This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m14s Senator envy
• 05m03s Marco favors free speech
• 14m40s Lard, petard
• 21m10s CultMarx on display
• 31m37s How to deport millions
• 33m33s Hungary blocks Prouds
• 35m33s Remembering Benny Hill
• 38m50s Signoff with Eddie Cochran

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Full Show On Spreaker

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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. 1, just to give you a break from No. 2, and this is your enviously genial host John Derbyshire with news and views from the past week.

Let me begin by explaining that last adverb. I’m not by temperament an envious person. The Tenth Commandment is an easy one for me. I rarely find myself yearning for something that someone else possesses but I myself want to have. I’m too fatalistic.

In one respect, though, I do envy the people of Missouri. Let me start by explaining that.

02 — Senator envy.     I live, as I’m sure I have mentioned before, on Long Island, in the outer-outer suburbs of New York City. My wife and I have lived here, in the same house, for 33 years, very happily. The house suits us, the neighborhood suits us, the town suits us, Long Island suits us. We have complaints I sometimes vent — the property taxes, for example, are outrageous; and getting off Long Island by road needs forward planning on the scale of D-Day — but we have no desire to move.

However, the house, the neighborhood, the town, and the Island are all in New York State, a stronghold of the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris won the state’s vote in November, 56½ percent to 43½.

I should say there’s a bit more more to the psephological story than that. The map of votes by county in New York State is mostly red. It’s the metropolitan counties — Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, New York City of course, … that got Harris the victory.

And the imbalance in space is mirrored in time. New York State has voted Democrat in every one of the last ten presidential elections. Prior to that, though, we voted for Reagan in ’80 and ’84, for Nixon in ’72, for Ike in ’52 and ’56, Dewey in ’48, and — bless their sweet souls — for Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover in the Arcadian 1920s.

So OK, New York is not the bluest of blue states. It’s in the running for that title, though, and our two U.S. Senators are out there leading the pack. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand are both too intelligent to be crazy-woke, like Cory Booker or AOC, and they’re not sufficiently skilled in the dramatic arts to fake it, but they don’t deviate far from the Democrats’ party line. Both favor open borders, for example, although with some small variations of emphasis.

Over now to the fine state of Missouri. Their two U.S. Senators are: senior, Josh Hawley, and junior, Eric Schmitt.

I can’t claim to be a closely attentive follower of either gent, but when I’ve seen them in passing, expressing an opinion on Fox News or social media, they have always been saying something sensible that I could nod along in agreement with. Hence my envy of Missourians. It’s Senator envy.

What is all that leading up to? To a segment on freedom of speech, that’s what.

03 — Marco favors free speech.     Freedom of speech, yeah. Guaranteed to us by the First Amendment, right? Well … not precisely. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” is what the Amendment actually says; but it’s amazing what the ruling class can do without there being a law that says they can do it.

I knew that in a general way, of course. As a former contributor to VDARE.com, I know it in a very personal way — more on that later. I got a whole new perspective on it yesterday thanks to Eric Schmitt, who I mentioned a minute ago. Yes, that Eric Schmitt, the junior U.S. Senator from Missouri.

Browsing X over my afternoon cup of tea I came across a longish thread the good Senator had posted, leading off as follows, tweet:

It’s hard to overstate how big this is.

For years, the State Department ran a global censorship operation — not just in America, but across the West.

Now, it’s pushing free speech instead.

End tweet.

Senator Schmitt is actually posting to publicize an article published Wednesday in The Federalist, written by our Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Title of the article: “To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship-Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled.” Opening two paragraphs, longish quote:

During his historic comeback campaign in 2024, President Trump vowed to close the book on a dark chapter in America’s constitutional history: the weaponization of America’s own government to silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans. The American people responded to this promise by giving President Trump a landslide victory last November.

Everything this administration has done since then has been laser-focused on fulfilling the promises made during that campaign. Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

End quote.

