The word “apartheid” is like every emotionally charged word in the English language in that the worst people abuse it. In South Africa, it had a real meaning, as it described a real system. The word means “apart” and described a system in which the ruling white population lived apart from the black population. In modern usage, it has come to mean any race-based social system. The “apartness” is not so much physical but more of a moral distinction.

The West may need to invent some new words for the multilevel sociopolitical system that is emerging, especially in Europe. The rule of law and equality under the law are being abandoned in favor of a system that is loosely based on American concepts of social justice and social vengeance. In the United Kingdom, for example, there is now a separate set of rules for the white population. Whites, especially white males, are now to be punished more harshly than nonwhites.

This is mostly a formalization of something that has existed informally since Tony Blair flooded the country with immigrants. If a Muslim were caught rioting or raping, he could get off with a warning in front of the right judge. A native Brit, on the other hand, could expect the maximum penalty, especially if he could be accused of holding the wrong opinions about things. This is very similar to what we see in the United States, except now it is formalized in UK law.

This is spreading all over Europe, and unlike the United States, it is eroding the entire concept of a rights-based society. For example, a woman named Lucy Connolly was sent to prison for three years for a Facebook post in which she protested the mass importation of hostile aliens. In the United Kingdom, the police spend their days scanning social media for unlawful posts by white Britons. Twitter is full of videos of police abusing white people for their speech.

The reason the Prime Minister is called “Two Tier Keir” is because he supports the two-tiered justice system that has emerged in the United Kingdom. It is a bizarre implementation of the apartheid system in that it has a separate legal system for natives and immigrants but also compels the natives to embrace the immigrants and their foreign ways. On Palm Sunday, Starmer was at a pagan shrine, celebrating a pagan ritual that happened to fall on the same day.

Almost forgotten now is Tommy Robinson, a street activist who opposes the importation of Muslims and other immigrants. He has been in jail for so long that people have forgotten about him, which is the point. No one seems to know why he is in jail, other than that he says things in public that the government says white people should never say, not even in private. In the United Kingdom, like many European Union countries, you can be sent to prison for private speech.

In fairness, the UK is not alone. Across Europe, the lights of liberal democracy have been extinguished. They regularly arrest and jail people for speech crimes, and they are now arresting opposition politicians. Marine Le Pen is the latest example. In Romania, they canceled elections until they could find a way to remove from the ballot the candidate most likely to win. The Europeans are quickly becoming the old Soviet Union, with better consumer goods imported from China.

What you see in Europe is a more subtle version of what is happening in the United Kingdom, and that is a racial divide in the law. Muslims in France do not have to worry about the police reading their social media posts. If you are a French farmer organizing a protest, you can be sure someone in your group is an agent of the state. The state does nothing about the flood of migrant crime but will throw a white YouTuber in jail for holding views the state says he is not allowed to hold.

America was heading down the same path, as the media and corporations were embracing these same authoritarian policies. Largely due to entrenched cultural opposition and the revolt of key oligarchs, this decline has been halted, and the new administration openly supports civil liberties. That speech by Vance was as much a signal to the American public as to the European political class. The days of de-platforming are over, so they claim.

The real test will be how the Trump administration deals with these countries that flagrantly abuse the rights of their citizens. Everyone understands that Asians have a different cultural tradition, one that does not include things like individual rights, the rule of law, and respect for public opinion. China is never going to be a liberal democracy, so there is no point in punishing them for it. The same is true for the countries of the Middle East or in sub-Saharan Africa.

Europe is a different matter. The only reason for the United States to care about Europe at all is that it is both the ancestor of our population and the source of the moral framework that defines the West. Europe has the same moral obligation to defend the ideals of liberalism as the United States. Clearly, the current European political class has no interest in maintaining liberal societies. The United Kingdom, in particular, is an egregious case, given its role in the evolution of liberalism.

During the Cold War, the United States had different relationships with countries firmly on the Western side than those on the communist side or not aligned. The starting point was always respect for the rights of the citizens. Even during the Cold War, the United States exerted pressure on South Africa to end its apartheid system on the grounds that it was a violation of Western morals. One can question the rationality of that, but at least foreign policy was on something of a moral footing.

If Trump is going to restore the rationality of American foreign policy, it must include a return to a policy of judging nations by how closely they respect our understanding of individual rights and liberties. If the United Kingdom wants favorable trade deals, for example, they must open their prisons and release their political prisoners. The same holds for the rest of Europe. Their prison system must be dismantled, and the laws penalizing speech must be repealed and condemned.

Otherwise, the United States will be in the contradictory position of punishing China for its lack of Western values, while ignoring the grotesque violations of those same values by Europe. A sense of moral obligation has always animated American policy, for good or ill, and the primary moral obligation of America is the defense of the Western tradition of rights, equality before the law and respect for public opinion. America needs to break apartheid Europe, just as it broke apartheid South Africa.

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!

Thirty years ago, a Ryder rental truck full of explosives detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast killed 167 people and injured hundreds more. According to the official truth, the van was parked at the site by someone named Timothy McVeigh. While he did not act alone, he was the only person in the truck when it was parked at the site. A total of four people were arrested and charged with the deadliest domestic terrorist attack to date.

At the time of the attack, the public naturally assumed there were many people involved, as such a thing should require a lot of hands. There was also the assumption that foreigners were involved. By 1995, the United States had been dropping bombs on Muslims for at least a decade. It was not unreasonable to think that some of those Muslims decided to get some payback. According to the FBI, that was not the case at all and the whole thing was done by four people.

It turns out that this may not be entirely true. At the time, there were news stories claiming that two people exited the Ryder truck. Security cameras captured the parking of the thing and the blast. There was even a manhunt of sorts for the guy they named John Doe #2, but he was never found. Later, the FBI said there was never another guy and there was no video footage suggesting such a thing. The media, as they always do, took that to mean they should drop it.

It turns out that the FBI was lying. This long piece in The Federalist chronicles the long saga of trying to get that information from the government. Why the government would be hiding any information about a domestic crime that occurred thirty years ago is a question that can only have one answer. It is not as if there could be top-secret information in such a case. According to the story, the main reason the FBI is hiding this data is they were lying all along about John Doe #2.

At the time, it was not unreasonable for people to accept that the claims about another suspect were simply a mistake. After all, whenever a big event happens, there are all sorts of rumors circulating in the media. Most people at the time accepted that the media was biased and sloppy, but they trusted the FBI. Thirty years on and no one in their right mind trusts the FBI or the media. Decades of lies and many examples of framing innocent people will do that.

Just as important, we now have lots of examples where the FBI used informants or embedded agents to entrap people by tricking them into committing crimes or talking about committing crimes. Under Obama, the FBI helped sell weapons to the Mexican drug cartels, who used those weapons to kill Americans. Under Biden they tricked a bunch of dupes into the Whitmer kidnapping caper. Of course, the FBI tried to overturn the 2016 presidential election.

Considering what we know now, reasonable people are reasonable to wonder if there was not something similar happening with the Oklahoma bombing. The initial reports of a second man in the truck, then the denials and now the maximum effort to conceal evidence of the second man look a lot like how the government handled the Ray Epps situation after January 6th. Given the pattern, John Doe #2 was most likely an informant or an embedded agent.

Another curious thing about this case is that McVeigh was executed quickly, which does not happen in the United States. His trial started in April of 1997, and he was executed in June of 2001, the first federal execution in 38 years. Terry Nichols has been squirreled away in the prison system. The media makes no effort to reach him. Michael Fortier agreed to testify against McVeigh and Nichols in exchange for a reduced sentence and immunity for his wife. They both went into witness protection.

The behavior of the Feds in this case also looks like their behavior in the Enrique “Kiki” Camarena case in the 1980’s. He was a DEA agent who was allegedly kidnapped by the drug cartels, but was most likely assassinated by the CIA, because he learned about the drug running and arms shipment to the Contras. It turns out that the American government was helping the Mexican cartel ship cocaine into the United States in exchange for help funding the Contras.

Of course, what we are seeing with the Oklahoma City Bombing case fits the pattern going back generations. The government is still fighting to hide Kennedy material, despite orders to release it. The Epstein material should have been released long ago, but it will never be released, mostly out of spite. Anything damaging to the government was destroyed long ago. In case after case we see that the government prefers to conceal rather than disclose, as a matter of policy.

