This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m30s Canceller gets canceled
• 12m48s Crushing dissent in the Party
• 24m06s The Amy Wax saga latest
• 32m08s Good news about Higher Ed.
• 34m55s A new ministate
• 37m49s Sir Keir is the wurst
• 39m52s Signoff for Springfield
• 00m00s Signoff

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners, from your holistically genial host John Derbyshire, looking back on another week of fun and frolic in the public sphere.

Before I begin, my thanks as always for your emails and your support. This is the last podcast of September so it comes with a reminder that my monthly Diary will be up next week, readable at johnderbyshire.com/Opinions and cross-posted to The Unz Review.

And please let me just also remind you that you can make a tax-deductible donation to my work by mailing an earmarked check to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

02 — Canceller gets canceled.     I’m sure listeners and readers all know the joke about the old guy grumbling to a stranger in a village pub — the joke that ends with the line: “But ya f*** one goat …”

My sympathies are with the old guy there. I’ve posted millions of words of commentary, reviews, and fiction, and published several books. When I’m introduced to someone for the first time, though — at any rate, someone who dwells outside the walls of Castle Woke — along with a good vigorous handshake I get something like: “Ah, ‘The Talk’! I love that piece! Beautifully done!”

Not that I’m averse to a little flattery, but please — it’s been more than twelve years since I wrote “The Talk.” Nor do I have any strong feelings towards goats.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about: “The Talk: Nonblack Version” was a column I posted at Taki’s Magazine in April 2012. Last time I checked it was still up at Taki’s, but in case it isn’t I’ve archived a copy at my personal website where you can read it.

This was in the aftermath of that incident in Sanford, Florida back in February that year, when a young black delinquent named Trayvon Martin was shot dead while assaulting George Zimmerman, a nonblack neighborhood-watch patrolman.

Zimmerman, the shooter, was and still is actually a light-skinned Hispanic. He was white enough, though, for the shooting to generate a mighty surge of what I call “the romance of American blackness“: the cherished story, dear to the hearts of whites and blacks alike, of ugly snarling gap-toothed rednecks doing violence to meek, helpless, photogenic blacks.

Part of that surge was a parade of black journalists publishing articles about how they had to give The Talk — capital “T” — to their children, warning them to tiptoe about in public for fear of evil whites lurking round every corner waiting for an opportunity to harm them.

In fact, as everyone knows and all crime statistics confirm, blacks are far more dangerous to whites — and, indeed, to each other — than whites are to blacks. So I countered all that nonsense about The Talk with my nonblack version, telling the truth of the matter — as if we don’t all know it — with links to supporting statistics.

This is of course a zone in which truth is no defense, is in fact forbidden. There was swooning, pearl-clutching, and shrieks of horror all over about my column.

I was a contributing editor at National Review when “The Talk: Nonblack Version” was posted at Taki’s. Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, canceled me by email. I wasn’t a salaried employee, so I can’t say he fired me; but yes, he definitely canceled me.

Nor can I say I was very distressed about my cancellation. National Review was, and still is, a gentry-conservative magazine. I’d been contributing to their pages for nigh-on fifteen years, and should have known better than to publish true facts about race, even in a different outlet.

In any case the event didn’t seem to me to be worth getting distressed about. My first acquaintance with journalism had been in 1980s Britain, where the profession was held in low regard and an opinion columnist was thought a dull fellow if he hadn’t been fired once or twice for crossing the boundaries of propriety.

Forward twelve years to today. National Review is still in business, their editorial line is still gentry-conservative with punctilious respect for what the founder of the magazine (although in a different context) called “the structure of prevailing taboos,” and Rich Lowry is still editor.

On September 16th Lowry was the guest of Fox News veteran Megyn Kelly on her daily vidcast, The Megyn Kelly Show. They talked about the hot political news item of that week: the flooding of Springfield, a small Ohio town, with settlers from Haiti and allegations that the settlers had been stealing geese from town ponds and pet cats from residents for food.

