This Week’s Show
Contents
- 03m05s Snobs & Slobs, Euro style
- 10m11s Trump trashes Ukraine
- 15m12s The mystery of South Africa
- 21m29s Don’t look up
- 28m31s Scatter the feds!
- 31m16s Fort Knox, wha?
- 34m30s Return of Butch & Suni
- 36m16s World Hippo Day
- 39m05s Silly signoff
Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed
Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On Rumble
Full Show On Odysee
Transcript
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, this last day of February, greetings from your normatively genial Radio Derb host John Derbyshire.
The first thing you want to know is of course whether I can list five things I got done last week to justify my employment. Of course I can! Five? How about eight? That’s the number of segments in last week’s podcast, not counting Intro and Signoff. There was a carefully-crafted segment on each of the following:
- Vice President J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference.
- President Trump giving the elbow to Ukraine.
- The condition of South Africa.
- A possible asteroid strike.
- Scattering federal departments out of D.C.
- Securing Fort Knox.
- Getting our astronauts home from the International Space Station.
- World Hippo Day.
Talk about spanning the globe! Note that list includes three segments on foreign affairs, after my confessing openly that I don’t much care about them. My scope even includes interplanetary space.
So yes, Elon, I have no difficulty responding to your Saturday email demand; although since I am not a federal employee my response is entirely voluntary.
Perhaps I should be a federal employee. What’s the healthcare plan like?
02 — CPAC report. Radio Derb goes on the air Friday evening or early Saturday, so my report on Saturday events comes six days later at week end.
That’s a shame as news ages fast. The news from six days ago is yellowish and curled up at the edges, and it’s starting to smell bad.
So it is with most news items, anyway. There are some exceptions: news items so piercingly relevant and forcefully presented, they’re still farm fresh — still fun to listen to — six days later.
I’ll give you an example. Last Saturday was the closing day, the third full day, of CPAC 2025. In the afterglow of Donald Trump’s election victory, spirits were of course high, and a lot of good speeches were made those three days: J.D. Vance, Nigel Farage, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Doug Burgum, Giorgia Pippalina, … something for everybody. Probably the visual that everyone will remember was Elon Musk brandishing a chain saw that had been given to him by Argentina’s Trumpish President Javier Milei, who also made a speech.
President Trump himself made the keynote speech. At an hour and a quarter it was much too long, and I found my thoughts drifting wistfully to Calvin Coolidge; but given what Trump’s achieved, and the trials — including of course literal trials — that he’s been through, I’m not going to begrudge the man indulging his natural prolixity.
The farm-fresh fragment I’m going to play for you here is not from Trump’s speech anyway, it’s from the speech by Tom Homan, Trump’s Border Czar. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you the whole speech, just the first two minutes. Here’s Tom.
[Clip: How ya doing? (Cheers.) Look … let me start out by saying this: If I offend anybody today, I don’t give a shit. (Cheers and applause.) Don’t care. The media are in the back room. I’m sure I’ll be reading a lot of hit pieces on me tomorrow. I don’t give a shit what you think about me. (Cheers and applause.) I get asked all the time: there’s a body … There’s a big part of this country that hates your guts. I don’t care. I don’t care, because we’ve got a job to do.
Y’know, I wake up every day for the last four years pissed off because the Dryden [sic] administration took the most secure border in my lifetime and un-secured it on purpose. Right?
I worked for six Presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan, and every President I ever worked for took steps to secure the border. Even Clinton and Obama took steps to secure the border because they clearly understood you can’t have national security without border security. They got it. Joe Biden’s the first President in the history of the nation that came into office and un-secured the border on purpose!
So for four years I wake up every day pissed off. That changed November fifth. (Cheers and applause.) Now I wake up every day excited because I work for the greatest President of my lifetime: Donald J. Trump! (Prolonged cheers and applause.)]
Now there’s a plain-speaking guy. All strength to your arm, Sir.
03 — Dems in the doldrums. The triumphalist high spirits at CPAC made a striking contrast with the gloom and doom that seems to prevail on the other side of the political divide — which mostly means among Democrats.
It’s bad, although just how bad depends to some degree on your news source. My Monday New York Post told me that, quote:
Unlike during the first Trump administration, Democrats are finding themselves demoralized, divided, low on energy as they attempt to counter the president’s blitz of executive orders, appointments and Oval Office directives.
End quote.
Last Saturday’s New York Times, on the other hand, tried to put some optimistic spin on things. Quote:
One month after President Trump was sworn in for a second term, Democratic despair and denial are giving way to an angry message from party activists and voters to their leaders.
Do something.
Across the country, anti-Trump protests and fiery town halls are flickering back to life …
End quote.