There is that other pattern at work here as well. That is where the FBI creates crimes so they can then use them to promote their brand to the American public and extract more cash and privileges from Congress. At this point, it seems like the only thing the FBI does is lure people into criminal conspiracies. There are 38,000 people employed by the FBI and most of them are probably on social media trying to bait people into going along with a plot that the FBI can then solve.

It is why people are right to assume that the reason the FBI is blocking the disclosure of information about John Doe #2 is that like so many of their capers, this is one that spiraled out of control. McVeigh and Nichols were willing dupes that the FBI was happy to manipulate, but they also turned out to be clever and willing to actually go through with the caper before the feds could put the brakes on it. That is the generous interpretation of events. It could be worse than that.

Given what has been revealed just in the last ten years, the political class should be united in their desire to disband the FBI. There is no appetite for even mild reforms, as we see happening now. Trump put Kash Patel in charge, not because he will change the agency, but simply to prevent them from launching another coup against him like they did the first time. Trump’s “solution” to the FBI problem is to put thumbless idiots in charge of it.

Just as we saw last week with the financial markets in response to Trump’s very mild changes in tariff policy, the inability to address the problem with the secret police is another example of how it may be too late. The secret police were allowed to turn into this monster that is now bigger than its supposed master. Instead of the secret police serving the political class, the political class serves the secret police. This is another sign that we have blown past the point of no return.

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 Russell Brand and what his case suggests about the state of the law, a post about using AI as an editorial team for the posts on this site, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the questions rarely asked regarding the ongoing American crisis is whether we have passed the point where reform is possible. Few want to consider that possibility for obvious reasons. If reform through the regular political process is no longer possible, then only unpleasant alternatives remain. One of those alternatives is some form of collapse. Like Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, America may be headed over the cliff with nothing to prevent it.

Last week, we caught a possible glimpse of the answer. Trump rolled out his tariff regime, and the stock markets went wild. It was not just a global selloff; volatility was off the charts, which is worse than the decline itself. A steady selloff occurs during a correction when markets are overbought. A chaotic, erratic decline signals panic setting in among the algorithms. It means their code cannot interpret the conditions they are programmed to use for trading.

Just as things began to stabilize, the bond market started to “get the yips”, as Trump noted on Thursday. No one in the mass media understands this, so they kept claiming the bond market crashed, which is far from accurate. The issue was that market players were dumping treasuries. It is unclear why, for instance, the Japanese central bank was selling treasuries. This uncertainty is just as worrisome as the actual dumping, so everyone was spooked.

Typically, the reason for dumping treasuries is a liquidity issue, either in the system as a whole or in a segment of it. In this case, the consensus is that hedge funds were raising cash due to the market decline. That could be true, but it is also possible the basis trade was unraveling. This is when hedge funds bet on tiny changes in treasury yields—a major way they generate profits within the system.

Here is how it works: Imagine you believe the value of an asset like a treasury will decline over the next six months. You hold this asset, but it is collateral for another transaction. You cannot sell it now, so you agree to sell it in the future at the current price rather than the market price at that time. If the price surges, you lose potential profits when the contract expires, but if the price drops as expected, you are protected from those losses.

There is much more to it, but that is the gist, and this happens across markets for everything, even treasuries, which have been very stable. Even earning a tiny percentage on these transactions can net millions for a fund handling tens of billions in trades. In fact, the financial system relies on clever quants coding models to exploit these small discrepancies between current and future prices to generate wealth.

When Trump’s tariffs caused this system to go haywire, triggering a panicked demand for cash, he had no choice but to back off. It was not that the bond market revolted due to a philosophical disagreement with the policy. Rather, this massive system is a house of cards that cannot tolerate even minor disruptions. Trump’s tariff regime should not have caused chaos, but the fact that it did suggests even small changes are no longer viable.

That is not the end of it. The central bank could mitigate this by injecting enough cash to resolve the liquidity issue. In fact, it can inject enough to counter deliberate revolts. You cannot beat the Fed. This should have happened last week, but Jerome Powell either refused to act or was too inept to grasp the situation. He has been the worst Fed chair since Arthur Burns, so incompetence is a strong possibility.

That said, the Fed held an emergency meeting just before Trump announced his tariff plan last week, likely in response to it. Given the Federal Reserve’s composition and its attitudes toward the American public, it is possible they intended to undermine the process. The Bank of England toppled Liz Truss’s Tory government, so it is not unthinkable. The head of the Bank of England at the time was Mark Carney, who is now the dictator of Canada.

This would imply that normalizing the American economy is no longer possible, at least not through standard political processes, because the entrenched interests profiting from the system will not allow it. That is what we will discover in the next ninety days as the Trump team navigates this challenge. Bessent has suggested they will use this time to strike individual deals with countries rather than unilaterally imposing a tariff schedule.

Of course, they could also have Jerome Powell killed, thus sending a message to the parasite class that they must fall in line or else. They never take no for an answer, so this approach never works. The Russians had to execute a lot of oligarchs before the rest finally fell in line with the new program. Falling in line usually meant fleeing the country with their cash. Maybe it does not have to come to that with the bankers, but last week was not a positive sign.

What the events of last week show is that normalizing American economic policy is not going to be easy within the current process. It also suggests it may not be possible without radical approaches to implementation. We may have reached the point where even with enough coercion, the system cannot be reformed. We may have blown past the point of no return as far as the political and economic order, so what lies ahead is chaos no matter what is done.

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

• 01m51s VDARE fights on
• 07m04s Lydia’s appeal
• 17m50s Tariffs, uh
• 23m25s Atheism news
• 24m38s Fascists suppress voters
• 26m32s Wonders of Nature
• 27m30s Signoff with The Four Lads

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a snippet from Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 played on the organ at Derby cathedral, and this is your combatively genial host John Derbyshire with some comments on the passing scene.

The format this week is somewhat different, the first two segments dominant.

I can already hear the grumbling. “Hey, Derb, you’re supposed to be a conservative. Why do you go messing up your format like this?”

To make a point, that’s why. The particular point I want to make is the sinister wickedness of state lawfare against private individuals and associations.

Sure, that point has been made often, including by me. It can’t be made often enough, though. Even with an enlightened administration in Washington, D.C. those individuals and those associations still face massed legions of left-wing and corrupt judges and state officials striving to extinguish our liberties. Fight! Fight!

02 — VDARE fights on.     I’m sure you know that this podcast used to be hosted by VDARE.com, along with numerous written articles and reviews I posted there. That happy state of affairs ended last July.

VDARE.com was the internet voice of the VDARE Foundation, set up in 1999 by Peter Brimelow to promote patriotic immigration reform as sketched out in his 1995 best-seller Alien Nation. That book’s subtitle was, “Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster.”

Common sense was a keynote of VDARE.com. We said aloud what everyone knows to be the case: politely and soberly, backed up with good data when necessary.

To be sure, common sense is a slippery concept, sometimes scoffed at by the wise. The philosopher Bertrand Russell is often quoted as having said, quote: “Common sense is the metaphysics of savages,” end quote. In point of fact that’s not quite what he said. But hey, that’s the kind of thing for intelligent discussion of which we go to websites like VDARE.com.

Well, that’s where we go if the powers of the State allow us to. The judicial powers of New York State, an army of left-wing activist state judges headed up by anti-white, anti-American, ferociously anti-Trump state Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt, have decided that citizens should no longer be allowed to go to VDARE.com for commentary on immigration and other social issues.

Since they were unable to find any instances where the VDARE Foundation or any of its employees had broken a law, they proceeded by lawfare, with endless subpoenas for paperwork and — as you will shortly hear — grueling KGB-style interrogations of VDARE associates or ex-associates.

To defend themselves the VDARE Foundation had to hire lawyers, which is of course expensive. After a couple of years it had got so expensive, VDARE had to cut back on their activities; hence the de-platforming of VDARE.com last July.

Yet still the assaults come, and still the lawyers have to be paid. If at last they can’t be paid the left-dominated New York courts will probably give Ms. Lardbutt a summary judgement. That will let her seize VDARE’s assets: the domain name, the archives, perhaps even the Castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, where VDARE holds events. Our state Attorney General, a single lady with net worth “about $2.7 million,” is never loth to acquire out-of-state properties.

(Speaking of events at the castle, I have heard that VDARE would dearly like for there to be a conference there in the fall; but of course it depends on the Foundation being able to raise sufficient funds.)

I’m not myself much of a fund-raiser. However, last week Lydia Brimelow, Peter’s wife and President of the VDARE Foundation — a job she somehow manages to do while raising three beautiful young daughters — Lydia posted a fund-raiser at X which I strongly commend to your attention.

