This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00m00s Intro: Explaining what follows
• 03m34s 2020: COVID hysteria
• 11m38s 2016: Death of Fidel Castro
• 18m07s 2012: Americans, your government hates you
• 28m18s 2008: Blackety-black
• 34m09s 2004: Frosty the Candidate
• 39m25s Signoff

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Well, sort of …

This is, never fear, your regularly genial host John Derbyshire. You are listening to this, or reading the transcript, on or after the weekend of December 6th-7th-8th. As it happens, I shall be off the grid that weekend. As I am speaking right now, my wall calendar shows Sunday, December 1st, and it is not lying.

As on similar occasions before, in order that regular listeners not be disappointed I have put together a frozen meal of sound clips from the Radio Derb archives. I shall deliver the finished product to my gracious host, the Z-man, to be defrosted, heated up, and served to you at the usual time on Friday the 6th.

Also as usual in these situations, I have tried to select the following audio clips non-randomly, to illustate some theme. This coming week — I mean, the week coming to me; for you it has come and is now departing — this week marks one month since our general election. That will be my theme.

The following clips are from past editions of Radio Derb podcast in the month following the general elections of 2020, 2016, 2012, 2008, and 2004. They are not necessarily election-themed; I have cast my net wide. I believe, though, that each one is of its time.

Because I have pulled these clips direct from the archives going twenty years back, there will be some differences in sound quality. I apologize for that. I don’t think it will be any hindrance to your listening pleasure.

All our yesterdays, opined Macbeth, have lighted fools the way to dusty death. I don’t know about that: a genius can have just as dusty a death as a fool. Macbeth was somewhat under the weather when he said it, though, so we should make allowances. A quick jog through all our yesterdays can at any rate help give us some perspective on our todays.

02 — 2020: COVID hysteria.     I’ll begin with the most recent previous election year, 2020. What was Radio Derb opining about in early December of that year?

Many things, of course. Among them: the COVID hysteria, then in full bloom. Radio Derb, December 4th 2020.

[Pips.]

[Clip.] I mentioned the coronavirus back there, and what I called “the absurd over-reaction” to it. Let me enlarge on that.

You all know about the reaction, whether or not you agree with me that it’s been an over-reaction. You know about the lockdowns and quarantines, the shuttering of restaurants, bars, and gyms. You’ve probably seen some of the protests against it all, like the big one in New York City’s Staten Island midweek.

You’ve also seen the hypocrisy of our ruling class on flagrant display:

• Nancy Pelosi getting her hair done, maskless, at a salon that was supposed to be closed.
• Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, maskless, attending a birthday party at a pricey restaurant.
• Michael Hancock, Mayor of Denver, the day before Thanksgiving gave a public address to the people of that city urging them to stay home and greet family by Zoom for the holiday. Less than an hour later, he got on a plane and flew to Mississippi to spend the holiday with his wife and daughter, presumably maskless.
• Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago, attended a crowded street party to celebrate Joe Biden’s apparent victory. That was November 7th. A week later she shut down the whole city and told Chicagoans to cancel their Thanksgiving plans. She did wear a mask some of the time at the street party, but dropped it when yelling into a bullhorn.
• Steve Adler, Mayor of Austin, Texas, posted a video message to inhabitants of Austin November 9th saying, quote: “We need to stay home if you can … We need to keep the numbers down.” End quote. It turned out he recorded that message while on vacation in Mexico, whither he had flown on a private jet.Two days before flying to Mexico Adler had hosted a wedding and reception in Austin for his daughter and 20 guests — ten more than were allowed under his own city guidelines.
• Just one more, though I could fill the whole podcast with these. This is Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York. November 18th Cuomo told reporters that, quote: “My personal advice is you don’t have family gatherings — even for Thanksgiving.” End quote. Next day, the 19th, he advised New Yorkers that, quote: “This year, if you love someone, it is better and safer to stay away.” End quote.But then, the following Monday, Cuomo told a radio interview, quote: “The story is, my mom is going to come up and two of my girls,” end quote.To the Governor’s credit, after a fuss in the local media, he canceled the dinner. Although perhaps he flew to Mississippi to join Mayor Hancock and his family, I don’t know

I know how I feel about these hypocrite politicians. I’m just having trouble imagining what you think of them if you are the owner of a small business you spent years building up, that has now been put out of business by their crazy regulations.

