This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• How Low Will They Go?
• A Consequential Endorsement
• Republics And Empires
• Certifiable Lunacy
• Miscellany
• Signoff

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Transcript

01 — Intro.    And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, one and all, from your inclusively genial host John Derbyshire, here to bring you reflections on the week’s news.

Ten days to the general election and the anti-Trump rhetoric is heating up. Did you know that Trump is a Hitler Hitler Hitler, Nazi Nazi Nazi, fascist fascist fascist? In case you didn’t, all sorts of Ruling Class front men have been stepping up to tell you: John Kelly, for example, Trump 45’s Chief of Staff, and Bob Woodward, one of the hack journalists who helped bring down the great Richard Nixon fifty years ago.

How will it all end up? I don’t know any better than you do, but I’ll speculate.

Before I get to speculating, though, just my weekly reminder that my website johnderbyshire.com is there for your reading and listening pleasure with links to my entire print and online output all the way back to 1966.

On the cover page of that website are instructions on how you can help keep me afloat using snail mail, PayPal, or crypto, or via Zelle direct to my bank, or with a tax-deductible donation by a check earmarked with my name and mailed to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. Thank you for your help.

02 — How low will they go?     The main takeaway from this week’s developments on the election front is, that our nation’s ruling class is worried. It’s dawning on them that they screwed up in giving us Kamala Harris as a candidate. It’s this anxiety that is driving their media stooges to all the Hitler Hitler stuff.

If they thought a bit more about it, which they probably won’t, they’d realise why they screwed up. They screwed up because foisting a weak candidate on the electorate worked so well back in 2020. They surely knew that Joe Biden was a weak candidate, a joke figure to anyone who’d followed politics the previous forty years. They figured they’d get away with it, and did get away with it, by keeping Biden out of sight under cover of the COVID panic and just screeching TRUMP BAD! TRUMP BAD! TRUMP BAD! through the media. And it worked!

If Biden 2020 was a weak candidate, Harris is even weaker; and there’s no excuse this time to just hide her in a basement. I think I’m a fairly open-minded guy; but summoning up all my resources of open-mindedness, I can’t believe anyone finds Kamala Harris inspirational.

I doubt she’s a bad person in any way, but inspiring? Nah. She’s someone with whom you might have a brief chat about the weather while waiting in a supermarket line, but by the time you’d got back to your car you’d have forgotten her, except perhaps for that off-putting cackle. On a long and close acquaintance, she might exhibit some virtues and perhaps stir some affection, but as President in the White House? Nah.

That the ruling class is worried is itself worrying. What might they do? How far — how low — might they go? They of course will do all they can to rig the vote — that’s already under way. I’ll come back to it in a minute. Will that be enough, though, with no COVID pandemic this time to hide the vote-rigging in a cloud of mist?

Might they try to take Trump out, you know … physically? Either before November 5th, if the polls get even worse; or, if Trump wins on the 5th, before the January Inauguration?

Until a few days ago I’d have dismissed such talk as nutty conspiracy theorizing. There is of course a nonzero probability of Trump being assassinated — heck we’ve already seen two attempts. As best I can judge those were both lone-wolf jobs, though, not regime-sponsored.

To us math geeks, the adjective “nonzero” encompasses very tiny numbers — one in a trillion, perhaps. So yes, if you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago about a regime-sponsored assassination of Trump, I’d have replied, “Yes, a nonzero probability,” in that sense.

If you asked me today, I’d replace that “nonzero” by a different adjective: probably “nontrivial.” In math-geek-speak, “nontrivial” is still small, but big enough to be worth your attention. Not one in a trillion: perhaps one in two hundred, something like that.

My advice to Trump would be to hire himself some really first-class private security and not rely on government employees. Even such precautions might not be enough, though. They don’t have to shoot the candidate. Trump’s doing appearances all over, presumably flying private jet from one to the other. Bringing down a plane isn’t that hard, and needn’t be obvious. You don’t need a hypersonic missile, just a pair of willing hands in the maintenance hangar at the airport.

Dark thoughts. Stay safe, Mr President, please.