Lydia’s fund-raiser is quite long, but what it lacks in brevity it more than makes up for in eloquence and sincerity. I urge you please to listen or read all the way through, then respond appropriately to Lydia’s closing appeal.

I thank you on behalf of common sense, whatever Bertrand Russell said about it.

03 — Lydia’s appeal.

[Clip:  I’m Lydia Brimelow, President of the VDARE Foundation. There are moments rare and piercing when I recognize that what VDARE is going through is not just lawfare. It’s actually spiritual warfare.

For three years we have fought against New York’s witch-hunt against VDARE. For three years we’ve shielded the names of our writers and donors from Letitia James’s inquisition. And now, now we’re in the valley of the shadow.

Letitia James does not pursue us because of some legal technicality. She pursues us because she hates what we represent: the unbroken thread of American identity and the sacred right of a people to defend themselves as a nation.

For three years we have walked through this shadow — not as victims, but as witnesses: witnesses to how far this notorious persecutor of Donald Trump is willing to go to silence the truth, how eagerly she sacrifices justice at the altar of ideology.

For three years we have fought not just for ourselves but for our pseudonymous writers who trusted us with their identities, and our anonymous donors who supported our cause when it was dangerous to do so.

Letitia James doesn’t want VDARE’s money. She wants VDARE’s submission. She wants our silence. But most of all, and worst of all, she wants names. She wants the names of our writers; not for the sake of transparency but because she knows that a truth spoken anonymously still shakes the world. A truth attached to a name can be punished.

She wants our donors’ names; not for accountability but because she knows that courage is contagious unless she makes frightening examples of those who inspire it. At VDARE we’ve paid dearly for refusing to submit — over a million dollars in legal fees that could have been used to educate, to build, and to inspire. Years of our lives have been lost towards compliance, not creation, and we’ve been burdened with the knowledge that no matter what legal hoops we manage to jump through, she’ll just build new ones.

She won’t even let us leave. VDARE Foundation was incorporated in New York in 1999 — before anybody thought about lawfare, before anybody had even heard of Letitia James — and we are not allowed to leave without permission. It turns out New York is like Hotel California: You can check in, but checking out is impossible.

Peter and I have even been forced to hire personal lawyers: not because we’ve done anything wrong, but because — according to New York — even our attempts to house our young family can be treated as a conspiracy.

Let me be clear: Your donations go to fund VDARE’s writers and VDARE’s mission. What Peter and I have to face personally is our cross to bear; but it does go to show how far Letitia James is willing to go. Which is: all the way to our kitchen table.

If VDARE can’t continue to pay lawyers to defend our writers and donors, Letitia James could move to put VDARE in a receivership. What that would mean is that a court-appointed Receiver, or possibly Letitia James herself, would then completely control VDARE, the website, the domain, and all of our archives and records, including attorney-client privilege materials. It would mean that all the donors’ names and all of the writers’ names would be completely exposed. Unless you can help now, we may no longer be able to protect them.

And yet, I do not despair. In January my husband Peter Brimelow, who was the editor of VDARE.com, took me to President Trump’s Inauguration. We went to cheer ourselves up. And we needed cheering up after watching VDARE.com get destroyed in 2024. Peter and I watched the swearing-in from the auditorium at the Heritage Foundation. It was a nostalgic return for us because that’s where I was an intern when we first met twenty years ago.

We particularly loved seeing the J6 pardon. Peter and I did not attend the January 6th protests but VDARE did run the earliest debunking of the moral panic that ensued against those who did. The January 6th pardons were not political acts, they were a reckoning with truth, and for a moment I saw the scales of justice trembling toward balance.

And then the knife. A couple of days after those January 6th pardons Letitia James hauled in a former VDARE Foundation board member — a man who resigned in 2020 — and interrogated him in a windowless room in New York for five and a half hours, under oath. He was illegally ordered not to discuss it with us. No transcript, no recourse, just the slow and grinding pressure of the State.

Let me emphasize here: VDARE has not been charged with anything, let alone convicted. This is how they break you: not with a single blow but with a thousand cuts.

But here’s what she doesn’t understand. We’re not fighting against her, we’re fighting for the historic American nation. In our fight we have witnessed miracles. When twenty-one million people saw my story on Tucker Carlson it wasn’t just exposure. It was samizdat for the digital age. When lawyers and paralegals then appeared exactly when we needed them, saving us half a million dollars, they weren’t just volunteers, they were angels in disguise.

These are visible examples of the material difference that can be made when supporters like you choose to stand with VDARE. VDARE stands at a threshold. If we fall through, then Letitia James will erase us from history — not just VDARE but the very idea that patriots can resist and win. If we stand firm Letitia James will have to face her limits.

The regime’s weakness is not in its cruelty, it is in its dependence on our fear. Every donation, every forwarded email, is another brick pulled out of their foundation of lies. The rumors we hear of coming justice, of a reckoning for the lawfare machine, could soon become a reality. They haven’t really coalesced in a way that I can confidently mention them now, but it is interesting to note that before Donald Trump’s election there were no friendly rumors at all.

We have three immediate legal needs.

• Number One:  Overturn New York State’s one-thousand-dollar-a-day fine. This was imposed on us in a naked act of tyranny over a dispute with VDARE’s compliance. It’s not over anything that has to do with our management of the VDARE Foundation. The lawyers call it “a process crime,” meaning it wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for this investigation that Letitia James has thrown at us. We are appealing this fine.

• Number Two:  We have appealed our First Amendment case in the federal court. If this appeal is unsuccessful then we can take it to the U.S. Supreme Court where truth still has a chance.

• Number Three:  We want to file ethics complaints against Letitia James. It’s time to expose her lies to the courts. Letitia James’s habitual violation of ethical norms is an open scandal. A year ago Representative Elise Stefanik filed a 64-page complaint against Letitia James’s persecution of Donald Trump. We can match that. Letitia James as an officer of the court is not supposed to lie to judges, but she has lied to judges about VDARE, repeatedly. Ethical violations are a very serious matter. Notoriously Trump allies John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani are facing disbarment for supposed ethical violations while they were defending Donald Trump. But what Letitia James has done to VDARE is far more serious.

Before we can see any of these victories, though, we have to survive. Survival isn’t passive. It’s what our writers do when they post pseudonymously. It’s what our donors do when they give their money despite the risk. And it’s what I do every morning when I come into the office and face subpoena instead of building the American institution that I love.

The heat we feel now is a fire that they hope will consume us. Stand with us: not in the ashes but at the forge. See what strength we can temper. Please give generously. Every dollar shields our writers and donors from ruin. You can give online at www.GiveSendGo.com/VDARE or you can give offline by mailing your donation to VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield, CT 06759. All donations are fully tax-deductible and every dollar counts.

Also please share this message. Every forwarded email is a torch passed. VDARE can’t afford our email marketing services any more. We can’t send out mass emails. If you could share this with your friends, share it on social media, forward an email, mention it to somebody, call in to a podcast, write a blog, …

We rely on you, our supporters, and the true grass roots to alert the world to the fact that while immigration patriotism — VDARE’s true cause — may be winning the battle, VDARE itself has been left bleeding on the field.

And above all, pray without ceasing. This is a spiritual battle as much as a legal one and we must ask God to intervene here, where the losses are so concrete and the victories are still precarious.

The castle still stands and VDARE still lives. The hour is now. Thank you.]

04 — Tariffs, uh.     The news headliners this past few days have been all about tariffs. Where does Radio Derb stand on this?

Uh, nowhere very firmly. I don’t know much about Economics and am not ashamed to admit it. In fact I have argued previously in this podcast that Economics is a pseudoscience, not to be taken very seriously.

That opinion goes back to the early 1960s when I was just starting to form political opinions. Britain’s Prime Minister was a chap named Alec Douglas-Home, a sort of languid aristocratic character out of P.G. Wodehouse. He had once famously confessed that he tried to make sense of economic documents by doodling with matchsticks.

British voters, feeling that the head of their government ought to have some deeper understanding of Economics than that, in 1964 booted out the matchsticks man and replaced him with Harold Wilson. Wilson didn’t just know Economics, he’d taught it at Oxford University. Just the man to get the country back on the rails, right? Well, to quote myself from that previous piece, quote:

I wouldn’t say Wilson’s government was an economic disaster, but no-one thought it was an economic triumph. “Lackluster” pretty well describes it, with the devaluation of the pound sterling against the dollar in 1967 as a low point.

