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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! This is your viscerally genial host John Derbyshire with some lowlights from the week's news. This week's podcast is structured, ladies and gents, like a classical symphony. The first few segments are straight reporting of news stories with only the barest minimum of snarky asides, irrelevant digressions, and scatological double-entendres. Only then, having delivered the news, shall I descend into opinionated commentary. Structure. Hey, it's not sonata form; but then, I'm not Franz Josef Haydn. I just use his music. OK, let's see how it goes. |
02 — Free screech at Yale. I don't know much about Yale University. The closest I ever got was back in my days as a professional dishwasher for Robbins & Robbins kosher caterers of New Rochelle. We catered an event at a synagogue in New Haven, a wedding I think it was. I do hold Yale in some esteem. Jared Taylor, one of my culture heroes, went there. So of course did Bill Buckley. Whether Yale did those gents any positive good, I can't say, not having known them before they went to Yale; but it didn't seem to have done them any harm. Whatever, Yale's in the news. Americans of a certain age will recall the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of fifty years ago. Well, the folks at Yale just heard about that and decided to have a disturbance of their own: a Free Screech Movement. First let's hear the screech. Then we'll do some analysis. The screech: [Clip] Luther: [Unintelligible] … unsafe space here for all … OK, that's the screech. Here's a rundown on the location and the dramatis personæ there. The location was an open space somewhere on the Yale campus. The confrontation happened on Friday, November 6th. The screecher is a Yale undergraduate, a senior, named Jerelyn Luther. Her major is either history or political science, I'm not sure. Jerelyn's a mulatto from an upper-middle-class family in Fairfield, Connecticut. Fairfield is a tony Whitopia, just 1.7 percent black, median household income in 2013 over $105 thousand, average price for a detached house that year $724 thousand. Jerelyn's own family home on Whiting Pond Road — Whiting, I like that — is appraised at $761 thousand. Jerelyn's Mom runs a public relations firm. The screechee is Nicholas Christakis, a Yale professor, who seems to be both a biologist and a sociologist. Christakis is a white guy, 53 years old. His wife Erika lectures at the university. As well as their academic duties, Mr and Mrs Christakis supervise Silliman College, one of Yale's residential facilities. Ms Luther is one of the students residing at Silliman. OK; so the mulatto student has an issue with the white master of her residential hall. Plainly we're in race-land here. What was the issue? Did someone burn a cross on the campus at Yale? No, that's not the issue. Although if anyone at Yale is into cross-burning, there's a contractor in my town who'll make up a really nice cross for you: creosoted wood, burns a treat … That's by the by. No, the issue here was that Yale, to be precise the Intercultural Affairs Committee at Yale — that's the administrative unit responsible for soothing the feelings of out-of-their-depth affirmative-action admissions — the Intercultural Affairs Committee sent out a campus-wide email warning students to be sensitive when selecting their Halloween costumes. Sample quote: Halloween is … unfortunately a time when the normal thoughtfulness and sensitivity of most Yale students can sometimes be forgotten and some poor decisions can be made including wearing feathered headdresses, turbans, wearing "war paint" or modifying skin tone or wearing blackface or redface. These same issues and examples of cultural appropriation and/or misrepresentation are increasingly surfacing with representations of Asians and Latinos. End quote. Now, believe it or not, there are adults at Yale who push back against all this exquisite sensitivity. Mrs Christakis is one such. She emailed the students under her care at Silliman College, pushing back ever so gently against the administration's Halloween honk. Sample quote from her email. American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition. End quote. And that's it, that's what the screeching is about. An upper-middle-class young woman attending a prestigious Ivy League university is outraged by the suggestion that she might have to endure a, quote, "regressive, or even transgressive, experience" — of the order of, seeing someone in blackface at a Halloween party. I should add that there are some side issues here. Rumors have been going around the campus of "racial incidents." There is as usual no evidence for any of them; and on the track record for this kind of thing, we can be sure at around the 99 percent level that if there is actual substance to any of the rumors, the perp would turn out to be a minority student desperate to manufacture some victimhood for himself. The phrases "campus race incident" and "campus race hoax" are, to a very high approximation, synonymous. What do we learn from this, comrades? Well, I'll postpone the learning experience to later. First, a little more reportage. |