Setting aside such dark thoughts, let’s hope for a Trump victory. Not just for a victory, mind, but for a landslide. A close result comes with some unpleasant prospects of its own; not lethally unpleasant, like an assassination, but unpleasant enough for us to devoutly wish it doesn’t happen.

Veteran British political journalist Andrew Neil explained why in a good column at the Daily Mail on Thursday. A close result could, warns Neil, drag America into a full-blown crisis. Sample quotes, comparing this year’s election to 2020, quotes:

The difference this time is that, if Trump wins narrowly, then Team Harris will almost certainly resort to the same legal guerrilla warfare Trump used in 2020. Both Democrats and Republicans are already lawyered up to the hilt in anticipation of a post-election day standoff.

Both sides have hired hundreds of expensive lawyers, backed by thousands of volunteer lawyers, to contest any close results. Team Trump is already far better organized and funded than it was four years ago to mount legal challenges on a grand scale if the election doesn’t go his way …

If Trump enjoys only a narrow victory, it seems more than likely that the assembled Democratic army of lawyers would quickly be transformed into an offensive force to undermine a Trump victory. Former President Obama has already issued an appeal for even more lawyers to rally to the Democratic cause.

So, in the days after November 5, whether it’s Trump or Harris that is thought to have just scraped over the winning line, that will not be the end of the matter. As the lawyers have their many lucrative days in numerous courts, the final result could be weeks away from being determined.

End quotes.

Neil points out that if those weeks drag out all the way to, and past, the Inauguration date, we’d have a Constitutional crisis on our hands.

Bottom line: We don’t just need a victory here, we need a landslide.

03 — A consequential endorsement.     Radio Derb of course endorses Donald Trump for President. There have of course been much more consequential endorsements.

Here’s one I watched on X earlier this week. The endorser here is Elon Musk. I should note that while I greatly admire the man, he is not a good speaker. In the audio you’ll hear a great many ums, ers, ahs, and y’knows. I have edited them out for the text transcript.

[Clip:  Well, as I said, I really would prefer not to be in politics at all, and the, the reason that I have stepped into the political arena this time is because I think the stakes are extremely fundamental.

I think democracy is on the line, I think the Constitution is on the line, and I fear that if Trump does not win we’re gonna have a single-party state and it’s going to be like California, but actually worse than California because, the one thing that keeps California from going even further than they do go is that people can move out of California and still be in America. But if you got no place to move then it’s going to be much worse than California.

And that’s the danger that we face: sort of an oppressive totalitarian state that has extreme restrictions on freedom of speech, that continues extreme over-regulation, but just basically makes government even bigger than it is today and takes away the liberty of the people.

So it was not something I wanted to do, but I felt it was critical to do it, or America’s not going to be America.]

Thank you, Sir. I agree with every word — I mean, other than the ers, ums, and ahs. If things go seriously awry, as I pondered last week, I look forward to seeing you on the triumvirate.

Although, concerning that, an old friend has emailed in to suggest I replace Vivek Ramaswamy with Ron DeSantis as a better choice for the position of competent government technocrat.

I see his point. The Governor of a state has experience as a political Chief Executive, which Ramaswamy hasn’t. Still, I’m reluctant to let go of Vivek and his manifold talents. Could we perhaps, when the coup takes place, come out of it with a quadrumvirate?

04 — Republics and empires.     As a footnote to my closing sentences there, and to Andrew Neil’s gloomy prognostications of a Constitutional crisis, I’ll just add that parallels to the collapse of the Roman Republic have been going on for a while this election cycle.

Eli Lake had one at the Free Press back in September, comparing Trump with the second-century-b.c. Gracchi brothers, a bit implausibly in my opinion. Sample quote:

You probably know about last year’s trend of American men confessing on TikTok how often they think about the Roman Empire. I’m a bit different. I’m obsessed with what preceded the empire, Rome’s republic. Empires are a dime a dozen in human history. They rise and fall, from Babylon to the Soviet Union. But republics — a form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the people — these are orchids: rare, precious, and fleeting.

End quote.

