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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Yes, this is your tastefully genial host John Derbyshire, teeming with a lot o' news. Listeners have been curious to know how we are settling in at our new studio, here in the grounds of the Derbyshire estates on Long Island. Not well, is the short answer. Having withdrawn from the generous patronage of Taki Theodoracopulos, I have been thrown back on my own meager resources. Not to mince words, ladies and gentlemen, there has been a tightening of belts at Radio Derb. Most distressful of all, I have had to let go my research assistants Mandy, Candy, and Brandy, after many years of servicing my needs very faithfully. I am glad to say that all three girls have succeeded in finding interesting new positions. Mandy, after briefly considering work as a missionary, will be a yoga instructress at New York University; Candy has taken up a longstanding offer to work as personal assistant to our old friend President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan; and Brandy is heading to Brazil to take part in a beauty pageant down there. I wish them all the very best. They will be replaced by a single part-time research assistant, for which position Mrs Derbyshire has insisted on doing the interviewing. Suitable applicants are welcome to apply via VDARE.com. So much for the in-house administrative bulletins. Let's take a look at the wide world outside Long Island. |
02 — Murder against the Narrative. The newsiest event at weekend, I mean the one taking up most space in news outlets and comment blogs, was the murder in Virginia of a TV reporter and cameraman. If you pay any attention at all to the news, you know the story. Around breakfast time Wednesday morning a reporter and cameraman were filming a live interview for a local TV news channel. The location was Moneta, Virginia, a rustic place a few miles east of Roanoake, and adjacent to Smith Mountain Lake, a popular vacation spot. The TV people were there to interview a local Chamber of Commerce director, Vicki Gardner, promoting tourism in the area. While the interview was under way and live on air, a person came up behind the cameraman and shot the reporter. Then he shot the cameraman. Then he shot Ms Gardner, the interviewee. Not only was the shooting caught live on TV, the shooter made his own video of it too. The gunman then drove off. Some hours later and 200 miles away he shot himself dead, still in his car, after posting his own video of the shooting to social media, faxing a 23-page manifesto to an office of ABC News, and tweeting comments about his motivation. The reporter, Alison Parker, and the cameraman, Adam Ward, died on the spot. Ms Gardner, the interviewee, was wounded but is recovering. The killer turned out to be Vester Lee Flanagan II, 41 years old, a former employee of the TV station, dismissed two years ago for relentlessly obnoxious behavior to his colleagues and managers. So, workplace violence, then? Yes indeed, even though committed out on location from the actual workplace. When stories like this break, the first thing you should do is crank up your sense of proportion. Workplace violence accounts for around 700 homicides every year in the U.S.A. — average two a day. That's two in an average 44 homicides overall in our country every day. Around twice that number, around 90 of us every day, die in road accidents. OK, sense of proportion marker has been planted. There were aspects of this Virginia story that made it exceptionally newsworthy, though: Most notably, just the fact that it happened on live TV. And then the first victim, the TV reporter doing the interview, was a comely young woman: slender and blonde, 24 years old. That adds an extra layer of awfulness. That it should do so is grossly unfair — I speak as an uncomely geezer male here, and hey, geezer male lives matter! — but it does do so, for deep and sound biological reasons. In what Charles Darwin called "the struggle for life," sperm is cheap, but eggs are expensive. We instinctively value comely young women higher than pock-marked old geezers. And then there was a race angle. All three shooting victims were white; the killer was black, or at any rate mulatto, and motivated by race hatred. He made that clear in his manifesto. As Radio Derb goes to tape here we haven't yet seen the whole manifesto, but ABC has released extracts. Sample, much edited by ABC News, with beeps where words were redacted, quote: What sent me over the top was the church shooting. And my hollow point bullets have the victims' initials on them … As for Dylann Roof? You want a race war [beep]? