»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was one of Haydn's Derbyshire Marches and I am your effulgently genial host John Derbyshire with some titbits from the week's news.

If you count Sunday as the first day of the week, my week started in the Volunteer State of Tennessee, where I attended the weekend conference of American Renaissance, along with such enemies of the people as Peter Brimelow, Richard Spencer, and "Ramzpaul." The conference was a great success, and I thank Jared Taylor for organizing it in such a lovely location.

You can read what I said at the conference in my current column at VDARE.com; or you can wait for the DVD to be posted by AmRen and actually watch me saying it.

For a third option, you can go to the Southern Poverty Law Center website and read what they say I said. "Virulent antisemitism," they call it. Well, it makes a nice change from the commenters at Taki's Magazine mocking me for my contemptible kissing up to my Jewish paymasters. I tell you, in this business you get it coming and going.

OK, let's see what's been coming and going in the world this past seven days.

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02 — Crime in New York.    My normal reading matter over breakfast is the New York Post, which I am able to read out here in the wine-dark Aegean Sea via the miracle of the internet.

Let me just walk you through a typical edition of my home town newspaper. This is the New York Post for Tuesday, April 21st.

Page 2, headline: Former mayor found guilty of public corruption. This is about a lady named Noramie Jasmin, 51 years old, formerly mayor of Spring Valley, a small town in New York State. The town is 60 percent black. Mayor Jasmin has been convicted of mail fraud and extortion in relation to a project pushed by a local developer. The deputy mayor Joseph Desmaret was also involved, but avoided a trial by pleading guilty. Ms Jasmin and Mr Desmaret are both black.

Further down page 2, headline: "Bungles" allowed Carl Heastie to make $200K off mom's crime. Heastie is the Speaker of the New York State Assembly, the lower house of the state legislature. His mother was convicted in 1998 of embezzling $90,000 and using the money to buy a New York City apartment in the Bronx. She died soon after conviction. Her son, now-Speaker Carl Heastie, got control over the estate and eventually sold the apartment some years later at a profit of $200,000.

So he reimbursed the embezzled amount, right? Ninety thousand, plus those years of interest, right? Wrong. Heastie claims he paid ten thousand dollars in restitution to his mother's victims. We must assume he trousered the other $190,000 as clear profit.

The Bronx District Attorney, Robert Johnson, should have taken legal action against Heastie on behalf of the victims, but did not. This is not very surprising. DA Johnson is deeply unenthusiastic about prosecuting criminals. A 2012 report showed him prosecuting only 75 percent of arrests. Johnson's predecessor prosecuted 99 percent.

Carl Heastie and Robert Johnson are both black.

On page 6 we read about a different New York City District Attorney, this one from Brooklyn. Headline: Ken Thompson's indictment strategies go soft on hard crime. Yep, that's the guy: Ken Thompson, Brooklyn DA.

DA Thompson's even less enthusiastic about prosecuting criminals than DA Johnson. An analysis by the Post showed that Thompson has the lowest percentage of indictments or guilty pleas before indictment of any of the city's five DAs. His current rate is about 10 percentage points lower than his predecessor's.

The other thing DA Thompson is famous for is using law enforcement officers, including highly-skilled and experienced detectives, as his personal errand boys, picking up his and his family's fast food and dry cleaning, and taking out the trash at his $1.6 million town house. Officers who refuse are assigned to dead-end cases.

Ken Thompson is black.

On the opposite page, page 7, headline: Private equity firm founder gets up to 6 years for stealing $9.3M. That would be 45-year-old Lawrence Penn III, convicted of grand larceny and falsifying business records. Again there's a partner in the crime who's pleaded guilty, 44-year-old Altura St. Michael Ewers.

Lawrence Penn III is black. Whether Mr Ewers is black I don't know; I leave you to google that rather unusual name for yourselves.

Forward to page 18 of Tuesday's New York Post. Headline: Politically connected reverend accused of fleecing nonprofit. This is 47-year-old Rev. Andre Soleil, who is indeed politically connected: a former aide to Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki.

Rev'm Soleil, quote, "hijacked a 50-year-old Harlem nonprofit and stuffed his pockets with organization funds meant to house and educate the poor, a new lawsuit charges." End quote. The sum of money here seems to be about half a million dollars. Rev'm Soleil is black.

Now, I don't want to leave listeners with a biased impression here: the impression, I mean, that blacks are over-represented only in white-collar crimes like embezzlement, bribery, fraud, and falsifying business records. New York City blacks, groaning as they are under the heel of White Privilege, are also forced by their poverty and oppression to commit street crime.

