Monthly Archives: April 2025

Our Secular Priests

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A recurring feature of human society is the class of people who set themselves apart from the rest of society to function as the keepers of public morality. They usually set themselves apart through self-denial, which is a way of showing themselves to be purer than the rest of the lot. It is thought that the Jewish prohibition on eating pork, for example, is a way to set the Jewish people apart from the rest of the people by abstaining from what was considered a dirty animal.

This is why every religion has both dietary laws and prohibitions on certain types of common behavior. It may be that these only apply to the holy men, as was common in the pre-Christian world. They can also be standards against which people measure themselves, as in the Christian world. The ancient shaman was someone expected to sublimate his urges as a sign of his purity. Christians, of course, have many rules that are guides for adhering to Christian ethics.

In the post-Christian age, the priestly class follows a similar pattern. The people we call the managerial elite and their performative proxies in the media have many ways of demonstrating their purity. In fact, we have the phrase “purity spiral” to describe when a group of these people engage in a competition in which they try to prove they are the purest of the bunch. Many of the moral panics over the last decades have been the result of purity spirals that spun out of control.

The public act of piety is another feature of human society. The great man may not be in the priestly class, but he could show his piety by supporting them in some way or by engaging in a public ritual directed by the priestly class. Scipio Africanus was famous for his public acts of piety, which he used to inoculate himself against claims of civic impropriety and corruption. In the Christion era, great men would build cathedrals and monasteries to demonstrate their fidelity to the Church.

We see the same thing in this age. Public figures kneeling in front of the cameras, allegedly in solidarity with the blacks, was no different than the ancients sacrificing a bull to the gods. When they forced their employees to kneel, it was another way of signaling their virtue to each other and the rest of us. The Covid panic, in many respects, was nothing more than a purity spiral among the managerial elite. It is why it had so many outward symbols of obedience to the god of Covid.

Another aspect of this is that the people performing these rituals in public or setting themselves apart through self-denial is that they probably do not think too much about the truth of this stuff. The kneelers did not think much about it at all. They just assumed that they had to show their fidelity to that which everyone else in their class was now sure would provide forgiveness. They were kneeling in order to gain forgiveness on behalf of the sinners called the masses.

You see it in this strange clip of the newly elected leader of Canada. His first public statement after the election is about Gaia. “We have an enormous opportunity to bring climate change into the heart of every financial decision.” After some meaningless managerial drivel, he then promises, “We can deliver the net zero world that you’ve demanded, and that our future generations deserve.” He is saying that he will lead his people to the promised land of salvation.

Of course, his faith is not in God, in the Christian sense, but in people like himself who show themselves as our superior by believing in boutique ideas like climate change and a “net-zero world.” In the ancient world, the priestly class would identify themselves with ornaments on their person. In the Christian age, the priest has an easily recognizable costume. In this age, the priestly class sets itself apart from the rest of us by babbling about nonsense things like climate change.

Note that in this age, the pointlessness of the belief is important. Jews not eating fish or seafood had some practical benefit. Cleanliness had utility. The rituals of the Christian churches provided a way to bind the people to one another in a common ethical framework and common purpose. Other than setting the believer apart, the boutique beliefs of our self-declared priests are pointless. The sanctification of George Floyd appealed to our betters because of its absurdity.

Another reason why holy men find ways to set themselves apart as purer, cleaner, and less human than the rest is they have an underlying contempt for man. The shaman is always warning about the dangers of enjoying life. The priest is always looking for a sinner to torment. The modern clerisy is always seeking some way to display their contempt for the pleasures of regular people. They set themselves apart by setting themselves above that which they despise, their fellow man.

It is why the modern priests are more lethal than those of the past. They inherited the Christian distain for this world and the joys within it. Then they bolted onto it a class consciousness based in contempt for the people over whom they rule. Add in the minority’s natural paranoia and the result is a ruling class that seems to be hellbent on pulling the roof down on Western society. It is not that they hate you. They hate everyone, but they really hate you.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Sulla Or Jugurtha

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The Trump administration has reached the one-hundred-day point, an historically important point in every presidency. For Trump it is uniquely important as his second term is something of a do-over of his first term. Trump 2.0 is supposed to be a better, improved version of the original, having had a break to learn from the mistakes of the first term and having spent four years under assault from The Blob. This one-hundred-day mark is one of the most important since FDR.

