Author Archives: thezman

Keepin’ It Real

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Note: Tonight Paul and I will be taking a victory lap on the Covid topic, so use the time to think about how you will congratulate us on being right about everything. You can tune in on Twitter, YouTube or Rumble.

The first four months of the Trump restoration have exceeded everyone’s expectations for no other reason than it has shifted the conversation. The bad guys are still battling everything in the courts and Congress, but unlike the first time, Trump seems to have a plan, and he has been aggressive in executing it. As a result, he has been setting the agenda rather than the bad guys. The one place where he is failing is with Ukraine, where it looks like he has painted himself into a corner.

When Trump came to power, the choices with regards to Ukraine were to either abandon the whole thing and get blamed for tanks in Kiev or continue the Biden policy and get blamed for tanks in Kiev. To his credit he tried to shake things up by talking directly to the Russians and bypassing the snakes in the foreign policy community while doing it, in an effort to reset the board. Clearly, the snakes and the bad guys did not see that coming, so they were unprepared for it.

The problem is that the facts on the ground have not changed, so there is no deal Trump can make with the Russians to end the war. Zelensky will never do any peace deal as that means the end of him. The nationalists in Ukraine will never accept a deal, which is why Zelensky cannot do a deal. The Europeans seem convinced that peace in Ukraine means the withdraw of America from Europe, so they are fighting like hell to keep the war going, even as it harms their positions.

Now it seems clear that the Russians have understood from the start that Trump was never willing to break with the Europeans or take on the crazies in Washington who created the Ukraine mess. They were happy to talk with him, but they knew there was nothing he could offer them, as he was simply unwilling or maybe unable to do what is necessary to get a deal done with them. That means peace comes when Ukraine can no longer fight and the Russians dictate terms.

That is probably why Trump is so angry. He probably understood his dilemma, but for some reason thought he could charm his friend Putin into yielding on some things in order to get a deal done. This was a serious error. Russians have been known for centuries as unyielding negotiators. They never trade what they have for something they already have or are about to have. They always deal from their interests, never personal vanity or out of a need to get along.

The best example of this is the Hitler-Stalin pact. Stalin was a Bolshevik, and he detested the fascists, but Russia was not ready to fight the Nazis, so Stalin did a deal to buy time, even if it meant doing a deal with the hated Nazis. Stalin was also willing to make deals with the capitalists, because it served Russian interests. The point here is even at the peak of their ideological fervor, the Russians still did diplomacy like Russians, which means in the interest of Russia.

For some reason Trump and Witkoff seemed to have thought they could talk the Putin government out of being Russian, but now they are finding out that their charm offensives changed nothing. The position of the Russians has not changed with regards to Ukraine and the West. They want Ukraine as a demilitarized, deradicalized neutral state with no connection to NATO. They will get that at the bargaining table, or they will get that on the battlefield.

Trump also suffers from the fact that the rest of the world no longer trusts Washington, no matter who is in the White House. The thing many Americans struggle with when it comes to foreign policy is that the same people who have been lying to us for decades have been lying to the world. The people who ran the Biden admin were not suddenly honest when it came to diplomacy. The American political class lies about everything to everyone, even themselves.

In a way, Trump and his team are the new management of a company that used to be a dominant player in the market but after years of mismanagement is now in trouble, which is why there is new management. They can go to their customers and promise things will change, but the customers are under no illusions that new faces will solve the problems of the company. In fact, the new promises after years of broken promises just raise more suspicions about the company.

That is probably part of Trump’s frustration. He is being treated by world leaders as a guy who lies all the time, when he is not the guy who did the lying. It is the other side of being an American. There are good things that are associated with being an American, things like confidence and risk taking. The other side of the coin is the bad things, like dishonestly and unreliability. It is why the only thing worse than being the enemy of America is being the friend of America.

Even though there are hints of realism creeping into official foreign policy discussions, we remain a long way from a realistic foreign policy. Trump and his team are still making the mistake of thinking the world looks at America as the good guy, the white hat trying to make the world a safer place for democracy. In reality, the rest of the world views America as either a thumbless clod or a perfidious troublemaker. The Russians lean heavily toward the latter type.

Ironically, Trump finds himself in the inverse position as his hero Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War. Regan would say, “Trust but verify” when dealing with the Soviets, on the grounds that the West kept its word. It was assumed that the communists would cheat, just like they did at the Olympics. Now the roles are reversed, and it is the Russians who assume they will keep their end of the deal, but it is the West that will eventually break the deal.

