Author Archives: thezman

Temporarily Successful Paupers

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about bugmen, a post about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

A basic rule of complex systems is that within them, you get more of what is rewarded by the rules of the system and less of what is not rewarded. In the case of human systems, this manifests as status. High status people will possess many of the qualities favored by the rules, and low status people will have fewer of those things. The stars of a sport are those who are either great at some aspects of the sport or very good at a wide range of favored skills in the sport.

Culture is the word we use for the complex system of rules and properties that define the societies in which we live. Like all systems, culture rewards some things and not others and punishes some things and not others. Status in the culture is determined by the overall quantity of these things. Some qualities are disqualifying, as the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein learned. He was very good at making profitable films, a highly prized quality, but he had habits that were eventually disqualifying.

This basic rule of systems can help explain why the United States finds itself in a crisis that, on the surface, seems easy to solve. The finances of the American empire are not so dire that they cannot be remedied. Some sacrifice would be needed, but with sound leadership, the fiscal house could be set right quickly. The same is true of the foreign policy challenges. The demographic and cultural issues are more complex, but the answers are known. It is a question of execution.

The most vexing problem of the current crisis for most people is why nothing gets done to address the known issues when the solutions are fairly obvious. On the one hand, there is an industry that exists to explain why the politics of each issue is such that the right answer can never be considered. On the other hand, there is libertarianism and conservatism that offer escape from the reality of the problem. These are the people who start every sentence with “all we need to do is…”

The corruption and escapism surrounding the question of why the issues that plague the country are never addressed are not explanations. They are part of the set of things that are caused by the core issue. We have gotten a hint of this in the first months of Trump’s second attempt at the wheel. He simply did things, like void longstanding executive orders on affirmative action. Suddenly, a man with the will to act was acting on a problem of politics, and the problem stopped being a problem.

What the first months of the new Trump term show is that leaders can simply act, and their actions can change the rules of the system. The racial rackets are suddenly in crisis because one man signed his name on some paper. We are seeing the same thing with immigration, where the political center is now speeding so quickly in the direction of the patriotic position that people are struggling to keep pace. It is as if there is a revolution going on in elite opinion.

This returns us to the question of why the same thing has not been done with regard to the main issues of the current crisis. The reason is systemic. The system rewards certain types of men and not others. That means our elites are high in the qualities that are rewarded and low in the qualities that are needed to solve the problem. The fact that Trump is universally hated in Washington speaks to the fact that he is high in qualities that the political system abhors.

An example of how this works is Mark Cuban, the billionaire who used to own the Dallas Mavericks and now agitates people on social media. He is a billionaire and therefore a member of the elite. The difference between Mark Cuban and the people in the stands at an NBA game wearing a team jersey is only about money. In fact, Cuban was one of those people as the owner of the team. He was not just the owner. He was the number one superfan of the team.

John Steinbeck coined the phrase “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” to describe the attitude of the typical American. The American Dream says that through hard work and determination, you can become wealthy. There is also the sense that serendipity plays a role in getting rich. You increase your odds of getting that winning ticket to the upper classes if you work hard. In this regard, Mark Cuban is the manifestation of this concept, as he got rich through hard work and serendipity.

There is a flip side to this that is clear with Cuban. Our elites think of themselves as temporarily successful paupers. The same turn of fortune’s wheel that made them rich could easily make them poor again. This is why American elites are so desperate to imitate the ways of the lower classes. It is as if they feel they must be penitent in order to prevent the hand of fate from sending them down the economic ladder. This is why rich celebrities are so fond of playing the victim.

Of course, it is not merely dumb luck that explains success. Hard work and determination play a major role, but the main driver is the relative quality of those things rewarded by the culture. America is a materialist society that rewards those who are good at our peculiar form of economics. Mark Cuban got rich because he was able to fob off onto tech billionaires a company that turned out to be worthless, but at the time looked like a goldmine.

Elon Musk became the world’s richest man by flattering the political class that his businesses were holy crusades. If they invested public money in those enterprises, they would not only bring salvation to society but also be seen as virtuous. Without hundreds of billions in public money, Musk is just an eccentric weirdo. His love for Donald Trump now looks like opportunism. It was a chance to run the same game on the MAGA movement that he ran on the left for so long.

The recent public feud between Trump and Musk is useful in understanding something else about our elites. Musk feels like Trump used him, but he should not be shocked, as to be an elite means being a tool. Success in economic endeavors is never about higher values or transcendent beliefs. It is about making the mechanics of the economic system work in your favor. At every level, the people involved are nothing more than tools to be used by those above them.

