This Week’s Show

Contents

• 02m09s Is the West waking up?
• 12m48s The Hanns Johst reflex
• 20m12s America’s can’t-dos
• 29m11s What’s up with Koreans?
• 32m12s New Yorkers don’t vote
• 34m12s Garbagegate
• 37m09s Trick-or-treat fades
• 39m23s Signoff: Halloween Hank

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. That was a snippet of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your awesomely genial host John Derbyshire with news of the hour.

Nothing much of any interest is happening here in the U.S.A. right now, so this week’s podcast will lean heavily on foreign topics. And no, this does not mean that Radio Derb is shedding our isolationist convictions. We remain as opposed as ever to foreign entanglements. Events beyond our shores, though, have an abstract interest of their own, and may have things to teach us.

So let’s go scanning the world. Before we do, though, let me direct you once again to my personal website johnderbyshire.com where, along with much fascinating reading and listening matter — including, just posted, my October Diary — you will find instructions on how to support me 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 as always for your encouragement.

02 — Is the West waking up?     A major problem facing Western civilization for more than a decade now has been mass illegal immigration. North America and Europe have been worst affected.

This is a topic it’s hard to be optimistic about, as good news has too often been followed by bad news. That pattern goes at least as far back as 1986, when Ronald Reagan signed IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of that year, which provided amnesty for illegal aliens who’d lived in the U.S.A. for at least five years, balanced by sanctions on employers who knowingly hired illegals. The amnesty happened; the employer sanctions didn’t.

It’s been like that all over. Thirty years on from IRCA, in 2016, voters in the U.K. took their country out of the European Union, telling pollsters that a major motivation was to regain control of their nation’s borders. The result was that border control collapsed completely, with tens of thousands of illegals pouring in every year since.

As I said, it’s hard to be optimistic. There are powerful forces driving mass illegal immigration: cheap-labor business lobbies, politicians looking for grateful immigrant voters, world-saver human rights agencies, immigration lawyers’ cartels, left-wing judges — kritarchs — dominating the courts, …

So I say the following thing cautiously, ready to be disappointed yet again, but I say it anyway: There are signs all over the West that citizens are waking up, in numbers big enough that the politicians are reluctantly, grudgingly paying attention.

Let me just run through some news stories I’ve bookmarked the past month. I haven’t followed up on all of them diligently and it’s possible there have already been reversals; but the increasing frequency of these stories all by itself suggest the conclusion I’ve drawn: citizens of the West are waking up.

• Opening paragraph from an Associated Press story, October 25th, quote: “The hard-right Dutch government announced unprecedented measures Friday aimed at reining in migration, including a re-introduction of border checks, making the Netherlands the latest European nation to take a hardline stance against migration as anti-foreigner sentiment surges throughout much of the continent.” End quote.
• October 9th Sweden — Sweden! — deported 22 Iraqis back to Baghdad. The news report says these were just rejected asylum applications, unrelated to any criminal activity. Sweden!
• Poland has elections in a few months and the political parties are telling voters their policies. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has proposed ending the right to asylum.There’s a caution we should add when talking about immigration politics in Eastern Europe. Their illegal immigrants aren’t coming in across the Mediterranean, not directly anyway; they’re mostly coming from further east, from Ukraine and Belarus.A lot are Third Worlders none the less , just taking a roundabout route. Quote from a Turkish news source, quote: “Most applications (60 percent) came from citizens of Ukraine and Belarus. The largest rise was in people from African countries, including Somalia, as well as the Middle East, including Syria.” End quote.
• Italy’s conservative government worked out a deal with Albania to ship migrants from safe countries there, to wait in detention camps for decisions on their status. Twelve illegals from Egypt and Bangladesh were actually shipped to the camp in Albania two weeks ago.Italy’s leftist judiciary, however, overruled the government on the grounds that Egypt and Bangladesh are not safe. The twelve illegals are now back in Italy. The elected government and the unelected kritarchs are locked in battle over the issue.
• Austria had an election at the end of September. The populist-conservative Freedom Party won the most votes with more than 29 percent.This is one of those multi-party parliamentary systems where like-minded parties have to form a coalition to get a government up and running. None of the other parties wants to play with the Freedom Party, so they won’t be in government.It’s plain, though, that widespread resentment about immigration was a big factor in the party’s success. Quote from EuroNews: “In its election program, titled ‘Fortress Austria,’ the Freedom Party calls for ‘remigration of uninvited foreigners,’ achieving a more ‘homogeneous’ nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.” End quote.
• Mid-October, ahead of the European Council summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen urged European leaders to consider the development of, quote, “return hubs outside the EU,” end quote. That means detention camps in third countries, like the one Italy set up in Albania, or the ones that Britain’s last government wanted to set up in Rwanda, where illegals could be incarcerated while their cases were decided.
• The European Union has its own parliament, and the EU Parliament has to pass budget resolutions. They failed to do so October 23rd, for interesting reasons.The budget resolution they were being asked to vote on included amendments to increase funding for border security and Albania-style deportation centresThat led to some nasty infighting. The amendments actually passed, but the budget resolution overall was voted down because it cost too much.
• Meanwhile, here on our own continent, headline from Bloomberg.com: “Support for Immigration in Canada Plunges to Lowest in Decades.” Sample quote: “Nearly six in 10 people now agree ‘there’s too much immigration to Canada,’ according to the country’s longest-running survey on the topic by the Environics Institute. It’s the first time since 1998 that this view is held by a clear majority, and a stark shift from favorable opinion over the past two decades.” End quote.

