Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the coming troubles for Europe with regards to Ukraine, a post the eternal war between mice and cats, a video from the bed of my truck and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

“A dog who will bring a bone will carry a bone” is an old-time expression that usually is meant to say that someone who will steal for you will steal from you. More generally it means that an immoral person on your side will eventually let you down or go over on the other side. The underlying assumption is that even in an adversarial environment, there are rules. The person who violates those rules can never be trusted, even when their rule breaking favors you.

This “lack of a code” lies at the heart of the traitor in wartime. The person who makes a deal with the enemy is harshly punished, usually executed, not because of the practical aspects of their crime. It is not that they gave the enemy an advantage or useful information. It is that they violated the code that holds everyone together in the fight. They have excluded themselves from the company of men who can be trusted to uphold the code when no one is looking.

Similarly, the traitor that comes over from the other side is usually treated with suspicion. In the Cold War, defectors were rarely treated well by either side. Russians who betrayed their countrymen just so they could get an American passport were treated well enough to encourage others, but they were assumed to be disreputable people. The Russians took the same view. Famous spies like Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union, were never welcomed by Russia.

Again, the underlying reason for the way traitors have been treated by their own people as well as the enemies of their people is that someone who breaks trust for any reason cannot be trusted. Someone who deliberately breaks a sacred trust is especially suspicious. It is why American corporations used to discriminate against divorced men. If your wife cannot trust, why should your boss? Adultery used to be a serious social crime when we were a proper society.

It is a good thing to keep in mind as we head into what is looking like another interregnum. Suddenly, the people who were sure Donald Trump was Hitler are now strangely quiet. Much of it is simply the fact that their emotional tank is drained. A decade of hysteria has run it course. At the same time, many have just decided to change tactics, seeing that their Hitler lies failed to stop Trump. They will come up with new lies because it is what liars do. They lie.

The same should apply to those who look like converts. Someone who was an implacable opponent of even the slightest pushback but is now “coming around” on things like immigration should be treated with a great deal of suspicion. They could simply be opportunists. That is, after all, the spring that motivates every traitor. They see an opportunity for themselves in violating the trust of others. Often, they lure their victims into trusting them so they can betray the trust.

A great example is Ben Shapiro. Everyone with two brain cells knows his deal. He is an ultra-Zionist whose only interest is his people. He is willing to lie promiscuously for that cause. It speaks to the nature of Zionism that its most fervent practitioners are the least endowed with European morality. Even the most fervent Nazi understood that there is such a thing as truth. It was the Nazis, after all, who gave us the expression “The Big Lie.”

That aside, even when a Ben Shapiro is doing damage to the enemy, it is important to always qualify the praise so no one forgets that a dog that will bring a bone will carry a bone. If an arsonist burns down the house of that guy selling drugs near the high school, it is normal and healthy to be happy for his suffering or death, but it should never be an endorsement of arson. If the arsonist, however, is one of your guys, then that is another matter. “Who” is what matters, not how.

Those are easy cases, but a more challenging example is someone like James Lindsay, who started out in life as an anti-Christian bigot. He then moved on from that hustle to tricking academic journals with fake grievance studies papers. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian made up fake studies using the bizarre jargon of the grievance studies rackets. These papers were made deliberately ridiculous to expose the vacuity of the so-called social sciences.

This was hilarious and it confirmed that the people involved in these fields are mostly hucksters making a living off lunatics. The trouble though is Lindsay and Boghossian were deceiving people not on behalf of their cause or for their people. They were betraying people for personal advantage. In other words, they were bringing a bone to one group but would eventually carry a bone from that group. This is what we now see with their attacks on populists and Christians.

Whatever benefit came from these two subverting the grievance studies people came at the cost of having them attack the people who cheered for them, but from a position of greater authority. When James Linday was just a chubby massage therapist hating on Christians, no one cared. Now that he is a famous internet influencer; he can do real damage. It is a good reminder that giving power to immoral people is never a good idea.

None of this means that political actors must be purer than Caeser’s wife. As Mr. Dooley said, “Sure, politics ain’t bean-bag. ‘Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists’d do well to keep out iv it.” Or as Carl Schmitt would put it, politics is about friends and enemies. The thing to remember is that it is a commitment to the morality of the cause that distinguishes the friend from the enemy, so even though an enemy can be useful, they remain enemies.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• 04m24s Not a disaster, a tragedy
• 10m21s Illegal aliens > U.S. citizens
• 14m52s The Muslim thing
• 23m48s Trump’s imperial dreams
• 26m18s An African in Greenland
• 33m26s Meet the norovirus
• 34m57s Unwelcome fame?
• 36m33s 2025 IYQST
• 38m51s Happy birthday to the King

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. That was Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 1 and this is your frostily genial host John Derbyshire with a brief scan of the news.

The news is of course dominated by the terrible fires over on the other coast. The news pictures showing the devastation of Los Angeles are really stunning. My sympathies to those afflicted, and all praise to the brave Angelenos fighting back against the flames.

L.A. can now join the sad list of cities that have been burned out in peacetime. Back when wood construction was the norm, such events were not uncommon. The Great Fire of Chicago is the one everyone knows about. That was in 1871. Legend has it that the fire was started when Mrs O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern, but I don’t know if that’s ever been confirmed.

San Francisco suffered devastating fires in 1906, following the great earthquake of that year. It’s a little-known fact that far more buildings were destroyed by the fires than by the earthquake itself.

Better known to British schoolkids was the Great Fire of London in 1666 that destroyed the old St Paul’s cathedral, giving Christopher Wren the opportunity to build the new one. Also on the upside, it likely put an end to the great plague of earlier that year, by killing all the rats.

Yes: back through history peacetime cities have gone up in smoke. My own little provincial hometown, Northampton in the English Midlands, burned down in 1675. Our schoolmasters used to tell us that the medieval town records, kept in the town castle, were moved to All Saints’ Church for fear the castle would be burned down. As it happened the castle went unscathed; but All Saints’ was burned to the ground and the records were lost. Municipal incompetence is not a new thing.

So Angelenos are in plenty of historical company here, although I don’t suppose it’s much consolation for them to know that.

And it’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good. Hop over to Amazon.com and put the words “The Great Los Angeles Fire” into the search box. You’ll see that there was a novel of that name by Edward Stewart, published in 1980.

Stewart wrote a shelf-full of novels, none of which I’ve read. Amazon has “The Great Los Angeles Fire” at sales rank 9,687,510 in Books, with just one posted review, dated 2015. This week’s events might give it a boost. That would be too late for Stewart, who died in 1996, but might help his estate beneficiaries.

02 — Not a disaster, a tragedy.     What lifts this week’s fires from a disaster into the realm of tragedy is that they are happening in California, the most progressive state in the Union.

The voters of California, we all know, elect only persons of the highest sensitivities to govern them. Concern for the environment is always placed ahead of mere brutish considerations of human amenity. Officials appointed to supervise agencies like Forestry and Fire Protection or Water Management are selected first and foremost with proper regard for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as of course they should be.

There’s the tragedy. You can see that … Wait: my audio files seem to have got somewhat tangled here. Give me a moment, please, while I untangle them.

[Pips.]

The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

[Pips.]

03 — Illegal aliens > U.S. citizens.     Here on the other coast, the one where the Derb estates are located, public officials are not as fanatically environmentalist as those of California, but they are very punctilious in defending the Constitutional rights of illegal aliens.

What’s that? You didn’t know that illegal aliens have rights under our Constitution? Welcome to Suffolk County, New York — my own home county, population one and a half million, occupying the eastern part of Long Island.

Thursday last week federal judge William Kuntz handed down a 36-page ruling telling my county that we had violated the Constitutional rights of several hundred illegal aliens when, back in the Obama administration, our Sheriff’s office detained them until federal immigration agents could show up and take them into custody for civil deportation proceedings. Note please that the feds, actually ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had asked the Sheriff’s office to hold the aliens.

Once again: The Sheriff of my county, Suffolk County, had several hundred illegal aliens detained or identified, I don’t know how. He notified ICE. They asked him to hold the aliens until they could get some agents here to take them into federal custody.

Judge Kuntz declared that New York State Law doesn’t allow our Sheriff to co-operate with federal law enforcement in such a shameless, brazen way. He has ordered the county to pay sixty million dollars to the aliens.

So I and my fellow residents of Suffolk County have to hand over our money to illegal aliens because our county Sheriff complied with a federal request. Note that the feds, who made the request, do not have to pay. And this is all according to a federal judge.

Although on that last point, Judge Kuntz does have the full support of New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt, who filed a brief on behalf of the alien scofflaws back in April last year. Quote from her:

Contrary to the contention of the defendants and the United States, federal law does not independently authorize state or local officers to make the civil immigration arrests at issue here.

End quote.

I don’t know the exact number of illegals being rewarded here. The news reports just say “hundreds.” If it’s six hundred, the payout will be one hundred thousand dollars per border-jumper, paid ultimately I guess out of my property taxes.

So while we East Coast slobs may not be as attentive as Californians are to the interests of tiny freshwater fishes, we are way out ahead at prioritizing the Constitutional rights of illegal aliens over the pocketbooks of U.S. citizens.

And if you’re not sure where in the Constitution those rights are affirmed, just email a query to Judge Kuntz’s office, I’m sure they’ll be glad to tell you.

