»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your tenebrously genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you news of the hour seasoned with conservatism, nationalism, and pessimism.

The birthday of a great living dissident is coming up next week — I'll get to that in a segment or two. Sir Winston Churchill's birthday is more immediately upon us: the great man was born 150 years ago tomorrow, November 30th. If you think Sir Winston was not a great man but an alcoholic psychopath in the service of international financiers, we'll have to differ; but at least look up what I said on the topic two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, what's happening in our domestic politics? Well, the nominations continue apace.

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02 — Trump's Labor Secretary.     Yes, the nominations continue. One of them infuriated the editorial writers at the New York Post, America's Newspaper of Record. Here they were sputtering away on Monday. I'll give you the editorial as it appeared in the print edition of the newspaper. Longish quote.

President-elect Donald Trump started celebrating Thanksgiving early by choosing to put a turkey in his Cabinet: Late Friday, he tapped Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer to head the Labor Department.

The Oregon Republican-in-name just lost her bid for re-election after a single term in the House, where she routinely toed the Big Labor line, co-sponsoring the radical PRO Act and opposing school choice — a cause Trump has fervently embraced.

She opposed Right-to-Work laws, which guarantee no-one can be forced as a condition of employment to join or pay dues or fees to a labor union in 27 states — nearly all of which voted for Trump.

That's why she was pushed by Teamsters President Sean O'Brien, whose union went no-endorsement in the prez race. And why she has the enthusiastic support of Randi Weingarten and her fellow teachers-union bosses — who went all-out to beat Trump.

This is a horrible pick: Trump won over the working class because he delivered rising wages in his first term, while President Biden's Big Labor-loving policies slammed workers. Unions in America today are a tiny (and shrinking) force in most of the private sector, but a huge bane in government. Chavez-DeRemer will be another barrier to the work of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency — and, indeed, to Trump's own push to force out the highly politicized "Deep State" operatives who did so much to hobble him in his first term.

We get that Trump is determined to not be a captive of old-school GOP orthodoxy. But he also prizes loyalty, and Chavez-DeRemer's loyalties reside with his enemies.

We hope he belatedly realizes that she should go somewhere she can do no harm — say, as ambassador to Burma, even if Turkey would be more appropriate.

End quote.

"The radical PRO Act"?  What's that all about? I had to look it up.

"PRO" stands for "Protecting the Right to Organize." The PRO Act has been promoted in Congress this past four or five years, but so far as I can ascertain it hasn't made it into the statute books. (Which, if I remember my Rules of Order, mean that it's a Bill, not an Act. Whatever …) The PRO Act would firm up union powers and add some new rights.

One of those new rights particularly caught my attention. The Act would, and here I'll quote from its Wikipedia entry:

allow for certain workers, such as those working in the gig economy, to attain the right to form a labor union or to bargain collectively. This would potentially include those who work for app-based companies such as Uber, DoorDash, or Lyft, and overall could include hundreds of thousands or millions of workers.

End quote.

Presumably it would also include freelance writers: poor ink-stained wretches like your genial host here who scrape out a meager living writing commentary and book reviews for the dwindling number of print outlets, or online for the infinitesimal number of websites that pay their contributors. I could join a union! Yeah, right.

The New York Post editors are writing from the traditional Republican point of view that the Democratic Party is the natural home of labor unions, the GOP their natural enemy.

I've never seen it from that point of view. Here I was passing comment back in October during the longshoremen's strike.

[Pips.]

In a general way I'm pro-union. Yes, employees should be able to lean on employers to share the profits of business fairly.

That's in the private sector, though. I'm totally against public-sector unions, who I think do great harm. They're not making a claim on profits; in the public sector there aren't any profits, only money raised from taxes and tariffs, which belongs to the citizens at large. If public-sector workers don't like their wages they can lobby their legislators to increase them, or else go find work in the private sector.

As the great President Coolidge told Samuel Gompers, quote: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time." End quote.

Glancing through my archives, in fact, I see that my recorded hostility to public-sector unions goes back more than twenty years. I may be wrong, but I'm consistent.

Since I'm recycling my past commentary, here is some from February 2011.

[Pips.]

One of the first things I was ever told in the journalism business, by a seasoned veteran of London's Fleet Street, was to be very careful what I wrote about the teachers' unions. Approximate quote from him:

"You can say what you like about party leaders, government ministers, the IRA, the PLO, organized crime, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, even the Royal Family. You'll get a couple of angry letters, that's all. But say something rude about the teachers' unions, you'll want one of those mirrors on a long handle to check for bombs under your car."