This is the reality of late empire America. The emerging world order where major regional powers work to keep the peace is the result of the lone superpower failing to hold up its end of the bargain. The alien weirdos who gained control of foreign policy traded American respect and credibility so they could seek revenge on their ancient enemy to the east. The result is America has a lot of work to do in order to restore her reputation and that will require a mighty dose of realism.

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 Return Of Elites

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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.

This is the time of year when entertainers, politicians and famous rich people are asked to deliver commencement speeches. Inevitably they deliver tirades against normal people and in favor of the latest trends. This season, the popular chant with this sort is the “rule of law” which is ironic given that the people chanting it spent the last decade obliterating the concept. The question that is rarely asked is why is it that rich people are so eager to support this stuff?

It is not just the ditzy actors who are prone to this. A part of getting rich in America is adopting the politics of the rich, which is hostile to normal things. Rich people, until very recently, were solidly behind open borders. They backed the street violence and chaos of the last decade through donations to the thicket of not-for-profits. The billionaires underwrote the entertainment content that preached the bizarre social theories at the root of their deranged politics.

On the surface, it makes little sense. If you are a rich person, you should not want to undermine order, as it is the rules that make you rich. You got your wealth because of the system, so the system is your friend. Think a little further, however, and you can see why the rich might want to make the rules more opaque. It is a form of pulling up the drawbridge behind them so new schemers cannot get in on the action. They got theirs, so it is time to keep you from getting yours.

In this regard these strange opinions about how we ought to act and how we ought to organize society function as a selection mechanism. The rich use the willingness to adopt these opinions as a test of your willingness to obey. This is very clearly how they select politicians. The more suggestable the person, the more likely they are to find success in politics. No master has ever wanted a slave who thinks outside the box or is willing to question authority.

That said, many of our rich people believe in this stuff. For actors, the answer probably lies in the fact that merit plays a small role in their success. Pretending to be someone else, singing a catchy tune and being funny are not uncommon skills. Restaurants in Los Angeles and New York are full of people capable to being good at those things in movies and television. Taylor Swift does not possess skills uncommon in her trade, but she is a megastar and everyone else sings for their supper.

Randomness plays an enormous role in carny life. Hollywood is full of stories about women who were spotted by a talent scout and turned into a star. Then you have the many actors who landed a role in a film that turned out to be a huge success, despite the studios thinking otherwise. Sally Field hit it big in Smokey and the Bandit, for example, despite the studio not wanting her or the film. Carny life is more about random chance than talent and hard work.

In a world where success and failure are random chance or perhaps decided by hidden forces unseen by the players, it is no surprise that these people are in the sort of paranoid politics that define carny life. It is not a huge jump from thinking shadowy figures behind the scenes determine your fate as an actor to thinking that an invisible army of Hitler fans secretly control society. Their lived experience tells them that the rules are a facade for the real power structure.

Randomness explains carnies and politicians, but what about the oligarchs? Why are so many of them fond of these paranoid politics? The last ten years of woke madness would not have been possible without the support of the oligarchs. In fact, the story of Trump’s return to power cannot be understood without noticing how the nation’s richest men lined up behind him. Most opposed him just five years ago, but then they changed teams and now support his reform efforts.

Here is where we see chance again. Look at the oligarchs and what you rarely see is people with unique talents for anything other than exploiting a bottleneck or monopoly that was often the result of chance. The PayPal mafia, the fifty or so people who founded PayPal, got super rich by exploiting special access to the banking system in order to facilitate online payments. Many went on to exploit new bottlenecks and monopolies to get even richer.

This is not a novelty of this round of oligarch formation. The oligarchs that emerged in the industrial age were similarly fortunate. A common story of that period was one where the guy who got super rich from a new idea was not the guy who came up with the idea, but the guy who bought the idea and then exploited it. The industrial oligarchs were good at gaming the system of the time, much in the same way that the modern oligarch was the product of gaming the system.

One of the truths about capitalism and market economics is that it does not select for virtue or even talent in the conventional sense. It selects for the ability and willingness to find gaps in the rules and the ability to ruthlessly exploit them. The tech barons found a gap in property laws, for example, that allows them to steal your information and then sell it to government and business. Without this loophole, the giant social media platforms collapse overnight.

The result of this system that randomly awards people with opportunity and then lavishly regards those who are willing to ruthlessly exploit the opportunity is an oligarchy composed of sociopathic lottery winners. The weird social politics that defines the attitudes of our elite are both a defense against similar lottery winners lurking below and a justification for their position. They are not just lottery winners, but members of an elect, fated to hold positions in the elite.

It has been noted that the creation of new oligarchs of the industrial era ended in the early 20th century. This came with the rise of managerialism, but also with a narrowing of the economic class. The overclass faded from the scene, retreating into philanthropy and public service roles. From the perspective of the typical American, the gap between the rich and poor narrowed and the middle-class came to dominate. Getting rich came to mean doing slightly better than middle-class.

