This Week’s Show

Contents

• 02m19s Foreigners behaving badly
• 09m28s Our anti-Trump judiciary
• 17m36s The shock troops of lawfare
• 25m38s Separation of powers 2025
• 34m02s The genocidal St. Patrick
• 36m01s YouTube kowtowing?
• 38m05s TDS and MIM
• 39m40s Signoff  with Gracie

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a fragment of Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 played on, of course, the piano; and this is your contritely genial host John Derbyshire with commentaries on the week’s news.

Before I commence commenting, just a short housekeeping note. I have been remiss in keeping my personal website properly tended.

If you go to the home page at johnderbyshire.com you will see in the “Navigation” box over at the right-hand side there an entry for “Recently published.” Clicking on that will send you to a page listing everything I have published, in print or online, for the past three months, with links to the individual publications.

That “Recently published” page relies on me adding items to it as I publish them — or, in the case of most print items, after a decent interval to let the print outlet get printed, distributed, purchased, and read.

I have been forgetting to do that, so that the “Recently published” page has been getting out of date. Some readers rely on it for access to my output, and they’ve been grumbling.

I am sorry. I shall strive to do better. The “Recently published” page is now up to date.

02 — Foreigners behaving badly.     We — our federal government — have been having trouble with foreigners.

Exhibit A; Thirty-year-old Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian who came here in 2022 on a student visa to attend Columbia University in New York City. The following year, 2023, he married a U.S. citizen, the daughter of immigrants from Syria. They are expecting a baby next month. Last year, 2024, Khalil was granted a Green Card for resident alien status.

After the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 Khalil became a busy activist in the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel student demonstrations at Columbia. March 8th he was arrested at Columbia under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which lets the feds remove a foreigner whose presence they think is a national security threat.

That’s the outline of the Khalil story. There are some unknowns, though, and stuff in Khalil’s background that we only partly know. He apparently has Algerian citizenship, but nobody knows how he acquired it. Living in Beirut in the years prior to 2022, he worked for either the British Foreign Office or just for the British Embassy, it’s not clear.

He was also employed in some capacity by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. UNRWA has been sued umpteen times over, and still is being sued, for helping to fund Hamas.

In less than a week following Khalil’s arrest nineteen lawyers had signed up to defend him and funds were pouring in to pay for them. The head of the defense team is another Syrian immigrant, a law professor at City University here whose legal studies were financed by a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship. Yes: that’s “Soros” spelled “S-O-R-O-S.”

So there is stuff in the background that we don’t know as well as we might like to. As I’m speaking here, Khalil is being held at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana after a federal judge from New York Southern District blocked his deportation pending judicial review. He’s whining to the media that he’s a “political prisoner,” but that’s nonsense: he’s free to leave the country any time he wants to.

Exhibit B is the 250 or so Venezuelan and Salvadoran gangbangers deported last Saturday to El Salvador in defiance of a hold order from a different federal judge, this one from the Washington, D.C. District.

This deportation was made under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which gives our government authority to deport foreigners who are dangerous to the public peace or safety of the United States. The deportees are now residents at CECOT, El Salvador’s famously strict Terrorism Confinement Center.

That Washington, D.C. judge who tried to stop the deportations is not pleased. He’s demanding that Trump’s Justice Department provide full, detailed documentation on how the deportations were conducted, presumably so that one or more of Trump’s people can be charged with contempt, or Trump himself impeached.

Exhibit C:  And I just saw that yesterday, Thursday afternoon, yet another federal judge, a Biden appointee working Virginia’s Eastern District, has blocked the deportation of Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national here on a student visa. Suri, like Khalil, is married to a U.S. citizen of Palestinian origins. Both husband and wife have been active in support of Arab terrorism. The wife’s father, according to an Indian newspaper, served as a senior political adviser to the Hamas leadership.

I’m no kind of legal scholar, but some things are basic common sense. Here’s one of those things.

If a foreigner living in my country is making a nuisance of himself to citizens, by engaging in gang activity or by helping to organize events that seriously disrupt learning in institutions of higher education, I want that foreigner expelled and banned from returning. If he’s married to a U.S. citizen they must decide between themselves whether the spouse will remain here — as of course she has every right to, as a citizen — or go to his country with him.

As I said, basic common sense: so basic that I believe some such opinion must have been prevalent in every nation for as long as nations have existed.

03 — Our anti-Trump judiciary.

Those stories I just told are only three skirmishes in the new style of anti-Trump lawfare being waged by the ruling class through the federal judiciary. Here are some more, not related to the issue of misbehaving foreigners.

Exhibit D:  Tuesday this week another federal district judge — also from Washington, D.C. — blocked Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from enlisting or serving in the U.S. military.