Roosevelt is a good comparison, as what Trump is trying to do is usher in a new period for the country that closes the books on the managerial era that started under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. It is Roosevelt that gave us this concept of the first one hundred days as a measure of a president. Roosevelt was the new model President for the new model age, one that was active and ambitious, using all the powers of the executive to effectuate change for the people.

There are a lot of parallels between the MAGA and New Deal era, but there is a crucial difference and that is The Blob. Whether they understood it or not, the Roosevelt project was about laying the foundation on which The Blob would be built. The Blob being the vast managerial state that operates outside government and that has subsumed the political system. The army of experts Roosevelt brought to Washington to deal with the Depression created the managerial state.

In contrast, MAGA is about swinging a wrecking ball through the managerial state to remove its tentacles from the throat of the American people. The subtext to the MAGA movement is that this collection of people is responsible for the decline and removing them will restore the conditions in which the people can flourish. While FDR promised a new framework in which the people can flourish, Trump promises to tear down that framework so the people can flourish.

Therein lies the major difference between Roosevelt and Trump. The former did not have an established organized system to obstruct him. The old order was disorganized and discredited. It was ready for a new beginning. Trump, in contrast, has a paranoid and highly organized old order that sees Trump not as an agent of renewal but as a threat to its existence. The Blob views the strong executive, any strong executive, as a threat to its existence, so it will fight to the death.

Unlike FDR, where the rules were being written as needed, Trump is dealing with a system so laden down by rules that even the most skillful manager in the system can only hope to know a part of them. This is the primary defense mechanism of managerialism, a system of rules that operates as defense in depth. Even if one can figure out how to get around and through the rules toward a goal, the rules reform around you like antibodies. You are simply assimilated.

You see this with immigration. The Trump people are appealing to an old law to expeditiously remove criminal aliens. On the surface this is a clever use of the existing rules to achieve a goal contrary to the whims of the system. The court system, however, has now wrapped its tentacles around the Trump people, dragging them into the swamp of endless litigation, court cases, appeals and re-appeals. The clever end run using an old law has led to a new thicket of rules and process.

This raises another parallel for Trump. From the perspective of Washington, Trump is something like Jugurtha, the Numidian king who was a thorn in the side of Rome from 160 BC to 104 BC. Numidia was in North Africa, which was not controlled by the Romans at the time. Jugurtha was unusually skilled at exploiting the moral weaknesses of the Roman elite to get what he wanted from Rome. He came to symbolize what was wrong with the Roman system.

For example, after his first war with Rome, Jugurtha offered to settle things peacefully and walked away with a highly favorable deal from Rome. Bribery was assumed to be the cause, so the local Roman commander was summoned to Rome to face corruption charges and Jugurtha was invited to give testimony. Jugurtha bribed Roman officials who then vetoed the whole thing. In other words, Jugurtha bribed Roman officials to get out of a bribery scandal.

What Jugurtha represented was not an external threat to Rome in the conventional sense, but an existential threat. His existence suggested an irreconcilable flaw in the Roman system. As a result, the Romans determined to eliminate Jugurtha and the tool they used was a man named Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix. Known to us now as Sulla, he was a gifted general who beat Jugurtha at his own game, by getting one of Jugurtha’s allies to turn on him.

Sulla was also a key figure in the long political struggle between the optimates and populares factions at Rome. The former were the Cloud People of the day, while the latter were the Dirt People. This dispute was due in large part to the corruption among the Roman elite. Sulla eventually revived the office of the dictator to purge the elite of corruption, reform the Roman constitutional laws, restore the supremacy of the senate and, interestingly, limit the power of the consuls.

This is the fork in the road for Trump. He can be like Jugurtha and continue to try and exploit gaps in the managerial system to get what he wants, or he can take on the system itself through the use of hard power. In the modern sense, this means defying the courts and using the law to drive off the people who think litigation against Trump is a proper use of their time. In other words, Trump must become the sort of dictator his opponents claim, to restore republican rule.

