This Week’s Show

Contents

• 03m05s The Time Travelers
• 11m20s O Canada
• 19m04s England votes
• 28m00s Granny Groomers
• 30m46s Profitable parole
• 33m49s The cat killer
• 35m44s Signoff with The Bee Gees  

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers, from your vernally genial host John Derbyshire with news and views from the week just passed.

Yes, it’s springtime. Walking Basil yesterday morning, May 1st, was a delight. The sky was clear, the sun bright, flowers in the gardens, blossoms on the trees. Not much birdsong; but I walk him early, so perhaps the birds were still asleep.

It was a marvellous awakening from dull, chilly February and March and even, this year, April. If you’ll forgive me a flight of metaphorical fancy, it brought to mind the political transformation of our nation this past three months.

It’s only been that long since the Biden Presidency, and the contrast is all too plain. We’ve gone from the sinister grim faces of Inner Party apparatchiks like Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland to the easy fresh openness of Marco Rubio and Pam Bondi; from the President answering five questions from reporters in nine open press cabinet meetings across his entire term in office to the President answering nearly a hundred questions from the press during just his first three such meetings; from brazen lies like “we can’t reduce illegal immigration until Congress passes new laws” to plain talk about the need to deport illegal aliens.

All right, my metaphor’s a bit of a stretch. It was inspired by Kamala Harris this Wednesday night beseeching her fellow Democrats to act like elephants, I forget why.

I shall get my feet back on solid ground shortly and discuss the elections we’ve seen this week. First, though, while I’m still floating free in the rhetorical sky, a segment about  time travel.

02 — The Time Travellers.     The contrast I touched on there, between how politics at the highest level in our public life was presented to us just a few months ago and how it is being presented today, came to me again yesterday evening after I watched two video clips.

The first clip concerned the SAVE Act — that’s S-A-V-E, SAVE, stands for “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” — passed in the House of Representatives April 10th, now waiting on a vote in the Senate.

The SAVE Act seeks, and here I quote the Act itself, quote:

To amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require proof of United States citizenship to register an individual to vote in elections for Federal office, and for other purposes.

End quote.

Imagine that! — a law requiring voters in federal elections to prove they are citizens — exactly the kind of thing Adolf Hitler would have pushed through the Reichstag, amirite?

As I said, the SAVE Act will come up for a vote in the Senate. Chuck Schumer, Democratic Party leader in the Senate, had words to say about that.

[Clip:] On the one side, Donald Trump recently issued an Executive Order that will coerce states to prevent millions of Americans from voting. On the other Republicans in Congress are pushing the SAVE Act — one of the most destructive, dangerous voter-suppression bills in recent memory. It is very reminiscent of Jim Crow.

That’s what Republicans want to do. They want to restore J… not only restore Jim Crow in the South: they want to have Jim Crow spread from one end of this country to the other.

It will not happen! It. Will. Not. Happen. Let me be clear: I will not let this noxious bill — the SAVE Act — become law. Every Senate Democrat, every single one of us, is united against it. They need sixty votes: the SAVE Act is dead on arrival.

I’d like to say it louder so my friends in the House and in the Right Wing over here can hear. The SAVE Act is dead on arrival.]

As so often nowadays, I found myself wondering whether perhaps Schumer is a time traveller from the past, accidentally dropped into the year 2025. “Restore Jim Crow in the South”? It’s been long decades since there was any significant political momentum to do that (and, by the way, the people pushing to do it back then were all Democrats).

It was like hearing a politician here, now, in 2025, talk about the Missile Gap, or prayer in public schools, or fluoride in the water supply, or telling us how much he’d enjoyed that Doris Day movie. Where, I found myself wondering, does Chuck Schumer stand on Free Silver, or Prohibition, or the Neutrality Acts?

Where this current SAVE Act itself is concerned, the feds are lagging behind the states. Proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting are being debated and enacted in state legislatures all over — most recently in Wyoming. You know Wyoming: that hotbed of nostalgia for Jim Crow, where Doris Day movies still play to crowded theaters.

I get that same time-traveller vibe any time I hear someone refer to this or that mild-mannered Congresscritter or entrepreneur as a fascist or a Nazi. There seem to be large numbers of my fellow-citizens who don’t know of any political horror shows that have taken place in the world since 1945. Or are they also time travellers?

That’s how politics at the highest level in our public life is all too often presented to us by those hostile to the current administration. I mentioned that as one side of a contrast I’d noted after watching two video clips.

