This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m44s Haiti comes to Ohio
• 10m22s Population doubles, employers leave
• 18m04s Towards the immigration singularity
• 24m39s The Trump-Harris debate
• 35m47s Signoff

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your superabundantly genial host John Derbyshire, currently convalescent after watching the Trump-Harris debate Tuesday evening.

I shall of course have things to say about the debate later in the podcast. Recording these words at midday on Friday, however, Tuesday’s debate is already old news. I shall offer my opinion, but I don’t have anything original to add to what has already been said. That’s the disadvantage of a weekly podcast.

Before I get moving in earnest, permit me my weekly reminder that the VDARE Foundation is still accepting tax-deductible donations by check earmarked to yours truly and sent by snail mail to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

That’s the intro. And now … [Clip:  Ethel Merman, “Let’s go on with the show.”]

02 — Haiti comes to Ohio.     The Caribbean nation of Haiti has figured prominently in this week’s immigration news. The main focus has been on the town of Springfield, Ohio, a small place 45 miles west of Columbus.

Four years ago Springfield’s population was 40,000. Today it’s nudging 60,000 — a fifty percent increase. Well-nigh all those 20,000 are from Haiti, the poorest and most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere with, since the assassination of the President three years ago, essentially no functioning government or law enforcement.

The Biden-Harris administration has shown special favor to Haitians. Back in early June they gave Temporary Protected Status, TPS, to any Haitian then present in our country, including those present illegally. TPS gives them permission to remain and work here.

Strictly speaking that permission is only valid until February 2026; but any attempt to deport the Haitians after that would of course encounter a massive barrage of litigation from NGOs and human-rights groups. The word “Temporary” in “Temporary Protected Status” is a bare-faced lie, and has been for many years.

Even before that granting of TPS Haitians were pouring in by applying for asylum on their cell phones using an app the Biden administration supplies for that purpose.

And in addition to that, the feds have been allowing up to 30,000 settlers per month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly directly into the U.S. for two years if they have financial sponsors. That “two years” limit is, you may be sure, just as bogus as the “Temporary” in “Temporary Protected Status.” Immigration jargon is a banquet of bogosity.

For Springfield, having their town’s population increase fifty percent in four years, with almost all the increase coming from such a poor, backward, violent place, has meant a lot of strain on property and services.

The schools and the healthcare and welfare systems have been badly affected. So has housing. Flush with generous handouts from the federal government — which is to say, from your taxes and mine — the Haitians are paying as much as $3,000 a month in rent, more than many citizens can afford.

There’s even more of a strain on Springfield’s social cohesion. The roads are now very unsafe, with Haitians driving automobiles for the first time, often unlicensed. One such, name of Hermanio Joseph, crashed his minivan into a school bus last August, killing an 11-year-old boy and sending more than 20 other children to the hospital.

Another Haitian settler, Robensen Louis, drove into 71-year-old Springfield grandma Kathy Heaton last December while she was taking in her garbage bins, hitting her with enough force to throw her body right across the street. The authorities won’t prosecute Robensen Louis, even though was driving with expired license plates.

No-one seems to know why Louis hasn’t been prosecuted. Reading these stories, my first guess was because Kathy Heaton was white. However, the eleven-year-old boy killed in August was white, too, yet the driver in that case has been prosecuted, so it’s a mystery.

Here was another senior Springfield lady who we know only as Noelle, addressing the City Commission August 27th.

[Clip:  I live at 426 Northwestern Avenue. Miss Skinner, who I’m not trying to put on the spot, is my neighbor.

(Chair:  Just talk to me, Ma’am. Thank you so much.)

And I’m done with what I’m seeing. It is so unsafe in my neighborhood any more. I have the homeless that were trying to camp out and I have … I have made concessions with them and I try to help them the best I can to keep them from trying to squat on my property. But it is so unsafe.

I have near me that cannot speak English, in my front yard screaming at me — throwing mattresses in my front yard, throwing trash in my front yard. And I can’t … Look at me. I weigh 95 pounds. I couldn’t defend myself if I had to.

My husband is elderly and last night after living in this home for forty-five years he said: “Noelle, guess what? It’s time to pack up and move.” He said: “We can’t do this any more.” He said: “It’s killing both of us mentally.”