This current revolt against managerialism led by some of the oligarchs is coming when the fruit of the technological revolution has been harvested. There are no new billionaires being minted from new technology. Similarly, the financial sector that experienced a parallel boom has consolidated as well. The one exception may be AI, but this is why the current oligarchs are desperate to wrestle control of it from the managerial class.

What we may be experiencing is another period of consolidation similar to what happened after the industrial revolution. The weird social politics are no longer useful as a defense of the oligarchy, so they are seeking to reorder the managerial system to lock in their positions and marginalize the sorts of politics that come with the boutique beliefs that define the woke phenomenon. They are tapping into populism as a useful way to pressure their fellow oligarchs into compliance.

The bulk of the 20th century was determined by elites who acted like elites and operated from the shadows. That was peak America, from the perspective of the typical American in this age. There was strong family formation and a strong middle-class that defended moderate morality. A nation full of normal middle-class people happy with the rules is not going to cause any trouble for the elites. Perhaps that is what the current elites are trying to recreate in this age.

This could explain the growing war on credentialism. The managerial class is festooned with people with little practical knowledge but festooned with credentials that they think make them a genius. This is why they think they can tell the rich guys what to do and where to do it. Breaking the spine of the managerial class will necessarily mean breaking their belief system. The sudden anathematization of woke culture is an effort to kill their gods and therefore their sense of authority.

In the end, the thirty or so years of bizarre social politics that have proliferated among the elites may be ending due to the consolidation of the oligarchy. Whatever benefit there was to these luxury beliefs has been consumed. What is left is a rallying point for members of the managerial class who refuse to bend the knee. Restoring normal social order is another step in shoring up the position of the oligarchs by removing any of the remaining threats to their position.

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!

Science Fiction

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a post about conservative corruption, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

When you look at lists of the best science fiction movies, what you see is a mix of recency bias and popular nonsense. Star Wars gets placed near the top because the lists are usually targeted to people who consume corporate slop. Back to the Future is another one on these lists that does not qualify as science fiction. It is a comedy where time travel is the MacGuffin. Of course, this raises the question as to what qualifies as science fiction and what makes for good sci-fi.

Science fiction is speculative fiction that relies on science to create scenarios where questions about the human condition are more easily explored. Artificial intelligence, for example, is useful in telling stories about what it means to be human. We instinctively know a computer program is not human, even if it is able to speak with us like a real human being. That gets to the issue of what separates flesh and blood humans from the artificial versions we are creating.

Heinlein said that science fiction takes what we know now, what we thought we knew before now and then speculates about the future based on a solid understanding of how science advances. Asimov famously said that science fiction is about how humans react to changes in science and technology. Together they make for a good definition of science fiction, which is as much about the science as the fiction. In other words, it is not just drama in space or in the future.

That is why Back to the Future is not science fiction. The time travel business is just a way for the main characters to be funny in unusual situations. The point of the film is to make people laugh, not challenge their views of humanity or technology. Time travel is a MacGuffin, which is a thing or event that moves the story along. The point of the time travel business is to put Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox in wacky situations so they can be wacky and funny together.

Similarly, Star Wars is not science fiction. This has become a controversial statement because the adult children who consume the modern iterations of the franchise like to imagine themselves as science geeks. George Lucas has always described the franchise as a space opera, because it is space opera. Star Wars is consciously melodramatic and formulaic. It could just as easily be set in the Middle Ages or the Old West, but he chose to set the story in space.

In fairness, the Star Trek franchise can also be called space opera. The stories in the television series are the definition of melodramatic and formulaic. While the original series tried to think about the impact of interstellar travel on humanity, subsequent series were standard televisions dramas set in space. The main appeal of the original series was the relationship of the three main characters. That could just as easily have been done on a pirate ship in the 17th century.

That goes to what Heinlein said about science fiction. It has to try to  project scientific progress into the future in a plausible way. We can assume we solved the problems of humans in space, for example, but it must do so in a way that is plausible. For example, we figured out how to shield spacemen from radiation and mitigate the effects of zero gravity on his muscles and bones. That means the humans still struggle with limitations, just different limitations than current humans.

This is why the girl boss phenomenon has killed modern sci-fi. The demand that the main character be a girl boss who never has to struggle to get what she wants and is never allowed to fail defeats the whole purpose of the genre. If science makes it so that girls can beat up men three times their size and they are able to solve every problem with minimum effort, there is no story worth telling. The girl boss turns the genre into a lecture on gender set in space.

