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.

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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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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.

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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 →

One of the consequences of the unfolding revelations in Washington is that we must reexamine the past in light of this new data. We now know that the political process was captured by the Blob and used to serve the Blob. That means the alleged policies of past presidents were probably not their policies at all. They were simply staying ahead of the policies put forth by the Blob.

At the same time, much of what we want government to do has gotten worse as the Blob has assumed control. Name a problem and not only has it gotten worse, but the cost of addressing it has grown out of control. One great example is the war on drugs that has tracked closely with the growth of the Blob. The cost of fighting it has spiraled out of control, while the problem has only grown worse.

It is the nature of managerialism to look for things to manage, but managing is not the same as solving or even mitigating. You cannot remain a manager if what the problem you are tasked to manage gets solved. In fact, solving the issue is exactly what you must seek to avoid, which means you become part of the problem. This is what we have seen with the drug war going back to the Reagan years.

That is the show this week. It is a dive into the rabbit hole of the drug war to try and explain how the drug menace is the result of managerialism. At every stop along the way, government either deliberately or incompetently advanced the flow of drugs into the country and the diversity of drugs available. The reason we did not have a drug epidemic a century ago is we did not have managerialism a century ago.

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 War On Drugs
• What Happened?
• Maxine Waters Was Right
• The Poppy Fields
• Syrian Captagon
• Purdue Pharma
• Fentanyl & Meth
• Marijuana Legalization
• Drugs, Protection & The State

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Contents

• 01m34s Trump the libertarian?
• 05m54s Horsegirl Sam
• 13m37s Zero-based government
• 18m56s Levantines and Slavs
• 27m40s Small win for Brunswick Three
• 30m45s End public-sector employee lobbies!
• 32m26s Indecisive on lobsters
• 34m39s License plate humor
• 36m26s Signoff with J.S. Bach

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers, as we close out this first week of February, the second week of the Trump counter-revolution.

Boy, things are happening fast. I just barely got to grips with the tariff issue when all the talk flipped to foreign aid. Halfway through reading up on that I got sidetracked by didn’t-we-just-know-it revelations about FBI shenanigans…

I can’t keep up. It’s some consolation to see that the legacy news outlets can’t keep up, either. I pick up a newspaper and yesterday’s big huge-headlines in-depth cover story has been pushed off to page 22 to make room for today’s big huge-headlines in-depth cover story about something different.

So don’t expect me to cover everything that’s happening, nor even anything in much depth. I’ll do the best I can, that’s all.

Continue reading →

As I was recording the show, news broke that one of the DOGE kids was doxed by an Antifa working for the Wall Street Journal. This is a bit ironic in that the crux of the USAID scandal is the nexus between the government, the vast network of not-for-profits, the media, and the activists. The money flowing around this system is what has made the last decade of domestic terrorism possible.

To emphasize the point, the activist in question was an employee at USAID before they literally paid for her to go to graduate school at Columbia. How exactly that worked is unclear, but that is what people on Twitter have unearthed. Such an arrangement would not be shocking, given the amount of money being pumped into the Radical Industrial Complex through the federal budget.

The fact that the Wall Street Journal is engaging in this behavior is another reminder that “conservatism” was part of the fraud. The kabuki theater of right versus left in our politics was always a fraud on the public, particularly the white middle-class, who were and remain the backbone of the country. The theater of democracy was intended to keep them bought in while they were dispossessed.

It also reveals that what we call the left is entirely artificial. Without the hundreds of billions from your pocket, it would barely exist. Like the progressive programs of the past, this system has cultivated generations of welfare queens to the point where they literally cannot exist without the system. Break the flow of cash into this system and it will collapse and take it bizarre faith with it.

While the week’s news has been both amusing and frustrating, it is important to remember that this is the final struggle for civilization. If the Musk team can break up the money flow, the crazies will be defeated, and society can be rebuilt. If they fail and the crazies win, then at best we get tanks in the streets. The Radical Industrial Complex is Skynet, and the only way forward is for it to be destroyed.

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
• Origins Of The Blob
• The Not-For-Profit Revolution
• Managerialism Meets Charitable Activism
• How The Blob Works
• The Attack On The Blob
• What Comes Next

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Contents

• 01m37s The smack of firm government (cont.)
• 05m13s Déjà vu all over again
• 09m13s The ratchet effect?
• 16m43s Diversity catastrophe?
• 20m03s A science geek, not a law geek, for HHS
• 28m57s Work for Trump, Bukele, and Milei
• 30m34s Brexit + 5
• 32m55s Be nice to the French!
• 36m08s Signoff with the èrhú

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a fragment of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your intensely genial host John Derbyshire with news and views from a National Conservative point of view.

Well, we are now twelve days into a new Presidency — one that, Progressives warned us, would put an end to democracy in our country, led by a man who is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

Yet so far there has been no declaration of martial law, no attempt to suspend the Constitution, and — so far as I can tell — no preparations to invade Poland.

Could it be that all those elite Progressives — academics, jurists, media talking heads — were mistaken? Hard to believe. Well, it’s still early days; we’ll see.

Continue reading →

A bit of a weird show this week. The post on Wednesday got me thinking about how I would explain to someone what I think is happening in Washington. That post relied on people understanding a lot of things that would not be familiar to most, so they would need a quick background before getting to the meat of the topic. Thinking about how to do that led to the idea of doing a show on it.

One of the things that you see with people who arrive on this side of the great divide is they often go through a crash course learning all the stuff that was excluded from their education and political understanding. Condensing that down into easily digestible bits is probably a good project for someone, given that we are seeing millions turn up on the edge of the great divide, looking for a lift over to this side.

That really is something to savor. Trump gave a presser after the chopper collided with the passenger jet in Washington and he put the blame on diversity. It is not the first time he has said something like this since he was inaugurated, but it is still shocking to hear a public official say what had been prohibited a year ago. This administration is saying things that got you booted from Twitter before Musk.

This is why the corporate takeover model works. Every company has a culture, and that culture is reinforced by management. Inevitably when new owners come in it means changes to the culture. To outsiders it does not seem that important, but to the people inside it is shocking. Our political system is being overhauled in the equivalent of a hostile takeover, like greenmailing. Instead, it is orangemailing.

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
• Origins Of Managerialism
• The Growth Of The Managerial Class
• Nixon
• Reinventing Government
• The Shadow Government
• The Greenmailers
• The End Game

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Contents

• 01m25s Pre-Inaugural Adventure
• 08m38s Energy in the Executive
• 15m00s The Bishop of Woke
• 21m08s Britain grovels
• 25m15s War against the normal
• 30m00s Indophobia
• 34m20s A line from Kipling
• 35m25s Suggestion for a pardon
• 38m29s Year 50
• 40m55s If VDARE.com, why not the SPLC?
• 42m16s Signoff with Victoria de Los Angeles

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01 — Intro.     That was indeed quite a week. And for all you fellow 1960s survivors: Yes, that was the great Millicent Martin. She is still with us, I think still active after a career spanning at least seven decades, and looking forward to her 91st birthday this year. Happy birthday in advance, Millie, and many more.

This is of course Radio Derb, being introduced here by your exultantly genial host John Derbyshire. As I said, it’s been quite a week.

It began for me on Sunday the 19th; and although there is nothing very consequential to report about that beginning, I’m going to give it a segment of its own anyway. The name of the segment is: Pre-Inaugural Adventure.

Here we go. Continue reading →