03 — Tears of the privileged. That November 6th confrontation between Prof. Christakis and Ms Luther has been bouncing around the internet all week, and everyone's had something to say about it. A few of my favorites from the tweetosphere:
OK, that's a few of my favorite comments. Meanwhile, at Yale itself, the whole business is being taken with utmost seriousness. From the Yale Daily News, November 12th, quote: Crammed into pews and lined up against the walls, members of the Yale community filled Battell Chapel past its 1,100-person capacity on Wednesday evening for "A Moment of Crisis: Race at Yale Teach-In," a forum dedicated to educating the community about the issues faced by people of color at Yale. End quote. So let me get this straight. You're black or mulatto — or possibly a quadroon or a high yaller — from some tony upper-middle-class enclave like Fairfield, Connecticut. You got affirmative-actioned into Yale, elbowing aside some white coal miner's kid from West Virginia with 200 more SAT points than you have. Now you're on the fast track to a high slot in our affirmative-action-ocracy, the most pampered, favored, fawned-over, and yes privileged group of people that ever existed, possibly excepting the pre-Revolution French aristocracy. You'll have some make-work job in the government handed to you, or take the diversity spot in some law firm or media outlet. You've got it made. And you're facing issues? What issues? The Yale cafeteria's arugula salad was limp? The Veuve Cliquot was insufficiently chilled? Let me continue this report from the Yale Daily News, quote: The teach-in, which followed more than a week of open forums, discussions and rallies in response to racial controversies on campus … Sorry, this is me interrupting again. I just want to interpret the phrase "racial controversies on campus" for you. Meaning: Someone thought he heard someone say they heard that someone had overheard someone say, that he'd heard a black kid was turned away from a private party. No, it really doesn't chill my blood, either; but it fills the Yale chapel. OK, continuing the quote: The teach-in … was organized by the University's four cultural centers: the Afro-American Cultural Center, the Native American Cultural Center, the Asian American Cultural Center and La Casa Cultural. Interrupting again here. I think I know what they do at the Afro-American Cultural Center: eat chitlins and sing gospel songs, right? What goes on at the Asian American Cultural Center, though? Is that where Vietnamese guys go to pick up Pakistani girls, or what? I just don't get the whole Asian-American thing. Never mind: continuing: The three-hour event was primarily composed of four panels … which discussed topics that included valuing women of color at Yale, mental health and its impacts on communities of color, addressing white and male privilege and the importance of taking ethnic studies classes. Me again, interrupting. Can you imagine sitting through three hours of that? Three hours of upper-class blacks and feminists whining? That's got to be about as much fun as the all-night dentist. Skipping forward a bit, did we get white ethnomasochists squirming with fake guilt? We sure did. Quote: In the panel about white and male privilege, the panelists, who included white men and men of color, shared their experiences with understanding systemic racism. Some admitted that they had been blind to issues of systemic racism growing up, while others urged white men to acknowledge and understand that they are products of the structure of white privilege … End quote. I should say that the President of Yale himself was there, doing the full multiculti grovel. Quote from him: I think there are so many voices that can be inspiring to the Yale community that we don't hear regularly, either because they aren't listened to or because they're speaking from the margins, and I think it's very much time to place them. End quote. No, that wasn't your local kindergarten principal, that was the President of Yale University. Heaven help this Republic. I was going to finish the segment there, but I can't resist just one more story from the Yale Daily News. Once you start reading their reports the thing gets a grip on your attention somehow, like a really gruesome car wreck. This is a different story, from the November 11th issue. The Yale Political Union held a debate on affirmative action. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Making the case against affirmative action was University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, with whom I was once honored to share a public platform. I'll just quote you this snippet from the Yale Daily News, quote: During Wax's speech, about a dozen members of the [Union] … rose and walked to the back of the room, where they turned their backs on Wax and raised their fists in the air. Several students cried during her speech. End quote. Did you get that last sentence? "Several students cried during her speech." You could carve that on Western Civilization's tombstone. |