Just so. Hell hath no fury like a public-sector union that believes its political power to be under threat. These teachers, road crews, garbage collectors, and municipal paper-pushers have controlled state legislatures here in the U.S.A. for so long now with their bought-and-paid-for politicians, the thought of any legislative threat to their plush healthcare deals and triple-padded, inflation-proofed pensions drives them to insensate rage.

That's what we're seeing in Wisconsin this last couple of days. Wisconsin's new governor, Scott Walker, a Republican, came in after last November's elections with a Republican state Senate and House, and they found themselves looking at a $137 million hole in the state's current budget, which the state constitution requires to be balanced, and a likely $3.6 billion shortfall projected for the next two-year budget.

Governor Walker and his Republican legislators decided to reform the conditions of state employment. They drew up a bill that will double state employees' health-care contributions to 12 percent and their pension contributions to 5.6 percent — in both cases, bringing the figure up to about half what a private-sector employee pays. The bill also removes most bargaining rights from public-sector unions.

Most of us in the private sector can't even understand why public-sector workers need labor unions. The point of a labor union is to prevent a profit-making enterprise from maximizing profits by exploiting employees. Since a state is not a profit-making enterprise, what need for unions?

Since a state can't go out of business, public employment is always more secure than work for a private company. Public-sector workers should give up something in return for that security, and collective-bargaining rights are a fair thing to give up.

Public-sector unionization is in fact quite a new thing. Not until 1961 were federal employees given collective-bargaining rights, though some states and cities unionized earlier. Still today, many states do not permit public employees to unionize. Of all the nation's eight million public-sector workers, less than forty percent are unionized.

Still, we private-sector Johnnies think that's forty percent too many, and we're cheering on Scott Walker here.

Note to self: After broadcast, send out assistant to buy one of those mirrors with a long handle …

[Pips.]

So where the issue of a nominee for Labor Secretary is concerned, my first question is, always has been, and will continue to be: Where does the nominee stand on public-sector workers organizing?

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03 — Killing Hong Kong.     I should add, for listeners who are themselves public-sector workers and who might have taken umbrage at all that negativity, I should add that I myself worked in the public sector for two years.

That was in London, 1969-1971. Equipped with a bachelor's degree in math, I thought I'd give computing a try. My father's advice to me had always been to "Get a government job!" I did; I went to work for the British Post Office, which in those days also ran the nation's telephone system.

So in 1969 I became a computer programmer, working on Telephone Billing. This was of course the early mainframe days: punched cards in, masses of printed paper out; no terminals, no screens, 32 kilobytes of main memory, external storage on mag tapes. This being a government operation, management hadn't yet figured out job titles for IT workers, so I was given the rank APC2 — Assistant Postal Controller Grade II.

If I'd stayed a government employee I'd now be enjoying retirement on a gold-plated government pension. Alas for what might have been! I got itchy feet, resigned from my career as an Assistant Postal Controller Grade II, took a trip abroad, and washed up at last in Hong Kong, where I stayed a year and a half.

Hong Kong was at that time a British colony of the more easy-going sort. There was a government, but you'd hardly have noticed. An ordinary Hong Kong resident could go his whole life barely interacting with the government at all.

Even when you needed the government, they didn't do much. If you called the police for any reason, when they showed up they would first ask you for money. Then, depending on how satisfied they were with the sum you offered, they might deal with the issue, or they might just drive away.

There was crime, of course, and corruption; but both at low levels — lower than an average big city in the U.S.A. today, — both within limits everyone understood, limits enforced by custom and social pressure. Hong Kong cured me forever of faith in government as the solution to all problems. It also left me deeply, permanently unreceptive to rhetoric about the evils of colonialism.

That wide-open, easygoing, free-wheeling Hong Kong is now long gone, I'm very sorry to say. The Chinese Communist Party has taken over the city with all its usual control-freakery and cruelty.

The Economist, November 19th, quote:

Whether a crime was even committed is debatable. Nevertheless, on November 19th judges in Hong Kong's biggest-ever national-security trial sentenced 45 activists to between four and ten years in prison. Those jailed are among 47 pro-democracy figures, known as the "Hong Kong 47," who were rounded up in 2021 for having organised a primary to choose candidates for the local legislature. Fourteen of the defendants were found guilty in May of conspiracy to commit subversion. Thirty-one had already pleaded guilty. Two were acquitted. The entire case has been widely criticised as politically motivated.

End quote.

"Politically motivated"? You don't say.