On page 16 of Tuesday's Post we get the New York Police Department's Daily Crime Blotter.

In the borough of Queens, quote, "four thugs beat a man at a massage parlor in a failed robbery attempt," end quote. The print edition of the paper, which my research assistants had faxed over to me, shows surveillance footage: All four perps are black.

In the Bronx, we also have surveillance footage of a chap who shot three people, including a 15-year-old girl, on Saturday night. He's black. The other Bronx story concerns two muggers who robbed a man at gunpoint in the street, but there's no surveillance picture and the Post offers no description.

In Manhattan, a mugger grabbed a woman at gunpoint and tried to drag her to an ATM, but she got free. No picture, no description of the perp. Also an apartment robbery: no picture, no description.

In Brooklyn there's a nasty case of identity theft; two well-dressed thieves, both black, caught on surveillance cameras, got away with over $10,000.

So that's one day's crime reporting from the New York Post. There are of course other stories in Tuesday's Post. Cuomo pushes normalization with Cuba, Clintons ran Tammany-like money operation, Radio Derb voted Most Influential News Outlet, … many other stories, but that's pretty much it on the crime beat, out of 25 percent black New York City.

I know, you're baffled. You watch all the TV crime shows, and it's always brilliant, sensitive big-city black police detectives tracking down white criminals. Surely the TV producers couldn't be giving us a biased view, could they?

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03 — Rev'm Fleecer and Rev'm Banger.     Just going back to that news story about the Harlem minister who knocked off a local charity for five hundred grand. I'm assuming that your reaction to the story was similar to mine, namely: "That doesn't sound very godly."

It really doesn't; but when you spend a good part of your day reading news stories, you find yourself wondering whether there are any black ministers at all who restrict their pastoral activities to preaching the gospel and being moral exemplars to their flock.

I could easily fill several Radio Derb broadcasts with stories of black clergymen either fleecing the congregation or banging the female portion of it, or both. I could start with Martin Luther King. I don't know whether the holy blessed martyr was a fleecer, but he was definitely a banger. The Rev'ms Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson of course need no introduction.

Our President's beloved pastor, the Rev. Emeritus Jeremiah Wright, did not hold the Seventh Commandment in very high esteem. He seduced the female half of a couple who'd come to him for marriage counseling; then later, when married to the seducee, he seduced a white church worker, causing her white husband to divorce her, after first delivering himself — this is the husband here — of the shamefully bigoted comment that, quote, "People wouldn't be happy to know that my wife was sleeping with a black man." Disgraceful! — the comment, I mean, not of course the adultery.

A reasonable instinctual response to the phrase "black preacher" would be to grab a tight hold of both your wallet and your wife.

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04 — The white trash candidate.     At the American Renaissance bash last weekend, Sam Dickson gave a brilliant, spirited closing speech to send us away all fired up. Sam's speech did, however, contain one statement I'd dispute.

Speaking of the Clintons, Sam, who is something of a Southern partisan, said that he and other born Southerners knew right away what low trash the Clintons are; the rest of the country had to learn it from experience.

Well, with all due respect to Sam, it wasn't obvious only to Southerners. I recall that when Bill Clinton first came to international attention in the early 1990s, British historian Paul Johnson wrote in the London Spectator that, quote, "nobody who has five times been elected Governor of a state like Arkansas could possibly be an honest man."

So it proved; though of course we must sympathize with and commiserate with the many good and worthy people of Arkansas who did not vote for Clinton, having, like Sam Dickson, seen through him at a glance.

Now the scummy sleaziness of the Clintons, and their sleazy scumminess too, are being aired all over again in a new book by political analyst Peter Schweizer, title Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.

Samples, all according to Peter Schweizer.

Sample One: When she was running for President in 2008, Hillary opposed a trade deal with Colombia because of that country's poor record on labor rights. Then in 2010, when Hillary was Secretary of State, the trade deal was approved. Somewhere in there the Clinton Foundation, which the Clintons use as a personal ATM, got millions of dollars from a firm named Pacific Rubiales, which profited mightily from the trade agreement.

Sample Two: In 2013 the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, took over a Canadian company named Uranium One, with uranium-mining stakes all over the world, including the U.S.A. This gave Russia control over one-fifth of uranium processing capacity in the U.S.A.

Because uranium is a strategic asset, the deal had to be approved by several US government agencies, including the State Department — headed at that time by Mrs Clinton.

