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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, fife'n'drum version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Yes, listeners far and wide, this is your non-omphaloskeptically genial host John Derbyshire with all the news that'll get you fired from a conservative magazine. Yep, two years ago this week. I'm having a little upwelling of nostalgia here. I wonder if they fixed that coffee machine in the office kitchen? But never mind that. Let's see what this big old world's been up to, as it goes careening round its orbit. |
02 — Rev'm Al wears a wire. So, it turns out Rev'm Al Sharpton was taking the King's shilling. Yes, everybody's favorite man of God was taking time out from his devotions to wear a wire for the FBI so they could get some incriminating quotes from people named — and I'm not making these names up, they're from the actual news stories — people named Joe "Bananas" Buonanno, Vinnie "the Chin" Gigante, and Federico "Fritzy" Giovanelli. This was back in the 1980s, before Rev'm Al embarked on his second career — second, I mean, after preaching the holy Word of God to his flock — his second career of defaming county prosecutors and rape victims, and inciting antisemitic pogroms to burn down clothing stores and hack Yeshiva students to death. Certain questions come to mind. Here's one: Why did Rev'm Al wear the wire? This one we know the answer to. Rev'm Al entered into certain transactions with a person he took to be an undocumented pharmacist, but who was in point of fact an undercover FBI agent. When Al showed up for a subsequent meeting, instead of Walter White greeting him it was a roomful of g-men, who showed him a video of the previous meeting and suggested he co-operate with them. All right, another question: How did Rev'm Al get close enough to Joe Bananas, Vinnie the Chin, and Co. to record their conversations? I mean, how did he introduce himself to them the first time? "Hi! I'm the Reverend Al Sharpton, and I'm here to save your poor souls. Repent!" That doesn't seem likely. And then there's the allied question: Why did the mobsters have anything to do with a lowlife like Sharpton? Don't they have any self-respect? Actually we know the answer to these questions, too. Before the FBI sting, Sharpton had been in deep with the shadier side of the music business — and I'm not talking about string quartets — and the boxing rackets. He was no stranger to the Mob, nor they to him. One more question: How does Rev'm Al get away with it all? The guy is totally untouchable. That county prosecutor sued him for defamation and got a $65,000 judgment. Sharpton announced he wouldn't pay. He never did, not a cent; eventually his supporters ponied up. He's hundreds of thousands of dollars behind in his taxes, apparently not having yet got to that verse where Jesus tells us to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's. Heck, he doesn't even pay his rent. So how does he get away with it? Beats my pair of jacks. Here's my best guess: Entertainment value. It's the Dick Turpin phenomenon. Turpin was a highwayman in 18th-century England, which is to say he made a living by robbing travellers, beating and torturing them if they didn't hand over their property. He committed at least one murder before being caught and hanged in 1739. He died in great style, chatting amiably with the hangman. Stories about him, half-admiring and half-horrified, circulated for decades afterwards. That kind of lawless audacity appeals to something in us, and I think Rev'm Al taps into that. At least one person agrees with me: Democratic political consultant George Arzt told the New York Post that this latest report about wearing a wire is likely to boost Sharpton's standing with the public rather than hurt it. Quote from Mr Arzt: "This is just going to add to his luster of being a character." It's amazing what you can get away with through sheer stone audacity. You don't want many Dick Turpins around; society would be unstable. One or two though is entertaining. Rev'm Al is a sort of court jester, a licensed fool. That's my best shot at an explanation, anyway. Be interesting to know what Rev'm Al thinks of it. I suppose we could ax him … |
