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

Note #2: Behind the green door, there is a post about the events of last Friday, a post about the importance of knowing who is in charge, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. I was also on with the boys from the Old Glory Club where we discussed the events of the day. The replay is here.

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

Ronald Reagan was famous for saying that “the closest thing to immortality is a government program.” He was not the first person to say it. There are examples of American politicians saying a version of this going back to the 1930’s. There are probably versions of this concept going back to the Kingdom of Ur, because it is the nature of government to create constituencies in favor of its actions and those constituencies always lobby for more of what created them.

You see this with Project Ukraine, which was largely created by a small number of zealots called the neocons in the Obama administration. They overthrew the government of Ukraine, installed an anti-Russian government and just like that there was money and opportunity in Ukraine. By the time Trump came along in 2016, the Ukraine project had a sizable constituency in the Western ruling class, which is why Trump was impeached. He threatened the project.

Since the war broke out in 2022, the power of the Project Ukraine constituency has grown much stronger for monetary and political reasons. Important interests in Western countries are making money from the war, so they support politicians who seek to keep the war going. The politicians are happy to oblige, as the war is a nice distraction from the boring tasks the voters expect from government, tasks that the political class has thoroughly and completely ignored.

There is also the fact that the European political class operates like a preschool, where they are the children, and the United States is the teacher. Ending Project Ukraine is like forcing them into regular school or maybe sending them home to parents who do not fawn over them like their teachers. The reality of Europe is bleak, largely due to the perfidy of the Europeans political class. They prefer not to face that and instead fixate on this glorious adventure in which they are the heroes.

Of course, like all government programs, there is the program itself, which always adheres to the iron law of bureaucracy. In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people. There will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization and those dedicated to the organization itself. The second group will gain and keep control of the organization. We see this with how the Blob is fighting DOGE like Grendel facing off against Beowulf.

This is what we see with Zelensky. He is the anthropomorphized government program, consumed with defending its prerogatives. It is why he was so nasty in his trip to the Trump White House. He could not believe that these people would have the audacity to make demands upon him. He is the indispensable man, on whose shoulders rests the fate of the free world and through him is expressed the hopes and dreams of the managerial class that created him.

This is the problem the Trump administration faces as they seek to wind down what they consider to be a pointless and costly enterprise. They wisely drove a stake through the heart of that part of the Blob that has controlled American foreign policy, which is why official Washington is struggling to defend Project Ukraine. Legacy media is simultaneously calling Trump Chamberlain and Hitler – he is somehow appeasing himself – but otherwise they have no answers.

The Europeans are another matter. They see themselves like the tax eaters in Washington getting memos from Elon Musk. For them, Project Ukraine is their reason to exist now, so Trump’s plans to end it are an existential threat. It is why they cooked up the scheme to trick Trump into going along with their peacekeeper idea last week and why they are now busy cooking up a new scheme. Ukraine is their teddy bear, and they cannot think of being without it.

Zelensky is the key here, as his very life probably depends on this war never ending, at least not until he has an exit strategy. He cannot make a deal with the Russians because the ultra-nationalist will not tolerate it. The only deal he could make is one that requires Russia to surrender, which is not a possibility. His other choice is fleeing the country, but he would no doubt be tracked down by enemies. That leaves him with no other choice but to keep the war going.

One of the truths of a government program is that when it is finally killed off, the world never ends and the people dependent upon it find something else. After the initial sobbing and moaning, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. That will be the case with Project Ukraine. What must happen first is Zelensky must exit the stage, and either be replaced by chaos or by someone willing to do a deal to end the war. At that point, the Europeans will adjust to the new reality.

This is where things stand now. At some level the Europeans seem to know it, which is why they put on a show over the weekend featuring their favorite comedian. It was a funeral where they could all hug and reminisce, except the corpse was still walking and talking, demanding more money and weapons. The reason Zelensky keeps talking about resigning is he knows that for this program to finally end, he must exit the stage, so he is hoping to create conditions which drag that out a bit longer.

While it may feel like government programs are immortal, immune to all efforts to slay them, nothing lasts forever. That is what we are now seeing. Along with the death of the 20th century mindset in American foreign policy is the death of its last great program, Project Ukraine and its anthropomorphized representation of it. Once Zelensky is gone, the war ends, and the process of developing new, normalized relations in Europe begins as we exit the post-Cold War world.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• 03m05s Snobs & Slobs, Euro style
• 10m11s Trump trashes Ukraine
• 15m12s The mystery of South Africa
• 21m29s Don’t look up
• 28m31s Scatter the feds!
• 31m16s Fort Knox, wha?
• 34m30s Return of Butch & Suni
• 36m16s World Hippo Day
• 39m05s Silly signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, this last day of February, greetings from your normatively genial Radio Derb host John Derbyshire.

The first thing you want to know is of course whether I can list five things I got done last week to justify my employment. Of course I can! Five? How about eight? That’s the number of segments in last week’s podcast, not counting Intro and Signoff. There was a carefully-crafted segment on each of the following:

1. Vice President J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference.
2. President Trump giving the elbow to Ukraine.
3. The condition of South Africa.
4. A possible asteroid strike.
5. Scattering federal departments out of D.C.
6. Securing Fort Knox.
7. Getting our astronauts home from the International Space Station.
8. World Hippo Day.

Talk about spanning the globe! Note that list includes three segments on foreign affairs, after my confessing openly that I don’t much care about them. My scope even includes interplanetary space.

So yes, Elon, I have no difficulty responding to your Saturday email demand; although since I am not a federal employee my response is entirely voluntary.

Perhaps I should be a federal employee. What’s the healthcare plan like?

02 — CPAC report.     Radio Derb goes on the air Friday evening or early Saturday, so my report on Saturday events comes six days later at week end.

That’s a shame as news ages fast. The news from six days ago is yellowish and curled up at the edges, and it’s starting to smell bad.

So it is with most news items, anyway. There are some exceptions: news items so piercingly relevant and forcefully presented, they’re still farm fresh — still fun to listen to — six days later.

I’ll give you an example. Last Saturday was the closing day, the third full day, of CPAC 2025. In the afterglow of Donald Trump’s election victory, spirits were of course high, and a lot of good speeches were made those three days: J.D. Vance, Nigel Farage, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Doug Burgum, Giorgia Pippalina, … something for everybody. Probably the visual that everyone will remember was Elon Musk brandishing a chain saw that had been given to him by Argentina’s Trumpish President Javier Milei, who also made a speech.

President Trump himself made the keynote speech. At an hour and a quarter it was much too long, and I found my thoughts drifting wistfully to Calvin Coolidge; but given what Trump’s achieved, and the trials — including of course literal trials — that he’s been through, I’m not going to begrudge the man indulging his natural prolixity.

The farm-fresh fragment I’m going to play for you here is not from Trump’s speech anyway, it’s from the speech by Tom Homan, Trump’s Border Czar. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you the whole speech, just the first two minutes. Here’s Tom.

[Clip:  How ya doing? (Cheers.) Look … let me start out by saying this: If I offend anybody today, I don’t give a shit. (Cheers and applause.) Don’t care. The media are in the back room. I’m sure I’ll be reading a lot of hit pieces on me tomorrow. I don’t give a shit what you think about me. (Cheers and applause.) I get asked all the time: there’s a body … There’s a big part of this country that hates your guts. I don’t care. I don’t care, because we’ve got a job to do.

Y’know, I wake up every day for the last four years pissed off because the Dryden [sic] administration took the most secure border in my lifetime and un-secured it on purpose. Right?

I worked for six Presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan, and every President I ever worked for took steps to secure the border. Even Clinton and Obama took steps to secure the border because they clearly understood you can’t have national security without border security. They got it. Joe Biden’s the first President in the history of the nation that came into office and un-secured the border on purpose!

So for four years I wake up every day pissed off. That changed November fifth. (Cheers and applause.) Now I wake up every day excited because I work for the greatest President of my lifetime: Donald J. Trump! (Prolonged cheers and applause.)]

Now there’s a plain-speaking guy. All strength to your arm, Sir.

03 — Dems in the doldrums.     The triumphalist high spirits at CPAC made a striking contrast with the gloom and doom that seems to prevail on the other side of the political divide — which mostly means among Democrats.

