This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m29s The decline of Jim Snow
• 12m40s Somalis all over
• 18m29s Habemus Papam
• 28m20s Lock ’em up!
• 31m15s Not a penny for Columbia
• 34m25s Yet another Indo-Pak War
• 36m04s Signoff with Tom Lehrer

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01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. I am your impressively genial host John Derbyshire, here with commentary on the week’s events.

In commemorations, the highlight of the week was Thursday, May 8th, the eightieth anniversary of V-E Day. I can’t think of anything original to post about the anniversary. However, anyone who was of enlistment age in 1945 is aged today in the upper nineties, so there must be many veterans still among us. I offer my thanks and respect for the victory they won, and for the sacrifices they and their comrades and their families made.

Now to lesser matters. First, the decline of Jim Snow. Continue reading →

With the new Pope being installed, this week seemed like a perfect time to explain why Protestants are the cause of all our troubles. It is the Protestant revolt that led to the re-emergence of paganism in the West. That is paganism in the sense of multiple sources of authority, not the Zeus and Athena business. Aside from some posers in the current age, the old gods have not made a return.

The Christian revolution is a remarkable thing in the history of man as to that point there were a lot of gods and a lot of ways to relate to those gods. Two groups of people could share the same god, but have different ways of serving that god. Within a society, people could have a variety of household gods which informed how they lived and how they related to their fellow citizens.

Christianity revolutionized this with one God for everyone and having that God as the source of everything, including man. Once you have just one God and one metaphysics arising from that God, then it rationally follows that there is one correct set of rules governing how man should live. This is the road to a universal morality that applies even to those who are not believers.

When the universal authority of the Church was challenged, the universal morality began to fail. After all, if the Church was wrong about the structure of faith, it could also be wrong about the nature of God. Calvin’s understanding God was different than the Catholic conception of God. Once the conception of God changes, the morality and metaphysics begin to diverge as well.

The crisis in  the West stems in large part from this divergence. The managerial class has its gods, things like Gaia and Diversity, that it is trying to impose on the population, but the population has its own gods. The Bible-believing Christian who thinks he talks to Jesus every day, not only has little in common with the homosexual Episcopalian, but he has no choice but to reject the gods of his rulers.

That is the show this week. It is a topic that probably deserves a ten hour commitment, but maybe that is something for the end of the year. The focus for now is how the Protestant revolts in the 16th century set off this process by which we now find ourselves in a new pagan age. Zeus and Odin have yet to make their appearance, but maybe they just have different names and guises this time.

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
• Paganism
• The Christian Challenge
• Catholicism
• Protestantism
• New Paganism

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Contents

• 03m05s The Time Travelers
• 11m20s O Canada
• 19m04s England votes
• 28m00s Granny Groomers
• 30m46s Profitable parole
• 33m49s The cat killer
• 35m44s Signoff with The Bee Gees  

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01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers, from your vernally genial host John Derbyshire with news and views from the week just passed.

Yes, it’s springtime. Walking Basil yesterday morning, May 1st, was a delight. The sky was clear, the sun bright, flowers in the gardens, blossoms on the trees. Not much birdsong; but I walk him early, so perhaps the birds were still asleep.

It was a marvellous awakening from dull, chilly February and March and even, this year, April. If you’ll forgive me a flight of metaphorical fancy, it brought to mind the political transformation of our nation this past three months.

It’s only been that long since the Biden Presidency, and the contrast is all too plain. We’ve gone from the sinister grim faces of Inner Party apparatchiks like Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland to the easy fresh openness of Marco Rubio and Pam Bondi; from the President answering five questions from reporters in nine open press cabinet meetings across his entire term in office to the President answering nearly a hundred questions from the press during just his first three such meetings; from brazen lies like “we can’t reduce illegal immigration until Congress passes new laws” to plain talk about the need to deport illegal aliens.

All right, my metaphor’s a bit of a stretch. It was inspired by Kamala Harris this Wednesday night beseeching her fellow Democrats to act like elephants, I forget why.

I shall get my feet back on solid ground shortly and discuss the elections we’ve seen this week. First, though, while I’m still floating free in the rhetorical sky, a segment about  time travel. Continue reading →

Something that has gone largely unnoticed is that the people who used to litter the streets screaming “racism” have disappeared. They have not gone away, but they have suddenly been marginalized. They spend their days on sites like Bluesky wondering why no one seems to care what they have to say anymore. The sites that used to pay for them to be pests are no longer interested in their material.

