This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m52s Hurricane Helene
• 11m32s Vice-Presidential debate
• 19m07s The Israel-Iran War
• 30m19s Longshoremen strike
• 33m56s President Carter at 100
• 35m49s The Great (squirrel) Replacement
• 40m04s Signoff with Buck Owens
• 00m00s Signoff

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your undeniably genial host John Derbyshire, with a glance at the news as September crumbles down into October.

Before proceeding, just a word of thanks for the encouragement and support I get from listeners and readers. Back in July, when VDARE finally succumbed to the relentless assaults of Letitia Lard-butt and her legions of lawyers, I admit I was in low spirits for a while, but you guys soon got me back to my normal, cheerful, sparkling self. Heck, I may even write another book, possible title We Are More Doomed Than Ever.

Please allow me my weekly reminder 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.

OK, this week’s news. Top of the headlines: that disastrous storm in the Southeast.

02 — Hurricane Helene.     Last Thursday evening, about the time I was organizing the September 27th edition of Radio Derb, Hurricane Helene made landfall on the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, heading north across the mainland with wind speeds up to 140 mph and lots of rain.

Helene proceeded northwards through Georgia, South Carolina, all the way up to the Appalachians — Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Western Virginia, burning itself out at last somewhere over South Kentucky.

Helene carried a mighty lot of rain with her. It was the rain that caused most of the damage inland. Pouring down, it of course didn’t stop to rest on the Appalachian mountainsides, just roared on down into the valleys and their rivers. It didn’t help that there’d been a big rainstorm in the days before Helene arrived.

The NOAA — that’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency in the federal Commerce Department that watches the weather for us — estimates that the rainstorm and Helene together dumped forty trillion gallons of water on the mainland U.S.A. That’s more than 36 cubic miles, enough to fill Lake Tahoe. If it were actually decanted into a perfectly cubic container, that container would be nearly three and a half miles wide, long, and high.

Hence all the horror stories we’ve been hearing. Whole towns have been washed away. The count of known fatalities was nudging 200 last time I looked, but with hundreds still unaccounted for. We must hope that those unaccounted for are just stranded in places inaccessible because of washed-away roads and bridges and unable to communicate because of power lines and phone lines down.

A quick internet search turned up a dozen or more organizations accepting donations to help the afflicted people; American Red Cross for example has a Hurricane Helene web page.

Donald Trump has opened a GoFundMe page if you’d like to route your donation through them. Trump’s old friend Steve Witkoff — his golf partner on the occasion of that second assassination attempt — got things rolling with a half-million-dollar donation. When I looked just now the page had just short of five million dollars.

These are our fellow citizens in distress down there, so let’s do what we can.

The anti-Trump forces have been trying to make political capital by blaming Hurricane Helene on climate change caused by fossil fuels. This came out in Tuesday’s Vice Presidential debate, although neither candidate shed much light on the issue.

J.D. Vance said that if you believe carbon emissions drives climate change then, quote “you’d want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.” End quote.

Tim Walz countered by saying that, quote, “We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have. We’re also producing more clean energy.” End quote.

If you can figure out who got the better of that exchange, you’re smarter than I am.

Joe Biden, talking at a briefing on relief for hurricane victims in North Carolina the next day, Wednesday, brought his usual moon-booted approach to the topic.

After some introductory remarks he said this, quote:

In a moment like this, we put politics aside. At least we should put it all aside, and we have here. There are no Democrats or Republicans; there are only Americans. And our job is to help as many people as we can as quickly as we can and as thoroughly as we can.

End quote.

But then, moments later, this, quote:

Let me close with this. Nobody can deny the impact of climate crisis anymore. At least I hope they don’t. They must be brain-dead if they do. Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger.

End quote.

Actually plenty of people deny the orthodoxy on climate change: my dinner club companion Will Happer, for example. What does he know? Quite a lot: he’s Emeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton University.

Which do I think better deserves the adjective “brain-dead”: Joe Biden or Professor Happer? Need you ask?