04 — The Muslim thing.     There has definitely been some big turn towards openness in public discussion, some widening of the Overton Window. Has all this been triggered by Donald Trump winning our November election; or was that just one expression of something deeper?

Whichever is the case, the noise in Britain about Muslim rape gangs is surely a part of what’s happening. Britain is a cultural colony of the U.S.A. so big sudden changes over there are echoing events here, although with a British twist.

Anyone who pays attention has known about the Muslim rape gangs in British cities for decades. An excellent, very well-researched book about it was published nine years ago. You won’t find the book on Amazon for some reason, but it’s on the Barnes & Noble website and they’ll sell you a paperback copy for $24.99. Title: Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Scandal. Author: Peter McLoughlin. Sample quote from the Overview at Barnes & Noble, quote:

So McLoughlin dug deeper and what he found shocked him: there were mounds of evidence that social workers, police officers, Muslim organisations, journalists and even some Members of Parliament must have known about these grooming gangs for decades, and they had turned a blind-eye to these crimes. He also came across references to incidents where any proof had since vanished. McLoughlin spent several years uncovering everything he could and documenting this scandal before the evidence disappeared. He demonstrates that the true nature of this grooming phenomenon was known about more than 20 years ago.

End quote.

Once again: The book came out in 2016. Peter McLoughlin was toiling away at those researches from the late 2000s through the early 2010s. And now suddenly, in 2025, it’s news.

In that long cover-up you see the power of the media, and of the larger ruling-class establishment of which it is one department. Once again, re-quote:

Social workers, police officers, Muslim organisations, journalists and even some Members of Parliament must have known about these grooming gangs for decades.

End quote.

Could this have happened in the U.S.A.? I don’t think so. As I said, Britain is a cultural colony of America so they adopt all our crazy social fads. Having adopted them, however, they then overlay them on older, strictly British foundations.

What they took in here was what I’ve been calling the Cold Civil War: two big blocs of legacy white people who can’t stand the sight of each other, engaged in constant battle. Racial minorities are sometimes enlisted to dig field latrines or feed the horses, but otherwise they just lurk around on the fringes of the battlefield, waiting for a lull when they can run in and loot the corpses.

In the U.S.A. the Goodwhite-Badwhite cut is between educated metropolitan elites and working people, especially in the South. It’s not deep and old, though. “Log cabin to White House” is still an ideal. America’s Goodwhites are arrogant and often brutal, but they know there are limits to their acceptability. The main racial minority has been blacks, their numbers small, the troublesome ones easily appeased by being ranked as Honorary Goodwhites.

In Britain the Goodwhite-Badwhite cut is overlaid on centuries of class privilege and subordination — all the way back to the Norman Conquest, when English people became second-class citizens of their own country. There was no racial minority until the 1950s. Today there are three: blacks from the Caribbean and Africa, Hindus from India, Muslims from Islamia, mainly Pakistan.

Blacks have proved generally manageable using techniques imitated from the U.S.A. Hindus are clannish and often annoying, but on the whole have merged quite well into Goodwhite ranks, even ascending to the Prime Ministership. That leaves Muslims.

Most Muslims of course want to live their lives, raise their families, and mind their business without trouble. There are, though, big minorities of Muslims who are otherwise disposed. This is true wherever there has been large-scale Muslim settlement. In 2025 that means all over Western Europe. It makes Muslims a very poor fit for Western society.

By the turn of the century Britain’s Goodwhites were aware of this. By then however, millions of Muslims had settled in Britain. The troublesome ones would, it was assumed, eventually assimilate into British culture. In the meantime their malefactions could be covered up, or blamed on Badwhites and their dumb, badly-parented, promiscuous daughters.

That whole model of Goodwhite management is falling apart. One sign of its disintegration is the accelerating disappearance of the word “grooming” in discussions of the Muslim rape gangs, as if they were kidnapping these 13-year-old girls so as to teach them the proper way to brush their hair. That isn’t what they were doing.

“Grooming” is even more offensive than the other term Goodwhites have been using to mask reality: “asylum seeker” for “illegal alien.” Both terms are, I am pretty sure, fast declining in frequency.

The disintegration of Goodwhite control is fortified by news from elsewhere in Europe. From Sweden, for example, which is now slamming the national gates shut and paying settlers to move back to their home countries.

So yes, there has been a turn: a turn from wishful thinking to realism all over the West. I think Donald Trump’s election was a symptom of the turn, not a cause of it. I’m not even sure Trump is a very good fit for these new times. I have no doubt, though, that he is better suited to them that what went before.

05 — Trump’s imperial dreams.     Ah yes, the Donald. This week our President-Elect has been indulging himself in some flights of imperial fantasy: Take back the Panama Canal, rename the Gulf of Mexico, annex Canada, buy Greenland.

Probably these are just the ramblings of a guy with too much time on his hands while waiting to move into his new house. There is some realism there in among the dreamings, though. Why shouldn’t we take back the Panama Canal, if it can be done without too much trouble? We built the durn thing, didn’t we?

Annexing Canada, on the other hand, is a crazy idea. The 47th President has major and immediate national problems to deal with; taking in Canada would just double the load. Let’s work on fixing what we can fix, and leave the dreams of imperial grandeur to number 48, or 49, or 50 …

The Greenland suggestion is worth considering, though. There are some great mineral resources there. It’s just across the Pole from Russia; Putin is already issuing warnings. The ChiComs will meddle if they can.

I’ve already written about a coming scramble for the Ant-arctic. It wouldn’t be surprising to see one for the Arctic, which is much more accessible and more relevant to the big players of geostrategy — like all of them, it’s in the Northern hemisphere.

Denmark, to which Greenland currently belongs, seems to have no very passionate determination to hold on to the place. The Prime Minister of Greenland just the other day called for independence from Denmark.

So yeah, food for thought on that one. I have, though, a personal image, a Greenland of the mind, that I’d like to share with you. I’ll give it a segment of its own.

06 — An African in Greenland.     I have never been to Greenland and have only ever read one book about the place. That one book, however, left a deep impression on me; so much so, I wrote a review of it — a long review, more than three thousand words. That review was published in The New Criterion May 2004 issue. It’s archived on my personal website, where you can read it at your leisure.

The book’s title is An African in Greenland. It is about just what the title says it’s about: in the late 1950s a young man named Tété-Michel Kpomassie from one of the tribes of what was then French West Africa went to live in Greenland. He stayed there about ten years. Then he moved to France and wrote a book about his Greenland adventures. He wrote in French, of course; the first English translation was published 1983.

To give you some of the flavor of the book, here are a few short quotes pulled from my review.

Quote:

It is, as it sounds, the strangest travel book ever written. One can only imagine how the appearance of this tall, very black young African struck the Eskimos of Greenland’s tiny, isolated settlements. Kpomassie carries the whole thing off brilliantly. Open-minded, self-assured, adaptable, acutely observant, and obviously very personable, he is the perfect guide to the Eskimos and what was left of their culture in the mid-1960s.

End quote.

Kpomassie was shocked by the casual sexual promiscuity of the Greenland Eskimos. Here’s a quote straight from the book, Kpomassie speaking. The European names notwithstanding, these are all Eskimos he’s writing about. Quote:

When we got to Lydia’s room a little earlier than expected, we saw Karl, Adam’s brother, lying naked in the bed beside Lydia! They were drinking beer and laughing. Seeing them lying there side by side, I couldn’t help feeling upset … To my astonishment, she didn’t understand why I was angry … In Greenland, jealousy is frowned upon … Greenland morality was beginning to disgust me.

End quote.

Was this looseness just transmitted from the Scandinavian welfare-statism of Denmark? Apparently not. Kpomassie treks further north, to a traditional Eskimo community. Quote from my review:

At the northernmost of his residences, a traditional Eskimo turf house, he slept together with all his host’s family in a single bed, for warmth. The family included a girl of twenty who was eight months pregnant. She claimed not to know who the father was, but [inner quote] “village gossip alleged it was her own father.” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

Quote. This is another one straight from the book, Kpomassie speaking. As before, the people he’s talking about are all Eskimos. Quote:

Apart from Eric … and one or two others who often left the village on fishing expeditions, none of the people I met seemed to have any definite job. Gerhart trailed me around with him day and night and seemed to do nothing. [Karl] gave me the impression of being a parasite living off his brothers … As for Hans, who supposedly worked at the naval dockyard, not once since my arrival had he gone to work. Yet Paulina was always offering coffee and drinks to visitors. How did she get the money? Well, let’s face it: a lot of able-bodied Greenlanders simply live on allowances from the Danish government.

End quote.

Nineteen-sixties Greenland seems, on Kpomassie’s account, to have been a dirty welfare slum with sloppy morals. He fell in love with the place somehow, though, and his book has lyrical passages about whale hunting in the Arctic Ocean and driving a dog-sled team alone, quote: “through starry nights swept by the aurora borealis,” end quote.

I don’t suppose 2025 Greenland bears much of a resemblance to the one Tété-Michel Kpomassie described. Writing that review of his book back in 2004, I did some quick research and turned up this from the BBC News website, quote:

Many of the Eskimo (Inuit) people survive by hunting and fishing and are struggling as fish stocks become depleted. [Greenland’s] population is only 56,000. Inhabitants face severe social problems, notably unemployment, alcoholism and rates of AIDS infection.

End quote.

So maybe things aren’t all that different. If any listeners have more recent first-hand experience of the place, I’d be interested to hear it.