End quote.

So don’t come to me for sage words about Economics. I understand of course that governments have to raise revenue somehow, for pensions and armies and such. Tariffs, it seems to me, are a perfectly sensible way to raise it. Where income taxes are concerned, I’m inclined (especially at this time of year) to agree with the character in one of Robert A. Heinlein’s books who opines that, quote from memory: “Taxation is theft; income taxes are Grand Larceny.” End quote.

I have of course been following the commentary. My impression is that the pro-Trumpers have the better of the argument. I’ll admit, though, that that impression is colored by plain pro-Trump prejudice. The contrast with Sleepy Joe — you know: Sleepy, Lying, Corrupt Joe — is simply staggering.

With Trump we have a guy who’s actually been engaged with the mercantile world for decades: evaluating counterparties, deal-making, winning, losing, keeping your feet while riding the ice-floes of commerce. I guess he could be wrong; but when I listen to the opposition, I know for certain that their wrongness prospects are way higher.

Rather than expound any further on a subject I don’t know well, I’ll hand you off to the man himself. Here he was in a TV interview earlier this week.

[Clip:  People took advantage of our country and they ripped us off for a very … for decades. I’ve been thinking about this for decades.

I’ve been … If you ever saw me on television, I was young like these guys. And, er … Those were the good old days, I’ll tell you, Roger. But I was like these guys — young. And I was talking about it. Nothing, nothing changed and nothing was done about it.

Then I did it; in my first term I did it, and did it well. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China — and others — and I started the process.

But then we had a fix-up from the COVID mess, caused by China. We had a fix-up from that and we did a good job doing it. And when we handed back the reins after a rigged election, and when we handed back the reins, the stock market was higher than it was before COVID coming in.

So, y’know, we did a great job. But we didn’t have time to do the big things, which we’re doing now. And it’s like the patient is sick, you have to do surgery. The patient is very, very sick. And, er, Joe Biden handed us over a country that was in very serious trouble, economically and in every other way. They let China run away with things; they let other countries run away with things.

And maybe worst of all in a certain way is what they did at the border. We had people pouring into our country by the millions …]

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

Imprimis:  I don’t normally have anything to say about religion, but in last week’s podcast there was a segment about atheism.

If you yourself, listener or reader, are an atheist, I hope you found that segment interesting. One who did sent me a link to an event I hadn’t known about: American Atheists 2025 National Convention. The prospectus promises, quote:

[O]ne of the most diverse line-ups of speakers of any atheist, freethought, or secular convention, including politicians, poets, international secular activists, and many more.

End quote.

The event takes place in Minneapolis. The dates are April 17th to 20th; so if you haven’t signed up yet, better get on it. Godspeed!

Item:  Thursday the House of Representatives passed a bill, the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility Act, to require that states obtain proof of citizenship in person from people who are registering to vote. The vote was 220-208, just four Democrats voting aye.

Coming up to our nation’s 250th birthday and we still don’t require proof of citizenship for voters? That’s incredible: like not having any checks on blind people getting pilot’s licenses.

And the Act is not yet law. It still has to be voted on by the Senate. It’s not clear how that will go. There’s a 60-vote threshold for it to pass, but Republicans only have a 53-47 majority.

Democrats are passionately opposed to the Act, and we all know why. Their opposition is fortified by the fact that the Act doesn’t just stop illegal aliens from voting, it also requires states to remove them from existing voter rolls and allows American citizens to sue election officials that don’t follow the proof-of-citizenship requirements. Voter suppression! Fascist! Nazi Nazi Nazi!

Item:  My personal favorite headline of the week is from Discover magazine, headline: Tipsy Fruit Flies Are More Successful in Mating Than Their Sober Counterparts.

From the text of the story, quote:

Alcohol makes male fruit flies of the species Drosophila melanogaster sexier by stimulating the production of sex pheromones. As a result, male flies are more successful at mating after consuming certain amounts of alcohol.

End quote.

Isn’t Nature wonderful?

06 — Signoff.     That’s all I have, listeners and readers. Thank you as always for your time and attention, and please do whatever you can, if only by reposting, to help VDARE in the fight against Letitia Lardbutt.

For signoff music, a novelty song from 1953. I gave this song a passing mention in my column in the April issue of Chronicles magazine. I thought Radio Derb listeners, many of whom I am sure subscribe to Chronicles, might like to hear it.

The song comes with some historical background. The Middle Ages, as everyone knows, began on Saturday, September 4th, A.D. 476, when Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, handed in his lunch pail to Odoacer the Goth. The Middle Ages ended on Tuesday, May 29th, A.D. 1453 — “Terrible Tuesday” — when Turkish Sultan Mehmet II captured Constantinople and killed Constantine XI, last ruler of the Eastern Empire.

That’s a pretty good innings for a historical epoch — nearly 977 years — so let’s hear it for the Middle Ages.

Look at that latter date, though: A.D. 1453. The year nineteen fifty-three was exactly five hundred years on from that, the semi-millennial. If that wasn’t a cue for a novelty song, I don’t know what could have been. So here were the Four Lads singing “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).”

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

I thought I would take a break from the money game this week to address an issue that comes up in the email from time to time. That issue is my ideology. Whenever I comment upon ideology, almost always in a negative way, I get comments suggesting I should explain my ideology, rather than just criticize others. Certain nationalists take issue with being called ideologues for some reason.

The trouble with this is I am not an ideologue, but I thought that might make for a good show, so that was the plan this week. Then as I was recording it, I started having issues with my voice, like I am getting a cold. That threw me off my game and the show wandered around a bit. I would have scrapped it and started over, but I was not sure if the pipes would make it, so I stuck with the first pass.

Realism and pragmatism are much abused terms in American politics. The people we call the right often claim to be on the side of realism, but that is not so. They are just a slower version of those they claim to oppose. The people we call the left used to love the term pragmatism, despite being fanatics. There is a good chance they dust off that language in time for the next election.

Realism and pragmatism are not the opposite of ideology. Ideology does not have an opposite unless you consider the absence of ideology as the opposite. No society is devoid of a moral framework, which either turns up in the dominant religion of the people or as a set of customs and traditions. Ideology is an attempt to replace both religion and tradition with a new moral framework.

The realist understands that ideology is a shabby replacement for religion and tradition, no matter how muted the goals. Pragmatism demands that any political program operate within the limits of the organic moral order of the people. The realist sees things as they are and wonders why, while ideologues dream of things that can never be and demands we explain why not. He never accepts the answer.

That is the show this week. The first half is the problem with ideology, but specifically the American ideology. I even talk about the L. Ron Hubbard of the American ideology, Leo Strauss a bit. One of these days I will do a show on Strauss, but I do not find him as interesting as his followers find him. The rest of the show is why I think I naturally reject ideology. Not a great show, but you get what you pay for.

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
• Ideology
• Why I am not an ideologue
• Realism

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Warren Buffet famously said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” The point of this metaphor is that in economic downturns you learn who has been taking excessive risks. Another way of putting it is that in easy times, everyone can be a hero or a genius. This has been the case for the American financial system for over thirty years. As long as credit money kept expanding, everyone had a chance to look like a financial genius.

This explains the prevalence of people in the financial media who somehow get everything wrong but maintain their status as experts. The most notable of this sort is Jim Cramer who has made a career out of being outlandishly wrong. Paul Krugman wrote a column for years about the economy, despite never being right about it. These are two famous examples, but the commentariat is littered with these types. As long as the arrow kept going up, being wrong was good money.

The trouble is that the entire financial industry is built on this premise. Being wrong comes with no penalty, because wrongness rarely comes with a cost. Sure, the MegaBrain Capital Fund might not perform as well as random guessing, but because the arrow always goes up, even the bad bets pay off. This also means anyone spouting random gibberish can present himself as an expert. Tens of thousands of mortgage payments, maybe hundreds of thousands, rest on this assumption.

The main reason for this, of course, is the United States has been both the global mint and the global bank since the 1980’s. You can see it in the markets. From 1985 to the present, the DJIA has increased by about nine percent per year. That includes the many busts that were backstopped by the global bank. From 1965 to 1985 the markets suffered a long bear market, after the long twenty-year bull market that kicked off after the end of the Second World War.

