This Week’s Show
Contents
- 03m31s Welkom in Amerika!
- 12m28s A church that won’t help white people
- 20m45s Death of a church
- 27m48s SCOTUS ponders citizenship
- 30m34s Latest from Woke Academia
- 32m34s For the boys in blue
- 34m28s Date-appropriate Signoff
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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! Greetings, listeners and readers. That was some of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is of course your significantly genial host John Derbyshire, with observations on the news at precisely the middle of May 2025. Fifteen days gone, fifteen still to go.
It sometimes happens, by sheer good fortune, that one week’s lead segment follows naturally from the previous week’s lead segment. That’s what has happened this week.
In last week’s podcast my lead segment was headlined “The decline of Jim Snow.” I defined Jim Snow as, quoting myself:
The social dogma on race that has prevailed since the 1960s … characterized by white guilt and favoritism towards blacks (a/k/a “affirmative action”) and by deference to what I have called “the romance of American blackness” — narratives about cruel leering white people beating up on helpless pleading blacks.
End quote.
My thesis was that the case of Shiloh Hendrix, the young white Minnesota lady who made a pile of money via crowdfunding following a heated exchange with a black man that the man posted on social media — that case, I argued, was yet further evidence that Jim Snow, as a social dogma, is losing its force.
I think one of the lead news stories this week may further reinforce that thesis; so that is my first segment today.
Before proceeding with it, I’ll just note as a matter of general interest, following on that segment from last week, that as I speak here on Friday afternoon the crowdfunding site for Shiloh Hendrix shows donations now up to $779,158. This time last week they were $759,786; so that’s a one-week increase of $19,372, damn near twenty thousand dollars.
02 — Welkom in Amerika!. So what’s my follow-up story that, according to me, may offer further evidence that the Jim Snow dogma is losing its force? The follow-up story is the arrival on Monday of 59 white South Africans as refugees.
The backstory here is that back in late January, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted a new law, the Expropriation Act, that allows authorities of the state to take private land without compensation so long as it’s done, quote, “in the public interest,” end quote. The definition of the public interest in the nation’s Constitution includes the redress of historical discrimination.
The Expropriation Act is obviously aimed at white farmers, most of whom are Afrikaners — that is to say, they are descended from Dutch settlers, not British ones, and speak Afrikaans, not English.
President Trump reacted to that in early February with an Executive Order that that halted all foreign aid to South Africa and declared that American officials should do everything possible to help, quote, “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” End quote.
Hearing of that, close to seventy thousand South Africans asked the U.S. embassy or its website for more information.
What are the rights and wrongs here? Historically, of course, from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, racial discrimination was institutionalized in South Africa in the system of Apartheid — racial discrimination that favored whites over blacks. So if today the government seizes the land of some white farmer without compensation so that some nephew of the President can have it, that will be legal under this Expropriation Act — the redress of historical discrimination.
All right, it’s legal; but is it just? I guess you could argue it either way, is or isn’t; but that’s deeper into the internal affairs of foreign countries than this isolationist wants to go. Let South Africans sort it out.
Same response to Trump’s declaration that “It’s a genocide,” by which he means it’s an effort on behalf of black South Africans to altogether exterminate white South Africans.
For sure there are some blacks who have that in mind — the ones chanting “Kill the Boer, the farmer,” at rallies of South Africa’s fourth largest political party [sound clip]. We have blacks like that in the U.S.A. too, as I have previously remarked.
What are the numbers, though? What are the prospects of an actual genocide? We know the numbers who called the U.S.Embassy to ask about refugee status: seventy thousand. The white population of South Africa is about four and a half million, so that seventy thousand represents one and a half percent. Not really a rush for the lifeboats.
From what I have gathered from news reports and from speaking not long ago with an actual white South African — a middle-aged male college professor — the country’s a mess. Crime is at appalling levels; and yes, a lot of it is targeted by blacks against whites. Public utilities are all failing, the economy’s in the tank, and so on.
It’s not Haiti, though. South Africa’s been a mess for years and citizens have adapted or left. There’s a flourishing tourist trade — the climate is superb. You want to talk immigration? The country has an estimated five million illegal aliens in residence, three million just from Zimbabwe.