The Biden administration then added insult to injury. Wednesday, the day after the Vice-Presidential debate, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, talking with reporters on Air Force One while on his way down to inspect the hurricane damage, said that another hurricane is on its way — I guess he meant Hurricane Kirk — and fretted that, quote:

We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what — what is imminent.

End quote.

FEMA, F-E-M-A, is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which reports to — Heaven help us all! — the Department of Homeland Security. Why have they run out of funds? Because in the past two years FEMA has dispersed 1.4 billion dollars to state and municipal governments to look after illegal aliens; 760 million last year, 640 million this year.

Which makes clear once again what I have told you before: the Prime Directive for our ruling class, which they attend to before all else, is to fill our country with foreign scofflaws, as many as want to come. With the grateful votes of twenty or thirty million of these settlers, our elites aim to establish a one-party state in which their power is solid and undisputed.

The sufferings of American citizens struck by a natural disaster are, by comparison, hardly worth their time. Note the date of that Air Force One conversation: Wednesday, nearly a week after Hurricane Helene struck.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were on the same flight. To be fair, though, the President has a great many other things to deal with from his beach chair and Harris is trying to keep her campaign alive.

For Mayorkas hurricane relief should have been Number One priority. But no: Mayorkas’ Number One priority is … well, I just told you what it is.

03 — Vice-Presidential debate.     Yeah, the Vice-Presidential debate. As usual, I have to confess that I lost interest about twenty minutes in and have had to fall back on the transcript posted online.

Naturally I first went Ctrl-F “immigr.” There were some juicy titbits here.

Perhaps the juiciest, for those of us afflicted with Trump Disappointment Syndrome, was Tim Walz saying, quote:

Donald Trump had four years. He had four years to do this. And he promised you, America, how easy it would be. I’ll build you a big, beautiful wall and Mexico will pay for it. Less than 2 percent of that wall got built and Mexico didn’t pay a dime.

End quote.

I don’t know if that two percent figure is accurate, but it might well be. Deep into the Trump administration Ann Coulter was repetitively tweeting something like, quote: “miles of wall built today: zero; miles built since inauguration:zero,” end quote. And to the best of my knowledge Mexico didn’t pay a dime.

Also negative for us Trump voters was J.D. Vance’s response to the moderator who asked, quote: “Would you deport parents who have entered the U.S. illegally and separate them from any of their children who were born on U.S. soil?” That was a perfect opening for Vance to address the issue of birthright citizenship, which so badly needs addressing, but … he didn’t. Ctrl-F “birthright” gets no hits.

Walz fell back, as Harris and Biden always do, on the Lankford-Schumer Bill of six months ago as evidence that the current administration tried really hard — honestly they did! —  to stop the incoming flood of illegal aliens, but Donald Trump scotched Congressional passage of the Bill by making a few phone calls.

Even conservatives liked the Bill, bleated Walz. Quote:

It was crafted by a conservative senator from Oklahoma, James Lankford. I know him. He’s super conservative …

End quote.

Senator Lankford “super conservative”? Not on immigration he isn’t. The immigration grades at NumbersUSA for Senate Republicans have Lankford at a C-plus, with only five Republican Senators ranked lower: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, James Inhofe, and Rand Paul. Lankford “super conservative” on immigration? Yeah, right.

That little narrative about Trump killing the worthy, border-sealing, conservative Lankford-Schumer Bill is so bogus Vance should have kicked it across the room. Just the name of the Bill tells you how bogus it is. As if Chuck Schumer would put his name to anything that might hinder the Great Replacement!

And then, the idea that Donald Trump could kill a Senate bill by making it known he was against it. That’s not how the Senate works, as Senator Vance surely knows.

The Center for Immigration Studies has tossed and gored Lankford-Schumer very comprehensively: Go to cis.org and put “Lankford” in the search box. Sample article, title: “Senate Bill Wouldn’t End ‘Catch-and-Release’ —It Would Perpetuate It.”

