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[Clip: [Party sounds in background.] And that was your enduringly genial host, opening the first ever broadcast of Radio Derb ten years ago this week. Yes, faithful listeners, this is our tenth anniversary — on Tuesday the 27th to be precise, so we've been partying all week here at the studio. I'm sorry to say that I am somewhat in the condition that a good friend of mine, as he staggers out of the bar or restaurant where he's spent the last four hours, refers to as, quote, "over-served." Things are getting a little blurry. Never fear, though; we have some recorded news segments in the hopper so you will not go away uninformed. Before we proceed, let me just dwell for a moment on that 2004 intro. The intro music there was the Act 1 Prelude to Carmen. Musical dilettante that I confessedly am, I had not yet been alerted to the existence of Haydn's Derbyshire Marches, which we now use for our introduction. Carmen is the story of a lovelorn young man who, in a fit of despair, murders the object of his affections — a topic by no means irrelevant to this week's news … but I shall get to that later. NationalReview.com was the original host of Radio Derb until we transgressed the bounds of proper Republican propriety in an election year and were cast out into the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth, from whence we were rescued by the noble Taki Theodoracopulos, whom God preserve! I regret to say — I sincerely regret to say, as it is a lapse of good manners on my part — that I have completely forgotten who Michael Graham was, though I have no doubt he is a good law-abiding citizen and loyal family man. Air America was, I quote from the Wikipedia entry, quote: an American radio network specializing in progressive talk programming. It was on the air from March 2004 to January 2010. End quote. In other words, listeners, Radio Derb started up a few weeks after Air America but has outlasted that enterprise by over four years! There you see the irresistible power of truth over falsehood. Magna est veritas et prævalebit! Reading a little further down that Wikipedia page I see that Air America suffered financial misfortunes. Quote: "A scandal involving nearly a million dollars in loans from a Boys and Girls Club in New York secretly transacted by Evan Cohen [one of the principals of Air America] came out in 2005 and was a source of negative publicity," end quote. I am glad to say that there is no danger of Radio Derb falling into any such squalid misfortunes. Our finances are in the very capable hands of our banker here on the island, Mr Kleptocopulos … who, as a matter of fact, is just passing right here by my desk. Καλησπερα, Mr Kleptocopulos. [He, gravelly voice: "Don-a you worry about a thing, Mr Derbyshire, I take good care a you business."] Well, that's most encouraging. Thank you, Mr Kleptocopulos. [He: "Eez nothing. 'Scuse, I go get drink. Τα λεμε αργοτερα."] Of course. Thanks again, Mr Kleptocopulos, and congratulations on the new yacht! — it's beautiful … I tell you, listeners, with so many shady characters in the world, it's good to know there are still people you can trust. OK, let's get started. For our first segment, just as a curiosity, let's take a sample from that first broadcast. What kind of things was I commenting on back in May of 2004? Well, things like this. |
[Clip: The world welcomed new arrival Apple Blythe Alison Martin, undoubtedly the apple of her Daddy's eye, and also of her Mommy's. [Party sounds again.] Ah, that dry Derbyshire wit. That was a reference to the daughter born to movie star Gwyneth Paltrow and rock musician Chris Martin on May 14th that year. Here we have another opportunity to boast of Radio Derb's longevity: You may recall that Ms Paltrow and Mr Martin "consciously uncoupled" from each other earlier this year. Outlasting a showbiz marriage is not, in the grand cosmic scheme of things, a very sensational achievement, and speaking as a devoted old married guy myself I am sorry to see any marriage fail, but I can't resist noting the fact anyway. OK, let's get some current news. |
03 — Brits poke a finger in the elite's eye. As foreseen by Radio Derb last week, Britain's UKIP party did very well in elections to the European Parliament. In fact they came out in first place among all Britain's parties, with 28 percent of the votes cast. The globalist white-hating open-borders angry-feminist Labour Party came second with 25 percent, the globalist white-hating open-borders homosexualist Tory Party came third with 24 percent, the globalist white-hating open-borders tree-hugging Liberal Democrats were fourth at 6.9 percent, and fringe parties took the rest. The turnout was low at 34 percent. This is always the case with European elections because the ruling classes still, after 40 years, can't persuade the British to give much of a damn about Europe as a political entity. If you want the actual percentages of the entire electorate voting for the major parties, you get UKIP 9.4, Labour 8.7, Tories 8.2, Liberal Democrats 2.3. Nobody even breaks ten percent, so this isn't exactly the storming of the Bastille. It's still very encouraging for