This makes the people at the top the most successful tools in the system. They are the tools the system uses to exploit the rest of the tools. It is no wonder then that the political elites use the economic elites as tools for their success. Trump’s relationship with Musk shows that Trump has learned how to be good at politics by using members of the economic elite like Musk as tools in his new trade. In a society of tools, everyone is eventually used and then discarded, even the elite tools.

This brings us back to those vexing problems of the current crisis. The solution is clear, but the execution requires men with the will to do it. Such men are never mere tools of the system, but men with a sense of nobility. They are men who understand why old men plant fruit trees. They have a higher purpose than the mere collection of things, and they do not see themselves as temporarily successful paupers. Their nobility is independent of their utility.

The American system does not produce such men because it does not reward the qualities that such men must possess. In fact, having a higher purpose is disqualifying in most areas of life. The businessman who sees his company as part of the social fabric will be ruined by those who can think only in money. The politician who speaks of sacrifice will lose to one promising free money. Materialism demands that you live in the present, so you can never transcend the present.

It was not always so for America. It is the transformation that occurred in the twentieth century that resulted in a system that produces our current elites. It is the failure of those elites that will bring about the end of the system that created them. Perhaps what comes next will once again reflect the essential American character, but this assumes there will be enough of those essential Americans to make it possible. That is the great question at the heart of the current crisis.

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!

Radio Derb June 06 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 03m16s Lunacy, Muslim-style
  • 10m07s Imaginative warfare
  • 15m12s Rumors of war
  • 22m29s Trump and Musk
  • 27m25s Valediction

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is your conclusively genial host John Derbyshire with the D-Day edition of Radio Derb. I know of course that most of you listen to the show on Saturday, which will be the 7th; but Friday is when I sit down to record it, so “D-Day edition” is valid.

Calendrical matters are at the front of my mind this week as Tuesday, June 3rd, was my birthday, my 80th birthday. I didn’t broadcast that fact in advance, so I was pleasantly astonished at the number of emails I got wishing me a happy birthday. How did people know? A moment’s reflection reminded me that my birth date is there for all to see on my personal website. It’s also on Twitter, if you go looking; and it’s on my Wikipedia page in between the descriptions of me as a hate-filled far-right homophobic racist misogynist full of hate.

Even after remembering all that, I was still surprised by the number of emails that came in: surprised, and stirred. I offer my sincere, heartfelt thanks to all who emailed, most especially to those of you who told me you’ve been following me ever since such-and-such, with some of the such-and-suches going all the way back into the 20th century. Thank you, thank you!

And yes, I had a very happy birthday. It was a lovely June day. I did some garden work and some undemanding household chores. For dinner my wife and kids took me to an excellent Italian restaurant in the village here and let me make a complete pig of myself. Life is good; all the better with a loving family and friends far and near. Thank you, again thank you!

I shall have more calendrical observations later. First, a glance at the week’s news. It’ll only be a brief one; I’m still in a holiday mood.

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In Search of Antisemitism

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Fifty years ago, the word “antisemitism” did not often turn up in everyday discourse and when it did it lacked the punch of today. The person who thought poorly of Jews was like the guy who was into conspiracy theories. Only in the upper reaches of society was it a fearsome accusation. That changed and now it is the worst thing that can happen to someone with a professional career.

The funny thing about the term and the meaning behind it is that it now has a definition that only professional anti-antisemites can explain. Fifty years ago, an antisemite was someone who hated Jews. Today, it is complicated. The determination as to whether someone is an antisemite requires a team of experts who have not only studied the man’s life but have also been trained in anti-antisemitism.

Eric Hoffer noted that mass movements in America become a religion, a corporation, or a racket, but in reality, they often become all three. You see it here. For some, anti-antisemitism is a way of life, like a religion. For others, it has become a lucrative career that provides them with regular appearances on television. For most now, it is a racket that lets them earn more than their talents warrant.

Ironically, this is only possible because America has no history of antisemitism and never possessed a critical mass of people who were hostile to Jews. The great wave of immigration in the 19th century that brought Jews to America delivered Jewish people into a land that was largely indifferent to them. Like the rest of the migrants, they had a rough go of it at first, but otherwise they encountered no opposition.