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE [beep]!!! End quote. The references there are to the church shooting in Charleston ten weeks ago. It's not clear whether the victims Flanagan speaks of are his victims — Alison Parker and Adam Ward — or the Charleston church victims back in June. I'd guess the latter. Dylann Roof was the Charleston church shooter. Once again, let's keep our sense of proportion properly calibrated here. It's plain from the manifesto that Flanagan was crazy as a coot: or, to quote his own precise words, "Yeah, I'm all fucked up in the head," end quote. Like Dylann Roof in Charleston, Flanagan was in fact in the long line of homicidal lunatics in America who have hoped to ignite a race war. As Radio Derb pointed out back in June, that line also includes kindred psychos Charles Manson 46 years ago and John Brown 156 years ago. Nations have their own styles in lunacy, and this is one of the classic American styles. Personally I'm not much interested in lunatics and their thought processes. That sort of thing is most properly the province of psychiatrists, and I'm content to leave it to them. What I do find interesting is the way news stories like this play out as episodes in the Cold Civil War, so I'll give over my next segment to that. |
03 — Who, whom? Chekhov nailed it. The key point here in media coverage of the Moneta shooting is that this crime goes against the Narrative. The Narrative, capital "N," is the mental picture of the world cherished by the goodwhite side in the Cold Civil War against badwhites. A core component of the Narrative is that badwhites are full of malice towards blacks, and are always seeking ways to harm them. They lurk around in dark places, nursing their guns — and probably their Bibles, too — just waiting for a black victim to come by. As Michelle Obama famously expressed it, perfectly in tune with the Narrative, quote: As a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station. End quote. Blacks in general, but especially gentry blacks like Mrs Obama, are totally, seamlessly in thrall to the Narrative. This particular article of goodwhite faith is entirely contrary to reality. I hang out with badwhite types a lot. I see very little malice towards blacks. What I see far more is the desire not to be forced to mix with them. "Freedom of association!" is the rallying cry. The malice and hatred I see is directed against goodwhites, against their arrogance and power and dishonesty. That's why I call this the Cold Civil War. It's whites hating whites; nobody much on either side, lunatics like John Brown and Dylann Roof excepted, actually cares much about blacks. As for wanting to harm blacks: As I and many others have explained, on Department of Justice statistics, blacks are far more dangerous to whites than whites are to blacks. Sample quote from me on this point, calculating from those government statistics, quote: While homicide is a very rare event and we are dealing with tiny probabilities here, any given black was almost fifteen times more likely to have killed a white in 2013 (probability 0.001 percent) than any given white was to have killed a black (probability 0.000068 percent). End quote. When it comes to articles of faith, though, reality is not the point. The point is to affirm the Narrative and pronounce anathema on those who dare to dispute it. The significance of an interracial murder is therefore determined, in the goodwhite mind, by the race of the victim and the race of the killer. Who is the subject, who the object? Or as Lenin expressed it very pithily, though in a different context: "Who, whom?" The Charleston church shooting was totally Narrative-compliant: a crazy white guy murdering nine harmless blacks. Gleeful goodwhites, with the media and political establishments in full howling accord, were easily able to leverage it into a campaign to abolish the Confederate Battle Flag, a longstanding goal of theirs. That's the kind of thing you can do with the Narrative wind in your sails. The Hartford Distributors shooting five years ago, by contrast, when black psycho Omar Thornton murdered eight white co-workers, was counter to the Narrative; so it was not followed by any media campaign to ban anything, and the media shoved the story down the memory hole as fast as they decently could. Who, whom? That's what determines the media approach and coverage. Here's an anonymous blogger who goes by the intriguing handle "posttenuretourettes," suggesting he's a retired academic. He doesn't tell us what his academic field was, but he sure knows his Russian literature. Quote from him: Chekhov has a short story called "A Chameleon," which revolves around an incident where a dog indisputably nipped a man's finger. The actual investigation hinges not so much on what happened, though — but rather on who the dog belongs to. When the policeman at first thinks it's just some mutt, either stray or owned by one of the little people, he threatens to have the owner fined and the dog put down. When, however, it's suggested that the dog belongs to the General, the policeman takes a sudden interest in how exactly the hapless bitten fellow managed to provoke the nice dog. They go through several cycles of this, with the policeman's tone towards the dog/victim changing from menace to endearment, depending on who-whom. End quote. Perhaps Lenin had that story in mind when he asked "Who, whom?" So it's fair to guess that while the Charleston killings will still be brought up by media goodwhites a year or five years from now as an example of badwhite depravity, these Virginia killings will be comprehensively forgotten, as the Hartford killings have been. Oh look — a squirrel! |