UKIP, the more so because municipal and county elections were held the same day, and UKIP did well with local voters too. There were about forty-three hundred seats on local councils in England up for vote. UKIP went into the election with just two of those seats; they came out with 163. The big takeaway from the vote is that it was a vote against the European Union. The most strongly pro-European of the major parties, the Liberal Democrats, were almost wiped out, going from eleven members of the Euro Parliament down to one. The European project was, when I was growing up over there, called "the Common Market." That's how British people understood it; that's how it was sold to them; as a free-market zone where sovereign nations traded with each other under minimal tariffs. No-one but a small metropolitan elite wanted to surrender key aspects of British sovereignty to continental bureaucrats or open the borders to Romanian gypsies. It happened anyway. In the age we live in, small metropolitan elites somehow get their way. Last week's results may mean that this age is ending and something new coming up on the horizon. British people would like to run their own affairs, as they used to — as the Swiss and the Australians and the Japanese do. They are fed up with mass immigration into their crowded, resource-poor islands. In a poll three months ago, 70 per cent of British voters said they want immigration reduced or stopped completely. The "stopped completely" figure was 21 per cent. That is, more than one in five Britons want no immigration at all. We Americans should hope that what's happening over there will be an inspiration to our own people. The British have historically been more deferential than us, more inclined than we are to meekly go along with what their social superiors think is good for them. Americans haven't been like that. This is more the land of the Whiskey Rebellion, the land where, as George Orwell said, if you don't like your boss you punch him on the nose and light out for the frontier. If the Brits can stick a finger in the eye of their elites, I'm sure we can. Let's take inspiration from UKIP. |
04 — Political Euro-quake. Stepping back from Britain and considering Europe as a whole, there was a similar pattern of revolt against the Euro-elites with a broadly nationalist coloring. This took different forms in different countries. The morons who write our newspaper headlines called it a triumph for the Far Right, but that's really an abuse of political language. In Europe overall, in fact, the political Left — socialist and redistributionist parties — did modestly well, increasing their seats by five. The biggest losers were the GOP-style pro-capitalist People's Party group, which lost 48 seats. The best result for any real political party was for Marine Le Pen's National Front in France. They went from three seats in the Euro Parliament to 24. To call the National Front "far right" is a stretch, as many of their domestic policies are socialist. They are certainly a nationalist party, but if that's what people mean, they should say so. In an age when the strongest political currents are globalist versus nationalist, libertarian versus welfare statist, we really should drop the left-right language altogether, it no longer makes much sense. Take open borders: Is that a left position, or a right position? As we see in the United States, it's both. Capitalists like open borders because they drive down wages. Socialists like open borders because they bring in poor clients for the welfare state and public-sector unions. So where's the left and where's the right? Across Europe, in any case, as in Britain, there was a definite surge of nationalist sentiment. The days when the business and intellectual elites had things all their own way may be coming to an end. Populism can go off in many different directions, and can easily be suborned by the elites, as the history of the Tea Party shows. If the populists in Europe can get some good mature leaders, though — and I believe UKIP's Nigel Farage is a better political athlete than I at first took him to be — there's the possibility of restoring a proper, healthy patriotism to the nations of Europe, averting the next financial crisis, and shoring up Western Civilization for another century or two. Let's hope. |
05 — First World under siege. Here are three headlines to make your blood run cold, and to perhaps suggest what will be the big running news story through the second half of this decade. First headline: Waves of immigrant minors present crisis for Obama, Congress. This is from Reuters, dateline May 28th. The story is that, quote: Tens of thousands of children unaccompanied by parents or relatives are flooding across the southern U.S. border illegally. End quote. The Border Patrol is estimating sixty thousand of these kids coming in this year. These are mostly not Mexicans. They come from further south: from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala. Second headline: 1,000 migrants storm Spain's African border. This is from an English-language newspaper in Spain, also May 28th. The border being spoken of here is Europe's only land border with Africa. Spain