04 — Scheisstika in Missouri. Here's another university president: Tim Wolfe, President of the University of Missouri; a white guy, 57 years old. Here was, I should have said. Mr Wolfe resigned his position last Tuesday. R. Bowen Loftin, Chancellor of the university's Columbia campus, announced he'd be resigning, too. What's up with all that? This started back in September. Peyton Head, a dark-skinned homosexual black guy at the Columbia campus, majoring in political science and international studies, complained on Facebook that someone in a passing pickup truck off-campus had yelled "Nigger!" at him. He was of course believed. When has anyone ever been known to lie about something like that? Then late in October university police fielded a complaint that someone had smeared poop in the shape of a swastika on a bathroom wall in one of the university dorms — a scheisstika, one wit has called it. Presumably this was human poop. This may actually have happened. Nobody took a picture, which is a little odd in the smartphone age; but the officer who responded wrote up a report in which he says he saw the offending artwork. It's a small dorm, the bathroom serves just five people, so it shouldn't be hard to find the perp; but if the college authorities know who did it, they are keeping shtum — holding it in, you might say. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, and from these ambiguous stories there swelled a mighty chorus of indignation. One black student, an education major, started a hunger strike on November 3rd, claiming that the college authorities hadn't done enough about all the racism. This hunger striker, by the way, name of Jonathan Butler, is another pampered pet of privilege. From the St Louis Post-Dispatch, November 11th, quote: He is a member of a prominent Omaha family. Butler's father is Eric L. Butler, executive vice president for sales and marketing for the Union Pacific Railroad. His 2014 compensation was $8.4 million, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. End quote. I'd say that casts some doubt on the sincerity of the guy's hunger strike. Just waft some scent of lobster bisque into the tent, I bet he'd fold. Then last Monday the black players on the college football team took a break from consulting with their lawyers about plea-bargaining down their rape charges to announce they were going on football strike, refusing to train or play until President Wolfe resigned. So President Wolfe resigned, and Chancellor Loftin followed suit. An interim President has been named, and he is of course a black guy. There were some sidebar items to the Missouri story. A freelance photographer on assignment for ESPN was insulted and shoved Monday by protesters. The shovers included a faculty member mellifluously named Melissa Click — a white lady, a professor of Communications, teaching courses with titles like, actual course title, "Television Program Analysis and Criticism." (Reading that I thought of the military recruiter in Starship Troopers going over Rico's high school transcript and saying, quote: "A boy who gets a C-minus in Appreciation of Television can't be all bad.") Tuesday the campus police emailed all students with guidelines on, quote, "Reporting Hateful and/or Hurtful Speech," end quote. Guideline number one, quote: "Call the police immediately at 573-882-7201. (If you are in an emergency situation, dial 911.)" End quote. Let me repeat that so it sinks in: The University of Missouri, a fully-accreditied institution of higher education here in the United States of America, instructs its students to call the cops if someone hurts their feelings. And you still don't think We Are Doomed? On Wednesday Peyton Head, that's the homosexual black student government president, the one who complained about the pickup truck incident, Head posted on Facebook that there had been a Ku Klux Klan sighting on campus. Campus police denied this, there was of course no evidence, and Head retracted the claim. So, racial ructions all over on our college campuses. Before I get to analysis, just a couple more stories, both non-campus related. |