One possible reason for this is that racism may have run its course. This novel moral concept that emerged a century ago may have finally burned itself out in the last great moral panic. White people are no longer concerned that their observations of the world may be at odds with the morality of these strange people who demanded we worship a violent drug addict like George Floyd.

It is hard to imagine, given that racism as a sin has been with us since anyone can remember, but it is a novel concept. A century ago, few people would have understood the word at all, much less incorporated the concept. Even fifty years ago it was possible to dismiss the idea. In the long history of human civilization, this weird idea is nothing more than a strange middle-class fad.

The fad may have come to an end. Trump whacking away at things like affirmative action and disparate impact, with little howling from any one could signal something bigger than the death of the racism concept. It may signal the end to the long experiment to overcome the natural diversity of man. The search for racial equality, like the search for bigfoot, may be a fool’s errand coming to an end.

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
• Race & Racism (Link)
• 20^th Century Racism
• Civil Rights
• Conservatives (Link)
• Race Communism

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Contents

• 01m13s Trump’s second first hundred days
• 08m26s The players, the field
• 13m42s The passing of a Pope
• 19m28s Cardinal Witch-Hunter
• 25m30s Shakespeare’s what?
• 28m29s Conspiracizing the space gals
• 32m09s Meritocracy restored
• 34m35s Signoff with Jimmy Castor

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01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. This is your perfectly genial host John Derbyshire with commentary on the passing scene.

A thing that is actually passing, and a week from now will have altogether passed, is the month of April 2025. Next Tuesday, the penultimate day in April, will also be the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second Presidency, counting January 20th — Inauguration Day — as Day 1.

That’s a handy hook on which to hang the question: How are they doing? I shall attempt an answer. Continue reading →

No one knows when slavery started, but it seems to have been a part of human civilization from the start. There is evidence of slavery in the earliest civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus Valley in India, and China’s Yangtze River Valley. This suggests slavery was integral to the establishment of large-scale settlements.

Slavery was the norm in the world until European Protestants decided it was immoral and began to ban it. Until the Protestant nations of Europe rose to power, slavery was tolerated by Christians. The Catholic Church opposed the treatment of African slaves in the New World but was not opposed to slavery. It was the Protestants who went the next step and demanded the end of slavery.

Of course, slavery was not what modern people imagine. Slaves often had rights and there were rules for how slaves must be treated. The very first law codes were created to deal with the treatment of slaves. This makes sense since if there are a lot of slaves, there is the risk of a slave revolt, so keeping the slave classes happy was always going to be a primary consideration for society.

This was true in the American South. Contrary to the nonsense version of history taught in schools and popularized through movies and television, the African slaves in North America were treated well. They were valuable property, one of the most lucrative investments in the New World, so slave owners took care of them. A happy slave was a productive and profitable slave.

In fact, slaves were much more productive than the freemen. Contrary to the cartoon version of history, the plantation owners cared more about their slaves than the white workers on the plantation. One reason for that is slavery as a form of labor was much more productive than paid labor. The slave owner was more likely to have a hired man whipped than to whip one of his slaves.

That is the show this week. It is about the economic reality of slavery in the South leading up to the Civil War. The source for this information is an old book titled, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by the economists Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a great work of revisionist history, a skill that we will need to hone, given that our official history is mostly nonsense.

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
• Cartoon Version of Slavery
• Time On The Cross
• Ten Points About Slavery
• Final Thoughts

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• 01m14s Senator envy
• 05m03s Marco favors free speech
• 14m40s Lard, petard
• 21m10s CultMarx on display
• 31m37s How to deport millions
• 33m33s Hungary blocks Prouds
• 35m33s Remembering Benny Hill
• 38m50s Signoff with Eddie Cochran

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01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a fragment of Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 1, just to give you a break from No. 2, and this is your enviously genial host John Derbyshire with news and views from the past week.

Let me begin by explaining that last adverb. I’m not by temperament an envious person. The Tenth Commandment is an easy one for me. I rarely find myself yearning for something that someone else possesses but I myself want to have. I’m too fatalistic.

In one respect, though, I do envy the people of Missouri. Let me start by explaining that. Continue reading →

This Week’s Show

Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Ideology
• Why I am not an ideologue
• Realism

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Contents

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

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Transcript

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

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

Continue reading →