Exhibit E:  Yet another federal judge, this one from the Maryland District, ordered Elon Musk to stop dismantling the sleazy USAID money racket and restore email and computer access to USAID employees.

Exhibit F:  Thursday, yet another federal judge, also from the Maryland District, blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing social security records as part of its hunt for fraud and waste.

This judge granted a temporary restraining order to prevent staff at the Social Security Administration from giving DOGE access to records that contain personally identifiable information.

Exhibit G:  Exhibit G has not actually materialized yet, but it’s totally predictable.

Thursday the President signed an executive order that he said would, quote, “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all,” end quote. Eliminationg the DOE was one of Trump’s campaign promises last year.

The Department of Education can’t actually be closed without the approval of Congress; but a great many of its functions can be lawfully eliminated, yielding major savings.

It was the Jimmy Carter administration that gave us the Department of Education back in 1979. It had been one of Carter’s promises in his campaign for the Presidency, to get the teachers’ unions on his side.

(Allow me just a brief aside. The political power of the teachers’ unions — their power in organizing voting blocs and funding campaigns — is immense. In 2003 Peter Brimelow wrote a very good book about this, The Worm in the Apple. It’s the same in Britain. One of the first pieces of advice I got when I started writing opinion pieces for British outlets in the early 1980s was this, from a seasoned old Fleet Street veteran, quote: “You can write what you like about the government, the Prime Minister, the Royal Family, the Church, the Pope, the IRA, … write what you like. There’ll be a few angry letters to the editor, that’s all. If you criticize the teachers’ unions, though, you’ll be needing one of those mirrors on a long handle to check for bombs under your car.” End quote. End of brief aside.)

So yes, the Department of Education. In the 46 years since it was created the Department has, according to President Trump, quote, “spent over $3 trillion without improving student achievement as measured by standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores.” End quote.

I haven’t checked that number but it’s easy to believe. In my paradigm-shattering 2009 bestseller We Are Doomed I had a whole chapter on education, Chapter Six. That chapter included a three-page section on the experiment conducted forty years ago in Kansas City, Missouri.

What happened, in very brief, was that after long litigation in the years up to 1985, a federal judge ordered the Kansas City school system and the state of Missouri to dramatically raise their spending. Quote from We Are Doomed:

Over the next twelve years the district spent over two billion dollars, most of it from the state of Missouri, the balance from increased local property taxes. Fifteen new schools were built and 54 others renovated.

End quote.

I went on to describe some of the expensive wonders that were added to the Kansas City school system: olympic-size swimming pools, and so on. After all that I tell my reader that, quote:

The whole project was a comprehensive failure. After twelve years, test scores in reading and math had declined, dropout rates had increased, and the system was as segregated as ever, in spite of heroic efforts to lure white students back into the system.

End quote.

There have been similar attempts elsewhere, inspired by orders from federal judges, to raise educational achievement by spending public money. They have similarly failed. That the Department of Education has spent three trillion dollars over half a century with the same result is, as I said, very easy to believe.

I am none the less certain that following Thursday’s executive order from Trump, federal district court judges will very soon swing into action with injunctions to block any reduction in Department of Education spending or staffing. Exhibit G will then be a reality.

04 — The shock troops of lawfare.     In these assaults on the President’s orders by federal district judges, it’s not hard to see the spirit of lawfare. Our nation’s ruling class are determined that there not be a successful Trump Presidency. They have declared war, and the federal judiciary is the vanguard of their army, their shock troops.

The guiding principle of lawfare is: “The process is the punishment.” Might some of those judicial blockings and annulments I’ve been talking about get overturned on appeal? Yes, they might: but how long does the appeal process take? While it lumbers on the President’s orders can’t be executed and elections approach.

The prospects for eventual overturning may anyway not be bright. Appeals end up at last in the U.S. Supreme Court.

One of them did end up before SCOTUS two weeks ago. This is in the context of Trump’s efforts to shut down USAID. One of the federal judges involved there had ordered the administration to unfreeze $2 billion of so-called “foreign aid.”

Most of that money will, if unfrozen and distributed, end up in the Swiss bank accounts of Third World corruptocrats, or being spent by Hamas and Hezbollah to feed and arm their troops and dig their tunnels; but this judge — his name is Amir Ali and his district is, guess what, Washington, D.C. — this judge insisted it be unfrozen.

Trump’s people directly petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to rebuke Judge Ali. The Supremes put the judge’s order on hold while they pondered the case. Having done so, on March 5th they ruled against the administration, so Judge Ali’s unfreezing of that $2 billion has taken effect — a loss for the administration, not to mention the American taxpayer, but a mighty gain for worldwide corruption and chaos.