Sunday, December 8th will be the 77th birthday of entrepreneur and newspaper and magazine publisher Lí Zhìyīng, English name Jimmy Lai. Mr Lai has been a stalwart supporter of civil liberties in Hong Kong. For that he has spent most of his time since 2020 in jail, the last four years in solitary confinement.

He was brought out for yet another show trial November 20th, accused of sedition and collusion with foreign countries. The verdict will of course be "guilty."

President-elect Trump vowed on a podcast in October that he would "a hundred percent" get Jimmy Lai out of China. Britain's Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has described Lai (who holds U.K. citizenship) as a, quote, "priority," end quote, for his government.

We old China hands are unanimous that Jimmy Lai will die in a communist dungeon. His friends say he himself is resigned to the prospect.

So spare a thought for Hong Kong and its people. It and they have gone from an extraordinary level of freedom to no freedom at all in twenty-seven years. Spare a thought, spare a thought.

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04 — The late-Biden Rush.     After the 2020 elections the Biden Rush — that is, the great rush of foreign scofflaws in across our southern border — was not too hard to predict. I of course predicted it.

With their man in the White House and control of the lower chamber in Congress, the ruling class opened the gates, with results we are all familiar with.

By the run-up to the 2024 elections a lot of that familiarity had turned to discontent among voters. Aware of this, and with the upcoming elections in mind, the Biden administration cut a deal with the government of Mexico to improve the optics of the situation.

Non-Mexicans flooding in across Mexico's southern border on their way north to the U.S.A. would be held down there in the South-Mexican states of Chiapas and Tabasco, with suitable adjustments to the computerised "asylum seeker" rackets to keep them from getting unmanageably angry. With U.S. journalists fixing their attention on our own border up in Mexico's north, the Biden Rush was no longer visible to them, or us.

Had the Democratic Party won control in this month's election, the agreement with Mexico could have been scrapped. The hundreds of thousands of would-be invaders pent up in those south-Mexican states could have been set free for another, now visible, Biden Rush.

Unfortunately American voters went the other way. You'd think that under the circumstances the outgoing administration would just throw up their hands, say "Aw, the hell with it! Let Trump handle it."

That is not what's happening. Following the election result, the administration has gotten busy. Busy doing what? Busy making sure that when the new Biden Rush arrives at our border it will be greeted with rules and regulations even more lax, more welcoming, than the last one. Quote from the New York Post, November 21st, edited quote:

The Biden administration is quietly rushing to implement new policies that will loosen restrictions on migrants who entered the U.S. illegally — a parting attempt to thwart President-elect Donald Trump's immigration crackdowns and mass deportations, sources tell The Post …

The outgoing administration intends to launch an ICE Portal app starting in early December in New York City that will allow migrants to bypass in-person check-ins to their local ICE office.

Homeland Security sources tell The Post the app will make it easier for migrants to flee authorities in part because the software has proven to be glitchy and unreliable.

Even when it's working correctly, the new app doesn't check for past arrests or outstanding warrants — something the current system tied to in-person appointments does, sources said.

Up to 100,000 migrants will be enrolled in the first wave of the program, sources said.

That's just one of a handful of initiatives being pushed through before inauguration day — including allowing migrants to contest government orders to undergo electronic tracking while they await their immigration appointments.

And experts said rolling back the policies might not be as simple as Trump waving his pen, because changes could be subject to both procedural hurdles and legal challenges …

Former acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan slammed the Biden administration's last-minute moves as [inner quote] "the opposite of a peaceful transition of power." [End inner quote.]

End quote.

It is, in other words, sheer spite. But spite driven by what?

I've been pondering that for years on this podcast. What is the driving factor behind this irresistible desire of ruling classes in the West to replace their legacy populations?

Call me a mystic, but I am more and more inclined to think that there is some deep psychic force being expressed here, like the Dark Energy that cosmologists talk about. It's not economic, political, sectarian, or cultural. It has no connection to reason at all. It's just there, like gravity, sucking our civilization down into the Pit.

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05 — Andreessen on Rogan.     In all proper modesty I acknowledge that Podcast of the Week this week was not Radio Derb. What was it, then? It was Joe Rogan's interview with Marc Andreessen. Doing my morning browse of X on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I don't think I've ever seen so many users enthusiastically posting clips from an interview.

Strictly speaking this was a vidcast, not a podcast. You get to see Rogan and Andreessen, as well as hear them. It also comes with a warning. WARNING: It's l-o-o-o-ng — three hours, eight minutes, and forty-five seconds.

So who is this Marc Andreessen guy? He is a huge figure in modern tech, with a net worth nudging two billion. If you're using any kind of browser to engage with the Internet — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Firefox, Opera — just nod a thank-you in Marc Andreessen's direction. He created the first commercial internet browser thirty years ago, when the Internet — at least so far as ordinary citizens were concerned — was an exciting new thing.