If progressive activism is flickering back to life, it’s time for us normal people to man the fire hoses.
Now, if you read much political commentary you’ll know that the word “normal” has been a topic of discussion recently. Headline from UnHerd.com, February 28th: “How the woke Right stole normality,” end headline. I picked that at random: there have been many similar.
What is normal depends on where you are standing, and who you are standing with. Until a few weeks ago our Tutsi ruling class all believed that their positions were normal, while the evil MAGA cult was a sinister Hutu aberration. After November’s election, and a month of watching MAGA actually at work in the White House to approving poll numbers, naturally the Tutsis are disoriented.
The more open-minded among them now understand that much of what they have cherished as normal beliefs — that biological sex is an illusion, unlimited immigration a blessing, energy from fossil fuels an evil — are scorned by most Americans. As the current cliché has it: the Tutsis are in the 20 zone of an 80-20 opinion split.
Some of those open-minded types are adjusting their positions accordingly, generating epiphemomena like Jeff Bezos this week re-orienting the opinion pages of the Washington Post MAGA-wise.
However, the New York Times‘ optimism is not misplaced. Tutsi progressivism is indeed showing signs of flickering back to life, or whatever counts as life up there in the woke stratosphere.
Last Saturday night, for example, Kamala Harris emerged from her mansion to give a speech at the NAACP annual awards ceremony, she being of course the awardee. It was indeed highly flammable stuff. Sample quote from that same New York Post report, quote:
Some see the flames on our horizons, the rising waters in our cities, the shadows gathering over our democracy and ask, “What do we do now?” … But we know exactly what to do, because we have done it before. And we will do it again. We use our power. We organize. We mobilize. We educate. We advocate.
End quote.
She forgot to add: “We bribe, we intimidate, we destroy with lawfare, …” but hey, some things are better left unsaid.
So yes, I’m gloating along with other Trumpies at the energy and authority coming out of the White House this past six weeks. The enemy will regroup, though. Probably they’ll adjust their public pronouncements in a more moderate direction. Perhaps fossil fuels won’t destroy the planet if sensibly managed. Perhaps there are only two sexes, tiny minorities of genetic abnormality aside. The true believers will still believe, but they’ll keep their beliefs strategically masked.
Here at the end of February, we shall soon be emerging from winter into spring. I’m looking forward to the Trump Spring, when I am sure we shall see a great and historic correction to America’s course.
Progressivism will not sleep, though. We need to keep our defenses fully manned.
04 — Immigration innovation: the Registry. We also need to keep a wary eye on the Dear Leader. Donald Trump has lived his entire life in circumstances of great wealth. That doesn’t necessarily destroy a person; it may endow him with wisdom not otherwise easily attainable, as I believe it has in Trump’s case. In other respects, though, it may also tilt him away somewhat from common sense.
This week saw two new immigration initiatives from the administration. My grading of them is A-minus for the first, C-minus for the second.
The first, announced Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security, aims to make to make illegal aliens age 14 or older in the United States register and provide their fingerprints to DHS within thirty days of entry or potentially face criminal prosecution.
This, we are told, will make it easier for ICE to round up anyone who entered the country illegally; aliens who can’t prove their immigration status and who haven’t registered will be subject to immediate arrest.
Just to clarify this: When you see or hear news or commentary that is supportive of ICE rounding up illegal aliens for deportation, the reporters usually lean hard on the word “criminal.” That’s defensive on the reporters’ part. “See, we are not going after that pleasant, friendly guy who mows your lawn. We’re going after muggers, dealers, rapists, and gang members.”
Fair enough. The truth is, though, that only a small minority of illegal aliens are muggers, dealers, rapists, et cetera. The great majority are harmless. The only law they’ve broken is immigration law. I speak here from the experience of having been one such person.
Here in fact is a wrinkle that I’ve never been able to iron out to my own satisfaction.
Apologists for the illegals always hasten to tell you that under current practice, aliens in the country illegally while not violating any other laws are considered to be committing a civil offense, not a criminal one.
My rudimentary understanding of jurisprudence has never been able to make sense of that. A civil offense, I have always supposed, is committed when some one person, or something with a legal personality — usually a corporation — wrongs some other person. The word “wrong” there, a schoolmaster told me back in the Eisenhower administration, encompasses four malefactions: nuisance, negligence, defamation, and trespass.
Which of those four applies in the case of an illegal alien? It’s never made sense to me, although friends with legal education keep trying patiently to explain.
That aside, back to the main point here: Under this proposed new plan, illegal aliens who don’t register could face a $5,000 fine and up to six months in prison, followed of course by deportation.
I graded this an A because I think people who break our laws should pay a price. They most certainly should not be rewarded.