Another way to think about it is the American stock market boomed by about ten percent per year when the rest of the world was in rubble. Europe was literally in rubble after the war. Much of it was controlled by communists. China was a feudal, agrarian society trying to implement Marxist-Leninism. Japan only stopped glowing after that long bull market ended. In other words, the American economy and the equities markets had a great run when there was no global competition.

Somehow, as if by magic, equities had a run like the post war decades, despite the hollowing out of the economy. The run has also been longer. The twenty-year post-war boom ran out of steam even though Asia was not online yet, just because Europe was starting to recover. We have experienced a forty-year run while at the same time the American economy transitioned from inventing things and making them to driving each other around in Ubers.

It turns out that if the mint can make as much money as it likes, being the only mint on earth anyone values, and they give what they mint to the only banking system anyone values, the people in this system can do no wrong. For decades it has been like being at a casino with an endless line of credit. Not only that, but the dealers would also occasionally give you some insider information on the decks. It is not hard to look like a genius when you are playing with house money.

That world is coming to an end. The shock therapy we are seeing is not just a bluff to get better tariff deals. It is in anticipation of the fact that the world is shifting from where the dollar dominates all global trade to one where local currency arrangements will often be preferred over the dollar. If you want to buy from China, it will mean doing so in their currency, not dollars. The same is true for other major trading countries. The Russians have been the proof of concept for this approach.

This does not mean the dollar collapses or people revert to carrying sacks of gold while riding to town on their donkey. The primitive use of shiny bits of metal as currency only comes back if we enter a dark age. What is happening instead is a change in how the world views dollars and more importantly, dollar denominated debt. That means the days of unlimited credit money is coming to a close. The dollar and dollar denominated debt will reconnect with the American economy.

This is all bad news for the flim-flam men who dominate the financial services industry as it means being wrong once again comes with risk. The bad bets from MegaBrain Capital Fund no longer just mean a lower return. Those bad bets now put the firm in jeopardy and get the smart guys fired for making those bad bets. Swimming naked will now come with the risk of the tide going out and staying out. Like the fox in the hen house, risk is returning to the money game.

What is about to happen to the financial sector is like what we see happening with the government sector. The tens of thousands of people who do not do anything necessary will be let go, and that includes the experts in the media. In a world where risk is real, no one will tolerate a television clown dispensing bad advice, unless he is in a fright wig and wearing floppy red shoes. The clowns will back in the circus while the serious men do the serious work.

This is the end of America’s long holiday from reality. Playing make believe in government, finance or the media is no longer possible. Making money will not be about finding clever ways to get that sweet sweet credit money, but about inventing things, improving things and making things. That will not leave a lot of room for diversity experts or chattering skulls. Those people can be put to work in the new factories and repair shops, perhaps sweeping the floors.

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 many things to spring forth from the political froth over the last decade is the level of coordination in the mass media. It was often clear that media activists were coordinating to create their preferred spin, but only with the help of conservative chattering skulls like Rush Limbaugh, who would create montages of media outlets repeating the same catch phrases. Social media now provides this service as the algorithms aggregate the stories and the repetition is too obvious to ignore.

Another thing that was not obvious is that many of the opinion makers, now called influencers, are in on the scam too. Often, they are paid by marketing companies to promote a viewpoint. The recent “soda money” scam where the soda industry paid a bunch of Twitter influencers to promote the health benefits of carbonated sugar drinks is an egregious, but typical example. The truth is, much of what the influencers do is paid for by marketing companies.

This is not just about moving product. The Israel lobby tried to secretly assemble a collection of right-wing influencers for a session with Bibi Netanyahu. Guys like Tim Pool were brought in so they could ask questions and be given instructions. Instead of paying them with cash, they get rewarded with access. This is an old trick that has worked on the media since forever. Look for Tim Pool and other famous influencers to sound remarkably like the ADL.

Payola is nothing new. In the golden age of popular music, record companies sent bagmen to big radio stations so the disc jockeys would play their songs. In the golden age of conservative politics, pens for hire were everywhere. Ben Domenech, one of the founders of The Federalist and RedState, was caught taking money from Malaysia to promote the interests of that country in his columns. Many other conservative pundits were caught up in that scandal.

This feature of the media exploded with the proliferation of digital media and the dominance of social media. It is also much easier to spot. The other day, a company hired by Ukraine did the soda money gag. This time it was a bunch of paid Ukraine supporters on Twitter repeating word for word the same erroneous claims about Chinese soldiers fighting on the side of Russia. The campaign was quickly suspended when it was too obvious to ignore.

It is not just the new school internet chattering skulls taking what used to be called payola, but also the old school types. This post by Victor Davis Hanson regarding the war in Ukraine has all the marks of pay-for-post. It has the typical neocon claims about the Russian army on the brink of collapse and the Russian economy in tatters, two stock bits of the neocon marketing campaign since 2022. Anyone paying the least bit of attention can easily spot those lines as agitprop.

The big tell that this is possibly paid opinion making is the claim that the proposed peace plan will create a DMZ along the border and the Russians will be forced to retreat back to their old border. Not only is this a fabrication, it is total nonsense. There is no such peace proposal and the only people claiming so are the neocons. They have been floating this idea since their 2023 offensive ended in catastrophe. Rather than accept defeat, they want a break to rebuild and rearm.

There are other neocon talking points sprinkled around the text. The claims about Russian losses are the most obvious. There is the crazy claim that Putin is trying to reassemble the old Soviet Union. There is also the mandatory criticism of Trump “art of the deal” negotiating style. Imagine Bill Kristol as a pinata and once he is busted open, what tumbles out are the main neocon talking points. Kids then took those and assembled them into that post for Mr. Hanson.

The Ukraine war has been highly useful in understanding the manipulation that lies behind the opinion makers. Whenever you see the phrase “full scale invasion of Ukraine”, you know you are dealing with a pundit paid by neocons, who are convinced this is powerful rhetoric. “Putin’s invasion” is another example. Normal people working at honest analysis do not use that language. These phrases are emotive signals to the neocon cult indicating a fellow traveler.

In fairness to Hanson, he is getting up there in years and he probably relies on an assistant to write his posts. American Greatness does not pay its writers, so no one can blame any of them for doing the minimum. It is a common practice for bigshot writers to rely on staff. Many of their books are written and assembled by assistants. The bigshot writer acts as the supervising editor. This is how Doris Kearns Goodwin got in trouble over plagiarism claims in one of her books.

That may be the case here. The person tasked with writing these posts simply relied on the copy provided from the neocon email list. On the other hand, Hanson has always been tight with the neocons. He has parroted their propaganda for years, so he could simply be doing the same in that post. That is the point though. In this age of zero trust, no one can be sure if it is honest error, ideological derangement, payola, or sloppy work from an old man nearing the end.

That is the world created by decades of media mendacity. As citizens trying to be as informed as possible, we find ourselves in a wilderness of lies. The “objective reporting” is all narrative storytelling to promote an agenda or a set of moral claims. Much of it is invented out of whole cloth. Analysis is often just payola, but much of it is part of a hidden agenda or a conspiracy. In a world where you cannot accept a man’s opinion as his opinion, you cannot trust 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!

In the fullness of time, we may look at the sale of the NBA franchise, the Boston Celtics, as the bell that rang at the peak of the financialized economy. The team sold for a record-breaking $6.1 billion to a group led by billionaire William Chisholm, the managing partner of Symphony Technology Group. That firm has nothing to do with music or technology. It is a private equity firm. The deal still must be approved by the league and must go through the usual legal process.

The team is one of the crown jewels of the league, so it makes some sense that it commands the highest value. Since the beginning of the NBA, the Boston Celtics have been something like the New York Yankees—winning numerous titles and featuring some of the game’s greatest players. Wyc Grousbeck, whose family leads the ownership group that bought the team in 2002 for $360 million, made, on average, thirteen percent per year on his investment in the franchise.

By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about six percent a year on average, accounting for several crashes along the way. Median home prices in the United States have increased at about the same rate over that time. Some areas, like the Washington, D.C. area, have seen even larger jumps. Given that official inflation numbers are roughly half that figure, it shows that assets, even common ones like houses and equities, have experienced a steady increase.

Now, a golden rule of life is that a thing is worth what someone will pay for it, but value is supposed to be linked to reality. The value of a business, for example, is tied to the value of its assets, its cash flow, and future profitability. A buyer expects to recoup his investment over a specific period, which means the business either has profits or assets that can be sold for a profit. The Boston Celtics are a business, so does that mean the business is worth $6 billion?

