This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m25s Pre-Inaugural Adventure
• 08m38s Energy in the Executive
• 15m00s The Bishop of Woke
• 21m08s Britain grovels
• 25m15s War against the normal
• 30m00s Indophobia
• 34m20s A line from Kipling
• 35m25s Suggestion for a pardon
• 38m29s Year 50
• 40m55s If VDARE.com, why not the SPLC?
• 42m16s Signoff with Victoria de Los Angeles

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     That was indeed quite a week. And for all you fellow 1960s survivors: Yes, that was the great Millicent Martin. She is still with us, I think still active after a career spanning at least seven decades, and looking forward to her 91st birthday this year. Happy birthday in advance, Millie, and many more.

This is of course Radio Derb, being introduced here by your exultantly genial host John Derbyshire. As I said, it’s been quite a week.

It began for me on Sunday the 19th; and although there is nothing very consequential to report about that beginning, I’m going to give it a segment of its own anyway. The name of the segment is: Pre-Inaugural Adventure.

Here we go.

02 — Pre-Inaugural Adventure.     The adventure was a trip to Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital, for what was billed as a Coronation Ball on Sunday evening at the Watergate Hotel. The organizers were Passage Press, which does sterling work promoting and publishing dissident right and new right names like, most recently, Steve Sailer.

In setting up my trip to D.C. I confronted some formidable logistics. I should have foreseen that great numbers of people would head to the nation’s capital to be there for the Inauguration ceremony. This year’s Inauguration was conducted indoors, but by the time that had been decided and announced, every single hotel room in the city had been booked in advance.

Giving up on hotel accommodation, I thought I’d rent a car, drive down to D.C., find a parking garage not too far from the Watergate, attend the ball, then head back to the parking garage and either (a) sleep in my car there, or (b) if they wouldn’t allow that, just drive far enough out of the city to somewhere I could pull over, park, and sleep.

I couldn’t get that to work, either, though. The parking garages were as fully booked as the hotels; and I guessed in advance — correctly — that the Inauguration security procedures wouldn’t allow street parking.

My only option was to ride the Amtrak train down from New York’s Penn Station to D.C.’s Union station Sunday afternoon, then ride back after the Coronation Ball ended at midnight.

That didn’t work well, either, though. There were no trains from Washington to New York at all between 10pm Sunday evening and 5am Monday morning. What was I going to do from midnight to 5am, and where the hell was I going to do it?

I bought a ticket to D.C. anyway and emerged from Union Station late Sunday afternoon. I’d figured I’d just hail a taxi to take me to the Watergate, but it was half an hour before I found one willing to take me for a price I could afford. I soon understood why. D.C. traffic was in an advanced state of pre-Inaugural chaos: massive jams, blue-flashing police cars every hundred yards, l-o-n-g detours. It took nearly an hour to cover the three miles to the Watergate.

The Coronation Ball was well worth my trouble, though — a great success. Among the several hundred attendees were a lot of old friends, notably Peter and Lydia Brimelow. Numerous people I didn’t know recognized me somehow, came up to shake my hand and engage me in lively conversation.

It was an actual ball, with orchestras and a dance floor. Best of all, it was a young crowd — median age no more than forty, I’d guess.

I’ve spoken and written about this youthful rising before — see last April’s monthly diary, for example. Thirty years ago, if you went to any event outside of mainstream GOP conservatism, it was likely to be populated by older, twitchy types muttering about black helicopters and fluoridation.

Nowadays, to quote myself from that April 2024 Diary, quote: “There’s a new, fresh, normie National Conservatism coming up — even, I have it on good authority, among card-carrying Young Republicans! All strength to them.” End quote.

The rise of Donald Trump has been a key factor in that change. It’s entirely appropriate that I’m commenting on the rise of youth — re-commenting, whatever — while describing an event to celebrate Trump’s Inauguration.

So: many thanks to the folks at Passage Press for organizing a successful evening. As the crowd melted away after midnight, though, I was left with the problem of how to stay awake until 5am. I had a book to read, but where was I going to sit and read it?

Union Station hadn’t looked very hospitable on my way in, so I thought I’d take my chances in the Watergate lobby. There were some nice big comfortable-looking sofas there. Perhaps I could just park myself on one of them for the duration. With my tux and black tie in plain view, it wasn’t likely the guys at the desk would mistake me for a homeless drunk.