03 — Eric Holder displays his wounds. There's a little coda to the Rev'm Al story. It so happens that Wednesday to Saturday this week, the week the story came out, Sharpton's National Action Network is having its annual convention, a big bash in the Times Square Sheraton, right in the middle of Manhattan. What is National Action Network? It's one of those shakedown outfits the black race hustlers set up, like Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH. They target some big corporation, find an employee willing to say she's been discriminated against in some way, or just put out stories saying the corporation doesn't hire enough blacks. They have a meeting with some flak-catchers from the company's Public Relations department, tell them: "You gotta fix this, of there'll be some ugly, noisy demonstrations in front of your offices, stories in the news, maybe a boycott." The flak-catchers ask: "How much?" The activists tell them. A check gets written, and the problem goes away until the next time Rev'm Al needs a new suit. If you think that sounds like a seedy protection racket, bite your tongue! These are black people we're talking about here, groaning under the heel of oppression and injustice, their spirits crushed by 200 years of slavery. And I must say, personally, I can't say I blame the race hustlers. They get away with these shakedowns because white people let them — because, to quote the title of one of my Taki's Magazine columns, "White People Are Pussies." If I could squeeze a couple million greenbacks out of Anheuser-Busch by threatening to park a posse of welfare cases outside corporate headquarters waving placards and yelling, I'd do it too. So here's this National Action Network, NAN — not to be confused with NAM, which is the acronym we anti-anti-racists use when referring to Non-Asian Minorities — here's NAN, Al Sharpton's personal ATM, having its annual bash in New York City, and everybody who's anybody wants to be on that platform with Rev'm Al. Well, everybody that's anybody who hates white people. Bill de Blasio, the communist Mayor of New York, was there, for example, looking a little battered and tired after losing his fifteenth arm-wrestling match with New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is just as nasty a piece of work as de Blasio in his own way, but with thirty points more IQ. De Blasio didn't mention Sharpton's little gig as an FBI informant, only heaped praise on the holy man, quote: To borrow a phrase from our youth: Reverend, you're the real thing. End quote. Wow, what colorful phrases were current in de Blasio's youth! We had a different phrase for the likes of Sharpton in my youth, but alas I can't repeat it on a family podcast. Next up was our nation's Attorney General, at ease among His People. Not altogether happy, though. As well as being the most anti-white Attorney General since Speedy Gonzales back in the Bush administration, Eric Holder enjoys the further distinction of being the most thin-skinned cabinet officer ever. After some perfunctory words of praise for Rev'm Al, Holder got to what was really on his mind: the lack of respect shown to him — to him! the descendant of slaves! — at a congressional hearing the other day. Quote: What Attorney General has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What President has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? End quote. Holder reminded the weeping conventioneers that in spite of these insults to his pride, he had struggled on Christ-like, toting his cross up the hill. His tenure as Attorney General has, quote: "been defined by significant strides … even in the face of unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and divisive adversity," end quote. Oh yeah, adversity. You coast through a pleasant middle-class upbringing in New York, then get wafted up through college on warm gusts of affirmative action into prosecutorships and judgeships, all on government salaries. Adversity. Some congressman told him off. Adversity. On Friday the NAN conference is to be addressed by the Head NAM In Charge, Barack Obama himself. You might think it's a bit off for the President of the United States to grace this rabble of cynical shakedown artists with his presence; but remember, please, that these are heroes of the Civil Rights movement, who faced the fire hoses and dogs so that little kiddies could go to school. Besides, Obama's been struggling all his life to be authentically black, and what could be authentically blacker than schmoozing with Rev'm Al? If Barry were standing for re-election there would of course be some tricky calculations to be made; but he's lame duck, so what the heck. |
04 — Things go better with Koch. The Koch bothers are in the news. Do I say it right? When I see a German name like that, I'm back in Siggy Buchwalter's German class at Northampton School for Boys, circa 1960. Siggy was fanatical about pronunciation. He once stood over me for what seemed like a full five minutes while I tried to pronounce the plural of kuh, meaning "cow," just making me say it over and over. I still have nightmares about it, and wake in a cold sweat at three a.m. muttering kühe, kühe, kühe, … Well, K-O-C-H is pronounced koch in German and means "cook." I've been here in the colonies long enough, though, to know that it's a serious faux pas — or, as the Germans would say, ein Fehltritt — to pronounce German names the German way. My fallback instinct is just to Anglicize the thing as "kotch," but people tell me that doesn't work, either. Apparently it's "coke." So that's what I'm going with. So, the Koch brothers. These are two guys, David