owns two small patches of territory on the coast of Morocco, both of them surrounded by high wire-mesh fences. Africans camp outside these fences and every so often storm them. On this occasion a thousand did so; about 400 made it over the fences into European territory. Third headline: French police expelling migrants from Calais camps. This is from the BBC News, May 28th again. Story: Around 800 illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa were living in a squalid camp outside Calais. That's the French city just across the Channel from England, a big hub for cross-channel truck and car ferries. If you can smuggle yourself onto one of those ferries or trucks, you can make it into Britain — the Promised Land. What these stories illustrate is that the First World in general, and the Anglosphere in particular, is under siege. This is only the beginning. High-fertility places like sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, and Pakistan have more people than they can feed or find work for. They are up against the Malthusian limit. If climate change does happen, or even if there's just a major volcanic eruption somewhere, cooling the world for a few years, they face mass starvation. The orderly, prosperous First World looks good to them; and the especially orderly, especially prosperous Anglosphere, with its strong humanitarian tradition and mental load of guilt over slavery and colonialism, looks especially good. This story will only get bigger. In fact, I'll make a prediction for later in this decade: boat people from sub-Saharan Africa crossing the Atlantic. It can easily be done, with a GPS navigation gadget costing a hundred dollars. Sooner or later the smugglers will figure it out. We should figure out how we're going to handle this. It won't be hundreds or thousands, or even tens of thousands. It'll be hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions. What are we going to do about this? Is anyone thinking about it? |
06 — Despair of the social retard. Horror story of the week was the lunatic who went on a killing spree in Santa Barbara, California last Friday, the 23rd. This person was Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old college student. Rodger first stabbed to death three other young male students in his apartment, his two roommates and one other. Then he went to a college sorority house to kill some women. They wouldn't let him in, but he shot two young female students outside, both fatally. Then he drove off and shot up a deli, killing another young man and injuring several people along the way by reckless driving. When cops caught up with him, he killed himself. There is a possible race angle here and a definite sex angle. Rodger's father is white British with a good position in the movie business. His birth mother is Malaysian Chinese, his stepmother Moroccan. The three young men he killed in his apartment all had Chinese names. I don't know what to read into that; but as an immigrant from Britain myself with a Chinese wife and a son, it naturally caught my eye. The sex angle is more obvious from a long rambling manifesto Rodger left behind. It's plain that he was a social retard who had no idea how to connect with women. He was a virgin, and very angry about it. It's also plain that he was crazy as a coot. That's not a proper clinical diagnosis, but we do have one of those: a psychiatrist found him seriously disturbed and prescribed anti-psychotic medication. Rodger of course didn't believe he was crazy — crazy people generally don't — and so didn't take the pills. That's the sorry state of the psychiatric profession today. "Son, you're borderline psychotic and dangerous. I'm going to prescribe you these pills to keep it under control. You'll be sure to take them, won't you?" Radio Derb's been here before: last September, after the Navy Yard shooting in Washington, D.C., when I told you about my own friend who went mad, also in California. Of course people like this should be institutionalized, but … that would violate their rights. That's crazy in its own way. Indeed, the cheerleaders for this social craziness deny that nutjobs like Elliot Rodger are crazy at all. Don't believe me? I refer you to a columnist named Jessica Valenti at the Guardian newspaper in London. Actual quotes from Ms Valenti's 24th May column. Quotes: To dismiss this as a case of a lone "madman" would be a mistake. It not only stigmatizes the mentally ill — who are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it — but glosses over the role that misogyny and gun culture play (and just how foreseeable violence like this is) in a sexist society. After all, while it is unclear what role Rodger's reportedly poor mental health played in the alleged crime, the role of misogyny is obvious … There you have all the lunacy — I am choosing my words deliberately here — all the lunacy of Cultural Marxist blank-slate situationism wrapped up in a neat gift package. There is no individual human nature; there is no self; there is no agency; there are only blind puppets, pulled this way and that by social forces, pulled towards homicide by forces denying the complete, original and perfect equality between men and women. "The devil made me do it," our great-grandparents used to say. Nowadays misogyny made me do it, racism made me do it, homophobia made me do it. Put me down as hopelessly old-fashioned here. I think Elliot Rodger did it because of some disorder in his brain; a disorder we knew about and could have acted on to save those six young lives, except that, in the name of a false and poisonous ideology, we have abdicated our responsibility in these matters. |
