This Week’s Show
Contents
- 01m04s Jared spreads terror
- 06m04s Atheism goes woke
- 16m53s Lawfare all over
- 22m13s Human rights lunacy
- 32m59s The Scopes centenary
- 33m52s Civil war? Nah
- 35m18s It is so flat!
- 36m27s Signoff with Maria
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Transcript
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. That was a fragment of Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 in the big band version, and this is your sensitively genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week’s news.
To begin with, a couple of segments on the culture.
02 — Jared spreads terror. On March 27th my dear friend Jared Taylor, the race realist proprietor of the American Renaissance website, addressed students at Colorado Mesa University, a public university in Grand Junction, Colorado, at the invitation of a student club.
The event had of course been arranged in advance. I’ll just quote here from Jared’s long March 31st post on X. Quote:
The first students heard about it was on March 7th, when university president John Marshall sent an 800-word statement to the entire campus. He agonized over [inner quote] “the most difficult and important test CMU has faced when it comes to free speech,” [end inner quote] but explained that the First Amendment is “sacred,” adding that [inner quote] “our task is to empower you to pursue truth.” [end inner quote] He called my views “vile” and “abhorrent,” but told students, [inner quote] “[I]t’s the opportunity of your life … to carefully deconstruct his dehumanizing ideas.” [End inner quote.]
End quote.
Is that actually the voice of an adult male American, president of a university? How has he concluded that Jared’s views are vile, abhorrent, and dehumanising? By a three-minute scan of Jared’s Wikipedia page, probably.
On that subject, though — I mean the subject of University President John Marshall — Jared is, as he always is, the perfect gentleman. Jared is highly intelligent, well-read, well-traveled, and scrupulously well-mannered. He picks no-one’s pocket, breaks no-one’s leg, and keys no-one’s Tesla.
Here he was being interviewed the day after the event by a guy from the university TV station.
[Clip: Interviewer — President Marshall, here in this community, has actually drawn quite a bit of criticism for even allowing you to come onto campus where some have said you should not have been allowed because of your views and your ideologies, and yet because of freedom of speech and his views on freedom and speech, he allowed that to occur.
Is there anything that you would actually still commend him or credit him for that in any manner, at least, on that level?
Jared — Certainly. In a way, President Marshall was in a tight spot. He apparently believes in the First Amendment. And as a matter of fact there are Supreme Court precedents according to which a publicly-supported university — which CMU is — does not have the right to draw a line and say “these opinions are absolutely unacceptable. You could have made a court case to force him to let me on the campus. He may or may not be aware of that.
But the fact that he stood firm and he said “We believe in freedom of speech” — in fact he called it “sacred” — yes, I commend him for that.]
What that interviewer called Jared’s “ideologies” are, as Jared explained later in the interview, race realism and white advocacy. He believes that races are biological realities, as they surely are. The foundational text of modern biological science has the word “races” in its subtitle. And Jared believes that white people have the right to speak up, politely but firmly, for their collective interests, a thing that nonwhites everywhere believe about their own rights.
That such a person should be the focus of furious controversy at an institution of higher education is a sad commentary on the state of our civilization.
03 — Atheism goes woke. I gave an oblique mention to Charles Darwin just there. That stirred some long-sleeping memories.
Twenty years ago, when I was writing for National Review, the “Intelligent Design” movement was still going strong, scoffing at the idea that living creatures evolve over many generations from one form to another. Every so often I had to arm-wrestle with I.D. proponents from organizations like the Discovery Institute.
This difference of opinion — loosely tagged as “Darwinism” versus “creationism” — was a real major split within the conservative movement. Politically, creationists were a subset of the Religious Right. National Review being a conservative magazine, they had some influence there. I was occasionally snubbed at the magazine’s events by fellow conservatives who considered Darwinism a form of treason to the cause.
Just twenty years ago, February 2005, National Review published a column in which I scoffed at Intelligent Design. The Discovery Institute, which is based in Seattle, flew a platoon of their big names over to New York for a meeting with National Review editors and staff, including of course me. We spent a whole afternoon kicking the issue around; mainly in a good-natured way, but of course nobody’s mind was changed.
Two years later, in May 2007, these two factions within conservatism, Darwinists and creationists, locked horns at a conference organized by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. There were two principals on each side of the argument: for creationism, political scientist John G. West and Economist George Gilder, both from the Discovery Institute; and for Darwinism, political scientist Larry Arnhart and ink-stained wretch John Derbyshire from National Review. The New York Times wrote up the event — the only time my name has ever appeared in their news pages, I think. Quote from their report, quote:
[T]he tension between the proponents of intelligent design and of evolution was occasionally on display. When Mr. Derbyshire described himself as a “lapsed Anglican,” which he compared to “falling out of a first-floor window,” Mr. Gilder piped up, [inner quote] “Did you fall on your head?” [End inner quote.]