and Charles, who are principals of Koch Industries, a huge multinational dealing in asphalt, chemicals, commodities trading, energy, fibers, fertilizers, finance, minerals, natural gas, plastics, petroleum, pulp and paper, ranching, and life-size anatomically correct inflatable companions. The Koch brothers are generous with their money, and have made big donations to hospitals, cultural institutions, and the like. The Koch brothers have also given a lot of money to politicians and political lobbies, as is their right. They are libertarian conservatives, so most of their money goes in that direction. It never hurts to spread some of the stuff around to powerful people on the other side, though, so they've done that, too … [Cough] … donation button … [cough] on my web page … [cough] … Sorry, got something stuck in my throat there. Where was I? Right, the Koch brothers. I'd better say up front that the Koch brothers are not not my cup of tea. They belong to the species of open-borders libertarians — people who believe that libertarianism, which is an exclusively white American phenomenon, will be much fortified if a couple hundred million non-white non-Americans are given settlement rights in our country. Open-borders libertarians are sometimes referred to as "suicidal libertarians." Notwithstanding that, the Koch brothers are major hate figures for the political left. They give money to conservatives! LOTS of money! Well, yes, but George Soros and his son give lots of money to leftist causes, along with other billionaires like Michael Bloomberg. Yes, but leftist causes are good, while conservative causes are evil! Apparently that's the entire logic. It's childish, but that's the level our politics has sunk to. Well, as I said, the Koch brothers are major hate figures for the left — or rather, they would be if hate were a thing leftists are capable of. In fact only conservatives hate; the left is a hate-free zone. Nonetheless, leftist politicians like New York Senator Chuck "I have a passion to legislate" Schumer try to get at least one mention of the Koch brothers into every paragraph when speaking to the faithful, so that the faithful can hiss and boo and shake their fists. So here was Senator Schumer two weeks ago on a morning TV program. The backstory here is that David Koch had funded some TV commercials criticizing Obamacare and calling for smaller government. Harry Reid had said this was un-American. The host of the TV show asked Schumer if he agreed with that. Schumer tried to lawyer it but the host kept pressing. At last Schumer said, quote: I think the commercials he is running are against the American grain and un-American, yes … I think what Harry Reid was saying was the actions are un-American. And they are, and they should change. End quote. That's bad enough by itself. A couple of days later, though, a journalist dug up a letter that Senator Schumer had written to the secretary of the Koch brothers' political action committee, dated October 2009, thanking the Koch brothers for their generous donation to his 2010 campaign! That Skunk Schumer is a duplicitous hypocrite who leaves a trail of sticky slime behind him when he moves around, is not news to conservatives in New York. I just thought the rest of you might want to know about it. |
05 — A rising tide of illegal infiltrators. I hope no Radio Derb listeners were taken in by the planted stories about the Obama administration deporting record numbers of illegal infiltrators. Every credible analytical immigration monitoring organization quickly figured out that the government had just changed the way they work the numbers, counting infiltrators turned right round at the border as "deportations," which was not previously done. That's last year's story anyway. Here are two from the past few days. First story is from USA Today, April 7th, headline, quote: Another wave of illegal immigration may be near. The gist of the story is, that several economic factors are together creating conditions in which illegal infiltration is bound to surge. For example: The slowdown in China's economy means they don't need so many of the commodities the Latin Americans sell them. That's a push factor, pushing infiltrators north. There are pull factors, too: Construction and retail sales are picking up in the U.S.A. at last, and those are sectors that employ illegals. Quote: Apprehensions along the southwest border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection … have increased each of the last three years. End quote. Second story is from the New York Times, April 10th, headline, quote: Hoping for Asylum, Migrants Strain U.S. Border. "Migrants," please note, is the way the New York Times refers to illegal infiltrators. See, they're not doing anything illegal, and definitely not infiltrating our country. They're just … moving from one place to another. This second story fleshes out the first. Key points:
