This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m37s The smack of firm government (cont.)
• 05m13s Déjà vu all over again
• 09m13s The ratchet effect?
• 16m43s Diversity catastrophe?
• 20m03s A science geek, not a law geek, for HHS
• 28m57s Work for Trump, Bukele, and Milei
• 30m34s Brexit + 5
• 32m55s Be nice to the French!
• 36m08s Signoff with the èrhú

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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! That was a fragment of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your intensely genial host John Derbyshire with news and views from a National Conservative point of view.

Well, we are now twelve days into a new Presidency — one that, Progressives warned us, would put an end to democracy in our country, led by a man who is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

Yet so far there has been no declaration of martial law, no attempt to suspend the Constitution, and — so far as I can tell — no preparations to invade Poland.

Could it be that all those elite Progressives — academics, jurists, media talking heads — were mistaken? Hard to believe. Well, it’s still early days; we’ll see.

02 — The smack of firm government.     It sure is nice to hear what a great British newspaperman once called “the smack of firm government.” Just to reprise a few.

• Birthright citizenship canceled. At any rate the President has done what is in his power to cancel it. What he did will of course be challenged, and the issue, which is how the Fourteenth Amendment should be interpreted — will end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. If they strike down the President’s ruling, there’ll be clamor for a Constitutional Amendment. At any rate, there’ll be clamor from Radio Derb; I can’t speak for the rest of you. I shall definitely be clamoring.
• Pete Hegseth, a combat veteran who believes that the military exists to fight wars, confirmed as Secretary of Defense.
• No more federal money for child sex-change operations. Good! I don’t know why these operations are allowed at all; but that’s probably a matter of state laws.
• Federal employees ordered back to their offices. Mixed feelings about that. They might do less harm at home playing World of Warcraft.
• A big house-cleaning at the Justice Department, deep-staters involved in anti-Trump lawfare reassigned to issuing and inspecting fur-trading licenses in the Aleutian Islands.
• Pardons for January 6th protestors who were outrageously overcharged for petty nonviolent offenses.
• Eight thousand members of our military who’d been discharged for refusing the COVID vaccine now restored to their previous ranks with back pay and full benefits.

And best of all, of course:

• Mass deportation of illegal aliens.

For the first time in years I am actually enjoying reading the news.

Yes, I’m enjoying it all just as much as you are; and I’m just as pleased as you are to see — it’s very plain to see — that Donald Trump learned important lessons from his first Presidency. He’s staffing up his administration with people who agree with him!

For all that, I cannot shirk my duty as National Conservatism’s leading pessimist. I’m the author of a book titled We Are Doomed, remember? So permit me, please, to throw a wet blanket over all the jubilation.

03 — Déjà vu all over again.     I’m actually experiencing political déjà vu.

This is not the first time I’ve rejoiced to see a feeble, ineffective government dominated by Progressive ideologues voted out of power to be replaced by a different party under a leader who voices commonsense truths clearly and firmly, delivering — yes! — “the smack of firm government.”

That leader was of course Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister of the U.K. for the last few months of the 1970s, all of the 1980s, and the first few months of the 1990s, total eleven and a half years. I was a big fan. To this day my Margaret Thatcher commemorative mug has pride of place among the glassware in my living-room cabinet.

For a sample of Mrs Thatcher’s common sense and a reminder of her firm, straightforward diction, here she was addressing the House of Commons on the subject of illegal immigration.

[Clip:  Those who are genuine refugees — and that is determined again by the United Nations — will not be returned. Those who are illegal immigrants … those who are illegal immigrants will be returned, and it is customary international law for countries to receive their own immigrants back into their country. And if the Right Honourable gentleman is suggesting that we ever get to a position where you cannot return illegal immigrants to their country of origin, then he is … he is proposing international chaos.]

Mrs Thatcher actually became Prime Minister on May 4th 1979. I had returned to Britain a couple of weeks before after three months abroad. I was somewhat out of touch with U.K. politics, although I knew enough to cheer when Thatcher won.

My sister and most of my British friends, by contrast, were Labour Party supporters — Progressives. They weren’t as hysterically crazy as today’s Trump-haters, but there was definitely a mild Thatcher Derangement Syndrome going round.

I remember watching TV coverage of the election results at the house of Progressive friends. They were scowling and shaking their heads in dismay. As the recipient of their hospitality I tried to curb my jubilation, but it wasn’t easy.