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

Imprimis:  If I appear to be giving you short measure this week, listeners, I apologize. I have been afflicted by a virus — the norovirus.

If you haven’t made its acquaintance, the main effect of the norovirus is emetic; that is, it makes you puke.

That’s an understatement, though. I’ve puked before. Back in the beer-drinking days of my younger years, I occasonally drank to excess and ended up on my knees talking into the big white telephone. Based on those episodes, I thought I knew about puking.

The norovirus introduced me to a whole new world of vomit. I could swear I brought up the contents not just of my stomach, but of my entire gastrointestinal tract. There was nothing left in there — nothing left in me except a mighty desire to lie on my bed groaning for two or three days.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to gross you out. I’m much better now, back to normal. I’m just a couple of days behind with everything, that’s all.

Item:  Following on from that one, though: the “noro” at the beginning of “norovirus” snagged my attention.

I know the medical prefixes we all know: “gastro-” for the guts, “cerebro-” for the brain, “hemo-” for the blood, “pneumo-” for the lungs, and so on. What’s “noro-,” though?

Cassell’s Latin Dictionary has nothing between norma (“a carpenter’s square for measuring right angles”) and nos (“plural of ego“). Liddell & Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon has nothing between νοοσ (“mind”) and νοσερóς (“sickly, ill”).

I consulted Dr. Google. Apparently the “nor-” of “norovirus” refers to the little town of Norwalk in Ohio, where the beastly thing first made itself known back in 1968.

Does Radio Derb have any listeners or readers in Norwalk, Ohio? How do they feel about having a virus named after their town?

Item:  UNESCO has declared this year, 2025, to be the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. The reason is, that it was a hundred years ago, as near as you can pin it down, that quantum mechanics really got airborne.

If you’re not up to date on your history of science, here’s something I wrote in my review of Gino Segrè’s 2008 book about those momentous events, book title Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics. Quote from myself:

The terrific theoretical turmoil of the 1920s, and most especially of 1925-27, gets five of this book’s fourteen chapters. The task facing the author here is to bring out the conceptual revolution that took place in those years, the unprecedented need for a new way of thinking about the subatomic world. These were the years when it dawned on researchers that the intuitions we acquire through our interactions with reality at everyday scales of measurement are simply not appropriate to events in the realm of electrons and protons.

End quote.

So welcome to the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. The definitive comment here was posted on X by everyone’s — well, every guy’s — favorite theoretical physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, quote:

It will be both good and bad at the same time.

End quote.

08 — Signoff.     That’s as much as my poor norovirus-addled brain can manage this week, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention, for all your good wishes and generosity.

This has been a week of birthdays. On the 5th, my daughter Nellie. God bless you, sweetheart. On the 6th, my brother Noel, who would be 95 had he not unfortunately left us nine years ago. On the 7th … Wait a minute, I have to dig around a bit here … um … Oh yes, of course: Millard Fillmore, the 13th President, born 225 years ago.

And on the 8th, the King — his 90th. Here’s something from him.

There will be more from me next week.

One of the many strange things about this age is that the most urgent issue facing the developed world gets the least amount of attention. That urgent thing is the collapse of fertility in every country with indoor toilets. Even India, a country famous for outdoor toilets, is having a baby bust. Indian fertility is now below replacement and, according to recent reports, is following the rest of Asia off the cliff.

In the EU, there are currently 1.46 live births per woman. France has the highest TFR at 1.84 live births per woman, but that is mostly the foreign population. The rest of Europe has birthrates well below replacement. Spain and Italy are at 1.3, which is what demographers call a population collapse. The only place in Europe with a healthy TFR is the Faroe Islands, which lies east of Iceland.

The Occident is doing well compared to the developed parts of Asia. Hong Kong no longer has children, as there is less than one live birth per woman. South Korea is right there with a TFR of 0.6. China is at 1.2, which should be what gets the ruling class to take notice, given China’s rocket high fertility in the recent past. It seems that wherever there are good times, people have stopped making babies.

This flies in the face of what we think we knew about biology. It has been assumed, because history seems to confirm it, that in good times people tend to have more children, while in bad times they limit their children. It is why Western nations cooked up schemes to limit reproduction during the Industrial Revolution. It was assumed that improving living standards would result in overpopulation.

The great global baby bust is telling us something. One is that what we thought we understood about demographics and population is wrong. When what was predicted did not happen, instead you got the opposite, it is time to rethink everything. The other is that there is a combination of forces that have been unleashed leading to what is looking like a great pruning of the human population.

That is the show this week. Everyone has their favorite reason for the population collapse, but those answers are probably wrong for the simple reason they assume a one-to-one relationship. In reality, complex things like human reproduction have highly complex causal relationships. That means the population collapse is most certainly do to a combination of things working in concert.

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 Fertility Crisis
• Diet
• Development
• Deracination
• Divinity

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Mark Twain said, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.” This is generally true, but occasionally something new comes along. The printing press is the best example. In fact, it was a revolutionary novelty. Much of what ails the modern world in some way traces its roots to the printing press.

The internet is another great novelty. Sure, the internet is, as Twain said, a lot of old ideas in a new combination. Sending letters to people over the internet is just a modern version of sending letters through the mail. Social media is a crowded public place where people strain to understand one another. Quantity has a quality of its own, however, and in the case of the internet, hooking billions together has created something that is different from its antecedents.

One example of this is the digital grifter. These are people who have many of the qualities we associate with conmen, but they also have qualities unique to the digital age and therefore could not exist before it. The analog grifters did not seek unrestricted attention, because they feared getting exposed. The digital grifter lives on attention and has no fear of being caught. In some cases, being labeled a grifter is viewed as an asset to the overall grift.

The difference between the digital grifter and the old fashioned grifter who may ply his trade online is that the money aspect of the grift is secondary. The old fashioned grift is all about separating the mark from his money. The digital grifter is not directly trying to scam people out of money. Instead, he wants a crowd that will operate as social proof for others who may buy something from him or sign up for a service like his YouTube channel, which is heavily monetized.

A good example of this is James Lindsay, the buffoonish “anti-woke” crusader who spends his days offending as many people as possible. He started out as a garden variety anti-Christian bigot, but that market was overserved, so he moved on to opposing “woke” nonsense in the academy. This got him a bunch of attention, so he expanded his anti-woke campaign to cover everyone. The Framers are now woke and Karl Marx was a woke crypto-Christian.

By making himself a public nuisance, he gets lots of attention, which brings him money through subscriptions, monetization and invites to events where other public nuisances do their act to the suckers. What he has done is make himself into a version of Mike Cernovich, a pioneer in using Twitter to troll himself into a career. Instead of pretending to be a lifestyle expert, Lindsay pretends to be a student of left-wing ideology and the champion of the fools who believe him.

The professional troll is a genuinely new thing made possible by the novelty of the internet, which makes it possible for a man and his phone to irritate millions of people with the push of a few buttons. While the public nuisance is not new, his elevation to a public figure is a novelty. In the analog age, Nick Fuentes was selling used cars and James Lindsay was that guy in accounting who talked about model trains. In this age they are getting rich as annoying weirdos.

This is leading to another novelty. The digital platforms that made these people possible are now transforming to encourage them. The Twitter monetization scheme is based on the number of people who engage with your post. The monetized users get paid for getting your attention and the best way to get attention is to be controversial, so it is not hard to see where this is heading. It is why Musk reinstated Fuentes. He may not get monetized, but his opponents do get paid to make noise.

Mark Zuckerberg just announced that he is cancelling his army of Indian content moderators and going to a group-sourced system like Twitter. The reason for this is moderation is bad for the professional troll. Community notes, however, is great for the professional troll, as it brings them even more attention. In effect, the group-sourced moderation encourages the sorts of behavior that moderation was intended to suppress, thus generating more of it.

It is why the “For You” tab on Twitter is worthless. It is filled with accounts that are designed to maximize attention. Many of them are bots that post and repost the same material to game the engagement system. There is a tragedy of the commons going on with Twitter. This is when many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, like your attention. They will tend to overuse it. For Twitter, it means people retreating to a narrow group they follow.

It remains to be seen if the social aspects of the internet can exist as a massive version of daytime television. There is a novelty to it and each version of the troll brings some new way of being a troll. There is a limit to everything, however, and we are already seeing a recycling of the trolls. James Lindsay ripped off Vox Day, who was on the anti-woke stuff when Lindsay was busy insulting Christians. The “groypers” are just a dumber version of the “stormies” created by Andrew Anglin.

Maybe this phase runs its course, like Hollywood reboots. After a few more turns of the wheel, people develop the mental armor to ignore the genre entirely. Starved of what it needs most, attention, the troll then withers and dies. On the other hand, maybe they kill off the big social media platforms as people retreat to private spaces. We are already seeing signs of this with the kooks stomping off to Bluesky. The great disaggregation of the internet will make the professional troll impossible.

Of course, the digital grifter and its crude variant, the professional troll, are novelties of this age, so it means their demise, if there is one, will be a novelty as well. New problems often require new solutions. Given that these people are unemployable in the normal sense, they will no doubt be like a drug-resistant virus, mutating with each eradication effort. Like those afflicted by herpes, the internet may never rid itself of the infection known as the professional troll.

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: An unexpected event this morning left me with no time to write,  so this is the green door post from yesterday to fill the void. Assuming nothing else goes wrong today, I should be back tomorrow.