I don’t understand what you expect of us as citizens. I mean, I … I understand that they’re here on a Temporary Protected Status and you’re protecting them, and I understand that. Our city services are overwhelmed and understaffed.

But who’s protecting us? If we’re protecting them, who’s protecting me?

I want out of this town, I am sorry. Please give me a reason to stay. Thank you.

(Chair:  Thank you.)]

A different resident, name of Anthony Harris, told that same meeting that Haitians are grabbing ducks from the park, killing, and eating them.

And of course it may not have been just ducks. You have surely heard the stories from social media about domestic pets, particularly cats, being killed for food by the settlers.

It’s not clear — well, not to me — how much evidence there is for these stories about pets. Apparently there really was a lady arrested last month in Ohio for killing a neighbor’s cat and eating it. However, that was in Canton, a hundred miles from Springfield; and the suspect, although black, is not a Haitian settler.

I guess it’s possible that some Springfield residents, on hearing that story, let loose their imaginations on the town’s Haitians. However, given what we know about conditions and customs in Haiti, it’s also entirely possible — very possible — the stories are true.

Whether they are or not, people have been having great fun with these stories online. A favorite of mine was the Babylon Bee, September 9th, running the headline, quote: “Ohio Chinese Buffet Forced To Close After Haitians Decimate Food Supply,” end quote.

03 — Population doubles, employers leave.     At week’s end we are learning that Springfield is not unique in having a problem with Haitians. The Daily Wire ran a report on Thursday about Charleroi, PA, just south of Pittsburgh. They say, quote:

Charleroi, a small town in Pennsylvania, has seen a 2,000 percent increase in its immigration population in the past two years, with the majority coming from Haiti. The small town had a population of about 4,200 in 2022.

End quote.

I’m not sure what to make of that. A 100 percent increase means that your number is now twice as big as before; a 200 percent increase means that your number is now three times as big as before, so an N hundred percent increase means that your number is now N+1 times as big as before.

Two thousand is twenty hundreds, so they are saying that Charleroi’s settler population is now twenty-one times as big as it was two years ago. If there was just one Haitian settler in Charleroi two years ago, today there are twenty-one. If there were a hundred, today there are twenty-one hundred. We don’t know which, they don’t give us proper numbers.

Trying to get a handle on the numbers here, I turned up a Charleroi church website that tells me, quote: “an estimated 2,000 Haitians have found a new home,” end quote.

If that’s twenty-one times what it was two years ago, then the immigrant population was 95 back then.

If, on the other hand, as I think more likely, I’m dealing here with writers who don’t know the difference between one Haitian and one percent, I resign in frustration. Is it too much to ask that paid journalists understand third-grade arithmetic?

To further confuse the numerical issue, here is Charleroi Council President Kristin Hopkins-Calcek talking to The Daily Wire. The actual topic here is a whopping great increase in the police budget that the Council’s had to push through. Quote from her:

We want to keep the public safe. We are having issues we have never had before. Our population has doubled and we have our police enforcing everything that citizens have demanded over time that they enforce.

End quote.

“Our population has doubled.” My 2018 Rand McNally Atlas gives the population of Charleroi six years ago as 4,120. If it’s doubled since then, it must now be more than eight thousand; and a good part of that additional four thousand — likely all of it — is Haitian settlers.

Wait, what’s this? Mon Valley Independent, September 5th. The Mon Valley, I should explain, is the region south of Pittsburgh watered by the Monongahela River. Charleroi is in that region. The Mon Valley Independent is a newspaper serving the region.

OK, here’s the news report from them, quote:

Charleroi glass factory to close

About 300 jobs at Corelle Brands will be affected

By TAYLOR BROWN, Senior Reporter

A glass factory that has been part of the fabric of the Mon Valley — and the Magic City — for nearly a century is expected to close by the end of the year.

It’s a devastating blow to the hundreds of employees who work at the Corelle Brands facility and for the economy in the Mon Valley that has struggled to recover for years since the closure of the steel mills in the 1980s.

Charleroi officials said Wednesday was a sad day for the borough when Anchor Hocking — the current maker of Corelle, Pyrex and CorningWare — announced the impending closure of its Charleroi plant.