The Supreme Court ruling against Trump there was five to four, the five being: Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson of course, plus Amy Coney Barrett (who I think at this point we can actually put in the “of course” column), and — whoops! — Chief Justice John Roberts. So much for the conservative court supposedly gifted to us by Trump 45.

Of the district court judges I have mentioned so far, you probably noticed that three out of the seven sit for the Washington, D.C. district. The other four are for New York South, Maryland, Maryland, and Virginia East.

Where general political orientation is concerned, those locations speak for themselves. If not precisely in Washington, D.C., they are in easy commuting range of our nation’s capital. I notice also, browsing the maps, that they contain counties that regularly show up in lists of the U.S.A.’s wealthiest.

These districts are populated by the Government People. They are as blue as it’s possible to be: not merely cerulean blue, they are ultramarine.

And if the districts are blue, the judges themselves aren’t exactly Johnny Appleseed. I’ve already mentioned Judge Amir Ali in the USAID matter. Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, in the case of deporting an Indian, is a black female, while Judge Ana Reyes in the transgender case is a Hispanic female.

I’d supposed, based on his names —his middle name is “Emanuel” — that Judge James Boasberg, who tried to stop those deportations to El Salvador, is Jewish, and so is in the regrettable old line of Jewish-American left-liberalism. However, he’s not included in Wikipedia’s “List of Jewish American Jurists,” so I don’t know.

It does seem, though, that his wife, his sister, and his daughter are all very active in leftist causes and the NGO money rackets.

So I’m ready to hazard a guess, without researching further, I’m ready to go out on a limb and say that Judge Boasberg is not a Trump voter and nor are any of his family or friends.

Yes: in the war to destroy the Trump Presidency, the federal judiciary is the vanguard, the elite troops at the front of the advance.

They’ve been bold in assault. At her presser on Wednesday, Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us that 67 percent of all injunctions against a President issued this century have been against Trump, with 92 percent of the judges issuing appointed by Democrats. There’s been some questioning of her numbers, but they sound plausible to me.

Wait, though. There are only a few hundred of these district court judges. They can’t win the war all by themselves, surely. Who are the bulk of the anti-Trump army — the squaddies, the doughboys, the cannon fodder? Next segment.

05 — Separation of powers 2025.     Reading up for our naturalization interview, we immigrants all learn about the Separation of Powers, a fundamental principle in the American system of government.

There are three of those powers, we learn. The Legislative Branch makes laws, the Executive Branch enforces the laws, the Judicial Branch interprets the laws. Right?

Yes, Mr Derbyshire, absolutely right. If you just take a seat outside I’ll print up your appointment letter for the oath ceremony. Congratulations! You’ll be an American!

I held to that simple truth for twenty-three years, until reading the March issue of Harper’s Magazine the other day. That issue includes an essay by Andrew Cockburn, the Washington, D.C. editor of Harper’s.

I can’t say I’ve read much of Cockburn’s output. He is, like me, a septuagenarian British immigrant, but he’s published way more books than I have. When I’ve thought of him at all it’s been as the son of offbeat journalist Claud Cockburn, whose name murmured in the background when I was growing up in Britain.

Cockburn Senior was not taken very seriously by serious people, so far as I could see. He was an open card-carrying member of the Communist Party. His pro-Stalin mis-reporting in the Spanish Civil War enraged George Orwell. I had vaguely supposed, the way a lazy mind does when not directly engaged, that his son Andrew Cockburn was a twig off the same ugly tree.

Whether that’s the case or not I still don’t know; but a stopped clock is right twice a day, we must always make allowances. This column in the March Harper’s is first-rate. Title: Rage Against the Machine. Subtitle: “Trump’s second attempt at dismantling the bureaucracy.” It’s a long piece — more than four thousand words — but well worth the trouble of reading if you don’t mind some brief lapses into kill-the-rich old-style leftism.

What does it have to do with the Separation of Powers? Just that it left me convinced that there are not three powers, but four. In addition to the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial, there is the Bureaucratic Power, and it may be mightier than them all.

Can Trump triumph over that power? Cockburn notes that the war against bureaucracy isn’t at all a new thing, and he runs through some depressing history. Reagan? Quote:

In office, Reagan duly set up a commission to root out waste and inefficiency. But the national debt almost tripled during his two terms, while the federal workforce expanded by more than three hundred thousand employees.

End quote.

Bill Clinton, you may remember, announced that, quote, “the era of big government is over,” end quote. No, it wasn’t.

Even Obama fired off a few shots. Another quote from Cockburn’s piece, quote:

In 2012, Barack Obama announced an ambitious plan to merge six federal economic departments and replace the Department of Commerce, all in the interest of an “effective, lean government,” but the scheme died out.

End quote.

