This Week’s Show

Contents

• Radio Derb Podcast, 1/17/2025
• Table of Contents
• 01m53s World Logic Day
• 09m09s The Competence Collapse
• 16m00s Economist fixes Africa
• 19m35s French theater fiasco
• 22m28s A new Botany Bay?
• 26m10s How is Tété-Michel Kpomassie doing?
• 30m39s The immigration racket
• 39m28s Where is Vivek?
• 40m13s Usha, Tennyson, and me
• 41m41s Can the universe think?
• 43m04s Signoff for California

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Transcript

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

First, however, a little housekeeping. The website VDARE.com remains in suspense thanks to the evil machinations of New York State’s well-upholstered Attorney General. However, the parent VDARE Foundation is very much alive, and planning for the future.

The latest development there is that Peter Brimelow, who got the whole thing started 25 years ago, now has his own Substack account. You can subscribe, and I urge you to do so.

You can support the VDARE Foundation itself by mailing a check to us at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. You can support me personally by earmarking the check with my name, or by any of the alternative options spelled out on my personal website. Thank you!

End of housekeeping. Let’s see what’s in the news. Continue reading →

Last year I did a show on the concept of civilizationalism, but I thought it was a good idea to revisit the topic now that Trump is back in town. Many of the things Trump has been saying since the election suggest he is headed in this direction, even if he does not think much about the concept. The tides of history are dragging him along toward this new organizational model.

The short definition of civilizationalism is that instead of humanity organized into countries or empires, it will be organized by civilization. Language, culture, history, tradition, and religion are not immutable, but they are not malleable. They evolve over long periods of time, so they feel permanent to us. These are things that resist the best efforts of the ideologues.

The last time I addressed this topic it was in the historical perspective. The show this time is about the nuts and bolts of it. We are seeing the rough contours in the world and even in the behavior of Trump. His desire to annex Greenland and Canada is not much different from Russia reabsorbing Ukraine into the Russian world. Canada and Greenland are part of the American civilization.

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
• Trump’s Curveballs
• Sphere of Influence
• Clash of Civilizations
• Multipolar World
• America & The New World

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One of the many strange things about this age is that the most urgent issue facing the developed world gets the least amount of attention. That urgent thing is the collapse of fertility in every country with indoor toilets. Even India, a country famous for outdoor toilets, is having a baby bust. Indian fertility is now below replacement and, according to recent reports, is following the rest of Asia off the cliff.

In the EU, there are currently 1.46 live births per woman. France has the highest TFR at 1.84 live births per woman, but that is mostly the foreign population. The rest of Europe has birthrates well below replacement. Spain and Italy are at 1.3, which is what demographers call a population collapse. The only place in Europe with a healthy TFR is the Faroe Islands, which lies east of Iceland.

The Occident is doing well compared to the developed parts of Asia. Hong Kong no longer has children, as there is less than one live birth per woman. South Korea is right there with a TFR of 0.6. China is at 1.2, which should be what gets the ruling class to take notice, given China’s rocket high fertility in the recent past. It seems that wherever there are good times, people have stopped making babies.

This flies in the face of what we think we knew about biology. It has been assumed, because history seems to confirm it, that in good times people tend to have more children, while in bad times they limit their children. It is why Western nations cooked up schemes to limit reproduction during the Industrial Revolution. It was assumed that improving living standards would result in overpopulation.

The great global baby bust is telling us something. One is that what we thought we understood about demographics and population is wrong. When what was predicted did not happen, instead you got the opposite, it is time to rethink everything. The other is that there is a combination of forces that have been unleashed leading to what is looking like a great pruning of the human population.

That is the show this week. Everyone has their favorite reason for the population collapse, but those answers are probably wrong for the simple reason they assume a one-to-one relationship. In reality, complex things like human reproduction have highly complex causal relationships. That means the population collapse is most certainly do to a combination of things working in concert.