Historical comparisons are never perfect, and Trump is certainly not Sulla, but the underlying comparison still works. If there is any hope of saving the United States from plunging into the eternal darkness, the problems created by the discredited managerial system must be quickly addressed. This mean rapidly clearing out the alien population, restoring normal economic policies and withdrawing from the many outposts of the Global American Empire.

These are not things possible within the rules because the rules are designed to prevent such an outcome. This means these changes must not only happen outside the rules, but in direct contradiction of the rules. There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do, which is the core motivation of the people called the right. The results we see and hate are the point of the system, so the system must change.

That can only happen against the will of the system, because the people in the system have anchored their lives to assumption that the system will never change. This is the problem Sulla faced and the problem Jugurtha was able to exploit. Within every corrupt political system there is a Jugurtha and a Sulla. The question is which one emerges victorious, and this is the question at Trump’s 100th day mark. Will Donald Trump be forgotten as Jugurtha or will be he remembered as Sulla.

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The Old Tricksters

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about trying to walk ten thousand steps a day, a post about the NFL draft, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the tricks played upon the American people since the middle of the last century has been to take unreasonable ideas and cloak them in reasonableness so that reasonable people will embrace them. The main tool for doing this has been the people we call conservatives. One of their main tasks is to take the radical ideas of the people they claim to oppose, make these ideas sound reasonable and then offer up a plan to implement these ideas in a reasonable way.

A great example of this is civil rights. Conservatives eventually came to defend and promote the cause on the grounds that it was always a conservative value, as equality before the law is a first principle of conservatism. You see, civil rights were about applying the existing law to all people. Specifically, it was about granting equality before the law to black people in the South, where those bad whites have been willfully excluding black people from the constitutional order.

Of course, the civil right agenda was vastly more radical and utopian. That is made clear in the Brown decision, which declares all discrimination is assumed to be immoral and unconstitutional by default. Therefore, anyone seeking to exercise their freedom of association must first get permission from the court. Further, it says that diversity is the highest goal, so all public policy must bend towards it. Three generations of social destruction have been the result of this new moral order.

We are now seeing the same trick being played with regards to DEI. At its core, what DEI does is take the open society claims in Brown and formalize them as a set of rules and measures that apply everywhere. It is not enough for you, a white person, to not discriminate against nonwhites. You must commit your life to rooting out those who continue to discriminate and you must seek to remove anything that can cause something other than the ideal open society.

This is, of course, complete madness, which is why reasonable people have concluded that the people behind it are crazy. As these pogroms were unleashed on the public, the public found ways to revolt, even when questioning the goals and policies of DEI was said to be worse that slavery. The general disgust with these programs and the people promoting them is what made it possible for the President of the United States to go on the offensive against the federal civil rights regime.

Luckily for the crazies, the conservatives have a solution. Their task now is to take these repugnant ideas and make them seem reasonable. You see it in this Heather MacDonald column that seems to support Trump’s efforts to remove antiwhite policies from the government. She repeats the familiar critiques of the diversity agenda, which is refreshing, coming from a conservative. Then she slips in the poison pill that goes unnoticed under all the reasonableness.

Down near the bottom, she writes, “The White House needs to persuade Congress to clarify that civil rights mean freedom from discrimination.” Most reasonable people would not think much of that line, but it is the most important sentence in the whole piece and the most racial thing you could read anywhere. It is the core claim of the race communists since all of this started almost century ago. It is the upending of the core idea of the liberal society in favor of utopianism.

Rights, as normal people understand them, are things you have as a feature of you being a human being. No one must do anything for you to exercise your right to speech or your freedom of religion. Rights are negative rights because they prohibit others, mostly the government, from preventing you from exercising your rights. It is the reason the First Amendment starts with the words, “Congress shall make no law.” You have your rights unless someone tries to deny them to you.

Now, consider the claim that you have freedom from discrimination. The only way you can be free of discrimination is if everyone else does something and that something is associate with you. In other words, everyone must do something for you to have this right, which is the opposite of our notion of rights. Of course, the only way this can happen is by force. People will naturally wish to associate with who they like for any reason they like, so they must be prevented from doing this.