So what with one thing and another, I think Trump’s February Executive Order was a bit of a stretch. I welcome it none the less, and I welcome these 59 Afrikaners who landed on Monday. I welcome it, and them, as further portents of the decline of Jim Snow — of institutionalized anti-whiteness here in the U.S.A.
If Trump 45 had tried this eight years ago, when Jim Snow was riding strong and anti-whiteness was the order of the day, the elites would have been howling blue murder. All I’ve heard so far has been some genteel negativity from the BBC and a slightly more combative version of the same from The New York Times.
To be sure, social media’s been lighting up. One black American female posting on X has openly threatened the Afrikaners, quote: “I just want to let you know that our President, he has Secret Service protection and you will not.” End quote.
Several others have jeered at us immigration restrictionists along the lines of, quote: “You’re against the asylum and refugee programs, aren’t you? So why are you smiling at these white South Africans coming in?”
I’d amend the wording there to “asylum and refugee rackets,” which is what they mostly are — more on that in the next segment. That aside, why would I object to well-dressed, well-mannered white Europeans getting some help to settle in the U.S.A.? Why should I not object to the uncouth, lawless, ignorant dregs of Somalia, Venezuela, and Pakistan being ushered in?
I live just twenty miles from New York City, which — as the song says — was once New Amsterdam. Why would I object to the assisted arrival of farmers with Dutch ancestry?
I won’t. I don’t. [Attempting Afrikaans.] Welkom in Amerika!
03 — A church that won’t help white people. The arrival of those Afrikaners has supplied me with yet another link between last week’s podcast and this one.
Speaking about the newly-elected Pope, I made some side comments about the Anglican church, my childhood introduction to institutional Christianity.
The Episcopal Church here in the U.S.A. is closely related to the Anglican Church of England. There was a spot of bother after the War of Independence when the Church of England priests and worshippers already settled here were no longer sure what to do with themselves in this new country.
They didn’t have any bishops to guide them — Britain’s colonial policy hadn’t allowed it — and they could no longer accept the authority of the bishops over the water because that would put them, at one remove, under the authority of the British monarch whom their fellow-countrymen had just defeated in war. They could elect themselves a bishop, but the English church wouldn’t consecrate him.
American Anglicans squared the circle in 1784 by electing Samuel Seabury of Connecticut as bishop and sending him over for consecration by bishops in Scotland, where the church was separated from the English King. Once he was back in the U.S.A., we had a Protestant Episcopal church under Anglican rites … and we still have it.
It now has lots of bishops — around 140 currently active. One of them, the Presiding Bishop, is supreme. That title is currently held by a chap named Sean Rowe: fifty years old, born in Pennsylvania, married with one daughter.
Well, the Episcopal Church has been in the news this week. They run an outfit called Episcopal Migration Ministries, EMM for short, which works with the federal government on resettling refugees. The Church gets a nice big federal grant for that, of course.
At the end of last month the feds informed EMM that they’d be expected to help out with resettling those white Afrikaners. Monday this week Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe sent a letter back telling the feds that the Church had decided not to comply. Key quote:
In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.
End quote.
So: “No,” says the bishop, “We’re not here to help white people.”
There’s actually a bit more to it than just plain woke anti-whiteness. That reference to the Anglican Church of Southern Africa offers a clue.
During the heyday of the British Empire, Anglicans didn’t just set up an offspring church here in North America, they set up such churches all over, from the Episcopal Church of Sudan to the Shèng Gōng Huì in Hong Kong … Although, while I hate to pick nits, if that latter one is in Hong Kong it ought to be spelt as Cantonese, not Mandarin: Sing Gùng Wúi.
Today there are 46 of these churches, spoken of collectively as the Anglican Communion. And yes, that includes one in Southern Africa, first bishop appointed 1847.
With that in mind, and scrolling through the faces of worshippers at the Anglican Communion website, you can see where Presiding Bishop Rowe is coming from.
In the previous segment I referred to the “asylum and refugee rackets.” EMM was one of them. Now it is apparently one no longer. That, if you set the race issue aside, is at least a small moral advance on the part of the Episcopal Church.