Over to Lowry, with particular attention to what he says at eleven seconds in to the clip.

[Clip:  I loved — I think it was in that interview where Dana Bash says, y’know, police have gone through eleven months of recordings of calls and they’ve only found two Springfield residents calling to complain about Haitianiggr … er, migrants taking geese from ponds. Only two callers, and I think one lesson this [sic] whole story: people don’t care about geese. Ah, people really hate geese! (chuckle) They … they … All things considered, I think people would prefer Haitian migrants to come and take the geese off the golf course, right? So it’s, it’s petsist. The cats and dogs has become the … the standard. Geese clearly don’t matter.]

Did you get it? Lowry tripped over his tongue there. Trying to say “Haitian migrants” the opening “m” of “migrants” got swallowed by the concluding “n” of “Haitian, “and the “i” of “migrants” came out short instead of long. Here are the key four seconds, slowed down.

[Clip:  Haitianiggr mm mm ah migrants …]

So Lowry said the Deplorable Word there, the word that blacks say all the time but that is forbidden to nonblacks. It’s clear, though, that he said it by accident, by the kind of phonetic stumble we all commit now and then when speaking impromptu and a bit too fast.

Neither Lowry himself nor Megyn Kelly showed any signs of having noticed the stumble. Wokesters are programmed to notice it, though, even were it to be broadcast in morse code from Alpha Centauri. Social media was soon ablaze. The editor of a conservative magazine is a racist bigot! lefties were crowing gleefully.

Incredibly (it seems to me) that microscopic verbal stumble got Lowry canceled from speaking engagements. Writing at his own magazine last week, September 19th, Lowry told us that a September 30th engagement at Indiana State University had been scrapped, quote from the university authorities, quote: “following the advice of our public safety officials regarding campus and community safety concerns,” end quote.

A bit further down Lowry also tells us that an address he was to have given at the Badger Institute, a gentry-conservative think-tank in, of course, Wisconsin had also been canceled. The Institute’s President would only tell him that it was because of, quote, “the environment,” end quote.

I guess I could be excused for smiling quietly here at my desk reading this stuff about my canceller getting canceled, Lowry getting hoist by his own petard (a phrase I rather particularly like because I know the meaning of the French verb péter).

But no, I’m not smiling. I’m shaking my head in despair at the depths of infantile stupidity we have been dragged down into by our national neurosis about race.

A university! A think tank! What does that university teach? What do the inhabitants of that think tank think about? Heaven help us!

For the record I can testify that during fifteen years’ acquaintance with Rich Lowry I can’t recall him ever, in word or deed, giving any evidence of political incorrectness. Heck: as editor of a gentry-conservative magazine, upholding political correctness has been a key part of his job.

The only fault I’d find with Lowry is that when it came to approving expense claims for travel and such, he could be somewhat … niggardly.

03 — Crushing dissent in the Party.     Since I have mentioned my 2012 column “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” I may as well pull from it some quotes relevant to this week’s news.

These quotes are from paragraph 10 of The Talk. At this point I had just got through covering the average differences that show themselves when large numbers of people are in play. The heading for paragraph 10 reads as follows, quote:

Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense.

End quote.

I then list, under sub-headings 10a, 10b, 10c, et cetera, some particular applications of that statistical common sense. Here are 10f and 10g.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

End quote.

Again: we are in the realm of statistics here, of statistical truth and statistical common sense.

• The statement that “on average, men are taller than women” is not contradicted by the fact that Suzy is real tall. It’s a statistical truth.
• Overcast skies often portend rain, so if I’m headed to an outdoor event and the sky is overcast, I take an umbrella. If, after all, it did not rain on the event, that fact does not prove me a fool or a bigot. I practiced statistical common sense.

I actually had New York City in mind when writing 10f and 10g. I get the New York Post delivered every morning to read over my breakfast. Much of the news therein of course concerns New York City, which is 23 percent black — just less than a quarter.