This is what makes the present moment interesting. Just as America is becoming something like medieval Spain in terms of demographics, we are seeing the first flickers of hostility to Jews. They are at the forefront of the open borders policies that have wrecked American demographics, thus creating conditions for the sort of tribalism from which most stereotypes about Jews arose.

That is the show this week. It is mostly an exploration of the anti-antisemitism world in search of a definition for it. Sprinkled in is the usual commentary about the weird things one finds when he goes down this rabbit hole. Unlike the anti-racism rackets, the anti-antisemitism rackets are far more complicated and have a logic to them that explains both anti-antisemitism and antisemitism.

It also explains why it must always bee looking for or producing antisemites that paly the familiar role of Old Scratch. One the one hand, the industry is ready accuse anyone of being an antisemite. On the other hand, it does produce people who think they are in a great struggle with the Jews. Negative identities, which is anti-antisemitism, must always preserve that which it claims to oppose.

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
  • Buckley
  • Defining Antisemitism
    • The American Government (Link)
    • Stockholm Declaration (Link)
    • Holocaust (Link)
    • More Holocaust (Link)
    • American Jewish Committee (Link)
    • ADL (Link)
    • Spelling (Link)
  • The Main Issues
  • America
  • Full Circle

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Signs In The BBB

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Note: Last night Paul and I talked about what it means to be a dissident and why the people we call the left believe the weird things they do. Watch here.

Most of the week has been talk about the “Big Beautiful Bill” that is winding its way through the gauntlet that is Congress. The hold up, as is always the case, is the Republicans are devoting their time to how best to use this opportunity to screw over their own voters. To be a Republican means looking for opportunities to remind your voters that the political system is hopeless. It is now looking like the Republican Senate will hand their president a major loss.

While many of the oligarchs have swung to the side of angels, the donor class in general remains locked into the old nation wrecking model where both parties are focused on undermining and destroying the majority population. The cultural atmosphere in Washington is radioactively hostile to the average American. The broad support for Trump and his policies is simply seen as proof that the people opposing Trump are the good guys in this long twilight struggle.

At some point, the effort will shift to peeling off some Democrats in the Senate to get the votes for the bill, which means giving even more away to the forces of darkness than was already in the bill. The end result will be something that has a few crumbs for the majority and mountains of stuff for the bad guys. The result of the “sausage maker” that is Congress will be a mighty turd sandwich with those few crumbs for the majority sprinkled on top like sesame seeds.

In fairness, some of those crumbs are good crumbs. There is $46 billion to build the wall Trump promised a decade ago. Given how incensed both parties were over this idea when it was proposed, this should be viewed as progress. There is a bunch of money in the bill to expand the forces and facilities needed to expel the invaders. The claim is that the additional resources will let the government expel up to one million invaders every year, not including the people nabbed at the border.

That is one of the many lies Washington has fed us over the years. They claimed that every year one to two million people were deported, when the number was actually around three hundred thousand. The additional million or so were people refused at the border for any reason. If Boobingo from Ghana did not have the right stamp on his passport and was rejected at the airport in Ghana, then that was counted in the deportation numbers.

There are tax cuts that actually favor people who work for a living. There is the “no tax on tips” change, which is a big deal. It also rolls back the reporting requirements from services like PayPal. Currently, if you get more than $600 through PayPal, you get a 1099 and then it is up to you to prove to the IRS that the money sent to you from a friend was not income. The “gig economy”, people who make money a few bucks at a time, will get serious tax relief.

One thing not mentioned in the media, because it requires a high school education to understand, is the planned rollback of energy regulations. The point of these changes is to allow the administration to kill off the Gaia nonsense in the energy sector to pave the way for new energy production. In one of his pressers, Trump casually mentioned the goal to add 400 GW from nuclear by 2050. That would mean quadrupling the amount of electric we get from nuclear power.

Along with the immigration measures in the bill, this is where you get a hint of what is vexing the oligarchs who are backing Trump. They look at AI and see the cubicle farms in their businesses being filled by robots instead of humans. That means they will need vastly more electricity than they currently have, and it means they need to find something to keep these unemployed people busy. The army of Indians stashed around the country will have to go back.

It is a bit ironic, in a way, as for decades people have argued that we do not need more people as automation is reducing the value of labor. Normal people in the regular world could see it, but the oligarchs did not see it. Instead, they saw the need for armies of Hindus to cheaply write code and administer the vast financial skimming models used by the financial sector. With AI, they can now see what automation means in their lives, so they are swinging around to the moral position.