Isn’t it all necessary, though? Wouldn’t a lot more people die without those regulations? How do I feel about the possibility that I might be one of them? Or someone I love?

This is where I find myself thinking something’s wrong with our deepest instincts. There is a point of balance to be found between carefree carry-on-as-normal and control-freak absolutism. We have not found that point.

Take traffic fatalities as a comparison. The U.S.A. suffers around 35,000 traffic fatalities a year. Every one is of course a heartbreaking tragedy to wives, husbands, parents, children, lovers and friends. Couldn’t we get the number down somewhat?

Sure we could. We could go for control-freak absolutism: implement a nationwide no-exceptions speed limit of fifteen miles per hour. That’s four times faster than walking: should be fast enough for anybody. Traffic fatalities would drop to a few hundred a year.

So why don’t we do this, and spare ourselves those tens of thousands of tragedies? Because Americans wouldn’t stand for it. The economy would be crippled: businesses can’t move goods at fifteen miles an hour. Even just ordinary citizens would be up in arms: “What, I have to spend four hours driving to check on my granny sixty miles away?”

Sure, we take sensible measures to reduce the toll: speed limits, vehicle inspections, seat-belt laws. In the final analysis, though, we accept that normal life includes some number of deaths, possibly deaths of ourselves or our loved ones. We like normal life, even if it costs many deaths. We don’t like control-freak absolutism, even if it saves many lives. We have found the point of balance.

In the case of the coronavirus, we haven’t. Instead of seeking for it in a reasonable way, we have defaulted to control-freak absolutism, along with all those displays of hypocrisy from the absolutists.

[Pips.]

03 — 2016: Death of Fidel Castro.     November 2016 was a good-news month: Donald Trump’s victory in the general election on the 9th, of course; and then, on the 25th, the death of Fidel Castro. Here was Radio Derb on December 2nd.

[Pips.]

[Clip.] The flow of bracing good news that began in the small hours of November 9th continued last week with the death of Fidel Castro.

This particular bit of news would have been even better if we’d heard that the tyrant had died slowly, screaming in agony, like so many of his victims; but one shouldn’t hope for too much. Let’s just be glad the old gangster is gone.

Reactions were predictable. Cubans who had fled from Castro’s communist dictatorship to the U.S.A. were dancing in the streets. Our own communists — people like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who honeymooned in Castro’s Cuba — along with those useful idiots kindly disposed towards communism, like Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau, expressed various levels of regret.

What’s predictable is not generally very interesting, though. It’s the un-predictable that always gets my attention. In that category I’d give pride of place to the article by Katie Hopkins in Tuesday’s Daily Mail.

Katie’s a sort of British Ann Coulter, only not quite so aggressive or intelligent. She’s argumentative, nationalist, contrarian, and irreverent towards PC pieties.

She went to Cuba to attend Castro’s funeral. She stood in line for hours, all through the night, with Cubans waiting to pay their respects, to walk past Castro’s memorial in Revolution Square.

She’s smart enough to know that events like this are stage-managed in a dictatorship, and that some people attend out of fear that not attending would bring punishment. She’s frank about the poverty, the lies, the fear, that pollute life under communism.

Still she is honest enough to see some genuine sorrow and pride. Quote:

Patriotism — manifest in their flag draped around shoulders, and precious currency — young women selling cakes, keen I take the notes home with me, to remind me of their country when I leave. Pride — in a small island, the David to America’s Goliath — who fearlessly prevails, against the odds.

And a strong sense of family, where people stand together, stay together, keep strong for each other to make things better.

There are a number of ways a human being can react to finding himself a native of one of these fly-blown Caribbean slum nations. One way — it would probably be my way — is to get the hell out of there to somewhere civilized. Another way, almost invariably futile, and quite likely fatal, too, is to take up the banner of freedom and justice and try to improve the place into a prosperous and open society.

And another is to adopt an attitude of indifference to what happens politically and flaunt a defiant patriotic pride that anything native is at least better than foreign domination. The canonical expression of this attitude was the Greek in Byron’s poem, living under Ottoman Turkish rule, and fondly remembering the ancient Greek ruler Polycrates, quote:

A tyrant; but our masters then
Were still, at least, our countrymen.

