This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m06s Crazy people doing crazy things
• 06m47s Bracing for disappointment
• 14m29s Can Britain be saved?
• 23m00s Consanguinity Central
• 31m13s 9/11 plotters win again
• 32m51s Jimmy Carter, R.i.P.
• 36m21s Generation what?
• 37m46s Yoon defiant
• 39m45s Muhammad takes New York
• 41m22s Number notes
• 43m05s Signoff with Punta

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee  width=”560px” height=”315px;”

Odysee is broke again

Transcript

01 — Intro.     Welcome, listeners, to the first Radio Derb of 2025. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 performed by a small wind band arrangement, and this is your primarily genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week’s news.

Dominating the week’s news were the two events early on Wednesday morning, the first in New Orleans around 3:15 a.m., the second in Las Vegas five and a half hours later. The first was plainly an act of terrorism; the second probably so, but we’re not yet certain.

Let’s see what can be said.

02 — Crazy people doing crazy things.    For us commentators, events like these offer slim pickings. Two crazy people did very crazy things. Whether they were working together, or entirely independently, isn’t clear.

Crazy person Number One was 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a native U.S. citizen from Texas. At 3:15 Wednesday morning he drove a rented Ford pickup truck into a joyful crowd welcoming the New Year in Bourbon Street. He killed at least 14 and wounded many more before police shot him dead.

Jabbar’s brother told the New York Times that he, Jabbar, had converted to Islam at an early age. He’d then served in the U.S. Army, honorably discharged in 2020. He’d been married and divorced twice, had at least two children; made a living in financial services.

Crazy person Number Two was 37-year-old Matthew Alan Livelsberger, an Army master sergeant on approved leave. Livelsberger rented a Tesla Cybertruck, filled it with combustible and explosive matter, and blew it up outside Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. He was found dead inside the wreckage, apparently having shot himself somehow while, or after, detonating the explosives. Seven other people in the hotel’s valet area suffered minor injuries. The hotel was not damaged.

So what’s to be said? In a country as populous as ours, crazy people are going to do crazy things now and then. If they’re part of some organized group, or acting on behalf of some hostile foreign power, there are things our government should do; but neither thing has been established in these cases.

Perhaps those brilliant sleuths at the FBI, after a few months of infiltrating Catholic church groups and raiding the lingerie drawers of politicians’ wives, will be able to prove that white supremacists were behind these attacks. We’ll have to wait and see.

Shouldn’t the authorities be more diligent about identifying crazy people and institutionalizing them? Yes they should, and we don’t institutionalize anything like as many lunatics as we ought. People with a clear record of craziness should be institutionalized. Instead, much more often than not, we hand them off to “community care” or “homeless services” or some other jobs program for social-science grads that leaves the crazy people free to wander the streets.

But what if the crazy person is doing his very first seriously crazy thing, as seems to be the case with Jabbar and Livelsberger? We had no proper grounds to institutionalize them until it was too late.

Sure, we could institutionalize people who say or post crazy-sounding things. There’s a real threat to liberty there, though. What’s a crazy-sounding thing to you may be just a bad joke, or drunk talk, to someone else. Totalitarian regimes institutionalize persons who disagree with state dogma. Don’t think our own ruling class wouldn’t do the same if we let them.

But can’t qualified psychiatrists figure out who are the craziest of the crazy? No they can’t. Psychiatry is a pseudoscience. I can personally testify, and I have … follow the link.

So, nothing to say but what I’ve just said, and said before.

I’m working from incomplete data, though. It’s possible Jabbar and Livelsberger knew each other and co-ordinated their lunacies. It’s possible they were both in the pay of Iran or North Korea. I have no doubt at all that comment threads on certain websites will soon be offering conclusive proof that it was all a Mossad operation.

As I go to tape here, though, all I know is that a couple of crazy people did a couple of seriously crazy things … as now and then happens.