Reading the Post daily across thirty-some years, it’s been hard not to notice that stories about corruption in the city government involve black officials way, way more than one time in four.

This week I have New York City in mind again. Our local media are dominated by the federal indictment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams on corruption charges. Given the foregoing and the fact that Adams is black, you can count me unsurprised.

This is the first federal indictment of a sitting Mayor in the city’s history. The charges are: bribery, seeking illegal campaign contributions, and wire fraud.

The feds seem to want to make a show out of it. Thursday morning a dozen FBI agents actually showed up at Gracie Mansion, the Mayoral residence, to deliver the indictment and take away the Mayor’s phone.

When you read the details, though, the charges look kind of petty. One of the most-discussed concerned a high-rise building in Manhattan erected to be the new Turkish Consulate. The Turks wanted it finished and furnished when their dictator, Recep Erdoğan, was scheduled to visit the city.

The city Fire Department weren’t satisfied with the structure so they wouldn’t allow occupation. The Turks, who had purchased the Mayor with minor favors, leaned on him; Fire Department officials feared for their jobs; and matters were arranged.

That’s naughty, sure, but pretty microscopic as political corruption goes. It’s very thin stuff by comparison with a U.S. Vice President enriching his family by trading favors with ChiCom oligarchs. Is something else going on here?

Maybe. Washington Post, September 26th, quote:

The matter was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Dale Ho, who was nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden in 2021. Ho has a background in election law and voting issues. Before becoming a federal judge, he was director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights project and he argued twice in front of the Supreme Court on issues related to immigration and the U.S. census.

End quote.

Voting rights, huh? Immigration …

Mayor Eric Adams is not a bad sort, as New York City Mayors go. He’s a Democrat of course, but by comparison with his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, he’s George Washington. Before he turned to politics he was a city cop for twenty years, so he’s well acquainted with law and order issues and has a good grip on reality.

He’s had his differences with the Ruling Class, though, especially on immigration. Here he was at a town hall meeting, September 6th last year, with several senior city officials sitting in a row behind him.

[Clip:  And let me tell you something, New Yorkers: Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this. I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City, destroy New York City.

We’re getting ten thousand migrants a month. One time we were just getting Venezuela. Now we’re getting Ecuador, now we’re getting Russian-speaking coming through Mexico, now we’re getting Western Africa, now we’re getting people from all over the globe have made their minds up that they’re going to come through the Southern part of the border and come into New York City. And everyone is saying it’s New York City’s problem.

Every community in this city is going to be impacted. Another twelve billion dollar deficit that we’re going to have to cut. Every service in this city is going to be impacted — all of us.

And so I say to you as I turn it over to you. This is some, some of the most educated, some of the most knowledgeable — probably more of my Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners and Chiefs live in this community. So as you ask me a question about migrants, tell me what role you played. How many of you organized to stop what they’re doing to us? How many of you were part of the movement to say: “We’re seeing what this Mayor is trying to do and they’re destroying New York City?

It’s going to come to your neighborhoods. All of us are going to be impacted by this. I said it last year when we had fifteen thousand, I’m telling you now with a hundred and ten thousand: The city we knew, we’re about to lose.]

We know that the Great Replacement — opening the U.S.A. to tens of millions from the Third World and getting them on the voter rolls a.s.a.p. — is a major priority for the Ruling Class, likely their Number One priority.

It wouldn’t be surprising for them to be ruthlessly intolerant of any deviation in the Party ranks on this, a key issue, perhaps the key issue for our elites.

More from the Washington Post, quote:

If Adams were to resign or be removed from office, he would be replaced by the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, who is widely viewed as more liberal than Adams.

End quote.

“More liberal than Adams”? Jumaane Williams, a black radical, is slightly to the left of Kim Jong Un. With hopes of graduating to properly-elected Mayor next year, he would certainly be more obedient to Party Central than Adams has been. And if Adams refuses to resign as Mayor, New York State’s Governor Kathy Hochul, a midwit Party hack, has the power to remove him.