It’s good to be reminded that human nature is not totally in thrall to the Pleasure Principle. I learnt this early. My childhood was spent among adults who couldn’t stop talking wistfully, nostalgically about World War Two, when they’d lived on starvation rations, their civil liberties severely curtailed, while fleets of enemy planes dropped bombs on their cities every night and their menfolk were shipped to the killing fields overseas.

They remembered those days so fondly! “There was none of this political bickering,” they’d say. “We were a real country then, all pulling together …”

So yes: Castro was a monster of cruelty and depravity, who murdered thousands, including some who thought they were his friends; who lived high on the hog while his people went hungry; whose hatred of America almost caused a nuclear war. Good riddance to the swine.

There is more to be said, though. In human affairs, there is always more to be said. Thanks to Katie Hopkins for saying it.

[Pips.]

04 — 2012: Americans, your government hates you.     One problem with illegal immigration — not the biggest problem by any means, but one of the most long-standing — is that it uses up most of the oxygen in debates over immigration in general, with very little oxygen left over for discussing legal immigration … which badly needs discussing.

Here I was working the topic in mid-December 2012, a month after Barack Obama’s re-election.

[Pips.]

[Clip.]  It’s been a while since there was an immigration item in the news for me to froth and sputter at. This week delivered a couple. I’ll tackle the big one here and defer the lesser one to my closing miscellany.

This concerns the STEM Jobs Act, which passed the House of Representatives last Friday and came up before the Senate this week. STEM — it’s an acronym, S-T-E-M — stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. High points of the Act: It

1. Eliminates the so-called Diversity Visa program. This monumentally stupid program, another demon spawn of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, may he be suffering all the worst torments of Hell, set aside 55,000 permanent resident visas for people from all over the world selected by lottery. Around 50 percent of the winners come from Africa, 30 percent from Europe, the rest from Asia, Australasia, and elsewhere in the Western hemisphere.
2. Awards that same number, 55,000, of permanent resident visas to foreigners graduating with doctor’s or master’s degrees in STEM subjects from U.S. universities, if they agree to work in their STEM field for at least five years.
3. Contains provisions to speed up entry for spouses and children of permanent legal residents, among whom much the biggest category are Mexicans.

The STEM Jobs Act is a Republican initiative, an aspect of the Republican desire to feed cheap labor to their business sponsors and funders. There is no evidence whatever that the U.S.A. has any shortage of STEM graduates. What would count as evidence would be rising salaries in these fields. Salaries overall are in fact falling, largely because these fields have already been flooded with foreign workers.

It’s not hard for a foreign graduate to get a job offer, if he’s willing to work for a low salary. As foreignization depresses salaries, STEM careers become less appealing to Americans, who go to law school instead.

I watched the whole thing happen in my own former profession, commercial IT. As a mainframe programmer in the U.S.A. forty years ago, I worked with teams of American programmers, all of them citizens from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, with ancestries that were Irish or Italian, Anglo or German, Jewish or black. It was a good middle-class career for a citizen. Now foreignization has killed that opportunity, and Americans have responded in the rational way, by shunning computer science courses.

To illustrate the issue, cast your eye down the graduate-student roster for Caltech’s Department of Electrical Engineering. It’s reproduced on ee2.caltech.edu/people/gradstudents.html, and again in a December 4 post on VDARE.com.

There are 96 graduate students listed. I have no way of knowing how many of them are non-citizens, but just based on the names, I’m guessing it’s a lot. Sixteen of the 96 names are of obvious British, German, Italian, or other European origin — that’s one-sixth. The others are all Indian, Chinese, Korean, or Middle Eastern.

Assuming a further sixteen of these non-European names belong to citizens, that would leave two-thirds of the class as foreign, which I think is a fair guess.

So that’s the Republicans’ STEM Act. It’s crafted to balance out various interests: Eliminate the Diversity Lottery, which just swells Democrat voter rolls. Residence visas for STEM graduates, which satisfies the cheap labor lobbies that fund the GOP. Speed up chain migration for legal residents’ families, to do that “reaching out” to Hispanics that the Republicans are always being urged to do. (Mostly by their enemies, but they are too stupid to notice that.)