So yes: these past few days I’ve been experiencing déjà vu all over again. Since the previous episode was forty-some years ago, however, I can recall how it all worked out in those following years, and legitimately wonder whether this Trumpian counter-revolution will follow a similar path.

So how did Thatcherism work out in the long run? Not well, is the sad answer.

04 — The ratchet effect?     That’s the long, long run I’m speaking about. In the early years of her administrations — of which there were three: she was re-elected in 1983 and 1987, with big majorities both times — in the early years her brutally realistic economic policies cost her some popularity with people who lost their jobs or benefits.

There were some balancing policies that kept her afloat. My personal favorite was the selling-off of public housing to tenants. My parents had lived for over thirty years in a house owned by the local town. Thanks to Mrs Thatcher I bought it for them at a rock-bottom price. I sold it ten years later for not much more. I should have kept it: similar houses in that neighborhood today sell for about thirty times what I got. Shoulda, coulda, woulda …

The Falklands War of 1982 really swung the country behind Mrs Thatcher and fixed her, even in the minds of Chinese peasants, as the Iron Lady. That flush of popularity was then fortified when she survived an assassination attempt two years later, followed by financial deregulation leading to a boom in the securities markets.

Then in the late 1980s she got tangled in some conflicts with colleagues and unpopular policies on property taxes. She resigned as Prime Minister in 1990; but her party, the Conservative Party, remained in power — which is to say, in control of Parliament.

What followed was seven years of Thatcherism Lite: not so much the smack of firm government as the gentle pat of neoliberal consensus.

British voters got tired of it. In 1997 they sent the Conservatives packing and put the Labour Party in power under Prime Minister Tony Blair. They did not know that Blair was a demon sent up from Hell by Satan to destroy their country, but they soon found out.

It was Blair’s keen co-operation in George W. Bush’s missionary wars that woke them up; but even before that Blair had thrown Britain’s borders wide open, “to rub the Right’s noses in diversity,” as one of Blair’s speechwriters explained.

Thence inevitably to the Britain of today: a poor, failing, unhappy nation, the streets of her once-noble old cities taken over by ululating mobs of fanatical foreign savages, her schoolchildren taught to feel guilt and shame that their ancestors had attempted to civilize half the world, her public services barely functioning.

Mrs Thatcher herself spoke of “the ratchet effect.” Political history, she thought, proceeds like a wheel with a ratchet. When the Left are in power they can advance the wheel in their preferred direction, towards ever more cultural nihilism and civilizational destruction. When the Right are in power we can only apply the ratchet — halting the leftward movement, but never really accomplishing any rightward shift.

The political history of Britain this past 46 years seems to illustrate the ratchet effect. Starting from a triumph of the Right 46 years ago, that nation is how sinking deep into the Leftist swamp.

And that raises the question: Shall we, the U.S.A., follow a similar trajectory from here to 2071 — from joyful triumph and satisfaction to the loss of all we cherish in our nation?

I wouldn’t rule it out. Following Trump’s election last year, Progressivism is taking a break to lick its wounds. It remains a formidable beast, though, with strong control over key areas of our public life.

Remember those surveys that come out periodically of professors at our universities: how many are Democrats, how many Republicans? I pulled one up at random from the College Fix, 2022. They found that half of all university departments had no Republican professors at all.

Possibly that’s changed some in the last three years, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. The rising generation of intellectuals, schoolteachers, media folk, doctors, and perhaps worst of all, lawyers are being indoctrinated by Progressives.

Yes, Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential election. His popular-vote edge over his opponent, however, was only one and a half percent. Seventy-five million Americans cast their vote for Kamala Harris — for Progressivism.

So cherish the hour, listeners; but remember, please, that an hour is, in the grand scheme of things, not a very long span of time.

05 — Diversity catastrophe?     Leading the news this past couple of days has been the appalling catastrophe Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., when an Army helicopter collided with a commercial passenger plane, killing all aboard both — 67 souls in all — and throwing their corpses, and all the wreckage, into the Potomac River.

In the commentary on this dreadful event there has been a theme — voiced by President Trump among others — speculating that pressure for race and sex diversity in hiring for federal agencies, like the one that supervises Air Traffic Controllers, might have been a factor, reducing the general level of competence among those Controllers.

My instinct is to take a cautious approach on issues like this, where there is so much human grief involved. I did, though, recall reading about lowering of standards in Air Traffic Control some years back in the Obama administration. So I started in on some research, to see what I could dig up.

Then, browsing on X, I came across Jared Taylor’s 15-minute video recounting his researches. I immediately abandoned my own inquiries.