The first clip was that one of Chuck Schumer fretting about the return of Jim Crow. (Concerning which, I recommend for further listening or reading my ruminations on July 30th 2021 under the heading “Is Jim Snow worse than Jim Crow?” If you prefer to listen rather than read, they start 1m13s into that podcast.)

All right, that Chuck Schumer clip was one side of the contrast. What was the other?

It was actually part of a TV program, Jesse Watters Primetime at Fox News, aired last night, May 1st. Jesse sat down with Elon Musk and the entire DOGE crew to hear about what Musk’s people do and how they do it. It’s a nearly half-hour clip (the first 27m33s here), but I promise it won’t try your patience.

President Warren Gamaliel Harding described his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover as, quote, “the smartest gink I know,” end quote. I feel sure that the great Harding, if he were among us today, would bestow that praise on Elon Musk. Perhaps Donald Trump already has.

So here was Musk, and here were Musk’s people. I counted sixteen of them around the conference table in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building — yes, including Big Balls — who, we have now learned, is just nineteen years old.

They were all smart, cheerful, and well-spoken; and they were all at pains to tell us that the federal workers they were engaged with were mostly honest, industrious, and keen to help the DOGE project. Sure, said Musk, there were conflicts: but it was like how, when you read history, it’s the wars that stand out, yet most history is not wars.

I strongly recommend that you catch that second clip, of Jesse Watters, Musk, and DOGE. Just don’t watch it too soon after the Chuck Schumer clip, or the latest Kamala Harris speech, or any videos of any principals in the previous administration — Mayorkas, Garland, Blinken, or Biden himself. The contrast will throw you across the room, you might break a bone.

03 — O Canada.     Elsewhere — I mean, outside the U.S.A. — it’s a season of elections. Yesterday, May 1st, there were local-government elections in England. Tomorrow, May 3rd, there is a general election in Australia. Next Wednesday, May 7th, the College of Cardinals meets in Rome to elect a new Pope. It’s elections all over.

The election most in the news this week has of course been the one conducted on Monday in Canada.

Canada’s legislative system is parliamentary, on the British model. There’s a lower chamber, the House of Commons, with 343 members. Whichever member’s party has a majority, or can cobble one together with smaller parties, that member becomes the Prime Minister, essentially Chief Executive. There’s an upper house, the Senate, but its members are not elected. They’re appointed, in effect if not in precise constitutional language, by the Prime Minister.

So on Monday our neighbors to the North voted to fill those 343 seats in Parliament and so, by implication, to choose the next Prime Minister of Canada.

Which party won this election? No party. As often happens with parliamentary systems, no single party got a majority of those 343 seats. The smallest possible majority would have been 172. The incumbent party, the Liberals, came close with 169; their main challenger, the Conservatives, got 144; the remaining 30 seats went to fringe parties, one or more of whom the Liberals will have to woo into a coalition.

This election was newsier than the average for Canada, although to be sure that’s not saying a lot. The winning incumbent party, the Liberals, had been limping along badly for a couple of years under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, culminating most recently with resignations and some scandal. With an election coming up, the Conservative opposition looked set fair to win easily, perhaps in a landslide.

Things got so bad for the Liberals that in January this year Trudeau announced that he’d resign from the Party leadership and the Prime Ministership, and wouldn’t run for a Parliament seat in this week’s election. In mid-March Mark Carney won the party leadership election and became Prime Minister.

Wait a minute. If the Liberal Party was in such dire straits just a few weeks ago, how come they defeated the Conservatives on Monday? OK, they didn’t exactly get a landslide win, nor even a clear majority. They got 25 more seats than the Conservatives, though; and to add insult to injury, the Conservative Party leader lost his own seat, which he’d held for twenty years. What brought about such a reverse?

It wasn’t a what, it was a who. Donald Trump and his policies un-nerved the Canucks. His tariffs on Canadian goods were a negative for the anemic Canadian economy, but it was likely his repeated suggestions that we might annex Canada as our 51st state that turned off more voters.

The Conservative Party guy who lost his seat was no Trump, but he was Trump-ish, certainly way more so than the Liberal chap.

I must say, I always thought that notion of Canada as our 51st state was seriously dumb. Leaving aside the feelings of Canadian voters, why on earth would we want a state that big? Canada’s not just fourteen times as big as our current biggest state, it’s actually slightly bigger than the entire U.S. of A. — one and a half percent bigger. Population-wise, we’d be taking in more people than there are currently in California, our most populous state. What a stupid idea!

It would have made more sense — not much more, but more — to propose adding Canada’s ten provinces and three territories separately to our fifty states, getting us up to sixty-three.

Or perhaps we could just pick up one or two. There has been some talk of Alberta Province, which was solid for the Conservatives, seceding from Canada. Hey, we’ll take ’em. We might take British Columbia, too, if we could exclude Vancouver.