Congressional Democrats have their own immigration bill, and as is the silly custom now, it too has an acronym: it’s the BRAINS Act. That’s B-R-A-I-N-S, which stands for Benefits to Research and American Innovation through Nationality Statutes. It’s pretty much the same as the GOP bill, except it doesn’t eliminate the Diversity Lottery. The Dems love that Diversity Lottery because the people it brings in are mostly uneducated and low-skilled, which is to say, future Democrat voters. The BRAINS Act is the brainchild of New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer.

Opposing the STEM Act in the Senate on Wednesday, Schumer said the Republicans’ Act contained, quote, “anti-immigrant language,” presumably because it does not increase the number of immigrant visas. It awards 55,000 to the STEM graduates, remember, but ends the 55,000-visa Diversity Lottery. BRAINS, on the other hand, also has the new STEM visas but keeps the Lottery.

In fact neither STEM nor BRAINS is anti-immigrant. What they both are, and what all immigration talk is at the level of congressional or mainstream-media discussion, is anti-American.

When this country first put men in space in the 1960s, immigration levels had been exceptionally low for 40 years, thanks to the restrictive 1924 Act. There was no shortage of scientists and engineers. Today we have twice as many citizens, 315 million people, a big enough pool of talent to supply all the expertise we need in every field. Employers don’t want Americans, though, because foreigners will work for less money.

The whole message of immigration talk from both parties is that Americans are no good. Foreigners are so much brighter, more industrious, more entrepreneurial. Having priced low-skilled Americans out of the bottom part of the labor market by allowing illegal Mexicans to flood in, Congress is now hard at work pricing the skilled middle-class out of their jobs with insults like the STEM and BRAINS Acts.

Here’s my comprehensive — yes!, comprehensive — solution, which I am sure will be enthusiastically received by both parties in Congress: the Systematically Crush America’s Majority Act, known for short as the SCAM Act.

[Pips.]

Just a footnote to that: So far as I can discover, neither the STEM Act nor the BRAINS Act attained legislative consummation. The SCAM Act, however, was approved unanimously by both houses of Congress, and remains in force to this day.

05 — 2008: Blackety-black.     The 2008 Presidential election featured two U.S. Senators: John McCain of Arizona for the Republicans, Barack Obama of Illinois for the Democrats. Obama got an easy win and the U.S.A. had its first black President-elect.

Obama’s blackness naturally got a lot of attention. Here it was on November 7th getting Radio Derb’s attention.

[Pips.]

[Clip.]  Meanwhile, our President-Elect. There is a great deal to say about the man, but I’m going to have four years to say it in, so let’s just take it one bite-size piece at a time.

Here, mainly just to get it out of the way, I’m going to pass some remarks on the fact of his being our first black President — specifically, on the role that Obama’s blackness played in getting him elected.

The main thing to be said here is that being black was a big help to him. For sheer starting advantages in life, there is nothing in the world better than being a smart, self-disciplined black person in America today. Every company, every department of every university, every government office from the federal to the municipal, every sports team, every labor union, every political party, is desperate, is frantic, to assert its “diversity” credentials.

Political parties especially. While Obama was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he was invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention. That’s what put Obama on the national stage. Now, what are the chances for an undistinguished state legislator from a middling state — no offense there to the good people of Illinois — who is running for the U.S. Senate, being asked to speak at a Presidential convention?

I don’t think I’m being controversial if I say that for a black person, the chances are very good; for a white woman, much less good, and for a white man, close to zero.

I’m not passing any judgment here, that’s just the way things are. Not just for Democrats, either: the thing I just said would in fact be even truer at a GOP convention.

Let’s face it, we are a race-obsessed nation. In the past, black Americans who were smart and capable were held back because of their race. Now, having recognized the injustice of that, we seek out capable black Americans and give them every possible assist. By acting like this we suppose that we are asserting our nation’s ideals of justice, equality, human dignity, and individual worth.

The supposition is mistaken in my opinion. Those ideals would be better asserted by treating everyone the same, without preference.

I also think there is dishonesty in our actions. By practicing this kind of favoritism, white Americans get the gift of cheap grace. That is, we get ourselves a license to avoid thinking about the really tricky race issues, like black criminality and academic achievement gaps.

Here’s a statistic from the DoJ website: Of black males in the U.S.A., one in 22 was in federal or state prisons at the end of June ’07; for white males, it was one in 130.