In the event they were friendly and helpful beyond the call of duty — went to considerable trouble to get me a taxi at 4am. If anyone in the management of the Watergate Hotel is a Radio Derb listener, give those guys a raise!

Mid-morning Monday I was back home on Long Island, just short of a night’s sleep and just in time to watch the actual Inauguration ceremony on TV.

All right; that wasn’t the most thrilling adventure you ever heard about, not exactly Lewis and Clark or Amundsen at the Pole. Make allowances, please: I don’t get out much.

03 — Energy in the Executive.     Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 70, famously argued that, quote:

Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.

End quote.

There hasn’t been much of that this past four years, but it looks as though our new Chief Executive intends to make up the deficiency. That very Monday afternoon, Inauguration Day, while I was collapsing into my bed at home to catch up on the sleep I’d missed, President Trump signed 26 Executive Orders.

For comparison, Joe Biden signed nine orders on his first day, Trump 45 signed one, Barack Obama two, George W. Bush none at all.

Here’s a tasty sample of the 26 orders. Those orders:

1. Withdrew the U.S.A. from the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change.
2. Implemented a freeze on federal hiring …
3.   … and another freeze on new regulations.
4. Ended remote working for federal employees, ordering them back to their offices.
5. Terminated all federal offices and positions related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and environmental justice.
6. Ended the political weaponization of the Justice Department
7. Ended federal censorship, restoring freedom of speech
8. Revoked 78 of Joe Biden’s Executive Orders
9. Granted, quote: “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” End quote.
10. Withdrew from the World Health Organization.
11. Removed security clearance for the 51 CIA agents who spread misinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop plus John Bolton.
12. Declared a National Emergency at our southern border
13. Vowed to investigate the feasibility of, quote, “implementing an External Revenue Service (ERS) to collect tariffs, duties, and other foreign trade-related revenues.” End quote.
14. Clarified that our military should prioritize the protection of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the United States along our national borders
15. Vowed to, quote, “encourage energy exploration and production on Federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf, in order to meet the needs of our citizens and solidify the United States as a global energy leader long into the future.” End quote.
16. Realigned U.S. Refugee Admissions policy to, quote, “admit only those refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate into the United States and to ensure that the United States preserves taxpayer resources for its citizens.” End quote.
17. Ended birthright citizenship.
18. Declared that there are only two sexes.
19. Restored the federal death penalty.

And a few more. Good nourishing stuff.

The next day, Tuesday, Trump was energetically busy again; most notably by firing off another broadside at Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He actually revoked an Executive Order issued by Lyndon Johnson sixty years ago, Executive Order number 11246, which insists on race and sex affirmative action for federal contractors and subcontractors.

So Trump is on the march, and in a promising direction. We’ve even been hearing rumors, as of Wednesday this week, that he may be pondering abolition of the federal income tax. Be still, my heart!

Our President’s heart is plainly in the right place. Executive orders, however, can be fragile and fleeting, as we found out when Joe Biden revoked most of the 220 orders issued by Trump 45. For real change we need legislation. For that we need a Congress on the President’s side — preferably for a full four-year stretch.

These orders are a good encouraging start, propelled by real energy in the Executive. Now we get to find out how much energy there is in the Congressional GOP.

04 — Bishop of Woke.     Also on Tuesday, President Trump, with members of his family and Vice President Vance with his wife, attended an inaugural prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral. Conducting the service was Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, leader of the Washington, D.C. Episcopal Diocese.

I’ll just read you a passage from the New York Times report of the event. Edited quote:

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde was nearing the end of her sermon for the inaugural prayer service on Tuesday when she took a breath and looked directly at President Trump.

[Inner quote.] “I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” [end inner quote] said Bishop Budde, the leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. [Inner quote.] “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives …

“The vast majority of immigrants are not criminals … I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

I got two surprises out of this story. First surprise: There are enough active Episcopalians in America to keep the church going — even enough to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of a structure the size of Washington National Cathedral.

Having had an Anglican education, when I settled in the U.S.A. thirty-some years ago I was an occasional congregant at my local Episcopal church. (The Episcopal Church is Anglican, so I knew the hymns and the liturgy.)

That went all right for a while. The minister was a sensible fellow who gave short, thoughtful sermons on religious topics.