If you were interested in immigration issues from 2007 to 2022 you probably remember the website called Refugee Resettlement Watch, run by a doughty Maryland lady named Ann Corcoran. Ann’s self-appointed mission was to expose the scandals, lies, and injustices inflicted on the people of the U.S.A. by the refugee agencies. The website remains online although Ann no longer posts to it.
At the center of the resettlement racket are a handful of NGOs, most with reassuringly churchy names. If you scroll down some on Ann’s website she gives a list: Church World Service, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, and yes, Episcopal Migration Ministries.
These NGOs drive the refugee and asylum rackets, taking in great scads of taxpayers’ money from the federal government while doing so, paying their operatives handsome salaries of course, and imposing all kinds of problems on American communities, as documented by Ann Corcoran. Also, of course, giving the finger to the principle of church-state separation.
If the Episcopal Church has given up its involvement in this sleazy business — well, that is, as I said, a moral advance, balancing out the anti-white message to some degree.
04 — Death of a church. Just a footnote to that last segment.
If the Anglican Church is spread all around the world like that, shouldn’t it have a Pope, like the Roman Catholic Church?
Eh, it does have … sort of. In England, where of course Anglicanism got its start, there are arch-bishops with authority over the bishops, and one of those archbishops is supreme above the others. That’s the Archbishop of Canterbury.
As it happens, the position is currently vacant. The last Archbishop of Canterbury, a bloke named Justin Welby, resigned in January. There’d been a sex scandal: a leader of church youth camps who’d been abusing young boys for years. Welby wasn’t directly involved, but he’d failed to take sufficiently strong action against the abuser when he knew about it and should have acted.
So there was a spell there when both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican one were without a head — the first time that had happened since 1691.
The Roman Catholics got themselves a new Pope pretty briskly, but it’ll take months for the Anglicans to install a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Meanwhile the Archbishop of York is carrying out Welby’s duties, notwithstanding there’s a fuss about him not acting forcefully enough when he should have in a separate child-abuse case.
(If you’re getting the impression that senior Anglican clergy are kind of limp, well … they are.)
While the Archbishop of Canterbury is head cleric in the Anglican Church, he himself has a superior he must report to. That would be the British monarch, one of whose ceremonial titles is “Defender of the Faith.”
So you’d think that King Charles would be exerting himself to sort out the mess in the Church he presides over. Perhaps he would be if he wasn’t so busy kissing up to Islam.
Does any of this matter? Will there even be a Church of England five or ten years from now? Not if it depends on involvement by the ruling dynasty, the Windsors. Charles, as we’ve seen, finds Islam more to his taste. He’s 76 years old, though, and not in good health.
His first son, heir to the throne Prince William, may not be much more use to the Church than Charles is. Quote:
England’s heir, Prince William, does not go to church every Sunday and was said by a palace insider to feel [inner quote] “not instinctively comfortable in a faith environment” [end inner quote] — ominously weasel words for someone who will bear the title of “Defender of the Faith.”
End quote.
I took that quote from a column about the Church of England in last week’s Economist magazine, column title: “The Church of England is dying out and selling up.”
Things really don’t look good. Three thousand five hundred churches have closed just in the last decade. Sixteen thousand remain open; so if the rate of church closures stays constant, the Church still has forty-five years of life in it. That’s a big “if,” though, with Muslims pouring into the country unchecked and taking over Britain’s cities and towns … and monarchs.
In 2012 the late Roger Scruton, a conservative philosopher, published a book about the Church of England, title Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England. I reviewed that book for the American Spectator. Closing sentence of my review, quote:
I liked this book. However, I was raised, like Scruton, in mid-20th century England, in a culture now as comprehensively extinct as that of the Moabites. Whether Our Church will find favor with, or even be comprehensible to, readers of different nativity, I would not venture to speculate.
End quote.
Yes, it made me sad. Watching the old country die makes me sad. Sorry, sorry: I shouldn’t inflict my sadness on you.
The sadness is widely shared, though, even among unbelievers. Where the national Church is concerned, it was all foreseen 71 years ago by Philip Larkin, one of the best British poets of the 20th century.
Larkin was a complete atheist; but one of his best-loved works, by believers and unbelievers alike, is the poem Church Going, written in 1954. YouTube has a recording of Larkin himself reading the poem. I strongly recommend it to your attention.