Then I downgraded slightly to A-minus because, in the first place, this proposed regime will just lead to more clogging up of the courts. Illegal aliens who are lawyered up by one of the NGOs that manages that kind of thing will register to strengthen their cases.
And in the second place, a great many illegal aliens, knowing that if they register they’ll be subject to deportation, just won’t register.
If this proposal had been in place when I lived here for five years on an expired visa, I would not have registered. Sure; some mis-step or stroke of bad luck might have alerted ICE to my illegality, got me arrested and deported. So what? I was a carefree twenty-something young guy sampling life’s adventures.
I said there have been two new immigration initiatives this week, and that I’d graded the second one C-minus. What is it? I’ll give it a segment of its own
05 — Immigration innovation: the Gold Card. This second one, which President Trump revealed to reporters on Tuesday while signing an unrelated executive order in the Oval Office, is for an upgrade to the current EB-5 visa program, of which I’ll give a brief description.
The “EB” in “EB-5” stands for “Employment-Based.” The “5” indicates fifth preference. When Congress created the EB-5 program in 1990 they tacked it on to the four traditional preference categories for Family-Based Immigration.
So what’s an EB-5 visa? From the website, quote:
Under this program, investors (and their spouses and unmarried children under 21) are eligible to apply for lawful permanent residence (become a Green Card holder) if they:
• Make the necessary investment in a commercial enterprise in the United States;
and
• Plan to create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for qualified U.S. workers.
End quote.
What is the “necessary investment”? Here the EB-5 website descends into legalese that I’ll leave you to study for yourself. The minimum dollar amount, as best I can figure, is $800,000 for investment in an area that’s rural or has high unemployment, with careful definitions for both terms. So for eight hundred grand, EB-5 will get you a Green Card: permanent residence in the U.S.A. for yourself and your family.
Trump’s proposal is to scrap the EB-5 and replace it with an upgraded version that he calls “the Gold Card.” One of those will cost, according to the President, “about five million dollars.” He promised to unveil more details over the next two weeks.
It’ll be a win-win, claims Trump. Foreign entrepreneurs seeking U.S. residence will pay the five million, enriching the U.S. Treasury by that amount, while bringing in skilled workers.
Quote from him: “We’ll be able to sell maybe a million of these cards, maybe more than that. If you add up the numbers, they’re pretty good.” End quote. They sure are: a million times five million dollars is five trillion dollars — more than the Treasury collected in revenue in 2023.
So what’s not to like?
For the full negativity I refer you to Ryan James Girdusky, who has tossed and gored the Trump Gold Card very thoroughly on his Substack, National Populist Newsletter. I’ll give you just a few of his points.
He quotes Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick telling us that applicants for the Gold Card will be, quote from Lutnick, “wonderful world-class global citizens,” end quote. Quote from Girdusky: “Anyone who uses the term ‘global citizens’ should not work in any administration that promises to put ‘America First.'” End quote.
Girdusky then points out that the EB-5 visa and the number of Green Cards altogether are ruled by Acts of Congress, not executive order. Innovations will face the difficulties all legislation faces in a finely-balanced Congress.
Then Girdusky argues that Trump’s arithmetic is too optimistic. Quote from Girdusky: “Only 2.6 million people worldwide have net assets above $5 million, and a third of them already live in the United States.” End quote. I’d like to see a check on those numbers, but that the Gold Card might solve our fiscal problems, I seriously doubt.
And then there are all the issues of fraud and corruption that already plague the EB-5 visa program. A high proportion of the world’s seriously rich people are oligarchs and crooks in places like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The ink won’t be dry on Gold Card legislation before they’ve figured out how to game it to their own advantage — with, of course, some assistance from our own less-scrupulous congresscritters.
Well, read Girdusky’s demolition job for yourself. This is a rich guys’ deal. To re-quote myself: Being rich doesn’t make you bad, and it certainly doesn’t make you dumb. You’re probably a lot smarter than the average. It can, though warp your judgement in some areas, and blind you to unsavory truths that are obvious to the rest of us.
So, the Gold Card? C-minus.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Wednesday Trump held his first full cabinet meeting. Elon Musk, who is not officially a cabinet officer, sat in on the meeting. In an agreeably modest acknowledgment of his role in the administration, Musk sported a black T-shirt reading “Tech Support.”
The emphasis of the meeting was on reductions in the federal workforce and other possible savings. Trump told us that my fellow Long Islander Lee Zeldin, now the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, was planning to cut that agency’s workforce by up to 65 percent. That would take the EPA’s permanent staff down from well over seventeen thousand to just over six thousand.
I’ll applaud with everyone else if Zeldin can pull that off, while shedding a quiet tear for his having lost the 2022 New York State Governor’s race to the appalling Kathy Hochul.