Then he was transferred elsewhere. His replacement was a younger man with strong lefty-progressive views on politics, society, and culture which he expounded on at length from the pulpit.

I don’t go to church to hear that stuff — heck, I can get it from watching MSNBC. Picking up occasional church leaflets or newsletters, I saw that the Episcopal Church was all trending like that.

So I dropped out, and for some years was a non-churchgoer. Then a neighbor persuaded my wife to try the local Baptist church. I went with her, of course. We found real Christian fellowship there, un-contaminated by wokery, and now we’re regular congregants.

I vaguely assumed that the Episcopal Church had by now totally succumbed to “Go woke, go broke.” No: apparently it’s still a going concern.

That was my first surprise. My second surprise was, when looking up Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde on the internet, to learn that she is not a bull dyke, as I’d supposed from her appearance and her aggressiveness towards our President. According to Wikipedia at any rate, she is married to a man and they have two sons.

Those markers of normality notwithstanding, her behavior on Tuesday was totally out of place. She should be fired, or defrocked, or whatever her church does to wayward bishops. It’s not her business to promote sexual confusion in children or deliberate flouting of the people’s laws on immigration and settlement. There is nothing Christian about either thing.

Even if there were, they would not be topics to air when addressing our President in public. The key phrase here is “ceremonial deism.”

The U.S.A. is not a theocracy. When Church meets State here in our republic, it does so within long-established limits via vague platitudes and bland generalities. An actual point of actual theology is going to annoy or offend some big proportion of listeners.

“Ceremonial deism”: get it embroidered on a hanky, Madam Bishop, and keep it with you.

05 — Britain grovels.     Where religion meets politics, we can at least take comfort in the fact that we have not admitted unmanageably large numbers of believers from an alien and aggressive faith.

The British have not been so sensible. Six and a half percent of the population of England and Wales was Muslim at the 2021 census. It may be seven percent by now, then soon ten percent. (The figure for the U.S.A. is less than one and a half percent.)

That six and a half percent is heavily concentrated in a few cities. London’s population is about fifteen percent Muslim. The West Midlands city of Birmingham, where I spent part of my childhood, is thirty percent Muslim.

A great many legacy British people are unhappy about this, the more so recently as the topic of Muslim rape gangs targeting white working-class British girls has been getting another airing.

The reaction of Britain’s ruling class has been to grovel — to the Muslims, of course, not to the native British. Here was Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer recently.

[Clip:  We’ve seen a devastating rise in Islamophobia, leaving people feeling fearful and unsafe in their own country. I’ve heard first-hand of women wearing hijab who are too scared to travel by public transport; of Muslim families being abused as they leave the mosque.

The surge in Islamophobia is simply appalling, Muslim women and girls disproportionately targeted, mosques forced to ramp up security, and British Muslims questioned as if they are terrorists.

I do not want Britain to be a place where British Muslims are not able to be their whole selves, where they feel they must hide or tone down who they are for fear of being attached to views that are not their own; where they’re asked to apologize for the actions of people who do not act in their name.

Our Britain is one where the enormous contributions of British Muslims are recognized and celebrated, their stories heard, their lives free from discrimination. As leader of the Labour Party I am indebted to the contributions of Muslim members, activists, and politicians who make our party what it is today.

I’d like to thank Muslim organizations and mosques who work tirelessly to raise awareness and shine a light on the scale of Islamophobia.]

What that clip brought to mind was another, much shorter one from a few months ago where Joe Biden’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told a sympathetic MSNBC interviewer that

[Clip:  Interviewer:  The President yesterday, at his commencement address for the Howard University graduates, called white supremacy the major domestic terrorist threat in this country. Is that correct?

Mayorkas:  It tragically is. You know, um, in the terrorism context, domestic violent extremism is our greatest threat right now. Individuals are driven to violence because of ideologies of hate, anti-government sentiment, false narratives, personal grievances and, like, and … regrettably we have seen a rise in white supremacy.]

06 — War against the normal.     In all three world-views on display in those segments — Bishop Budde’s, Sir Keir Starmer’s, Alejandro Mayorkas’ — the enemy is normality, especially in the form of legacy white populations.

The evil being done, in Bishop Budde’s view, is being done by citizens who object to the sexual mutilation of children or to foreign scofflaws crossing our borders without permission. The evil-doers are those objectors — normal people.