That comes to the other part of the formula. It is not enough for the science to make some sense, leaving humans in a familiar conflict. The story has to be compelling. It is why Blade Runner can be called great sci-fi. The science is compelling as it suggests that material progress does not guarantee human happiness. It also delves into the question of what it means to be a human. The ambiguity of Deckard’s true nature and how his story plays out is gripping storytelling.

Of course, films have another aspect and that is the visuals. World building with the written word depends heavily on the reader. With movies, the maker has to do all of the work in order to get the viewer to suspend disbelief. This is another area where the girl boss ruins the project. By definition, girl boss lives outside the physical constraints of the world created for her. This makes that world absurd and pointless. The film becomes a study of girl boss rather than storytelling.

The visuals are why films like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey are always at the top of these lists. The science is great, and the fiction is great, but they are also visual masterpieces that have come to define the genre. Many of the common things in space shows were invented by Kubrick. A film about a dystopian future will always mimic the visual sense of Blade Runner. It is why Star Wars works. The look and sound are great, despite being formulaic drama.

One final piece of the puzzle is what the stories are telling us about the current mood regarding science and culture. When Kubrick make 2001: A Space Odyssey, America was optimistic about space on the surface, but also anxious about the ramifications of technological advance. By the 1970’s, that anxiety had subsided only to return in the 1980’s when the microprocessor revolution hit normal Americans. Good science fiction holds a mirror up to the age in which it is produced.

In the end, what matters most is that Star Wars is not science fiction and anyone who argues otherwise should be sent to a camp. Further, there is a debate as to whether Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey is the best science fiction film, with some room to argue for Alien. The argument against Alien is that it is also a monster movie, so there is a category dispute. Otherwise, your choices for the greatest sci-fil film are down to two and there is no point in debating it.

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 23 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m22s Mortalism in the news
  • 07m04s Regretful mortalism
  • 13m52s A clumsy Commencement
  • 20m18s A joyful Commencement
  • 26m11s Hesperophobia (cont.)
  • 36m47s That pesky semicolon
  • 38m53s Romania’s new President
  • 41m32s Rotherham’s new Mayor
  • 43m40s Signoff with cultural appropriation

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was of course Franz Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your indigenously genial host John Derbyshire. What does it mean to be “indigenously genial”? I’m not sure, but give me a break here, I’m running out of adverbs.

I’ll open today with a segment on a peculiar way of thinking which I shall call “mortalism,” although I’m not at all sure that’s the correct descriptor.

Mortalism isn’t crazy in itself; it’s actually quite logical, although in my opinion misguided. Like so many other ways of thinking, though, it has a lunatic fringe. This week we encountered that lunatic fringe. Here we go. Continue reading →

A Show About Nothing

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This weekend is the official launch of summer in America. It does not feel like the first weekend of summer, but that is probably due to the weather. It has been cool and rainy here for most of spring. Even so, it is the start of the summer season. That means the A-list fabricators will be taking off, leaving the media mendacity to the second string for the next few months. The quality of lies will be low.

It will be interesting to see if the Trump admin maintains the pace. The last four months has been a whirlwind. This week we got the South Africa stuff, which is one of those things that no one thought possible six months ago. The Overton window is moving so quickly it is hard to keep up with it. Now that official Washington is heading off for the summer, it will be interesting to see if the admin takes a break

The other thing to watch for this summer is if the crazies get brought out of storage to riot somewhere. If you scan Bluesky, they are depressed. The money dried up and then the jobs dried up. Now they are left to trade scare stories to one another in the weird echo chamber that is Bluesky. If it is an Orange Man Summer, the fever swamp could be on suicide watch by August.

Normally there would not be a show this week, as the Friday before a holiday weekend is a good time for a break. I had some time to kill, so I threw something together that was light and not too taxing. It is a good time to relax and not think about the madness of this age, so the show is easy listening. I hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day weekend and thank you for reading and listening.

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
  • A Bunch Of Stupid Questions
  • Outro

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Struggle Of Science

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For a while, it seemed like the human sciences might finally close the gap between metaphysics and morality that has plagued us for so long. The age of ideology has relied upon the blurry, unclear understanding of human nature to get away with moral systems that are objectively inhuman. If the sciences could clear up certain things about the human condition, then it would force the ideologues to rethink their claims about how humans ought to act and organize.

The ideologues had an answer to this and that was to declare much of the human sciences haram. The crazies were sent out to proliferate the term “race science” which simply means any science that contradicts the one true faith. The human biodiversity guys never got their head around it and as a result that scene has receded into the shadows of the internet. The people in the professional sciences took the path blazed by conservatives and bent the knee to the crazies.