07 — Miscellany. And now, here comes the lovely Miss Ellany, bringing with her our closing roundup of brief items. Imprimis: Headline of the week is from the German illustrated magazine Bild, quote: Danke für dieses arschgeile Wochenende! Google Translate renders that as, quote, "Thank you for this ass horny weekend!" The inspiration here is three photographs of famous ladies' rear ends. Left to right across the page the ladies are: Khloe Kardashian, whose very large derrière is discreetly sheathed in a long evening gown; her sister Kim Kardashian, whose simply colossal butt is stress-testing the fabric of skintight pants, and Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge, a/k/a Kate Middleton, whose well-formed but more modestly-proportioned royal heinie was exposed in all its nakedness by an unfortunate gust of wind while a paparazzo was nearby. That at least is what Bild says happened. Having mixed somewhat with the paparazzi community I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that they carry wind-making machines concealed in their cameras. The Kardashian girls are of course American. The Duchess however is English; so I guess what we're seeing there is a London derrière … [Clip: Londonderry Air.] Item: Self-styled poetess Maya Angelou died this week at age 86. I may as well confess, since I've already said it in a column elsewhere, that I think her literary output was worthless and her autobiographies — she wrote seven — probably fake. As a poetry lover I am particularly offended by her claims to practice that craft. A craft it is, like making tables, with a toolbox of devices — rhythm, meter, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, etc. — developed across centuries to meld sound and sense in the most effective way. Ms Angelou knew none of that. The man who makes us a table needs some skill with his tools. The table must stand firm on a level surface. Objects placed on it must not slide off. On this analogy, Ms Angelou's tables — her poems — had legs of different lengths and nails hammered in all the wrong places. If you tried to put anything on her table, it rolled off. Having just committed gross violations of the maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum, let me redress the balance somewhat by saying this: Ms Angelou was that characteristically American type, the successful self-promoter. In spite of having no talent or skills and starting out with no money, she somehow got people to support her and pay for her output. She was a sort of literary Kim Kardashian. It's not very praiseworthy or socially useful, but it's hard to blame her for taking advantage of the rubes to make an extremely comfortable and remunerative life for herself. "There's one born every minute," said P.T. Barnum. To which Barnum's assistant responded: "Where do all the rest of them come from?" Item: For a glimpse at the future direction of our country, you may want to check out the next generation of its elites. The Harvard Crimson is there for you with a survey of attitudes, beliefs, and experiences among the class that will graduate this summer. The biggest skews from the national average are sexual, geographical, and political. Fifteen percent of students say they are homosexual. Estimates for the population at large are disputed, but the consensus among researchers is three or four percent. The geographical skew is even more marked. This year's Harvard graduate is disproportionately likely to come from one of four places — New York, Washington D.C., Massachusetts, or California. And a huge 64 percent of them intended to live in one of these four places. Politically, no surprise: They are way liberal. Fifty-nine percent describe themselves as liberal or very liberal, compared with 14 percent saying conservative or very conservative. So, a great new cohort of reinforcements for Cultural Marxism. Boy, this is going to be a long war. |
08 — Signoff. And there you have it, ladies and gents. I was hoping to get a rousing chorus of "Happy Birthday, Radio Derb!" from the assembled partygoers to see us out, but I'm afraid there was something of an epidemic of over-serving, and those who haven't staggered off to their domiciles have fallen asleep here in the studio. Hold on: My research assistant Mandy is asleep curled up against my desk here. Let me see if I can get a "Happy Birthday!" out of her. Mandy! Mandy! We're signing off, honey. [Snoring sound.] No, I'm afraid it's hopeless. I'll just have to play some music to see us out. Since we came in with Carmen, let's leave with her. Here's Jussi Björling with the flower song. Take it away, Jussi! More from Radio Derb next week. |
[Music clip: Jussi Björling, "La Fleur que tu m'avais jetée …"]