04 — Gun control, friendly fire, and a vacation suggestion. Just a few follow-up points on the Virginia murders. First point: the inevitable side issues. The two commonest topics stirred up by these crazy shootings are, one, gun control, and two, treatment of the mentally ill. Nobody has anything to say about either that makes much sense to me. Gun control? Plenty of jurisdictions have more liberal gun laws than Virginia, with very little gun crime. The BBC reported two years ago that the nation of Iceland is, quote, "awash with guns," yet the homicide rate in Iceland is essentially zero. Similarly with Switzerland. Vermont has the most liberal gun laws in America, yet it's not notorious as a hotbed of gun crime. The mentally ill? Do we even have a firm definition of "mentally ill"? Do we even want one? I'm not sure that I do. Many goodwhites believe that we badwhites are mentally ill for not going along with the Narrative. I'm sure a lot of them would like to lock us up in asylums, as happened to dissidents in the old U.S.S.R. The father of Alison Parker, the murdered TV reporter, grabbed both issues at once. He said his life's work from now on would be to, quote, "make sure crazy people don't get guns." I understand how Mr Parker feels, and sympathize with his grief; but the functional definition of the term "crazy person" is mostly "a person who has done a crazy thing." Until a person has done a crazy thing, he's not considered crazy — not by the authorities, at any rate. A friend of mine actually did go crazy. We knew it, his poor wife knew it, everyone around him knew it; yet efforts to get the authorities interested were futile. The definition of "crazy," so far as public authorities are concerned, is that you did something seriously, indisputably crazy: burned your house down or … shot someone. As I said, I have yet to hear any commentator say anything useful about either gun control or the identification and treatment of crazy people. Taking guns away from law-abiding people will just leave criminals with all the guns. Allowing the authorities to define crazy down will end up depriving all nonconformists of their liberties. I like my liberties, thanks all the same. I'll take my chances with lunatics, including lunatics with guns. Second point: You might think that what follows trespasses on the edge of bad taste, but it seems to me it's worth noting; and of course I don't want to see anybody murdered, least of all pleasant young white females. It has to be said, though, that from the point of view of the Cold Civil War, the Virginia murders were in all probability instances of friendly fire. I don't know the particular political outlooks of reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward. I do have some acquaintance with the staff of local TV stations, though. They are goodwhites to a man and a woman. In all likelihood, Vester Lee Flanagan murdered two people whose commitment to the Narrative was as firm as Michelle Obama's. The same irony was on display in Charleston. Dylann Roof didn't shoot up an Al Sharpton demonstration or a Louis Farrakhan rally. He shot up a room full of harmless old black church people — people Sharpton or Farrakhan would sneer at contemptuously as Uncle Toms. Friendly fire, see? If Vester Flanagan really wanted to stick it to the white devils, he would have shot Jared Taylor, or Colin Flaherty, or … me. That would be too rational, though. Lunatics, by definition, are not rational — a fact for which I guess we, certainly I, should be grateful. Third point: just a word about Moneta, where the shootings took place. Moneta is a tiny community, not very prosperous to judge from Google Street View, apparently struggling to bring in a little revenue from honest commerce — mainly tourism. It would be a shame if people were to avoid Moneta just on account of this horrid murder. It's not Moneta's fault that it was the place where Mr Flanagan chose to vent his hatred of whites. I am now a fulltime contributor to VDARE.com, which is named for Virginia Dare, the first child born of English parents in the New World. So what? So this: Moneta, Virginia is the home of a firm named Virginia Dare Cruises and Marina, who will feed you a nice dinner and take you on a nice cruise around Smith Mountain Lake. Virginia Dare Cruises and Marina have absolutely no corporate or financial connection with VDARE.com; but if you're down there in the lovely Virginia piedmont, as my wife and I were a few weeks ago, call 'em up and reserve a dinner, or a cruise, or both. Help your fellow Americans to make an honest buck. |