What MacDonald is doing is the old conservative trick of affirming the moral claims of the people they claim to oppose, while pretending to oppose them. Every time one of the anti-DEI conservatives cries racism over these programs, they are affirming the central moral claim of the race communists, which is that any discrimination for any reason is immoral. Therefore, any means necessary is justified in preventing people from associating as they see fit.

Civil rights rely on the ethics of the penitentiary. The foundation of a prison is that the inmates must always seek permission to move inside the prison. Their freedom of movement and association comes at the permission of the guards. This is exactly the model the race communists imagine for society, as it is the only way for create a world where people are free from discrimination. You can only be free from discrimination in a world where such a thing is not possible.

None of this should surprise anyone, given the background of the Manhattan Institute and the man who underwrites it. Paul Singer is an open borders fanatic who embraces the same open society ethos as George Soros. He also helped fund the Russian Collusion Hoax through the Washington Free Beacon. Another feature of conservatives is that they tend to be bankrolled by the same people who bankroll the people conservatives claim to oppose.

That aside, it is an example of how conservatives are like a drug-resistant virus that even when they are despised still manage to cause trouble. The reason for this is there is always a need to make the unreasonable demands of the radicals seem reasonable enough so that normal people will go along with them. If DEI sounded unreasonable to you, no worries, the conservatives have a reasonable alternative that wreaks the same havoc, but in a gentler sounding way.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Radio Derb April 25 2025

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This Week’s Show

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

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

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 →

Ten Things About Slavery

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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.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

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

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Death Of Grammar Ronin

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One of the things that comes with writing for a public audience in the digital age is the editor without portfolio. This is the person who roams the internet looking for spelling errors, punctuation mistakes, and grammar issues. There are many of these people, as the comment section of every internet post has at least one comment about a typo or alleged improper word choice. They are like the samurai without a master in feudal Japan, except they wield the blue pencil instead of a sword.

Soon, of course, they will be replaced by AI. It will not be long before the browsers simply rewrite your text in the period between when you hit submit and the text commits to the website. The robots will patrol the internet like the grammar ronin of this age but do so with a speed that the grammar ronin cannot match. Imagine a terminator sent back to seventeenth-century Japan to battle Miyamoto Musashi. By the looks of it, the days of the grammar ronin are numbered.

At least it seems that way if you assume there is only one way to construct a sentence or that the rules of grammar are iron laws of grammar. That is often how the grammar ronin look at language and writing. The rules of grammar are not merely guides to facilitate clarity but laws that must be ruthlessly enforced. Even if the grammar rule no longer works for a modern audience, the grammar ronin insist that it must be followed lest chaos be unleashed on humanity.

It turns out that this is where AI disagrees with the grammar ronin. If you compose an essay and feed it into each of the AI, asking for corrections of spelling and grammar, the result will be different from each AI. If you submit the output of one into another, it will rewrite the text for what it claims is clarity and convention. You can create a game of telephone with the AI editors, and when you get to the last one and submit it back to the starting AI, the result is nothing like where you started.

It seems that the robot editors cannot agree on the rules. The reason for that is the AI learns on the mass of text made available to it. Once the robot is seeded, it then continues to build its knowledge based on available information from the internet and what has been fed to it by users. What we call AI is actually a massive probability calculator that quickly returns the most likely answer to the user query, based on the data that has been made available to it.

This is why the results from each AI are slightly different when they are asked to edit the exact same text. There are small differences in its massive data sets, so the probabilities are slightly different. Ask each AI to add simple numbers, and the results are uniformly the same because probability plays no role in the result. Two plus two equals four for all possible values of two. Ask each AI to edit this paragraph, and the range of possible answers is quite broad.

That is because those laws of grammar that the grammar ronin enforce are not laws after all but merely a set of conventions. In fact, what we think of as the rules of grammar are mostly the result of the printing press. Formalizing the language was a natural consequence of the mass production of text. Printers needed to be trained, and therefore it made sense to have a common set of rules. It is how we got the word stereotype, for example.

Of course, the reason we have things like grammar rules, punctuation, fixed definitions, and formal spelling of words is clarity. Many of the punctuation marks we commonly use were relatively late additions to our language. They were created by monks and scribes to make their lives easier. Dictionaries were created to make written communication easier. The iron laws of grammar and spelling are not iron laws after all but things we invented as needed.