I’m glad to see you in a cabinet position, Lee; but I’d have been gladder by far to see you in the Governor’s mansion of my state.
Item: My opinion of military generals in general (so to speak) never really recovered from hearing General George Casey, who was Army chief of staff at the time, telling us, after the murder of thirteen people by a crazy Muslim at Fort Hood in 2009, that, quote: “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” End quote.
My opinion sure wasn’t improved twelve years later from hearing General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telling us, quote, “I want to understand White rage.” End quote. (And yes, I know: he was one of Trump’s first-term appointments.)
So I experienced no distress at all while reading about our President and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissing six top generals in what the Washington Post called a “Friday night purge” last Friday night.
The purgees included Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown Jr. Before being appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs by Joe Biden in 2023, General Brown had been Chief of Staff of the Air Force.
General Brown is black; suspicions that he was an affirmative-action hire — a sort of military counterpart of Ketanji Brown Jackson — were not softened by his having signed on, while Chief of Staff of the Air Force in 2022, to an official Air Force memorandum specifying, quote, “officer applicant pool goals, broken down by race, ethnicity, and gender,” end quote, and directing his subordinates to, quote, “develop a diversity and inclusion outreach plan,” end quote.
I haven’t researched the other Friday night purgees, but if they are cut from the same cloth as Generals Casey, Milley, and Brown, I believe the American military to be under better control today than it was last Friday morning.
Item: Monday night Vivek Ramaswamy officially entered his name in next year’s Ohio gubernatorial race.
The New York Post copped an interview with him in which Ramaswamy leaned hard on his plans to improve Ohio’s schools. He will support school choice, make public-school teachers’ pay merit-based, and ban cell-phones from the classrooms.
The first two of those three proposals will fire up the opposition of the teachers’ unions.
I sincerely wish Ramaswamy all success in his campaign; but I urge him to bear in mind that the story of Jack the Giant-Slayer is … just a story.
Item: In last week’s podcast I included a passing reference to the 1964 movie Goldfinger, which featured Sean Connery as James Bond … and of course, I can’t forbear mentioning, Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore.
Goldfinger was the third James Bond movie. From the first one in 1962, creative control of the James Bond movie franchise was in the hands of the late Albert Broccoli and then, after his death in 1996, his daughter Barbara and her half-brother Michael Wilson.
Well, a few days ago we heard that Barbara and Michael have handed over control of the franchise to Amazon MGM Studios, which is owned by — of course — Amazon.
The price of the handover is not known for sure, but it seems to be in the region of a billion dollars.
Will Jeff Bezos be the next James Bond? We’ll have to wait and see.
Mention of the early Bond movies stirs personal recollections. In an earlier segment I mentioned having been “a carefree twenty-something young guy sampling life’s adventures.” That was in the early 1970s when Sean Connery’s version of James Bond was firmly planted in everyone’s mind.
Having a British accent in the New York bar scene was a great advantage. I’d strike up a conversation with a single young lady at the bar. Two or three exchanges in, after complimenting me on the accent, she would urge me to say it. “Say it! Go on, say it! ‘My name is Bond, James Bond.’ Say it, please!”
Always glad to oblige, I would say it in my best Bond voice. Game, set, and match: I could order a taxi back to my place right there. Ah, youth!
Item: No, I’m not going to neglect foreign affairs altogether. Germany had a much-anticipated election on Sunday. The result, however, was deeply unsurprising — barely newsworthy.
Just as all the polls had predicted, Friedrich Merz’s center-right coalition got most votes, 28½ percent, the National Conservative AfD came second with just under 21 percent, the center-left, left, and Greens mopped up the remainder.
Since Merz has sworn a solemn oath not to co-operate with AfD, he’ll work up some kind of parliamentary majority by co-operating with the center-left or Greens.
The ongoing invasion of Germany by Muslims and Africans was a major issue in the election, and a minor one after it. The AfD leader accused Merz of having promised, during the campaign, to close the nation’s borders, then, after his victory, denying that he had so promised.
The fact-checkers tell us that Merz has the better of this. He never promised to close the borders, only to secure the borders. So I guess all those Third Worlders are in no danger of being turned away at Germany’s borders; they’ll just have to smile and submit to a pat-down before passing through.
It’s all very German.
07 — Signoff. That’s all, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention, and please allow me my usual reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to that fine monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I am now a regular contributor. Thank you!
Last week I gave you a segment on World Hippo Day, February 15th. Then I signed off with a music clip unrelated but just as silly.
Halfway through this week it dawned on me that I’d missed a chance. Hippos … silly song … come on, Derb. So this week I’m making up for it. Here to sing us out are Flanders and Swann with the Hippopotamus Song.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.\