Of course, the fact that even with oligarch support this bill is struggling speaks to the problems of the political system. The massive amounts of new spending and the failure to include the savings found by DOGE is a good reminder that the system cannot be reformed though the normal means. It will take a fiscal crisis and then emergency powers to fix the government’s finances. Most likely it will require a Robespierre to pave the way for genuine reform.

In the end, despite the Republican perfidy and conservative cuckery, the existence of this bill hints that some powerful people are serious about avoiding disaster. It is one of those tiny steps in the sane direction on some issues that will either be viewed as too little too late or the start of the great reordering. Of course, either way, there will be a great reordering no matter what. The question that hangs over all of this is whether it comes by the pen or by the sword.

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

The Death Of Experts

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Note: Tonight at 8:00 EDT, Paul and I will be talking about what it means to be a dissident in this age. The show is on Twitter, YouTube and Rumble.

A strange thing developing in pseudo-intellectual circles is the defense of expertise, by which is meant the defense of credentialism. People long on credentials, but short on practical knowledge and experience, are demanding they get the respect they deserve as experts in their respective fields. Nathan Cofnas is the latest to get in on the issue by demanding we respect his authority as an expert. Dick Hanania has also used to the issue to get attention online.

It is not a new issue nor one exclusive to the sorts of people who seek attention online as “influencers.” Credentialism produces a class of people who have no practical knowledge, so they have no experience. The lack of experience means they have no tangible results to back up their claims to expertise. This produces a class of people who defend credentialed experts. The anti-Trump crank Tom Nichols is a good example of the type. He even wrote a book defending credentialed experts.

Credentialism itself is a sign the system has entered its denouement. It signals the capture of the system by people who are motivated by class consciousness rather than a genuine expertise in a specific field. The group of people devoted to genuine expertise are shouldered aside by those devoted to defending the privileges that come from claiming expertise. To solidify their hold, they create arbitrary barriers of entry into the domain of expertise, which are called credentials.

This is the flaw in Peter Turchin’s concept of elite overproduction, at least as far as it applies to the managerial state. It is not that there are too many elites for the available positions, but that the nature of elite degrades over time. The builders give way to maintainers who are then displaced at the top by people who are good at institutional politics, to the exclusion of practical knowledge. The definition of elite then changes from practical things to the abstractions we see within credentialism.

That aside, for those interested in seeing how the defense of credentialism manifests with the next generations, this video is a good start. Dave Greene, the man behind the YouTube channel The Distributist, debated Nathan Cofnas, the person who gained some notoriety attacking Kevin MacDonald a half dozen years ago. Cofnas is now trying to create a new career defending credentialism. Cofnas then defended his performance with former pornographer Luke Ford.

Without knowing it, at least as a front brain process, Cofnas is engaging in a group activity in his defense of credentialism. He is appealing to the people who may or may not allow him to remain in the expert class. He is not trying to convince the rubes to respect his authority. He is signaling to his betters that he is a reliable candidate for admission into the club. His thumbless way of doing it is his undoing, but it the behavior elicited by the selection mechanisms of credentialism.

A more nuanced example is this post on Zero Hedge about the plan circulating in the West to cut themselves off from cheap energy products. The origin of the post is the site OilPrice.com, which is a clearing house of postings about the energy markets. The author of the post is someone calling himself Cyril Widdershoven. That is not a fake internet name, but a real person. Here is his CV on LinkedIn. He is an anthropomorphized example of credentialism.

If you read the postings of Cyril Widdershoven at that site, what you see is that he is usually wrong in his predictions. His analysis in the case of the pending energy sanctions rests not on an understanding of oil markets but on an understanding of the prevailing opinions in the expert class. That is the key to his wrongness. He is always wrong in the same way everyone else in the expert class is wrong. In managerialism, being wrong along with everyone else is better than being right.

That is the thing about credentialism. It selects for people who preternaturally understand the prevailing attitudes within the group. It is why the range of opinions is so narrow in every field. Once any group hits a critical mass of people whose instinct is to be in the center of the group, the group is then defined by the fights to be as close to the center as possible. The expert class becomes a collapsing star. This is why our expert class now sounds like a chorus rather than a debate.

You see the problem in that video of Cofnas debating Greene. Cofnas cannot distinguish between error and a lie or understand why one is better than the other because for him they are not moral issues. Both are simply means to an end, much in the way a sociopath views the truth and a lie. In the case of credentialism, error and lying only matter insofar as they move you closer to the center. The practical impact is of no importance to the people inside the expert class.