03 — Bracing for disappointment.     Here was our President-Elect, speaking to reporters on New Year’s Eve

[Clip:  First Reporter:  Why’d you change your mind on H-1 visas?

Trump:  I didn’t change my mind. I’ve always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. And we need a lot of people coming in. We’re going to have jobs like we’ve never had before.

First Reporter:  But, Sir, you said … You’ve changed your position …

Second Reporter:  You plan to go to the Carter funeral?]

With the Inauguration now just two weeks away, I would describe my own state of mind as: Bracing for disappoinment.

Regular Radio Derb listeners will know that I am a longtime sufferer from Trump Disappoinment Syndrome. Here I was in November 2018, two years into Trump 45.

[Pips.]

The one thing a National Conservative can expect from our President is disappointment.

The biggest disappointment is of course on immigration. No proper border; no universal compulsory E-Verify; no tax on remittances; no end to birthright citizenship, or chain migration, or the visa lottery, or the investor-visa scam, or the OPT guest-worker racket, or the ruthless replacement of America workers by cheaper H-1 and H-2 visa holders from abroad …

And that’s just to speak of formal, legal immigration issues. Illegal immigration is worse than ever. Headline from Breitbart.com, November 26th, headline: Illegal Immigration under Trump on Track to Hit Highest Level in a Decade.

How many illegal aliens do you think CBP apprehended last month, month of October, at the Southern border, listener? Several hundred? A couple of thousand? Could it possibly have been even ten thousand or more?

Listener, it was fifty-one thousand. That’s seven and a half caravans, using the unit of measure I introduced four weeks ago: one caravan equals seven thousand souls. Seven and a half caravans in one month.

Where legal immigration is concerned, you may fairly say that the President can’t legislate, only Congress can legislate, and the congressreptiles just won’t because they’re all bought and sold by the cheap-labor and open-borders lobbies.

To which I’d reply: true enough, but much of the success or failure of a President is measured by how good he is at getting Congress to do stuff. On that metric, Trump is an utter failure.

Where illegal immigration is concerned, the President does have real power: law-enforcement power by executive authority, power as Commander-in-Chief to deploy troops. Trump hasn’t done nothing in those areas, but he hasn’t done much; and what he’s done has been timid, half-hearted.

[Pips.]

So I’m bracing for a relapse back into TDS, Trump Disappointment Syndrome.

Things will be better this time, though, won’t they? Trump learned a lot from that first administration, didn’t he? This time his Vice President is on board with real reforms, not just a Uniparty hack. The cabinet picks this time round are independent thinkers, not Deep State swamp critters.

The mood of the country is ready for change this time, not like in 2016. Back then we were still swooning over Barack Obama and smug in our virtue at having elected a black President — twice! Today the idiocy, blunders, embarrassments and corruption of the Biden-Harris regime are still fresh and ugly in our minds.

So this time will be better, right? Right?

Eh, maybe. It’s quite likely we’ll return to a sane energy policy; that would be a big positive. Musk and Ramaswamy may really manage to make us less of a regulatory state ruled by midwit bureaucrats and more of a constitutional state ruled by legislators and judges. Yes, there are good things that might happen.

Shall we still have a Department of Education in January 2029, though? Shall we still be spending twelve and a half billion dollars per annum on Head Start? Shall we still have twelve thousand troops stationed in Italy and twenty-four thousand in South Korea? Shall we still have birthright citizenship and social security benefits for illegal aliens? My guesses are “yes” in every case.

Perhaps more to the point, shall we still have those things in November 2027? If we do, how much MAGA enthusiasm will have drained away in TDS — Trump Disappoinment Syndrome — those first two years? How will that affect the midterm elections?

And then, yes, legal immigration. “We need a lot of people coming in,” the President-Elect told us on Tuesday. Do we, Sir? How do you know that? Did we need a lot of people coming in in 1960, when our population was demographically stable, immigration was low, and a working man in his thirties could afford a house, a car, and a family?