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 Fertility Crisis
• Diet
• Development
• Deracination
• Divinity

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m06s Crazy people doing crazy things
• 06m47s Bracing for disappointment
• 14m29s Can Britain be saved?
• 23m00s Consanguinity Central
• 31m13s 9/11 plotters win again
• 32m51s Jimmy Carter, R.i.P.
• 36m21s Generation what?
• 37m46s Yoon defiant
• 39m45s Muhammad takes New York
• 41m22s Number notes
• 43m05s Signoff with Punta

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     Welcome, listeners, to the first Radio Derb of 2025. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 performed by a small wind band arrangement, and this is your primarily genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week’s news.

Dominating the week’s news were the two events early on Wednesday morning, the first in New Orleans around 3:15 a.m., the second in Las Vegas five and a half hours later. The first was plainly an act of terrorism; the second probably so, but we’re not yet certain.

Let’s see what can be said. Continue reading →

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m28s America First, Americans First
• 06m50s End guest-worker visas
• 13m48s Does Trump remember his first term?
• 21m27s Importing an overclass (cont.)
• 29m18s Mass deportations are under way!
• 31m48s California makes theft a crime
• 33m13s Britain’s Blairite ambassador
• 36m22s Trump and Cleveland in sync on death penalty
• 38m30s Mangione hybristophilia
• 40m27s The Gaetz Report
• 42m02s goes AWOL, how could they tell?
• 43m04s The quick key to Congressional spending
• 45m54s Signoff with Peter Dawson

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. I hope you have all recovered from your Christmas hangovers and surfeits of fruitcake, turkey, and plum pudding. This is of course your abstemiously genial host John Derbyshire with my last podcast of 2024.

That puts me under the usual temptation to make the show a back-glancing survey of the year. This year, though, I shall resist that temptation. The topic of legal immigration has been all over social media — at any rate, all over X, the only social medium I actually sign on to.

That topic is close to my heart. I’ve been commenting on in the past two weeks. I shall therefore continue my commentary here, leaving unrelated topics to later in the podcast.

Here we go. Continue reading →

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m51s Drone panic
• 06m55s This land is their land
• 11m05s End student visas
• 16m28s Zero-based immigration policy
• 21m43s Chauvin gets a break
• 24m22s How they spend our money
• 26m14s VDARE’s Christmas message
• 26m58s Signoff: Not a Christmas song?

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air for Christmas! That was the voice of the great American soprano Leontyne Price giving us Hark! The Herald Angels Sing; this is the voice of your suitably genial host John Derbyshire with reflections and commentary on the week’s news.

First, those mysterious drones. Continue reading →

The final show of the year is a double album set. That means two hours of the dulcet sound of my voice jumping through twenty topics. There were a lot of good questions this time, so rather than try to figure out which ones were the best, I decided to do a two hour show and cover them all. There were some left out only because they were duplicates or not appropriate for a family show.

A few will become full shows in the new year. While I was talking about Strauss it occurred to me that it would make for a good trio of shows. One hour on Strauss, one hour on the neocons and one hour on Claremont. All three are tangled up together and all three are relevant to the next administration. There are more than a few people from the Jaffa cult in the Trump team.

Another thing that occurred to me while doing the show is a good feature of the new site would be a way to submit show ideas and questions/topics for these multi-topic shows that people seem to like. Over the holidays I am hoping to make some progress on the new site and maybe have it done next month. If anyone has ideas feel free to post them up in the comments

Otherwise, this is the final show of the year, other than the green door show. There will be a Sunday show and maybe some video experiments. That is another project on the drawing board. I did some experiments from the back of the truck the other day, so I might test those out over the holiday break. On the other hand, if they are terrible, I might save myself the trouble and scrap the idea.

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
• Liberalism
• Black Pilled
• Leo Strauss
• Dissident Art
• Our Bolsheviks
• Juvenile Politics
• AI
• Cunning & Evil
• Music
• Marriage & Family
• Civilizationalism
• Jewish Lobby & Christian
• Profilicity
• South Asians
• Populism Versus Dissident Right
• The Fuentes Business
• Video & Writing
• Christianity & Liberalism
• Israel & Jews
• Be Not Afraid

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m56s Make America Normal Again
• 06m09s Trump: harbinger of a new age
• 11m05s Syria is the new Libya
• 16m50s The West is best
• 21m48s Immigration roundup
• 28m39s Spared the Hitler comparison
• 30m10s Cliodynamics (not sci-fi)
• 31m30s Moore’s list
• 32m36s Signoff:  An advertisement for Cultural Appropriation

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. This is your demonstrably genial host John Derbyshire, back in the recording studio after nine days off the grid. So this week’s podcast is farm-fresh, not frozen and reheated like last week’s.

