This Week’s Show

Contents

• 02m57s Victory for the normies
• 08m59s Bonfire of the talking points
• 14m32s Window of opportunity for troublemakers
• 18m21s The squirrel election
• 25m37s Compulsory voting? Strewth!
• 32m50s Landscaper wars
• 34m49s Sci-Am editor speaks
• 38m03s The Amish vote
• 40m21s Signoff with the Chairman

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     Yeah yeah, I know: it’s a little early for Christmas. I just wanted to come in with jubilation, and there’s nothing quite as jubilant as the Hallelujah Chorus. That was the London Philharmonic conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, whom I once saw conduct in person.

This is of course your jubilantly genial host John Derbyshire, on the air with edition number 970 of Radio Derb. The previous 969 podcasts — audio and text transcripts both — are all archived at my personal website johnderbyshire.com. From the “Navigation” box on my home page just click on “Opinions” and then, at the “Opinions” page, click on “Radio Derb.” There they are, hours of happy listening.

As Master of the Metadata I can in fact tell you precisely how many hours: 621, plus 39 minutes and 22 seconds. Sit back and enjoy!

Also on my home page are instructions on how to support my work using snail mail, PayPal, or crypto, or via Zelle direct to my bank. To make a tax-deductible donation, earmark a check with my name and mail it to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. Thank you!

The occasion of my jubilation is of course the triumph of my party, the Republican Party, in this week’s general election. I shall open with some comments about that.

02 — Victory for the normies.     My main takeaway from this election was its normality. I think I’d been reading and hearing too many dire predictions of abnormal things that might happen, some of which I’ve aired here at Radio Derb.

Would the regime, smelling defeat, go shamelessly all-out on the vote-rigging, as they may have done in 2020? Or stage some foreign-policy or military crisis to make themselves look busy and competent?

Or would it perhaps be a really close finish, resulting in both sides bringing forth legions of lawyers to argue their case — “See? We won!” … “No, look at this! We won!” — with lawfare raging for weeks on end while the nation’s business languished in chaos. After all, lawfare is the Establishment’s first resort where anything involving Donald Trump is concerned.

In the event, nothing at all untoward happened. It was just a normal election. My lady and I went out to vote after dinner. There were no lines at all, hardly anyone else there voting, in fact. Our polling station closed at nine p.m.; this was about 8:30.

Then we went home and watched the early results on TV. I nodded off after a couple of hours and took myself to bed. Mrs Derbyshire, who’s a night owl and anyway much more interested in retail politics than I am, stayed up watching until well into Wednesday morning. Then she came up to bed, jabbed me awake with an elbow, and said: “Trump’s won.” I grunted my satisfaction then went right back to sleep.

Breakfast time I put on Fox News and, sure enough, Trump had a solid lead in the College and the GOP looked good to take the Senate. I spent Wednesday morning flipping between TV and X, occasionally chuckling with pleasure.

So just a normal election. Also, when demographic numbers started to come out, a norm-ie election, with us normies driving the result.

Traditionally in two-party systems there’s a “sandwich effect”: top and bottom against the middle. It seems to me the bottom layer of bread for the sandwich — poor underclasses with not much education — is thinner than it used to be while the top layer — well-off, well-educated voters — is thicker. The middle of the sandwich, though — non-rich, non-poor, home-owning, family-raising nine-to-five men and women, normies — is just as thick as ever, perhaps thicker, and swung the election to itself.

Both Presidential candidates behaved decently well, though Trump better than Harris. Trump gave a fine stirring speech at 2:30 Wednesday morning from his headquarters in Florida.

Harris supporters held a watch party Tuesday night at Howard University in D.C., Harris’ alma mater. ABC News tells us that, quote: “The evening started out with music pumping and crowds dancing,” end quote. Harris herself didn’t show up, though, even when it was clear she’d have to concede. The party broke up at last with disappointment and tears after an announcement that the concession speech would be given at 4pm Wednesday afternoon.