It’s bad, although just how bad depends to some degree on your news source. My Monday New York Post told me that, quote:

Unlike during the first Trump administration, Democrats are finding themselves demoralized, divided, low on energy as they attempt to counter the president’s blitz of executive orders, appointments and Oval Office directives.

End quote.

Last Saturday’s New York Times, on the other hand, tried to put some optimistic spin on things. Quote:

One month after President Trump was sworn in for a second term, Democratic despair and denial are giving way to an angry message from party activists and voters to their leaders.

Do something.

Across the country, anti-Trump protests and fiery town halls are flickering back to life …

End quote.

If progressive activism is flickering back to life, it’s time for us normal people to man the fire hoses.

Now, if you read much political commentary you’ll know that the word “normal” has been a topic of discussion recently. Headline from UnHerd.com, February 28th: “How the woke Right stole normality,” end headline. I picked that at random: there have been many similar.

What is normal depends on where you are standing, and who you are standing with. Until a few weeks ago our Tutsi ruling class all believed that their positions were normal, while the evil MAGA cult was a sinister Hutu aberration. After November’s election, and a month of watching MAGA actually at work in the White House to approving poll numbers, naturally the Tutsis are disoriented.

The more open-minded among them now understand that much of what they have cherished as normal beliefs — that biological sex is an illusion, unlimited immigration a blessing, energy from fossil fuels an evil — are scorned by most Americans. As the current cliché has it: the Tutsis are in the 20 zone of an 80-20 opinion split.

Some of those open-minded types are adjusting their positions accordingly, generating epiphemomena like Jeff Bezos this week re-orienting the opinion pages of the Washington Post MAGA-wise.

However, the New York Times‘ optimism is not misplaced. Tutsi progressivism is indeed showing signs of flickering back to life, or whatever counts as life up there in the woke stratosphere.

Last Saturday night, for example, Kamala Harris emerged from her mansion to give a speech at the NAACP annual awards ceremony, she being of course the awardee. It was indeed highly flammable stuff. Sample quote from that same New York Post report, quote:

Some see the flames on our horizons, the rising waters in our cities, the shadows gathering over our democracy and ask, “What do we do now?” … But we know exactly what to do, because we have done it before. And we will do it again. We use our power. We organize. We mobilize. We educate. We advocate.

End quote.

She forgot to add: “We bribe, we intimidate, we destroy with lawfare, …” but hey, some things are better left unsaid.

So yes, I’m gloating along with other Trumpies at the energy and authority coming out of the White House this past six weeks. The enemy will regroup, though. Probably they’ll adjust their public pronouncements in a more moderate direction. Perhaps fossil fuels won’t destroy the planet if sensibly managed. Perhaps there are only two sexes, tiny minorities of genetic abnormality aside. The true believers will still believe, but they’ll keep their beliefs strategically masked.

Here at the end of February, we shall soon be emerging from winter into spring. I’m looking forward to the Trump Spring, when I am sure we shall see a great and historic correction to America’s course.

Progressivism will not sleep, though. We need to keep our defenses fully manned.

04 — Immigration innovation: the Registry.     We also need to keep a wary eye on the Dear Leader. Donald Trump has lived his entire life in circumstances of great wealth. That doesn’t necessarily destroy a person; it may endow him with wisdom not otherwise easily attainable, as I believe it has in Trump’s case. In other respects, though, it may also tilt him away somewhat from common sense.

This week saw two new immigration initiatives from the administration. My grading of them is A-minus for the first, C-minus for the second.

The first, announced Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security, aims to make to make illegal aliens age 14 or older in the United States register and provide their fingerprints to DHS within thirty days of entry or potentially face criminal prosecution.

This, we are told, will make it easier for ICE to round up anyone who entered the country illegally; aliens who can’t prove their immigration status and who haven’t registered will be subject to immediate arrest.

Just to clarify this: When you see or hear news or commentary that is supportive of ICE rounding up illegal aliens for deportation, the reporters usually lean hard on the word “criminal.” That’s defensive on the reporters’ part. “See, we are not going after that pleasant, friendly guy who mows your lawn. We’re going after muggers, dealers, rapists, and gang members.”

Fair enough. The truth is, though, that only a small minority of illegal aliens are muggers, dealers, rapists, et cetera. The great majority are harmless. The only law they’ve broken is immigration law. I speak here from the experience of having been one such person.

Here in fact is a wrinkle that I’ve never been able to iron out to my own satisfaction.

Apologists for the illegals always hasten to tell you that under current practice, aliens in the country illegally while not violating any other laws are considered to be committing a civil offense, not a criminal one.

My rudimentary understanding of jurisprudence has never been able to make sense of that. A civil offense, I have always supposed, is committed when some one person, or something with a legal personality — usually a corporation — wrongs some other person. The word “wrong” there, a schoolmaster told me back in the Eisenhower administration, encompasses four malefactions: nuisance, negligence, defamation, and trespass.

Which of those four applies in the case of an illegal alien? It’s never made sense to me, although friends with legal education keep trying patiently to explain.

That aside, back to the main point here: Under this proposed new plan, illegal aliens who don’t register could face a $5,000 fine and up to six months in prison, followed of course by deportation.

I graded this an A because I think people who break our laws should pay a price. They most certainly should not be rewarded.

Then I downgraded slightly to A-minus because, in the first place, this proposed regime will just lead to more clogging up of the courts. Illegal aliens who are lawyered up by one of the NGOs that manages that kind of thing will register to strengthen their cases.

And in the second place, a great many illegal aliens, knowing that if they register they’ll be subject to deportation, just won’t register.

If this proposal had been in place when I lived here for five years on an expired visa, I would not have registered. Sure; some mis-step or stroke of bad luck might have alerted ICE to my illegality, got me arrested and deported. So what? I was a carefree twenty-something young guy sampling life’s adventures.

I said there have been two new immigration initiatives this week, and that I’d graded the second one C-minus. What is it? I’ll give it a segment of its own

05 — Immigration innovation: the Gold Card.     This second one, which President Trump revealed to reporters on Tuesday while signing an unrelated executive order in the Oval Office, is for an upgrade to the current EB-5 visa program, of which I’ll give a brief description.

The “EB” in “EB-5” stands for “Employment-Based.” The “5” indicates fifth preference. When Congress created the EB-5 program in 1990 they tacked it on to the four traditional preference categories for Family-Based Immigration.

So what’s an EB-5 visa? From the website, quote:

Under this program, investors (and their spouses and unmarried children under 21) are eligible to apply for lawful permanent residence (become a Green Card holder) if they:

• Make the necessary investment in a commercial enterprise in the United States;

and

• Plan to create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for qualified U.S. workers.

End quote.

What is the “necessary investment”? Here the EB-5 website descends into legalese that I’ll leave you to study for yourself. The minimum dollar amount, as best I can figure, is $800,000 for investment in an area that’s rural or has high unemployment, with careful definitions for both terms. So for eight hundred grand, EB-5 will get you a Green Card: permanent residence in the U.S.A. for yourself and your family.

Trump’s proposal is to scrap the EB-5 and replace it with an upgraded version that he calls “the Gold Card.” One of those will cost, according to the President, “about five million dollars.” He promised to unveil more details over the next two weeks.

It’ll be a win-win, claims Trump. Foreign entrepreneurs seeking U.S. residence will pay the five million, enriching the U.S. Treasury by that amount, while bringing in skilled workers.

Quote from him: “We’ll be able to sell maybe a million of these cards, maybe more than that. If you add up the numbers, they’re pretty good.” End quote. They sure are: a million times five million dollars is five trillion dollars — more than the Treasury collected in revenue in 2023.

So what’s not to like?

For the full negativity I refer you to Ryan James Girdusky, who has tossed and gored the Trump Gold Card very thoroughly on his Substack, National Populist Newsletter. I’ll give you just a few of his points.

He quotes Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick telling us that applicants for the Gold Card will be, quote from Lutnick, “wonderful world-class global citizens,” end quote. Quote from Girdusky: “Anyone who uses the term ‘global citizens’ should not work in any administration that promises to put ‘America First.’” End quote.

Girdusky then points out that the EB-5 visa and the number of Green Cards altogether are ruled by Acts of Congress, not executive order. Innovations will face the difficulties all legislation faces in a finely-balanced Congress.