Quote from the New York Times report on this, quote:

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

Sample Three: In December 2012 a company named VCS Mining, based in Delaware, got one of only two "gold exploitation permits" to extract gold from Haiti — the first such permits issued in over 50 years. VCS participate in the Clinton Global Initiative, an offshoot of the aforementioned Clinton Foundation. In October 2013 — so this is some months later, and Mrs Clinton is no longer Secretary of State — Tony Rodham joined the board of VCS. He's Hillary's brother.

Quote from the Washington Post story on this, quote:

The Clintons have been longtime advocates for development in Haiti, especially since the earthquake … But the Clintons' image in Haiti has slipped in recent months as Haitians increasingly complain that Clinton-backed projects have often helped the country's elite and international business investors more than they have helped poor Haitians.

End quote.

Sample Four: Schweizer says that Bill earned a staggering $48 million in speeches during Hillary's four years as Secretary of State. He notes the interesting statistic that, quote, "Of the 13 Clinton speeches that fetched $500,000 or more, only two occurred during the years his wife was not Secretary of State," end quote.

The truly amazing thing about all this is that it's news, printed in newspapers. Are there really sentient beings who do not, after all these years, know what the Clintons are?

Astounding to report, there really are such people. Gallup reports that in its annual survey of the most admired people in America, last year turned up Bill Clinton at the third most popular choice for most admired man, and Hillary as top choice for most admired woman. Twelve percent of respondents chose Hillary as most admired or second most admired — twelve percent. What on earth do they admire her for?

Many wise and thoughtful people, including at least one of our nation's Founding Fathers, did not care for democracy. I have many friends and listeners who would prefer a limited franchise — even, in some cases, an absolute monarchy or military dictatorship.

I am not one of those crabbed souls. I cling to a trust in the good sense of the common citizenry. I'll admit, though, that sometimes it's awfully hard to keep clinging. Twelve percent. Great God in boots, twelve percent …

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05 — Africa's boat people.     Aprill, with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote. Yes, it's springtime in the Northern hemisphere. The Mediterranean Sea is calm and warm, and boats are setting out from the coasts of Turkey, Syria, and especially North Africa crammed to the gunwales with illegal immigrants desirous of living in Europe without having to go through the tiresome formalities of applying for permission.

Europe's media and political elites are mostly sympathetic, especially since last weekend, when several hundred illegals drowned. Apparently they all rushed to one side of their boat when a passing ship was sighted, and the result followed. Not much grasp of basic physics in evidence there.

These "migrants," as the newspapers call them, as if they were flocks of birds following the call of nature to seek their summer feeding grounds, these "migrants," the papers say, are pitiable souls, the poorest of the world's poor, in flight from war and oppression, desperately seeking a better life in a place where they can achieve their dreams of being astrophysicists, software entrepreneurs, soccer stars, or rap artists.

It's all hogwash. They are by no means the poorest of the poor, as you can tell by looking at their well-nourished frames and designer windbreakers. To get across the Sahara and on to one of those boats in the Mediterranean will cost you from five thousand to thirty-five thousand dollars. These are the upper-middle classes of countries like Niger and Eritrea — along with, of course, that other social stratum with money to spend, the criminal classes.

Yes, there are some refugees from fighting in Syria. The BBC tells us, however, that, quote, "Of those migrants who die in the Mediterranean, the vast majority of them began their journey in Sub-Saharan Africa." If you take a look, there isn't actually much war going on in sub-Saharan Africa.

The BBC ran a weepy story about Gassama, an illegal from Gambia, a country in West Africa. Get yer hankies out, quote:

It was difficult to find work [in Libya]. I was also arrested three times and taken to five different prisons. I had to pay each time to get out of prison.

End quote.

That's tough; but what was wrong with staying in Gambia? They're not at war with anybody, and don't have a civil war going on. They've been independent for 50 years, plenty of time to shake off the legacy of colonialism. They are a huge recipient of Western aid: The nation's entire stock of health-care vehicles — ambulances and such — comes from an aid organization called Riders for Health.

Even where wars are going on, I can see a case for taking in some helpless old people and little kids with their mothers; but why should we take in able-bodied adults? They should stay and fight to protect their homes and their loved ones.

But what sub-Saharan Africa has really high levels of is not war but fertility. Of the 224 countries with total fertility rate listed in the CIA World Factbook, Gambia ranks number 41. The average Gambian woman can expect to have 3.85 children in her lifetime; and that's low by African standards. In Niger the number is 6.89.