If you ignore the regions with hardly any population — which in Canada, means a lot of territory — the country breaks into snobs and slobs not unlike the U.S.A.

The eastern parts — Ontario, Quebec, much of the Maritime Provinces — is loaded up with woke urbanite snobs: Trump-haters yearning for a green economy, open borders, and probably — I admit I haven’t researched this point — sex-change operations on teenagers. So is a wee fragment of the far West, the bit called “Vancouver.”

Vancouver aside, though, west of Lake Winnipeg are a million or so square miles inhabited mainly by slobs — normies who’d prefer fossil fuels, demographic stability, and teenagers left the way God made them.

So my advice to our President would be: Cut out the stupid b-s about a 51st state bigger than the current fifty. Just do some gentle wooing of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and B.C. (neglecting Vancouver). There’s gold in them thar hills — there actually, literally is, and a whole lot of oil and natural gas, too …

04 — England votes.     Thursday this week — yesterday, as I speak … there were local elections in England. Not in Scotland, Wales, nor any part of Ireland, so far as I know: this was England only.

And it wasn’t a general election, for politicians with national authority. These were local elections. The structure of local government in England is complicated, and I won’t inflict a description of it on you. If you’re curious, three or four hours’ browsing on the internet may clarify the matter somewhat.

Just to give you the flavor, I note that yesterday’s election was for people to govern in fourteen county councils, eight unitary councils, one metropolitan borough council, and the Isle of Scilly.

You know what counties are, of course. We have counties here in the States. I live in Suffolk County, New York. What the heck is a “unitary council,” though? If you really want to know, here’s the definition from Wikipedia, quote:

In England, a unitary authority or unitary council is a type of local authority responsible for all local government services in an area. They combine the functions of a non-metropolitan county council and a non-metropolitan district council, which elsewhere in England provide two tiers of local government.

End quote. Got that? There’ll be a quiz period afterwards.

The Isle of Scilly? Don’t ask.

Anyway, there were these local elections, with almost no consequences for the balance of power in the U.K. government. I have to say “almost” because, folded in with the strictly local contests, there was a special election for one seat in Parliament, the member for that seat having resigned after being found guilty and sentenced to ten weeks in jail for beating up one of his constituents.

Local as all the other contests were, they excited much interest because most of the candidates advertised their affiliation to one or other of the national parties. The vote counts therefore offered a snapshot of public feeling about those parties, most particularly the two big ones: the Labour Party, which won last July’s general election; and the Conservative Party, which had held effective power for fourteen years under five Prime Ministers prior to that election.

The Labour Party, as I said, won last year’s general election and came to power under its leader, Sir Keir Starmer. This was widely understood to be a negative vote, though: not so much a vote for Labour as a vote against the Tories — that is, the Conservatives — who, in those fourteen years of power, had conserved nothing at all.

If that is right, then Labour came into power already unpopular, just less unpopular than the Tories. These local elections yesterday, with some due allowance for a lower turnout than in general elections, are being scrutinized for signs as to the relative current popularities. Have the Tories recovered some of their support? Has Labour lost some of theirs?

And, perhaps most keenly, what about the Reform Party? This is the populist-nationalist party headed by Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage — the nearest Britain has to a Donald Trump. Reform came out of last year’s general election with five seats in Parliament, its first seats ever won by election. (One Tory member had switched to Reform prior to the 2024 campaign.)

Reform went through some stumbles and some squabbling later last year, but it seems now to be shaping up as a robust contender for power. That’s my impression: did yesterday’s local-election voters see it the same way?

It looks as though they did. Friday afternoon as I record this we are still getting a scatter of late results, but it’s clear that — I’ll just quote here from the London Independent, quote:

The party has taken overall majority of Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Kent, and Nottinghamshire councils, which were all previously Tory-run. Reform has also taken control of Durham and Doncaster councils, where Labour was previously the biggest party.

End quote. Derbyshire — hey!

For a crowning triumph, Reform also won that special election for a seat in Parliament. True, the Reform candidate won it by only six votes after a recount, but the winner last July, Mike Amesbury of the Labour Party — the fellow who beat up one of his constituents — had a majority of over fifteen thousand votes back then.

If Reform can rein in the Third-Party hedging and squabbling, they may reduce the Conservatives to a fringe party — a well-deserved fate after fourteen years of almost nothing. It would have been absolutely nothing had they not acted on the Brexit referendum: but they managed to turn even that into a pile of dog poop.