Can you please demonstrate to us, with logic and numbers, that 2025 U.S.A. is underpopulated? Oh; and by the way, have you spoken to any Australians about these issues?

04 — Can Britain be saved?     As bad as things may be in the U.S.A., they are far worse in the Mother Country. A quote here from Gregory Hood, writing at American Renaissance, January 1st, quote:

Germany has the excuse of being conquered and occupied, but the country that stood for a time alone in World War II now teaches its own children to despise its history and culture. There is no free speech. A two-tier justice system represses patriots and coddles non-white street criminals. The Labour government is wildly unpopular, but the Conservatives are rudderless.

End quote.

A little background here. For the past several decades two parties have dominated British politics: the Conservative Party, whose origins go back to the 17th century, and the Labour Party, which first came to power in 1924. The Conservative Party were of course the party of snobs; Labour were the party of slobs.

The distinction didn’t always break predictably. Plenty of wealthy snobs, fired by guilt or ideological ardor, embraced Labor; plenty of working-class slobs have found King, country, and tradition more inspiring than the slogans of the union organizer. The last great Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, rode to power — three times! — on the working-class vote.

Sometime around the turn of this century, though, the party system collapsed in on itself. For thirty years now Britain has been ruled by a Uniparty of center-left ideological inclination.

The only thing anyone remembers about the administration of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is its legalizing of homosexual marriage in 2013. The main thing Britons remember about the administration of Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the great flood of immigrants he allowed, legal and illegal. Nobody remembers anything at all about the administration of Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, who may have been just a holographic projection.

The finest Conservative orator of the later 20th century, and one of the best intellects ever to occupy a seat in Parliament, was Enoch Powell, remembered today — to the degree that Brits are allowed to remember him at all — with shame and loathing for having objected, in 1968, to the importation of an American-style race problem.

So conservatism is dead in Britain; and there is, to all intents and purposes, only one party in Parliament.

Clever sloganeering and media manipulation kept this unhappy truth out of sight for a few years. In the present decade, though, it has become plain to all. As a result, voters are looking for a new party, one that dissents from the lukewarm center-leftism of Labour and Conservative.

Apparently they have found one. The party named Reform UK, under the leadership of Nigel Farage, claimed over Christmas that its registered membership now exceeds that of the Conservative Party.

Legacy media usually describe Reform UK as, quote, “a right-wing populist party,” end quote. That sounds promising. Will Nigel Farage and his troops, if elected to form a government, be able to halt and reverse Britain’s demographic replacement and economic decline?

Opinions differ. Gregory Hood, who I began this segment by quoting, thinks not. Writing from a point of view of white advocacy, he offers many examples of Nigel Farage’s squishiness on, most particularly, Islam. His closing sentences are, quote:

The British are a people — a formerly great people — not a set of abstractions, values, or ideas. They deserve a champion. Nigel Farage has not shown he is willing to be that champion. He is 2024’s White Renegade of the Year because he is muffing a great opportunity.

Let us hope he surprises us in 2025 — and also that our leaders realize what we really need is a lot of people going out.

End quote.

I share Gregory Hood’s skepticism, but also his hope. By all means make up your own mind. Read Hood’s article; then listen to Nigel Farage himself speaking at length. The following is from a New Year’s Message he posted this week. I say “from” because it’s actually edited down to a minute and a half from the five and a half minutes originally posted.

Clip:  (Brief piano intro/)  Well, I’m fortunate today to be giving you this New Year’s message from Blenheim Palace: not only a magnificent place and a wonderful place to come and visit, but of course the birthplace of Winston Churchill, who represented something when this country was indeed a great country — not just in terms of looking after its own people but in standing up for the right things in the world.

We have been appallingly led in this country now for several decades. We are in societal decline. We are in economic decline: most people are getting poorer with every year that passes. We’re losing any sense of national identity … for us to get back our independence — Brexit, taking back control of our own lives — and to see that completely squandered by a Conservative Party who frankly never believed in it but used it for electoral advantage in 2019 …

We want to make this country prouder; we want to make our borders secure; we want to make our people better off. And that message is resonating. And over the course of Christmas tens of thousands of people have joined Reform UK.