05 — Europe begs help from Africa. This story comes from Europe. I'm sure I don't need to tell listeners that Europe is being flooded with illegal aliens from Africa and the Middle East. Around 800,000 have arrived so far this year, of whom around a quarter are from Africa, most from sub-Saharan Africa. The official jargon for these illegals is "asylum seekers." That is, they claim to be fleeing from persecution. In practice only a microscopic minority truly match that description. The great majority just want to move from their poor, crappy, misgoverned countries to the much nicer nations of northern Europe, nations that Europeans have patiently built up for themselves and their posterity over many centuries of constitutional trial and error. What's supposed to happen is, the authorities in European countries investigate each arrival. Those who can prove persecution get asylum. Those who can't are sent back whence they came. Here we hit a problem. Africa has way too many people — far more than there are jobs for. African countries don't want their illegals back, any more than Mexico wants theirs. Like Mexico, these African countries would much prefer their illegals stay in the countries they have illegally entered. For one thing, that relieves African rulers of the problem of unemployed and disgruntled young men in troublesome quantities. For another, the illegals, once settled in Europe, send cash remittances back to their home countries. For these messed-up, poverty-stricken nations, remittances are a major source of national revenue. This week saw a big diplomatic effort to solve the problem. There was a meeting in Malta between the European Council and the heads of several African countries. (The European Council, I should explain, is basically the leaders of all the EU nations, with an ex-leader added as chairman. An American equivalent would be the governors of all the states, chaired by some ex-Governor who's avoided jail, if you can find one.) So there they were, all these European and African leaders, meeting in Malta, a little Mediterranean island state that is an EU member. (It's nothing to do with the story, but I can't forbear noting that Maltese is the only Semitic language written with the Latin alphabet.) How did things go? Not well. The Europeans were basically saying to the Africans: "You have to take back your illegals and prevent any more from coming. Illegal immigration's getting to be a big thing with our pesky electorates." The Africans, in response, were saying: "All right, but it'll cost ya." The way it shook out, the Euros couldn't meet the Africans' price. The Africans were especially unwilling to take back their illegals. Key phrase from the conference report by Donald Tusk, the European chairman, quote: We will facilitate returns, preferably voluntary, by a number of concrete steps, such as African immigration officials travelling to Europe to help verify and identify the nationalities of irregular migrants. End quote. Let me just translate that "preferably voluntary." Translation: "We promise not to deport anyone." While I'm at it, let me also translate the phrase "African immigration officials" for you. Translation: [ker-CHING]. Even this nothingburger is going to cost the Euros two billion dollars. They're going to have to bid way higher than that to get rid of African illegals … I beg your pardon: "asylum seekers." And Africa is only half the EU's problem. The other half is Turkey. The situation here is fundamentally the same: the Euros want Turkey to stop sending illegals, the Turks have an asking price. So there's to be another conference with Turkey later this month. Will it go any better than this one did? That depends on whether the EU can grow a spine in two weeks. I don't believe this has ever been known to happen in biology, so the prospects are not good. |
06 — Transgendered Hispanic mulattos save America! Just one more news story before I get to the snarling vituperation … er, sorry, I mean "thoughtful editorializing." This week encompassed Veteran's Day, or Armistice Day as I grew up calling it. When you brought up the Google search screen that day, you saw one of their date-relevant doodles. The doodle showed seven veterans in uniform. Only two of the seven were unambiguously white, and both were female. Two were clearly black, one male and one female. Among the others, one, another male, was clearly meant to be Hispanic. They didn't put a sombrero on him, but he was brown with a mustache. Oh, wait, mustache: perhaps he's also the homosexual token? Whatever. Of the remaining two, one was vaguely mulatto, the other yellowish and so I guess East Asian. This Google doodle generated much ridicule. It was, people said, wildly at statistical odds with the actual veterans population. Was that so? Let's investigate. The federal Department of Veterans Affairs has a statistics office, and that office has a website, and from that website you can download spreadsheets analyzing the veteran population. Well, you can if you have a lot of patience. As always with federal websites, the rule is: Good enough for government work. I just did that, and learned that at September 30th this year there were an estimated 21,680,534 veterans. If you cut them by race, to the nearest percentage, there are 77 percent non-Hispanic white, 12 percent black, 7 percent Hispanic, 4 percent other. The breakdown by sex is: male 91 percent, female 9 percent. I am shocked to report that the VA spreadsheet offers no other options for sex. Nine