Joe Sobran is arguably the first person hurled into the void in a process that eventually was called cancel culture. His primary sins were skepticism about Israel as our greatest ally and suspicions about the motivations of the neocons. It was the neocons who successfully campaigned to have Sobran branded a heretic and run out of the conservative movement.

Looking back four decades on, you see all the ingredients for what became a widespread form of domestic terrorism in the last decade. Interestingly, all of it is in what Bill Buckley thought was his best book. It is a collection of his essays on the topic of antisemitism, as well as his famous finking on friends like Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan at the request of his new benefactors.

Reading Buckley’s version of the Sobran affair, what comes through is that all politics in a democracy are theater. Buckley felt he had to debase himself, his friends and even his own family in order to remain on the stage. The reason for that is the stage managers had an agenda that agenda was anathema to the human spirit and traditions conservatism allegedly represented.

In the show I take a much tougher tone with Buckley, but upon reflection I do not think he was a soulless political operator. Even though he treated Joe Sobran horribly, Sobran thought well of Bill Buckley until the end. It is a good reminder that you can think well of someone in the whole, even though they have done you wrong, in your view, over a particular issue. Even the best men have terrible flaws.

All that said, it was Buckley’s decision to cancel Sobran that gave us this now familiar model for controlling the public square. Even today, public officials feel they must publicly swear loyalty to Israel for fear of being cancelled. This noxious effluvium even hangs over the tribe we call the left. The great terror that haunts public discourse got started with Buckley hurling Joe Sobran into the void.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• The Past Is Prologue
• Joe Sobran
• The MacGuffin
• Bill Buckley & Antisemitism
• The Cancel Process
• Sobran The MacGuffin

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Contents

• 01m04s Ireland’s new troubles
• 16m39s Something to dress up for
• 27m51s Free Puerto Rico!
• 31m05s Vance socks it to them
• 32m13s Too many foreign students?
• 32m27s Too woke for Disney!
• 36m11s Signoff:  As Irish as it could be

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01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is of course your gratuitously genial host John Derbyshire with a look at the news.

This week’s podcast is more than usually self-indulgent. Inspired by the coming St. Patrick’s Day, I got talking about the home islands over the water there and couldn’t stop. I beg your pardon, and hope you find something interesting here — I mean, as interesting to you as it obviously is to me.

Here we go. Continue reading →

Lost in all the howling about DOGE, the rogue judges and the Ukraine happenings is the Trump economic policy that is slowly coming into focus. One of the reasons the administration pushed for the continuing resolution was that they needed time to put together budgets and spending priorities based on the cuts they are now making across all agencies of the government.

It is why they were so mad about the grandstanding of Thomas Massie. He is clearly someone who does not understand what they are doing and too addled by the brain-rot of libertarianism to ever understand it. He wanted to waste time and political capital on a pointless fight over pennies. The administration has bigger plans for reorganizing the government that needs time to develop.

The new economic model will be based on cheap energy, cheap money, low taxes on labor, limited regulation, and tariffs on imports. You can hear all of these when Trump seems to speak off the cuff. His plan to eliminate taxes for those earning under $150,000 per year is a good example. That is not just a tax cut for the wage earner, but also a tax cut for the employer.

The point is to make labor relatively cheaper for domestic employers, while using tariffs to make cheap foreign labor relatively more expensive. This is not a lot different from what Reagan tried to do in the 1980’s with Japan. Instead of being limited to trade issues with specific countries, it is to be the general policy. The goal is to boost domestic production in order to lower imports.

That is the show this week. The first part is a summary of the current economic model which no one discusses anymore. Back when it was coming into focus, people debated it and those opposed turned out to be right. The second part is about the schemes to unwind the old model and create a new one. Trumponomics is Abenomics but for a continent sized country with the global reserve currency.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Post-National Economics
• Examples
• Trumponomics
• Will It Work?

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• 00m54s Movies: the long farewell
• 07m05s Spellbound and swallowed
• 15m28s Trump’s address to Congress
• 24m55s Trump-Zelensky style clash
• 26m49s Help the Brunswick Three!
• 28m21s The Brits catch “disparate impact”
• 31m03s Romania should know
• 33m41s Signoff: It ain’t Joan

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01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your briefly genial host John Derbyshire.

I say “briefly” because I am currently oppressed by tasks demanding my time, and so must borrow time from the podcast. I shall not borrow much, but I apologize anyway, and shall proceed direct to this week’s commentary. Continue reading →

One of the interesting things about the shift in foreign policy initiated by the Trump administration is that it is a break from what has been policy for a century. This sudden lurch into realism is a departure from Wilsonian democracy. Trump wants to center policy on the material interests of the country. Up until now, policy was centered around moral claims about how the world ought to be ordered.

Through the Cold War it was assumed that pragmatism was the rule because of the threat of nuclear annihilation. The better way to view it is that Wilsonian democracy was on a leash for forty years. Once the Cold War ended, it was like a hyperactive dog that got under the fence. The last thirty years has been an explosion of Wilsonian democracy playing catchup for lost time.

Even during the Cold War, American policy makers and politicians had a fondness for moralizing about the world. There were endless debates over the morality of dealing with dictators who happened to be anti-Soviet. This was finally resolved in the 1980’s with the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian. The former was a temporary compromise, while the later was a forever enemy.

Once totalitarianism ended, then it was a race to go around the world addressing the temporary tolerance for governments not up to American standards. Now it seems this has run out of road and necessity is once again forcing a return of realism in the foreign policy realm. That is the show this week. It is a general primer on realism versus the idealism that is now being abandoned.

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
• Foreign Policy: How Nations Behave
• Just War
• Wilsonian Democracy
• Liberalism
• Thucydides
• Realism

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Contents

• 02m27s CPAC report
• 06m56s Dems in the doldrums
• 13m57s Immigration innovation: the Registry
• 20m40s Immigration innovation: the Gold Card
• 28m15s Trump 47’s first cabinet meeting
• 29m57s Hegseth’s Friday night purge
• 33m13s Ramaswamy for Ohio
• 34m23s James Bond Bezos?
• 37m30s Germany’s unsurprising election
• 39m45s Signoff: The Hippopotamus Song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

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

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Contents

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

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Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

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

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• 02m53s Healthcare gets a new boss
• 03m49s Healthcare horror Down Under
• 05m33s Immigration enforcement gets real
• 09m55s Why are politicians so rich?
• 13m05s Healthcare:a history
• 26m43s Signoff with a medical melody

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01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. This is your feebly genial host John Derbyshire with our weekly survey of the passing scene.

My choice of adverb there was reluctant but accurate. For the past few days Mrs Derbyshire and I have been afflicted with a nasobronchial disorder of the lesser sort, not serious enough to raise our temperatures or justify a doctor’s visit but leaving us enervated and operating at half speed.

The podcast will therefore be shorter than usual, for which I apologize. The commentary on current affairs will be thin gruel. When you’re feeling unwell it’s hard to concentrate on anything other than how unwell you’re feeling.

There will also be a healthcare theme to the podcast. Not a personal one: there is nothing more boring than listening to other people talk about their health issues, unless you’re a doctor and getting paid for it. I shall therefore not impose on you with accounts of our own ailments. I shall, though, later on give you a segment on health in general, in social and historical context.

And yes, of course, we both know there any many worse afflicted than ourselves, often in solitude. We at least have the consolation of feeling miserable together. With noses red from sneezing and throats hoarse from coughing, she is still my Valentine, and I am hers. God bless you, my Valentine.

OK: First let me do what little I can do with the week’s news. For symmetry, I’ll start with some healthcare-related items. Continue reading →