Team science, in their shadowy warrens on the internet and secret gatherings within the institutions, takes solace in the belief that reality is that thing which does not go away when you stop believing in it. Eventually, the reality of the human condition, as understood by science, will prevail over the increasingly bizarre claims that we see from the ideologues. After all, math must eventually prevail over the people who think you are assigned a sex at birth.

That is most certainly true to a degree. The great snapback we are seeing in public attitudes on a range of issues is due to the excesses of the crazies. It is one thing for a man to put on a dress and parade around town in it. It is another for that man to insist everyone play make-believe with him. One of the truths about progressive values is they prevail only where they comport with general Christian values. When they collide with those values or physical reality, they crumble.

That is what we are seeing now. It was reasonable for the crazies to demand that normal people tolerate the guy in the dress. Tolerance has deep roots in Christian ethics to the point where it is a habit of mind for Western people. The crazies could appeal to that deeply held belief in favor of the pervert. When they demanded that the pervert in the dress have easy access to your kids, then things changed. In the fullness of time, it will be the lurch towards the kids that ended the woke terror.

This is not much help to team science, which remains in a defensive crouch, wondering if they will get a reprieve. The answer is probably no, at least not until the egalitarian ideology is defeated by other means. Intelligence studies, for example, are just about banned at this point and will remain so. If you want to do that work, you will find no funding and no support. The best you can do is bundle it up in another area of research that passes muster with the academic clergy.

It is a good example of how facts have no chance against feelings. Facts may not care about your feelings, but feelings are in charge. This has always been so and that is a fact that the fact-people never grasp. You get a sense of it in this hilarious thread by an old HBD guy on Twitter. You get the sense that he is completely baffled as to why people think he is the crazy one in the thread. Despite his “theory of the mind” pretensions, he has no idea how people think.

Another example is this post by Steve Stewart-Williams on the topic of homosexuality and its possible genetic causes. Since the dawn of time, humans have understood that some men are sexually attracted to men, rather than women. It was a problem to be managed, from a societal perspective. This remains true. The causes of homosexuality are not terribly important. Even if team science finally figures out the puzzle, no one will care because it is not important.

What is important, regarding homosexuality, is how society deals with it in the context of social health and fitness. Until recently, we had that worked out, so if science does crack the puzzle, the most likely result will be a eugenic solution to once again solve the homosexuality problem from a societal perspective. Couples will demand tools to make sure their child is not a homosexual. After all, no one has ever hoped their child would grow up to be a happy, healthy homosexual.

The reason science has lost every fight with belief since Galileo is that science is an unsatisfactory replacement for belief. Humans are believing machines, so if you destroy their current beliefs, they do not stop believing. They simply find something new to believe, often something ridiculous, like communism. This is something team science has never been able to grasp. Muttering “but it moves” does not help them and it did not help Galileo either.

That is not to say that science is bunk. Some of it is, for sure. The Covid revelations that are trickling out show how easily science is corrupted. The reason the HBD world is a bit of laughingstock now is they fell for the Covid nonsense. Science is a tool and like all of our tools, it will be used to make our world as we think it ought to be, for no other reason than we believe it should be so. If science is not the right tool for the job, then we find different tools and maybe hang the scientists.

As we enter the final phase of the last great ideology, it will not be the death of belief and the rise of reason. Instead, it will be the death of those old universal believes in favor of more practical and useful beliefs. Science will be a tool in the struggle, but it will not replace the dying ideology. This is not the future. The future will be what we make of it, and “we” will be those who win the great struggle for who rules. In the end, science tells us that it is always who shall overcome whom.

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!

Generations

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Note: On Tuesday nights, I participate in a Twitter space where we discuss spicier topics than you find in the news. The replay of last nights episode here

Generational politics is one of the cruder forms of politics as it generally reduces to members of one age cohort hurling slurs at other cohorts. Ironically, the origin of this form of politics is the baby boomer generation, who were the first group of Americans to form an identity around their birth cohort. Baby boomers have since been synonymous with the post-war cultural trends and the radical politics that came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.

These days, of course, “boomer” has become an epithet due to their children using it to describe degenerate or materialistic culture. Boomers are selfish old people who only care about their stock portfolios and their lawns. They are the “greedy geezers” of this age, which is ironic in that the term first gained traction decades ago as the baby boomers started to take over politics. This is another example of how the universe has a sense of a humor and cruel streak.

Of course, thirty years ago when terms like “greedy geezer” were getting tossed around, the culture was undergoing a generational shift. The WW2 Generation was giving way to the baby boomers. Bill Clinton came to be seen as the typical boomer, ushering in a new set of morals and sensibilities to politics. For the last thirty years, baby boomer politics have been American politics. Now they are seen the out of date politics of a quickly fading era.