I had never heard of this GEC, this Global Engagement Center. It was an agency within the State Department that had begun life in 2011 under a different name to monitor and counter propaganda from terrorist outfits like Al Qaeda. It quickly expanded its scope, though, as government agencies will, to cover, quote, “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts,” end quote.

“Disinformation” became the keyword, defined by the GEC to mean anything unpleasing to the ruling class, including of course anything pro-Trump. One more quote from Marco Rubio, this a short one. Quote:

With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting “disinformation.”

End quote.

One of those organizations was the Global Disinformation Index, a British entity that published a list of the Most Dangerous News Outlets. The Federalist was itself on that list, along with Newsmax, The American Conservative, The American Spectator, and six other outlets, every one on the political right. The list even includes my breakfast New York Post. This Global Disinformation Index was just one of the critters being fed with State Department dollars — which is to say, your tax dollars and mine.

Rubio tells us that the State Department agency running this censorship and news-manipulation show, the GEC, actually had its funding cut off by Republicans in Congress at the end of last year, but the Biden State Department managed to keep it alive under a new name. It has now, Rubio assures us, been killed stone dead.

One more brief quote from our Secretary of State, quote:

The American people don’t need an obscure agency to “protect” them from lies by pressuring X to ban users or trying to put The Federalist out of business. This administration will fight false narratives with true narratives, not with heavy-handed threats decreeing that only one “truth” be visible online.

End quote.

I thank Secretary Rubio for taking this stand on behalf of free speech; and I thank Senator Eric Schmitt for bringing that article to our attention.

On top of that, I thank my lucky stars that I moved to the U.S.A. In the nation of my birth, on the other side of the Atlantic, freedom of speech is long dead. Over there, if you post on social media something that makes some person somewhere feel anxious, a squad of police officers — four or five at least — will come to your home and interrogate you. They may, following laws passed by Parliament, arrest and detain you.

Should they consider your words to have been caused anxiety at a serious level, they may charge you with a crime. A woman from my home town over there is serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for a tweet she posted during the Southport riots last summer.

The jailbird there is 42-year-old Lucy Connolly, an ordinary citizen with no prior criminal record, who did not herself participate in any kind of social disorder. Mrs. Connolly has been put in the “most dangerous” category of inmates and denied temporary leave to see her 12-year-old daughter and sick husband, as is commonly granted to prisoners in the less terrifying categories.

So much for freedom of speech. Britain is far gone into the darkness.

I thank Senator Schmitt once again for bringing Marco Rubio’s article to my attention, and I am encouraged to read our Secretary of State taking such a firm position on free and open discussion. Perhaps he and his cabinet colleague, Attorney General Pam Bondi, will give some attention to the silencing of that free and open discussion by means of lawfare.

That’s what we content creators call a segue …

04 — Lard, petard.     Yes: you know where this is headed, don’t you? It’s headed to New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt, who by relentless lawfare shut down my previous host, VDARE.com. The proprietors of VDARE hadn’t committed any crime; Ms, Lardbutt just didn’t like their opinions, so she lawyered them to death.

So imagine my pleasure when I heard that on Tuesday this week our State Attorney General has been hit with a criminal referral from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“Criminal referral” is when agency or authority A, which has no powers of prosecution, sends a notice to agency or authority B, which does have those powers, recommending criminal investigation or prosecution for crimes within B’s prosecutorial powers. “B” in this case is of course Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, “B” for “Bondi.”.

What crimes might Ms. Lardbutt have committed? The referral says she may have engaged in financial fraud by making false statements in real-estate transactions. The three charges I’ve so far seen publicized are:

1. To secure a loan for a property in Norfolk, Va. she claimed it would be her principal residence to get a more advantageous mortgage rate. As sitting Attorney General of New York, however, she is required by law to have her primary residence here, in New York.
2. She misrepresented a five-unit property in New York City as a four-unit property. again to get a better loan rate.
3. She filed papers listing herself and her father as a married couple. The lady is not in fact married, to her father or anyone else.

Aren’t the first two of those charges strangely similar to the real-estate shenanigans our state A-G accused Donald Trump of having engaged in, leading to a show trial before a sniggering prosecutor-friendly New York judge, a trial that ended with a half-billion-dollar judgment against Trump?

