01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was Franz Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 played on a dobro guitar, and this is your observantly genial host John Derbyshire with reflections and commentary on current events.
The election campaigns are heating up a little. November 5th is only sixty-seven days away. Sixty-seven is of course a prime number; in fact it’s the largest prime that is not the sum of distinct squares. And if you want to link it to November 5th, just remember that if you raise 5 to the 67th power you get a 47-digit number whose first two digits are 6 and 7 …
Sorry, numbers always snag my attention. They sometimes snag Kamala Harris’s attention, too, though not in a good way. I shall get round to that in the fulness of time.
Meanwhile, the interview! Our Vice President and her running mate gave a joint interview! How did it go? First segment.
02 — Kamala and Tim submit to questioning. Yesterday evening at nine o’clock I settled down in my living-room to watch the CNN interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Before proceeding, let me just ask: Does anyone else have the problem I have with that “z” in the Governor’s name? Having done three years of high school German my instinct is always to pronounce it “ts.”
Radio and TV reporters mostly just execute a plain alveolar fricative, usually unvoiced — “s” — but sometimes voiced — “z”; but in this age of exquisite sensitivity about ethnic offense, the Governor might take that to be a deliberate slight on his German ancestors, as when Winston Churchill mocked his WW2 enemy as “Nazzzz-is.” You can’t be too careful nowadays.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the CNN interview. I guess you have already surmised that I did not find it fascinating. Tell the truth, I bailed out halfway through — at the point where Dana Bash asked the Vice President whether, if elected, she’d appoint a Republican to her Cabinet. The Veep said she would. My thought was: “You’ll be spoiled for choice, Ma’am” … but more on that later.
As low as my expectations were, that first half of the interview undershot them. Excuse me for going geezerish on you, but you can add political interviewing to the list of occupations that have declined dramatically in levels of skill and competency across the past five or six decades.
Back in the 1960s TV interviews of politicians were little short of knife fights. I can recall sitting in company with a roomful of fellow students watching an interview of Prime Minister Harold Wilson when one of the company yelled out: “He’s sweating! Look, he’s sweating!” And indeed, the Prime Minister was.
There was one interviewer — I can’t remember his name — of whom it was said that the politicos were all terrified of him, and only faced off with him because the alternative was to be labeled a coward. Where is that guy? We sure could use him over here now.
OK, OK, the CNN interview. Having bailed out from the TV version I did my due diligence this morning, pulling up and reading a transcript. The written form was of course even more anesthetic than the spoken — great billowing clouds of nothing.
In fairness to Dana Bash, the interviewer, she did attempt a couple of gentle jabs.
When she asked the Veep, quote: “If you are elected, what would you do on day one in the White House?” end quote, Harris responded with 129 words of nitrous oxide. When she stopped, Bash asked again, quote: “So what would you do day one?” End quote.
And again, when the Vice President told us she wanted to, quote, “turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies,” end quote, Dana Bash came back with, quote: “With the last decade, of course, the last three and a half years has been part of your administration.” End quote.
A gentle jab is none the less a jab. With a few months’ combat training Dana Bash might rise to the level of making her victim sweat.
Mostly, though, the interviewer failed to follow through. The chaos at our Southern border? That was Donald Trump’s fault, said Harris. Congressional Democrats, working together with Republicans, had earlier this year put together a super new bill that would have solved the immigration crisis once and for all; but Donald Trump killed that bill — the so-called Lankford or Lankford-Schumer Bill — in Congress.
Who knew Trump had so much power over Congress? In fact the Lankford Bill would have made things much worse, legalizing what is currently illegal. The Center for Immigration Studies did very detailed analyses of the Bill — go to cis.org and put “Lankford” in the search box.
It wasn’t even necessary for Dana Bash to have studied those analyses. Certainly our immigration laws need improving; but most of the current crisis can be dealt with by executive action. In fact it was caused by executive action: No sooner was he in the White House than Joe Biden canceled more than five hundred executive actions on immigration taken by the Trump administration.
Where immigration is concerned, we need a new Chief Executive way, way more than we need new laws.