I’m with Eli Lake on that, at least. The Roman Republic fell apart at last from internal contradictions, but it had a pretty good innings — nearly five hundred years. If we just do as well as that with our republic, we won’t crumble until the middle of the 23rd century. Hey!

I wouldn’t be so sniffy about empires, though. They can of course be despotic and cruel, but they are not necessarily so. I’m a fan of the Habsburg Empire, for example — in its later days called Austria-Hungary.

Nor am I the only one. Here’s historian Krishan Kumar in his 2017 book Visions of Empire, Chapter 4, quote:

Of all the empires discussed in this book, the Habsburg Empire is the most tortuous, treacherous, and protean. There are even, as we shall see, difficulties and disputes about what exactly to call it, how to name it. But at the same time it is also — if such a thing is permitted of empires — the most lovable. All empires inspire a certain degree of nostalgia after their demise. In the case of the Habsburgs, this can border on the clinical.

End quote.

Let’s not forget also, in this context, that as messy and violent as the fall of the Roman Republic was, it birthed an empire that lasted five hundred years — fifteen hundred if you count its successor, the Eastern Empire, and well over eighteen hundred if you then also count the Holy Roman Empire, which you probably shouldn’t. All three of those empires made major contributions to Western Civilization.

I of course don’t want to see this election bring down our republic. In the sorry event that happens, though, good may yet come of it at last.

05 — Certifiable lunacy.     Browsing social media the other day, here was a post on X that returned an echo from my bosom. The poster is Michael Arouet, October 20th.

Most of the post is taken up by a headline from some unidentified news source above a picture of some generic ivy-walled old university. Headline: “Saying ‘the most qualified person should get the job’ is a microaggression, Britain’s top universities insist.” End headline. Above that is Michael Arouet’s comment, thus, quote:

Do you share my opinion that the Western world has collectively lost its mind and is on a straight line into misery and poverty?

End quote.

Judging by the three hundred-odd comments on that post, a great many of us do share Arouet’s opinion.

I share it myself. In crude polemic of course, words like “crazy,” “insane,” “lunacy,” and so on are thrown about very carelessly; but I think any person not infected by current mind viruses has sometimes found himself thinking that key institutions of Western Civilization, like the universities, have departed altogether from reason and sense.

I had found myself thinking that just before Arouet’s post. Last weekend the Mrs and I took a trip out of state to be at a friend’s birthday party. Also at the party was Jared Taylor, proprietor of American Renaissance, which describes itself as, quote, “the Internet’s premier race-realist site.” End quote. I’ve known Jared for more than twenty years, and it was pleasant to chat with him in person.

We asked after each other’s children. Jared has two daughters. The younger lives in England. He would like to go visit her, but he can’t. The U.K. authorities consider Jared to be such a threat to their nation’s peace and security, they will not give him a visa.

Jared, I will attest from my twenty years’ acquaintance, is a model American gentleman: generous, thoughtful, patriotic, exquisitely well-mannered, scrupulously law-abiding, well-educated, fluent in at least three languages. He wishes no harm to anyone; and, to the best of my knowledge, has never done any harm to anyone.

Jared’s opinions on race are those expressed by Abraham Lincoln when that President addressed a delegation of free blacks at the White House in August 1862. Lincoln was hoping to persuade the free blacks of the benefits of resettling themselves in Liberia or the Caribbean. Quote from Honest Abe.

You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.

End quote.

Yet Jared — this intelligent, calm American gentleman, is forbidden to enter the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile — day after day, month after month, year after year for seven years now, lawless invaders have been pouring in to the U.K. across the English Channel from France — nearly thirty thousand this year already. They are placed in pleasant hotels, given free meals, healthcare, smartphones, and plenty of opportunities to work untaxed.

All of these invaders are laughing at British law; a good proportion are gangsters and psychopaths. Stories about British citizens being assaulted, robbed, scammed, raped, or murdered by these so-called “asylum seekers” appear daily in the British press.

Yet a quiet, law-abiding American will not be granted a visa to visit his daughter.