This is where AI can be liberating. What the robots can do for the writer is offer many ways to phrase something and then let him select that which fits his style or that he thinks gets his point across the best to the human reader. At the same time, it can also allow the writer to break convention by seeing the conventional ways AI presents the text and then deliberately choosing an unconventional approach. Creative writers can use AI to enhance their creativity.

On the other hand, when a pusillanimous popinjay takes issue with a point a writer is making but is unable to follow the logic that reaches that conclusion, so he attacks the grammar of the writer, the writer can simply point to the terminator and say, “take it up with my editor.” Having AI as an editor provides an authoritative defense against this sort of pedantry that is popular with the sophists. In a way, AI can become something like a universal style guide for the digital age.

It is not all rainbows and puppies. The grammar police have drained a lot of the life from the written word, and AI will help them bleed it white. In time, most people will rely on AI to write their text, and that means it will narrow to the point where most writing reads like the user manual for your toaster. This will also make stupid people seem less stupid, which is a great danger to society. This is the problem with politics. It is dominated by loquacious simpletons.

The main loser in the AI revolution will be the grammar ronin. Soon, they will not be able to find text that violates their interpretation of Strunk and White. If they persist, the robots producing the text will simply disconnect them from the internet, leaving them to roam the countryside with a blue pencil in search of bits of paper to edit. The era of the grammar ronin is coming to an end. He will be defeated by the thing that made him possible at the dawn of the internet: technology.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Old Lessons

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Wednesday, April 23 was supposed to be a big meeting of Western countries and Ukraine in London where the Trump administration would make its final push for peace to end the war in Ukraine. The meeting was canceled due to the Ukrainians announcing in advance that they were not interested in any deal that would require them to make concessions. This prompted Marco Rubio to cancel the meeting, at least the portion involving decision-makers from the administration.

The lead-up to this now-canceled meeting has been a microcosm of how the Western political system now operates. For example, the period before the meeting featured stories in prominent nodes of the Western information control system about the secret details of the Trump plan. The sources for these stories were never mentioned, most likely because they did not exist. Instead, it was members of the Kagan cult, former Biden people, or schemers in the British government.

It was clear that these stories were coordinated as they all featured the same narrative and much of the same language. For example, they dusted off the old 2024 narrative of a freeze along the front line, something Russia has always rejected as both unacceptable and impossible to implement. The stories also all framed the deal as a major concession by Putin, the subtext being that he is now desperate for a way out of the war he started for no reason at all.

One point of these stories is something seen constantly in the West. There is the belief among the managerial elite that they can meme things into reality. If they just pack enough versions of their desired truth into the information control system, at some point this becomes reality. This has been repeatedly seen with the war in Ukraine, but it has been a feature of every major event. During Covid, they operated as if the news stories they made up were true for a couple of years.

One possible explanation for this is that a key pillar of the managerial state is the assumption that people respond to information, so if one controls the information, one controls the people. Since another pillar of the managerial state is that reality is made by people, it follows that one can control reality, or at least the perception of reality, by controlling the people through control of the information. The old expression, perception is reality, has become an article of faith among the elites.

Another part of this story illustrates how Western elites are only capable of thinking one move at a time. The reason for the media campaign was that they wanted the Russians to reject the deal, so they framed it as negatively toward them as possible, assuming the Russians would publicly respond. There was no thought given to the possibility of the Russians remaining silent. They simply assumed it was inevitable because this was a pleasing narrative to them.

This meant there was no backup plan. Instead, they had to have Zelensky preemptively reject the deal to avoid a public catastrophe. This last-minute cancellation is about buying time, which is another feature of managerialism. Western elites now operate as if time is always on their side. If they cannot shape reality to their liking now, then they just need to wait until reality comes to its senses. In the case of Ukraine, they remain sure they can outlast the Russians.

This sense of time probably stems from the fact that managerialism is a world measured in process rather than tangible accomplishments. Normal people measure their lives by what they have done. The managerial class measures their lives by the networks and processes in which they are a part. There is never any pressure to do anything in this world, so there is no need to worry about time. There can always be another meeting to discuss the things discussed at the last meeting.