The answer is no, not in the conventional sense. Most sports franchises are break-even businesses, with many losing money. They often have negative cash flow due to player salaries, which means they carry a lot of debt. The NBA is experiencing a sharp downturn in its popularity, with television ratings down 60% from the peak. The Celtics do not own their arena, so they lack that asset to supplement their business. Most likely, the franchise is a money-loser by conventional standards.

Of course, the new owners do not care about the business side. They are billionaires who want to be in the billionaire club. It is as much about status as it is about business, but the business side still matters. They no doubt look at the massive inflation in franchise values and think they will have no trouble flipping this property for a nice profit once they get bored with it. In other words, they assume the asset inflation we have seen since the 1980s will continue.

This makes sense in the context of the current American economic model, the one Donald Trump is determined to replace with a new model. The economy that emerged in the 1980s is based on unlimited, cheap credit money that gets plowed into assets like equities, startups, and frivolous things like modern art and sports franchises. William Chisholm is a billionaire, despite never having invented or built anything, because he is highly skilled in the legerdemain of modern finance.

Another aspect of the new economy explains why certain assets, like sports franchises and some tech sectors, have outperformed houses and stocks. The NBA is financed, in large part, by taxes it levies on every household. These taxes come in the form of cable and television bills. If you have a television service, you are paying for all those games you don’t watch. Channels like ESPN are bundled into the bill, and they are a significant part of it. That money subsidizes the NBA.

If, tomorrow, everyone could simply pay for what they watch, like software as a service, sports channels like ESPN would go bankrupt within a month. Right behind them would be all the sports leagues. The reason? Sports networks would lose about 80% of their revenue. That means ESPN could not spend billions on live sports content, and without that revenue, the leagues would collapse. That $6 billion sale of the Celtics would look like the worst bet in history.

The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. The NBA is one example where the quality of the product has been disconnected from its financial success. In a true market economy, the owners of the Celtics would struggle to give it away, because the NBA, as an entertainment product, is in steep decline.

If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.

The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital. It is not just that we cannot borrow more money. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system.

That is why the sale of the Celtics may be the bell ringing at the peak of the massive asset bubble that is the American economy. The absurdity of it should offend even the most zealous believer in the transactional economy. In a country with serious problems that require elite investment, watching rich parasites plow billions into a human flea circus brings revolutionary thoughts to mind. It may be the last grotesque gesture of an economic model that has run its course.

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 an old post I did on Vladimir Putin as the antidote to Peter the Great, a post about the Amazon series The Bondsman, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, Trump stunned the world by following through on what he has been promising since he came down the escalator in 2015. He imposed across-the-board tariffs on every country in the world—except Russia. The reason Russia was excluded is that they are already sanctioned to the maximum. The tariff knob does not go past one hundred, so they were not on the list. Every other country was hit with a tariff, even Israel, which should cause some people to rethink things.

This set off the Great Trump Stock Market Crash, which promises to continue this week as the rest of the world responds to the new world order. The old trading models no longer work, so the default fallback in these conditions is cash. The quants were working feverishly last week to update their models in order to find the bargains that will inevitably be sitting there, waiting for the lucky. The smart money thinks the floor is a twenty percent correction, followed by stability.

The yesterday men and the crazies are sure this is the Great Depression, because their history of the world starts in the 1930s. It is a stylized history, such that every modern event can be jammed into the 1930s, the 1960s, or the 1980s. Since they are sure Trump is secretly Hitler, this must be the 1930s—even though we have witnessed many stock market corrections in the last thirty years. The COVID crash, the mortgage bubble, and the dot-com bubble are easy examples.

In reality, what we are seeing is the long-overdue return to normalcy, where American economic policy is aimed at benefiting the American people, rather than abstract concepts from economics departments. If Canada has tariffs on American goods, then the United States should have tariffs on Canadian goods—unless it can be shown that the American people benefit in some way from the imbalance. The same is true for every other country in the world.

One of the weird things about decades of American trade policy is that it has created the same sense of entitlement as government racial policy. Just as nonwhites think they are entitled to be near white people without conditions, the world thinks it has a right to access the American market without conditions. This is most obvious in Europe, which has taken this lopsided arrangement for granted. They have also assumed they are entitled to American defense, while doing nothing in return.

The logic behind this arrangement has always been nonsense—but people love to believe in nonsense, especially their own. We see this with the free trade crowd, who are claiming tariffs will only harm the American people. If that were true, then the rest of the world should have been miserable for the last thirty years. Further, if that were true, then the rest of the world now has a chance to usher in a golden age for their people by eliminating their tariffs instead of raising them.

The truth of the matter is that all economic policy is about trade-offs—especially in global trade. This is why it is called trade, rather than “free.” Having a tariff-free relationship with Canada could make sense if the Canadian government could be trusted, as the American and Canadian economies are so similar. The same is not true for Mexico or Bangladesh. Trade is never just about money—it is also about culture and the national interests of the trading countries.

Of course, what we are seeing is not really about trade so much as it is about getting the American financial house in order. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary and architect of the Trump economic policy, has made this clear. Normalizing American trade relations is just one arrow. Another is the mass reorganization of government that kicked off in January. For the first time in the life of anyone reading this, the size and scope of government will be reduced.

Another arrow is the changes in the tax code that are slowly working their way through both houses of Congress. The Senate passed its version of spending and tax cuts, so now it is on to the House. What is shaping up is a two-pronged approach: one is to put into law the cuts made by the DOGE boys, and the other is a radical revamping of the tax code to reflect the new economic approach. Removing taxes on tips and overtime, for example, is part of the Senate model.

What we are seeing is the most radical alteration to the American economic model since the 1980s. The reason for it is that the old model is unsustainable. As Bessent pointed out, there is a limit to borrowing. For a long time, the American model relied on creating unlimited credit money in the banking system and massive federal borrowing. We have reached the limits of this model. Now, that model threatens the integrity of the American economy, so changes must be made.

More important are the changes in how we think and talk about the economy. For the longest time, the economy has been treated as a god. Americans were expected to tolerate anything to please it. If the economy demanded Haitian cannibals in your town, you had to accept it. If the economy demanded that the quality of your hand tools decline, you just lived with it. If the economy required you to work two jobs to make ends meet, then you did it. The economy was a remorseless god.

This sort of thinking makes sense to an alien overclass that sees the United States as an opportunity to be exploited. It does not make sense if the ruling elite feels a connection and obligation to the people. Shifting from the old transactional model of economics to a nationalistic model requires a new language. Simply pointing at a graph that trends upward is no longer enough. The political class will now have to possess some economic literacy.

It is too soon to know if these changes can make it through Congress. The winners under the old exploitative model will not go quietly. No one knows if the American public will tolerate the pain that must come with the transition. It is not all bad news, though, so the pain may be limited. Energy costs are falling—crude is under sixty dollars a barrel. This could tame inflation enough for the Fed to cut rates. Low taxes and cheap energy will go a long way toward cushioning the transition.

In the end, Bessent is correct. America cannot continue to create credit in the financial system and borrow trillions to hire government workers. We either have an orderly transition back to a normal economy, or we have a disorderly transition. The name for that is collapse—and that is vastly worse than a stock market correction. This is the reason the economic elites are backing this move. They know that the people who suffer the most from failure are the elites.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m04s Jared spreads terror
• 06m04s Atheism goes woke
• 16m53s Lawfare all over
• 22m13s Human rights lunacy
• 32m59s The Scopes centenary
• 33m52s Civil war? Nah
• 35m18s It is so flat!
• 36m27s Signoff with Maria

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Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.    And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. That was a fragment of Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 in the big band version, and this is your sensitively genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week’s news.

To begin with, a couple of segments on the culture.

02 — Jared spreads terror.     On March 27th my dear friend Jared Taylor, the race realist proprietor of the American Renaissance website, addressed students at Colorado Mesa University, a public university in Grand Junction, Colorado, at the invitation of a student club.

The event had of course been arranged in advance. I’ll just quote here from Jared’s long March 31st post on X. Quote:

The first students heard about it was on March 7th, when university president John Marshall sent an 800-word statement to the entire campus. He agonized over [inner quote] “the most difficult and important test CMU has faced when it comes to free speech,” [end inner quote] but explained that the First Amendment is “sacred,” adding that [inner quote] “our task is to empower you to pursue truth.” [end inner quote] He called my views “vile” and “abhorrent,” but told students, [inner quote] “[I]t’s the opportunity of your life … to carefully deconstruct his dehumanizing ideas.” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

Is that actually the voice of an adult male American, president of a university? How has he concluded that Jared’s views are vile, abhorrent, and dehumanising? By a three-minute scan of Jared’s Wikipedia page, probably.