Do I share Michael Arouet’s opinion that the Western world has collectively lost its mind and is on a straight line into misery and poverty? Yes, I do. How could I not?

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

Imprimis:  Some suspicious spirits are still surmising that Joe Biden is intent on hobbling Kamala Harris’ chances. It’s a bit late in the day for suggestions, but here’s one from me.

If our President really would like to undermine his Vice President, he could stage a replay of Dwight Eisenhower’s little gaffe in the 1960 campaign. At that point Richard Nixon, running for President, was in his eighth year as Ike’s Vice President. From John Farrell’s biography of Nixon, Chapter 15, quote:

But just before Labor Day, Nixon fell victim, once again, to Eisenhower’s thoughtlessness. When asked at a press conference to name an important contribution that Nixon had made to a presidential decision, Ike replied: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

End quote.

Item:  I’m going to quote from myself at some length, if you’ll permit me, kind listener. These quotes are from a piece I published in Chronicles magazine following the 2020 election. Quotes:

My strongest impression from the U.S.A.’s 2020 general election is that the process by which we record and count votes is an unholy mess, wide open to fraud. Counting was suspended for hours without explanation; great tranches of mail-in votes appeared out of nowhere; vote monitors were denied access; counting continued for days. We are a First World nation with a Third World voting system.

In fact that may even be a slight on the Third World. India, which has four times our population but only one-eighth our per capita GDP, with vast regional differences in language and religion, held a general election last year. The final tally of the 614 million votes cast began at 8 a.m. on May 23rd; results followed just hours later …

Australia, although a constitutional monarchy, has a federal structure not unlike our own. Elections there are supervised by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), a federal body. All registered candidates can nominate “scrutineers” to be present throughout the polling and counting at every voting place. Voting is compulsory, with fines for defaulters. Absentee voting is strictly limited; and the limits have not been much affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We don’t have to adopt all of Australia’s rules, but Australia does show us that a federal nation is quite capable of operating a system cleaner, more efficient, and far less prone to manipulation than our own. Congress should exercise its constitutional powers to federalize our elections.

End quotes.

Meanwhile, in the united chaos of electoral America, the federal Justice Department is suing the state of Virginia for denying noncitizens the vote.

And at the same time a judge in the state of Georgia has struck down a rule that requires that ballots be counted by hand, and two other rules that had to do with the certification of election results.

Not to worry, though. The election’s only eleven days away now. I’m sure the ballots of all who voted, citizens and noncitizens both, will all have been certified, counted, and collated just a few weeks after that — or perhaps a few months — and we shall be notified of the results.

Let India and Australia do as they please with their absurdly simple, unsophisticated voting systems. This is the U.S.A.: we do things properly here.

Item:  In my September 27th podcast I reported on an unfortunate slip of the tongue by Rich Lowry, my old boss at National Review, speaking on The Megyn Kelly Show. I hope Rich has fully recovered from that tiny embarrassment.

In case he hasn’t, here to cheer him up is a similar story from across the Pond, just to illustrate how easy it is to flub your syllables.

This was a routine news’n’chat show called Good Morning Britain. There are three people in the story. Two of them, Richard Madeley and Susanna Reid, are on-screen behind a desk, hosting the show. The third, not on-screen, is roving reporter Andi Peters. The topic the three of them were reporting on was the return to British TV of Barney the Dinosaur after 14 years absence.

Here’s the slip of the tongue, Richard Madeley speaking about his colleague Andi Peters. Listen carefully and catch it as it flies past; it’s at just four seconds into the clip.

[Clip:  (Female host laughing) … Back to the future. Speaking of dinosaurs, er, Andi Penis … Andi Peters, he’s been around almost as long as the dinosaurs have been gone.]

In the Radio Derb transcript I’ve given a link to the actual video. It’s worth going there just to watch Susanna Reid trying to control her face.

Item:  All enlightened people know of course that there are more than two sexes … I’m sorry: genders. There are more than two genders. Those who think otherwise are of course hateful people full of hate and are probably plotting acts of violence against persons who do not conform to their narrow, bigoted outlook.