Then Girdusky argues that Trump’s arithmetic is too optimistic. Quote from Girdusky: “Only 2.6 million people worldwide have net assets above $5 million, and a third of them already live in the United States.” End quote. I’d like to see a check on those numbers, but that the Gold Card might solve our fiscal problems, I seriously doubt.

And then there are all the issues of fraud and corruption that already plague the EB-5 visa program. A high proportion of the world’s seriously rich people are oligarchs and crooks in places like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The ink won’t be dry on Gold Card legislation before they’ve figured out how to game it to their own advantage — with, of course, some assistance from our own less-scrupulous congresscritters.

Well, read Girdusky’s demolition job for yourself. This is a rich guys’ deal. To re-quote myself: Being rich doesn’t make you bad, and it certainly doesn’t make you dumb. You’re probably a lot smarter than the average. It can, though warp your judgement in some areas, and blind you to unsavory truths that are obvious to the rest of us.

So, the Gold Card? C-minus.

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

Imprimis:  Wednesday Trump held his first full cabinet meeting. Elon Musk, who is not officially a cabinet officer, sat in on the meeting. In an agreeably modest acknowledgment of his role in the administration, Musk sported a black T-shirt reading “Tech Support.”

The emphasis of the meeting was on reductions in the federal workforce and other possible savings. Trump told us that my fellow Long Islander Lee Zeldin, now the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, was planning to cut that agency’s workforce by up to 65 percent. That would take the EPA’s permanent staff down from well over seventeen thousand to just over six thousand.

I’ll applaud with everyone else if Zeldin can pull that off, while shedding a quiet tear for his having lost the 2022 New York State Governor’s race to the appalling Kathy Hochul.

I’m glad to see you in a cabinet position, Lee; but I’d have been gladder by far to see you in the Governor’s mansion of my state.

Item:  My opinion of military generals in general (so to speak) never really recovered from hearing General George Casey, who was Army chief of staff at the time, telling us, after the murder of thirteen people by a crazy Muslim at Fort Hood in 2009, that, quote: “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” End quote.

My opinion sure wasn’t improved twelve years later from hearing General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telling us, quote, “I want to understand White rage.” End quote. (And yes, I know: he was one of Trump’s first-term appointments.)

So I experienced no distress at all while reading about our President and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissing six top generals in what the Washington Post called a “Friday night purge” last Friday night.

The purgees included Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown Jr. Before being appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs by Joe Biden in 2023, General Brown had been Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

General Brown is black; suspicions that he was an affirmative-action hire — a sort of military counterpart of Ketanji Brown Jackson — were not softened by his having signed on, while Chief of Staff of the Air Force in 2022, to an official Air Force memorandum specifying, quote, “officer applicant pool goals, broken down by race, ethnicity, and gender,” end quote, and directing his subordinates to, quote, “develop a diversity and inclusion outreach plan,” end quote.

I haven’t researched the other Friday night purgees, but if they are cut from the same cloth as Generals Casey, Milley, and Brown, I believe the American military to be under better control today than it was last Friday morning.

Item:  Monday night Vivek Ramaswamy officially entered his name in next year’s Ohio gubernatorial race.

The New York Post copped an interview with him in which Ramaswamy leaned hard on his plans to improve Ohio’s schools. He will support school choice, make public-school teachers’ pay merit-based, and ban cell-phones from the classrooms.

The first two of those three proposals will fire up the opposition of the teachers’ unions.

I sincerely wish Ramaswamy all success in his campaign; but I urge him to bear in mind that the story of Jack the Giant-Slayer is … just a story.

Item:  In last week’s podcast I included a passing reference to the 1964 movie Goldfinger, which featured Sean Connery as James Bond …  and of course, I can’t forbear mentioning, Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore.

Goldfinger was the third James Bond movie. From the first one in 1962, creative control of the James Bond movie franchise was in the hands of the late Albert Broccoli and then, after his death in 1996, his daughter Barbara and her half-brother Michael Wilson.

Well, a few days ago we heard that Barbara and Michael have handed over control of the franchise to Amazon MGM Studios, which is owned by — of course — Amazon.

The price of the handover is not known for sure, but it seems to be in the region of a billion dollars.

Will Jeff Bezos be the next James Bond? We’ll have to wait and see.

Mention of the early Bond movies stirs personal recollections. In an earlier segment I mentioned having been “a carefree twenty-something young guy sampling life’s adventures.” That was in the early 1970s when Sean Connery’s version of James Bond was firmly planted in everyone’s mind.

Having a British accent in the New York bar scene was a great advantage. I’d strike up a conversation with a single young lady at the bar. Two or three exchanges in, after complimenting me on the accent, she would urge me to say it. “Say it! Go on, say it! ‘My name is Bond, James Bond.’ Say it, please!”

Always glad to oblige, I would say it in my best Bond voice. Game, set, and match: I could order a taxi back to my place right there. Ah, youth!

Item:  No, I’m not going to neglect foreign affairs altogether. Germany had a much-anticipated election on Sunday. The result, however, was deeply unsurprising — barely newsworthy.

Just as all the polls had predicted, Friedrich Merz’s center-right coalition got most votes, 28½ percent, the National Conservative AfD came second with just under 21 percent, the center-left, left, and Greens mopped up the remainder.

Since Merz has sworn a solemn oath not to co-operate with AfD, he’ll work up some kind of parliamentary majority by co-operating with the center-left or Greens.

The ongoing invasion of Germany by Muslims and Africans was a major issue in the election, and a minor one after it. The AfD leader accused Merz of having promised, during the campaign, to close the nation’s borders, then, after his victory, denying that he had so promised.

The fact-checkers tell us that Merz has the better of this. He never promised to close the borders, only to secure the borders. So I guess all those Third Worlders are in no danger of being turned away at Germany’s borders; they’ll just have to smile and submit to a pat-down before passing through.

It’s all very German.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention, and please allow me my usual reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to that fine monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I am now a regular contributor. Thank you!

Last week I gave you a segment on World Hippo Day, February 15th. Then I signed off with a music clip unrelated but just as silly.

Halfway through this week it dawned on me that I’d missed a chance. Hippos … silly song … come on, Derb. So this week I’m making up for it. Here to sing us out are Flanders and Swann with the Hippopotamus Song.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.\

On the show Wednesday with Paul Ramsey, we talked about how Trump is a bookend for Nixon containing the period of peak managerialism. The managers ran Nixon out of town for the crime of being a strong executive and now Trump, the strong executive, is running the managers out of town. It remains to be seen if that is how it plays out, but it is a good way to containerize this period of history.

Doing the show, it occurred to me that we can do something similar with populism in that it was populism that gave birth to managerialism. When you look at the birth of progressivism, it started with the populist movements. It peaked with the FDR administration, which is the rise of the managers. Now we see a populist movement rising to smash what was set off by original populism.

Here is where you see the two faces of populism, democratic and authoritarian or anarchic versus orderly. Of course, it is a fact of history that democracy leads to authoritarianism, so this long cycle dating to the 19th century follows a predictable course, just more slowly and mildly. The synthesis that will result from it may be a modern version of what the Framers imagined.

Anyway, that is for some posts this week. The show this week is a review of and comment upon populism in its many forms, as well as the criticism of it in light of the events unfolding in Washington. It is one of those shows that meanders around a bit, so it has no main point, just a main theme. Perhaps if the topic is of interest, I can do a more formal deep dive into the topic.

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
• Populism
  • Britanica (Link)
  • European Center for Populism Studies (Link)
• The Negative View
• The Positive View
• Populism in America

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

One of the many failings of conservatism was the insistence that with just the right argument using just the right data points, the people they called the left would throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. At the core of what later became known as civic nationalism was the assertion that all political actors are looking for objective truth and therefore would respond to it. The reason for political disputes was the failure to flesh out the facts.

Politic is about morality, not facts. It is also about power, specifically the power to impose your moral vision on the rest. Facts have little to do with politics and are often seen by ideologues as a threat. The diversity cult looks at the FBI crime stats as a direct threat to their project, so they worked to suppress them. The flat earth people insist that intelligence testing is a conspiracy of some sort. They label it “race-science” because adding the words “race” to anything anathematizes it.