Well, they’re the same kind of thing, sure. So is this just Trump’s revenge — hoisting Letitia Lardbutt with her own petard? Possibly. If it is, I’d find it hard to blame him.

Whatever it is, our A-G isn’t taking it sitting down, for which chairs all over New York State are breathing sighs of relief. Here she was responding in public on Wednesday.

[Clip:  My mission is clear. I’m focused. I’m prepared. I’m ready. I’ve been trained by the best. I went to Howard University, that overturned legal segregation in this country. I’ve been taught in those classrooms where Thurgood Marshall once taught. I’m not afraid of no President. Donald Trump, we’re ready for you, we’re coming for you. We’re standing up for you. (Sic.) We’re fighting on. We’re not going down (unintelligible). Victory, my friends, is clear! It’s now! And I’m not waiting four years, I’m waiting two, until a Speaker by the name of Hakeem Jeffries comes to bring us some rest. Come on, ladies, it’s up to us. We saved this democracy before, we’ll save it now! Let’s go! (Cheers.)]

It’s not likely Ms. Lardbutt has anything to fear. As Jonathan Turley pointed out in the New York Post, quote:

She is unlikely to be prosecuted by New York prosecutors using the ridiculous law weaponized against Trump.

She emphasized that Trump did not have to produce a single penny of loss for a victim to be hit with half a billion dollars in fines.

But that was Trump and this is New York.

There will be no mob or media frenzy demanding charges.

This is indeed New York, in whose state judiciary white, Christian, heterosexual male judges of a conservative inclination are as common as peach trees in Antarctica.

You could ask Peter Brimelow about that. Peter spent three years and more than a million dollars of the VDARE Foundation’s money fighting the A-G’s obviously malicious and unfounded lawfare against VDARE.com, lawfare waged solely because Ms. Lardbutt didn’t like the opinions posted there. Peter encountered no help or sympathy, let alone outrage, from any member of the state appeals judiciary.

Yep: this is New York.

05 — CultMarx on display.     I’ve always liked the term “Cultural Marxism.” I’m sorry it’s gone out of style. Yes, I’m familiar with the philosophical objections to it — as familiar as a person can be when his head is impervious to abstract philosophizing.

I like it because I am frequently in argument with someone who believes that human society is composed of a class of oppressors and a class of their victims. Some such notion has always been around, I suppose; but Classical Marxism gave it a mighty boost.

Twentieth-century Communists tried to use Classical Marxism as a model for society and politics, with horrific results. Using the term “Cultural Marxism” in argument neatly — well, neatly enough — links more modern oppressor-victim ideologies to those Satanic horrors that so disfigured the twentieth century.

The phrase “Cultural Marxism” can also be chopped down Newspeak-style to “CultMarx,” from five syllables to two. What’s not to like? You can’t fight fashion, though. Nowadays people squint if you say “Cultural Marxism.” If you say “CultMarx” they just look baffled, or roll their eyes and turn away.

That’s a pity because the ideology currently plaguing us and providing half our news stories, the ideology we call “Woke,” is all structured around oppressor-victim models of society. It’s CultMarx. If it ever attains primacy it will bring us what Classical Marxism brought to hundreds of millions: slavery, starvation, torture, and death.

The present manifestations of CultMarx in American society particularly favor three varieties of the oppressor-victim model.

• In Variety One the victims are incarcerated or confessed criminals, the oppressors are normal citizens, non-criminals, especially law-enforcement officers.
• In Variety Two the victim is black people, the oppressors are non-blacks, often defined down more narrowly, as narratives require, to just white people.
• In Variety Three the victims are illegal aliens, the oppressors are citizens, especially those engaged in enforcement of immigration laws.

There’s a considerable intersection, of course — draw your own Venn diagram — because blacks are much more inclined to criminality than nonblacks, illegal aliens are criminal by definition, and some fair proportion of illegal aliens are blacks from the Caribbean or the poop-hole countries of sub-Saharan Africa. So it’s sometimes difficult to locate the precise focus of Woke sympathies.