For that the candidate did show up, although half an hour late. The speech she gave was spirited and defiant. It was too long, but not obnoxious in any other way, and more coherent than most of her speeches.

So yes: a normal election, with a victory for the normies.

Too much normality can of course be dull, complacent, even oppressive at times, stifling originality and bold enterprise. These aren’t those times, though. The Great Awokening of the last dozen years has tried to break too many norms: men can have babies, crime should be legal, national borders are cruel, gasoline is poison, government should pay my debts, … we normies have had enough of it.

Time to re-establish some traditional, well-tried norms. Time for some normality.

03 — Bonfire of the talking points.     We should of course be magnanimous in victory and not gloat. That’s not easy, though. I spent all of Wednesday quietly gloating.

The key word there, however, is “quietly.” It would indeed be unseemly for Trump and his staff, or senior Republicans, or congresscritters elected on Trump’s coat-tails, to gloat. Public gloating is out of court. We private citizens, though, in the privacy of our chambers, scrolling through one of those online montages of lefties shrieking and wailing — Matt Walsh has put one together — can I think be excused.

And when we pause our private gloating and think about the election, it was indeed a big event — normal in how it played out, but more significant than usual. The word “historic” is not out of place.

One of our big political parties, the GOP, has gone through a major change in just a few years. It’s hardly recognizable. It seems like just yesterday that George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, were big Republican names, basking in the favor of their party.

Today they are wandering around dazed, bumping into the furniture. There must be something they have in common with Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, but you’d have to think hard to come up with it.

What about our other big party, the Democrats? They worked the identitarian handle successfully for two election cycles, giving us Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 — our first black President! They tried it again with Hillary Clinton in 2016 — our first female President! … but it flopped. The candidate was lame and unconvincing.

They tripped over their feet in 2020, desperately promoting congressional lifer and grifter Joe Biden as the Working Man’s Friend in order to outflank Bernie Sanders. In the chaos of the COVID pandemic, and likely assisted by some strategic vote-rigging, it worked.

Once in the White House, though, it turned out that Biden had no program at all other than to cancel, negate, annul, and reverse the policies of his predecessor. His administration was all negativity. We have spent four years in the World of Null-T.

This year, bereft of anything positive to offer the nation, the Democrats cranked the identitarian handle again. Kamala Harris — our first black female President! When it became clear that Harris’ head was just as empty as Joe Biden’s, the plan flopped.

Does the Democratic Party need a major re-alignment, as the Republicans did a few years ago? Is Kamala Harris their John McCain — in the same relation to identitarianism as McCain was to neoconnery? Is there a blue equivalent of Donald Trump out there somewhere who will lift the Democrat train back onto the electoral tracks?

I bet there is. And I bet that the Democrat talking points of today — a woman’s right to choose, the rich should pay their share, diversity is our strength! — will, a decade or two from now, sound as stale and implausible as George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” project and his promise to “disarm Iraq and free its people.” I predict a bonfire of the talking-points.

That’s politics. It doesn’t stand still. Your talking points today could be the other party’s ten years from now; although it’s much more likely they’ll be cold ashes in what’s left of the bonfire.

04 — Window of opportunity for troublemakers.     Presidential Inauguration Day is of course Monday, January 20th next year. That’s 73 days from today as I speak — ten and a half weeks. Congress convenes January 3rd, certifies the election result January 6th — we all know that date by now.

That’s a good span of time, long enough to give the President-elect time to pick his cabinet and put together some kind of starting program; long enough for new congresscritters to rearrange their personal affairs around spending time in D.C.

That’s all good and sensible, but those lame-duck weeks offer opportunities to trouble-makers.

There’s a batch of several thousand trouble-makers in southern Mexico as I speak, people from all over the world looking to break in to the U.S.A. across Mexico’s northern border in defiance of our laws. They’ve been penned down south there by the Mexican government this past few months to help the Biden-Harris administration look good.