Another thing that the conservative view of politics got wrong is that it left people with only two choices when evaluating left-wing rhetoric. Either the people chanting about white power structures were lying or they were deeply confused. In both cases, it was assumed that they had to know the truth and that the truth would either set them straight or force them to stop lying. Untold man hours were wasted trying to explain the truth to crazy relatives because of this.

Even now, with all that is happening, it is hard for people to accept that the crazies are in fact crazy enough to believe the nutty things they are saying. This post in the New York Times feels like parody, but it is written to soothe the nerves of the believers while they huddle together plotting how to respond. The writer genuinely believes Washington is being taken over by a Stalin-like figure and he and his coreligionists are the beginnings of a great resistance to it.

This is the precursor to the forming of a narrative. The cult we call the left operates like all cults in that it has a story to explain itself and its destination. Within the story are stories to address the bumps along the way as well as the victories. Soon, others will take this framework in which the good guys are being oppressed by the bad guys and create a narrative that fills in the details, especially the part where they finally vanquish the monster and everyone cheers.

It is hard for normal people to accept that the writer is as crazy as it seems. After all, he had to have sat in meetings at the New York Times where people boasted of ruining critics of the Biden regime. He must be aware of the doxing campaigns and the hooded terrorist gangs sent to harass dissidents. It is inconceivable to a normal person that this guy does not see the irony in what he is writing. The truth is he is that crazy and the audience is right there with him.

Part of how cults respond to disconfirmation and setbacks is they create new pleasing narratives for why things have not gone as predicted. A month into the Trump presidency and the crazies have settled on an economic collapse as the most probable end to the Trump tyranny. According to the Times, the economy is already reeling from policies that have yet to be implemented. The Telegraph reports that the really smart people foresee disaster for the Trump economy.

This gets to another thing that people struggle to accept. These people lie. They will make up whatever whoppers they think they need for their narrative. Extreme partisanship rewards sociopathy, so over time the movement will be overrun by people who see no moral distinction between the truth and a lie. All that matters is whether it serves the cause, by which they mean does it strengthen their side or does it cause harm to their opponents?

Despite all that has been revealed so far, as well as the massive media gaslighting campaign last year, people still think there is truth in the media. There is little doubt that the Harris campaign turned many people from civic nationalist into something else, but for many, the whole thing was forgotten after the election. It is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, which is when you see something in the media that is an obvious lie but then forget that story and trust the next story in the same media site.

What all this tells us is that even though normal defeated crazy in November and the Trump admin has a plan to defeat the Blob in order to restore sobriety back to politics, the road back to normal will be long and full of trouble. Scan the fever swamps and it is clear that events have had no impact on the crazies. If anything, they have become crazier now that they have shuffled off mainstream platforms into places like Bluesky and Reddit where they are free to fly their freak flags.

Similarly, the media has learned nothing from the last decade. They put everything they had into dragging Harris over the finish line but failed because not enough people trust them anymore. Despite the massive rejection that was the November election, they are now leaning into the same tactics that brought them to this point. The employees of Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post still think they get to tell the owner of the company to buzz off and leave the running of it to them.

While it does appear that we have reached the end of a cycle of madness, perhaps several historical cycles that culminated in the last decade, it is going to be a long road back to normal. The crazies will not simply go away. They must be defeated, caged, and only released when the conditions that created them are eradicated. The normals will have to be trained in the new way of engaging in politics. Much like Russia after communism, America is on the road to recovery, but it is a long road.

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!

An iron law of the universe is the opposite law of liberalism, which states that whatever the left is saying, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. It is not a perfect rule in that the opposite is obvious or correct. It is just a good place to start when trying to figure out what they are doing. Projection plays a central role in the interior life of the progressive hive mind, so they inevitably accuse the enemies of the hive of doing what the hive is doing or has done.

An old example comes from the heady days of the Tea Party, which was a genuine populist and grassroots response to the cultural revolution. Normal, middle-class people started to organize against the Obama administration, but also the sissies of conservatism who were hiding under their beds at the time. Suddenly, people were turning up to protest and fight back against the gathering madness. It was a foreshadowing of what would come in 2016.

The response by the left was to accuse these people of being part of a conspiracy organized by the enemies of history. Nancy Pelosi famously said it was not a grassroots movement, but an AstroTurf movement. For those who do not know, AstroTurf is a genericized brand name or proprietary eponym for fake grass. Of course, what was true at the time and true to this day is the “grassroots” support of the left was bought and paid for by tax dollars laundered through the Blob.

It was one of those moments that revealed something about the sorts of people who end up in left-wing social movements. They always assume that the enemies of the hive operate as they do and will act like they would if given the chance. It is why they were sure Trump would trample your civil rights after he won in 2016. They knew that if they were in his position, that is what they would do. After the color revolution that toppled Trump and installed Biden, it is exactly what they did.

Now that Trump is back, we see the opposite rule kicking in as part of their coping strategy and effort to organize a response. The crazies are now free speech warriors, claiming Trump is going to start censoring people online. The very same people who chanted “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” as anyone with a sober thought in their head was evicted from Twitter are now carrying on as if they are Ann Frank, hiding in the attic from the MAGA police.

This story about how a handful of zombies turned up to yell at a Congressman is framed as a populist rebellion. These are people made angry by their television, so they show up on command at this event to be angry. A defining feature of these old, white progressives is they have no idea why they are angry. The person on their television is angry, so they are angry. They are the sort that started saying “keev” the weekend the war in Ukraine started, as if they always said it that way.

Of course, nothing about this is on the level. That is the great lesson of the populist rebellion that started with the Tea Party. Our politics have been entirely fake for decades, manufactured and controlled using government money. These efforts to repeat what worked in the past affirm it. Our politics for the last several decades have been pretty close to the opposite of what was beamed to us. “Our democracy” was absolute party control.

All ideologies rely on lies to fill the gap between their vision of the moral society and the reality of the human condition. This habit explains the violence that comes when the ideologues gain control. The lies are replaced by a program to fill the gap between ideology and reality. That gap is always filled with corpses, but it is never completely filled, so the lies return as the cost-effective option. In time, they become so comfortable with the lies that lying is the solution to everything.

We are seeing this in the “resistance” being rolled out in the media. It is not connected with reality but dreamed up by the same people who claimed they were defending democracy when they were harassing people for Facebook posts. The same narrative makers who swore all their failed schemes were working right up until it was obvious that they were not working are now busy imagining a scenario in which they are carried back to power on the shoulders of the people.

Things like the opposite rule are part of the essential appeal of ideology, which is an escape from reality. This is what ideology inherits from Christianity. The losers drawn to the new religion spreading around the Roman Empire were attracted to the promise of escape from this life. If they followed this new religion, they would one day stand shoulder to shoulder with the great men of this age in the sight of God. Ideology says the same thing but stops at the bit about God.

Libertarians imagine that one day they will be yeoman farmers, totally self-sufficient and liberated like the rich guys they admire. The antifascist imagines herself as a stunning and brave member of the committee, as respected as the men who never pay much attention to her. The conservative believes he will one day be rich like Donald Trump, but classy like Bill Buckley. The fascist imagines himself in a snappy uniform in charge of men, instead of a loser playing video games all day.

This is what brings us back to the opposite rule of liberalism. The last ideology, like all ideology, requires the suspension of disbelief. Accusing the bad guys of doing what you have done or are currently doing is a way to escape the reality of politics. It is not a fight for power, but a great crusade between white hats and black hats. To think otherwise is to be back in the reality from which you are trying to escape. The “resistance” to Trump are not losers, but the heroes of a story they are now writing.

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 great insights from Eric Hoffer was that ideologies do not require a positive agenda, but they must always have something they oppose. That is the point of his famous line, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This makes perfect sense when you realize that being in favor of something means being opposed to its opposite. Often, the first part of the equation rises from the last part of it.

This may explain why we have been ravaged by movements that are focused solely on a devil, often one disconnected from reality. The last several decades in the West have been about creating a new version of Old Scratch, then finding people to either blame for the existence of Old Scratch or accuse of being his allies. The public square has been filled with people who describe their thing with the prefix “anti”, without bothering to explain the point of their efforts.