Look at it another way. Africa has added 200 million people to its population in the past ten years. The population of the European Union is 500 million. Let's do a thought experiment here and assume that the Europeans, moved by the plight of these "migrants," admit 200 million of them. Demographic result for Europe: They just increased their population by forty percent. Demographic result for Africa: Their population is back where it was in … 2005.

This will not end well. The current population of Africa is 1.1 billion. By the end of this century, according to the U.N., it will be four billion and some. Except that, of course, it won't, because Dr Malthus is waiting in the wings tapping his foot impatiently.

There isn't anything Europe can do about this. Well, there are things they could do: they could take a billion or two people in to relieve the surplus, but what would that do to Europe? In any case, Europe's people are not going to let their governments perpetrate such an act of civilizational suicide. Read the comment threads on stories in European newspapers about the Mediterranean boat people. Already the word "torpedo" shows up rather dismayingly often.

As we go to press, Europe's leaders are dithering on the issue. Dither away, Sir, Monsieur, Señor, Signor, and Mein Herr — along with, of course, the female equivalents. Don't dither for too long, though. As the steward said to Timon of Athens: the future comes apace.

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06 — Innumerate intellectuals.     Reading commentary on the Mediterranean boat people brings home to me how innumerate a great many public intellectuals are.

I'm a math snob, I confess. I was trained in math. As the training got to higher and higher levels I discovered that I wasn't really cut out to be a mathematician, and sensibly went and did other things with my life; but the early training stayed with me, and my mind leaned that way anyway.

Faced with a news story like that, I instinctively peer round the back of the words to see if there are numbers lurking there. Usually there are. As Pythagoras discovered 25 hundred years ago, there are numbers behind most of what goes on. That's generally where the truth lies, in the numbers.

That little bit of basic arithmetic in the previous segment, for example. Take 200 million Africans and move them to Europe: You just increased Europe's population by nearly half, but all you did to Africa was take its population back to where it was ten years ago. No, I didn't think that up myself; I found it in the comment thread to one of Steve Sailer's blog posts. It just caught my eye. But that's the point: It's the kind of thing that would catch my eye, because of the numbers, and the way my mind works.

This is an unusual and eccentric way of thinking. Check out the bigfoot commentators talking about the boat people. Bloomberg View ran an editorial saying the following thing, quote:

It would be nice to think that the EU should simply offer legal passage to refugees fleeing violence and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. Politically, however, such an open-door policy is impossible, given the current anti-immigrant mood in Europe.

Darn it, that low-class, bigoted anti-immigrant mood. If not for that, we could just let them all come legally! This is not some dimwit blogger saying this; it's the editorial board of a major news and business analytical service.

Someone named Dylan Matthews over at the eminently respectable Vox web magazine takes this to the extreme. The title of Matthews' piece gives the main idea, quote: The only real solution to Europe's migrant crisis is to let everyone in.

Once again: population of Africa, 1.1 billion. Add in the Middle East, you're up around two billion. Population of Europe, half a billion. Let 'em all in! says Matthews. Europe would be improved by it. Dylan Matthews believes this!

The numbers don't register with him. What catches his eye is not some arithmetical factlet like the one I picked up. What catches his eye is the weeping mother, the drowned corpse washed up on a beach; or the airy theories of some crackpot economist, that the whole world would be rich if all the world's poor people moved to rich countries.

For a numbers-based view of immigration, watch Roy Beck's jelly beans presentation. It's on YouTube: Search for "roy beck jelly beans," B-E-C-K. Roy makes the numbers jump right out at you. Not surprising: his organization has the name NumbersUSA. It's one of the best immigration-restrictionist outfits at work; and naturally, I love its name.

Most people, including most of the people paid to write public commentary, are innumerate; and that makes much of what they say worthless.

The other day I was sitting around talking with some people about the human sciences; about human abilities, intelligence, personality. When I talk about those topics I have certain images in the back of my mind: graphs, histograms, bell curves, and multidimensional scatter plots. Actually three-dimensional scatter plots: I can't visualize more than three dimensions, although there have been people who can.

So there's this picture in my mind of, for example, a three-dimensional scatter plot, a wire-frame cube with a cloud of dots in it, clustered around a diagonal of the cube. Tightly clustered, high correlation; loosely clustered, low correlation. With a little practice you can estimate the correlation coefficient to one significant digit from looking at the scatter plot.