As January 20th grows closer, the Europeans are growing more hysterical about what Trump may do with Project Ukraine. There were rumors before the holidays that Keir Starmer was set to visit Mar-a-Lago to talk with Trump about Ukraine. Starmer had a call with Trump which must not have gone well, as the British media came out with stories about Trump rambling during the call.

It is hard to know what Trump is thinking with regards to Ukraine, which is why the Europeans are in a panic. If they knew what he is planning, they would be busy undermining it, which is why Trump is not talking about his plans. His personal emissary on Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, has cancelled his plants to visit Kiev and European capitals, which only adds to the intrigue.

The big fear in Europe is that Trump will do a deal with Putin and cut the Europeans out of the process. One would think that any deal that leads to peace would be welcome, but the Euros have more skin in the game than most realize. They either need the war to continue, or they need it to end in a way that does not expose the financial corruption around the entire project.

One good example for why the Euros are in this predicament is a town called Shevchenko, which is in eastern Ukraine. The Russians have just captured it as part of the steady push west. This little village would not matter, if not for the fact that it has one of the largest lithium mines in the world. It is part of what may be the world’s biggest lithium deposit.

While lithium is enormously important, that is not why this matters. You see, this mine is not actually owned by Ukraine. The rights to exploit it were traded away to an English company that was planning to use an Australian company to mine it. How this came to be is not all that clear but given the way the world works it surely required underwriting, which means British bankers were involved.

Now west of this town are other towns with massive lithium deposits, which have been pledged as collateral for various things, including the war. It is the thing that never makes it into the media. A significant portion of the financing for this war is tied to Ukrainian assets, which serve as collateral. They also buy the support of economic elites for this project. Project Ukraine is important business.

The reason the Russians captured this town is they are slowly encircling a city called Pokrovsk, which has been a major supply hub for the Ukraine army. The Russians are trying to split the front so they can break up the Ukraine army. This lets them destroy it piece by piece, limiting Ukraine’s ability to shift reserves where needed. This town with the big lithium mine is near the city of Pokrovsk.

This is a huge problem for Ukraine, but it is an even bigger problem for the EU, because Pokrovsk is vital to the coal and steel industry of Ukraine. You see, project Ukraine was supposed to bring the Ukraine steel industry into the EU economic zone, but now it looks like it will become part of Russia. The many investors in Ukrainian industry are not going to happy if Trump signs this land away to Russia.

This is the reason they put a gun to Speaker Johnson’s head last year to get the $60 billion Ukraine bill passed. Much of that money was to make whole those who had invested in project Ukraine. The arms dealers had “lent” the Biden admin weapons to send to Ukraine and they needed to be paid. The same is true for players like Blackrock that invested in Ukrainian agriculture.

Based on the hysteria in Europe, it does not appear as if the political class there has a similar way to solve their problem. If Trump makes a deal with Russia, all those companies and banks that invested in the project will be left with nothing but worthless Ukrainian bonds. It is why the European political class is desperate to be included in the negotiations. They think they can claw back some of the money.

Then there are the Russian frozen assets. Most of these are held in European banks and the Euroclear Bank. Any deal the Russians make with Trump to end the Ukraine war will include those assets. Otherwise, the Russians will confiscate American assets currently in Russia and Trump will not agree to it. In fact, walking bank sanctions and unfreezing assets may be the prerequisites for negotiations.

What if those assets are not available? The Europeans have been issuing bonds against the profits from those assets, but what if they have been using the assets themselves for other things? Even if the principle is intact, the investors expect to get paid, so if the assets are gone, then the profits are gone as well. Billions rest on those assets not being unfrozen anytime soon.

In a way, project Ukraine is coming full circle. In Trump’s first term, official Washington freaked out when Trump sent Giuliani to Ukraine. What followed was the first Trump impeachment as a massive smokescreen to hide what was happening. Five years later and the Europeans are in the same bind, but they cannot stage a phony scandal and impeachment to buy time and conceal the crime.

This is probably why the Europeans are going crazy over Musk. They think they can escalate their feud with Trump to the point where he either backs off and agrees to consult with them on Ukraine or maybe they can pin the blame on Trump for whatever happens to Ukraine in the coming year. It is not a great plan, but when you owe money and have no way to pay, you will try anything.

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 of the more interesting things to occur while waiting for Trump to be installed as the new ruler of America has been Elon Musk taking on Europe. First, he wrote an essay in support of the political party Alternative for Deutschland, which sent the German political class into a panic. Then Musk attacked the British government for covering up the Pakistani rape gangs. He also demanded the release of Tommy Robinson and said Nigel Farage should quit and let a real man take over the Reform Party.

Stupid people said he was doing this to distract from the dustup over H1B visas, but stupid people say stupid things like this. The world’s richest man, close confident of the new ruler of the American empire, does not need to distract from anything and he does not take aim at the provincial leaders in Europe to hide from a meaningless internet spat over immigration policy. It is safe to assume that what Musk is doing is both deliberate and with the support of Trump.

The first thing to note is that Trump does not like Keir Starmer. No one likes Starmer, but Trump has reasons beyond that to attack him. Starmer was on the anti-Trump train, and he sent people to help Harris in the election. This was a huge blunder that Trump will never forgive. Given that Starmer is as popular as rectal cancer right now, Trump can easily put his government in crisis. We already see this with the Musk attacks on Starmer over the rape gangs.

Keep in mind, that this is happening against the backdrop of Justin from Canada resigning from office after Trump made fun of him. Trump started talking about tariffs on Canada and Trudeau immediately flew to Mar-a-Lago to patch things up only to have Trump call him the governor of Canada. This kept up until the Trudeau government essentially collapsed, forcing Trudeau to resign. The collection of pipsqueaks that make up the European political class certainly noticed this.

Keir Starmer has more to worry about than Trudeau. The British political class has been orchestrating a massive coverup of what should be considered treason by the political class over the last two decades. They invited South Asian migrants into the country, who then created a crime wave, including the mass rape of young British girls as a way of turning them into prostitutes. Meanwhile, the British press waged war against the local population.¹

In other words, it would be very easy for an angry Trump, with the help of his good friend Elon Musk, to destabilize the British government. If the choice is between Keir Starmer, and his diverse collection of halfwits, and the relationship with the American empire, the UK economic elite will pick the latter, even if it means forcing an unprecedented election in which the hated Nigel Farage could win. This is not a fight the UK political class can win.

This is a reality across the EU. The European political class can talk big and pretend they are global leaders, but in reality, they are provincial clodhoppers who exist at the discretion of the United States. Trump has more respect for the wine steward at Mar-a-Lago than he does for Emmanuel Macron. Given the fragile condition of the European economy and the even more fragile political conditions in Europe, Trump could easily remake the politics of Europe if he chooses.

While the drama is interesting and amusing, there is something much bigger happening here regarding the relationship between America and Europe. It is well known that Trump has no use for NATO. He sees it as an expensive American obligation to a collection of pampered ingrates. He has repeatedly said the economic relationship with Europe must change, because as far as he is concerned, the Europeans have been freeriding on America for too long.

What we may be seeing here is the first salvos in an asymmetric war by the Trump administration on the legacy relationship between America and Europe. The choice before the Europeans is to either accept vassalage in exchange for continued American protection or regain their independence but do so without special access to American markets and the American defense umbrella. At long last, the Europeans are going to learn that there is something worse than being an enemy of America.

For their part, the Europeans are taking every chance to make things worse for themselves in this process. Probably the biggest mistake was the arrest of the Telegram founder Pavel Durov by the French. Macron lured him to France, where he was arrested on nonsense charges. If the Europeans will arrest this guy, then they will arrest Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. This was the equivalent of the butler telling his boss to shut up at a dinner party for the boss’s close friends.

The angry comments from Macron, Starmer and Olaf Scholz, the outgoing German chancellor, aimed at Elon Musk suggest these people are incapable of understanding what is happening to them. At some point the economic elites of Europe may have no choice but to step in and begin forcing through reform. This assumes the economic elites have enough gas in the tank to do it. Decades of poor management by the political class have sapped Europe of its economic strength.

Regardless, what we are seeing is the start of a process that will lead to a fundamental revision of the decade’s old relationship between the America and Europe. Similar to how the so-called captive nations of the Soviet Union broke free, ushering in the collapse of communism, this jettisoning of Europe by the United States will mark the end of both Cold War America and the unipolar world. Decades after the Cold War officially ended, it will finally end in the West.

¹Graph first published by Gerry Nolan at The Islander Telegram channel.

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

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the world of kitchen knives, a post about Musk’s Twitter issues and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the difficult things for most Americans to accept is that the people on the ballot every election have little role in public policy. The way the system is supposed to work is that the voters select their elected officials, who then meet and agree on new laws and changes to the law. They also pick the people in charge of the many agencies that carry out the laws passed by the elected officials. In reality, the people in those elected offices play almost no role in legislation and policy.

The easiest place to see this is in foreign policy. In the last election, there was little mention of foreign relations. Trump pledged his unconditional support for Israel, which every candidate is required to do in America, but otherwise he had little to say about what is happening in the world. Those running for House and Senate seats were mostly silent of foreign affairs, aside from pledging their loyalty to Israel. We are in a proxy war with Russia and China, and no one talks about it.

One main reason for those House and Senate candidates not saying much of anything is they have no role in the process. Many of them could not find Ukraine on a map, despite cheering wildly for Zelensky when he spoke to Congress. Only those who have been around for a decade or more understand why Ukraine is an issue. Some of them have been invited to get a taste of the side action, which is the primary benefit to sticking around in Congress for a long time.