And I have to tell you, like his style or not, Donald Trump coming back as the American President is good news, not bad news. If History teaches us one thing it is that dictators and bad guys only respect strength. And let’s face it: without America we are defenceless, so that relationship is crucial.

So make it your New Year’s Resolution: Join Reform UK, join the fight back, let’s make Britain great again. Happy New Year.

05 — Consanguinity Central.     I mentioned there Nigel Farage’s squishiness on Islam. That’s timely: the Muslim rape gangs are back in the British news.

First let me introduce you to Jess Phillips, a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the British government. To be precise, she is the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls. There’s glory for you.

Working-class English girls definitely need some safeguarding. For fifty years now gangs of Muslim men have been kidnapping girls eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, and subjecting them to rape and torture, in a few cases to murder.

This is a major national scandal because everyone in authority — police, child welfare services, politicians both local and national — has been striving to cover it up. Britain’s ruling class believed that if the horrors were generally known there would be major social disturbances directed against Muslims.

There have actually been cases where a father has tracked down his missing daughter to one of the rape gang locations, made his way in somehow, called the police, and then, when the police arrived, himself been arrested for causing a disturbance.

Most offensively, it seems to me, Britain’s media have softened the facts of rape, torture, and killings under the euphemism “grooming.”

That’s where Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips comes in. The town council in one of these towns, the town of Oldham in northwest England, has been pressing for a full national-level government inquiry into the rape gangs after hundreds of young girls in the town have been abducted and raped.

The decision as to whether there should be such a national-level inquiry fell on Jess Phillips. She decided there shouldn’t. Oldham town council should deal with the matter themselves, she declared. So, presumably should the numerous other towns known to host Muslim rape gangs.

Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips is of course a member of Parliament. The following may therefore apply. Quote from The Critic, January 2nd:

One also can’t help wondering if Phillips — who, at the last General Election, narrowly triumphed in her heavily Muslim … constituency over Jody McIntyre, a Muslim candidate campaigning on the issue of Gaza — fears upsetting her constituents.

End quote. Indeed one can’t.

In a British context, the word “Muslim” is, to a good first approximation, a synonym for “Pakistani.” Most British Muslims come from Pakistan.

If you import big numbers of Pakistanis, as Britain has, you are not only getting a lot of Muslims; you are also getting people from a radically different culture.

I am looking at a picture from the science magazine Nature. The picture shows a map of the world with each nation colored according to its percentage of consanguinous marriages — marriages between close family members, mainly cousins.

Most of the world — all the Americas, Europe, Russia and the Far East, Southern Africa, Australasia — has the lightest color, indicating less than five percent of marriages consanguinous. The only nations otherwise colored are those in the Muslim belt across North Africa and West Asia, plus the Dravidian-speaking states of Southeast India.

Only two nations are shown as having rates of consanguinous marriage above fifty percent: Saudi Arabia and, yes, Pakistan.

Saudi Arabia, population 32 million and rich, doesn’t send out many emigrants. Pakistan, population 241 million and poor, does. Britain has about 1.6 million of them.

That 1.6 million come, as I said, from a radically different culture. With more than fifty percent of marriages consanguinous, Pakistan is Consanguinity Central, clannishness on steroids. The men in a Pakistani rape gang are all related; and they all share deep contempt for working-class white British people who let their young women walk out alone, unveiled and unchaperoned.

Where is Nigel Farage on all this? Gregory Hood quotes him from a recent interview, quote:

If we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose. We have to do everything we can to bring British Muslims with us.

End quote.

So yeah: squishy. A more robust National Conservative would be talking about, perhaps, giving Muslims an incentive to leave. But that is of course, in the U.S.A. and Britain both, beyond the bounds of respectable discourse.