Jared’s video is a little masterpiece of investigative reporting. I can’t even attempt anything half as good. Jared is Mozart; I’m Salieri.I urge you to set aside fifteen minutes — actually fifteen and a half, I see — to watch the whole thing.

After a jihadist went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood Army base, Texas, in 2009, killing thirteen people and wounding 29 more, Army chief of staff General George Casey famously remarked that, quote: “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” End quote.

Are there people in positions of authority in the federal government today who feel the same way about Wednesday’s disaster? I have not the slightest doubt that there are; although whether any of them will be brazen enough to say it out loud like General Casey, I doubt.

06 — A science geek, not a law geek, for HHS.     Second in the news is the continuing interrogation of President Trump’s cabinet nominees by the relevant Senate committees. The one that’s been getting the most coverage has been Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I knew very little about RFK, Jr. I remembered him being in the news last year as a candidate for President, until Donald Trump somehow persuaded him to drop out and endorse the Trump ticket.

From before that I had even dimmer memories of him occasionally being in the news for something or other. I couldn’t have told you of any specific things he was in the news for, but they’d left me with the overall impression that he’s a nutty conspiracy crank.

Striving for fairness again, I looked him up. What kind of education did he have? Let’s see.

• Undergraduate degree: B.A. in American history and literature from Harvard.
• Postgraduate degree one: J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
• Postgraduate degree two: Master of Laws from Pace University.

OK, so pretty well-educated … but not really in the way I’d want in my HHS Secretary. No science.

I’m not saying the HHS Secretary should hold degrees in nuclear physics; but there should be some sign in his educational record that he has an empirical, quantitative cast of mind and a curiosity about the natural world — a generally scientific cast of mind.

I want my HHS Secretary to know the difference between median and mean, between bacterium and virus, between false positives and false negatives. Does RFK, Jr. know basic science stuff like that? Somehow I doubt it.

My morning newspaper, the New York Post, didn’t do anything at all to turn me towards a more favorable view of RFK, Jr. Very much the contrary. They’ve been running opinion pieces under blistering headlines hostile to the nominee, headlines like these:

(Jan. 28th)  Senators, vote ‘nay’ to a Health hazard like RFK

(Jan. 29th)  JFK kid: ‘Predator’ RFK Jr. ‘unqualified’

(also Jan. 29th)  RFK JR. ANTI-VAX STANCE A ‘SCAM’

(yet again Jan. 29th)  RFK? No Way!

(Jan. 30th)  POLS STICK IT TO BOBBY   Rip into Trump HHS nom’s vax double-speak

(Jan. 31st)  RFK JR. STANDS BY VAX DOUBTS Won’t deny autism link in Senate grill

(I took the headlines and dates there from the print newspaper; the online versions sometimes differ.)

Sample quote from the first one there, longish quote:

On the eve of his hearings, Kennedy now claims he’s not “anti-vaccine,” that he simply wants there to be more “transparency.” But RFK Jr.’s idea of transparency is whatever helps his trial lawyer friends.

He has made a career in litigation out of pointing out a rare side effect, which there often are, then claiming the whole thing is faulty for profit.

The job of the health secretary and the Food and Drug Administration is to put the many first — how do we help the most people with a treatment? RFK exploits the rarity. All it takes is one person with a symptom — that maybe isn’t even associated with the drug or vaccine — and you have a lawsuit. He wants to give conspiracy theorists and legal opportunists material to twist to his own ends.

And RFK Jr. will continue to make money off this, having stated he won’t stop taking payments from his ambulance-chasing lawyer friends even as health secretary.

End quote.

The article I’m quoting there is an unsigned editorial, by the way, so if there is anything false in it, JFK, Jr. has a strong case for a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper. Which he would jump on, because … he’s a lawyer.

And yes: for an unscrupulous lawyer, I can see that vaccine lawsuits are a fertile field. Sure: a vaccine may harm you, or even kill you. But then, so might the thing you’re being vaccinated against. It’s a balance of risks, like so much else in life.

That’s the mindset of a science geek, though; and as I’ve observed, there doesn’t seem to be anything of the science geek in RFK, Jr. He’s a law geek, looking for a lawsuit. Different mentality.

I understand, of course, that Trump’s nomination of him is entirely political. As tiny as RFK, Jr.’s voter base surely was, it might have pulled enough votes away from Trump to give Kamala Harris a victory. He did Trump a favor by dropping his candidacy and endorsing Trump. Trump wants to return the favor. I understand.