We are about to experience another generational culture shift as the children of the baby boom generation begin to push their parents over the side. This is why the term “boomer” has become an epithet. The derogatory use of the label is a signal that the user is not into conventional culture and politics. To reject “boomer politics” is to reject the old-fashioned dichotomy of left-versus-right, as is defined by cable news programs, talk radio and the mainstream media.

We are getting a glimpse of this in the Trump administration. Donald Trump is technically not a baby boomer. This must be said because otherwise you get six million messages explaining that the baby boomer generation starts with those born after noon on June 30th, 1946, and Trump was born on June 17, 1946. It is this sort of hairsplitting that makes generation politics so mind-numbingly stupid. It makes the blue pencil crowd seem stable minded by comparison.

That aside, Trump is emblematic of the politics and culture that we generally associate with the baby boomer generation. He is materialistic, hedonistic, and jarringly superficial in his politics. For example, his main interest in ending the Ukraine war is so we can do business deals with the Russians. The history and geopolitical import of what he is doing is never mentioned by him. For Trump, it often seems like that the only thing that matters is the acquisition of stuff.

Contrast this with J.D. Vance, the millennial man in waiting. His story is centered on his cultural journey from the underclass into the managerial class and then as a critic of the managerial system that made him possible. He is the most articulate critic of managerialism to ever hold office in Washington. It remains to be seen if he wins the White House on his own, but he is clearly setup as the heir to Trump. He will take the baton on behalf of his generation from the boomers.

Despite the millennial disdain for baby boomer culture, they are the results of it due to the fact they were raised in the product of it. Things like helicopter parenting and structured play time were boomer creations. Millennials are the first generations raised by people who used the word “parenting”, so it is no surprise that the millennials are the first to use the word “adulting.” They were raised to expect a highly structured and safe environment where everything is clearly labeled.

There is far greater cultural intensity with millennials than prior generations. For the boomers, generational politics was mostly about marketing cultural items like clothing, lifestyle choices, and music. For millennials, culture is tangled up in the structure of life, so they are more keenly aware of themselves as a cohort. They are the first generation to sense that their identity is entirely exogenous. Individually and collectively, they are who they are because of taxonomical reasons.

This shift in generational identity can be seen in how millennials react to generalizations versus how baby boomers react. Make a generalization about baby boomers and you get flooded with boomers telling you that they are not like that. Make a generalization about millennials and they will agree and amplify it. Because conformity has always been a part of millennial cultural awareness, conforming to generational stereotypes does not bother them. It is their normal.

This is another thing with millennials that is different from boomers. They expect the systems they inherited to work as described on the box. The two sides of millennial politics are from those raised on the mother’s milk of post-Marx culturalism and those raised on civic nationalism. The former is perpetually angry that things are not fair, and the latter is determined to make things work as described to them. Vance versus AOC is a duel between competence and anxiety.

That brings up something else about millennial culture. It is focused on the present, but in the context of what was promised. This makes it backward looking. The Vance side is determined to remake things, so they are what he expected, rather than something new that is a break from the past. The AOC side is similarly determined to remake the present to fit the promise, but the promise came from the New Left politics that sunk roots in the culture when her parents were kids.

Generational politics can only take you so far in getting a sense of what lies ahead for the culture and politics. Reality is the great restraint, and the millennials are inheriting an enterprise in decline, while their parents inherited one that was at its peak. This is the heart of the millennial critique of the boomers. They see their parents as living off the profits of the past and they see themselves as tasked with cleaning up the mess after a long generational party.

This is why the millennial age could turn out to be quite conservative. Necessity will mean relegating luxury beliefs to the fringe. No one has time for the hysterical and childish politics of the AOC side when there is work to be done, debts to be paid and institutions to be restructured. Millennial politics could be the domination of the organizational men, who take pride in making the machine operate and have no tolerance for throwing sand in the gears.

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 Banality Of Biden

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Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She noted that Eichmann was not the cartoonish villain one expected, given the accusations against him. Instead, he appeared to be a normal man who performed the tasks assigned to him, without having any ideological or emotional attachment to them. This led Arendt to argue that evil could be the result of the work of ordinary people who were not inherently malicious.

Her formulation turned out to be useful to generations of evil people who used this framework to accuse ordinary Americans of being evil, for the crime of living their lives as white people. That was probably why the line became so popular, but that does not strip it of its truth value. Human systems are capable of turning the ordinary acts of the people in the system toward evil ends, even though the people themselves may not be evil in the ordinary way we think of it.