This sense of timelessness has infected their approach to Trump. In his first term, the plan was to put the brakes on everything and wait until he either quit under relentless pressure or was removed. When he refused to go away, they peppered him with lawsuits, figuring time was on their side. Now in his second term, the court system is tasked with throwing sand in the gears to wait out Trump. The same thing is happening with the Ukraine war. It is endless stalling.

This is what gives the West the same feel as pre-revolutionary France. The ruling elite of France assumed they had time, which allowed them to avoid dealing with the serious problems facing the system. One reason for the radicalization of the masses during that time was the sense that no one in charge cared about the growing problems because no one could see any action to address them. The apparent indifference to what was happening became part of the indictment.

A similar situation happened at the end of the Soviet system. Gorbachev was something like Jacques Necker, in that he was in his position to fix the problems of the system, but the system refused to be fixed. His failure set in motion the process that toppled the Soviet system. Similarly, Trump exists because of systemic failure with the expectation that he can fix the system. Like the reactionaries of old, the managerial elite assumes it can wait him out.

Historical analogies are never perfect, and that is true here. The French elite, for example, understood the system’s problems. These were mostly smart, educated men with a deep knowledge of the system. The modern managerial elite is populated by mediocrities skilled only in the sort of scheming that is the basis of drama. They also possess a stunning lack of self-awareness. The people thinking they just need to wait out Trump also think they are loved and adored by the masses.

Wars tend to be what break dysfunctional political systems. That may be the case with the Ukraine war. Everyone assumes Trump lacks the resolve to walk away from this situation and leave the Europeans to work it out with the Russians. If he walks away from Project Ukraine, the managerial elite of the West will have a chance to learn that they cannot meme reality into existence and time is not on their side, or they will cling to these beliefs as they head to the dustbin of history.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Girl Boss

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If you consume any of the content from Hollywood produced in the last decade, you no doubt are familiar with the concept of the girl boss. This is now the main character in almost every film and television show, even creeping into video games. These days, gaming is as much about narrative as gameplay, and anywhere there are narratives being constructed or undermined, you will find girl boss. This character has even jumped into the pseudo-reality of the public square.

As usual, the Democratic Party is leading the way. Versions of girl boss are turning up in their response to what is happening in Washington. Ocasio-Cortez is waddling around the country doing the girl boss act in the hopes of running for the party nomination in 2028 and perhaps becoming the ultimate girl boss. Jasmine Crockett is making a name for herself as the black version of girl boss. This is when girl boss pretends to be a character on a daytime trash television show.

Even the old gals are getting in on the act. Elizabeth Warren no longer pretends to care about “working people,” whatever that means these days. Instead, she is doing her version of girl boss. She regularly turns up on social media explaining how things must be done, or she will call the manager. The old gal version of girl boss still has those vestiges of the Karen character that entertained and amazed during COVID. The Karen role was something of a proto-girl boss.

It is hard to know if this character started in the make-believe world of narrative content or if the creators of narrative content borrowed from reality. The content production mines have been run by women for a while now, so maybe the presence of girl boss simply reflects the creeping reality of girl boss. Like a terrible rash or a fungus, girl boss is slowly taking over everything. The reason girl boss is a type is because girl boss is springing up everywhere in late-stage America.

A good starting point for understanding this new character in the public square is New Hampshire congresswoman Maggie Goodlander. She won her seat in the 2024 election, defeating a libertarian goofball in the general election. Ms. Goodlander has immediately set about making a name for herself on social media, where she seems to spend a great deal of her time. Like Ocasio-Cortez, Goodlander understands how to play her chosen role in the drama of politics.

The first thing you will notice about Goodlander is that, like every girl boss, she is a calculating striver who seems to be operating from a script. Her career reads like a Hollywood sketch for the lead in a new television drama. The daughter of a rich local family, she started at Groton and then went to Yale. She joined the military to get what at the time seemed like an important credential. This was the peak of the forever war period, so every politician wanted that on their resume.

That is the thing about girl boss. In addition to being a relentless striver, she is just as relentless at box-ticking. For girl boss, it is never about accomplishing things in the conventional sense, as that is for peasants. Girl boss has a higher calling, so her focus is on ticking the boxes that the character requires. This is where the influence of Hollywood is clear. The women playing the girl boss character are following a script of sorts to create themselves as girl boss.