I just seriously doubt that HHS Secretary is the right reward for this particular guy. Surely there’s some place he could do less harm, and stand a better chance of surviving the Senate confirmation process?

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

Imprimis:  George Canning was an early 19th century British statesman who served two spells as Foreign Secretary. For diplomatic and commercial reasons to do with Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal he strongly supported the independence of the rebellious Latin-American colonies. He explained it all to the House of Commons in 1826 in a sentence he is famous for, quote: “I called the New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old.” End quote.

Today, with Britain and the European countries — including France, Spain, and Portugal — all in the doldrums, perhaps it’s time for us in the New World to again redress the balance of the Old.

I can think of several New World leaders who might do useful work on that: Donald Trump of course, but also Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, and Javier Milei, President of Argentina. All three guys are very good with the smack of firm government …

Item:  Today, January 31st, at 11pm Greenwich Mean Time, marks the fifth anniversary of Brexit, when Britain officially left the European Union.

Brexit has to go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in history. If Britain had been led by people of courage and imagination, she could have recovered her national independence, as those who’d voted for Brexit supposed she would.

Unfortunately the country was led by mediocre seatwarmers with about as much collective imagination as a cage full of parrots. Their idea of national independence was kowtowing to the European Court of Human Rights, which is a lawyers’ ramp, just like everything else with “Human Rights” in its name.

If only Maggie Thatcher had been in charge! Or Donald Trump, or Nayib Bukele, or Javier Milei.

The Gen Z cohort over there — that’s young people aged 13 to 27 — would scoff at that as unacceptably tame. They want dictatorship, according to a study that’s causing some worried comment over there.

Sample quote from the London Times:

Fifty-two per cent of Gen Z … said they thought [inner quote] “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.” [End inner quote.] Thirty-three per cent suggested the UK would be better off [inner quote] “if the army was in charge.” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

Item:  Just one more on the Brits. They’re building a new battle submarine for the Royal Navy. Planning and construction has been under way for some time, back to when Queen Elizabeth was still alive.

Royal Navy ships’ names have to be approved by the monarch. For this submarine, the Navy suggested HMS Agincourt. That’s the name of a battle that took place in the Hundred Years War between England and France back in the fifteenth century. It was a great and glorious victory for the English against superior numbers, and for King Henry V, who led them into battle. Someone wrote a play about it, but I forget the details.

Queen Elizabeth approved the name Agincourt. Then she died, and her son Charles became King.

Last week we learned that the submarine’s name has been changed. It won’t be HMS Agincourt, after all. It’ll be HMS Achilles. Britain’s Ministry of Defence was apparently worried that Agincourt might offend the French, reminding them of that defeat six hundred years ago.

The BBC says King Charles was involved in the decision somehow. He certainly must have approved the name change.

When Brits — including even a British monarch — worry about hurting the feelings of the pouting, primping, frog-eating French, Britain is definitely finished. Perhaps those Gen Z-ers are on to something …

08 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks as always for your time and attention, your encouragement and support. May you enjoy good health and prosperity in the Year of the Snake.

Yes, Wednesday was Chinese New Year’s Day. Tuesday evening we had a family banquet. There were eight around the table: Dad, Mom, Son, Daughter, grandson, Son’s girlfriend, and an older couple we’ve known for years: yet another English native married to yet another Chinese lady. The unmarried received gifts of money from the married in hóngbāo red envelopes, according to tradition.

Family and old friends: a warm, convivial evening, with proper deference to tradition and more food than we could finish. Life is good!

On behalf of the VDARE Foundation, which is still a going concern with plans for the future, please permit me to remind you that Peter Brimelow now has his own Substack account, which of course you should subscribe to. You can support the 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. VDARE thanks you and I thank you!

Just to record this being the first week of a New Year on the traditional Chinese calendar, here’s a bit of traditional Chinese music. The title is 月夜愁, which translates as something like “Moonlight Melancholy.”

The Chinese Wikipedia tells me that there’s a whole family of songs with that title, going all the way back into traditional Taiwanese folk music. Taiwanese pop star Jody Chiang had a hit with one such song twentysome years ago: there’s a link in the Radio Derb transcript, if you’d like to listen to it.

For signoff I’ve gone with an older instrumental version, the principal instrument here being an èrhú, which is a two-string Chinese fiddle — a longtime favorite of mine. Furthermore, I’m giving you the least melancholy passage in the recording — the allegro, as it were. I don’t think they could dance to this even in West Virginia.

If Allah wills it, there will be more from Radio Derb next week.