For Sir Keir Starmer the evil is being done by legacy British people who make unkind remarks about women wearing headscarves. The evil is not being done by gangs of Muslim men kidnapping and mass-raping 11-year-old British girls. To the contrary, the evil there is being done by those Brits who insist on there being exposures of these horrors and public inquiries into them. That’s Islamophobic!

For former Secretary Mayorkas the evil is being done by sinister organizations of gap-toothed hillbillies looking to assault and kill blacks — those villains in the Romance of American Blackness. He can’t name any such organizations; and he probably knows — or if he doesn’t, he should — that where interracial assaults occur, black-on-white are a large multiple of white-on-black, as they always have been.

These are, in all three cases, people who hate the normal, especially when it is incarnated as their own kin — their own race, their own ancestors, their own nations. Their solution, in all cases, is replacement — more border-jumpers, in numbers that will overwhelm the loathsome, dull-witted deplorables of our nations’ legacy majorities.

This is a real collective sickness, a mass psychosis. One of the consequences of it has been to devalue the word “diversity” and the concept behind the word.

One of the great defects of human reason is its tendency to multiply things that ought not be multiplied. If one of something is good, it does not follow that two of it is twice as good and ten of it ten times as good. That’s not how we take our medications, unless we’re engaged in a suicide attempt. It’s not how we salt our stew.

Racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity is a good thing at low levels. The Italian barber, the Chinese restaurant, the black jazz singer — what’s not to like? They are salt in the stew — flavoring and enhancing it.

As the late great Enoch Powell told us, though, “Numbers are of the essence.” Could mid-20th-century Britain take in a thousand Muslims from Pakistan? Sure, why not? Ten thousand? Maybe, so long as they didn’t all settle in one place. A hundred thousand? Whoa …

This stuff is so elementary I feel embarrassed to speak it aloud. Isn’t it obvious? Just common sense? Normal? Apparently not.

07 — Indophobia.     The latest to find themselves on the wrong side of that fork have been Indians.

Browsing on X last weekend I came across a post from someone tagging himself “FrogButt.” The post shows a photograph of Vice President J.D. Vance holding his youngest child, four-year-old Vivek. FrogButt has added the commentary, quote:

It’s sad. You want the guys running things to have a stake in the future, and there’s some of that, but Vance does not have children who look like him, who smell like him, who even have earwax like him. He’s alienated from the future of Americans in a very real sense.

End quote.

In case you didn’t get the earwax reference: There are two types of earwax, one wet and sticky, the other dry and crumbly. Which type you have is determined by just one single gene. It’s one of the very few features of our bodies so determined, along with hairy elbows and others I’ve forgotten. Almost everything else about us is determined by multiple genes working together.

The dry, crumbly style of earwax is less common than the sticky sort. It’s mainly found among Asians, East and South. That’s by no means universal, though. Lots of Asians have sticky wet earwax; so FrogButt is making an unjustified assumption.

From the comment thread to FrogButt’s post, and from many other places, it’s not hard to detect a rising tide of Indophobia. I’ve been getting some of it myself since making friendly remarks about Usha Vance in last week’s podcast.

Not hard to detect, and not hard to understand. With the aid of the “guest worker” visa rackets, unscrupulous American employers have brought in hundreds of thousands of Indians to do middle-class tech jobs for low wages and the hope of a green card, displacing American workers and in some cases making those workers train their Indian replacements.

I’d be mad about that, too. Shame on our government for allowing it to happen. Shame on our new President for repeatedly expressing support for the rackets.

This has been going on for so long now that the earliest Indian hires are in senior management positions, responsible for hiring staff. With routine Third World clannishness, they have a strong preference for hiring more Indians, and the lawyers and lobbyists running the “guest worker” rackets are eager to help.

So it’s not surprising that we are now drifting to Indophobia. Perhaps Trump could borrow Sir Keir Starmer’s speechwriter to cook up an angry diatribe about it.

The root problem here? We’re governed by people who don’t know how to salt their stew.

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

Imprimis:  A couple of weeks ago I regaled you with a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s great poetic tribute to common sense, The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

I still had that poem in mind when, on Monday, I saw some TV clips of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris slinking away at last from their positions at the top of the Executive Branch to return to their homes. One of Kipling’s lines came irresistibly to mind.