End quote.

So here are a couple of small, quiet, working-class American towns: Springfield, Ohio and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. Springfield seems to be doing OK economically, but Charleroi is losing a major employer. It’s not likely, not at all likely, that either will be improved by mass settlement of people from one of the world’s most dysfunctional nations.

Mass settlement is what they’re going to get, though, courtesy of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Alejandro Mayorkas, and the NGOs and churchy-sounding resettlement agencies that live high on funds from federal taxpayers.

“Public affairs vex no man” said my literary hero Samuel Johnson. I’ll admit they don’t usually vex me much — not as much as a neighbor’s dog getting into my yard.

However, when I’m reading these stories about small, quiet American towns that are homes to non-elite working or retired American people being destroyed by mass settlement of unassimilable aliens, and then I see the smug, smirking faces of the clowns and crooks who manage our public affairs, I do feel vexation rising.

I wish no-one harm. If, however, I were to find myself in a room with Alejandro Mayorkas and some large, heavy, sharp-cornered, throwable object, I don’t think I’d be able to restrain myself.

04 — Towards the immigration singularity.     The late great British Conservative Party Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was fond of the word “ratchet,” possibly because it is a near-anagram of her name. She spoke of British politics suffering from a “ratchet effect.”

When Progressives hold power, she would say, they can turn the wheel clockwise to a new position. The ratchet is no hindrance to them because it is shaped to permit turning in that direction, clockwise.

When conservatives are in power, though, and want to turn the wheel counter-clockwise to a better state of affairs that prevailed before Progressives fouled thing up, the ratchet won’t let them. The best they can do is, to not turn the wheel any further clockwise — to just leave it where the Progressives put it.

In fact — and I don’t actually recall Mrs Thatcher saying this, although it surely occurred to her — in fact the ratchet effect is worse than that. OK, so the wheel can’t be turned counter-clockwise. Politicians like to look busy, though. They don’t want their opponents to say they are sitting around idle doing nothing. The temptation therefore is to give the wheel a clockwise nudge.

Sure, that advances the Progressive program and annoys conservative voters, but at least you look busy. Perhaps this explains marginal phenomena like the later Conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron pushing same-sex marriage through Parliament.

These reflections came to mind on Tuesday when I was reading Noah Carl’s opinion column on immigration in the online magazine Aporia. Titled Winning the argument on immigration, it’s a really good, forceful piece.

I’ve been an immigration buff for ages, and have the bookpile to prove it, so an opinion column on the subject has to be better than the average to snag my attention. This one did.

To win the battle for demographic stability, argues Carl, winning elections is not enough — nothing like enough. OK, you won the election; but one day, probably four or eight years later, you will lose power and the other party will be at the wheel — turning it clockwise. Quote from him:

The ratchet effect of electoral politics, whereby “your guys” put the brakes on demographic change and then “the other guys” slam the accelerator, is particularly intractable for two reasons.

End quote.

Carl spells out the two reasons. Much abbreviated they are: (1) immigrants vote Progressive more than natives do, and (2) immigrants support immigration more than natives do.

A little further on he coins another phrase I intend to plagiarize when no-one’s looking: an “immigration singularity.” Quoting Carl again:

This is the point where the process [he means the process of bringing in ever more foreigners and giving them the vote] becomes self-sustaining because immigrants tend to support pro-migration parties, and once they reach a critical mass in the population, restrictionists can no longer win elections.

End quote.

Is there any solution to this — any way to avert that “immigration singularity”? The only hope, writes Carl, is to win over elites, or at least enough of them. Edited quote:

You need to win over enough judges, journalists, policy wonks, high-level bureaucrats, and indeed, politicians. There must be a general consensus on the issue … Supporting mass immigration should be seen as quirky and eccentric — like being an anarchist or an Austrian-school libertarian.

End quote.

Carl doesn’t underestimate the difficulty of up-ending the elite narrative like that. He offers some leverage points, though. High-skilled immigration, for example, just strip-mines developing nations of their best and brightest. How does that square with left-liberal affinity for the care/harm axis of Moral Foundations Theory? Isn’t it obviously harmful?