Just a brief footnote to all that. The Daily Mail reported on December 31st that Pakistan and Afghanistan may be about to go to war with each other. Apparently the Afghan Taliban has a Pakistani offshoot, and the Pakistanis don’t like that.

That map of consanguinous marriages around the world shows Afghanistan as in the second-highest group, 40 to 49 percent of marriages consanguinous.

On that basis, if the two nations do go to war, may I be the first to suggest that the conflict be named “the War of Consanguinities”?

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

Imprimis:  You may recall that last summer the defense attorneys for the three 9/11 masterminds we hold at Guantanamo Bay were given a plea deal by the Biden administration. The deal was, that their clients would plead guilty to murdering three thousand people in exchange for being spared the death penalty. This, mind you, was 23 years after the crime.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin dissented, saying that he should have signed off on the plea deals. He moved to get them annulled.

At year’s end a military appeals court ruled against Austin, so the plea deals stand.

Austin can now take the matter to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but we don’t yet know whether he will or not.

Once again: This is 23 years after the atrocity. It will soon be 24. Then 25, soon 30, … Shall we eventually have to pay Social Security to these vermin?

They should have been stood against a wall and shot twenty years ago … at least.

Item:  So goodnight Jimmy Carter. I can’t claim to nurse any strong feelings about the 39th President one way or the other. My first spell in the U.S.A. was from August 1973 to October 1978, and so overlapped with the first half of his administration. I wasn’t taking much interest in politics, though, and he didn’t really register.

Yet in one of those inexplicable ways our memories work, I do remember the first time I heard his name in conversation. I was developing a computer system for a firm in New York that had branch offices all over. For some reason I was roped in to go with some of the company execs to the Atlanta office in March of 1975.

There was some delay landing us at Atlanta airport. Inquiring, we were told that a tornado had passed through that morning, ripping the roof off the Governor’s mansion.

Who was the Governor of Georgia? I asked one of my companions. He shrugged. Quote: “Who knows? It was Jimmy Carter, last I heard. I think he quit so he can run for President next year, though.” End quote.

He had and he did. I don’t know whether the generally negative view of his Presidency is fair. He was surely, though, as many have noted, a good ex-President, living modestly and doing good works, not piling up wealth and corporate directorships and phony “charity” cash spigots like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Notes British commentator Ian Birrell, quote: “He refused to suck up to the billionaires, charlatans and dictators willing to pay hefty sums to recruit well-connected ex-politicians.” End quote.

I’m reminded of the closing sentence of George Orwell’s obituary for Mahatma Gandhi, quote:

One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

Item:  Generation X, Generation Z, Millennials, Boomers, … I know from conversations that a great many people find these categories as annoying as I do. I can never keep straight which is which.

Well, they’re making it worse. Babies born between 2025 and 2039 will belong to Generation Beta, somebody has decided.

This is actually double annoying, as there seems to be no consensus on how to pronounce the word “beta.” That’s how I say it, but a lot of Americans seem to prefer “bay-tuh” or “bay-duh.”

Checking with the official list, I’m reminded that the categories aren’t even equally spaced. Millennials span 15 years but Gen X has 18 and Boomers 19.

Can’t we just use decades: “He’s an eighties, she’s an aughts,” and so on? Grrrr.

Item:  My December 13th podcast had a segment on South Korea, where President Yoon Suk Yeol, halfway through his five-year term in office, had declared martial law, only to have the declaration smacked down by parliament, who at the time I spoke were debating a motion to impeach him over it.

Impeach him they did. President Yoon wouldn’t step down, though. For three days as I am speaking now he’s been hunkered down in his official residence spitting defiance.

I don’t have a dog in this fight. That’s probably just as well; if I had one, the Koreans might eat it. I have been learning more about President Yoon, though.

For example: I noted in that mid-December podcast that South Korea’s main problem was demographic. Quote:

South Korea’s Total Fertility Rate is now at a sensationally low 0.68 children per woman. That’s a decline from 1.2 children per woman since 2014, so a 43 percent decline in just ten years.