With the FBI leading the charge and a woke judge assigned to the case, this looks to me very much like an elite-driven political operation.

04 — The Amy Wax saga latest.     Here’s another person in the news that I’ve known for many years: fourteen years actually, since I helped her to defend a book she had written. That was at a panel discussion organized by the Black Law Students’ Association of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, April 2010.

Yes, this is the continuing saga of U. Penn. law professor Amy Wax, whom I have written about at length on VDARE.com. The authorities at her university have been gunning for her since 2017, when, in collaboration with another law professor at a different university, she published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Enquirer arguing for the supremacy of bourgeois values.

She has committed numerous other offenses against Ruling-Class ideology. Also in 2017, in a video chat with Glenn Loury, she said that she had never seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of his or her class at the law school, and rarely in the top half. For that she was removed from teaching first-year courses. In 2021, and then again, defiantly, in 2023, she invited white advocate Jared Taylor to address her students.

That claim she made to Loury, that no black students had graduated in the top quarter of their class, could, if false, easily be shown false by U.Penn. Law School releasing the relevant statistics. So far — seven years on — they have not done so.

And so on. Professor Wax has tenure, so the university can’t fire her; but last year Theodore Ruger, the Law School Dean, submitted a 12-page charge sheet to the Faculty Senate calling for “major sanctions” against her.

Now U. Penn. is acting on that. Amy Wax has been altogether suspended from teaching for a year, on half pay. She’s also lost her named professorial chair and summer pay in perpetuity. These sanctions all begin in fall next year.

Monday this week Nathan Cofnas posted at X a little photo gallery showing the eight members of the university hearing board that originally found Professor Wax guilty. One is a male, or at any rate it sports a mustache; the other seven are all women, two of them black.

That little photo gallery makes a nice set with the one I offered you last week showing the main editorial board of Scientific American magazine, six women and three men. This was after the magazine endorsed Kamala Harris for President. The guy who posted that photo gallery commented that, quote:

Scientific American isn’t Scientific American. It’s a skinsuit being worn by a cabal of overpromoted head girls and their housebroken soyboys, for whom science is only interesting insofar as it can be used to bolster propaganda imperatives for their side’s political goals — “sustainability,” “equity,” and so on. If those goals require “science” to be redefined as “supporting a cackling social-climbing prostitute with the verbal IQ of a parakeet,” then that’s what The Science means.

End quote.

There is definitely a resemblance in the two photo galleries, the disciplinary board at U. Penn. Law School and the editorial board at Scientific American. This is our Ruling Class. These are the people who have captured most of our major institutions.

There seems to be a lot of academic politics tangled up in the Amy Wax case. According to an article in the Free Beacon on Wednesday this week, these harsh sanctions were originally approved last year by Liz Magill, who at that time was President at U. Penn.

Magill ceased to be President last December following those Congressional hearings about antisemitism on college campuses. Magill, at those hearings, told the Congressmen she couldn’t punish antisemitic speech because of U. Penn.’s unbreakable dedication to free speech, to the First Amendment. I can imagine Amy Wax rolling her eyes right up to the ceiling when she heard that.

But then, says the Free Beacon, the university felt it was getting too much negative publicity, what with Magill’s resignation, the student demos for Hamas, and the proposed sanctions on Amy Wax. So they offered Professor Wax a deal: lighter sanctions and a one-time payment of $50,000 to offset the loss in summer pay.

In return, Wax would have to agree not to bad-mouth the University, not to sue them for what they’ve subjected her to, and not to disclose evidence she had presented in internal hearings to clear her name.

Amy Wax, bless her, refused the deal. Quote from the Free Beacon:

The settlement agreement would have put the kibosh on further controversy. That is why, Wax told the Free Beacon, she repeatedly refused to sign it.

