This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m51s Drone panic
• 06m55s This land is their land
• 11m05s End student visas
• 16m28s Zero-based immigration policy
• 21m43s Chauvin gets a break
• 24m22s How they spend our money
• 26m14s VDARE’s Christmas message
• 26m58s Signoff: Not a Christmas song?

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air for Christmas! That was the voice of the great American soprano Leontyne Price giving us Hark! The Herald Angels Sing; this is the voice of your suitably genial host John Derbyshire with reflections and commentary on the week’s news.

First, those mysterious drones.

02 — Drone panic.     From early December on, my local news media here in New York were running stories about mysterious lights hovering above night-time New Jersey. The lights were generally described as coming from “drones,” but nobody seemed to know for certain just what they were. If the authorities — the FBI, Homeland Security, the Federal Aviation Administration — if they knew, they weren’t telling us.

I assumed it was just a hysteria of the sort our media are drone to … sorry: I mean prone to in periods when there isn’t much political news — for example, when one federal administration is packing up to make way for a new one. Drones were the new Qanon, another hysteria I could never summon up any interest in.

It didn’t help that the drones seemed mainly to be seen over New Jersey. To seasoned New Yorkers like your genial host, New Jerseyans are the dimwitted country cousins; like the Irish are to the English, or New Zealanders to Australians. Do you think 180 is a high IQ? You do? What, for the whole of New Jersey? (ta-da!) And so on. That reality-TV show Jersey Shore of course reinforced the stereotype.

Last Saturday conspiracy theorists finally caught up with the drone business. It was, they told us, the opening phase of Project Blue Beam. That’s a conspiracy theory cooked up thirty years ago by a Canadian wacko, alleging a covert operation by global elites to establish a totalitarian world government by orchestrating fake celestial or supernatural events using advanced technology.

Among those on board with that were Roseanne Barr, Adam Kinzinger, Alex Jones, and Charlie Kirk — a pretty solid bench of tinfoil-hat conspiracizers, lacking only Tucker Carlson and RFK, Jr.

Sane people pointed out that with most of the sightings near military bases, it wasn’t likely these drones were of foreign nationality, or we would have shot them down. Other sane people said they might not be drones at all, just small manned aircraft displaying the lights that are required in U.S. airspace.

The question vexing most of us was: Why don’t the feds tell us what’s going on? With all their surveillance technology, they surely know. Donald Trump voiced that vexation on Monday at a press conference in Palm Beach — his first presser as President-Elect. Quote:

The government knows what is happening. For some reason, they don’t want to comment. And I think they’d be better off saying what it is our military knows and our president knows.

End quote.

I didn’t see much mystery myself. With five weeks to Trump’s inauguration, I assumed that Biden and his people were too busy packing their boxes to bother with minor responsibilities like telling us what they know about something.

Then the following day, Tuesday, the FBI, FAA, Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security said in a joint statement that, quote:

We assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones.

End quote.

So that was the end of the drone panic, right? Wrong!

03 — This land is their land.     While Jersey Girls had been worrying that voyeurs might be using drones to record their extracurricular activities and Roseanne Barr was moving stuff into her fallout shelter in preparation for the Apocalypse, the New York Post had been gathering information on drone sightings elsewhere. Quote from that organ, December 18th, quote:

At least 17 military bases adjacent to Chinese-owned farmland across the US have experienced a rash of drone sightings in recent weeks, The Post has learned.

Mysterious drones have been reported near military bases in Hawaii and by installations in Utah, California, Maine and Florida — among other facilities scattered throughout the country.

The Post previously identified 19 military bases that lie close to farmland bought up by Chinese-owned companies — a situation that has worried China analysts, who feared the Communist country would use the land to spy on US military operations.

End quote.

Further down the report we learn that as of year-end 2022, Chinese investors owned 350 thousand acres of US farmland — that’s 546 square miles — as of December 31, 2022. Just one guy, billionaire and Chinese Communist Party member Chén Tiānqiáo is the second-largest foreign owner of farmland in the U.S.A — nearly 200,000 acres of farmland, which is 312 square miles.

It’s sheer coincidence, of course, that so much of this Chinese-owned farmland is right up adjacent to our military installations. Sheer coincidence, right? Sure.

Reading reports like this I’m struck time and again by the easy-going carelessness of the federal officials we trust to administer our laws, and indeed of the laws themselves. Why isn’t any drone within sight of a U.S. military base immediately shot down? Why do we allow foreigners to buy hundreds of square miles of our farmland?

“This land is your land, this land is my land, …” warbled Woody Guthrie back in the day. That needs an update, Woody. Today several hundred square miles of it is their land.

How many square miles of mainland China’s farmland is owned by American citizens? I think we all know the answer to that one.

Our agricultural land is one component of our country’s resources, of our national treasure. We should cherish those resources and guard them jealously, not hand them over for cold cash to anyone who shows up and asks.

It’s like … What’s it like? … Oh yeah: it’s like our immigration system.

04 — End student visas.