Now there’s no longer any point in that, Mexico will open the gate of the pen and the invaders — sorry! the “asylum seekers” — will head north to our border, aiming to make the crossing before January 20th.

Another category of trouble-makers is the leadership of nations looking to take advantage of temporary American weakness. If Xi Jinping wants to blockade Taiwan, Vladimir Putin wants to get seriously nasty with Ukraine, Iran wants to kick over the traces somehow in West Asia, or North Korea in East Asia, here’s a window of opportunity.

Would the decision-makers in the Biden Administration respond firmly? They might, but there’s nothing in it for them. Three months from now they’ll be back at their ranches. Their main concern at this point is not to be held responsible if things go pear-shaped. Heck, let the new guys deal with it

And then there are domestic trouble-makers looking to pull off another 2016: another Russian-misinformation hoax, perhaps, or something more original, to preoccupy the new administration with defending itself against Special Prosecutors for a couple of years.

Might our so-called “national security services” — the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, … do you have any idea how many of them there are? — might they try something like that?

Of course they might. It worked last time, didn’t it? I wouldn’t be terrifically surprised to learn that right now, somewhere in the Swamp, 50 former intelligence officials are already licking their lips and unscrewing the caps of their pens.

05 — The squirrel election.     Five podcasts ago, on October 4th, I had a segment about squirrels — the first time I’ve ever turned my attention to those little critters, I think.

That was prescient of me. There is a case to be made that, if elections need a mascot from the animal kingdom, this week’s was the Squirrel Election.

The first hint of this came at breakfast time on Sunday, November 3rd. That was two days before what we were told was to be a historic election. I sat down to breakfast with my New York Post, America’s newspaper of record. What should I see totally dominating the front page? A squirrel!

The news story was about Mark Longo and his wife Daniela. The Longos made a bundle of money with pornographic pictures of themselves on social media. They used that money to buy a 350-acre property in upstate New York, from which they now run a nonprofit animal rescue operation currently hosting 300 animals.

Two of those animals were: a squirrel named P’Nut and a raccoon named Fred. P’Nut had been taken in seven years ago after his mother was hit by a car; Fred the raccoon was left at their front door four months ago.

P’Nut the squirrel lived full-time in his own room in the Longos’ house because, according to Mark Longo, quote: “He never developed the instincts to survive outside.” End quote. Fred the raccoon split his time between an outside enclosure and a room in the house.

Mark Longo is a master of social media: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, OnlyFans, and of course X. He’s used these outlets with great success to publicize P’Nut the squirrel, and to a lesser degree Fred the raccoon. P’Nut, says the New York Post, captured the hearts of three million social-media users.

I guess there are a lot of people out there with a lot of time on their hands. Whatever: it turns out that keeping squirrels and raccoons indoors is illegal in New York State. Someone ratted to state authorities about the Longos … Sorry: I mean, someone alerted the authorities.

Wednesday, October 30th, a convoy of vehicles from New York State Departments of Health and Environmental Conservation showed up at the Longos’ property with search warrants. Ten government agents spent five hours going through the house. P’Nut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon were of course found. They were taken away and euthanized.

That was the front page story on my Sunday New York Post. It was all over the other papers, too, and huge on social media. Elon Musk posted about it and Presidential candidate Donald Trump issued a statement. This was the big story all weekend, two days before the election.

Tuesday and Wednesday of course the election got everyone’s attention and P’Nut the squirrel — ex-squirrel, former squirrel, late squirrel, whatever — got correspondingly less coverage.

Then on Wednesday afternoon Kamala Harris came out on a stage at Howard University, her alma mater, to give her concession speech. She was half an hour late showing up, so that the assembled crowd and we TV viewers were staring at an empty stage as they waited. Not altogether empty, though. At one point, shortly before Kamala arrived, a squirrel scurried across the stage.

I’m not sure what the universe is trying to tell us here, but it’s something to do with squirrels. I therefore name this the Squirrel Election.