Dana Bash just let it go and allowed Harris to emit more soporific fumes.
She did some similarly mild questioning of Tim Walz, concerning things he’s said and claims he’s made that are at odds with known facts about his life and career. Walz put it all down to too much passion — “I care too much!” — and problems he has with grammar. Uh-huh.
Wait, though: Isn’t grammar White Supremacist, like punctuality, or politeness, or demanding correct answers in High School math? So maybe Governor Tim is on the right side — the woke side — here.
03 — Bye-bye, Uniparty. What a mighty force Donald Trump has been in our nation’s politics! To put it at its simplest: He smashed the Uniparty.
We now have two major political parties with distinctly different outlooks and programs. That’s either a good thing, or an existential threat to our democracy, depending on whom you ask.
Compare last week’s Democratic Party National Convention with the Republican one in mid-July. The Democrats got both Bill and Hillary Clinton — separately, on separate days — and both Obamas, too, separately but one right after the other the same evening.
So the Republicans at their Convention got George W. Bush, right? No, he didn’t show up. Nor did Dick Cheney, Bush’s Vice President; although to be fair, Cheney is 83 and has had a heart transplant. Nor did Dan Quayle, though. Quayle’s younger than I am and in good health, so far as I know.
Paul Ryan told us back in May he wouldn’t vote for Trump, so his absence was no surprise. Where was Mike Pence. though?
Could it be that the older generation of Republican politicians want nothing to do with Donald Trump’s GOP? It certainly could.
New York Times, August 26th, edited quote:
More than 200 people who previously worked for President George W. Bush and Senators Mitt Romney and John McCain have signed a letter endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Many of the more prominent signatories, including a chief of staff, a legislative director and a deputy campaign manager for Mr. McCain, had signed a letter supporting President Biden in the 2020 election …
The former Republican officials’ renewed support of the Democratic ticket reflects how Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party under his leadership, as well as deep and persistent opposition to his candidacy from those who served Republican presidential candidates.
Mr. Romney, Mr. Bush and other high-profile Republicans skipped the Republican nominating convention last month.
End quote.
Bush … Cheney … Romney … McCain … just speaking the names of those Uniparty Republicans you start to smell dust and mildew. Was it really less than six years ago that Paul Ryan was House Speaker? Just twelve since Mitt Romney was GOP Presidential candidate?
How time flies! — carrying away with it as it flies all the scraps and detritus of failed programs and thwarted ambitions.
In my previous segment I noted Kamala Harris affirming that, yes, she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet. They’re lining up already, Ma’am.
And as Trump pulled Republicans away from the Uniparty, he pulled some Democrats, too. Most notably in recent days, he pulled Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
I have my reservations about RFK, Jr. He’s a bit too much of a conspiracy theorist for my confidence, with somewhat of a mystical streak where Mother Nature is concerned.
But hey: Who has a better excuse for conspiracy theorizing than a guy who’s the son of RFK and nephew of JFK? And maybe I should worry more than I do about fluoride, vaccines, and endocrine disruptors. I just don’t have the time for so much worrying.
And I see RFK, Jr. is a keen falconer. On the strength of having reviewed two books about falconry (here and here) I can testify that it’s an impressive thing to be keen about.
So while I don’t want RFK, Jr. put in charge of anything important, I’d be happy to see Trump appoint him head of some minor federal agency — the National Endowment for the Humanities, something like that.
Tulsi Gabbard I don’t have such a clear picture of, but she seems like a useful member for Trump’s and Vance’s team. She handles herself well in TV interviews I’ve seen.
I’d like to know more about her views on crime and punishment, having seen her go after Kamala Harris in the 2020 campaign for Harris having put too many people in jail when Attorney General of California. Sorry, Tulsi, but it seems to me we should be putting way more people in jail than we currently do.
So again there should be a spot for Ms Gabbard in a Trump administration, but not too high up the pecking order.
And taking the theme of a Uniparty crack-up international, it would fill my heart with joy to see the same thing happen in the mother country. The two big parties over there, Labour and the Tories, have been perfectly indistinguishable for decades now.