Managerialism, of which the expert class is a part, rests on the social capital of the people over whom it rules. The accumulating errors of the expert class, which contributes to the dysfunction of the managerial system, is eroding the social capital of society and thus we see the collapsing trust in experts and the state. Counterintuitively this is seen as proof within the expert class that they are not just experts, but members of the elect, chosen to rule over the non-experts.

This explains the prevailing madness in our politics. The motivations inside the system are now divorced from practical necessity. The rooms where decisions are made are full of people with resumes littered with the word “consultant” or letters indicating admission to various subgroups in the expert class. Nowhere is there anyone who knows how anything works. The only thing they know for sure is that you should respect their authority as experts.

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!

Blackrockistan

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Note: Tonight at 8:15 EDT, I will be on with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow and Harrison Smith from Infowars to talk about remigration. I may also announce, with a great flourish, that I am officially off the Trump Train. Tune in here.

A question that is never asked in official circles, or even much in unofficial ones, is why Western leaders seem so desperate for war? For the last three-plus years, they have been scheming to start a direct war with Russia. The rhetoric has been so crazed it suggests they have a death wish. It is not just Russia. They want war with China and Iran, which would mean a regional war in the Middle East. The one thing the West seems sure about is the need for a big war.

Of course, given the increasing separation between official narratives and reality, many are sure they are at war. The current Prime Minister of Britain is telling his party that the country is now at war and must mobilize the country. Emmanuel Macron has spent the last year flitting about the continent as if he is leading Europe in a war against Russia, despite the fact the official position of his government, and NATO, is they have no direct role in the Ukraine war.

There is a Little Rascals quality to Europe at the moment. None of these countries have an army capable of fighting beyond their borders and many could not defend themselves against a well-armed militia. Europe has relied on the American military for so long most have forgotten how to fight. Instead, like the old television program, they dress up like big boys and girls and put on a show. Watching the girl bosses of the EU make threats is as absurd as the old television show.

That does explain one reason for the rhetoric. To be a European head of state is to be powerless, other than the power to put on a show. France, for example, relies on the EU to control its economy, trade policy and immigration policy. NATO decides what France can do with its shrinking military capability. The typical American governor has more sovereign authority than the head of France. While not entirely ceremonial, this is the direction for the “leaders” of Europe.

If you are allowed to do only one thing after reaching the highest office in your country’s political system, that is the thing you will do, and with gusto. Keir Starmer, for example, understands that the Bank of England overthrew the Tory government and put Labour in charge of parliament with a minority of public support. Every EU leader knows the EU rigs elections and overthrows governments. Every European “leader” knows he is an actor hired to play a role, so they play the role.

That gets to who is doing the hiring. Starmer is in office because the Bank of England saw him as a suitably complaint puppet. Macron remains in power, despite losing the last election, because Blackrock wants him in power. Germany’s new puppet is in charge for the same reason. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager controlling more than nine trillion dollars. That means it has real power, the power to pick who wins elections and who controls public policy.

Blackrock invested billions in Ukraine prior to the war, because it believed Ukraine would fall into the Western orbit, which would mean Blackrock would control trillions in natural resources. The reason the Republicans were suddenly desperate to get sixty billion in new money to Ukraine after the 2022 midterm victory was to get Blackrock and others some of their money out of Ukraine. The proxy war with Russia was sold to the bankers as an opportunity to loot Eurasia again.

Now that the war has turned against the West, the rhetoric has become shriller for political reasons, but also as a way to sell arms. Blackrock and other massive private asset holders have large stakes in companies like Raytheon, Lockheed, Rheinmetall and many other arms makers. Another reason the political class of Europe is carrying on as if Genghis Khan is about to cross the Dnieper is they think it builds popular support for rebuilding their militaries.

There is another element to this. The Western oligarchy is based on the assumption that the United States is the global bank and the global mint. It performs this dual role by controlling the global reserve currency, which is made possible by controlling the most important global assets. To this point, that was made possible by controlling oil via the petrodollar agreement with OPEC. If energy must be priced in dollars, the demand for dollars can never be challenged.

The technological revolution, which is largely responsible for creating this new oligarchical class, has also undermined this arrangement. There are now other things in great demand to meet the needs of technology. Simply skimming from the oil trade is no longer enough. America needs computing power and that means energy production, which means a massive increase in energy consumption, along with the consumption of other natural resources needed for big computing.