The anti-fascists are the best example. They have created a fantasy world for themselves where they are the last line of defense against an enemy that exists only in their imaginations. Most are suffering from some form of mental illness, and many are simply losers with nowhere to go. Others could be living useful lives, but they are drawn to this bizarre cause because they need a purpose. They need to believe in something, but they will settle for opposing something.

The same is true for the antiracists. There has been no meaningful opposition to black inclusion for generations. In fact, much of the American culture has been altered to accommodate even the worst elements of black culture, in an effort to make blacks feel a part of American society. Despite that, a billion-dollar industry sprang up committed to stamping out something that does not exist. The cause of civil rights, having reached its goal, was left with the Devil it could not relinquish.

What we may have experienced over the last thirty or so years is the last gasp of the age of ideology. All these ways to hunt down Old Scratch have their roots in American Progressivism, which was the last ideology standing after the Cold War. It turns out that the end of history was a warning to those who had organized their lives around the egalitarian and universalist beliefs that evolved in the United States. As a result, we have experienced a frenzy of effort to provide a reason for it to exist.

It is easy to forget that ideology is an anomaly in human history. Human societies were initially organized around practical concerns like safety. Religion and culture were useful adhesives to bind the people together, but the main purpose of human organization was always rooted in the practical. There was always a divide between the public and private, because the former was about maintaining society as a whole while the latter was about living your life as an individual.

Ideology is the attempt to fuse the public and private so that private actions are controlled to serve the public good, which itself is aimed at abstract moral claims, rather than the practical maintenance of society. Christianity focused on the individual and made the necessary accommodations with the necessities of secular rule. Folk religions went the other way, providing the broad framework of the people, but leaving the individual to sort out his private gods.

In a way, it is fitting that Progressivism is the last ideology. It was always at its best in opposition to something. It is fitting for a warrior people. Whether it was individual vices like alcohol, drugs and sex, or social concerns like inequality, racism and poverty, Progressivism had a way to wage war on them. In the great ideological battles of the last century, Progressivism was useful in rallying the war-minded American to the banner opposing fascism and communism.

With no more ideologies to oppose, Progressivism was left to find new devils around which to rally the faithful. The trouble was these new versions of Old Scratch were either imaginary or so decrepit they could not put up much of a fight. Having exhausted itself fighting these windmills, everyone is ready to move on to more practical concerns, like the economy, leaving the dead-enders and lunatics to pleasure each other in the fever swamps of the internet.

This may be why the early efforts at dismantling the Blob and the administrative state have been met with a tepid response. That apparatus was the tool to organize the people around a great cause. In a post ideological age, where there is no need or desire to rally a diverse and complicated society around simplistic causes, the managerial state is an expensive white elephant. It may be that managerialism can only work within the ideological state.

The end of ideology may also revive religion. Those blue-haired spinsters screaming themselves purple on the street corner can go back to terrorizing schoolboys about their penmanship and playing with their food. Christianity was very good at finding a use for these maladapted mutants. These people will need a place to go that will provide them with the purpose they seek. Perhaps we get a revival of the small-bore proselytizing in favor of tradition and stability that used to be the norm.

That aside, what we may be experiencing is the end of the long pursuit of a universal morality promised by the dawn of reason. The result of the long journey is the understanding that there is no universal morality and no universal truth, other than the truth of the human condition. The purpose of human organization is not to transcend the human condition, but to improve our material existence, so that we can enjoy the time each of us is allotted to the fullest we desire.

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

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the blob, a post about big stupid trucks, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. Last Wednesday was the kickoff of a show with Paul Ramsey, which you can watch on Paul’s channel. I also did an appearance on the Mike Farris show, which can be seen here.

The Trump administration’s opening of direct talks with the Russians setoff panic in Kiev and the capitals of Europe. The reason for that is Project Ukraine was centered on the acceptance that there could be no direct talks with Moscow, until the Russians surrendered their country to the control of the usual suspects. Trump’s call with Putin and then the meeting in Saudi Arabia violated this central assumption. First there was panic and now there is a game of chicken.

The Trump administration has concluded, after assessing the situation inside and outside the issue of Ukraine, that normalizing relations with Russia is in the best interest of the United States. One of the obstacles to that is the war in the Ukraine, so logically they are looking to wrap up the war as quickly as possible. The Russians have agreed to talks with Ukraine but insist on elections in Ukraine first. They point out that by the laws of Ukraine, Zelensky does not have the power to sign a deal.

Russophobes argue that this is a stalling tactic, but they are the ones demanding the unconditional surrender of Russia before any talks can start, so this is the usual projection that is a feature of the post-liberal West. The Russians, having been burned by the Minsk agreements charade, want the next deal to have teeth, so they are insisting that it be signed by the internationally and domestically recognized leader of Ukraine, which means new elections.

The Russians would probably drop this demand if the EU were willing to co-sign whatever deal is struck, but such an offer will never come. The reason is the whole project relies on never having direct talks with the Russians. This is the trap setup in 2023 to keep everyone committed to Project Ukraine. Ukraine passed a law forbidding direct talks with Russia in exchange for unlimited support. Europe signed on in exchange for unlimited support from Washington.

The reason the Biden administration expedited the remaining weapons and money allocated to this project was an effort to prevent the incoming Trump administration from rethinking these arrangements. They would not have time to do that, as Ukraine would immediately need more money and weapons. The assumption was that they would have no choice but to go along with more money and weapons, thus entangling Trump in the Ukraine trap.

The underlying assumption was that Trump would not walk away from Project Ukraine and risk the image of Russian tanks rumbling through Kiev. This is the assumption the Europeans and Zelensky are relying on as they deal with Trump. In fact, Zelensky is so confident of this that he is going out of his way to jerk around the Trump administration on the mineral rights deal. Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are coming to Washington this week to set Trump straight.

Reportedly, Starmer and Macron will present a plan to Trump that has the UK and France putting troops into Ukraine, while the United States provides air cover from bases in Poland and Romania. In effect, the United States must create a no-fly zone over Ukraine and go to war with Russia if the Russians violate it. The madness of the scheme is so beyond the pale it is hard to accept as real, but the Europeans are operating in an alternative reality from the rest of us.

The Trump people see that the main obstacle to their plans for normalizing relations with Russia is Zelensky. Anyone who has dealt with a deadbeat knows Zelensky and the best way of dealing with this type is to get rid of them. Elections will remove him from the picture. The end of American support will also remove him from the picture, as the only reason for him to exist is as a facilitator of money and arms into Ukraine, mostly the money, which is stolen by Ukrainian officials.

The danger of pulling the plug on Ukraine is that it could be bad public relations, which is where the mineral rights dispute comes into play. The point of this is to make it appear as if Zelensky is unwilling to make a deal for more money and make it look like he is the obstacle to a peace deal. Trump’s team has figured out that Zelensky cannot sign the mineral deal, and he cannot agree to negotiations, so they are pressing on both in order to shift the blame to him.

What is setting up is a game of chicken. On one side we have Zelensky and the Europeans, who are sure Trump will never walk away from Ukraine. It is why they are getting bolder in their demands. They think Trump is bluffing. On the other side we have Team Trump who is sure the Europeans will fall in line, rather than risk a break with Washington, even if it means abandoning Ukraine. Zelensky is sure he has fooled everyone with his latest schemes.

For their part, the Russians are making the prudent bet. It costs them nothing to talk with the Trump administration and there is a good chance it leads to a positive outcome, so they will follow that route to the end. Similarly, the Chinese have made positive noises about the start of talks between Moscow and Washington. Like the Russians, the Chinese welcome the return of normalcy to Washington. China and Russia are open for business and ready to make deals.

It is too soon to know how this ends, but this game of chicken revolves around Zelensky being the ruler of Ukraine, which means the way to avoid a collision is to remove him from the equation. The Russians figured this out two years ago. The Chinese figured it out last year when they had talks with him. Now the Trump administration has arrived at the same conclusion. That leaves the Europeans and the bet in the White House right now is they will choose Washington over Zelensky.