[Inner quote] “This case is about free expression,” Wax said. “Penn wanted absolute silence. The big question is: Why do they want to hide what they’re doing?” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

So the big question now is, will Amy Wax sue? I await further reports with interest.

05 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  The good news about higher education is a precipitous drop in enrollments. Quote: “From 2010 to 2021, enrollments fell from roughly 18.1 million students to about 15.4 million.” End quote. I took that from a column by law professor and author Jonathan Turley in Thursday’s New York Post.

Professor Turley allows that some of that drop is due to declining birth-rates and some to increasing economic hardship; but he gives some good respectable poll numbers showing that public regard for higher ed. has been sliding downwards for years.

For example — these numbers are from Gallup — people were asked whether they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed. Nine years ago 57 percent said they did; last year, only 36 percent.

Quote from Professor Turley:

In my new book The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, I discussed the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculties replicate their own views and values.

One survey (based on self-reporting) found that only 9 percent of law professors identified as conservative.

End quote.

It’s strange to recall — and I can recall it; it wasn’t that long ago — that the legal profession, especially at the level of judges, was the embodiment of conservatism, a bulwark of established principles and procedures — laws! Now it’s just a front for leftist political activism.

Our universities, our courts. We really are in trouble.

Item:  Pop quiz: What’s the world’s smallest nation? Yes, you got it: Vatican City, 127 acres, population 764. That’s the world’s smallest nation.

Not for much longer, though. Albania is planning to create a similar, but even smaller, self-governing religious enclave on what is currently Albanian territory. This new nation, to be officially named the Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order will, the New York Times tells us, have, quote “its own administration, passports and borders,” end quote.

The religion of the new nation will be Islam, but in a mild and eccentric form. The Bektashis are a medieval Moslem sect at odds with both Sunni and Shiite Islam. They are exceptionally tolerant, allowing alcohol, letting women wear what they want, and imposing no lifestyle rules on believers.

Although too moderate for mainstream Muslims, they were too Islamic for Kemal Ataturk, who threw them out when he established the modern Turkish republic a hundred years ago. They took refuge in Albania and have been there ever since.

So how small will this new country be? Twenty-seven acres; that’s about five New York City blocks. If shaped as a perfect circle, the entire border would be less than three-quarters of a mile. If a perfect square, the perimeter would still be less than five-sixths of a mile … Sorry, my inner mathematician got loose there.

Baba Mundi, current leader of the Bektashi sect, told the Times that, quote, “Size doesn’t matter.” Yeah, that’s what we guys always say.

I just hope the Bektashis will be able to control the fourteen hundred yards of their border. Perhaps we could send Kamala Harris over there to give them some pointers.

Item:  Rich Lowry isn’t the only one having speech stumbles. British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, addressing his party’s annual conference on Tuesday, made a plea for peace in the Levant, thus, quote:

I call again for restraint and de-escalation at the border between Lebanon and Israel. Again, for all parties to pull back from the brink.

I call again for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the return of the sausages — the hostages — and a recommitment to the two state solution, a recognized Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel.

End quote.

Naturally the comment thread at X had much fun with that. Sample comment, quote: “This absurd man must be the wurst PM in history,” end quote, “wurst” spelled “w-u-r-s-t.” And so on.

The fate of the Israeli hostages, supposing any are still alive, should of course be no laughing matter. Sir Keir Starmer, on the other hand, should be a laughing matter: a clueless clown with no idea at all how to attend to the security, prosperity, and health of his nation’s citizens.

So … to laugh or not to laugh? Life is full of choices.

06 — Signoff.     There you have it, ladies and gents — another week of sliding down History’s razor blade. Thank you for listening or reading, and may the force be with you these last days of September.

To play us out, here’s a song I remember from many years back, in a recording from many, many years back — actually from 1901. This is Burt Shepard, an American who achieved fame in Britain way back then. This particular song has been getting a new lease of life recently in and around Springfield, Ohio.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.