That's how I think. That's how you need to think, if you're going to grasp complicated quantitative ideas.

That's not how Dylan Matthews thinks. If you ask him about intelligence or personality, he thinks of his sister-in-law, or this kid he knew who dropped out of school, or some scheme he read about to fix the schools so that all the dumb kids become smart … something personal, anecdotal, or social.

Same with immigration. The immigration boosters aren't thinking about numbers, about the kind of issue Roy Beck is illustrating. They're thinking about their grandmother having a hard time on Ellis Island, or the Famine Ships, or that polite, hard-working Guatemalan gardener they have. It's personal, social, anecdotal, emotional — not really thinking at all.

I'm sorry, but if you're not thinking about numbers, you're probably not thinking.

People, including lots of very smart people, aren't thinking about numbers. Those of us who go looking for the numbers are eccentrics, freaks. I know it, I confess it.

Pythagoras was right, though. Truth is in the numbers. If you can't see through the emotionally-loaded words and pictures to the cold numbers, you won't get much of a grasp on the truth.

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

Imprimis:  When the subject of Mediterranean boat people comes up, I like to remind people that this may not stay a Mediterranean problem, especially when the Europeans institute strong Australian-style measures to stop the Mediterranean traffic.

If Africans can't head across the Mediterranean to Europe, they may instead head across the Atlantic to America. With modern GPS navigational aids, it's not that hard. They'll need a better quality of boat, and a lot more food and water, but those shouldn't be insuperable problems.

Far-fetched, you say? Couldn't possibly happen, you say? Brothers and sisters: It's already happened.

From the Independent, a London broadsheet newspaper; Saturday, February 3rd, 2007. Quote:

Fourteen men who were trying to journey by a British-registered catamaran from Senegal in West Africa to New York, where they dreamed of finding jobs and new lives, have been rescued from an Atlantic storm after drifting for days with broken sails and a stalled engine.

U.S. Coast Guard officials said the men set out on their voyage on the 50ft yacht, called L'Onde Marine (Ocean Wave) on 12 December. They had been drifting without power or sails for days when the boat was spotted last Sunday by a merchant container ship listing badly in 30ft waves.

The ship arrived at the port of Brooklyn on Wednesday and the men were taken into custody by U.S. customs officials. They are being held at a detention centre in New Jersey and face almost certain deportation back to Senegal.

Yes, the U.S.A. has already — eight years ago — received its first African boat people. There's a billion more where they came from.

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Item:  The 2015 World Happiness Report is out. It's the third of these annual reports, put together by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a bunch of North American academics with grants from the U.N. They try to drill down through the merely economic factors to how people feel about their lives and prospects.

The ten happiest countries, from the top: Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia. All Northwest Europeans, or populations descended therefrom.

The ten un-happiest, from the bottom: Togo, Burundi, Syria, Benin, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Chad. Coming soon to a Mediterranean port near you.

All together, now, you know the words:

If you're Northwest European and you know it, clap your hands.
If you're Northwest European and you know it, clap your hands.
If you're Northwest European and you know it,
And you really want to show it,
If you're Northwest European and you know it, clap your hands.

[Applause.]

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Item:  And finally, some good news from the world of politics. Thursday this week the United States got a new Attorney General, to replace the appalling race grievance fanatic Eric Holder as head of federal law enforcement.

The new A-G is a person I've admired for many years. I'm very glad to see this fine American lady get political recognition at last. Not only is she an admirable person in herself; she is also a representative of an entire class of people who get far too little respect in our nation today: poor rural whites.

So welcome to high political office, Ms Loretta Lynn. As you perform your official duties, emulate Eric Holder in just this one respect: Never forget that you are there first and foremost to serve and protect your people, of whom I am proud to be one.

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08 — Signoff.     There you have it, ladies and gents: another week of sliding down History's razor blade.

It would be remiss of me to sign off without taking note of the week's major publishing event. My new anthology is out, title From the Dissident Right II. It's a selection of essays and reviews I published in various places during the year 2013, including two entire transcripts of Radio Derb. The "II" at the end of the title signifies that this is the second such anthology; the first, which covered 2012, was published last year to tumultuous applause.

I urge you to hasten to Amazon.com and purchase your copy before a tsunami of demand overwhelms the Amazon servers.

To sing us out, here's a song from the new U.S. Attorney General, Ms Loretta Lynn. This particular song resonates with me. My own sweet mother was, just like Ms Lynn, a coal miner's daughter.

More from Radio Derb next week!

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