The Tory Party is badly in need of a Trump to split off national populists, send the Establishment hacks back to the stables — or better yet, the knacker’s yard — and make clear that post-Cold War globalist neoliberalism has had its day and is now at one with Nineveh and Tyre. I’d hoped Nigel Farage might do the job but his Reform Party, when he got it to the battlefield, was too little and too late.
Perhaps a second Trump administration, followed by a couple of Vance administrations, will show the Brits how it’s done.
04 — Idealism vs. expediency in voting rules. Back in March 2022 the then-Governor of Arizona, Republican Doug Ducey, signed a bill requiring voters to prove their citizenship in order to vote in a presidential election. Associated Press reported at the time that the signing drew, quote, “fierce opposition from voting rights advocates,” end quote.
That’s the kind of thing that just baffles me. What are the emotions inspiring that, quote, “fierce opposition,” end quote? To whom is it of vital, passionate importance that people who can’t prove they are citizens should be allowed to vote for a President?
I’ll admit that where right to vote is concerned, I’m on the sterner end of the opinion spectrum. I haven’t been able to get much traction for my proposal that we should only be allowed to cast a vote after first crawling across a field of broken glass while Army Rangers fire machine-guns over our heads. Still, I live in hope that we may at least, one day, get back to single-day voting with proof of citizenship compulsory at registration.
Well, that Arizona law ignited a battle in the courts, with activists giving over much time and a great deal of money in legal fees to get the thing overturned. It actually was overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, although they later de-overturned it.
The legal wrangling eventually landed in the U.S. Supreme Court. On August 22nd the Supremes, in a 5-4 order, allowed enforcement of some of the law’s regulations barring noncitizens from voting.
Only some, mind. The matter’s not totally closed, and the lawyering — on what seems, to a lay observer, to be an obvious and highly desirable defense of voting integrity — will continue in the lower courts, probably until the crack of doom.
Why, I ask again, why is this so contentious? Eric Lendrum over at American Greatness has enlightened me. Edited quotes:
When the law was first passed, it was estimated that the proof of citizenship requirement could result in as many as 200,000 illegal aliens no longer being able to vote. This could prove decisive in the Grand Canyon State, which apparently voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election by less than 11,000 votes.
Many statewide elections in 2022 were equally as contentious, with the gubernatorial race being decided by roughly 17,000 votes, the Secretary of State race being determined by just over 20,000 votes, and the Attorney General race being won by less than 300 votes; all of these elections were won by Democrats, thus sparking further accusations of voter fraud.
Arizona remains one of the most critical swing states in the coming election, worth 11 electoral votes.
End quote.
Ah, I see.
In the same general zone, there’s some confusion about Donald Trump’s position on mail-in voting.
The Donald was tweeting furiously against mail-in voting during the 2020 campaign and he seems still to be critical of the practice. Earlier this month he told a rally in Montana that, quote: “We want to go back to one-day voting and paper ballots. Very simple, very simple.” End quote.
Trump’s campaign organizers, however, are pushing mail-in voting for all they’re worth. From the website donaldjtrump.com, August 27th, headline: “Team Trump and RNC Launch Huge Mail-in Ballot Tool in Pennsylvania,” end headline.
What we have here seems to be a conflict between idealism and expediency.
Of course Trump is right: mail-in voting is a terrible idea. It is also unfortunately a fact all over the country. Within that fact is a factlet: Democrat voters use mail-in voting much more than Republican voters.
Some of the reason for that is the afore-mentioned furious tweeting against mail-in voting that Trump did in the 2020 campaign. It seems likely that the trend then got an assist from the COVID pandemic.
Democrats, always eager to obey ruling-class orders, took the health restrictions of that pandemic period more seriously than did Republicans. They were reluctant to go to crowded places like polling stations, and so preferred mail-in voting.
And then, quote from Associated Press, May 17th this year, edited quote:
The trend continued in 2022, and its costs were starkly illustrated in Arizona.
Three top-of-the-ticket Republican candidates there … encouraged their supporters to vote in person on Election Day. An election machine meltdown that day in one-third of the polling places in the state’s most populous county led to huge lines and some would-be voters departing in frustration.