The “official” reason for that six-to-one disparity is “racism.” But, excuse me, we just elected a black President. Yet we’re still so racist we incarcerate black men at six times the rate of white men?

But hey, why think about this difficult stuff? It makes our heads hurt. It makes us feel uncomfortable, and anyway no-one has a clue what to do about it, so what’s the point? Voting a black guy into political office is so much easier! You just have to pull a lever! Cheap grace, you see?

There is no denying the U.S.A. has made great progress in the matter of race, as President Elect Obama illustrates. For all the favoritism, we are closer to being a meritocracy now than we were a hundred years ago.

In the matter of honesty about race, though, I don’t think we have much to boast about. It may even be that we have bought our progress at the cost of some honesty. I dunno, ask your grandpa.

[Pips.]

06 — 2004: Frosty the Candidate.     The 2004 general election was not one of the more exciting kind, but it had points of interest.

The Presidential candidates were incumbent President George W. Bush for the Republican Party and John Kerry, junior Senator from Massachusetts, for the Democrats. Radio Derb favored Bush, although with many reservations, especially about his War on Terror, concerning which the word “quagmire” was already in widespread use.

Where the war was concerned, Kerry actually shared those reservations. I didn’t agree with him about much else, though; and there was a cold, shifty quality about the way he presented himself and his positions that turned me off.

To be honest, though unfair, Kerry’s great wealth was also a turnoff. He was the richest man in the Senate, a trust fund kid in his own right who’d never had a regular job or run a business, married to a super-wealthy heiress in her own right.

Sure, the GOP candidate came from wealth, too; but he’d run an oil company and helped to run a baseball team. And, although again unfairly, a rich Texan and a rich guy from Massachusetts give off different vibes.

The Swift boat controversy didn’t help Kerry. A Swift boat is a small, light, fast vessel used for coastal and river patrols. Kerry had served as a naval officer on these boats in Vietnam in the late 1960s. He’d been wounded more than once and been awarded five combat medals for his service.

Once discharged and back in the U.S.A., though, he’d joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War and demonstrated with them, on one occasion publicly throwing away his medals. That ticked off a lot of vets.

Thirty years later, Kerry running for President in 2004, a group of Swift boat veterans organized against him, challenging the legitimacy of his medals. So far as I can figure, the medals were legitimate, but in late 2004 this was still a talking point.

In December 2004, after his defeat in the November election, Radio Derb passed comment on John Kerry. This being the Christmas season with Christmas songs in the air, I thought I’d pass my comment musically. I worked out appropriate lyrics to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman.”

Unable to find anyone willing to accompany me, I delivered the song over the airwaves a cappella. Here it is: “Frosty the Candidate.” Please do not email in to tell me I have a lousy singing voice; I’m well aware of the fact.

[Pips.]

[Clip.]  Frosty the candidate
Was a chilly kind of soul.
With his lantern jaw
And his pompadour,
And his icy self-control.

Frosty the candidate
Was a decorated vet.
With a Senate seat
Where he couldn’t be beat,
He just looked like a safe bet.

There must have been some magic
In the way that he campaigned;
For when it came convention time,
Nomination he’d attained!

Frosty the candidate
Came on strong in the debates;
And out on the trail
Seemed he couldn’t fail
To swing some crucial states.

But then his wartime comrades,
Feeling cheated and betrayed,
Showed us how he’d lied,
Slandered men who’d died,
In that long-ago decade.

Frosty the candidate
Started slipping in the polls.
By election night
He’d slipped out of sight,
With his story full of holes.

Thumpety thump thump,
Thumpety thump thump,
Look at Frosty go.
Thumpety thump thump,
Thumpety thump thump,
Goodbye, gigolo!

[Pips.]

07 — Signoff.     There you are, ladies and gentlemen: five of our country’s Presidential election cycles, as seen by Radio Derb. Thank you for listening. I shall be back at the microphone next Friday, so the December 13th Radio Derb will be farm-fresh and up-to-date.

In the meantime please allow my weekly reminder that my home page at www.johnderbyshire.com has full instructions on how to support my work using snail mail, PayPal, or crypto, or via Zelle direct to my bank. You can also make a tax-deductible donation by mailing a check, earmarked with my name, to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. Thank you!