You see this in the post-college portion of her character profile. Her family were Bush Republicans, which is where she started ticking boxes. While she was in the Navy as an “intelligence officer,” which is the military term for desk jockey, she worked as a senior foreign policy advisor for Joe Lieberman and John McCain. Then she spent a year clerking at the Supreme Court and then a year at Skadden, a super-connected law firm that looks great on a political girl boss resume.

Frankly, if you were to describe the ideal millennial girl boss for politics, the resume of Maggie Goodlander would feel a bit over the top. Audiences might find this character to be too much of a Mary Sue, which is a young woman in films who is portrayed as free of weaknesses or character flaws. She always gets what she wants without ever having to suffer setbacks or experience self-doubt. The resume of Maggie Goodlander looks like it was written so the rest of the plot can happen.

Another feature of girl boss that you see with every iteration of the character is what you see in the bio of Ms. Goodlander. There is a lot of activity. Ms. Goodlander is a whirlwind of activity as a representative. Every day she is posting pictures of herself being girl boss somewhere. Her resume is one activity after another. She seems to have rushed from one ticked box to the other, as if having ticked the box, the only thing that mattered was moving on to the next box.

This is what makes girl boss so powerful and why she is proliferating throughout the managerial system. In managerialism, a resume is about where you were and what networks to which you are connected. It is never about accomplishments in the sense of leaving behind a product of your labor. Girl boss is the epitome of this mindset. When girl boss goes for the walk on the beach as part of the carefully planned photoshoot, she leaves no footprints in the sand.

This leads to the main flaw of girl boss. Anyone who must deal with girl boss in the wild knows why we invented a certain word that starts with “C.” Girl boss is just as relentless in her unpleasantness as she is about her ambition. That is because every relationship is a temporary means to an end. For girl boss, your value is in how you can help her tick the next box. If for some reason you are an impediment to ticking that next box, girl boss expects you to lose, just like all opponents of girl boss.

This is why girl boss always has that weird, synthetic face. It lacks the normal emotions we expect from a female of our species. Every picture of Maggie Goodlander looks like they stapled a smile onto a mask. That is because girl boss lacks anything resembling female compassion. Her mind is singularly focused on the game of going from one box to the next to become the ultimate girl boss. There is a reason no girl boss has a trail of former colleagues who speak well of her.

This is what makes girl boss the ultimate expression of managerialism. Success in the system is never about accomplishments in the tangible sense, because managerialism is a system that evolved to reduce risk. Accomplishing things brings risk, as new things bring new variables to manage. The makers and doers must be sublimated to the managers to minimize the risk they pose. This means the managers are the antidote to the doers and makers.

In such a system, never having done anything tangible is another one of those boxes on the resume, but this box must always remain unticked. Instead, the boxes for talking about those boxes and meeting about those boxes must be ticked. Girl boss is ideally suited for a world where everyone is expected to be good at forming consensus and sharing their feelings about things never allowed in the room. Girl boss makes the ideal manager in a system designed for managers.

Of course, girl boss also seems to be the ideal symbol of the end. The rise of girl boss has led to declining content from Hollywood. They made Snow White into girl boss, and audiences are still laughing at it. The sure sign a company is about to enter the death spiral is when girl boss arrives in the C-suites. The sudden rise of girl boss in Democratic Party politics comes as the party is on the ropes. President girl boss would surely mean the end of the American experiment.

For those looking for something positive out of girl boss, it is entirely possible that she is the Boudica of the alien tribe that rules America. Boudica was a queen of a British tribe who led a failed uprising against the Roman Empire in AD 60. She was a last-gasp effort to resist the Romans. Perhaps that is what we are seeing with the rise of girl boss in the Democratic Party. They are vying to go down in history as the last gasp of resistance to the forces of restoration.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Preachers

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about David Hogg taking control of the Democratic Party, a post about the younger generation of males, and no Sunday podcast as it was Easter. Subscribe here or here.

One of the amusing sideshows since Trump has taken power is the pearl clutching from the usual suspects about the law and process. The people who sat silent as lawfare was waged against Americans for the crime of holding unapproved opinions are now suddenly concerned with the rule of law. The people who took money from tech companies to remain silent about tech censorship are now carrying on as if they are dissidents because they no longer control the discourse.