Carl’s bottom line, quote:

Getting into power isn’t enough: winning the argument is necessary.

End quote.

Well, he’s proved that to my satisfaction. Getting into power surely makes winning the argument easier, though.

05 — Trump-Harris debate.     OK, the Tuesday night Presidential debate, Trump v. Harris.

I steeled myself to my duty and watched the whole thing. When I rose from my armchair at last I was … well, no, not vexed, but … depressed. I’m a Trump voter and Trump plainly lost that debate.

There are at least three public Trumps. There’s the smart, wry, sarcastic Trump we saw in his debate with Joe Biden on June 27th. Then there’s the tribune of the common man, the blood-streaked guy we saw raising his fist in defiance on July 13th. And then there’s the narcissistic blowhard we got on Tuesday.

Harris performed well. We’d been snarking for weeks about how she’d been closeted away with experts on debate prep, being coached by them. I don’t know how much the DNC paid those experts, but they sure got their money’s worth. Harris was, if you’ll pardon an expression I heard down in Texas once, slicker than snot on a doorknob. I think Trump sprang every trap she set.

She, and the so-called moderators. Yes, it was three against one. Still, an experienced politician prepped up to the eyeballs is one thing; a couple of midwit college Media Studies majors should have been easy meat for Trump. Yet they tripped and tangled him as thoroughly as Harris did.

The information content of the show was close to zero. What should we expect from a second Trump administration? What should we expect from a Harris administration? Content-wise, nobody watching the debate came away any wiser.

But that’s not what the debate was for, not what it was about. It wasn’t about content, it was about form.

Where form was concerned, we did learn something. We learned that with sufficient coaching, a cackling ignoramus with a race card and with media assistants on hand to help her, can present as mentally agile. And we learned that a smart, wry, sarcastic tribune of the people can, with no coaching at all, present as a blustering doofus.

Yes, I’m still going to vote for the guy. As frustrating and disappointing as another Trump Presidency is likely to be, it will do far less damage to our country, and do a far better job keeping us out of other people’s wars, than a Harris Presidency. As dire as Trump’s Tuesday night performance was, I’ll still be voting for him.

I’m encouraged to find myself with plenty of company there. The pollsters seem to agree that the debate did very little to change minds.

We Trumpsters know our man. We sigh, shrug, and put up with him. Progressives remain convinced, no more or less than before, that Trump is the reincarnation of some Austrian painter while Harris is an apostle of joy and social justice.

All that said, I’m going to confess to some post-debate uneasiness, something I didn’t think about until Tuesday. To put it as briefly as I can: Trump is old.

The uneasiness arises from the fact that he is one year younger than me, plus a few days. If he’s old, I’m older. If Trump’s age is a negative, mine is something negativer.

Yeah, yeah, I know: people age at different rates. We can be senile at sixty; or we can be writing books at age 99, like Henry Kissinger. Generalizing in this zone isn’t very fruitful.

Yet still I know that aside from the quantifiables of intelligence, alertness, and memory, there are matters of attitude. I don’t look on the world, on life, on other people, or — apologies to Dr Johnson — on public affairs as I did at seventy or sixty or fifty. My annual checkups with our family doctor show, year by year, ever higher levels of the hormone fukitol in my system, apparently self-generated by my metabolism as I age.

And when watching TV or social media and I see one of the younger, brighter, sharper Trumpists talking — DeSantis, Ramaswamy, or, yes, Vance — I can’t help thinking: Why isn’t it one of these guys on the ticket? Why Trump?

By way of illustration, let me give you the GOP Vice Presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, dealing with a snippy CNN interviewess on the Springfield cats issue. Listen, and compare with the way Trump handled that issue Tuesday evening.

After listening, just ask yourself the question I’m asking myself: Isn’t there some way we can flip the ticket: Vance as President, Trump as Vice?

[Clip:  CNN:  The other thing he brought up, which I was kind of surprised by, I guess I would say, is, he brought up this misleading false claim that you yourself have talked about in recent days, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are abducting people’s pets and eating them, which officials there have said is not true.

You yourself acknowledged it may be false on Twitter, you still told people to keep spreading it. But Trump just amplified it to tens of millions of people who were watching. Why push something that’s not true?