The three top Republicans all lost, including falling 17,000 votes short in the governor’s race and 500 votes short in the one for Attorney General.
End quote.
Hmm: This segment started and ends in Arizona. What’s up with that?
Bottom line here: Trump is of course right. Mail-in voting is a terrible idea that opens up our elections to all kinds of shenanigans. Sometimes, though, you have to bow to expediency if you want to win, and do the same unsavory things your opponent is doing.
Idealism is great. Unfortunately this is not an ideal world.
05 — Rev’m Al reclaims the black vote. Last Thursday, on the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, four of the Central Park Five appeared on stage, accompanied by veteran antiwhite activist Al Sharpton.
These are four of the men, at that time teenagers, who in April 1989 raped and severely beat a young female jogger in New York City’s Central Park. They confessed, were convicted, and spent from six to thirteen years in prison.
Because the Central Park Five were all black or Hispanic while their victim was white, the convictions were angrily contested by Al Sharpton and others of the antiwhite persuasion, including of course many whites.
In 2002 the convictions were vacated. The Five filed a federal lawsuit against New York City.
The city’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, fought the lawsuit very resolutely; but when far-left Bill de Blasio was elected Mayor in 2013 he ended the litigation and the Five got huge cash awards — the biggest one more than twelve million dollars.
There’s no doubt the Five were in fact guilty. There was no retrial so they were never officially declared innocent. A court decision is vacated when there was thought to have been some error in the proceedings that affected the outcome.
The city should have re-tried the Five, but Mayor de Blasio declined to do so.
As Ann Coulter has written, edited quote:
Of the 37 youths brought in for questioning about the multiple violent attacks in the park that night, only 10 were charged with a crime and only five for the rape of the jogger … All five confessed — four on videotape with adult relatives present and one with a parent present, but not on videotape.
Two unanimous, multicultural juries convicted them, despite aggressive defense lawyers putting on their best case.
End quote.
So why was this relevant last Thursday evening at the Democrats’ Convention? Because Trump!
At the time of the gang rape, Trump was just a New York real-estate tycoon. Like everyone else in the city he was horrified at what had happened — so horrified he posted full-page ads at his own expense in city newspapers demanding stronger sentences for muggers and the death sentence if a mugger’s victim died.
Those advertisements did not mention the Central Park gang rape, although everyone assumed that was the inspiration for them. Trump of course had no judicial or law-enforcement authority. He was just a private citizen expressing an opinion — one that was very widely shared.
So: In the first place, it is highly unlikely any wrong was done to the Central Park Five. A great many of us think that they got off lightly for the terrible thing they did; that the city copping out from a retrial was shameful, and that stuffing the pockets of these ghetto savages with city cash was double shameful.
In the second place, if any wrong was done to the Five, Trump played no part in doing it.
His newspaper ads did not demand execution of the Five, as one of the lying rapists told the Convention last Thursday; Trump called for murderers to be executed; but the Central Park victim had not died, and in fact is still with us.
Most likely Sharpton and his capos had been hearing these reports about Trump polling well with black voters this time round, and Thursday’s show was an attempt to slow that trend.
Lotsa luck with that, Rev’m Al.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: How smart is Kamala Harris? Well, there are of course different kinds of smarts. I think some kinds are foundational, though.
There’s literacy, for example; not a deep absorption in the literature of the ages, just the ability to read, to grasp the meaning of written words without struggling. I don’t want an illiterate person to hold senior office in any government with authority over me.
And then there’s numeracy — the ability to grasp the meaning of numbers without struggling, to relate a number to the size of the thing it’s numbering and to the comparative size of similar collections. Again: I don’t want an innumerate person in high government office.
Kamala Harris is seriously innumerate. Here she was at a campaign event in Charlotte, NC. This was October 2020, two weeks prior to the voting in that year’s election.
[Clip: We’re in the middle of a crisis caused by this pandemic — that is, a public health crisis — and we’re looking at over two hundred and twenty million Americans who just in the last several months died.]