A brief footnote to all that. The story about P’Nut the squirrel in Sunday’s New York Post quotes Mark Longo thus, speaking about the government agents who ransacked his house, quote:

They asked my wife, who is of German descent, what her immigration status was. They asked if I had cameras in my house. They wouldn’t allow me to go to the bathroom without a police escort, who then checked the back of the toilet to see if I was hiding anything there.

End quote.

Why were the government goons asking about Mrs Longo’s immigration status? New York is a sanctuary state.

Possibly, in the lunacy of current immigration law non-enforcement, the goons were protecting their rear ends. If it had turned out that the lady is an illegal alien, they might have backed off and ended the raid for fear they’d be tagged as having persecuted a terrified, harmless “asylum seeker.”

And then perhaps whoever it was that reported the Longos to state authorities would have been prosecuted by New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt for “hate speech” …

Am I being too cynical? You can never be too cynical.

06 — Compulsory voting? Strewth! …     A couple of segments ago I spoke about a bonfire of the talking points. Well, there is one Democratic Party talking point we’ll be hearing a lot less frequently, at any rate until 2028.

This is the talking point about how the Electoral College system delivers unfair results, as when candidate X wins the popular vote but loses the College.

This has happened just five times in our nation’s history, most recently in 2016 and 2000. It didn’t happen at all in the entire twentieth century, so it’s not exactly a pressing issue; but it makes a good talking point when there’s some dead air to be filled in a speech or TV interview. Abolish the Electoral College!

Did it happen this time? Did Kamala Harris win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College? It’s highly unlikely.

We don’t yet have a full tally for the popular vote. When I looked just now, with 92 percent of the vote counted, Trump was up more than four million over Harris, a better than six percent margin. So for Harris to win the popular vote I will say with good confidence: no chance.

So perhaps we’ll hear no more about the need to abolish the Electoral College, at least until the next election.

And on the general topic of electoral mechanics, I’ve been getting emails from the Antipodes. They’re not directly related to our election this week, but I’ve found them interesting enough to be worth sharing with you.

In last week’s podcast, November 1st, I mentioned a conversation I’d had with my son on the subject of compulsory voting, like they have in Australia. It seemed to me to be a good idea, but my son disagreed, quote from him:

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.

End quote.

That got me two emails from listeners acquainted with Australia’s elections. Yes: Radio Derb’s scope is world-wide.

First email, quote:

In your latest Radio Derb you note your son’s concern that compulsory voting, as we have here in Australia, can lead to some undesirable outcomes.

There is an extra twist. We have preferential voting, which means that instead of placing an X next to our preferred candidate, we are required to number every candidate in order of preference. So people forced to vote, but with no interest in doing so, will often just number the candidates in the order in which they are listed on the ballot paper. This is called the Donkey Vote.

Our Electoral Commission decides randomly the order in which candidates are listed on the ballot paper. Thanks to the Donkey Vote it is estimated that gaining the top spot on the ballot paper can yield an extra 1 or 2 per cent of the vote. It is a matter of celebration for the candidate who gains this coveted position.

End quote.

[This correspondent links to several illustrative examples from Australia: here, here, here, and here. Also one from Ghana.]

Second email, quote:

Regarding compulsory voting, I’ve both voted and been a scrutineer in Australian elections.

You don’t technically have to vote. You have to turn up, get your name crossed off, and collect a ballot. It’s secret from there, so what can they do?

The main effect is to get unengaged citizens to a polling station to avoid the twenty-bucks fine. Being unengaged, they usually just vote for the one candidate they’ve heard of. Thus, sending out Christmas cards and nonsense like that can make a big difference. “Oh that’s the guy who sent me a Christmas card, I’ll vote for him!” I’ve literally heard this.

Blank ballots or donkey votes (voting 1-4 down the line) exist but are not that common. Those are mostly new migrants who don’t speak English.