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

• 03m05s Snobs & Slobs, Euro style
• 10m11s Trump trashes Ukraine
• 15m12s The mystery of South Africa
• 21m29s Don’t look up
• 28m31s Scatter the feds!
• 31m16s Fort Knox, wha?
• 34m30s Return of Butch & Suni
• 36m16s World Hippo Day
• 39m05s Silly signoff

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your stratospherically genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you some notes from the week’s news seasoned with wit, cynicism, and some bafflement.

Most of this week’s news has related to foreign affairs. That puts me at a slight disadvantage as I’m not really engaged with matters foreign. I often find them interesting, from a detached historical and anthropological point of view; and I have sympathies and unsympathies, both governed by my strong preference for civilization over barbarism.

Those are calm abstractions, though. I’m not engaged with foreign issues in the way that I see commenters on social media engaged, with deep feeling and strong commitment. I’m a Fortress America guy.

I want us to have lots of nukes. I’ve been telling the world that for more than twenty years. Actual quote from me in 2004: “You Can Never Have Enough Nukes.” End quote. I likewise want every kind of anti-missile defense we can devise, and state-of-the-art protections against anything a hostile power might hit us with: conventional, nuclear, chemical, biological, drones, … everything.

That attained, I want us to mind our own business while the rest of the world goes hang.

So I’m not really your go-to guy for news about foreign parts. They’re in the news, though, and we’re tangled up with them because of past stupidities; so I’ll do my best.

02 — Snobs & Slobs, Euro style.     There is no doubt at all that the Speech of the Week was the 20-minute address delivered by our Vice President J.D. Vance to the annual Munich Security Conference on February 14th.

What is the Munich Security Conference? Well, it describes itself on its website as, quote:

The world’s leading forum for debating international security policy. It is a venue for diplomatic initiatives to address the world’s most pressing security concerns.

End quote.

In other words it’s a big talking-heads show for diplomats and national-security decision-makers from umpteen countries, mainly those belonging to NATO and the EU, although other countries have open invitations.

I have no idea how much influence the Conference has on geostrategic developments, or whether it has any at all; but it lets us see what these people are thinking.

So what did our Vice President tell them? In very brief, that their countries were too much under the domination of globalist elites and should pay more attention to what ordinary citizens want. To put it in terms of the monosyllables favored here at Radio Derb, he told Europe’s Snobs to listen more to Europe’s Slobs.

The Vice President’s speech included references to three events close to it in time: two in the recent past, one in the near future.

In the past was the annulling of the December election in Romania — which nowadays is a member nation of both the EU and NATO. There was no clear winner in that election, but a strong showing by parties described in the regime media as “far right,” “ultra-nationalist,” and so on, and accused of being illegally influenced by Russia. Sound familiar?

In the much more immediate past was an attack in Munich itself the day before our Vice President spoke. A fanatical Muslim illegal alien from Afghanistan drove his car into a crowd, killing a two-year-old girl and her 37-year-old mother and injuring 36 others.

The future event is of course the federal election taking place in Germany this Sunday, February 23rd. Polls show the center-right alliance — approximately the pre-Trump Republican Party — at thirty percent, the populist-nationalist Trumpish AfD at twenty percent, and other parties down at fifteen percent, or thirteen percent, or single digits.

Populist nationalism dwells under a dark cloud in Germany, for reasons not hard to figure. Big old respectable parties like that center-right alliance have sworn not to join in coalition with AfD. Since there can be no effective government in a parliamentary system of this kind without coalition, we have a problem. Could we see a Romanian solution? It’s possible.

So that was the context for J.D. Vance’s remarks. He spoke to the Conference from the other side of the Trump Revolution, which none of them has experienced yet. “Trust your citizens,” he told them. “Let your people speak.” Quote from MSN, quote:

Vance accused European leaders of using [inner quote] “Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” [end inner quote] to suppress dissenting ideas — rather than engaging in debate with their own people to figure out what they are fighting for.

[Inner quote:] “I believe deeply that there is no security if you’re afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” [end inner quote] he said, adding there’s “nothing” Europe can do for the US if they are “afraid” of their citizens.

End quote.

The assembled Snobs didn’t take it well. The Conference Chairman Christoph Heusgen, in his remarks wrapping up the event, actually started weeping. Quote from him:

this conference started as a transatlantic conference, but after the speech by Vice President Vance on Friday, we must fear that our common value base is not so common anymore.

End quote.

The news source I took that from — it was actually the Times of India — told us that the Chairman’s voice was, quote, “breaking with emotion,” end quote.

The people running Europe are not just Snobs, they’re also pussies.

03 — Trump trashes Ukraine.     The Vice President’s Munich speech and the reactions to it make the case for Fortress America all by themselves.

While the Euro-pussies are yielding up their nations to barbarian settlers from Islamia and black Africa, they’re looking to us to defend them from mighty Russia? Really?

Mighty Russia has 150 million people and a total GDP of seven trillion dollars. Hold those numbers in your mind a moment: 150 million, seven trillion.

Europe — the EU plus the U.K. — has 520 million people and a GDP of 20 trillion: three and a half times Russia’s population, three times its wealth. Two of the 28 European nation-states there, France and the U.K., have nuclear weapons.

These people can’t defend their territories against a corrupt, way-overstretched empire whose male population is drunk half the time? Too bad.

Our President has generated much tut-tutting with his recent comments on the Russia-Ukraine war — the one I have been referring to since it started as the war between the world’s two most corrupt white nations.

Some of those comments deserve a tut-tut, or at any rate a tut. No, Sir, it wasn’t Ukraine that started the war. They weren’t blameless, and neither were we; but there were alternatives to a military solution, alternatives the Russians might have explored; but Putin decided on straight aggression.

To me, an isolationist, that’s all academic, though. The squabbles among Eastern Slavs are none of North America’s business. They are Europe’s business; and a Europe run by wise decision-makers might have averted the whole thing, while at the same time being well-prepared to defend their territories if matters went seriously pear-shaped.

Whatever, it’s not North America’s business. We should have withdrawn from NATO back in 1991 after the Warsaw Pact folded up their tents. Europe was richer and more demographically stable then than it is now; Russia was in a state of collapse. The Euros could have waved us a cheerful goodbye and rechristened NATO to ETO, the European Treaty Organization.

Historians of the future, studying the West’s geostrategy in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War, will shake their heads in disbelief at our colossal collective stupidity. What on earth were our statesmen thinking?

Now perhaps at last, under President Trump, we may put things right. We know that Trump is, in a general way, anti-NATO. Just pull us out of the darn thing, Mr President.

Our Vice President seems to be similarly inclined. He got my attention in last year’s election campaign when some reporter asked him about Ukraine. Replied Vance: “I don’t care about Ukraine,” or words to that effect. Neither do I, J.D., neither do I.

To the world-saving Snobs that makes me a stooge of Putin. So what? I don’t care. The world-savers are out of power. We Slobs are running the show. Get us out of NATO, Mr President!

04 —The mystery of South Africa.     This week Cyril Ramaphosa commenced his eighth year in power as President of South Africa. That comes one week after President Trump issued an order stating that, and I’ll quote direct from the order here, quote:

(a) the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and

(b) the United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.

End quote.

Trump’s order is in reaction to South Africa’s parliament passing an Expropriation Act back in December. The Act aims to correct what black South Africans consider to be an injustice: that a disproportionate quantity of the country’s best farmland is owned by whites, who are only seven percent of the country’s population.

The way the Act is written, though, it seems to disregard private property rights — particularly white people’s property rights — as it permits land seizures by the government without compensation. Hence our President’s response.

Again, as an isolationist, I’m not sure that the travails of white South Africans are any of our nation’s business. That’s by the way, though. The main emotion stirred in me by this story, and every other news story about South Africa, is wonder: wonder that the place is still on the map, is still functioning as a more-or-less modern society, and still has a seven percent white minority. Heck, they even have an illegal-immigration problem.

Thirty years ago when Apartheid ended and blacks took over the government, I was cynical. Zimbabwe, next door to South Africa (and today a major source of those illegal immigrants) had gone under black rule fifteen years before, and was a mess. The joke among us cynics was in fact:  Q — What’s the difference between Zimbabwe and South Africa?  A — About five years.

Yet South Africa’s still there, and still in one piece. It has problems, to be sure: but there’s been no tribal war, no economic collapse, no outward floods of refugees. If you meet white South Africans — I met one a few months ago — they shrug and say, “Yeah, crime’s bad …,” but they don’t seem inclined to emigrate.