End of key points. With robots checking us out at the supermarket, robots picking from our warehouse shelves, and pretty soon robots driving our cars, truck, and cabs, we have no need for millions more illiterate Guatemalan peasants. Twenty million Americans are looking for jobs, or have given up looking for jobs. We need to enforce our laws and secure our borders, and Chuck Schumer, George Soros, Harry Reid, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Koch brothers be damned. |
06 — Fools for love. Did I leave anybody out there? I sure did: Nancy Pelosi. In an interview April 9th, Mrs Pelosi unbosomed herself of the following thought, quote: I'll be very honest with you: Looking at the numbers at some point, in terms of how people are treated and deported and families separated and the rest, this has a scent of Japanese internment. It's really a black mark. End quote. OK, let's parse that. "How people are treated …" How should foreigners be treated who have shown disrespect for our country's laws? With a Welcome Wagon parcel and free manicure? How do other countries treat illegal infiltrators? How does Mexico treat them? "… and deported …" Well, duh. That's what you do to infiltrators, or what you should do. That's what the people's laws, passed by the people's Congress in solemn session, say should be done. "… and families separated …" Nothing in our laws or regulations requires families to be separated. Nobody wants families to be separated. I don't want families to be separated. Families should be deported together. "… a scent of Japanese internment." Mrs Pelosi is referring to the WW2 order to West Coast Japanese Americans to move out of likely invasion areas. For those who had nowhere to move to, government camps were provided. The camps were not bad. They had restaurants and beauty parlors, clinics and libraries. Big news outlets like Life magazine visited them and reported on them. People who did have somewhere to go were not interned. I used to have a colleague in New York City, a Japanese-American whose family just moved to the East Coast. "It's really a black mark." It's a black mark, for the federal government to enforce federal law? What on earth is this bird-brained old biddy talking about? Mrs Pelosi's crazy gibberings were not even the worst to come out of a politician's mouth this week on the subject of illegal infiltrators. The real depths here were plumbed by Jeb Bush, son [sic — sorry!] of the clueless La Raza cheerleader George W. Bush, and sometime Governor of Florida — a state where, I am told, it is increasingly difficult to find an entry-level job if you can't speak Spanish. Here's what the treasonous creep said, actual quote: the way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn't come legally, they come to our country because their family's, you know, a dad who loved their children was worried that their children didn't have food on the table. And they, you know, wanted to make sure their family was intact and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it's not a felony. It's kind of — it's an act of love. It's an act of commitment to your family. End quote. I won't burden you with a full deconstruction of that. I will just note that according to a consulting firm named Euromonitor, as reported by the Latin American Herald Tribune newspaper, among the top ten countries in the world with the highest rates of obesity there stand Mexico at fifth, Venezuela at sixth and Guatemala at tenth. And if Jeb Bush thinks that what these foreign scofflaws are doing to the U.S.A. is an act of love, he needs to brush up on his sexual etiquette. What they're doing to us, via our schools and hospitals and welfare programs and law enforcement problems, what they're doing does indeed bear some resemblance to a sexual act, but not one of the loving kind. |
07 — No-hoper diversity. Jeb Bush also featured in the week's most depressing story. This is from the Daily Caller, April 9th. Some university has polled the people planning to attend the Iowa caucuses for 2016. Whom do GOP caucasians — is that the noun, caucasians? … caucus-goers, whatever — whom do they favor as Republican Presidential candidate? Number One: Mike Huckabee at eleven percent. Tied in second place: Rand Paul and Jeb Bush at ten percent. Below them: Senator Ted Cruz and someone named Ben Carson at nine percent. Then Chris Christie at seven, a six-way tie at six percent between Scott Walker, Rick Santorum, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Condoleezza Rice, and Sarah Palin. Bringing up the rear, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry. I told you it was depressing. What a sorry crew! I believe the only name there that favors enforcement of our country's immigration laws is Sarah Palin. At least there's some variety, though, some diversity. We have fat no-hopers and thin no-hopers; white, brown, and black no-hopers, andro-Americans and gyno-Americans. I couldn't spot any Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, or Qs in the list, but you never know. The Democrats can't even say that. Sixty-three percent of Democratic caucasians want Hillary Clinton as their party's nominee. Sixty-three percent. Hillary Clinton. I've been in Iowa a couple of times. I thought it was pretty nice. When did it get taken over by space aliens? |