This is the subtext to the broad indictment of managerialism. The fascists, understood through the lens of managerialism, created a ruthless machine, animated by ideology, that dehumanized their society. The Soviets were close behind in creating a communist machine that forced everyone into the moral framework of the ideology. Those who could not fit into the ideology were destroyed. This is what made fascism and communism evil. They mechanized and normalized brutality.

Of course, that view of fascism and communism was from the perspective of people on the cusp of post-liberalism. The paleocons, sensing that America was succumbing to the same managerial forces as Europe, were warning about what lies ahead for managerialism as an organizing political order. They were wrong in their analysis, as America ceased to be a liberal society in the 19th century. Progressivism, the unique American ideology, was filling the void in the 20th century.

This turned out to be the great innovation of progressivism. It appropriated the language and forms of liberalism in order to present itself as the antithesis of ideology. It was the broad conclusion of reason. Progressivism, repackaged as liberalism in the Cold War, was not about how the world ought to be, but about how the world would be if only people allowed it to be so. Man, liberated from superstition and ignorance, would naturally settle into liberal democracy.

The result, however, was what the paleos predicted. The managerial revolution that began in the first quarter of the 20th century got going for the same reason it got going in communist and fascist societies. Ideology is not enough. It needs a practical application that takes the moral claims and turns them into an ethical system administered by a priestly class. The role of the priest in a Christian society is filled by the manager in an ideological society.

It is why America is awash of moralizing. Every politician eventually turns himself in an Old Testament prophet, warning that we must comply with the tides of history or face certain destruction. Every product is sold as a sacrament. Buy this widget in order to tell the world you are a righteous man. Middle managers in corporations are sent off to leadership class, so they can properly evangelize to their cubicle jockeys. The most trivial things are attached to great moral crusades.

This brings us back to Arendt’s observations about Eichmann. The crimes against civilized life we have observed over the last years were done by people, who like Eichmann, did not present themselves as evil. They could not imagine themselves as evil because they were on the right side of history. The proof of that is everyone they know is on the same side and everyone they know is a good person striving to make the world a better place.

It is this system of thought that made Joe Biden president. He was the smiling face of a machine that rewarded affable, useful dullards, as long as they served the needs of the system, which was the endless hunt for enemies of the system. The peak of the woke terror produced President Joe Biden, the guy who was supposed to normalize the terror by making ordinary people accept it as normal. How can “Working Class Joe” be a bad guy when he is always telling jokes and smiling?

It is why it is right to think about Joe Biden as the Eichmann of woke. Just as Eichmann and many men like him were the banal face of the underlying evil of the system, Joe Biden was the avuncular, jovial face of the American managerial system. He is not unique, but typical, the good example of the type that has come to dominate the political class, which is the fig leaf for the managerial class. The smiling, backslapping pol is what stands between the citizen and the machine.

Stripped of the charming rogues and pitchmen, the evil of the machinery is made plain and therefore easy to resist. That is the part of Arendt’s observations about Eichmann that applies to us now. Even if neither man can be accused of evil on the individual basis, their talents were put to use by an evil system. Even if one can show that their intent was not evil, it does not matter. They helped normalize evil and that is arguably worse than the evil itself.

It is tempting to think this is an inappropriate comparison, given the death sentence that has been handed to Biden. In 1961, however, when Eichmann was given his death sentence, the system which he served was long gone and the damage it wrought was gone with it. Joe Biden is still causing damage. His cancer diagnosis is now removing the last bits of trust in the system. The life of Joe Biden and now his looming death, has been in service to the destruction of social trust.

It was hard to hate men like Eichmann, even after their actions had been universally condemned, because they were not obviously evil men. That was always the point of Joe Biden and why the managerial class loved him. He was a simpleton and braggard, but he would ruthlessly execute his instructions and do so in a way that was hard for the people to hate. He normalized evil by making it feel like the way things were done and had to be done. Joe Biden is the banality of evil.

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!

Happy Campers

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the classic film, The Maltese Falcon, a post about my trip to the Old Glory Club, and no Sunday podcast. I got back too late on Sunday to do a show, but I will post something extra this week about the conference or maybe a second video. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

One of the realities of the late managerial age is that the sorts of numbers managers love and therefore produce in volume, are increasingly unreliable and often manufactured to fit an agenda. Good data is usually too late to be actionable or is simply the accurate version of the previously reported fake data. Economic data is the most obvious example of this trend. It used to be central to the news cycle but has now become so corrupt the media will ignore it.

In the Biden years, much like the Obama years, it became popular with the reporting agencies to produce fake economic numbers and then come back at a later date to “revise” the previous data so they could pretend they were being accurate. It was always a cycle where new data contained information about how the previous data was revised in a way negative to the administration, but often made the new data look like the administration was doing a great job.