Woven through the news this past few days have been three stories with a strong CultMarx coloring.

First story: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien gangster from El Salvador deported back to his home country by the Trump administration on March 15th on counter-terrorism grounds. April 10th the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Garcia’s deportation illegal and instructed the administration to, quote, “facilitate,” end quote, his return to the U.S.A., presumably so that he can resume his status as an illegal alien.

El Salvador has incarcerated Garcia in their famous maximum-security CECOT prison. Unfortunately Garcia, while not precisely white, is definitely not black, so he can’t claim the incarcerated-black-illegal alien CultMarx trifecta. Politicians from our Democratic Party have none the less been climbing over each other to get a photo-op with him in his cell.

Second story, likewise a twofer: 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony. At a high-school track meet in Texas on April 2nd Anthony, who is black, got into an argument over seating with white student Austin Metcalf, also aged 17, but from a different school. When Metcalf tried to shove Anthony, the latter took a knife from his backpack and stabbed Metcalf with it, leaving the lad to bleed out in his twin brother’s arms.

Anthony was arrested, charged with first-degree murder, and held with a million-dollar bond. He told an officer, quote: “I was protecting myself. He put his hands on me.” End quote.

He didn’t stay incarcerated for long, though. On Monday County Judge Angela Tucker, a mulatto, reduced the bond to just a quarter million and released him to house arrest. Meanwhile sympathizers — people sympathizing with the killer, that is — had contributed over four hundred thousand dollars to Anthony’s defense fund.

Anthony’s family are living pretty large: in a pricey house — rent estimated at $3,500 a month — in a gated community with three late-model cars in the driveway, one of them just purchased, according to a neighbor. Whether all those donations contributed to this prosperity is not clear to me. It’s probably not polite to ask. Karmelo Anthony is, after all, the victim in this case.

And then, Luigi Mangione, 26-year-old prime suspect in the death by shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in front of the Hilton Hotel in New York City last December 4th.

This is a double-jeopardy case, with Mangione facing both state and federal charges. He was indicted on the federal charges yesterday and will appear in court in Manhattan sometime today, Friday the 18th —I don’t have an exact schedule.

The federal charges are murder by firearm, using a silencer, and two counts of stalking. Disapproving as I am of double jeopardy prosecutions, I’ll give grudging thanks that at least Mangione isn’t charged with depriving Brian Thompson of his Civil Rights. The hottest current legal argumentation concerns whether the federal death penalty can be applied, as U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi wants, as do I.

The CultMarx enthusiasm here is much closer to actual Marxism than in the other two cases. Mangione is white, a native citizen, a middle-class IT worker-bee. Brian Thompson was CEO of a healthcare firm — a capitalist! And in a branch of capitalism that is, as all right-thinking people know, killing people for profit with fake drugs and procedures.

Hence all the hybristophilia I commented on back in the December 27th podcast, when it was already surging. Now of course it’s in full flood. Former New York Times reporter and Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz told us last week that Mangione is, quote:

[A] revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart … He’s a person who seems like he’s this morally good man, which is hard to find.

End quote.

The case for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment gets stronger by the hour.

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

Imprimis:  At the risk I’ll be accused of kissing up to the boss here, I commend to your attention the Z-man’s midweek tweet on immigration enforcement.

At the risk of having my lunch privileges canceled, I should say that the tweet doesn’t say anything original, just things that immigration patriots — those at VDARE.com, for example — have been saying for years. These are things that need saying, though, and can’t be said often enough.

The proper approach to removing the twenty or thirty million illegal aliens — nobody knows the exact number — from our country is not to arrest them and try them in court one by one. We don’t have that much jail space, and all those trials and subsequent appeals would take centuries, possibly millennia.

The right approach is to mandate E-verify for employment, social benefits, public schools and housing, and to offer rewards for reporting employers that hire illegals, with savage penalties for those employers. Noncriminals will self-deport, leaving a residue of criminals that law-enforcement can deal with.