[Clip, Steve Bannon speaking;] I’m also for big restrictions on legal immigration. Until Silicon Valley, until these places have, I don’t know, twenty percent African American and twenty percent Hispanics and kids can go to college …

And every college you go to, every engineering school you go to is flooded with foreign students taking American jobs … I don’t agree with that. American jobs should be for American citizens.

President Trump and I actually disagree. President Trump said a couple of months ago, he said, “Hey, er, you know, on every college … every college graduate, right? and every graduate of a community college should have a, um, should have a green card stapled to their diploma.”

Remember he said this? This is after he came back from having dinner with David Sachs and his beaners [?], the tech beaners in San Francisco. He said, “Every graduate, foreign student graduate, and every graduate — foreign student graduate — from a community college should have a green card attached to their diploma.”

I said: “[inaudible] We have tremendous respect for you, love you, we’re at your base, but I’ve got another recommendation.

I’d like to put in an exit visa on every college graduate — foreign student that graduated from college here — and thirty days to leave and go back home and help make their nation great again.

And for … And we shouldn’t take any foreign students in community colleges. That should be … that should be for American citizens, particularly for African Americans and Hispanics. You’re never going to get … They’re never going to get up the economic chain unless we do this.”

That was Steve Bannon being interviewed Wednesday this week. All right, it’s easy to make fun of Steve. Did he really say “beaners”? And his nod of deference to the DEI mob is not convincing, although it might have some point politically. Twenty per cent blacks and beaners … sorry, Hispanics, in hi-tech jobs? Yeah, sure.

Bannon is, though, however clumsily, expressing a position that’s going to cause mighty tensions in the Trump 47 administration. I had words to say about this last week, noting that while Trump and Musk both favor stapling permanent-resident cards to the diplomas of foreign graduates, Stephen Miller takes a strongly Bannonite line.

So do I. I’d go further than Bannon, in fact: I’d end the issuance of student visas.

Higher education is, like agricultural land, a key national resource. Foreigners should not be permitted to purchase it. It should be for Americans. And no — sorry, Steve — not particularly for black and Hispanic Americans but for all Americans, selected strictly by merit.

We are a nation of a third of a billion people. In there somewhere is all the talent we need.

So why do we issue student visas? Because the Higher Education lobby loves them. They love them because foreign students pay full fees — no nonsense about grants or scholarships.

Foreign students are key to keeping the endowments of our univerisities fully bloated. How else do you think the University of Michigan can afford to spend thirty million dollars per annum on DEI programs?

Steve Bannon has not been named to any position in the Trump administration and it’s highly unlikely he will be. That leaves Stephen Miller as the only sensible voice on the topic of legal immigration, so far as I know. I don’t know where Vivek Ramaswamy stands on the subject.

The first few months of Trump 47 will be dominated by noise about illegal immigration as the new administration acts to correct the horrors arising therefrom. Those of us arguing for a more reasoned approach to legal immigration won’t be able to get a word in edgewise, not even if our name is Stephen Miller.

Legal immigration needs a serious overhaul, though. Is it too much to hope for that later in the Trump 47 administration, when our borders are finally under control, we can have a national conversation about foreign workers and students? Yes, it’s probably too much to hope for, given the blindness of Trump and Musk on the issue; but let’s hope anyway.

05 — Zero-based immigration policy.     This week’s political news has mainly been about the national budget, and the usual congressional wrangling over it. This is an annual feature of our political life. In the twenty years I’ve been podcasting Radio Derb, I’ve tackled it several times — check the archives.

So I’m going to take a pass this year and leave the congresscritters to work it out among themselves. The topic did, though, in combination with the remarks I made about student visas, stir recollections of my own career in corporate budgeting way back in the 1970s. Here I was reminiscing about it on Radio Derb seven years ago.

[Pips.]

Going back to that most important duty of Congress: I know something about budgeting. One of the first big computer systems I designed, back in mainframe days, was for the general ledger and budgeting function of a medium-sized corporation.

Back in those days — this was the 1970s — there was a management fad for “zero-based budgeting.” The traditional way for an organization to work up next year’s budget had been to start with the current year’s budget and make little adjustments up or down here and there. In the zero-based model, you tossed current year in the trash bin and started with a clean sheet of paper. What should we be doing, and how much should we spend doing it?

Like all management fads, sometimes it worked in practice and sometimes it didn’t. It had the appeal of elegance and simplicity, though; and under forceful corporate leadership it made an end run around powerful entrenched departmental interests.

So that’s my slogan for this week: Back to Basics — zero-based basics.

[Pips.]

I would l-o-o-o-ve to see Congress attempt a zero-based annual federal budget, but that of course is never going to happen.

A zero-based approach to immigration, however, is not so hard to imagine. Although I doubt we shall see it any time soon, it’s of the order of things that might happen under an enlightened administration and Congress.

It would start by throwing out all of current immigration law, which is an unholy mess. Then we’d ask: “What kinds of visas should we issue, and how many of each?”