End quote.

Has President Yoon stepped up to improve the demographic situation? Er, no. He has four dogs and three cats, but … no children.

Just murmur a prayer for those dogs, listeners.

Item:  According to the London Daily Mail, December 5th, Muhammad is now the most popular name for baby boys in England and Wales. That’s just “Muhammad” spelled “M-u-h-a-m-m-a-d,” however. If you include all thirty-plus variant spellings, says the Daily Mail, it has been the most common for over a decade.

So yes, Britain’s gone, gone into the darkness.

Don’t get smug, though. PostMillenial, December 28th, quote:

For the first time, Muhammad cracked the top ten list of most popular boy names in New York City.

End quote.

For years I’ve been quoting what seems to me the most astonishing statistic in our recent demographics: that the U.S.A. took in more Muslim settlers in the fifteen years following the 9/11 attacks than we had in the fifteen years before those attacks.

And you want to tell me we have a sane immigration system? Yeah, right.

Item:  It would be remiss of me, or at any rate out of character, to let the year 2025 get under way without some remarks about the number 2025.

It’s a perfect square, 45 times 45, the first year to be a perfect square since 1936. The next one will of course be at 46 times 46, which will be the year 2116. 2025 will therefore, in close to actuarial certainty, be the only perfect square to occur in my lifetime.

Curiously, if you were to increase each of its digits by 1, 2025 becomes 3136, which is also a perfect square, 56 time 56. That’s unusual: the only other case I know of is 25 becoming 36.

Oh, and 2025 is the sum of the first nine cubes: 1³ + 2³ +3³ +  etc., all the way to 9³.

More than you wanted to know? Sorry: once a numbers geek, always a numbers geek.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gents, for this first podcast of 2025. Many thanks for your time and attention, and especially for your donations and encouragement through 2024, a particularly trying year because of the suspension in July of VDARE.com, Radio Derb’s former host.

The website remains in suspension under the evil glare of New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt. The VDARE Foundation, however, is still very much a going concern. We hope, for example, to have a conference at the castle in lovely Berkeley Springs, West Virginia sometime this Spring. I shall be there, and look forward to meeting Radio Derb listeners. I shall post details when I have them.

You can support the VDARE Foundation by mailing a check to us at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield, CT 06759. You can support me and my family in particular by earmarking your check with my name, or by any of the other methods listed on my home page. Thank you!

Some signoff music. Readers of my December Diary will know that the Derbs spent a few days of early December in Belize. That’s a tiny little nation on the Central American isthmus — hang a left at Guatemala (which, as a matter of fact, we also visited).

Pop quiz: can you name a famous person from Belize? That’s actually a bit unfair. Belize only has 400,000 citizens, and it’s only been an independent nation since 1981.

Wikipedia comes up with a list of 36 names; but the only two I’d ever heard of prior to visiting the place were Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and tech entrepreneur John McAfee.

Even those two are only Belizian by a stretch. Biles was born in Columbus, Ohio. Wikipedia only says, quote: “Simone holds Belizean citizenship through her adoptive mother and considers Belize to be her second home.” End quote. John McAfee was born in England to an American father and an English mother. Wikipedia, quote: “He resided for a number of years in Belize, but returned to the United States in 2013 while wanted in Belize for questioning on suspicion of murder.” End quote. What’s the story there, I wonder?

Well, I learned a third name on our Belize trip — I mean, the name of a guy who was actually born in Belize with Belizian ancestors and who is as famous as Belizians get.

Our tour guide, another native Belizian, was keen for us to know that the nation has its own style of music. It’s called Punta, and its leading performer is a Belizian named Pen Cayetano. As well as being a musician, Cayetano is also an artist who has exhibited his paintings all over the world.

So of course I’m going to sign off with some Punta music. Here’s Pen Cayetano himself. The sound quality isn’t great because it’s a street performance. It does give the flavor of Punta, though.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week