Vance:  Well, first of all city officials have not said it’s not true. They’ve said they don’t have all the evidence

CNN:  They’ve said they have no evidence.

Vance:  We’ve heard from a number of constituents on the ground, Kaitlan, who — both first hand and second hand reports — saying this stuff is happening, so they very clearly — meaning the people on the ground dealing with this — think it is happening, and I think it’s important for journalists to actually get on the ground and uncover the stuff for themselves when you have a lot of people saying: “My pets are being abducted,” or geese at the city pond are being abducted and slaughtered right in front of us.

This is crazy stuff. And again, whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true, … whatever the case may be, Kaitlan, This town has been ravaged by twenty thousand migrants coming in. Healthcare costs are up, housing costs are up, communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town. This is what Kamala Harris’s border policies have done.

And I think it’s interesting, Kaitlan, that, that the media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats. And that speaks about the media’s failure to care about what’s going on in these communities. If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep on because the media could … should care about what’s going on.

CNN:  I saw you say that. I think the media does care about it. I just heard a very lengthy report in the New York Times on it. PBS News Hour did a whole story on it. But can I ask you …

Vance:  All [inaudible] by us, talking about it and bringing it up. Nobody cared about this until we raised this issue.

CNN:  Senator, you talked about that your office has gotten a lot of reports. I mean, if someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot. I mean, why … You have a sense of responsibility as a running mate and he certainly doesn’t as the candidate to not promote false information, right?

Vance:  Could be. That is a totally fair point. But nobody’s calling my office and saying that they saw Bigfoot. Look: what they’re calling and saying is, we’re seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats and city officials aren’t doing anything about it.

Now again, I have a responsibility as a United States Senator. I think the media has a responsibility as an institution that cares about truth to actually take people seriously when they say their lives have been ruined by this migrant crisis.

And again: If every single thing that the media says about this story is false, the verifiable facts are that this community had their lives destroyed by twenty thousand migrants coming in and uprooting life.

CNN:  Again: officials said no credible evidence for the claim. But Senator J.D. Vance, thank you for joining us with your [inaudible] reaction.

Vance:  Thanks, Kaitlan.

CNN:  Jake, back to you.]

Compare the way Trump, in the debate, handled a regime stooge on the Springfield cats story with the way Vance handled the same situation there.

Trump got into an unproductive joust with the stooge — “Well, I’ve seen people on television …” Vance nimbly steered talk to the real issue: American small towns destroyed by uncontrolled mass settlement from primitive cultures, decorating his argument with some nicely barbed remarks about the media not doing their job.

Is it really too late to flip this ticket?

06 — Signoff.     I’m afraid I am running way over my time, ladies and gents. I told you I am an immigration buff from way back. Once I get going on that topic it’s hard to apply the brakes. I shall therefore forgo my usual miscellany of brief items and proceed directly to signoff.

Thanks as always for your time and attention, your emails and donations. Once again: you can donate tax-free by check earmarked for me to The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

For signoff music I shall make amends for a mild slight I committed in my August Diary. Concerning the need for a male voice, baritone or tenor, in the worship team at my local church I said, quote: “Baritone for preference; tenors too often want to steal the show.”

That was of course a gratuitous slight against the tenor community, which includes many modest and self-effacing individuals. To make amends, I shall sign us out with the voice of a fine English tenor.

To make double amends — demonstrating that not only am I free of real anti-tenor prejudice, I also hold no negativity towards the female sex — the voice here is that of a female tenor. Yes, there really is such a thing … or was; I don’t think any lady is currently marketing herself as a female tenor. A hundred and some years ago, it wasn’t totally unknown.

Here then to see us out is Ruby Helder, a female tenor, singing Ciro Pinsuti’s melancholy valediction “The Last Watch.”

Watch with me, love, tonight!
This is the last time we meet,
For I must leave thee, O my sweet,
Our fate is fixed, our dream is o’er,
Our ways lie parted evermore!

Ms Helder, I cannot forbear noting, was, until she drank herself to death in 1938, married to Chesley Bonestell, who did the illustrations for The Conquest of Space, one of the favorite books of my childhood.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.