I've never engaged personally with Andreessen, but just on the evidence of the Rogan interview it's plain he is very smart indeed — so smart his vocal apparatus has trouble keeping up with his mind: he's a very fast talker.

I don't imagine many of my listeners have the patience to watch a three-hour vidcast all the way through. The best, most quotable part of this one is, by general agreement, the ten minutes beginning at one hour, thirty-three minutes and twenty seconds in.

Here are some sample quotes extracted from that ten minutes, starting just after Rogan quotes Elon Musk saying that there are today more federal agencies than there have been years of the United States. Sample quotes, edited.

Andreessen:  Correct. Yeah: 450 federal agencies and two new ones a year. And then my favorite twist is, we have this thing called "independent federal agencies" So for example, there's this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is the … It's sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control. And it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the Constitution, like, there is no such thing as an independent agency, and yet — there it is.

Rogan:  What does her agency do?

Andreessen:  Whatever she wants.

Rogan:  What does it do, though?

Andreessen:  Basically, terrorize financial institutions, prevent fin-tech, prevent new competition, new start-ups that want to compete with the big banks … Just by terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services … This is where a lot of debanking comes from, is these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system … My partner Ben's father has been debanked.

Rogan:  For what?

Andreessen:  For having the wrong politics. For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations — here's a great thing — under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the past twenty years, there's now a category called a Politically Exposed Person — PEP. And if you are [sic] a PEP you are required by financial regulators to kick them off … to kick them out of your bank …

Rogan:  What if you're politically on the left? … So no-one on the left gets debanked?

Andreessen:  I've not heard of a single instance of anybody on the left getting debanked … There's a Constitutional Amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech but there's no Constitutional Amendment that says the government can't debank you. Right? So if they can't do the one thing they do the other thing. And then they don't have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private-company banks to do it, and then the private-company banks do it because they're expected to. But the government gets to say: "We didn't do it. It was the private company that did it." And of course J.P. Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers — of course, right? Because they're a private company. And so it's this sleight of hand that happens. So basically it's a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran …

End quotes.

There is of course much more, all of it expressed clearly by a serious, seasoned actor in financial and informational technology. I have never seen such a clear description of the Administrative State and its methods, from a guy who's confronted it and them countless times. Check it out.

My thanks to Marc Andreessen for that; and my apologies to him at second hand on behalf of all the many X users who have trouble with the correct spelling of his name. And yes, of course, thanks to Joe Rogan, too.

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

Imprimis:  The spite of our elites towards Donald Trump, their determination to use the last few weeks of their administration to thwart his plans, may not be limited to a flood of illegal aliens granted new privileges. It may extend as far as engineering a major war to greet Trump when he crosses the threshold of the White House.

Tucker Carlson thinks so. So does my boss the Z-man.

Can Trump Derangement Syndrome really drag people down that low? I don't see why not. It brought us the corruption and invalidation of the legal system and federal law enforcement, gross mismanagement of the nation's finances, favors to despots who call us The Great Satan, … in short, lt brought us the World of Null-T.

Our power elites have no limits. Nothing is sacred to them. They destroyed Trump's first Presidency; now they are bending their efforts to destroying his second. To that noble end, war is a small price to pay. And of course it won't be them who pay it; it'll be the rest of us.

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Item:  Some new information here from the U.S. Census Bureau, which gathers data on worldwide trends.

One of the most striking findings is that South Korea's Total Fertility Rate is now at a sensationally low 0.68 children per woman. That's a decline from 1.2 children per woman since 2014, so a 43 percent decline in just ten years.

For a stable population under modern circumstances you need a TFR somewhere around 2.1. At 0.68 you will, in two or three generations' time, be producing mere thousands of new citizens per annum while burdened with millions of the elderly living longer and longer as medical science improves.

It's a sad prospect. I got a small personal glimpse of that sadness just recently.

I was at dinner with an old acquaintance, a seventy-ish American gentleman of good humor, high intelligence, and blessed with worldly success and wealth. Making idle chat about our families, I described the antics of my delightful, mischievous grandson, who lives much of the time with us.

My friend shook his head sadly, looking down into his food. He has given up hope of his children presenting him with any grandchildren. Now in middle age, they are just not that way inclined.

I felt the utmost sympathy. Reading these statistics about South Korea, I felt sympathy and sadness on a wider scale. So many millions — tens of millions — of lonely old people. What an ocean of loneliness is in front of us! Can't we think of anything to do about this?