Easy, you see? It just needs some simple legislation — for Congress to step up to its responsibilities … Which means nothing will be done.

Item:  Before delivering actual news on the next item, let me explain to new listeners that I jeer at verbal monstrosities like “LGBTQ.” My own word for persons who are sexually eccentric is “Prouds.”

They tell us they are proud and attach the word “Pride” to all their public events. It’s not a rude or insulting word, or negative in any way, unless you take your Sunday-school teacher’s warnings about the Seven Deadly Sins much too seriously. So as far as I’m concerned, they are Prouds. “LGBTQIA…”? Ptui, I spit.

That said, here’s the news item. On Monday the parliament of Hungary passed an amendment to that nation’s constitution that allows the government to ban the Prouds from staging public events. The vote was 140 to 21.

This is all within the context of Hungary’s high official regard for childhood development not impeded or distorted by adult displays. “Daddy, what are those people marching for?”

The adjective “proud” comes through in Hungarian as büszke. “Prouds,” in the sense of “Proud people,” is a büszke emberek. Just in case you ever need to know.

[Permalink]

Item:  The word “fame” is all too often yoked with the word “fleeting.” Here’s a case from across the pond that illustrates why, and offers some insights into the slow-shifting currents of pop-cultural fashion.

The name here is Benny Hill. I knew that name very well, although it hasn’t crossed my mind for years — actually decades, I think.

Hill was a British TV comedian, floruit early 1950s to late 1980s. The Wikipedia page tells us that, quote:

The Benny Hill Show, which debuted in 1955, was among the most-watched programmes in the UK; his audience was more than 21 million in 1971. The show was also exported to over 100 countries around the world, a global appeal which the [British Film Institute] attributed to [inner quote] “Hill’s emphasis on visual humour transcending language barriers” [end inner quote].

End quote.

Benny is suddenly news again because a British TV channel just recently aired a program named The Cancellation of Benny Hill. The show pondered how Benny’s style of humor has, quote from a Daily Mail article, quote: “come to be criticized for containing racist, sexist, risqué and vulgar content which would be deemed unacceptable by today’s standards.” End quote.

I record this just because, after all those years of never thinking about Benny, then reading that Daily Mail article last Monday, I wasted a good part of my afternoon trawling through Benny Hill sketches on YouTube.

Not all his stuff has lasted well, and it’s easy to see why, as the Daily Mail reports, Gen Z females wince and frown at some of his sketches. Benny was a great natural comic, though. Where the humor has lasted, it’s still funny.

If you want to see for yourself, try the Vicar Sketch. I’ve put a link in the transcript; if you’re only listening, go to YouTube, key “Tommy Tupper vicar” into the search box, and start the video around 2m30s in.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gents. Thanks as always for your time and attention, and a very happy Easter to one and all.

Remember please 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 Chronicles magazine, where I contribute a regular column. Thank you!

For signoff music, please permit me a nostalgia trip. I’ve told you this story before, but the coincidence of dates is tempting me to tell it again, and I’m not much good at resisting temptation.

First I need to relocate us in time and space. The time: the week of April 18th, 1960 — 65 years ago. The place: Gosport, a big naval base on the south shore of England. The precise place: HMS St Vincent. “HMS” stands for “His Majesty’s Ship,” or in 1960 “Her Majesty’s Ship.” HMS St Vincent was not actually a ship, though. It was a shore base used by the British Navy for training boys in the arts of seamanship.

I was a naval cadet at the time. My school had sent its little squad of naval cadets to HMS St Vincent for a week’s training during the Easter vacation.

The week was strenuous but instructive. I’m sure I learned a lot, although I can’t remember any of it.

That week didn’t start well, though. Our first or second day aboard, we got the news from the barracks radio that Eddie Cochran had died in an automobile accident while on a British concert tour. He was only 21 years old. The news cast a pall, at any rate on those of us lads already hooked on pop music and au courant with all the American artists.

So here is Eddie to sing us out again. There will be more from Radio Derb next week.