Foreign policy is the domain of the executive, but it is obvious that the President has little role in the process. Joe Biden was a vegetable for his term in office. So much so that decisions on most things were delegated to various appointees. Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken ran foreign policy, but even they were only in charge of a small portion of what the world sees as American foreign policy. The reason for that is much of it is now done off the books, outside the official system.

For example, the years long effort to regime change the country of Georgia was not a White House or State Department caper, in the sense that there were high level meetings about the program or decisions made by the senior staffers. This operation was run by the informal network of formal and informal operational nodes that make up the American foreign policy community. It is not really accurate to call it American, as it now includes nodes around the West.

For example, last year the Russians raided a group of call centers operating in Russia, that were organized by something called The Milton Group, by the former Minister of Defense of Georgia, David Kazerashvili. Amusingly, these call centers were intended to operate various frauds in the West, but they also helped organize the pro-Western protests in Georgia. One center was run by an Israeli and Ukrainian citizen and the other by an Israeli and Georgian citizen.

How a normal fraud operation gets repurposed into a mechanism to topple governments is not a big mystery. It turns out that there is more money in regime change than in scamming old people out of their pensions. That money comes from the thicket of NGO’s and clandestine government operations that often operate independent from Western governments. It is unlikely that elected officials in the West had any idea who was running the Georgia caper.

One reason why this shadow foreign policy establishment remains unknown to most elected officials is much of it predates their time in politics. For example, one of the main organizers of the Georgia regime change operation was an organization called CANVAS, which operates out of Serbia. It is a spinoff of a group called Otpor, which was founded in the 1990’s when the former Yugoslavia was falling apart after the end of the Cold War. Guess where they got their money?

CANVAS now operates all over the world, targeting regimes that are coincidentally on the list of regimes targeted for a color revolution. They were involved in the effort to overthrow the Belarussian government and in the overthrow of the Ukraine government during the Obama administration. Of course, that event haunts us today. It has been made infamous for the scenes of Victoria Nuland waddling around Kiev, handing out cookies to the pro-Western protestors.

Speaking of Toria Nuland, she was not only responsible for the Ukraine catastrophe that continues to rage, but she has been a lifelong advocate for regime change as the official policy of the American government. This is why after she left the Biden administration, she landed a post at the National Endowment for Democracy, one of those semi-formal nodes in the foreign policy community. She will bring years of regime change experience to the organization.

The National Endowment for Democracy is one of those groups that has been around longer than most politicians, so it is background noise to them, but it plays a key role in what manifests as American foreign policy. It was founded in 1983 by Carl Gershman and Allen Weinstein. They worked in the Reagan administration and then formed several NGO’s, all with help from government money. Like so many NGO’s, it is a clearing house for money and international activism.

There is a good bet that there is not a single Senator involved in foreign policy oversight who has ever heard of the men who founded NED. They have no idea that there are lines in the State Department budget sending money in the form of grants and vendor contracts to groups like NED. They certainly have no idea about how the State Department encourages corporate giving to these groups. It is a world that operates in the shadows, where elected officials rarely tread.

These groups are not just operating abroad. They play a major role in building narratives in which the elected official operates. For example, there are ads on YouTube from a group called Center for Civil Liberties, that claims Vladimir Putin is kidnapping Ukrainian children. This group wants your help to stop him. If you go to their about section, you see they are supported by familiar names, like the National Endowment for Democracy and the American State Department.

What this means is those ads telling American YouTube viewers that Vladimir Putin is kidnapping Ukrainian children are, in some way, sponsored by the American government, operating through a proxy. Much of what elected official believe to be reality is the product of such operations. One point of this network of NGO’s is to help shape and control the information space. You can see why Washington is obsessed with creating narratives rather than reality.

This is just in the area of foreign policy. Every day politicians are briefed by groups they think are grassroots organization, but in fact are marionettes operated by one of the formal or informal organizations. The media is peppered with press releases and provided copy for their outlets. Most important, the organizations can introduce the right people to the right people, with “right” being the key word. If you play ball and avoid asking the wrong questions, you can be a right person.

It is why voting seems to make things worse. The people making decisions that matter to you are never on the ballot. The people on the ballot are often less informed about how things work than the voters. The reason for that is the parties select for the compliant and the incurious. Those who get too curious or refuse to play ball will find themselves with a primary opponent and no money. It is why “our democracy” is a rhetorical and literal fig leaf for the Deep State.

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

• 01m06s Crazy people doing crazy things
• 06m47s Bracing for disappointment
• 14m29s Can Britain be saved?
• 23m00s Consanguinity Central
• 31m13s 9/11 plotters win again
• 32m51s Jimmy Carter, R.i.P.
• 36m21s Generation what?
• 37m46s Yoon defiant
• 39m45s Muhammad takes New York
• 41m22s Number notes
• 43m05s Signoff with Punta

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

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Odysee is broke again

Transcript

01 — Intro.     Welcome, listeners, to the first Radio Derb of 2025. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 performed by a small wind band arrangement, and this is your primarily genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week’s news.

Dominating the week’s news were the two events early on Wednesday morning, the first in New Orleans around 3:15 a.m., the second in Las Vegas five and a half hours later. The first was plainly an act of terrorism; the second probably so, but we’re not yet certain.

Let’s see what can be said.

02 — Crazy people doing crazy things.    For us commentators, events like these offer slim pickings. Two crazy people did very crazy things. Whether they were working together, or entirely independently, isn’t clear.

Crazy person Number One was 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a native U.S. citizen from Texas. At 3:15 Wednesday morning he drove a rented Ford pickup truck into a joyful crowd welcoming the New Year in Bourbon Street. He killed at least 14 and wounded many more before police shot him dead.

Jabbar’s brother told the New York Times that he, Jabbar, had converted to Islam at an early age. He’d then served in the U.S. Army, honorably discharged in 2020. He’d been married and divorced twice, had at least two children; made a living in financial services.

Crazy person Number Two was 37-year-old Matthew Alan Livelsberger, an Army master sergeant on approved leave. Livelsberger rented a Tesla Cybertruck, filled it with combustible and explosive matter, and blew it up outside Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. He was found dead inside the wreckage, apparently having shot himself somehow while, or after, detonating the explosives. Seven other people in the hotel’s valet area suffered minor injuries. The hotel was not damaged.

So what’s to be said? In a country as populous as ours, crazy people are going to do crazy things now and then. If they’re part of some organized group, or acting on behalf of some hostile foreign power, there are things our government should do; but neither thing has been established in these cases.

Perhaps those brilliant sleuths at the FBI, after a few months of infiltrating Catholic church groups and raiding the lingerie drawers of politicians’ wives, will be able to prove that white supremacists were behind these attacks. We’ll have to wait and see.

Shouldn’t the authorities be more diligent about identifying crazy people and institutionalizing them? Yes they should, and we don’t institutionalize anything like as many lunatics as we ought. People with a clear record of craziness should be institutionalized. Instead, much more often than not, we hand them off to “community care” or “homeless services” or some other jobs program for social-science grads that leaves the crazy people free to wander the streets.

But what if the crazy person is doing his very first seriously crazy thing, as seems to be the case with Jabbar and Livelsberger? We had no proper grounds to institutionalize them until it was too late.

Sure, we could institutionalize people who say or post crazy-sounding things. There’s a real threat to liberty there, though. What’s a crazy-sounding thing to you may be just a bad joke, or drunk talk, to someone else. Totalitarian regimes institutionalize persons who disagree with state dogma. Don’t think our own ruling class wouldn’t do the same if we let them.

But can’t qualified psychiatrists figure out who are the craziest of the crazy? No they can’t. Psychiatry is a pseudoscience. I can personally testify, and I have … follow the link.

So, nothing to say but what I’ve just said, and said before.

I’m working from incomplete data, though. It’s possible Jabbar and Livelsberger knew each other and co-ordinated their lunacies. It’s possible they were both in the pay of Iran or North Korea. I have no doubt at all that comment threads on certain websites will soon be offering conclusive proof that it was all a Mossad operation.

As I go to tape here, though, all I know is that a couple of crazy people did a couple of seriously crazy things … as now and then happens.

03 — Bracing for disappointment.     Here was our President-Elect, speaking to reporters on New Year’s Eve

[Clip:  First Reporter:  Why’d you change your mind on H-1 visas?

Trump:  I didn’t change my mind. I’ve always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. And we need a lot of people coming in. We’re going to have jobs like we’ve never had before.

First Reporter:  But, Sir, you said … You’ve changed your position …

Second Reporter:  You plan to go to the Carter funeral?]

With the Inauguration now just two weeks away, I would describe my own state of mind as: Bracing for disappoinment.

Regular Radio Derb listeners will know that I am a longtime sufferer from Trump Disappoinment Syndrome. Here I was in November 2018, two years into Trump 45.

[Pips.]

The one thing a National Conservative can expect from our President is disappointment.

The biggest disappointment is of course on immigration. No proper border; no universal compulsory E-Verify; no tax on remittances; no end to birthright citizenship, or chain migration, or the visa lottery, or the investor-visa scam, or the OPT guest-worker racket, or the ruthless replacement of America workers by cheaper H-1 and H-2 visa holders from abroad …

And that’s just to speak of formal, legal immigration issues. Illegal immigration is worse than ever. Headline from Breitbart.com, November 26th, headline: Illegal Immigration under Trump on Track to Hit Highest Level in a Decade.