All those precedents notwithstanding, Cockburn suggests Trump might have a chance. Quote:

Among Trump’s principal targets is the so-called administrative state, meaning the power of federal agencies to interpret legislation, essentially giving them lawmaking powers. Thanks to a recent decision by the Supreme Court that struck down essential features of the Chevron doctrine (the outcome of a 1984 Supreme Court decision upholding the legitimacy of delegating policy interpretation to government agencies), the new administration could have a potent weapon in pursuit of this goal. Instead of agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services or the Environmental Protection Agency having the power to determine how laws are enacted, such authority will now be in the hands of the courts.

End quote.

Hm, well. That authority is only any use if the courts are on Trump’s side — which, as I have been explaining, is not the case.

And Cockburn’s final conclusion is pessimistic. He identifies a fifth power, or at any rate a four-and-a-halfth power: what he calls “the contractor state,” quote: “all those, led by the giant defense contractors, who are dependent on government spending.” End quote. An estimated four out of every ten people working full-time for the government are not federal employees, Cockburn tells us.

I think I detect Cockburn Senior’s Leninism showing through when Junior talks about the contractor state. Quote:

The most tangible result of Trump’s depredations will likely be the further enrichment of his ultra-wealthy supporters.

End quote.

So we’re back to Kill the Rich. All right: Andrew Cockburn’s no more a likely Trump voter than Judge Boasberg is. It’s a good engaging essay he’s written, though, and I recommend it to your attention.

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

Imprimis:  Last week I had some comments distantly related to St. Patrick’s Day, which was of course Monday the 17th.

There were St. Patrick’s Day marches and celebrations all over, of course, but also … demonstrations against the saint.

Here was one in Toronto: a crowd of fat ugly women wearing those checkered dish towels that signify allegiance to Arab terrorism …

Wait a minute: “a crowd”? We really need a new collective noun there. “A kennel,” perhaps? All suggestions gratefully received.

Sorry. Back to Toronto. So there were these bowsers out in the street in Toronto wearing their dish towels, howling that St. Patrick was a mass murderer. Actual quote:

F**k St Patrick. He’s a killer. He killed people. He got rid of people. He genocided people.

End quote.

From my own engagements with the Irish, I think someone should warn these ladies about saying things like that when Irishmen are nearby in any numbers. That might lead to genocide, at any rate a small local genocide. I’ve almost come to blows with Irish people just by telling them St. Patrick was British, which is true.

Item:  How hard do I work at keeping up with events in China? Not very hard at all, I confess. I do subscribe to The China Journal, an excellent scholarly publication from the University of Chicago Press.

And when my brain’s too tired for academic reading, as is increasingly the case, I go to YouTube for the latest from my favorite commentators on China there.

Who are they? They are:

1. Winston Sterzel, a.k.a. “Serpentza.”
2. Matthew Tye, a.k.a. “Laowhy86.”
3. Chris Chappell at China Uncensored.

These three guys all know China really well and they can all put together a good professional-quality video. None of them is a ChiCom stooge; they are all China critics.

Someone at YouTube seems to have noticed. A few days ago the three did a joint vidcast to tell us that their viewerships — all three of them — had suffered a sudden and serious collapse. “YouTube Doesn’t Want Us Talking About China” was the title.

I haven’t made any attempt to get to the bottom of this — I wouldn’t know how — but I’ll be watching with interest to see if Winston, Matthew, and Chris have.

Item:  I’ve been a great admirer of Elon Musk since reading the biography of him by Walter Isaacson. He’s super smart, engagingly witty, thoughtfully self-critical, and supernaturally energetic.

It’s that last one, I believe, that really separates the achievers like Musk from idlers and bumblers like me. I wish Elon all the luck in the world at countering the legions of morons and zealots who’ve suddenly decided he is Public Enemy Number One.

I was going to try coming up with a nifty abbreviation for all this anti-Musk lunacy, something similar to “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but Scott Jennings has beat me to it with “Musk-Induced Madness.”

The mathematician in me, though, can’t help wondering what the Venn Diagram looks like, or if there even is one. Are there TDS sufferers who are not also afflicted with MIM? Are there vice versa? I’d really like to know.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all I have, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening or reading. I’m going to remind you, as I always do, that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account.

And having mentioned the boss’s name twice in this podcast, let me draw your attention to Peter’s plaintive post at X yesterday, tweet:

How come a dozen judges can rush to interdict Trump while VDARE couldn’t find one judge to stop NY AG Letitia James wrecking its 1A rights with an “investigation” costing $1MM and counting, although not charging, let alone convicting it, of anything?

End tweet.

How, indeed? A thoroughly politicized judiciary? Oh yeah.

You can also of course write a check to the VDARE 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. And, as you will see from my flawlessly up-to-date “Recently published” page, you can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine. Thank you!

There will be more from Radio Derb next week. Here’s Gracie to sing us out.