05 — Which side is Trump on in the Cold Civil War? Donald Trump's campaign for the 2016 Republican nomination continues its progress through the political establishment somewhat in the manner of General Sherman's march to the sea, no offense intended to our Southern listeners. Last Friday, after Radio Derb had gone on the air, Trump addressed a rally in Alabama, which is pretty much Badwhite Central. In the 2012 election, 84 percent of whites in Alabama voted Republican. So many people signed up for the rally, Trump's people had to move it from the original venue to Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile. Ladd-Peebles seats 33½ thousand, and it looked pretty darn full on the news pictures. Trump spoke for an hour in Mobile, revealing among other things that he believes that intelligence is at least in part genetic. Quote: My uncle was a professor at MIT. He was a smart guy, y'know? — good smart guy. Right? Good family! Do we believe in the gene thing? I mean … I do. Right? Y'know? I do. Like they used to say, Secretariat doesn't produce slow horses. End quote. Alabama … genetics … Wait a minute: Cold Civil War-wise, which side is this guy on? That's the question now carefully being planted in the minds of goodwhites by the political establishment and their media shills. A key part of the strategy is to play up the support Trump is getting from people on the Dissident Right; people like me, people like my friends Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer. That is the point of the articles you're now seeing in mainstream-media outlets about how all the nation's hateful haters love Trump. The hit piece by goodwhite journalist Evan Osnos in this week's New Yorker magazine is representative. Jared Taylor deconstructed Mr Osnos's article for VDARE.com, exposing all the misreprentations and false statistics. I can't improve on Jared's analysis, and urge you to read it for yourself. As Jared says, quote: Two thirds of [the article] is about Mr. Trump's supporters — including me — and that's what explains the title: "The Fearful and the Frustrated" … New Yorker readers can feel smug without even reading the article; Mr Trump appeals to losers, just as they have always thought. End quote. That's us Trump supporters: fearful and frustrated, dimwitted and gullible, baffled by the modern world, clinging fearfully and frustratedly to our guns and our Bibles. The media's got this one under control, guys, don't worry about a thing. For a more thoughtful view of how the Dissident Right regards Trump, here's Reuben, the blogger over at jewamongyou.com, posting on Wednesday, quote: Unlike so many of my fellow Americans, I don't follow politics much. I don't care what the President, or congressmen, say — because they only say what they say for political gain. After they're elected, they do whatever moneyed interests want them to do. End quote. That's somewhat on the over-cynical side, but it expresses a measured skepticism about Trump I'm hearing a lot from friends and colleagues. We like him because he hates so many of the things we hate. He gets the immigration issue. He doesn't mince words or pander. As a skilled and experienced negotiator — for goodness' sake, he's written books about how to negotiate — he'd be an effective President. But, a Messiah of the Dissident Right? Nah. This is politics, the art of the possible. There aren't any Messiahs. We'll take what we can get, though. |
06 — White-Latino supremacy. In last week's podcast I referred to Congressman Luis Gutiérrez as a, quote, "Latino supremacist." Several listeners emailed in to congratulate me for hitting that particular nail on the head. One of them added the following, though, which I think is a point worth discussing. I quote from my listener, who prefers to remain anonymous. Before I do so, in fact, this gives me the opportunity to repeat one of Radio Derb's ground rules. If you email me in with something I want to quote, I will always ask for your permission before doing so, and will further ask whether or not you prefer to remain anonymous. OK, over to my listener, quote: The phrase "Latino supremacist" needs unpacking. The usual rule in Latin American nations, certainly in Mexico, is that the commanding heights of politics, culture, and the economy are held by whites, while the bronze race, La Raza, feeds on scraps from their tables. End quote. It's a good point. For a column I wrote last year I put together collage pictures of the last dozen Presidents of Mexico, and the same for Brazil. As I said in my column, they, quote: "don't look anything like California lettuce-pickers or Carnavaleras," end quote. They sure don't. What they look like is, boards of directors of two Westchester County exclusive golf clubs. So why is