Crime is bad, most notoriously crimes of violence against white farmers, although the actual statistics are unclear. It of course doesn’t help that the Economic Freedom Fighters, a fringe political party led by black supremacist Julius Malema, has “Kill the Boer!” as a campaign song (although the New York Times tells us we shouldn’t take it too literally.)

Yet still there’s no outgoing flood of white refugees. Reporting on Trump’s order, Reuters records a lukewarm response from Afrikaners. Sample quote from the Reuters report, quote:

The order provided for resettlement in the U.S. of [inner quote] “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” [end inner quote] as refugees.

Afrikaners are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers, who own most of the country’s farmland.

[Inner quote:] “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go,” [end inner quote] said Neville van der Merwe, a 78-year-old pensioner in Bothasig near Cape Town.

[Inner quote:] “There hasn’t been any really bad taking over our land, the people are carrying on like normal and you know, what are you going to do over there?” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

To me — a race realist, pessimist, and cynic — South Africa is a mystery. If anyone has a theory, I’ll listen to it attentively.

05 — Don’t look up.     It’s not only human action that creates dangers for us. While wars between nations can be very destructive, there are sources of destruction outside the human realm, too.

There are, for example, rogue asteroids. The latest one to disturb our peace of mind is unromantically named 2024-YR4. In hopes of allaying your fears, I shall refer to the thing as Daisy.

Astronomers only got acquainted with Daisy in December, and there are still some important things we don’t know about her. Her size, for example, given in Tuesday’s New York Times as between 130 feet and 300 feet across.

We do know enough about Daisy’s orbit, however, to predict that there is a one-in-thirty chance she will hit our own planet on December 22nd 2032 — just in time for Christmas!

Supposing we do in fact draw that one-in-thirty chance, how much damage might Daisy do?

That, no-one can really say. There are too many unknowns. We don’t know Daisy’s composition, for instance. She could be a solid lump of iron, or a loosely-bound collection of stones, ice, and rock fragments. Nor can we say how she will hit us, if she hits us: just skimming across Earth’s upper atmosphere or crashing vertically down.

A stony asteroid could break up in the air, turning into a shower of meteorites. With a really solid one, it of course matters whether it hits on land or at sea; and if on land, how populated that bit of land is. A solid vertical hit on land could generate an impact crater as much as two-thirds of a mile across. That’s just the crater: there’d be total destruction from the blast wave for miles beyond that.

Well, it’s a one-in-thirty chance (although the astronomers keep updating that number) and we have nearly eight years to prepare ourselves, so don’t be losing sleep over this.

And astronomically speaking, far worse things can happen — have happened. I’m going to quote myself here, if you don’t mind. This is from my monthly Diary, December 2018. The Mrs and I had taken a short vacation in Cancún on the northeastern tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Here I was reporting on that trip. Quote:

If I had the time and leisure to do serious travelling in Yucatán … the first place I’d head for would be the little coastal town of Chicxulub Puerto, 200 miles west of Cancún.

That town marks the precise spot, as near as we can figure it, where an asteroid smacked into our planet 66 million years ago. The subsequent ructions and climatic disasters wiped out much of life on Earth, most notably the dinosaurs.

My desire to visit Chicxulub is not, I’ll admit, rational. There’s nothing to see there. A lot of natural landscaping goes on in 66 million years, and the crater — it’s 93 miles across — can now be seen clearly only with special scientific intruments. Half of it’s under the sea.

Still I’d like to stand there where that thing hit, just for the imaginative thrill. Plus, on the assumption that two asteroid hits at the same place are highly unlikely, being in Chicxulub there’s one less thing to worry about in the cosmic-catastrophe line.

(Reflecting on that when reading through: Given that the great worldwide die-off following the asteroid strike was from drowning, burning, freezing, suffocation, poisoning, or starvation, being at Ground Zero when the asteroid hit might actually have been optimal.)

End quote.

To further allay your fears, gentle listener, please notice the difference in scale there. The biggest estimate for the size of Daisy is 300 feet; the Chicxulub asteroid was six miles across. That was one hell of an impact. The worst thing Daisy might do would be a gentle bump by comparison. A crater two-thirds of a mile across? The Chicxulub crater — still detectable after 66 million years — is 93 miles across.

Sure, the human world can be a dangerous one. Try as we might, though, we can’t deliver danger in anything like cosmic quantities.

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

Imprimis:  Of all the administrative reforms undertaken or proposed by President Trump and his people, the one that gets the loudest cheer from me is the idea of moving the headquarters of federal agencies out of Washington, D.C. to some location elsewhere in the other 99.99827 percent of our country’s land area.

The first Trump administration actually tried this, in a half-hearted and ineffectual way. Three and a half years into that administration, in August 2020, the Bureau of Land Management — that’s the agency within the Department of the Interior responsible for managing land owned by the federal government — the BLM had its headquarters office moved out of D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado.

The government people weren’t happy about it. More than 87 percent of the Bureau’s D.C.-based employees quit.

I’d call that a plus; but a year later, September 2021, the Biden administration — or Third Obama administration, George Soros administration, whatever the more accurate term is — moved the BLM head office back to D.C., where it’s been ever since.

With modern communications, there is no case at all for headquartering all the federal agencies on one 70-square-mile patch of real estate. Scatter them to the four winds! It would even make better sense national-security-wise. As things stand, one well-aimed missile with a 50-megaton warhead could wipe out the federal government and all its data.

(Hey, stop that cheering in the back row! Show some good taste, please, and proper respect for our nation’s public servants. Thank you …)

Item:  Fort Knox has been in the news. That’s the bullion depository at Fort Knox army base in Kentucky, where the U.S.A. stores around half of our gold reserves.

I confess I’m not clear as to why Fort Knox has been in the news. Apparently Elon Musk has been posting on X some skepticism about whether the gold bullion there is secure. Maybe we should audit it, he’s said. Wednesday this week, talking with reporters on Air Force One, President Trump confirmed that they are indeed going to do an audit. Actual quote from him, quote:

We’re going to go to Fort Knox, the fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there.

End quote.

The Treasury Department tells us there are 147,341,858.382 troy ounces of gold in the Fort Knox bullion depository. That’s awfully precise; why do we need an audit?

And with gold currently trading at $2,951.90 the troy ounce, that Fort Knox share is worth only $435 billion. I make that just 1.2 percent of our $36.22 trillion national debt — a mere bagatelle.

Working the arithmetic the other way, that $36.22 trillion national debt equates to around 421,000 tons of gold. Is there actually that much mined gold in the entire world?

So our weeny little $435 billion deposit isn’t going to be much help with the trillions that dominate our national finances. Is it even worth the trouble of auditing? Didn’t we come off the gold standard decades ago?

I guess I’m not really getting the point of Fort Knox. But hey, we got a fun movie out of the durn place — Goldfinger, remember that?

“Do you expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.”

Eh, they don’t make ’em like that any more.

Item:  Just one more from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. NASA has now given us a definite date for the return of those two astronauts stranded in orbit on the International Space Station: March 19th.

You’ll no doubt recall that the two — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, aged 62 and 59 respectively — arrived at the space station June 5th last year, for a stay that was only scheduled to last eight days. However, the Boeing vehicle that was supposed to return them to Earth was judged not spaceworthy, so they’ve been waiting for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be ready.

There’s been some concern about their health up there, after all these months in weightlessness. NASA says not to worry, they’re fine; but some physiologists say that without the regular constant stresses on bones, muscles, and body fluids that we get from gravity, there’s bound to be deterioration.

Let’s hope there’s no permanent harm, and these two brave, cheerful astronauts return home safely March 19th. And let’s hope they negotiated a good overtime rate before they went up there.

Item:  Did you know — I bet you didn’t: in this case, in fact, I’d bet money on it — did you know that last Saturday, February 15th, was World Hippo Day? I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying that “every dog has its day.” Well, it’s not only dogs; hippos have their day, too — February 15th.

Here in New York State I have been leading a small group of citizens agitating to have World Hippo Day moved from February 15th to October 18th, the birthday of our State Attorney General. So far, however, our efforts have met with no success.