On that subject, though — I mean the subject of University President John Marshall — Jared is, as he always is, the perfect gentleman. Jared is highly intelligent, well-read, well-traveled, and scrupulously well-mannered. He picks no-one’s pocket, breaks no-one’s leg, and keys no-one’s Tesla.

Here he was being interviewed the day after the event by a guy from the university TV station.

[Clip:  Interviewer — President Marshall, here in this community, has actually drawn quite a bit of criticism for even allowing you to come onto campus where some have said you should not have been allowed because of your views and your ideologies, and yet because of freedom of speech and his views on freedom and speech, he allowed that to occur.

Is there anything that you would actually still commend him or credit him for that in any manner, at least, on that level?

Jared — Certainly. In a way, President Marshall was in a tight spot. He apparently believes in the First Amendment. And as a matter of fact there are Supreme Court precedents according to which a publicly-supported university — which CMU is — does not have the right to draw a line and say “these opinions are absolutely unacceptable. You could have made a court case to force him to let me on the campus. He may or may not be aware of that.

But the fact that he stood firm and he said “We believe in freedom of speech” — in fact he called it “sacred” — yes, I commend him for that.]

What that interviewer called Jared’s “ideologies” are, as Jared explained later in the interview, race realism and white advocacy. He believes that races are biological realities, as they surely are. The foundational text of modern biological science has the word “races” in its subtitle. And Jared believes that white people have the right to speak up, politely but firmly, for their collective interests, a thing that nonwhites everywhere believe about their own rights.

That such a person should be the focus of furious controversy at an institution of higher education is a sad commentary on the state of our civilization.

03 — Atheism goes woke.     I gave an oblique mention to Charles Darwin just there. That stirred some long-sleeping memories.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing for National Review, the “Intelligent Design” movement was still going strong, scoffing at the idea that living creatures evolve over many generations from one form to another. Every so often I had to arm-wrestle with I.D. proponents from organizations like the Discovery Institute.

This difference of opinion — loosely tagged as “Darwinism” versus “creationism” — was a real major split within the conservative movement. Politically, creationists were a subset of the Religious Right. National Review being a conservative magazine, they had some influence there. I was occasionally snubbed at the magazine’s events by fellow conservatives who considered Darwinism a form of treason to the cause.

Just twenty years ago, February 2005, National Review published a column in which I scoffed at Intelligent Design. The Discovery Institute, which is based in Seattle, flew a platoon of their big names over to New York for a meeting with National Review editors and staff, including of course me. We spent a whole afternoon kicking the issue around; mainly in a good-natured way, but of course nobody’s mind was changed.

Two years later, in May 2007, these two factions within conservatism, Darwinists and creationists, locked horns at a conference organized by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. There were two principals on each side of the argument: for creationism, political scientist John G. West and Economist George Gilder, both from the Discovery Institute; and for Darwinism, political scientist Larry Arnhart and ink-stained wretch John Derbyshire from National Review. The New York Times wrote up the event — the only time my name has ever appeared in their news pages, I think. Quote from their report, quote:

[T]he tension between the proponents of intelligent design and of evolution was occasionally on display. When Mr. Derbyshire described himself as a “lapsed Anglican,” which he compared to “falling out of a first-floor window,” Mr. Gilder piped up, [inner quote] “Did you fall on your head?” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

A year before that, in 2006, academic biologist Jerry Coyne had started his blog titled Why Evolution is True; three years after that he published a book with the same name. The blog is still going strong.

“Strong” actually doesn’t begin to describe it. Today’s post — April 4th 2025 — runs to eleven thousand words with thirty-two images (both still and moving) three charts or maps, and one four-panel cartoon. It’s not just idle ranting, either: nearly a thousand of those words, and one of the charts, is given over to the tariffs issue. (Jerry is skeptical.)

The guy is 75 years old. How on earth does he do it? I can only watch and envy.

Politically, Coyne is on the libertarian left. He’s of Jewish ancestry and a keen Zionist (although not a Cohen), but regards all religion as false. For a long time he was a director on the honorary board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), a longstanding atheist organization headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin.

Then four months ago — December 29th last year — Coyne resigned from the FFRF. The cause of his resignation was an essay published the previous month, November, by Kat Grant, a fellow at the FFRF, arguing forcefully that biological sex is an illusion: that, quote, “A woman is whoever she says she is.” End quote.

Coyne asked to be allowed a rebuttal. FFRF said okay, and posted a short piece he wrote titled: “Biology is not bigotry,” arguing for the reality of biological sex. The day after they posted it, however, they took it down, issuing a statement that the posting was an “error of judgment,” that it “does not reflect our values or principles,” and that it had caused “distress.”

Coyne resigned, along with two other big-name atheists: Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has, in other words, gone woke. The woke ideology has captured American atheism, or any rate its most prominent and long-established organization.

Monday this week Jerry Coyne published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal under the title “Losing My Nonreligion” He insists he didn’t pick that title. He’s still an atheist, just not a woke one. His Zionism should fit pretty well, as anti-Zionism seems to be settling in as a component of woke ideology.

In that Wall Street Journal op-ed Coyne argues that wokism, or at least transgenderism, now exhibits the very same features he objects to in religion. I’ll give you a longish quote. Quote:

In many ways, transgender ideology is no different from the religious dogma the FFRF was founded to oppose. It insists on doctrines that are palpably untrue (“trans women are women”), engages in circular reasoning (“a woman is whoever she says she is”) and affirms mind/body dualism (“your self-concept is more real than your actual sex”).

It also makes anathema of heresy and blasphemy (tarring of dissenters as “transphobes”), attempts to silence critics who raise valid counter arguments, seeks to proselytize children in schools and excommunicates critics (J.K. Rowling is the best-known example). Like religious fundamentalists, proponents of these views have a fierce conviction that they’re morally correct and know what’s best for you and society. To disagree is to be immoral — sinful, you might say.

End longish quote.

So the wheel turns; so atheism morphs into a quasi-religion. I refer you to the quote from myself that follows quotes from George Orwell and A.E. Housman at the top of my home page.

Things used to be so much simpler. Atheist or believer; left or right; Jew or Gentile; if you knew where a person stood on one of those axes you could make a fairly safe guess where he was on the other two. Now people are all over the place.

I’m really having trouble figuring out the twenty-first century.

04 — Lawfare all over.     Boy, this lawfare has really taken off, hasn’t it? Populist nationalists are being lawfared all over the civilized world.

The latest casualty is Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s pop-nat party, National Rally and, according to the Reuters report, a a front-runner in polls for France’s 2027 election. Monday this week a French court found Mlle. Le Pen guilty of misusing EU funds. Now she can’t run in 2027 unless she gets and wins an appeal.

“Misusing EU funds,” eh? I wonder what she did with them. Wrote them in the wrong box on a spreadsheet, perhaps.

It’s happening all over Europe. The establishments there have been watching the way our own elites tried to deal with the menace of Donald Trump. They watched and learned; now they are employing their own judiciaries the way our rulers have been employing ours. U.S.A. shows the way!

Deep state operators from Bucharest to Barcelona have memorized the famous line supposedly uttered by Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s secret-police chief: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

In Barcelona, to be fair, the lawfare is just getting started. The pop-nat party of Spain is called Vox. We just learned this week that the official spokesman for the Vox Party is under police investigation. All right; he’s not the leader of the party, just the spokesman. They have to start somewhere, don’t they?

For what is this gent, whose name is José Antonio Fúster, for what is he being investigated? For misusing EU funds? No, way way worse than that.

Señor Fúster, at a press conference back in July 2023, had read out aloud a list of the first names of people arrested after heavy riots that month in Barcelona. The list went like this: Sabar, Omar, Nassim, Abdelkader, Salah, Salah, Younes, Karim, Jamil, Amir, Ali, Oussama, Hassan, … Sr. Fúster commented, quote: “Can you see any pattern? The only hatred is against Spaniards and their security.” End quote. The man’s an Islamophobe! [Scream.]

Yes, it’s lawfare all over against us pop-nats. That’s quite a revolution. Until recently — well within living memory — the law was a conservative profession. The wigs, the robes, the Latin tags, … conservatism enthroned, or enbenched.

Mr. O’Shaughnessy, has your client never heard the expression sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas?