End quote.
A year before that, in 2006, academic biologist Jerry Coyne had started his blog titled Why Evolution is True; three years after that he published a book with the same name. The blog is still going strong.
“Strong” actually doesn’t begin to describe it. Today’s post — April 4th 2025 — runs to eleven thousand words with thirty-two images (both still and moving) three charts or maps, and one four-panel cartoon. It’s not just idle ranting, either: nearly a thousand of those words, and one of the charts, is given over to the tariffs issue. (Jerry is skeptical.)
The guy is 75 years old. How on earth does he do it? I can only watch and envy.
Politically, Coyne is on the libertarian left. He’s of Jewish ancestry and a keen Zionist (although not a Cohen), but regards all religion as false. For a long time he was a director on the honorary board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), a longstanding atheist organization headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin.
Then four months ago — December 29th last year — Coyne resigned from the FFRF. The cause of his resignation was an essay published the previous month, November, by Kat Grant, a fellow at the FFRF, arguing forcefully that biological sex is an illusion: that, quote, “A woman is whoever she says she is.” End quote.
Coyne asked to be allowed a rebuttal. FFRF said okay, and posted a short piece he wrote titled: “Biology is not bigotry,” arguing for the reality of biological sex. The day after they posted it, however, they took it down, issuing a statement that the posting was an “error of judgment,” that it “does not reflect our values or principles,” and that it had caused “distress.”
Coyne resigned, along with two other big-name atheists: Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has, in other words, gone woke. The woke ideology has captured American atheism, or any rate its most prominent and long-established organization.
Monday this week Jerry Coyne published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal under the title “Losing My Nonreligion” He insists he didn’t pick that title. He’s still an atheist, just not a woke one. His Zionism should fit pretty well, as anti-Zionism seems to be settling in as a component of woke ideology.
In that Wall Street Journal op-ed Coyne argues that wokism, or at least transgenderism, now exhibits the very same features he objects to in religion. I’ll give you a longish quote. Quote:
In many ways, transgender ideology is no different from the religious dogma the FFRF was founded to oppose. It insists on doctrines that are palpably untrue (“trans women are women”), engages in circular reasoning (“a woman is whoever she says she is”) and affirms mind/body dualism (“your self-concept is more real than your actual sex”).
It also makes anathema of heresy and blasphemy (tarring of dissenters as “transphobes”), attempts to silence critics who raise valid counter arguments, seeks to proselytize children in schools and excommunicates critics (J.K. Rowling is the best-known example). Like religious fundamentalists, proponents of these views have a fierce conviction that they’re morally correct and know what’s best for you and society. To disagree is to be immoral — sinful, you might say.
End longish quote.
So the wheel turns; so atheism morphs into a quasi-religion. I refer you to the quote from myself that follows quotes from George Orwell and A.E. Housman at the top of my home page.
Things used to be so much simpler. Atheist or believer; left or right; Jew or Gentile; if you knew where a person stood on one of those axes you could make a fairly safe guess where he was on the other two. Now people are all over the place.
I’m really having trouble figuring out the twenty-first century.
04 — Lawfare all over. Boy, this lawfare has really taken off, hasn’t it? Populist nationalists are being lawfared all over the civilized world.
The latest casualty is Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s pop-nat party, National Rally and, according to the Reuters report, a a front-runner in polls for France’s 2027 election. Monday this week a French court found Mlle. Le Pen guilty of misusing EU funds. Now she can’t run in 2027 unless she gets and wins an appeal.
“Misusing EU funds,” eh? I wonder what she did with them. Wrote them in the wrong box on a spreadsheet, perhaps.
It’s happening all over Europe. The establishments there have been watching the way our own elites tried to deal with the menace of Donald Trump. They watched and learned; now they are employing their own judiciaries the way our rulers have been employing ours. U.S.A. shows the way!
Deep state operators from Bucharest to Barcelona have memorized the famous line supposedly uttered by Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s secret-police chief: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
In Barcelona, to be fair, the lawfare is just getting started. The pop-nat party of Spain is called Vox. We just learned this week that the official spokesman for the Vox Party is under police investigation. All right; he’s not the leader of the party, just the spokesman. They have to start somewhere, don’t they?
For what is this gent, whose name is José Antonio Fúster, for what is he being investigated? For misusing EU funds? No, way way worse than that.