How many illegal aliens do you think CBP apprehended last month, month of October, at the Southern border, listener? Several hundred? A couple of thousand? Could it possibly have been even ten thousand or more?

Listener, it was fifty-one thousand. That’s seven and a half caravans, using the unit of measure I introduced four weeks ago: one caravan equals seven thousand souls. Seven and a half caravans in one month.

Where legal immigration is concerned, you may fairly say that the President can’t legislate, only Congress can legislate, and the congressreptiles just won’t because they’re all bought and sold by the cheap-labor and open-borders lobbies.

To which I’d reply: true enough, but much of the success or failure of a President is measured by how good he is at getting Congress to do stuff. On that metric, Trump is an utter failure.

Where illegal immigration is concerned, the President does have real power: law-enforcement power by executive authority, power as Commander-in-Chief to deploy troops. Trump hasn’t done nothing in those areas, but he hasn’t done much; and what he’s done has been timid, half-hearted.

[Pips.]

So I’m bracing for a relapse back into TDS, Trump Disappointment Syndrome.

Things will be better this time, though, won’t they? Trump learned a lot from that first administration, didn’t he? This time his Vice President is on board with real reforms, not just a Uniparty hack. The cabinet picks this time round are independent thinkers, not Deep State swamp critters.

The mood of the country is ready for change this time, not like in 2016. Back then we were still swooning over Barack Obama and smug in our virtue at having elected a black President — twice! Today the idiocy, blunders, embarrassments and corruption of the Biden-Harris regime are still fresh and ugly in our minds.

So this time will be better, right? Right?

Eh, maybe. It’s quite likely we’ll return to a sane energy policy; that would be a big positive. Musk and Ramaswamy may really manage to make us less of a regulatory state ruled by midwit bureaucrats and more of a constitutional state ruled by legislators and judges. Yes, there are good things that might happen.

Shall we still have a Department of Education in January 2029, though? Shall we still be spending twelve and a half billion dollars per annum on Head Start? Shall we still have twelve thousand troops stationed in Italy and twenty-four thousand in South Korea? Shall we still have birthright citizenship and social security benefits for illegal aliens? My guesses are “yes” in every case.

Perhaps more to the point, shall we still have those things in November 2027? If we do, how much MAGA enthusiasm will have drained away in TDS — Trump Disappoinment Syndrome — those first two years? How will that affect the midterm elections?

And then, yes, legal immigration. “We need a lot of people coming in,” the President-Elect told us on Tuesday. Do we, Sir? How do you know that? Did we need a lot of people coming in in 1960, when our population was demographically stable, immigration was low, and a working man in his thirties could afford a house, a car, and a family?

Can you please demonstrate to us, with logic and numbers, that 2025 U.S.A. is underpopulated? Oh; and by the way, have you spoken to any Australians about these issues?

04 — Can Britain be saved?     As bad as things may be in the U.S.A., they are far worse in the Mother Country. A quote here from Gregory Hood, writing at American Renaissance, January 1st, quote:

Germany has the excuse of being conquered and occupied, but the country that stood for a time alone in World War II now teaches its own children to despise its history and culture. There is no free speech. A two-tier justice system represses patriots and coddles non-white street criminals. The Labour government is wildly unpopular, but the Conservatives are rudderless.

End quote.

A little background here. For the past several decades two parties have dominated British politics: the Conservative Party, whose origins go back to the 17th century, and the Labour Party, which first came to power in 1924. The Conservative Party were of course the party of snobs; Labour were the party of slobs.

The distinction didn’t always break predictably. Plenty of wealthy snobs, fired by guilt or ideological ardor, embraced Labor; plenty of working-class slobs have found King, country, and tradition more inspiring than the slogans of the union organizer. The last great Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, rode to power — three times! — on the working-class vote.

Sometime around the turn of this century, though, the party system collapsed in on itself. For thirty years now Britain has been ruled by a Uniparty of center-left ideological inclination.

The only thing anyone remembers about the administration of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is its legalizing of homosexual marriage in 2013. The main thing Britons remember about the administration of Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the great flood of immigrants he allowed, legal and illegal. Nobody remembers anything at all about the administration of Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, who may have been just a holographic projection.

The finest Conservative orator of the later 20th century, and one of the best intellects ever to occupy a seat in Parliament, was Enoch Powell, remembered today — to the degree that Brits are allowed to remember him at all — with shame and loathing for having objected, in 1968, to the importation of an American-style race problem.

So conservatism is dead in Britain; and there is, to all intents and purposes, only one party in Parliament.

Clever sloganeering and media manipulation kept this unhappy truth out of sight for a few years. In the present decade, though, it has become plain to all. As a result, voters are looking for a new party, one that dissents from the lukewarm center-leftism of Labour and Conservative.

Apparently they have found one. The party named Reform UK, under the leadership of Nigel Farage, claimed over Christmas that its registered membership now exceeds that of the Conservative Party.

Legacy media usually describe Reform UK as, quote, “a right-wing populist party,” end quote. That sounds promising. Will Nigel Farage and his troops, if elected to form a government, be able to halt and reverse Britain’s demographic replacement and economic decline?

Opinions differ. Gregory Hood, who I began this segment by quoting, thinks not. Writing from a point of view of white advocacy, he offers many examples of Nigel Farage’s squishiness on, most particularly, Islam. His closing sentences are, quote:

The British are a people — a formerly great people — not a set of abstractions, values, or ideas. They deserve a champion. Nigel Farage has not shown he is willing to be that champion. He is 2024’s White Renegade of the Year because he is muffing a great opportunity.

Let us hope he surprises us in 2025 — and also that our leaders realize what we really need is a lot of people going out.

End quote.

I share Gregory Hood’s skepticism, but also his hope. By all means make up your own mind. Read Hood’s article; then listen to Nigel Farage himself speaking at length. The following is from a New Year’s Message he posted this week. I say “from” because it’s actually edited down to a minute and a half from the five and a half minutes originally posted.

Clip:  (Brief piano intro/)  Well, I’m fortunate today to be giving you this New Year’s message from Blenheim Palace: not only a magnificent place and a wonderful place to come and visit, but of course the birthplace of Winston Churchill, who represented something when this country was indeed a great country — not just in terms of looking after its own people but in standing up for the right things in the world.

We have been appallingly led in this country now for several decades. We are in societal decline. We are in economic decline: most people are getting poorer with every year that passes. We’re losing any sense of national identity … for us to get back our independence — Brexit, taking back control of our own lives — and to see that completely squandered by a Conservative Party who frankly never believed in it but used it for electoral advantage in 2019 …

We want to make this country prouder; we want to make our borders secure; we want to make our people better off. And that message is resonating. And over the course of Christmas tens of thousands of people have joined Reform UK.

And I have to tell you, like his style or not, Donald Trump coming back as the American President is good news, not bad news. If History teaches us one thing it is that dictators and bad guys only respect strength. And let’s face it: without America we are defenceless, so that relationship is crucial.

So make it your New Year’s Resolution: Join Reform UK, join the fight back, let’s make Britain great again. Happy New Year.

05 — Consanguinity Central.     I mentioned there Nigel Farage’s squishiness on Islam. That’s timely: the Muslim rape gangs are back in the British news.

First let me introduce you to Jess Phillips, a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the British government. To be precise, she is the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls. There’s glory for you.

Working-class English girls definitely need some safeguarding. For fifty years now gangs of Muslim men have been kidnapping girls eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, and subjecting them to rape and torture, in a few cases to murder.

This is a major national scandal because everyone in authority — police, child welfare services, politicians both local and national — has been striving to cover it up. Britain’s ruling class believed that if the horrors were generally known there would be major social disturbances directed against Muslims.

There have actually been cases where a father has tracked down his missing daughter to one of the rape gang locations, made his way in somehow, called the police, and then, when the police arrived, himself been arrested for causing a disturbance.

Most offensively, it seems to me, Britain’s media have softened the facts of rape, torture, and killings under the euphemism “grooming.”

That’s where Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips comes in. The town council in one of these towns, the town of Oldham in northwest England, has been pressing for a full national-level government inquiry into the rape gangs after hundreds of young girls in the town have been abducted and raped.

The decision as to whether there should be such a national-level inquiry fell on Jess Phillips. She decided there shouldn’t. Oldham town council should deal with the matter themselves, she declared. So, presumably should the numerous other towns known to host Muslim rape gangs.

Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips is of course a member of Parliament. The following may therefore apply. Quote from The Critic, January 2nd:

One also can’t help wondering if Phillips — who, at the last General Election, narrowly triumphed in her heavily Muslim … constituency over Jody McIntyre, a Muslim candidate campaigning on the issue of Gaza — fears upsetting her constituents.

End quote. Indeed one can’t.

In a British context, the word “Muslim” is, to a good first approximation, a synonym for “Pakistani.” Most British Muslims come from Pakistan.

If you import big numbers of Pakistanis, as Britain has, you are not only getting a lot of Muslims; you are also getting people from a radically different culture.

I am looking at a picture from the science magazine Nature. The picture shows a map of the world with each nation colored according to its percentage of consanguinous marriages — marriages between close family members, mainly cousins.

Most of the world — all the Americas, Europe, Russia and the Far East, Southern Africa, Australasia — has the lightest color, indicating less than five percent of marriages consanguinous. The only nations otherwise colored are those in the Muslim belt across North Africa and West Asia, plus the Dravidian-speaking states of Southeast India.