percent of seven is 0.63; so if you're going to show seven people in your veterans doodle, one female would be an extremely generous allocation. Race-wise, you'd want at least five white faces, one black would be generous, one Hispanic would be extravagantly generous, Asians and Apaches … fuhgeddaboutit. Are the folks at Google perhaps influenced away from statistical truth by the diversity within the company itself? Let's investigate that. Just this summer Google issued a report on the composition of their workforce. If you go to the website, www.google.com/diversity, you have to wade through a lot of happy-smiley propaganda text and pictures about "inclusiveness" and such, then you get to actual numbers, separated into tech and non-tech employees. Whaddawe got? Tech: 59 percent white, 1 percent black, 2 percent Hispanic, 38 percent other. Thirty-five of that 38 are Asian. Non-tech, so now we're bringing in the janitors and mail-room staff — as well as, of course, all the wonderful people who work in Google's office of diversity and inclusion — the numbers are: 64 percent white, 4 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic, 28 percent other, with 23 of the 28 percent Asian. Sex-wise, Google's tech workforce is 82 percent male. The non-tech side is 53 percent male. Again it is distressing to report that no other sex categories are shown. Get with the program, people! So no, that doodle isn't reflecting Google's own workforce. What it reflects a bit more closely is the faces shown in that propaganda section at the front of the report. Of the nine faces there, two are black, for 22 percent. Four are female, that's 44 percent. That in fact takes you to the heart of the matter. The Veterans Day Google doodle is also propaganda. It is in fact, to use one of my current favorite expressions, "virtue signaling," formerly known to theologians as "cheap grace." You put out a smokescreen of virtuous images to show the world what a good, good person you are. Then you go home to your other-sex partner in your one-percent-black gated whitopia. Hypocrisy, some dead white guy said, is the homage that vice pays to virtue. Not any more. Today hypocrisy is the homage that white liberals pay to the gods of Diversity. |
07 — White people are pussies. OK, enough with the news stories. What do they teach us? The big thing they teach us is, to quote from the title of a column I wrote three years ago, that white people are pussies. Perhaps that's a bit unkind, not to mention a bit ethnomasochistic. Of course not all white people are pussies. I know some white people who are not pussies. Heck, one of them is running for President. For sure, though, a lot of white people are pussies, and that lot includes wellnigh all white liberals. That in turn includes as a subset practically all white employees in college administration. Pussy-wise, actual college faculties are a bit more … how shall I say it? … diverse. In the Science and Math departments, my experience has been that while a vague liberalism predominates, most faculty just want to get on with juggling quarks or proving theorems and don't want to be distracted by all the political nonsense. The professional schools are similar, but with a higher pussification quotent. The humanities are pretty solidly — I guess a better qualifier here would be "fluffily" — pussified. Yes, there are non-pussies in academia. The aforementioned Amy Wax, that U. Penn. law professor who made students cry by arguing against affirmative action in this week's Yale debate, is clearly not a pussy. Here's another case: Dale Brigham, an associate professor of nutrition and exercise physiology at the University of Missouri. Professor Brigham, a white guy, had scheduled an exam for early this week. That was of course just when the race business blew up, accompanied by a threat on social media from a white lunatic who said he'd go on a shooting rampage against blacks. Prof. Brigham was urged to cancel the exam so that students could cower weeping in their safe spaces. He refused, writing in an email to his students, quote: If you give into bullies, they win. The only way bullies are defeated is by standing up to them. If we cancel the exam, they win; if we go through with it, they lose. This was considered so outrageously insensitive, Prof. Brigham felt obliged to resign. As we go to tape here, though, the university hasn't accepted his resignation, so possibly there are some non-pussies even in the administration there. Or possibly Prof. Brigham has learned to love Big Brother and is right now installed naked in a barrel at the football team changing rooms, I don't know. So no, we're not all pussies. The pussification factor is high enough among whites, though, that nonwhites and ethnomasochist white anarchists can get anything they want by targeting the plentiful supply of white pajama boys and girly-men and their female auxiliaries. In some cases, as the Google doodle shows, the screechers and anarchists