Protest votes by people enraged at being forced to vote (or whatever) are extremely rare. Out of many thousands, I only saw one. The boxes were unnumbered and they’d scrawled “THE ALIENS ARE COMING” across the paper.

End quote,

Reading those emails, I come to the conclusion I always end up at after scrutinizing different voting systems: none of them is waterproof, nor even anything close to waterproof.

Here in the U.S.A. I’d be happy to settle for one-day, one-place voting with compulsory i.d. to be presented — and with of course sensible alternative arrangements for invalids, citizens overseas, and so on. What’s the argument against that?

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

Imprimis:  A follow-up here to a segment in my October Diary under the heading “Landscaper wars?”

In that segment I mentioned the number of landscapers at work leaf-blowing, grass-cutting, tree-trimming, etc. that I pass on my morning walk with my dog.

Then I wondered aloud whether, since landscaping is plainly a very competitive business here in the Long Island suburbs, there is ever sabotage — one firm trying to cut down the competition by disabling other firms’ equipment.

Of all the replies I got by email, this was the nearest thing to an affirmative, quote:

I do IT contracting and tech support for a landscaper … I don’t know if he was ever sabotaged, but based on the physical security and surveillance setup at his facility, he is certainly prepared for it. Maybe he has learned from experience and has grown to the point he can afford to protect his assets.

End quote.

The several other emails I got from people who know the landscaping business all said that the only illegality these firms worry about is theft of their equipment by employees, especially immigrant day-laborers.

Item:  I have posted regular laments for the decline of Scientific American magazine, which I read faithfully all through my late-teen and early-adult years. My most recent such lament was in the September 20th podcast, following that magazine’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for President.

In case you think I over-stated my case there, permit me to share with you some of the reactions to this week’s election result by Laura Helmuth, Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American.

I am taking them from a post at X by Michael Shermer, so I’ll preface them with his preface. Michael Shermer, tweet:

I wrote a monthly column for Scientific American for 18 years and could not have been prouder to have been part of that 150-year old standard-bearer of science and the search for truth. Those days are gone. Sci-Am is now a shill for far-left woke progressives. Here is the Editor-in-Chief.

End tweet.

There follow re-tweets that Michael has taken from Laura Helmuth, Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American. First re-tweet:

I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.

End tweet. Second re-tweet:

Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the Moon and back.

End tweet. Third retweet:

Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The moral arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself.

End re-tweets.

Thank you, Michael. Trust the science, listeners! Trust the science and trust Scientific American!

Item:  Finally, it’s not just in New York that the storm-troopers of state agencies are liable to kick down your door. It happens in Pennsylvania, too.

Back in January The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture stormed the farm of Amos Miller in Lancaster County. Miller, said the State, had violated federal rules on milk production, privately selling raw milk to willing customers.

Amos Miller claims religious reasons for ignoring the federal rules; his supporters, who are numerous, also argue that the rules are petty and unnecessary.

Wait a minute: Lancaster County? That’s full of Amish, right? Right. Amos Miller himself is Amish and his fellow Amish have been up in arms — metaphorically speaking, of course (the Amish are strict pacifists who refuse to serve in the military) — about the January raid, and about government overreach in general.

Pennsylvania, we’ve been hearing, was crucial to the result of this election. There are a lot of Amish there, so presumably their vote has likewise been crucial.

So how did the Amish vote? Overwhelmingly for Trump, we are told, although the exact numbers have been disputed.

The Amish have one of the highest fertility rates of any American demographic — somewhere between six to eight children per woman. If current fertility rates persist, the U.S.A. will be majority Amish three or four centuries from now. Politicians would be wise to keep an eye on their voting intentions …

08 — Signoff.     That’s all I have for you this election week, ladies and gents. Thank you as always for your time and attention, and for your emails and your encouragement.

Today’s podcast has completely exhausted my appetite for politics, so for signoff music I shall fall back with a grateful sigh on something merely seasonal. Here’s the Chairman of the Board.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.