often pivot on the actions one anonymous man. Like Gavrilo Princip, Oswald changed what people assumed to be the flow of events in a terrible way. Most think that if he had missed and Kennedy had survived, the 1960’s would not have led to the cultural catastrophe that still haunts us today. Many argue the same with regards to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Speculative history aside, what seemed certain in the 1980’s and into the second Bush presidency, that Reagan was one of the great presidents, is now more open to debate, assuming anyone thinks to debate it. That is one of the most intriguing aspects of Reagan right now. Hardly anyone talks about him. There is more time spent on Clinton, Nixon, or Obama, and no one thinks they were great presidents. Reagan and the 1980’s have become a forgotten bit of our history.

That said, this may be the prelude to a revival of interest in Reagan. Once the geezers leave the scene and the remnants of conservatism are swept from the stage, a new set of eyes can examine that time without the bias of having experienced it. The first passes at history are always self-serving and flattering to the winners. Later passes turn the near past into justification of present agendas. It is further down the line that you get a more candid view of events.

Even if in the fullness of time Reagan is on the list of great presidents and the 1980’s are studied as an important time, what will be lost is the impact the man at the center of that age had on the people. Reagan was a towering figure who changed the culture simply by setting an example with his public presentation. It is a thing to keep in mind as we watch the final act of Donald Trump. Great men are great men because they inspire the great men of their age.

¹Get your mind out of the gutter.

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