don't actually have to do anything. The pajama boys know what is expected of them and do it unprompted, either from commercial calculation or, Heaven help us, from actual sincerity. And sometimes the price of pussification is just too high for total abject surrender, as was the case with the Europeans in Malta this week. Not that the price was high enough to turn the pussies into angry tigers; that never happens. It was, though, high enough for the Euros to drop their key demands, fudging over their retreat with weasely blather about "taking concrete steps" and "addressing root causes." What would the world look like if white people were not pussies? Or at least, if the pussified portion of the white population were a despised and impotent minority? Permit me to dream. |
08 — Dream sequence. [Dream music.] That's supposed to be dream music. Yes, in this segment I am dreaming. Yale University, November 6th. Professor Christakis, when that potty-mouthed rich brat starts screeching at him, turns away grim-lipped and walks off to the university's administration office, where he files a request that she be punished for insulting and abusive behavior towards a campus authority figure. The university swings into action. Potty-mouth is suspended for a year and barred from campus. Her fees for the year are forfeited. Professor Christakis shows up at the faculty Christmas Party dressed as Nathan Bedford Forrest, to general applause. University of Missouri, November 8th. President Wolfe announces that by agreement with his board, and support from the alumni association and the state legislature, the college football team is to be disbanded, all football fixtures and training programs canceled. Furthermore, the practice of bringing in low-IQ students for the college sports teams and signing them up for b-s courses like "Television Program Analysis and Criticism" in the pretense they are engaging in higher education, will cease as of this semester. Mountain View, California, November 11th. Google, Inc. has announced that it will abandon its diversity strategy. The company will no longer require employees to participate in unconscious bias workshops. Outreach programs to historically black colleges will be dropped, as will the partnership efforts with Hollywood studios to produce girl-friendly promotional movies about computer science. The Veterans Day Google doodle shows the U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Malta, November 12th. Following the collapse of talks with African nations this week, the European Commission announced the following steps.
[Dream music.] That's a sample of my dreams, listener: not dreams of "hate" or "harm," as the Cultural Marxist propagandists would have you think. These are dreams of a fair and just world. In my dream-world, no-one lets his judgment be warped by racial guilt. In this world, no-one is privileged on account of his race, and everyone understands that unequal outcomes by race are the fault of nobody but Mother Nature. In this world, elementary truths have not been forgotten, truths like:
All right, it's a dream world, and it's annoying to have other people tell you their dreams. I'm sorry. Forgive me. Please forgive me. I will do anything if only you'll forgive me. I am so, so sorry. On behalf of all privileged cisgendered white males everywhere, I humbly apologize. Won't you forgive me? Please, please forgive me. Here, take my money, please … |
09 — The coveted crown. This week's miscellany of brief items will have to be drastically truncated, I'm afraid, listeners. I am way over time, and if I don't wind up quickly, I shall be late for the diversity and inclusion seminar that VDARE has signed up its employees for. I therefore only have time to note that the finals of the Miss BumBum pageant were held November 9th in São Paulo, Brazil. The MailOnline website offers full photographic coverage. The 15 finalists, each representing a Brazilian state, displayed their talents to a packed audience in various ways. Listeners may recall that a couple of weeks ago I had a crack at guessing the winner, and settled my preference on Sabrina Boing Boing of Rio Grande Do Sul. Well, Senhorita Boing Boing enthralled the crowd by licking a baseball bat … for quite a long time. Alas, it wasn't enough to sway the judges. The final winner was Suzy Cortez of Distrito Federal. Poor Sabrina was left to bring up the rear. The show was rounded off with a coronation, of course. The pageant crown was placed on Senhorita Cortez's … ah, let me just do a quick fact-check here …[keyboard sounds] … yes, on her head. Congratulations, Suzy; commiserations, Sabrina — try to put it behind you, dear. I'm sure we all look forward to next year's contest. |
10 — Signoff. That's it, ladies and gents. I am indeed way over time, so I'll just thank you for listening and urge you to tune in again next week, when there will be more caustic commentary from Radio Derb! |
[Music clip: More Derbyshire Marches.]