05 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: One of Trump 47’s first Executive Orders after he took office in January was to end the birthright-citizenship interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Local judges from coast to coast promptly issued nationwide orders of their own blocking the President’s order.
Yesterday, Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for and against both issues: birthright citizenship, and the power of a single local judge to temporarily block a president’s agenda nationwide.
On birthright citizenship, the President posted the following thing at X yesterday, quote:
Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the “SUCKERS” that we are!
End quote.
Like too many of the President’s posts, that doesn’t actually make much sense, but he’s surely right that foreigners are taking us for suckers. Trump’s next assertion, however, is just plain false. Quote:
The United States of America is the only Country in the World that does this, for what reason, nobody knows.
End quote.
In fact about thirty countries, including most of the Latin American ones, have birthright citizenship.
Whether or not birthright citizenship is constitutional depends on which interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” you favor. The writers of that Amendment should really have been more explicit.
The Supreme Court’s term ends in late June; we’ll likely get a decision about then. On birthright citizenship I’m betting they’ll leave it as is, telling us if we want it changed we should lobby Congress to amend the Amendment. Which of course they never will.
Item: Whatever is changing out here in reality, academics are still deep in the world of woke, where there is no such thing as sex and no such thing as race. Latest news from that strange world: pregnancy is just a social construct.
The academic here is Carlo Sariego, a Ph.D. student at — wait for it — Yale University. I’ve stared at Carlo Sariego’s picture for a couple of minutes, but I still have no idea whether he or she is male or female. For pronouns I’ll go with “it.”
It has just recently put out a paper with the title “Transfeminist Pregnancy: Reproductive Speculation, Genre, and Desire.” Sample quote from the introductory abstract:
I argue that pregnancy is not to be defined by biological phenomena but instead as a genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience and expectation. As a multidimensional genre of experience, rather than merely a biological datum, pregnancy can potentially establish a shared ground between trans and cis women.
End quote.
Yale University was once one of our foremost seats of learning. Can we call in the U.S. Air Force yet?
Item: Did you know — I bet you didn’t — that this week has been National Police Week? Whether you did or not, I recommend to your attention Ryan Zickgraf’s May 14th article “The Fading American Police Officer” at UnHerd.com
New York City Police Department headcount has fallen by eleven percent since 2019, the author tells us. Nobody wants to be a cop any more. Why is that, I wonder?
To cheer myself up, and as a personal tribute to the boys in blue, I’ve pulled down one of my favorite books: Connie Fletcher’s 1990 classic What Cops Know. Sample passage from page 83 in the paperback. Quote:
There’s something we call the “Guilt Indicator.” Over and over and over again we see it. I can’t tell you how many scores of times I’ve seen it myself. This is it: We have three suspects for murder. You throw them all in the interrogation room, handcuff them to a wall. Come back later, one guy’s asleep. That is an absolute indication of the person’s guilt.
End quote.
I love this book. Cops really know stuff.
06 — Signoff. That’s it, listeners and readers. Thank you for your time and attention.
I have some date-appropriate signoff music for you, but first I’ll just give my customary reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation 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. Thank you!
Signoff music. We’re coming up to high school graduation time, with its accompanying events. Those events of course include the prom, with all its teenage joys, pains, stresses, and ambiguities. For us in the geezer cohort, watching the young folk frolicking at their graduation prom is also of course an occasion for nostalgia.
Back in the Mother Country there was actually no tradition of a high school prom, or indeed of anything ceremonial about graduation. We seniors finished classes, sat our final exams, then spent the tail-end of the term goofing off — playing card games in the science lab until the school shut down for summer vacation. That’s how I remember things, anyway.
We had our teenage years, though. We had dances, and we had those joys, pains, stresses, and ambiguities. Nothing brings them back so clearly as the popular music of that time — in my case, the early sixties. A character in one of Noel Coward’s plays remarks, quote: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” end quote. Indeed it is.
I’ll sign off with what is, for me, one of the most potent examples, nostalgia at the max. Eh, where did all those years go? You younger listeners, gather ye rose-buds while ye may, and don’t be put off by the fact that rose-buds come with thorns.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.