And heaven help the Brits if Sir Keir Starmer stays in power much longer. There is no mistaking his hatred for his own people. So keen is he to speed up their replacement, he has launched a scheme to pay landlords — anyone with a house to let — full rent from government funds (which is to say, from taxpayers’ pockets) guaranteed for five years if they will take in illegal aliens.

This, at a time when young English couples struggle to find a rent they can afford and have given up all hope of buying a house.

And the numbers of illegals coming in across the English Channel continues to swell. The number arriving in 2025 passed the ten thousand mark April 28th; last year it did not pass that mark until May 24th. Sir Keir makes occasional noises about “smashing the gangs,” by which he means the gangs smuggling the illegals over, but nothing happens.

Perhaps, like his four predecessors as Prime Minister, Sir Keir has no idea what to do about the invasion; or perhaps he has gone full Mayorkas, quietly rejoicing to see it happen. Neither thing will win him any popularity, except among those who wish to see England destroyed.

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

Imprimis:  By now I think we have all heard about the “grooming gangs” of Britain: gatherings of immigrant Pakistani Muslims gang-raping young English girls — sometimes pre-teens — they had lured into their apartments.

That was the descriptor favored by the British media: “grooming gangs” — as if they were teaching these children the right way to do their hair and nails. It helped to minimize the atrocity of the thing, and minimizing it was what the authorities wanted.

If the truth about the rape gangs became generally known, that might incite Islamophobia — which is, as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has repeatedly told us, the worst thing in the world.

Something similar is going on in Sweden; but the victims here are from a different age cohort. Spiked Online reports that helpless old women all over that country have been sexually assaulted by those assigned to care for them.

There, too, there’s been an effort to cover up the horrors. Why? asks Spiked. Lack of respect for the elderly, they suggest. Then, edited quote:

But there’s another equally troubling reason. And that is the fact that some of the carers accused of abuse and rape come from migrant backgrounds. It seems more than plausible that too many have been wary of bringing the cases to light out of fears of stoking a racist or anti-immigrant backlash among the public.

End quote.

Always eager to help, I have a suggestion for the Swedish authorities and media. Following the British example, they should address the issue in soft, unthreatening language.

Don’t describe the perps here as “rapists,” or — heaven forbid! — mention their national origins or religion of preference. Just call them “Granny Groomers.”

Item:  It is of course a feature of modern Progressivism, a.k.a. “woke,” to favor criminals over law-abiding people wherever possible. After all, it’s not a criminal’s fault he’s a criminal; it’s something society did to him — something our shamefully white, Christian, male-dominated, heterosexual, over-policed society did. The so-called “criminal” is in fact a victim.

Here’s a little photo-montage to make your blood run cold: fourteen of the sixteen members of New York State’s Parole Board. Eight of the fourteen are female; six are black or mulatto; over-representation in both cases.

These parolers have a strong tendency to be way out on the far Left, like the New York State governors who appoint them. Sample quote concerning the current New York Governor, from the Daily Mail story I’m reading, quote:

Hochul has filled five seats and the board is still not at max capacity. Some of her appointees were denied for being too [inner quote] “closely associated with the system we seek to reform,” [inner quote] a caucus said at the time.

End quote.

Members of the New York board are each paid $190,000 a year for their services. There are some side rewards, too: One current board member, name of Tana Agostini, married a murderer while he was incarcerated and then pressured the board to release him, which of course they did.

I vented my disgust with and loathing of the parole system online back in 2009. People emailed in to tell me that parole varies by state and that some states — he named Virginia — had abolished it altogether.

That was 2009. I don’t know the current state of play. I hope more states have abolished parole, and that yet more will do so in future. Perhaps one day all states will have abolished it. I feel sure, though, that New York will be the last. Grrrr …

Item:  On an theme somewhat related to the previous item, I just read a post about the cat-killer of Santa Ana in California.

This guy, name of Alejandro Mayorkas … Sorry! I got my Alejandros mixed up: This guy, name of Alejandro Acosta Oliveros, lures cats with offers of food; then, when they get close enough, stomps them to death. He’s known to have murdered a lot of cats, and went to jail for it; but local Progressives got him released.

Yes, it’s a horrible story; but at least he’s just one crazy guy. Back in 2014, as a reminder that some aspects of human nature have improved across history, I quoted the following passage from Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Re-quote:

In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, [inner quote] “The spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” [End inner quote]

End quote.

It’s sometimes hard to believe, I know, but we have improved.

06 — Signoff.     That’s it, listeners and readers. Thank you for your time and attention, and please allow me to remind you yet again 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, who publish my work. Thank you!

Signoff music? May 1st? The BeeGees, of course.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.