Mr and Mrs Derbyshire actually spent eight of those nine days in Belize. That, you can be entirely excused for not knowing, is a tiny little nation on the East coast of the Central American isthmus, a British colony until 1981 but now independent. I shall have more to say about our Belize adventure in my Diary at the end of this month.

And now I’m back in the saddle with Radio Derb’s weekly survey of the news. The transition from warm Caribbean air to the frosty New York variety has left me with a sore throat, so I’m going to sound a little hoarse [horse sound], for which I apologize. That aside, it’s business as usual.

So, the news. First, MANA. Continue reading →

One of the interesting things about what is happening in Syria is that it is not just the fall of the government but a collapse of Syrian society. When Assad fled, everyone in his government went into hiding. The people running various parts of the system abandoned their posts, leaving no government at all. The money is worthless, so the economy has ceased to function.

Then you have the gangs of lunatics running around, supported by your tax dollars, making sure nothing is working. Now we are getting word that remnants of the military are forming up into war bands. Soon the various ethnic and religious groups will do the same and the result will be a war zone where lightly armed war bands fight with one another for control of increasingly worthless land.

In other words, Syria collapsed and went from a poorly functioning country to something like a fallen Bronze Age society. This is not just the fall of a government but the collapse of everything, which is not something we often see. The last example is Libya, which was not much a society before we killed Gaddafi. The most recent example is the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago.

That is the show this week. Societal collapse is a rare thing, but Syria is a good reminder that it can still happen. The conditions are pretty similar in all the big examples of collapse. Of course, once you start thinking about those conditions, the West begins to look a bit fragile. Syria is also a reminder that collapse always catches people by surprise, even those causing it.

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
• Syrian Collapse
• French Collapse
• Tsarist Collapse
• Soviet Collapse
• Collapse & Revolution
• The American Collapse

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00m00s Intro: Explaining what follows
• 03m34s 2020: COVID hysteria
• 11m38s 2016: Death of Fidel Castro
• 18m07s 2012: Americans, your government hates you
• 28m18s 2008: Blackety-black
• 34m09s 2004: Frosty the Candidate
• 39m25s Signoff

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Well, sort of …

This is, never fear, your regularly genial host John Derbyshire. You are listening to this, or reading the transcript, on or after the weekend of December 6th-7th-8th. As it happens, I shall be off the grid that weekend. As I am speaking right now, my wall calendar shows Sunday, December 1st, and it is not lying.

As on similar occasions before, in order that regular listeners not be disappointed I have put together a frozen meal of sound clips from the Radio Derb archives. I shall deliver the finished product to my gracious host, the Z-man, to be defrosted, heated up, and served to you at the usual time on Friday the 6th.

Also as usual in these situations, I have tried to select the following audio clips non-randomly, to illustate some theme. This coming week — I mean, the week coming to me; for you it has come and is now departing — this week marks one month since our general election. That will be my theme.

The following clips are from past editions of Radio Derb podcast in the month following the general elections of 2020, 2016, 2012, 2008, and 2004. They are not necessarily election-themed; I have cast my net wide. I believe, though, that each one is of its time.

Because I have pulled these clips direct from the archives going twenty years back, there will be some differences in sound quality. I apologize for that. I don’t think it will be any hindrance to your listening pleasure.

All our yesterdays, opined Macbeth, have lighted fools the way to dusty death. I don’t know about that: a genius can have just as dusty a death as a fool. Macbeth was somewhat under the weather when he said it, though, so we should make allowances. A quick jog through all our yesterdays can at any rate help give us some perspective on our todays. Continue reading →