My Lord: in the remote farming village in County Kilkenny where my client lives, they speak of little else.

Now, somehow, the benches have filled up with wokesters. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” says a rebel in one of Shakespeare’s plays. I don’t want to see anyone hurt, and in fact have met some very pleasant lawyers; but I think Western Civ. might get started on the road to improvement by burning down all the law schools.

05 — Human rights lunacy.     It’s not so much of an issue here, but an ongoing scandal in Britain is the gross mis-application of human rights law. This may, like so many other of Britain’s misfortunes, be a legacy of the evil Tony Blair regime; Blair’s wife is a human-rights lawyer.

There’s usually a particular case in this genre that everyone’s talking about over there, a particularly egregious case. The one that most recently snagged my attention was that of Klevis Bisha, a 39-year-old Albanian.

Mr. Bisha immigrated to Britain illegally at age 15 back in 2001. His asylum claim was rejected, but for reasons unclear he was allowed to stay anyway, and in 2007 granted British citizenship. He married another Albanian, they had three children, and at some point he embarked on a life of crime.

In 2007 his criminality got him jailed. It was found out that he had lied about his origins, telling the authorities he was from Yugoslavia. He was stripped of his citizenship and ordered deported.

However, there were issues with his son. We don’t know the lad’s name, but on appeal an immigration judge ruled that for Mr. Bisha to be deported while his son stayed in Britain would be an offense against human rights. But it would also go against the lad’s human rights for him to go to Albania with his Dad. Why? Here I’ll just quote from the report at GB News, quote:

An immigration tribunal ruled that it would be [inner quote] “unduly harsh” [end inner quote] for [the boy] to be forced to move to Albania with his father owing to his sensitivity around food. The sole example provided to the court was his distaste for the “type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad.”

End quote.

Did you get that? An illegal alien career criminal can’t be deported to Albania because his son doesn’t like Albanian chicken nuggets. To make him eat them would be an offense against his human rights. That’s how crazy the judges are over there in Shakespeare’s island.

What’s being perverted here is the idea of human rights — a proper and sensible idea, worthy of respect if correctly applied.

And human rights are of course truly, grossly, abused elsewhere. I’ve just been reading in the March edition of Literary Review an account of the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of 60-year-old Australian writer Yang Hengjun. Yang is of Chinese origins but an Australian citizen since 2003. Convicted of espionage, on what evidence we don’t know, he’s imprisoned under a suspended death sentence and has been badly ill-treated.

There you certainly have a case for human-rights organizations and human-rights lawyers, and there are of course numerous similar ones. I strongly support the principle of human rights, properly applied. The principle is not properly applied by allowing an illegal alien criminal to stay in your country because of his son’s taste in snack food.

Among those who have remarked on the case of Klevis Bisha is American novelist and journalist Lionel Shriver. Ms. Shriver — and yes, she’s a she, that “Lionel” notwithstanding — is best known as the author of the 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, from which a rather good movie was made.

Ms. Shriver was being interviewed for the YouTube channel Spiked. Here’s how it went, slightly edited. Her mentions of The Sun refer to a British tabloid newspaper.

[Clip:  Host — Another major area of this, completely unaccountable in a similar vein, is the asylum system, of course. And there’s been a string of absurdities that you’ve written about brilliantly, Lionel, recently …  What do you make of these kinds of cases? and have we just completely lost control?

Shriver — I’ve concluded that the only solution is to eliminate the asylum system altogether. I mean, I realize there’s an element of pie in the sky there, but I don’t mind planting the idea in some politician’s mind. Maybe eventually this stuff will get so insane — though it’s hard to imagine it getting more so — that someone will move on this.

I don’t even think that withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights is enough. You’d also have to get rid of the refugee convention. And I think that if you’re really going to start picking all this stuff out there are still other treaties that you’d have to withdraw from.

I question the entire system. I don’t understand why, as a legacy of World War Two, we necessarily — just because we feel badly that we weren’t welcoming enough for Jewish refugees, especially before the war — why does that mean that every Western country has to allow that every single person from anywhere in the world who sets a toe in their territory has immediate access to, if nothing else, the entire justice system, which they do not pay for or contribute to?

And here, that system has gone nuts in protecting the rights of the asylum-seeker. One thing that really knocks me back when I read these articles — you know, The Sun loves them — you know: someone can’t be deported because his kid doesn’t like foreign chicken nuggets. I mean, you couldn’t make this stuff up. As a fiction writer, it spares me a lot of bother. [All laugh.]

What really knocks me back is the number of appeals a lot of these people have. You know, it is not unusual to read that somebody has been denied asylum eight or nine times in a row. Why is that possible? Why can’t you just make a single decision and there is no appeal? I mean, we could at least start there …

Host — Or one appeal, or something like that …

Shriver — Yeah. Not even one appeal. Just forget it! [All laugh.] And this is expensive. And on top of that, of course, we allow that if you have set a toe in the territory, then you also have access to welfare; and there is some obligation of the state to put you up. We have all these expensive hotels.

The British people are enraged over this, and so are the Americans. This is where Trump really has his finger on the pulse. This is out of control. The biggest issue in the U.S. economically is asylum-seekers’ access to health care, right? Which costs a fortune in the United States.

So I just … I think it’s out of control. We just take it as a given that most of these people are not actually persecuted. Y’know: they’re looking for, quote “a better life.” (Which is a little advertisement: the title of my new book. It is about immigration … but that’s not out yet.) So, you know, they’re gaming the system. It is just understood. And I don’t even think we’re sufficiently incensed about that.

And furthermore we’re dealing with a judiciary — especially in the U.K. — which is chronically left-wing and is always looking for an excuse to let people stay. The approval rate is something like seventy-five percent. That’s absurd. There’s no way that three-quarters of these people — on boats, for example — are coming from France — terrifying France! — are doing anything but trying to look for better economic opportunities.]

Note to self: Watch out for Lionel Shriver’s next novel, title something like A Better Life.

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

Imprimis:  Since I raised the subject of evolution back there, let me note that this July, July 10th, we come up to the centenary of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee.

That was where two accomplished orators, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan squared off in court in hopes, on the defendant’s side, of publicizing the case against a state law that forbade the teaching of evolution in schools.

I’m sure the good people of Dayton have some kind of commemorative event planned. I’ll look out for notice of it and try to get down there.

Item:  Most of last week’s Radio Derb was given over to Professor David Betz’s ideas about a coming civil war.

For a different point of view, one that is contrary to Professor Betz, I recommend Keith Woods’ article Don’t Bet on Civil War, which you can read on the internet free of charge. You can also read it in the book Keith published a few months ago, Nationalism: The Politics of Identity.

Keith’s article defies brief summary, so I’ll just give you a paragraph from near the end. Quote:

I believe diversity and ongoing mass-immigration into Western countries will continue to drive unrest and polarisation, but opponents of this agenda should not put their faith in some future uprising or collapse to reverse it. Change will be slower, and will require a lot of hard work winning hearts and minds, organising, gaining power, and taking advantage of disrupting events.

End quote.

Item:  Finally, my favorite news story of the week. This is of course from the Daily Mail. Opening paragraph, quote:

Civilian astronauts captured astounding footage of Earth from space that clearly shows the planet’s curvature, sparking outrage among Flat Earthers.

End quote.

Was this an April Fool prank by the Mail? Doesn’t look like it; the story is dated April 3rd.

I have a soft spot for contrarians and nonconformists of all kinds — well, all harmless kinds. In that spirit, I’m going to take the story as genuine and state my pleasure at knowing there are still Flat Earthers among us. Jolly good luck to you all; but be careful not to fall off the edge.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention. Now get back to work preparing your income taxes. If our President’s loftiest ambitions come true, there may come a day when you’ll never have to do them again.

Saturday evenings Mr and Mrs Derbyshire settle down before the TV with glasses of wine to watch a movie on Netflix. Our choice last Saturday was last year’s Angelina Jolie non-hit Maria, about the last days of the great opera singer Maria Callas. I say “non-hit” because the movie wasn’t very well received. It got an Oscar nomination, but the reviews were sniffy.

Eh, we’ve seen worse. Callas’s later life was somewhat of a train wreck, and that’s hard to capture in a movie. By way of consolation, we got some of her songs, lip-synced of course. Here’s one of the best-known. No apologies for that: it’s rightly famous. “I lived for art, I lived for love, never did harm to a living soul…”

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.