I repeat my caution about the need for proper pessimism here, but that’s interesting stuff.

The apparent acceptance of the idea of detention centers in third countries — what President Ursula von der Leyen calls “return hubs” — is particularly encouraging.

The Euros — and perhaps we North Americans, too — might speed up the turnover in those “return hubs” by casting the nets a bit wider than Albania and Rwanda. Why not send illegals to Haiti or the Congo to await decisions on their court cases? Why not Somalia or Sudan?

Hey, I’ve got an even better idea: why not North Korea?

03 — The Hanns Johst reflex.     You want Nazis? I got Nazis. Here’s one: Hanns Johst, an actual Nazi, a German poet and playwright who joined the party in 1932. One of his plays was staged in 1933 to celebrate Hitler becoming Chancellor of Germany.

The only reason for non-German-speakers to remember Hanns Johst is a line from that play, which has been endlessly mis-quoted in translation. The line is, actual quote: “Wenn ich ‘Kultur’ höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!”

Translation: “When I hear ‘culture’ … I unsafe my Browning!” end actual translation. He means a Browning pistol, of course. To unsafe it, you release the safety catch. Usual mis-translation, quote: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.”

[Added when archiving:  James Fulford, my handgun advisor, tells me that: “I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure Johst would have meant one of these 1910 pocket pistols rather than the big 1935 the British and Canadian armies used.” Thank you, Sir.]

That quote, or mis-quote, is a popular way to put down the kind of person who’s not interested in anything mentally or spiritually improving, only in force and violence. A great many Nazis were like that; so, of course, were and are a great many non-Nazis. It’s a human type.

I’m not like that and I try to avoid people who are. I like culture, at any rate in the sense of the English word: the German one carries a bit more semantic load.

I’ll confess, though, that Johst’s famous line did come to mind when I was reading this piece at the Daily Wire, October 30th. Headline: “UN Non-Profits Pave The Way For Permanent Mass Migration.”

The writer here is Todd Bensman, a seasoned reporter from the Center for Immigration Studies who knows the immigration topic forwards, backwards, and sideways. I have watched him speak in person, giving clear, detailed answers through a long Q&A session.

Here, in Todd’s own words, is what he’s writing about in this piece, quote:

The dozens of migration-oriented UN agencies and private international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have already plowed hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. tax money into constructing a permanent, incentivizing safety net of aid way stations for migrants. Way stations that stretch for thousands of miles along the migration routes from South America to the U.S. border, all built over the last nearly four years of President Joe Biden’s administration.

End quote.

Yes, listeners: Our money, your tax dollars and mine, have since 2021 been sluicing through the U.S. State Department as grants and spending contributions to the UNHCR, the IOM, UNICEF, and dozens of private, mostly religious-based NGOs to build … Wait, sorry: did I lose you there among the abbreviations? Sorry. Here’s a guide:

• UNHCR:  United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
• IOM:  United Nations International Organization for Migration.
• UNICEF:  United Nations Children’s Fund.
• NGO:  Non-Governmental Organization. These are theoretically private agencies, most with reassuringly-religious names, but heavily loaded up with government money, which is to say taxpayers’ money. Bensman names two NGOs in this Daily Wire article, both religious: Cadena, a Spanish-language Jewish NGO, and ADRA, an agency run by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

So … what was I saying? Yes: Our money, your tax dollars and mine, are sluicing through the U.S. State Department as grants and spending contributions to the UNHCR, the IOM, UNICEF, and dozens of NGOs to build a highway thousands of miles long from South America to the U.S. border, stocked with way stations to provide, quote, “cash cards, cash in envelopes, food, vouchers for onward travel and lodging, medical treatment, pharmaceuticals, legal counseling and much more,” end quote.

Listeners, I urge you to read Todd Bensman’s article — there’s a link in the transcript of this podcast. If you read it all the way through you will have acquired a Hanns Johst reflex like mine.