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Item:  My old pal Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama … Oh, all right: I met him once and shook hands with him. He, the current Dalai Lama, turns ninety next July 6th. That has religious significance.

The significance is, that the physical Dalai Lama — the one whose physical hand I shook — is, in the religion he represents and in the minds of his followers, merely a vehicle for a high-quality spiritual being, a Buddha. Once that vehicle has ceased to operate, the Buddha will migrate to a new vehicle, a newborn child.

So how do you figure out which newborn child got the Buddha reincarnated in him? Or her: the present Dalai Lama has said it could be a female. He has also said that he — that is, his inner Buddha — may not be reincarnated at all.

So it's already a bit vague and confused. What's the significance of next July 6th? The significance is that back in 2011 His Holiness declared that discussions about his reincarnation would take place once he reaches the age of 90, adding that, quote: "For now, we must wait a little longer for a clearer picture." End quote.

The wild card here, the yak in the woodpile, is of course China. They don't want any discussions about the pontiff's reincarnation. They'll appoint someone of their own choosing, someone who won't give them any trouble.

We know this because it's happened before. Next to the Dalai Lama, the most important person in Tibetan Buddhism is the Panchen Lama. That dignitary died in 1989 in Chinese-occupied Tibet, where he'd been a political prisoner for fifteen years. In 1995 the Dalai Lama, at this point an exile in India, tapped a six-year-old Tibetan boy as the reincarnated Panchen Lama. The communists arrested the child and his family, and none of them has been seen since.

Why are the ChiComs being so cruel to the Tibetans? Because they don't want any messy regional uprisings and all the bad publicity they'd bring, that's why. You think it's easy running an empire?

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Item:  Last weekend Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket took six space tourists into orbit. One of them was an astronautical engineer named Emily Calandrelli, 37 or 38 years old (we're not sure) and quite strikingly pretty. Ms Calandrelli thereby became the hundredth woman to go into space.

It was of course terrifically exciting for all aboard, with much cheering and whooping in the video clips sent down to Earth. Ms Calandrelli's mode of expressing her excitement, however, generated much off-color humor. Listen.

[Clip:

Male voice:  Look at that Earth! Look at that Earth!

Emily:  I'm here! I did it! … Guys, look!

Male voice:  There you go!

Emily:  (Gasp.) (Breathlessly:) We're in space right now … Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness! … That's our planet … (Even more breathlessly) Oh, my goodness! That's …

Male voices whooping triumphantly …]

The humor was of course widely denounced as sexist, misogynistic, objectifying, and hateful. That's the times we are in.

I beg leave to think that those who generated the humor were inspired not by hatred of women nor even feelings of superiority, but by the desire to have some harmless fun.

Also to assert the true fact that men and women are in some respects … different, and to poke a finger in the collective eye of the woke schoolmarms who deny it.

However that may be, the phrase, "I felt the Earth move" now has a whole new dimension. Emily Calandrelli didn't just feel it move, she saw it move.

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07 — Signoff.     That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you as always for your time and attention, for your support and donations.

Concerning the latter: The home page of my website johnderbyshire.com has full instructions for how to donate; just scroll down a page or two to the "Introduction" section. My heartfelt thanks to you in advance for doing so.

The item in my November 15th podcast about Japan launching into orbit a space satellite made of wood, continues to inspire. You'll recall that I concluded the item with the question: "Which nation do you think will be the first to launch into orbit a satellite made of leather?

Last week I recorded my bafflement at the fact that several emailers answered with Scandinavian countries — Sweden, Norway, Denmark. Why? I wondered.

Radio Derb's reach is of course world-wide. On Monday I received the following from a listener in Norway. Quote:

I too was surprised about the Scandinavian leather suggestions — but I am convinced it has to do with Black Metal, our top music export. It's all about leather, just image search it and you will see.

End quote.

Sure enough: if I put the phrase "black metal" into the search box for Google Images, I do indeed see a lot of leather.

I had never heard of Black Metal music, though, and had no idea what it sounded like. Over to YouTube, which has lots of examples.

To sign us out, and with a sideways nod to all the retail outlets shrieking at me that today is Black Friday, here is a sample of Black Metal. It's from an album with title "From the Vastland" by the group Tenebrous Shadow.

This particular track identifies as "Asto Vidatu," which is the name of a malevolent spirit in Persian mythology.

Yes: that's Persian, not Scandinavian. That doesn't make sense to me, either, but I'm no musicologist. Listening to it, in fact, I find myself thinking that there are some doors Man was never meant to open … but judge for yourselves.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

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