We don’t often get to see the full list of genders, though. Michael Anton says he found a source listing sixty-three, but I can’t find it. I did recently, though come across a news story from Scotland listing twenty-four.

Scotland, although a component of the U.K., has its own partly autonomous government. As guidance to employees of that government when gathering information about sex and gender, quote, “for operational, statistical and research purposes,” end quote, the Scottish Government has issued a list of all 24 sexes … sorry! genders.

Here is that list, courtesy of the Daily Mail, October 21st.

• Cisgender
• Trans man
• Trans woman
• Non-binary
• Trans — not otherwise specified
• Agender
• Trans Masculine
• Trans feminine
• Genderfluid
• Genderqueer
• Questioning
• Intersex
• Assigned female at birth — not specified
• Assigned male at birth — not specified
• Pangender
• Bigender
• Autigender
• Androgynous
• Gender non-conforming
• Detransitioned
• Neutral
• Demigender — female
• Demigender — male
• Demigender — not otherwise specified

There you are, listener. As a conscientous good citizen you should commit that list to memory. And take care not to get the categories confused. “Genderfluid” refers to “a person who does not identify as having a single unchanging gender.”  “Genderqueer,” on the other hand, means “a gender identity that is other than male or female, or a combination.”

Keep it all clear in your mind so that, should you find yourself in the employment of the Scottish government, you will not suffer embarrassment or confusion when a Campbell or a Cameron, a Macpherson or MacLeod tells you his gender.

Wait a minute … his gender? His? Her? Xis? Their? Zeir? … Ah, the hell with it.

Item:  Two of the most outrageous, appalling miscarriages of American justice in recent years were the trials and convictions three years ago of the Brunswick Three: father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael and their neighbor, Roddie Bryan.

That’s “trials” in the plural, as the Brunswick Three were subjected to both state and federal prosecutions in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, in jeering indifference to the principle of Double Jeopardy. Arbery was black and the Brunswick Three are white; otherwise there would certainly not have been two trials, and probably not even one.

There are some fine details in the sentencing, but basically the Brunswick Three got two life sentences each. It was, I repeat, a gross violation of justice against three decent, upstanding citizens.

Thursday this week attorneys for the Three appeared before the state trial judge again to argue for a new trial. They appealed the federal verdicts back in March.

I don’t know what the chances are for these appeals. The original trials were conducted in late 2021 and early 2022 when our country was still in the poisonous shadow of the George Floyd hysteria. The prospects for sane rulings might be better now. I wouldn’t bet on it, though: the Romance of American Blackness — evil, leering whites assaulting meek, innocent blacks — is too deep ingrained in the national psyche.

Greg McMichaels’ wife Leigh maintains a website, mcmichaeltrial.com, with information about the case and updates about the Three. It also has a link to a GiveSendGo page where you can donate to the legal costs for the appeals. I urge you to do so, and to pray for the eventual freedom of these three innocent men.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all I have this week, listeners. Thank you for your time and attention, your encouragement and support.

I mentioned my math geekery back there, and my opinion that we math geeks are more careful with terms like “nonzero” and “nontrivial” than is the average citizen.

That got me thinking back to my early childhood, when I already found numbers more interesting than words. I developed particular fixations on the words “few” and “several.” I heard adults using them all the time, but without precision. Researching the matter and thinking deeply about it, I came to the conclusion that “few”  should really be a synonym for “seven,” while “several” should be a synonym for “sixteen.”

Those conclusions have somehow stuck with me across the decades. Still today, if I hear someone say “a few” when the assembly in question has more than seven or less than seven members, I felt uncomfortable about it …

And if you still don’t think my number fixation is a little weird — harmless, of course, but weird — let me just tell you that today, as I record this on October 25th 2024, today is my twenty-nine thousandth day on earth, counting the day of my birth as Day One. Happy 29,000 to me!

To play us out, a little Baroque music, one of Vivaldi’s violin concertos. Yes, Vivaldi did compose other stuff besides the Four Seasons. This is actually the closing allegro of Concerto No. 12 in E major, played here by the Concerto Italiano under Rinaldo Alessandrini.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.