When you next hear the phrase “United Nations” or the word “non-profit” or one of those abbreviations like “NGO” or “UNHCR” or “IOM,” or even perhaps the word “humanitarian,” you will experience a powerful urge to reach for your gun.

04 — America’s can’t-dos.     I was of course just screwing with you back there in my intro when I said that nothing much of any interest is happening here in the U.S.A. right now. There’s an election happening in four days time as I record this.

People keep asking me what the result will be. I honestly have no clue. Donald Trump and his people seem optimistic. Indeed, Trump himself seems to be thoroughly enjoying the campaign. He’s out there addressing huge crowds, dressing up as this and that, cracking jokes, having the time of his life apparently. Good luck to him! He’s got my vote.

Well, actually he hasn’t got my vote yet. Hoping to avoid the lines on November 5th, my lady and I tried for early voting on Tuesday this week. I’d mis-read the schedule, though; we went at 6 p.m. but the polling place had closed at 3.

My reaction was: Serves us right. I don’t like the idea of early voting; should have stuck to my principles.

We’ll vote next Tuesday instead. Lines be damned: voting should take place on one day, in one location. Show up; show your i.d. as that of a registered citizen on the voter rolls; cast your vote.

I’m an American, twenty-two years a citizen. I count myself lucky to be one, and don’t wish to be anything else. I pay my taxes and salute the flag; my son served four years with the U.S. Army.

I love my country, but I reserve the right to criticize. We do most things right, but there are two things we don’t do right: voting, and foreign policy.

We are still, I do believe, the can-do nation — as well we should be, having so many people blessed with so much liberty. Those two things, though, are America’s can’t-dos, our two zones of incompetence.

On voting, there are regular reminders as to how incompetent we are. This week’s reminder: the U.S. Supreme Court had to step in so that the State of Virginia could purge 1,600 noncitizens from its voter rolls.

Why were there 1,600 noncitizens on the voter rolls? Beats me; but the kritarchs of the Virginia State judiciary were fine with them being there and had ordered the Governor to stop trying to purge them. That’s why the Supremes came in.

Our voting system’s a mess, even when you get the date and time right … which, OK, I didn’t. Why should we not have one day, one place voting, citizens only? Make it a public holiday.

Yeah, yeah: Some people have to work the day — cops, doctors, er … election officers. Some people are hospitalized, or can’t make it to the polling place for other reasons. Some are out of the country, serving in our military or diplomatic services, or just employed abroad. It’s not that hard to organize exceptions. There’s no reason why citizens not in those categories should be able to vote early or by mail.

You hear it said that the Constitution is at fault. Article I, Section 4, for example: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof …” OK, but it goes on to say that Congress can make or alter the rules. The Constitution can in any case be amended, and has been, notably to allow for the election of Senators.

The whole system for federal voting needs to be tightened up and the rules, duh, federalized. There are plenty of foreign models we could look to for inspiration; just last week I spoke at length about India and Australia.

(In the matter of Australia, I mentioned there that they have compulsory voting, with fines for defaulters. My son pointed out that this may not be a great idea. A lot of people don’t want to vote. If you make them, they will mess up the ballot paper, or vote for the craziest fringe candidate, or just vote at random. He has a point; but this is the kind of thing we could resolve by public discussion as part of the federalizing process. Let’s at least get the process under way.)

I mentioned that there are two things we don’t do right: voting and foreign policy. However hard it is to fix voting, fixing foreign policy will be harder.

A big, populous, resource-rich, well-educated nation like ours, safe between two oceans and with no challenging neighbor nations, should have thoroughly mastered the art of minding its own business.

We can’t of course totally ignore the rest of the world. There are trade routes and space satellites to be protected, matters of common interest in the management of diseases, industrial espionage, and so on.

Personally, I’d also allow a certain, carefully-calibrated measure of favoritism towards other nations that share our cultural roots, especially in the Anglosphere; but I’m not sure that careful calibration is a thing our foreign-policy establishment is capable of.

In any case those are not the issues that have been driving our foreign policy this past thirty years. Some departure from the mind-our-own-business ideal was excusable during the Cold War; but management of our foreign relations since then has been disastrous. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, outsourcing jobs to China and India, making an enemy of Russia all over again, … catastrophes all.

So there are my hopes for this election result: a rational system of federal voting, a rational foreign policy centered on minding our own business. I doubt we shall get either; but a Trump administration will at least point us in the right direction, and perhaps move us a few inches forward in that direction.

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

Imprimis:  Back there I suggested detention centers in North Korea for illegal aliens. That prompts the question: What the heck is the matter with Koreans?