I’m looking at a World Hippo Day commemorative website that tells me, quote:

These adorable creatures spend their days splashing in the water, munching on grass, and wowing us with their powerful jaws!

End quote.

You might get a different point of view from 72-year-old Craig Manders of Cranford, New Jersey. June 5th last year Mr Manders and his wife Lisa, age 70, were on safari in Zambia to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Then while Mrs Manders was standing on a river bank taking pictures of a partially-submerged hippo at rest in the water, the beast suddenly came charging up out of the river and crushed her to death with its enormous jaws.

Last week Mr Manders filed suit against the tour company, which is based in Connecticut, for failing to protect him and his wife.

Radio Derb’s sincere sympathies of course go out to Mr Manders, with hopes for a fair judicial outcome. Being crushed to death by a rogue hippo is a dreadful fate indeed. As a former employee of VDARE.com I can imagine it all too easily.

07 — Signoff.     That’s the show, listeners. Thanks as always for your time and attention, your donations and support.

Thanks also to the listeners and readers who emailed in their sympathies after I reported last week that Mrs Derbyshire and I were both unwell. Thus encouraged, we are now back to normal — bless you all! We are in fact looking forward in good cheer to a small life milestone this weekend: Sunday, February 23rd, is E-Day minus one hundred. I shall have more to say about E-Day in future podcasts.

All those thanks come with my usual reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation during its suspension by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to that fine monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I am now a regular contributor. Thank you!

For signoff music this week, I’ve settled on something silly. I like silly and try to encourage it; I don’t think there’s enough silliness in the world.

The land of my birth, it seems to me, has been way out ahead of other nations in the cultivation of silliness. Sure, Americans can be silly: think of the Three Stooges or the Keystone cops. Our TV sitcoms occasionaly attained well-nigh British heights of silliness. Even Saturday Night Live had silly moments, as I remember; although I’m remembering the show as it was forty-some years ago.

In silliness, however, the Brits reign supreme. No other nation could have generated Monty Python’s Flying Circus — even the title is silly.

I don’t know how it was here in the States, but across the pond there, broadcast silliness goes way back before the age of TV. I can remember as a child, before we had a TV, listening spellbound to a deeply silly half-hour radio program called The Goon Show on BBC Radio. Among other keen listeners to that show was Charles Windsor, then Prince of Wales, nowadays King Charles the Third. He was mimicking the silly voices from The Goon Show well into the 1970s.

That great tradition of British Radio silliness continues to the present day. There’s a show on BBC Radio 4 with the title I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, where a panel of comedians is challenged to do silly things … like, for example, singing the words of some familiar song to the tune of a different familiar song.

To give you the idea, here was comedian Tony Hawks in Season 43 of the show, April 2004, singing the words of the Muppet Show intro theme to the tune of the late-1960s pop music hit A Whiter Shade Of Pale.

Yes, it’s silly. That’s the point.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

In every human organization there are things that are true but for one reason or another, everyone agrees to ignore them. It may be that these things are just annoying, like the personal ticks of the boss. In other cases, they are things that would put the organization at risk if people tried to address them. Human systems often must ignore things that contradict the logic of the system.

The American political order as established by the Constitution has holes that the Framers chose to ignore because they had no choice. The final results were a compromise between thirteen states that often had serious conflicts on things, conflicts that could not be reconciled, so they were ignored. The most obvious one is the issue of slavery that was resolved at a later date.

The managerial system that is under assault by Trump was made possible by ignoring things that were essential to its existence. The creation of executive agencies and who controls them is a good example. For fifty years everyone in Washington pretended that these agencies were a fourth branch of government. Trump has stopped pretending and is challenging a core assumption of managerialism.

That is the show this week. It is yet another way of looking at how we got to this place and why Trump can do what so-called conservatives had promised for decades but were never able to do. At the heart of managerialism was mokita, things everyone knew were true but agreed not to discuss. Like a body, the truth can only be hidden for long until it bobs to the surface.

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
• Mokita
• The Political Mokita
• The Constitutional Order
• The Managerial Mokita
• The Trump Challenge

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Full Show On Spreaker

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Full Show On Odysee

One of the new features of life since Trump came back to town is that things move quickly and if you are not careful, they will move without you. Ten thousand USAID employees learned this in week one. One day they were organizing the resistance and then the next day they were setting up a LinkedIn account. The first month of the Trump presidency has been a whirlwind of change. This is creating two classes of people, one who keep pace and one who are left behind.

One of those being left behind is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He now finds himself on the wrong side of the Trump’s friend-enemy distinction. He made the mistake of thinking the new boss was the old boss and his tricks would keep working. When those tricks did not work, he made the very big mistake of saying the new boss was misinformed. Now the new boss is making it clear that Zelensky will not be part of the future. Just like that, Zelensky is being reassigned to the dustbin of history.

The reason that Zelensky has so quickly gone from being the indispensable man to the guest who refuses to leave is that long before he was told about any of this, decisions were made about his future. For months prior to the election Trump would say he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but he refused to elaborate on the grounds that it was not prudent to talk about it publicly. The only clue he provided was that the war would never have happened if he had been president.

People dismissed this as hubris, but it was an important clue. If Trump had been president, he would have demanded to talk with the Russians and he would never have elevated Zelensky to the status of indispensable man. Project Ukraine was only possible by first anathematizing Russia and then turning Zelensky into a heroic figure at the point of the spear resisting the evil Russians. Remove that friend-enemy set up and the war never gets started.

Once you look at the war the way Trump has been looking at the war since it started, his approach makes perfect sense. He is doing now what he would have done if he were in the White House for a second term. He opened a dialogue with the Russians, and he minimized Zelensky. The reason for that is this war is not about Ukraine or some abstract concepts from the past century. It is about how conflicts between the great powers will be settled in the future.

Here is where you see the two class of people. Zelensky is operating from the old model where moralizing about world affairs was the rule. It was about those old 20th century ideas of good guys and bad guys. Trump is operating from the new model where everything is about business. Project Ukraine is bad business, so it must end and there is nothing more to say about it. Zelensky is the project manager who thinks the project is about something other than business.

Zelensky is not alone in this. His friends in Europe are also trapped in the past, thinking that they are skillfully playing the old game, when in reality they are soon to join Zelensky in the room of formerly relevant figures. The British figurehead Keir Starmer is coming to Washington next week thinking he is going to explain things to President Trump with regards to Zelensky. In reality he is going to be sat down by Trump subordinates and told he has been demoted.

Trump signaled as much when a reporter asked him about Starmer announcing his trip to Washington last week. Trump casually said that Starmer wanted to visit, but he was unsure of when he was coming. He treated it like the pool guy called and said he had to do something about the algae. That should have been a signal to the Brits that Starmer will not be welcomed as an equal, but like everyone else in Europe, they are struggling to come to terms with the new world order.

The same thing is happening locally. Scan many conservative sites or their accounts on Twitter and they are carrying on like it is 1985. Granted, this has been their act since 1985, but it is clearly not 1985 now. They are still doing the “If we use our power then the we are no better than the Democrats” act. The dumbest ones are still singing from the neocon hymn book. Dissidents have often joked that conservativism is a museum to the Reagan years, but now it is painfully true.

In fairness, the dancing partner of the conservatives are struggling as well. This tweet from a progressive chattering skull is emblematic. He is working from the old playbook that says the “left” calls out the “right” about not following the rules and the “right” then uses that to fink on their voters. The people operating in the new way of things just shrug at this stuff. The whole point of the present moment is to flip over the tables in the temple of politics and usher in a new age.

This is not just a struggle for the establishment. Old think is a problem for people who claimed to be dissidents. The people called “right-wing influencers” are struggling to maintain an audience because their act is suddenly irrelevant. Many are now becoming Trump critics because it is the only way to get attention. It turns out that they were never for anything, just against things. Remove those things they oppose, and they are left with a gaping hole in their act.

Where all this leaves us is we have two classes of people now. There are those who are embracing the new way of doing things, even if how it all works is not all that clear, and then there are those who wish to remain in the past century. Perhaps this will be the new political spectrum. The left will be the dead-enders who continue to look backward, and the right will be those facing the future. Regardless of the labels, the future will belong to those who embrace it, leaving the past in the past.

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