congresscritter Gutiérrez pushing for a society which presumably will end up, as all Latino societies do, stratified by race, with whites running the show and browns like himself doing the yard work? Well, for one thing there is the great truth that if love is blind, hate is even blinder. Congresscreep Gutiérrez is driven by hatred of gringos and his hatred blinds him to obvious facts like the one stated by my listener. An alternative explanation would be cynicism. The white elites in Latino countries put a few browns and mestizos in secondary positions to give the illusion of sharing power. They flatter and pamper these stooges, who repay them with loyalty and obedience, like trusties in a jail. Perhaps congressweasel Gutiérrez hopes for one of these trusty positions in the Latino U.S.A. he's trying to bring about. My personal preference would be to live in a society not stratified by race, certainly not in the rigid Latin-American style. A famous survey in Brazil in 1976 asked people to self-identify by skin color: it got 134 different categories, from acastanhada, which means "cashew-colored," via meio-amarela, that's "mid-yellow," to vermelha, which means "reddish." I don't want to live in a country that racially self-conscious, not even one like Brazil, with us whites living in gated communities up on the mountains and the other 133 races fighting over table scraps in the stinking favelas down below. That's the society congressreptile Gutiérrez is wishing on us, though. Speaking as a white person, I guess I can live with it if I have to; but what's in it for him? |
07 — Weigh anchor, baby! One great service Donald Trump has performed is to bring the issue of birthright citizenship into the public square for discussion. Except that "discussion" is too kind a word for what's been going on. On one side of the "discussion," open-borders shills and Diversity fanatics have been thundering from their pulpits that birthright citizenship is an ironclad guarantee right there in the U.S. Constitution, and anyone who dares question it is a reincarnation of Julius Streicher. On the other side is Donald Trump and we on the Dissident Right saying: "Can we please talk about this?" Oh, and also a thumping large proportion of Americans. Polling on birthright citizenship is distorted by the poll question always being phrased in terms of amending the Constitution, when in fact a simple legislative act would proably do the trick. Even with that distortion, though, polls turn up sizeable minorities of Americans, around forty percent, who want birthright citizenship repealed; and among Republicans, the figure is basically half. The diversity enforcers are ferocious on this one, though. I was getting my knuckles rapped by John Podhoretz about it ten years ago. It's in the Constitution! It says it right there, Fourteenth Amendment! You want to change the Constitution? Lotsa luck with that! That's pretty much the tone. Open-borders enthusiast Linda Chavez took the same tone in her syndicated column last week, reviewing Donald Trump's immigration policy paper. Sample quote: Trump's proposal to eliminate birthright citizenship is downright un-American. End quote. As I pointed out here on VDARE.com: Whether or not opposition to birthright citizenship is un-American, birthright citizenship itself is the rule in just two of the forty nations the IMF classifies as "developed," so birthright citizenship is un-developed. It's also un-Anglo-Celtic: of the six Anglo-Celtic nations, only the U.S.A. and Canada have birthright citizenship. Britain, Ireland, Autralia and New Zealand don't. Is birthright citizenship guaranteed in the Constitution? Some legal experts don't think so. Whether it is or not, we amend the Constitution to adapt to changed circumstances. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, is, like, you know, an amendment. I can't myself work up much interest in the jurisprudential bickering about whether the Constitution does or does not mandate birthright citizenship. Either birthright citizenship is right for us, in this time, or it's not. Let's hear the arguments. First off, what are the arguments for birthright citizenship. Let's hear them. And please note: "It's right there in the Constitution, you stinking fascist!" is not an argument. The latest development on this front is that Jeb Bush of all people, speaking English for a change, came out against "obstetric tourism," in which foreign women come to the U.S.A. just to give birth, knowing their baby will have citizenship and can later bring them in via chain migration. Jeb made it plain that he totally supports birthright citizenship — it's in the Constitution! — but thought the obstetric tourists were taking unfair advantage of a noble and righteous concept. However, Jeb snookered himself on Monday by saying that the obstetric-tourism issue was, quote, "frankly, more related to Asian people." That is perfectly true. Mexicans and Central Americans just stroll over the border to have their anchor babies; but in Peking, Manila, and Seoul there are business firms advertising in news media to handle the paperwork for you. It's a branch of commerce over there. So now all the Asian-identity whiners are up in arms against Jeb. The poor guy can't catch a break. Perhaps it would help mend things if he were to give a speech in Mandarin. Just a suggestion, Jeb. |