Señor Fúster, at a press conference back in July 2023, had read out aloud a list of the first names of people arrested after heavy riots that month in Barcelona. The list went like this: Sabar, Omar, Nassim, Abdelkader, Salah, Salah, Younes, Karim, Jamil, Amir, Ali, Oussama, Hassan, … Sr. Fúster commented, quote: “Can you see any pattern? The only hatred is against Spaniards and their security.” End quote. The man’s an Islamophobe! [Scream.]
Yes, it’s lawfare all over against us pop-nats. That’s quite a revolution. Until recently — well within living memory — the law was a conservative profession. The wigs, the robes, the Latin tags, … conservatism enthroned, or enbenched.
Mr. O’Shaughnessy, has your client never heard the expression sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas?
My Lord: in the remote farming village in County Kilkenny where my client lives, they speak of little else.
Now, somehow, the benches have filled up with wokesters. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” says a rebel in one of Shakespeare’s plays. I don’t want to see anyone hurt, and in fact have met some very pleasant lawyers; but I think Western Civ. might get started on the road to improvement by burning down all the law schools.
05 — Human rights lunacy. It’s not so much of an issue here, but an ongoing scandal in Britain is the gross mis-application of human rights law. This may, like so many other of Britain’s misfortunes, be a legacy of the evil Tony Blair regime; Blair’s wife is a human-rights lawyer.
There’s usually a particular case in this genre that everyone’s talking about over there, a particularly egregious case. The one that most recently snagged my attention was that of Klevis Bisha, a 39-year-old Albanian.
Mr. Bisha immigrated to Britain illegally at age 15 back in 2001. His asylum claim was rejected, but for reasons unclear he was allowed to stay anyway, and in 2007 granted British citizenship. He married another Albanian, they had three children, and at some point he embarked on a life of crime.
In 2007 his criminality got him jailed. It was found out that he had lied about his origins, telling the authorities he was from Yugoslavia. He was stripped of his citizenship and ordered deported.
However, there were issues with his son. We don’t know the lad’s name, but on appeal an immigration judge ruled that for Mr. Bisha to be deported while his son stayed in Britain would be an offense against human rights. But it would also go against the lad’s human rights for him to go to Albania with his Dad. Why? Here I’ll just quote from the report at GB News, quote:
An immigration tribunal ruled that it would be [inner quote] “unduly harsh” [end inner quote] for [the boy] to be forced to move to Albania with his father owing to his sensitivity around food. The sole example provided to the court was his distaste for the “type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad.”
End quote.
Did you get that? An illegal alien career criminal can’t be deported to Albania because his son doesn’t like Albanian chicken nuggets. To make him eat them would be an offense against his human rights. That’s how crazy the judges are over there in Shakespeare’s island.
What’s being perverted here is the idea of human rights — a proper and sensible idea, worthy of respect if correctly applied.
And human rights are of course truly, grossly, abused elsewhere. I’ve just been reading in the March edition of Literary Review an account of the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of 60-year-old Australian writer Yang Hengjun. Yang is of Chinese origins but an Australian citizen since 2003. Convicted of espionage, on what evidence we don’t know, he’s imprisoned under a suspended death sentence and has been badly ill-treated.
There you certainly have a case for human-rights organizations and human-rights lawyers, and there are of course numerous similar ones. I strongly support the principle of human rights, properly applied. The principle is not properly applied by allowing an illegal alien criminal to stay in your country because of his son’s taste in snack food.
Among those who have remarked on the case of Klevis Bisha is American novelist and journalist Lionel Shriver. Ms. Shriver — and yes, she’s a she, that “Lionel” notwithstanding — is best known as the author of the 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, from which a rather good movie was made.
Ms. Shriver was being interviewed for the YouTube channel Spiked. Here’s how it went, slightly edited. Her mentions of The Sun refer to a British tabloid newspaper.
[Clip: Host — Another major area of this, completely unaccountable in a similar vein, is the asylum system, of course. And there’s been a string of absurdities that you’ve written about brilliantly, Lionel, recently … What do you make of these kinds of cases? and have we just completely lost control?
Shriver — I’ve concluded that the only solution is to eliminate the asylum system altogether. I mean, I realize there’s an element of pie in the sky there, but I don’t mind planting the idea in some politician’s mind. Maybe eventually this stuff will get so insane — though it’s hard to imagine it getting more so — that someone will move on this.
I don’t even think that withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights is enough. You’d also have to get rid of the refugee convention. And I think that if you’re really going to start picking all this stuff out there are still other treaties that you’d have to withdraw from.