It’s not just the Norks, it’s the other half of Korea, too. Here is a posting on X, echoing others I’ve seen. Tweet:

South Korea has such cursed vibes. Everyone is working themselves to death and a majority of people say the country is hell. The politics is literally incels vs feminazis. Birthrate below 1.0. I can see why they are obsessed with zombie movies.

End tweet.

The poster there means “total fertility rate,” not “birthrate.” The CIA World Factbook actually gives South Korea a total fertility rate 1.12 children per woman, ranking it as 226 out of 227 nations, ahead only of Taiwan. Still, those two, along with Singapore, are demographers’ favorite bets for Nations Soon to Go Extinct.

It’s a shame. Remember Solzhenitsyn’s great Nobel Prize speech. Quote:

The disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

End quote.

I’ve never been to Korea — well, no more than a few yards in — and haven’t had much acquaintance with Koreans. And sure: North Korea is a horror show, and likely a menace to world peace. Korea, though, at least as currently embodied by South Korea, is a distinctive nation with a history, a culture, a language, and a cuisine worth preserving. In that Solzhenitsyn spirit, I’d hate to see it go extinct.

Item:  A footnote on voting. The topic here: Why is New York City so ill-governed? Last year, for example, the city got the How Many Stops Act, which forces city cops to fill out detailed paperwork on every encounter with members of the public — not just crime suspects, everyone. If I ask a cop what time of day it is, he has to write me up. This, in a city drastically short of police officers — even shorter after they passed that Act than it had been before.

New York is full of idiocies like that. Why? Because the City Council, which makes the by-laws, is a nest of crazy wokesters.

But why is that? Because New Yorkers don’t vote, that’s why. Betsy McCaughey, writing in the New York Post, October 25th, quote:

In last year’s local elections, when all 51 council seats were up for grabs, voter turnout was a dismal 7.2 percent for the primaries and 12.8 percent in the general election.

End quote.

So even in the general, only one voter in eight showed up at the polls.

I take my son’s point about the downsides of compulsory voting, but could the results really be worse than this?

Item:  I keep telling you: Snobs and slobs, snobs versus slobs, that’s what our politics comes down to. None other than the President himself let the mask slip Tuesday on a virtual campaign call with Voto Latino, a Hispanic activist outfit.

This was after a comedian I’d never heard of, hired to speak at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden bash last weekend, had called Puerto Rico a, quote, “floating island of garbage,” end quote.

The President pretended to be outraged about that.

[Clip:  The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.]

That got added to the charge sheet of ruling-class snobbery towards us slobs along with Barack Obama’s “bitter clingers” and Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.”

The White House made a clumsy attempt to detoxify it. In the transcript released by the White House press office, an apostrophe was inserted between the “r” and the “s” at the end of “supporters.” That made it read as though the garbage referred to belonged to some supporter of Trump, presumably the offending comedian. The apostrophe had not been present in the original transcript submitted by White House stenographers.

This developed into a big story, inevitably tagged as “Garbagegate.” Who authorized the insertion of the apostrophe? Was that what the President meant, or not? Which version goes to the National Archives, the one with the apostrophe or the one without?

I’ve watched the clip several times, and played the sound over at various speeds, listening carefully to the President’s intonation. He was calling us, Trump’s supporters, garbage. There’s no reasonable doubt about it. And why wouldn’t he? That’s how the snobs feel about us slobs.

Item:  Yesterday, Thursday, was Halloween. My grandson, two years and nine months old, was taken out by his Mom for his first trick-or-treating. Reports are, he enjoyed himself.

Little Mikey may be one of a dwindling few, though. We’ve been living here in the outer-outer suburbs of New York for 32 years now. Every year at Halloween we fill a bowl with candy to hand out to trick-or-treaters who come calling.

Lately the number of callers has fallen off steeply. Last year we got just one, although it was three or four kids in charge of an adult. This year … none. The bowl of Halloween candy sits there unmolested.

I’m seeing reports of the same on social media. Here’s one from Jacob Shell, Geography Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, tweet:

This was my first Halloween in the suburbs and I bought like 40 dollars of candy thinking it was going to be like what I remember from late 80s childhood with dozens of groups of kids out, and instead like 3 small groups showed up, mostly helicopter parents running the operation.

End tweet.

Are we de-socializing? Is childhood no longer a matter of having fun with other kids, but instead just a solitude of sitting at home diddling with a smartphone? Not for my grandson, it won’t be, not while I can do anything about it.

06 — Signoff.     That’s all, listeners. Thank you for your time and attention, and for your continuing support.

The trick-or-treat tradition may be sliding into oblivion, but Halloween house and garden decorations are still going strong. My suburban street is well furnished with ghouls, skeletons, monsters, evil-grinning jack-o’-lanterns, and similar reminders of what, for the rest of the year, we’d rather not be reminded of. This week’s signoff music is in that Halloween tradition.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.