Only two nations are shown as having rates of consanguinous marriage above fifty percent: Saudi Arabia and, yes, Pakistan.

Saudi Arabia, population 32 million and rich, doesn’t send out many emigrants. Pakistan, population 241 million and poor, does. Britain has about 1.6 million of them.

That 1.6 million come, as I said, from a radically different culture. With more than fifty percent of marriages consanguinous, Pakistan is Consanguinity Central, clannishness on steroids. The men in a Pakistani rape gang are all related; and they all share deep contempt for working-class white British people who let their young women walk out alone, unveiled and unchaperoned.

Where is Nigel Farage on all this? Gregory Hood quotes him from a recent interview, quote:

If we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose. We have to do everything we can to bring British Muslims with us.

End quote.

So yeah: squishy. A more robust National Conservative would be talking about, perhaps, giving Muslims an incentive to leave. But that is of course, in the U.S.A. and Britain both, beyond the bounds of respectable discourse.

Just a brief footnote to all that. The Daily Mail reported on December 31st that Pakistan and Afghanistan may be about to go to war with each other. Apparently the Afghan Taliban has a Pakistani offshoot, and the Pakistanis don’t like that.

That map of consanguinous marriages around the world shows Afghanistan as in the second-highest group, 40 to 49 percent of marriages consanguinous.

On that basis, if the two nations do go to war, may I be the first to suggest that the conflict be named “the War of Consanguinities”?

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

Imprimis:  You may recall that last summer the defense attorneys for the three 9/11 masterminds we hold at Guantanamo Bay were given a plea deal by the Biden administration. The deal was, that their clients would plead guilty to murdering three thousand people in exchange for being spared the death penalty. This, mind you, was 23 years after the crime.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin dissented, saying that he should have signed off on the plea deals. He moved to get them annulled.

At year’s end a military appeals court ruled against Austin, so the plea deals stand.

Austin can now take the matter to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but we don’t yet know whether he will or not.

Once again: This is 23 years after the atrocity. It will soon be 24. Then 25, soon 30, … Shall we eventually have to pay Social Security to these vermin?

They should have been stood against a wall and shot twenty years ago … at least.

Item:  So goodnight Jimmy Carter. I can’t claim to nurse any strong feelings about the 39th President one way or the other. My first spell in the U.S.A. was from August 1973 to October 1978, and so overlapped with the first half of his administration. I wasn’t taking much interest in politics, though, and he didn’t really register.

Yet in one of those inexplicable ways our memories work, I do remember the first time I heard his name in conversation. I was developing a computer system for a firm in New York that had branch offices all over. For some reason I was roped in to go with some of the company execs to the Atlanta office in March of 1975.

There was some delay landing us at Atlanta airport. Inquiring, we were told that a tornado had passed through that morning, ripping the roof off the Governor’s mansion.

Who was the Governor of Georgia? I asked one of my companions. He shrugged. Quote: “Who knows? It was Jimmy Carter, last I heard. I think he quit so he can run for President next year, though.” End quote.

He had and he did. I don’t know whether the generally negative view of his Presidency is fair. He was surely, though, as many have noted, a good ex-President, living modestly and doing good works, not piling up wealth and corporate directorships and phony “charity” cash spigots like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Notes British commentator Ian Birrell, quote: “He refused to suck up to the billionaires, charlatans and dictators willing to pay hefty sums to recruit well-connected ex-politicians.” End quote.

I’m reminded of the closing sentence of George Orwell’s obituary for Mahatma Gandhi, quote:

One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

Item:  Generation X, Generation Z, Millennials, Boomers, … I know from conversations that a great many people find these categories as annoying as I do. I can never keep straight which is which.

Well, they’re making it worse. Babies born between 2025 and 2039 will belong to Generation Beta, somebody has decided.

This is actually double annoying, as there seems to be no consensus on how to pronounce the word “beta.” That’s how I say it, but a lot of Americans seem to prefer “bay-tuh” or “bay-duh.”

Checking with the official list, I’m reminded that the categories aren’t even equally spaced. Millennials span 15 years but Gen X has 18 and Boomers 19.

Can’t we just use decades: “He’s an eighties, she’s an aughts,” and so on? Grrrr.

Item:  My December 13th podcast had a segment on South Korea, where President Yoon Suk Yeol, halfway through his five-year term in office, had declared martial law, only to have the declaration smacked down by parliament, who at the time I spoke were debating a motion to impeach him over it.

Impeach him they did. President Yoon wouldn’t step down, though. For three days as I am speaking now he’s been hunkered down in his official residence spitting defiance.

I don’t have a dog in this fight. That’s probably just as well; if I had one, the Koreans might eat it. I have been learning more about President Yoon, though.

For example: I noted in that mid-December podcast that South Korea’s main problem was demographic. Quote:

South Korea’s Total Fertility Rate is now at a sensationally low 0.68 children per woman. That’s a decline from 1.2 children per woman since 2014, so a 43 percent decline in just ten years.

End quote.

Has President Yoon stepped up to improve the demographic situation? Er, no. He has four dogs and three cats, but … no children.

Just murmur a prayer for those dogs, listeners.

Item:  According to the London Daily Mail, December 5th, Muhammad is now the most popular name for baby boys in England and Wales. That’s just “Muhammad” spelled “M-u-h-a-m-m-a-d,” however. If you include all thirty-plus variant spellings, says the Daily Mail, it has been the most common for over a decade.

So yes, Britain’s gone, gone into the darkness.

Don’t get smug, though. PostMillenial, December 28th, quote:

For the first time, Muhammad cracked the top ten list of most popular boy names in New York City.

End quote.

For years I’ve been quoting what seems to me the most astonishing statistic in our recent demographics: that the U.S.A. took in more Muslim settlers in the fifteen years following the 9/11 attacks than we had in the fifteen years before those attacks.

And you want to tell me we have a sane immigration system? Yeah, right.

Item:  It would be remiss of me, or at any rate out of character, to let the year 2025 get under way without some remarks about the number 2025.

It’s a perfect square, 45 times 45, the first year to be a perfect square since 1936. The next one will of course be at 46 times 46, which will be the year 2116. 2025 will therefore, in close to actuarial certainty, be the only perfect square to occur in my lifetime.

Curiously, if you were to increase each of its digits by 1, 2025 becomes 3136, which is also a perfect square, 56 time 56. That’s unusual: the only other case I know of is 25 becoming 36.

Oh, and 2025 is the sum of the first nine cubes: 1³ + 2³ +3³ +  etc., all the way to 9³.

More than you wanted to know? Sorry: once a numbers geek, always a numbers geek.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gents, for this first podcast of 2025. Many thanks for your time and attention, and especially for your donations and encouragement through 2024, a particularly trying year because of the suspension in July of VDARE.com, Radio Derb’s former host.

The website remains in suspension under the evil glare of New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt. The VDARE Foundation, however, is still very much a going concern. We hope, for example, to have a conference at the castle in lovely Berkeley Springs, West Virginia sometime this Spring. I shall be there, and look forward to meeting Radio Derb listeners. I shall post details when I have them.

You can support the VDARE Foundation by mailing a check to us at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield, CT 06759. You can support me and my family in particular by earmarking your check with my name, or by any of the other methods listed on my home page. Thank you!

Some signoff music. Readers of my December Diary will know that the Derbs spent a few days of early December in Belize. That’s a tiny little nation on the Central American isthmus — hang a left at Guatemala (which, as a matter of fact, we also visited).

Pop quiz: can you name a famous person from Belize? That’s actually a bit unfair. Belize only has 400,000 citizens, and it’s only been an independent nation since 1981.

Wikipedia comes up with a list of 36 names; but the only two I’d ever heard of prior to visiting the place were Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and tech entrepreneur John McAfee.

Even those two are only Belizian by a stretch. Biles was born in Columbus, Ohio. Wikipedia only says, quote: “Simone holds Belizean citizenship through her adoptive mother and considers Belize to be her second home.” End quote. John McAfee was born in England to an American father and an English mother. Wikipedia, quote: “He resided for a number of years in Belize, but returned to the United States in 2013 while wanted in Belize for questioning on suspicion of murder.” End quote. What’s the story there, I wonder?

Well, I learned a third name on our Belize trip — I mean, the name of a guy who was actually born in Belize with Belizian ancestors and who is as famous as Belizians get.

Our tour guide, another native Belizian, was keen for us to know that the nation has its own style of music. It’s called Punta, and its leading performer is a Belizian named Pen Cayetano. As well as being a musician, Cayetano is also an artist who has exhibited his paintings all over the world.

So of course I’m going to sign off with some Punta music. Here’s Pen Cayetano himself. The sound quality isn’t great because it’s a street performance. It does give the flavor of Punta, though.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week

Note: There is no show today, but for those who need to hear my voice, I was on a couple of popular programs over the holidays. I was on with Paul Ramsey and his lovely new cohost, Alicia Bittle. Rumble link. I was also on with Mike Farris. The Rumble link for that is here.

One of the strange aspects of the so-called information age is how little information there is relative to what was expected at the start of this age. At the dawn of the internet, everyone assumed we were on the cusp of a great democratization of information, where everything was available to the public. Not only would the sum of all human knowledge be made available to everyone, but the ability to conceal information, like government secrets, would be near impossible.