08 — Miscellany. We may have bidden farewell to Mandy, Candy, and Brandy, but we still have Miss Ellany here to bring us our closing potpourri of brief items. Imprimis: Speaking of retired academics: I cherish the memory of one of my math professors at University College who was nearing retirement age. He boasted to us undergraduates that he would move to a cottage in the countryside; and that he would give his cottage a name, as country people in England do. What would that name be? "Aftermath." [Boo, hiss.] Item: This campaign has been delivering some very delicious and revealing contrasts. Goodwhite champion Bernie Sanders had a rally scheduled in Seattle August 8th, with a pre-rally public address in that city's Westlake Park also scheduled. Several hundred people showed up for that address. Before Sanders could speak, however, the stage was taken over by two black females screeching about racism. You could see their point: The crowd of several hundred Sanders fans was, judging from the news pictures, a sea of whiteness. Sanders stood aside deferentially to let the black women screech. After a while, when there was no sign of them stopping, he just left the stage. End of event. Even some of the goodwhites in the audience were booing. Forward to Tuesday evening this week and across the country to Dubuque, Iowa, where Donald Trump held a news conference. White-Latino supremacist Jorge Ramos tried to do to Trump what the black harpies had done to Sanders, disrupting the event with demands to be heard. Trump nodded to the security detail, who politely but firmly escorted Ramos out of the room. The contrast couldn't be sharper. One speaker, faced with ethnic activists disrupting his event, handed the event over to them. The other speaker, faced with the same thing, dealt with it briskly then got on with his event. Come on, really: If it came down to these two, which one would you vote for? Item: I mentioned the Russian writer Chekhov back there. Well, here's a Chekhov story. The British opinion journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was stationed in Moscow as a reporter for the left-wing Guardian newspaper back in the early 1930s. This was the time of the terrible Stalin famines, news of which was kept well hidden from foreign journalists Muggeridge had befriended a Russian woman who worked as a translator. One evening she went with him to the theater to see one of Chekhov's lugubrious psychodramas about 19th-century provincial Russians. Coming out of the theater afterwards, Muggeridge asked his Russian companion what she thought of the play. Replied she: "I can't understand why they were all so unhappy. They had enough to eat, didn't they?" Item: Finally just a personal shout-out here. Back in spring of 2013 the wife & I were in Nashville, Tennessee for the American Renaissance conference. We took time out to explore the town, ending up one evening at a bar named Dick's Last Resort on Second Avenue. It's a fun bar. We had a good time and a nice meal. As souvenirs, we bought two beer glasses. I broke one of the glasses last year. Then, doing dishes a few days ago I broke the other one. On a whim, I looked up Dick's on the internet and gave them a call. I got a very nice lady named Dana, with one of those irresistible Southern accents. Dana said she'd be glad to ship me replacement glasses and took my address. "But how much are they," I asked, "with shipping and all? You didn't tell me." Dana asked me if we'd spent a lot of money on our visit to the bar. I replied that I couldn't truthfully say so: we had a meal and a couple of drinks, that was all. "Did y'all have a good time, though?" she asked. I said yes, we enjoyed ourselves. "Well then, honey," said Dana, "I'm going to ship those glasses to you for free." I protested but she insisted. I hung up, quietly wondering if I'd ever see my glasses. I didn't say anything to the Mrs. This morning my glasses arrived, carefully packed and intact, in a box with a lot of other little souvenirs. I call that real American good nature. If you're around Nashville, Tennessee, swing by Dick's Last Resort. The place has booze, decent food, character, and a very sweet lady named Dana. Give her a hug from me. |
09 — Signoff. That's all for this week, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the summer. Our signoff music this week is dedicated to Jeb Bush, who I know is a keen Radio Derb listener. More from Radio Derb next week! |
[Music clip: Tom Paxton, "Spanish is the loving tongue."]