I’m not proud that it did; but confession is good for the soul, so I’ll confess. The line that came to mind was, quote:

The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire.

Item:  Pardons have been spraying out from both Biden and Trump. One of Biden’s, issued in his very last minutes as President (and strictly speaking a commutation, not a full pardon) was for Leonard Peltier.

That was a blast from the past. It was like hearing something on the radio from Electric Light Orchestra, or the intro music from The Jeffersons.

For the younger cohort I should explain that fifty years ago the name Leonard Peltier was on the tips of the tongues of every Progressive American. Peltier, a Chippewa Indian, had been convicted in 1977 of shooting dead two federal agents on his reservation in South Dakota. He was, Progressives would tell you at great length, the victim of a gross injustice on the part of the federal government.

Whether he was or not, I have never been interested enough to form an opinion. He was convicted and given a life sentence, which he’s been serving for 48 years. Now he’s 80 years old and in poor health. Biden’s commutation of his sentence will allow him to serve the rest of his life sentence at home.

I guess Biden, whose senses were intact back in the 1970s, remembered Peltier as a Progressive cause célèbre and wanted to accumulate a few more Progressive brownie points on his way out.

As I said, I have no opinion about Peltier’s guilt or innocence. I do, however, have strong opinions about the Brunswick Three, Gregory and Travis McMichael and Roddie Bryan, who were given federal life sentences three years ago in the death of Ahmaud Arbery. That was on top of state sentences, under the double jeopardy system that takes over when there’s a dead black man to account for.

I have both read and written extensively about the Brunswick Three. Their convictions, state and federal both, were monstrous miscarriages of justice. Our new President can’t do anything about the state convictions, but he can void the federal ones, and he should do so.

Item:  Here’s a thing about the year we are now three weeks into, the year 2025. I haven’t seen anyone take note of it yet, so possibly I am the first.

This year, 2025, is Year 50 on the Khmer Rouge revolutionary calendar. That regime, which has a good claim to having been, per capita, the most senselessly brutal and homicidal of the 20th century, took power in Cambodia in April 1975. The leaders — Progressive leftists, of course — had studied in Paris; so taking the French Revolution as their model, they declared a new calendar, with 1975 as Year Zero.

They remained in power for four years, committing appalling atrocities against their own people. While they were still ruling, a French author named François Ponchaud published a book exposing some of the horrors, title: Cambodia: Year Zero.

Ponchaud’s readers couldn’t believe what he was telling them, but he didn’t know the half of it. We now know that in the annals of man’s inhumanity to man, the Khmer Rouge stand near the summit.

If you don’t know about the Khmer Rouge and would like a short account — shorter than a book, I mean — you might start with two book reviews that I’ve published, both archived on my website. One, from 2005, is a review of Philip Short’s biography of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader. The other, from 2000, reviews a book about S-21, the regime’s torture and interrogation center.

Item:  My previous host VDARE.com having been crushed by the lawfare of New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt, I was pleased to see my new host, the Z-man, make a very interesting suggestion on X the other day.

Z’s suggestion is directed to Steve Marshall, Attorney General for the state of Alabama.

Now that the coast is clear, says Z, it might be time for A-G Marshall to start a Letitia Lardbutt-style crusade against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Quote from Z:

Driving that odious organization into bankruptcy would be a great service to the country.

End quote.

Oh, I’ll second that. The SPLC was a clever idea at its inception — to monetize white-liberal guilt. It’s got way out of control, though. Time someone put the brakes on.

“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was The Z Man, and Hell followed with him.”

09 — Signoff.     That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, the first week of the counter-revolution. I’m sure there will be lots more good things to report on in the weeks to come. Onwards and upwards! Excelsior!

Thank you as always for your time and attention, your emails and support. Let me remind you that Peter Brimelow now has his own Substack account and urge you to subscribe to it. You can support the VDARE Foundation itself by mailing a check to us at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking the check with my name, or by any of the alternative options spelled out on my personal website. Thank you!

The news from Los Angeles continues to be depressing. My sympathies to those suffering loss or grief over there.

For opera fans it lightens the depression a bit to recall that Los Angeles is the name not only of a city but also of a singer: the great mid-20th-century Spanish soprano Victoria de Los Angeles. She will sing us out with Butterfly.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.