The trillions in natural resources underneath the Donbas were seen as a quick and easy answer to the Western hunger for natural resources. Of course, it was just the first domino in the eventual exploitation of the rest of Eurasia. The technological revolution has turned the West, particularly America, into a ravenous beast that must find new sources of food to maintain itself. Big Tech and Big Finance have created a vampire economy that is always looking for a new neck.

They say all wars are banker’s wars and this has been true since the spread of popular government in the 18th century. Once who controls the assets is divorced from how those assets are used, there is no longer any control over how those assets are used by the political system. We see that in the modern West. The people vote, politicians are picked to fill the offices, but policy is made by those who own the assets because the Golden Rule states, the men with the gold make the rules.

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!

Asabiyyah

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the death of college athletics, a post about building a workbench, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

If you were to imagine the ideal human community, you would probably assume “ideal” meant peaceful and cooperative. There may be people who think the ideal society is one that it is something like a prison exercise yard, but most people think of the idyllic society as one in perfect harmony. Everyone cooperates with one another in order to overcome the natural challenges that come with human society. Disagreements are worked out through the free exchange of ideas and compromise.

Everyone understands that even on a small scale, such a thing is not possible, but it has always been a useful metric. We often measure society against this standard of what we conceive of as the ideal society. It is why every year there are studies posted listing the happiest countries or the least corrupt countries. These are ways to see how the country stacks up against that ideal. Happy people have less crime and corruption than people in quarrelsome, uncooperative societies.

This is not a Christian concept as many assume. People have noticed since the ancient times that societal health correlates with cooperation. Aristotle talked about the concept of philía, which roughly means friendship or affection. It is the glue that holds a people together, which is a requirement of the polis. It is the natural desire to cooperate with others, not just from personal interest, but for the sake of the polis. The “politics” of a society, therefore, arise from friendship and affection.

The 14th-century Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun wrote about this thing he called asabiyyah, which is something like social cohesion or group solidarity. It is the natural desire to cooperate that arises from family and the tribe, which allows for the construction of increasingly complex social structures. The more asabiyyah a society possesses, the more it is able to accomplish. This, Khaldun noted, is also why complex societies inevitably collapse.

The thing that makes it possible for one people to dominate other people is that which eventually erodes their social cohesion. It is social cohesion that facilitates cooperation, which increases the prosperity of the society. That prosperity then brings expansion and the incorporation of new people, who begin to drain that social cohesion. The cost of acquiring new people is the loss of social cohesion. This then raises the cost of governing the society, which further erodes asabiyyah.

There are many famous theories as to why human societies rise and fall, but all must contend with this central truth of human society. It can only exist when people are able to trust and cooperate with those outside their kin group. The greater the distance from that kin group, the more it costs to maintain cooperation. The reason empires always fall is they end up including people so distant from one another that they are unable to form any sort of cooperative relationship.

Look around the West and you see two things. One is the cost of the state is spiraling upward as it becomes increasingly incompetent. An unsaid truth of many American cities is they lack a genuine police force. The police are just a state sponsored gang that keeps the less organized gangs in check in order to maintain some safe areas for the elite and the tourist areas. Parts of cities like Baltimore can no longer be included in the concept of “civilized society.”

European cities are struggling with the same issue, but for different reasons. Instead of an unassimilable population from an old economic model, they imported millions of people who are genetically distant from the native population. Many of these people are hostile to other people imported into Europe. This alone has eroded social cohesion, but the efforts to maintain order are also eroding social trust. Every man jailed for speech crimes is a loss of European asabiyyah.

This may explain the sudden lurch in elite opinion in the United States away from unlimited immigration to what may be open hostility to it. Every day the window on the issue seems to move from the long-held position of open borders to what is now called remigration, the return of migrants to their homelands. The State Department has announced it is opening an office of remigration to facilitate this. A year ago, uttering the word “remigration” in many places could get you jailed.

This change is elite driven, which is what matters. Instead of an elite responding to public opinion, it is the elite now trying to drive public opinion. When the CEO of JPMorgan Chase speaks dismissively about immigration, as he recently did on the left-wing cable channel CNBC, something big is happening in the clouds. Conventional wisdom among the elite on immigration has swung to the opposite side. There is a reason for it, and it is not a sense of shame.