As I’ve already said, I don’t see a case for any student visas at all. Let every country educate its own citizens.

Tourist visas? Sure. Tourism is great. I just got back last week from a brief tourist adventure of my own, to Belize. I learned interesting things and had my horizon broadened some. Tourism, yeah — let ’em come!

Business visas likewise. Business folk need to engage with colleagues abroad. No problem with that.

Talent visas? Italy’s leading operatic soprano is invited to sing at the New York Met — let her in!

Family unification? What if Tourist Tom and Suzy Citizen fall in love and want to tie the knot? Good luck to them: give Tom a residence card. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. There’s scope here for fraud, though. I’d want this visa category carefully policed.

And so on. From the zero-base principle we could build up a rational immigration system. If Trump 47 wants to give it a try, I’ll be glad to offer my consultancy services — suitably remunerated, of course.

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

Imprimis:  I’ve spoken at length on Radio Derb about what I call “the romance of American blackness“: the fantasy, cherished by blacks and whites alike, that black Americans must tiptoe around in terror of being assaulted and likely murdered by evil, feral whites.

It’s a real national pathology, and no laughing matter. For one thing, it has generated great cruelty.

Two outstanding cases of that cruelty in recent years have been the brutal prosecutions of Derek Chauvin in Minnesota and the Brunswick Three in Georgia. In both cases the defendants were subjected to Double Jeopardy, with federal civil rights charges piled on top of state homicide charges.

The case of the Brunswick Three is the more egregious. Three upstanding citizens with no evil intent, attempting a citizen’s arrest which was lawful at the time, may spend the rest of their lives in jail. Appeals are under way, but it’s a slow and expensive business.

Derek Chauvin is a less sympathetic case, but he’s been wronged none the less. This week there’s been a small break in his federal case, where Chauvin got a 21-year federal sentence for violating junkie hoodlum George Floyd’s civil rights.

Chauvin pleaded guilty to the charge; but he didn’t know, because his attorney didn’t tell him, that Floyd had a heart condition.

A judge ruled Monday that Chauvin’s present attorneys can research Floyd’s heart condition to see if it supports the appeal.

Meanwhile, the Romance of American Blackness continues to burn bright in America’s collective consciousness. I have no doubt it will generate more outrages, more cruelty.

Item:  In New York City news: the city’s subway and bus systems are plagued by fare evasion. Non-paying riders are estimated to cost the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) $800 million annually.

The reason why levels of fare evasion are so high isn’t hard to figure. The reason is, nobody gets prosecuted for it.

You can check this out for yourself by hanging out for a while near one of the turnstiles leading to a subway platform. You won’t wait long before some person, instead of scanning his subway pass to free the turnstile, just vaults over the barrier.

(If, after several such observations, you were to notice common demographic characteristics of the turnstile-jumpers, that is very bad of you and you should be ashamed of yourself. Stop noticing!)

Not to worry, though; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is on the case. They are planning to spend up to $1 million in federal grant money on a study that they hope will help them understand the mindset of the average fare evader, a psychological study.

Nobody’s better at spending public money than public agencies, right?

Item:  VDARE.com has been silenced but not killed. Peter and Lydia Brimelow are striving tirelessly to keep the case for rational immigration policy in the public forum still in the teeth of continuing relentless lawfare from Letitia Lardbutt at the New York State Attorney General’s office.

Please, please read Lydia’s eloquent account of VDARE’s current situation in her Christmas message at X.

07 — Signoff.     That’s your Christmas present, listeners. Thank you for your time and attention, and of course for your generous support. I try to acknowledge that support as best I can; but I haven’t yet figured out how to individually acknowledge donations via crypto. So if you’ve sent me fragments of bitcoin, please accept my heartfelt, but generic, thanks

A 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!

Scrolling down through the Radio Derb archives, I was surprised to find that over twenty Chistmases I didn’t once sign out with anything from the Great American Songbook. I was surprised because (a) I’m a huge fan of that musical genre, as you’ll know if you’ve listened to Radio Derb much, and (b) it contains several lovely Chistmas songs.

On reflection, I’m much less surprised. Yes, I love those mid-20th-century classics; and yes, plenty of them are for Christmas. The trouble is that in the weeks leading up to Christmas they get played relentlessly over the sound systems in public places, especially department stores and supermarkets, to the point where you want to tell Bing Crosby to shut the hell up so you can concentrate on trying to find those cookies your kids like.

Digging around on YouTube, however, I found a Great American Songbook number that I don’t recall ever hearing at ShopRite or Costco around Christmas. That would have suited the songwriter, Frank Loesser, just fine, because he didn’t intend it as a Christmas song. According to his daughter, he got annoyed when it was sung during the holidays.

Creators can be wrong about their creations, though. Whatever Frank Loesser thought, it is a Christmas song, in theme and mood. Here’s a bit of the 1960 recording by Ella Fitzgerald, who pretty much owned the Great American Songbook.

Merry Christmas! There will be more from Radio Derb next week.