Anyone scheduled to debate a Biden administration front person who knows that immigration will feature in the debate, and knows that the enemy will bring up the Lankford-Schumer Bill as a good-faith effort to solve our immigration problems, anyone in that position should have read up on the Bill’s many, many debunkings and aired them in the debate. Vance didn’t.

If an idle ne’er-do-well like your genial host here can look these things up, so can the staffers of a U.S. Senator for him to use in debate.

That all said, Vance clearly won on form. He was clear while Walz was frequently muddled; he looked fit and fresh while Walz looked fat and old; watching Vance in action you could see why someone might vote him into the Senate, while watching Walz in action you were finding it hard to believe he was elected six times to the House of Representatives and twice to Governor of his state. What are they smoking up there in Minnesota?

We all know what FDR’s Vice President said about the Vice Presidency. This time around, with the possibility of a President, if he’s elected, ending his term as an octogenarian, the Vice Presidency matters a wee bit more than usual.

That wee bit aside, I doubt Tuesday’s debate was very consequential or changed many minds.

I will say, though, that the notion I’ve seen aired on social media, that the GOP might flip its ticket to put Vance at Number One, Trump at Number Two, is highly appealing. No, of course it’s not going to happen, but … we can dream …

04 — Israel-Iran War.     The Israel-Iran war — can we please just call it by its proper name? — the Israel-Iran war heated up some more this week. Israel took out more of the leaders of Iran’s proxy units in Lebanon; Iran retaliated with a barrage of missiles.

I’m an isolationist. John Quincy Adams’ famous 1821 speech returns an echo from my bosom. That’s the speech where he said America, quote: “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” End quote.

In that spirit, I wish we would keep our troops out of this. Are they in it? Yes, they are. We currently have 900 active-duty personnel in Syria, which is a client state of Iran, and 2,500 in Iraq, which, though not at client-state level, is under strong Iranian influence. I’d like to see these troops brought home.

Wait: I’m a supporter of Israel, aren’t I? Shouldn’t we help them in this war? In the rhetoric of Iran’s rulers, after all, Israel is only the Little Satan, we are the Great Satan.

And I’m a nationalist, aren’t I? The opposite of nationalism is imperialism. Plainly Iran wants imperial control over its neighborhood. Why else have they put such resources, so much effort into furnishing these client states and proxy armies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen? Shouldn’t we take some kind of a stand for nationhood?  — for those nations as well as helping Israel?

Yeah, yeah, but there are definitions to be clarified there. Define “take a stand.” Define “help.” If “taking a stand” means “sending our troops in to support the constitutional nationalists,” well, we did some of that earlier this century. It didn’t work out well.

“Help Israel”? Help how? Give them money? Give them weapons? Sell them weapons at low rates? Send ships and planes to support their military?

Count me a minimalist there. If Israel has our weapons in its arsenal needing maintenance and replenishment, I certainly wouldn’t deny them. Nor do I begrudge some of my federal taxes going to help their war effort.

Because Israel is an outpost of Western Civilization in a region with much barbarism, I regard those funds as a sort of civilization tax. I’m a conservative, a big fan of Western civ.

All that aside, I favor minding our own business. I’d be very sorry — again on grounds of civilizational solidarity — to see Israel destroyed, but I don’t want the U.S.A. getting into a war with some peer nation — Russia, China, India, even Iran, especially the nuclear-armed Iran that we keep being told will show up any day now — I don’t want a shooting war with any of those to prevent Israel’s destruction.

So those are my opinions, as best I can organize them. I’m a conservative, nationalist, isolationist well-wisher of Israel.

And yes, of course I know there is much more to be said on all those points. Imperialism, for example, can be a great civilizing force, as the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, British, and French showed. There is even a case to be made for the Ottoman Empire. Under conditions of modernity, though, I believe nationalism is much to be preferred, at any rate in the civilized West.