This gets back to those old concepts about what makes society possible and how best to measure the prosperity of a society. Decades of mismanagement due to the needs of the American empire have drained the West of its asabiyyah. As a result, the cost of maintaining order in the West is reaching a danger zone. All one has to do is look at the budgets of Western governments and then look at the condition of society. In many places, no government at all would be an improvement.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that it is the money men who are the first to sense something is seriously wrong in the West. They may not understand the cultural issues, but they see the gap between the cost and the results. The world’s richest man was not tasked with finding trillions in waste by accident. With $19 Trillion in debt rolling over in the next year, the money men are right to be worried that they have drained the last drops of asabiyyah from the Western world.

While it is tempting to see this sudden realization as a positive, Ibn Khaldun was not optimistic about a society’s ability to rebuild its asabiyyah. This is a theme with all writers who examined societal decline. Once a society hits that inflection point, it no longer has the capacity to reform itself. Social cohesion is not something that can be rebuilt, not even through shared struggle, as it is something that naturally occurs. Once it is drained it is gone and the society it produced is gone with it.

Perhaps this is a necessity as the West finally escapes the age of ideology. The decline of the West will open the ground for new social cohesion to form organically among the European populations that remain in Western lands. The new, post-ideological societies, growing up in majority-minority lands, will place social cohesion and asabiyyah at the top of their social hierarchy. The new asabiyyah will grow out of the wreckage of the ideological society.

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!

Radio Derb May 30 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 02m24s Open the pod bay doors, Hal
  • 06m46s AI scrapes Grub Street
  • 14m06s Trump 47 report card: (1)
  • 19m14s Trump 47 report card: (2)
  • 23m00s Trump 47 report card: (3)
  • 28m29s Cooking the data at Harvard
  • 30m34s The LGBTQ+ Community Month
  • 31m51s Smartphones are a human right
  • 33m15s Signoff with Carousel

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is of course your provocatively genial host John Derbyshire with commentary on the news this penultimate day of May 2025.

Just a wee housekeeping note before we start. I took my signoff music last week from a YouTube clip of two Chinese ladies playing Chinese music on Chinese instruments in a big public square. The people passing by in the square who stopped to listen didn’t look Chinese; neither did the buildings around the square. I surmised that it was a European city, and noted that someone in the YouTube comment thread thought it might be Munich.

A friend more resourceful than myself emailed in to tell me he had copied and pasted a couple of screenshots from that YouTube clip into Grok. Grok, he said, seems confident the video is shot in Milan, identifying the Castello Sforzesco and the Piazza del Duomo. Thank you, Sir!

Grok describes itself as, quote, “your truth-seeking AI companion for unfiltered answers with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing,” end quote. In other words, it’s an Artificial Intelligence chatbot. Let’s have a starting segment on AI. Continue reading →

Death To Freaks

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While everyone is enjoying a bit of a respite from the crazies flying their freak flags in our faces, it is important to remember that they have not gone away. Like cicadas, they have merely gone into hibernation. There they will rest up and conjure some new versions of their egalitarian lunacy. A decade from now they will spring forth and start the cycle of madness over again.

In the interim, the people who orchestrated the freakshow will be busy gnawing away at the fibers of society in an effort to prevent regeneration. They can still use Trump to generate support and get money from soulless oligarchs, who think underwriting this stuff will bring them peace. The lawfare we see against the Trump admin is a good example of what will be the norm now.

The crazies will also refit their image by disposing of the old freaks and finding new freaks to be the face of their craziness. Expect new faces in the media saying the same old things but with new language. Just as the New Democrat was the old crazies in new baby boomer wrappers, the next round of freaks will be the same freaks but dressed up in the garb of the new generation of millennials.

That is the show this week. It is a vacation week for many and a slow week in general, so I am trying to keep in light. Even though it is fun to mock these people now that the tide has turned against them, it is important to remember that the freaks never change, and they never quit. The coming peace in the culture war is a false dawn. True peace only comes when freaks are permanently forced to the margins.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Intro
  • The Freak Show
  • The Freaks
  • Shadow Freaks (Link)
  • Death To Freaks

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Odd Squad

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Note: This is the five year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, peace be upon him, so I will be part of a Twitter space discussing the life and legacy of one of our nation’s greatest heroes. You can listen here.

The general assessment of Trump 2.0 so far, by those inclined to support him, is that his domestic operation is doing great, but his foreign policy operations is a work in progress, to be generous. It is still early, and the primary focus should be on domestic policy, but foreign policy is not unimportant. Thirty years of horrific domestic policy has often been justified on foreign policy grounds, so they are not entirely divorced from one another.