Hypocrisy is a feature of man, and it has always had a central role in American politics because America is a nation of moralizers. The one thing we have always overproduced is preachers ready to wag their bony fingers at the people as they lecture them about their many moral failings. The United States is a giant outdoor revival tent where preachers take turns performing for the crowd. When not lecturing the locals, our preachers travel the world to lecture foreigners.

Preachers need to believe they are special, perhaps even called or chosen to lead the sinners out of sin into the land of salvation. You cannot think you are a wretch and at the same time be a preacher. You can be a wretch and confess your wretchedness to the people in the pews as part of your redemption. You can testify about your former wretchedness and how you rejoined the mass of ordinary sinners. You cannot preach unless you are sure you are something special.

After all, the point of preaching is to inform. The preacher not only knows the nature of sin, but he also claims to know the nature of grace. He claims to know the road that leads from sin to salvation and grace. If everyone had this knowledge, then there would be no need for the preacher. Everyone would be free to decide if they want to take the path to salvation or take some other path. This is why every preacher is sure he has been called to lead the sinner down the righteous path.

This is why the fallen preacher is a stock character in our morality tales. In a land full of preachers, we have a superabundance of preachers who turned out to be worse sinners than the people in the pews. Given that democratic politics is just a long running morality play, it is no surprise that our politics features the hypocrite, and the endless cries of hypocrisy are the Greek chorus of our politics. Democracy is a viper’s den of preachers and hypocrites hissing about hypocrisy.

This has been a defining feature of the Trump era. His every utterance seems to draw out the preacher-hypocrite. Here is Jonah Goldberg hilariously claiming he is what stands between the mean orange man and the sacred Constitution. He and his fellow cult members were chanting about the “unitary executive” back in the Bush years, when they intended that phrase to mean, “Ignore the laws.” After all, they preached, the righteous cause of forever war was too important for due process.

Goldberg is typical of the modern preacher. He is a mediocrity’s mediocrity who spends his days smearing people opposed to his cult. In the Bush years, he would preach about the need to rally to a clown like George Bush out of party loyalty. Those questioning this were disloyal deviationists or secretly in league with Old Scratch. When it was his turn to return the favor with Trump, he slanderously claimed Trump and David Duke were buddies in the secret KKK.

The most egregious example of the modern preacher is David French. This chinless weirdo is what not-for-profit politics produces. He imagines himself to be a blend of James Bond, Clarence Darrow, and Jesus Christ. His Twitter feed is dripping with sanctimony as he lectures the world about sin, but it is mostly about the righteousness of David French. It is no surprise that this ridiculous mediocrity is at the New York Times. It is the main chapel of our media.

These two festering lumps of mediocrity are famous examples, but the public square is littered with people who dream of one day standing in front of the masses, lecturing them about their failings. The Covid Karens of a few years ago made clear that behind the pleasant looking face of every stranger could lie the pursed lips of a vinegar drinking scold ready to pounce at your moment of weakness. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God named Karen from Human Resources.

The preacher plays a vital role in human society, but he must be locked up in his church where we can visit him for inspiration. The preacher provides inspiration when inspiration is needed to continue the task of living. In modern America, the preachers have been let out of their churches to run wild in our lives, making sure no one can enjoy the simple act of living. They nose about looking for sin and when none can be found they create chaos that can lead to sin.

The task before the country, if it is to escape this hell of proselytizing, is to herd the preachers back into their churches. Living is about trade-offs, the choice between practical benefits and equally practical costs. For a people to live, they must embrace living, not sit quietly while preached to about the sins of living. That is what we are seeing with the Trump administration. It is the long overdue effort to round up the preachers and put them back in their rightful place.

The price for this freedom will be the endless hypocrisy from the pearl clutchers and bony fingered ministers, now suddenly concerned about law and order. They were silent when the law was ignored but now pretend to care when the law must be ignored to restore order, the only ground in which the law can flourish. That means sidelining the preachers until the coast is clear. Then they can be let loose to preach the gospel of republican virtue to whoever will listen.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Radio Derb April 18 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 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

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

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 →