On the matter of helping Israel, how much help do they actually need? Watching the progress of the Israel-Iran War, Israel seems to be doing pretty well — remarkably well for a small, resource-poor nation of ten million up against a big, resource-rich one of ninety million.

They don’t want any help in actually fighting; Israelis fight willingly and well for themselves, as their numerous enemies found out in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. They are tactically ingenious, as we saw with the exploding pagers the other day, and they are great-grandmasters of spycraft. As a last resort, they have nuclear weapons.

They can be fearfully good at politics, too. The current issue of the London Spectator has an interesting article by historians Niall Ferguson and Jay Mens, title “Israel’s Iron Prime Minister.”

That article compares Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister for almost 14 of the past 15 years, with Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century statesman who created modern Germany.

Bismarck is known to history as Germany’s Iron Chancellor; Bibi, say these historians, is Israel’s Iron Prime Minister, as skilled as Bismarck was in the statecraft of both peace and war.

Sample longish quote:

Yet, for all the resemblances, Netanyahu seems to be reliving Bismarck’s career in reverse. In 1874, 16 years before being forced out of office, Bismarck complained: “I am bored. The great things are done.” After close to the same amount of time in office, Netanyahu has never been less bored, for he now has the chance to do the great things. The decapitation of Hezbollah may be his Königgrätz, the battle in 1866 which confirmed Prussian primacy over Austria. Destroying the Iranian nuclear programme — or the regime itself — would be his Sedan, the battle that doomed the Second French Empire of Napoleon III.

End quote.

And if Israel is doing well under very capable leadership, the same can’t be said of Iran. The government is crudely authoritarian and widely unpopular, especially with young urban Iranians hungry for some Western liberty and hedonism. There are restless minorities: Turks, Kurds, Azerbaijanis, …

The military is big and powerful; but military matters dwell, for ordinary citizens, in the shadow of the horrendous Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s in which hundreds of thousands of young Iranian men died to no purpose. The survivors are middle-aged now but you may be sure their children have heard their stories about incompetent leadership and unnecessary suffering.

There is also a plausible government-in-exile, led by the son of the last Shah. Hale and hearty at age 63, he lives in Virginia.

I don’t know how much support he has in Iran; but given the blundering arrogance and cruelty of the mullahs, there must be plenty of educated middle-class Iranians thinking wistfully about Constitutional Monarchy. Or perhaps some have heard of Pat Buchanan’s book from 1999: A Republic, Not an Empire.

Well, that’s what I think about this war, based on my fundamental geostrategic principles: nation, civilization, and minding our own business as best a nation can in a busy commercial world.

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

Imprimis:  A busy commercial world, yes. A key feature of that world is big seaports where international trade lands up.

The ships bearing that trade have to be loaded and unloaded. For that you need longshoremen. Our nation’s longshoremen staged a three-day strike earlier this week, in pursuit of a 77 percent wage increase over six years.

I’m not sure what position to take on that claim. In a general way I’m pro-union. Yes, employees should be able to lean on employers to share the profits of business fairly.

That’s in the private sector, though. I’m totally against public-sector unions, who I think do great harm. They’re not making a claim on profits; in the public sector there aren’t any profits, only money raised from taxes and tariffs, which belongs to the citizens at large. If public-sector workers don’t like their wages they can lobby their legislators to increase them, or else go find work in the private sector.

As the great President Coolidge told Samuel Gompers, quote: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” End quote.

OK, so these longshoremen: are they private sector or public sector? It’s not clear. Their wages are paid by USMX, the United States Maritime Alliance, which describes itself on its website as, quote, “an alliance of container carriers, direct employers, and port associations,” end quote.

Are those port associations privately owned or government owned?

Before I could get that figured out we got news that an agreement had been reached and the strike called off. The strikers had been taking political heat because they were holding up the unloading of relief supplies for hurricane victims. They’ve settled for a 62 percent wage increase over six years, which still sounds like a lot to me.

Why do we need longshoremen, anyway? YouTube is choc-a-bloc with videos of China’s big container ports, in which there is barely a human being to be seen. The work is all done by robots, AI, 5G and cloud computing.