It has not turned out like that at all. In many ways, people are more ignorant now than fifty years ago, despite having access to the great data stream. It turns out that you must want the information in order to have it and most people just want to be told what to think. Faced with the great firehose of information called the internet, most people simply find a narrative source to trust. Instead of gathering up the available facts to understand what is happening, people just trust the news.

This was always true, but prior to the internet there was some competition inside the media for an audience. That meant doing genuine reporting. The local newspaper had lots of information about what was happening. One unexpected result of the internet is a mass convergences of mainstream news sources and a narrowing of what is presented to the readership. Look at a aggregation site like this one and you can see the echo chamber that is mass media quite clearly.

The internet killed off local news and the organs that provided it. The days of making a career as a newspaperman covering local events are gone. Along with it the apprenticeship system has disappeared. People entering media as a career now step into a narrow, vertical world where the major regime outlets are at the top and everything below is aimed at feeding people into those major outlets, while echoing everything that comes from those outlets.

It is why we know so little about the Jefferey Epstein case, relative to what should and could be known about it. The major media outlets have little interest, beyond parroting government statements, so there is nothing for the rest of the system to echo and amplify. For example, the two guards that night have been ignored by the media, despite being the second to last people to see Epstein alive. The NY Times does not care about the case, so no one else cares about it.

This is a pattern with most big stories. The lunatic they caught outside of Trump’s Florida villa should be great tabloid fodder. The guy’s internet profile alone makes for great clickbait, but the major media has no interest in him. In the analog age, camera crews would have tracked down everyone who met him. In this age of a trillion cameras, no cameras show up anywhere interesting. The same is true for the kid who allegedly took shots at Trump in Pennsylvania.

There are many ways to describe the modern mass media, but one label that fits is “deliberately uninterested.” There is a weird lack of curiosity in the modern media that defies easy explanation. Sure, the people running the Post or the Times coordinate with the government, but one would think a small outlet would see this gap as a chance to grow their audiences. Instead, even C-list outlets follow the lead of the Times and Post into the great darkness of modern ignorance.

Look at the New Year’s Day terror attacks. Now that the identity of the two people involved are known, it should spawn a million questions. The obvious place to start is the fact that neither man fits the profile. According to the government, for no reason at all, two military men went crazy on the same day. The Vegas guy’s back story makes no sense whatsoever, but so far no one in the mass media has found anything weird about it, much less questioned the government about it.

Both guys were attached to Fort Bragg, which is a pretty big coincidence all by itself, but this is not the first terrorist attached to that base. This alone should spark some curiosity by the media, but when you look closer you see there is a lot of violent crime attached to this base. It is the sort of thing that in a prior age would be the basis for a big expose in a major news outlet. Reporters would have been tasked with asked the government about it, but today it gets ignored.

Even if the Fort Bragg connection is mere coincidence, we will never learn anything about these two cases. The “journalists” will cut and paste some government press releases into their sites and a week from now it will be forgotten. Like the Trump assassins, the major media outlets will simply ignore these stories and so the rest of the media system will ignore them too. In their place will be the latest conspiracy theories around Trump that the Post and Times are peddling.

The great leaving alone that now defines official media is, in part, due to the professionalization of media. In the analog days, the news was a working-class job, so there was a degree of distrust between the media and the ruling class. Today, every journalism student imagines herself as part of the ruling class and one day she will do her part to further the mission of the ruling class. To reach the top of the media system, one must be an unusually good toady.

There is also the fact that the interests of the ruling elites have consolidated, which has resulted in confluence in the media. In the old days, the guy who owned a major newspaper saw the guy who owned a factory or the guy who owned the bank as a rival, so he was fine with his people poking around in their business. He also looked at the government as a potential problem, so maintaining an adversarial relationship with the political class was in his interests.

Financialization has resulted in a narrow economic elite. They are all in the same boat when it comes to how they view society, so they no longer see each other as rivals, and they all depend on the managerial elite to run things. In the media, the result has been a shift in skill selection. In the old days, getting dirt on a banker and a politician doing deals would make your career. Today, what makes your career is building a relationship with them, so they trust you with information.

The shift to access journalism has come with new selection pressure. In the old days, noticing patterns and having a curious mind were rewarded. Today, those are qualities that get you weeded out early in your career. What matters today is the right LinkedIn profile and the right relationships. It a world where curiosity can get you expelled from your social group, in addition to our profession, it is no wonder that everyone in the media is good at never noticing anything.

This also explains the obsession with narratives. Now that the media is absorbed into the managerial class, it is assumed that controlling the narrative is the key to pushing the programs and initiates of the managerial class. As you see inside every large corporation, everyone feels the need to support the latest things and be seen promoting the latest things, so what little imagination and creativity remains, flows into creating and promoting the narratives that support the latest things.

The result of this is we now live in an age of ignorance. The objective facts are often more readily available than in the prior age, but they are so layered in pejorative narratives that they are difficult to locate. With no institutional support in finding and assembling the facts, we are left with narratives that often serve no other purpose than to make the participants feel like winners. The great leaving alone that defines the public square has created an age of ignorance.

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!

The new year has started with a bang, literally and figuratively, as terrorism was the big story on the first day of the year. A Tesla truck exploded outside the Trump building in Las Vegas, killing one and injuring seven. Then there was the car attack in New Orleans, where according to news reports a car went on a rampage killing fifteen people and injuring dozens of others. Police say the driver of the vehicle was not alone and there is currently a manhunt for the others.

The identity of that driver in New Orleans has been released and to no one’s surprise his ancestors were not on the Mayflower. The media is calling him a “Texas man” but he was born to recent arrivals, most likely from East Africa. He served in the military and had various office jobs until he decided to go on jihad. Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar is a good reminder that absimilation is just as likely as assimilation. It is a thing we increasingly see as alien populations increase in the West.

Assimilation means to become like that which you joined. As John Derbyshire observed almost a decade ago, there is an opposite, absimilation, which means to become less similar to that which you have joined. In the case of second and third generation immigrants, this is a common enough thing that it has become the focus of the overall immigration debate. While most absimilated migrants do not go on murderous rampages, many refuse to assimilate on principle.

This is one of the problems with immigration that the Romans understood, but our current oligarchs do not understand. When the alien population is small, the pressure to assimilate is very high. Those who refuse can find little support within their alien community, so they either assimilate or leave. This was the case with 19th century immigration from Europe. Some claim up to a third of European immigrants remigrated because they could not or would not fit into American society.

When the alien population reaches a large enough size, there forms a critical mass of aliens who refuse to assimilate and find enough support within the alien population to survive apart from the main population. This was the lesson of the 19th century when Italians packed into ghettos became a society within a society. It turned out that even in 19th century America, assimilation is not automatic. The more alien the population, the more difficult it is to assimilate them.

Of course, in this age, there is no effort to assimilate these people. Instead, they are encouraged to let their freak flag fly in the name of diversity. Further, there has been intense pressure on the native population to move aside and not demand these new people quickly assimilate into the native culture. The result is second a third-generation migrants who are alienated by the deracinated state of America and encouraged to hate the white population.

That alienation is not just with the migrants. It appears the Las Vegas Tesla attack was done by a white man named Matthew Livelsberger. Like Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans terrorist, Livelsberger was an army veteran and served with Jabber at the same base in Texas. It is looking like these two attacks are connected and the result of a group that may have come together in the military. Long forgotten, Nidal Hasan was in the Army when he went on his rampage.

It should surprise no one that alienated migrants are now finding common cause with alienated natives this way. On the one hand, we have massive importation of people unlikely to assimilate into American society. On the other hand, we have a culture war against the native white population, specifically white men. It is as if the ruling class is trying to create the perfect conditions for terrorism. This is not an unreasonable suspicion, given the performance of the FBI.

Even though these events took place in the new year, they are part of a pattern we saw in 2024 from the FBI and the other security forces. The assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania was due to staggering incompetence. The same is true of the attempt in Florida by a guy who should have been on the FBI radar. Time after time we see that the FBI fails at its basic duties, most likely due to the fact they spend all their time trying to frame people for the latest fads.

As we always see in these terrorism cases, the people involved in this one will have been brought to the attention of law enforcement. The FBI will say they had reports about these people. No one will ask what they did with those reports, because the answer is they did nothing. Their response will be to demand more money so they can frame some people for whatever they will call this stuff. They will pretend they are now on top of this new problem.

Putting aside the FBI malfeasance, this batch of terrorism is a reminder that our rulers have created a tinderbox. The revolt against Musk over the holiday break regarding Indian migrants should be another warning to the oligarchs. To head off much bigger problems down the road, there needs to be an immigration moratorium, including a halt to most “guest worker” programs. Every new arrival is a flammable log on the hot coals of the deracinated American population.

Further, there needs to be a national effort to assimilate the current alien population into the native European culture. Part of this needs to be remigration. Those who refuse to assimilate must leave. Cultural diversity needs to be treated like communism was treated in the 1950’s. It took an economic collapse and world war to assimilate the last great immigration wave. That was with a diverse European population before the major powers had nuclear weapons.

Unless the oligarchs wish to be swinging from trees, they need to head off this looming demographic disaster. Things like diversity and openness are luxury goods that can be indulged in easy times, but the easy times are over, so these leisure habits must be replaced with realism. What the first day of the new year tells us is America has a real problem with its population. That reality can no longer be ignored. To fix it means being realistic about the human condition.

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!