The reason the Trump foreign policy operation is struggling can be understood by looking at the team assigned to implement his policy. The top foreign policy job was given to Marco Rubio, a guy with zero experience in this area, other than sitting on Senate committees. A pawn of the Israel lobby, he also sided with the neocons for his entire career in the Senate. During the transition, this nomination was counted as the worst of Trump’s cabinet picks.

Rubio seems to have had some sort of epiphany when it comes to politics that went unnoticed as he no longer sounds like a neocon. In fact, he sounds like a critic who has been reading dissident websites. His commentary on South Africa, for example, is the sort of stuff that used to get your bank account closed. Even so, Rubio is without experience, so he is learning on the job, a job that traditionally sets the tone for the administration’s foreign policy approach.

Things get more unconventional with the national security team. Mike Waltz was the National Security Advisor until it was revealed that he was playing footsy with far-left radicals in the media. Then there are Michael Anton and Sebastian Gorka as Deputy National Security Advisors. Both are best described as media personalities with close ties to the neocons. Eli Lake loves Anton and Lake is firmly in the paranoid anti-Russia social network of neocon media activists.

Then you have Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, two people with no experience in their areas of responsibility and zero experience running big, complicated organizations. Gabbard’s claim to fame is breaking with Washington on Syria and her party on social issues. Hegseth was a popular Fox News star with unconventional opinions on the military. These are Trump’s most out of left field foreign policy picks.

The two defining features of Trump’s foreign policy team is a general lack of experience on foreign policy issues, and they have earned the trust of Donald Trump. That last part gets attacked by the media, but it is important if you are looking to redefine and revitalize the foreign policy community. Trump needs spear catchers who will do what must be done to implement policy. What sunk Trump’s first term were all the people thinking they could use Trump to boost their career.

The main problem is the experience. This is not always a bad thing as fresh eyes are certainly needed in all of these areas. Old hands would never think to ask why things are done the way they are done, especially in how information is selected and filtered before it is presented to the President. The intelligence people in Trump’s first term gave him the mushroom treatment. Most of the time, he was left with choices he did not want but was forced to pick from them.

The real issue here is these people are not just tasked with implementing Trump’s vision of a new foreign policy, but they have to figure out what that is and then figure out if they agree with it. It is not all that clear if Trump’s vision is merely dovish within the context of the standard Wilsonian model that has dominated America since Wilson or if it is a rejection of that framework entirely, in favor of the 19th century conservative approach embodied by the famous quote from John Quincy Adams.

Added to this is the fact that it is not all that clear if most of the people have thought much about this until this point. Seb Gorka is mostly known for being rude to people on Twitter and being a guest on conservative chat shows. Michael Anton is best known for one essay in 2016 and his love of fashion. Tulsi Gababrd is the only member of the team that has offered original thoughts on foreign policy. For the most part, Trump’s team is a blank slate when it comes to foreign policy.

This may be a good thing, as at least he has a team that is open to questioning the status quo, even if they have not formulated an alternative. The foreign policy community is stuffed to the gills with people who have been carefully vetted by the Israel lobby and the neocons. Trump had little choice but to reach outside of that world for people he could trust and who would try to think for themselves. The result is an odd squad of neophytes and eccentrics.

It remains to be seen if this works but it explains why foreign policy is so uneven at the start of this term. It also explains why Trump has been so reliant on Steven Witkoff, as his personal emissary. He may be the one guy who understands what Trump is thinking with regards to foreign policy. There again, we see a man with zero experience in foreign affairs, outside of business dealings. Like everyone else in the Trump foreign policy team, he is learning on the job.

This may explain why the Russians are willing to talk to the Trump people. They see the effort to break from old patterns. It may also be why the Iranians have agreed to talks with Trump people, despite Trump breaking their deal in the first term. People who spend a lot of time studying American politics sense an opportunity to break from the past with regards to dealing with the Americans. It also explains why the Russians are so patient with the Trump team.

Again, it is too soon to know how this ends. It is an odd collection of people held together by a desire to head in a new direction, even if they have no clue as to which direction they will be heading. Perhaps for now a desire to break from the past is enough to get the ball rolling. If they managed to avoid being outflanked by the Europeans and subverted by the Washington establishment, they might finally create a plausible alternative to Wilsonian democracy.

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!