Now, that might have been a slip of the tongue, the kind of thing that can happen to anyone. It wasn’t, though. How do I know it wasn’t? Because here she was three days later at another event, this one in Cleveland, OH.
[Clip: We are in the midst of a public health epidemic that has taken the lives of over two hundred and twenty million Americans in just the last several months.]
The population of the United States in October 2020 was just over 332 million. For Kamala’s statement to be true, it would have to have been 552 million a few months earlier. To get down to 332 million in October, forty percent of that 552 million would have to have died.
Does the Vice President believe that actually happened? If so, she belongs nowhere near the levers of power in our republic, nor in any of the other forty-five trillion republics in the world.
Item: I love my New York Post. Without the daily delivery of that newspaper, my breakfast oatmeal would have no flavor.
I hope therefore I may be forgiven for plagiarizing from the Post’s August 23rd editorial matter. My excuse is that I’d thought the same thought myself before seeing it in print there. A great many other people must likewise have noticed what we noticed.
Partial quote from the New York Post editorial:
If there’s one thing Democrats hate hate hate, it’s those evil, greedy billionaires ruining the country for everybody else!
Just witness socialist screecher Bernie Sanders railing against them at the DNC, with a heavy-breathing speech about how we need an economy that works for everyone, something that Donald Trump — himself an evil billionaire — can’t deliver.
Except that, right after Bernie, hard-left Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker came out to brag about how rich he was — flashing his inherited wealth (about $3.5 billion worth, specifically) with a claim he’s richer than Trump.
Huh?
And it’s not like billionaires were absent on other nights, either …
End quote.
That’s just the opening volley. I’ll leave you to read the whole thing for yourself; it’s online at nypost.com.
They go on to mention other speakers at the DNC Convention on other nights: Oprah Winfrey, net worth around three billion dollars; and the Obamas, who have around seventy million stashed away somewhere in their four — count ’em four — luxury homes, of which just the one at Martha’s Vineyard is worth twelve million.
We have to allow, of course, that Oprah and the Obamas are at least self-made plutocrats, while Governor Pritzker inherited his fortune.
As the Post editorialists say, and as I myself certainly believe, there’s nothing wrong with being rich, either self-made or inherited. It just doesn’t square very well with lecturing about the evils of wealth.
Item: I generally scoff at conspiracy theories, but sometimes I find myself wondering.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump last month is one of those times. The whole business is peculiar, and the extremely slow pace at which facts in the matter are emerging makes it all even peculiarer.
Where government operations present as weird like this, one of two things is at the root. The two things are: malice, or stupidity.
Stupidity is the better bet. There’s no screw-up like a government screw-up; and there’s no government screw-up like a federal government screw-up. The alphabetic list starts with “Afghanistan” … although there may possibly have been a federal government screw-up involving aardvarks that I haven’t heard about.
On the attempted assassination, I have no theories of my own to offer. Malice certainly can’t be ruled out when it’s Donald Trump we’re talking about; but even with the limited information we’ve so far been given, it’s plain that serious incompetence on the part of the federal Secret Service was a factor, and incompetence is the offspring of stupidity.
I await further developments with interest.
07 — Signoff. That’s all, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening, and as always thank you for your emails and donations.
For signout music, I’m going to yield to guilt. My sin here has been a sin of omission, not commission. The thing is: I’ve never signed off with any black African music.
Black American music, sure: I gave you Nat King Cole just a few weeks ago. You’ve also heard Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, James Baskett, Kathleen Battle, … and that’s just the last three and a half years. No white supremacy here, officer!
Actual black African music, though — or even merely black-African-inspired music — has been absent. I have for some time been nursing the whim to include some. It’s just been a whim away; and now, here, I shall at last surrender to my whim.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
This Week’s Show
Contents
- 01m56s Kamala and Tim submit to questioning
- 09m45s Bye-bye, Uniparty
- 17m42s Idealism vs. expediency in voting rules
- 26m29s Rev’m Al reclaims the black vote (he hopes)
- 32m17s Our innumerate Vice President
- 35m22s Billionaires at the Dems’ Convention
- 38m34s The Trump assassination-attempt mystery
- 40m27s Signoff with African music
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