Peak managerial mendacity was Covid. The CDC stopped reporting deaths as a real-time number so they could report fictionalized accounts of bodies in the streets, always somewhere not where you live, which explained why you did not see the bodies in the streets, but they were somewhere! Old metrics that relied on hard data, like dead people showing up in morgues, were massaged to the point where you could no longer get the number of actual dead people.

We are getting a version of this now that Trump is back. His tariff plan has kicked off a new genre of managerial horror stories. These come in the form of economic reports that, like the bodies in the streets phenomenon, always focus on a part of the country where you do not live. Somewhere there are empty Walmart shelves due to the trade war with China. There are people you do not know who are shocked by the rise in prices, even though your prices have declined.

The cycle for management is always the same. First, they produce reliable numbers from trusted sources to measure their performance. Then they create models from those numbers to justify their continued employment. This is when they begin to reimagine how the old data is collected and before long, we have theories about how best to manage information, which always underscores the need for management to keep a tight control on the narratives.

Bankruptcy usually follows that last phase, or at least an economic crisis great enough to warrant restructuring. That is because reality is indifferent to the model makers and will eventually break every model. We are living through a version of this process in the twilight of managerialism. Since the Obama, years the choice has been between your lying eyes and the model of reality presented by management. Enough people picked the former and we are now undergoing a change in management.

For example, during the Biden years we were told that the economy was going great and those grumbling about egg prices were ingrates. Now that Trump is in power, the media say we are in a depression. Go on the roads right now and you will be confronted with miles of RV’s and campers. This week, which leads to Memorial Day weekend, the nation’s highways will be full of the things. So much so that massive traffic jams will be a feature of the weekend.

Why does this matter? RV’s and campers have long been a useful metric for the economy and the public perception of the economy. The more people hitting the roads for campgrounds and parks, the better the economy. In 2023, the industry went into a deep recession to the point where many companies shut down production. Then it started to slowly bounce back in 2024. Now it is undergoing a boom with the highways now flooded with happy campers.

This used to be a metric discussed in public, but like so many of these things, it fell out of favor in the Obama years. Management and its marketing department, what we call the media, decided that the customers really did not know best, so they scrapped those numbers in favor of metrics that flattered management. The reason they are in the jam that they currently find themselves is they started to believe their models of reality instead of facing reality. Now there is a hostile takeover underway.

A cruder and more hilarious version of this process is the recent reporting of Joe Biden’s health and fitness. The data in this case was our eyes. Everyone not blinded by their own models of reality saw a frail, doddering old man. Management’s model, however, showed that he was a model of fitness and virility. Now that model is being revised to show he was actually suffering from dementia and has aggressive cancer. The new model is now converging with reality.

The Biden story is a version of the basis trade, which pits models of a point in the future and the models are continuously updated until the point is reached. It is a way for the model makers to think they can control the future, so it makes sense that the people running America Inc. would think in these terms. They just forgot about the part that says in the end, reality always wins. That is what you see on the road. America is happy with the state of things, so they are going camping.

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 16 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 03m31s Welkom in Amerika!
  • 12m28s A church that won’t help white people
  • 20m45s Death of a church
  • 27m48s SCOTUS ponders citizenship
  • 30m34s Latest from Woke Academia
  • 32m34s For the boys in blue
  • 34m28s Date-appropriate 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 and readers. That was some of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is of course your significantly genial host John Derbyshire, with observations on the news at precisely the middle of May 2025. Fifteen days gone, fifteen still to go.

It sometimes happens, by sheer good fortune, that one week’s lead segment follows naturally from the previous week’s lead segment. That’s what has happened this week.

In last week’s podcast my lead segment was headlined “The decline of Jim Snow.” I defined Jim Snow as, quoting myself:

The social dogma on race that has prevailed since the 1960s … characterized by white guilt and favoritism towards blacks (a/k/a “affirmative action”) and by deference to what I have called “the romance of American blackness” — narratives about cruel leering white people beating up on helpless pleading blacks.

End quote.

My thesis was that the case of Shiloh Hendrix, the young white Minnesota lady who made a pile of money via crowdfunding following a heated exchange with a black man that the man posted on social media — that case, I argued, was yet further evidence that Jim Snow, as a social dogma, is losing its force.

I think one of the lead news stories this week may further reinforce that thesis; so that is my first segment today.

Before proceeding with it, I’ll just note as a matter of general interest, following on that segment from last week, that as I speak here on Friday afternoon the crowdfunding site for Shiloh Hendrix shows donations now up to $779,158. This time last week they were $759,786; so that’s a one-week increase of $19,372, damn near twenty thousand dollars. Continue reading →