I question the entire system. I don’t understand why, as a legacy of World War Two, we necessarily — just because we feel badly that we weren’t welcoming enough for Jewish refugees, especially before the war — why does that mean that every Western country has to allow that every single person from anywhere in the world who sets a toe in their territory has immediate access to, if nothing else, the entire justice system, which they do not pay for or contribute to?
And here, that system has gone nuts in protecting the rights of the asylum-seeker. One thing that really knocks me back when I read these articles — you know, The Sun loves them — you know: someone can’t be deported because his kid doesn’t like foreign chicken nuggets. I mean, you couldn’t make this stuff up. As a fiction writer, it spares me a lot of bother. [All laugh.]
What really knocks me back is the number of appeals a lot of these people have. You know, it is not unusual to read that somebody has been denied asylum eight or nine times in a row. Why is that possible? Why can’t you just make a single decision and there is no appeal? I mean, we could at least start there …
Host — Or one appeal, or something like that …
Shriver — Yeah. Not even one appeal. Just forget it! [All laugh.] And this is expensive. And on top of that, of course, we allow that if you have set a toe in the territory, then you also have access to welfare; and there is some obligation of the state to put you up. We have all these expensive hotels.
The British people are enraged over this, and so are the Americans. This is where Trump really has his finger on the pulse. This is out of control. The biggest issue in the U.S. economically is asylum-seekers’ access to health care, right? Which costs a fortune in the United States.
So I just … I think it’s out of control. We just take it as a given that most of these people are not actually persecuted. Y’know: they’re looking for, quote “a better life.” (Which is a little advertisement: the title of my new book. It is about immigration … but that’s not out yet.) So, you know, they’re gaming the system. It is just understood. And I don’t even think we’re sufficiently incensed about that.
And furthermore we’re dealing with a judiciary — especially in the U.K. — which is chronically left-wing and is always looking for an excuse to let people stay. The approval rate is something like seventy-five percent. That’s absurd. There’s no way that three-quarters of these people — on boats, for example — are coming from France — terrifying France! — are doing anything but trying to look for better economic opportunities.]
Note to self: Watch out for Lionel Shriver’s next novel, title something like A Better Life.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Since I raised the subject of evolution back there, let me note that this July, July 10th, we come up to the centenary of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee.
That was where two accomplished orators, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan squared off in court in hopes, on the defendant’s side, of publicizing the case against a state law that forbade the teaching of evolution in schools.
I’m sure the good people of Dayton have some kind of commemorative event planned. I’ll look out for notice of it and try to get down there.
Item: Most of last week’s Radio Derb was given over to Professor David Betz’s ideas about a coming civil war.
For a different point of view, one that is contrary to Professor Betz, I recommend Keith Woods’ article Don’t Bet on Civil War, which you can read on the internet free of charge. You can also read it in the book Keith published a few months ago, Nationalism: The Politics of Identity.
Keith’s article defies brief summary, so I’ll just give you a paragraph from near the end. Quote:
I believe diversity and ongoing mass-immigration into Western countries will continue to drive unrest and polarisation, but opponents of this agenda should not put their faith in some future uprising or collapse to reverse it. Change will be slower, and will require a lot of hard work winning hearts and minds, organising, gaining power, and taking advantage of disrupting events.
End quote.
Item: Finally, my favorite news story of the week. This is of course from the Daily Mail. Opening paragraph, quote:
Civilian astronauts captured astounding footage of Earth from space that clearly shows the planet’s curvature, sparking outrage among Flat Earthers.
End quote.
Was this an April Fool prank by the Mail? Doesn’t look like it; the story is dated April 3rd.
I have a soft spot for contrarians and nonconformists of all kinds — well, all harmless kinds. In that spirit, I’m going to take the story as genuine and state my pleasure at knowing there are still Flat Earthers among us. Jolly good luck to you all; but be careful not to fall off the edge.
07 — Signoff. That’s all, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention. Now get back to work preparing your income taxes. If our President’s loftiest ambitions come true, there may come a day when you’ll never have to do them again.
Saturday evenings Mr and Mrs Derbyshire settle down before the TV with glasses of wine to watch a movie on Netflix. Our choice last Saturday was last year’s Angelina Jolie non-hit Maria, about the last days of the great opera singer Maria Callas. I say “non-hit” because the movie wasn’t very well received. It got an Oscar nomination, but the reviews were sniffy.
Eh, we’ve seen worse. Callas’s later life was somewhat of a train wreck, and that’s hard to capture in a movie. By way of consolation, we got some of her songs, lip-synced of course. Here’s one of the best-known. No apologies for that: it’s rightly famous. “I lived for art, I lived for love, never did harm to a living soul…”
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.