The Chinese tell us that transition to full automation typically took four to six years.

Six years, huh? That’s exactly the term of this strike-ending wage agreement. I wonder what the USMX bosses have in mind?

Item:  Tuesday this week was the one hundredth birthday of President Jimmy Carter. Happy birthday! and all best wishes to him.

I lived in the U.S.A. for only the first half of Carter’s Presidency; I returned to Britain in October 1978. So some of the key events of that Presidency I only observed from a distance; notably the Iranian revolution, the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Those weren’t happy times for the U.S.A. Carter of course did his best to navigate the turbulent waters; but nobody rates his time in office a success, with due allowance for one or two positives like the Camp David Accords.

And yes: you could argue that those Accords make a case against minding our own business … but you could also argue the opposite thing.

So, by pretty general agreement, a failed Presidency.

Jimmy Carter is, also by general agreement, a decent and intelligent man. So if his Presidency has a lesson for us it is, that decency and intelligence, while of course desirable human attributes, are not sufficient for success in high political office. You need a touch of the Bismarck, too.

Item:  Far, far back in my memory I recall one of my teachers in elementary school — Mr Elliot, I think it was — telling us with much indignation how Britain’s native red squirrels were being driven to extinction by grey squirrels from America.

For background, here is a quotation from Britain’s Wildlife Trust website, quote:

There are two species of squirrel in the UK; red squirrels and grey squirrels. Red squirrels are our native species and have lived in the UK for around 10,000 years. Grey squirrels were introduced to the UK from North America by the Victorians in the 1800s. The first record of them escaping and establishing a wild population is 1876.

End quote.

And yes, here’s a post from a different British website, that of the Woodland Trust. This one’s dated 2018, quote:

Red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) live in coniferous forests and deciduous woods in Europe and northern Asia. Their range extends from the UK, Ireland and western Europe to Russia, Mongolia, and northwest China.

Numbers in the UK have fallen dramatically since grey squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) were introduced as an ornamental species in the 1870s.

Since then, the UK population of reds has dropped from around 3.5 million to between 120,000 to 160,000 individuals (according to different estimates). The population in England is thought to be as low as 15,000.

End quote.

So Mr Elliot was right. The American invasion! Squirrelwise, the Victorian Brits were apparently planning a Great Replacement.

All is not lost for the red squirrels, though, at any rate in Scotland. Here’s a report from GB News, October 1st, quote:

Native red squirrels are on the verge of a significant triumph in their long-standing struggle for survival against the grey squirrels in one of Scotland’s major cities.

A project has announced a “significant decline” in grey squirrels — which they say could be completely eradicated from Aberdeen “in the near future.”

End quote.

What seems to have happened there is that grey squirrels first showed up in Aberdeen fifty years ago, carrying squirrelpox — a virus harmless to them but fatal to red squirrels. In 2009 the Aberdonians started a program of trapping and killing the greys. Numbers are now down in the low two digits.

Britain for the British! Although I must say, as an animal lover, I’d rather the Brits had first tried mass deportation …

06 — Signoff.     That’s all I have, listeners and readers. Thank you for your time and attention, and again for your encouragement and support. May all be well with you and yours. For those of our fellow citizens in the Southeast, the hurricane victims for whom things are definitely not well, patience and courage, please; help is on its way.

In my September Diary I included a segment titled “Triumph of the prudes.” Opening sentence, quote: “A century or so ago, vinegary old maids were frowning at dancing, drinking, and sex. It looks as though they’ve won the arguments.” End quote.

I didn’t include cigarette smoking in my list of vices there, but I’m sure the vinegary old maids were frowning on it. Given the great decline in cigarette smoking since, they won that argument too.

Where smoking, drinking, and loose sex are concerned, the negative point of view was most memorably expressed musically by Nashville songwriter Tim Spencer back in 1947. Here it is sung by Buck Owens.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.