08 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: Switzerland has an assisted suicide clinic called Dignitas. Make an application, pay a fee — the basic package is around $5,000 — sign a bunch of waivers, and they'll slide you out smoothly and painlessly into the next world. Well, an 89-year-old British woman we know only as Anne availed herself of the service on March 27th, in spite of being neither terminally ill nor handicapped. Why did this lady want to turn in her lunch pail? She said she was, quote, "fed up with the modern world of emails, TVs, computers and supermarket ready meals," end quote. Who doesn't know the feeling? Well, I mean of course, who over the age of sixty doesn't know the feeling? Further quote from Anne, quote: I find myself swimming against the current, and you can't do that. If you can't join them, get off. End quote. Anne told the newspaper she felt email had taken the humanity out of human interaction, and said people were, quote, "becoming robots" sat in front of screens. It's a sad story, but there'll be more like it. When the Social Security funding crunch kicks in, assisted suicide will start to look like a really good idea to politicians. At the same time, a couple more iterations of social media and nobody will talk to anyone any more, or bother to look at anything but those damn fool screens, and people who grew up having conversations, reading books, gardening, playing bridge, and ballroom dancing will be praying for release. Item: Here's a way you would not wish to go. A senior North Korean bureaucrat named O Sang-hon has been executed by flame-thrower. Mr O is thought to have been associated with Jang Song-taek, uncle of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, whom Kim had executed last December by plain old firing squad. (The story that he was eaten by dogs turned out to be a spoof.) Two years ago Kim had an offending bureaucrat executed by mortar round, so there's some sign here of a theme developing, people who tick off the leader getting their ticket punched with some kind of unconventional field weapon. Be interesting to see how the next one goes. By claymore mine? Hand grenade? Drone strike? We'll see. What I'd like to see is Fat Boy strung up by his heels from a Pyongyang street light, like Mussolini. I'd definitely drink to that. Item: Barack Obama's aunt Zeituni Onyango has died from cancer at the age of sixty. May she rest in peace. Ms Onyango's story is a sordid and depressing one, but as with Al Sharpton, it's hard to blame her for taking advantage of a white American public all too willing to be taken advantage of. I can't improve on the remarks in a brilliant April 10th column by Michelle Malkin, which I urge you to read. Here's just a brief extract, quote: Like millions of other "temporary" visa overstayers, Auntie Zeituni never went home. And despite billions spent on homeland security and immigration enforcement, no one ever went looking for her to kick her out of the country after her time was up. Item: I think we all know the story of Eva Braun, who was Adolf Hitler's mistress for the last twelve years of his life, and indeed of her life. They committed suicide together in the Berlin bunker in April 1945. Well, a hairbrush that belonged to Ms Braun still has some hair on it, and scientists have extracted her DNA from the hair fragments. There are some sequences in the DNA suggesting that Ms Braun may have been Ashkenazi Jewish on her mother's side. It wouldn't be that surprising. Plenty of German and Austrian Jews converted to Christianity in the 19th century: Karl Marx's dad, for example. The real mystery about Adolf and Eva is whether he ever got the leg over with her. There are some scholars who think not. They kept separate rooms, and Eva was once heard to say that Hitler never acted like a man to her, though no-one knows quite what she meant. Hitler was strange in several different ways. If the lady was Jewish, that puts the relationship in a new light. At this point you think I'm going to start in with the Jewish wife jokes, don't you? You know: definition of Jewish foreplay — half an hour of begging, that kind of thing. Well, I'm not. No way. I refuse to participate in the persecution of a harmless minority. Anyway, time's up here. |
09 — Signoff. Yes, that's all, folks. [Clip: Looney Tunes, "That's all, folks!"] What was that? Now I know how much you stateside listeners are looking forward to next week. Springtime; the sun shining; the birds singing; daffodils bursting up through the soil … and you poor shlubs have to sit in some windowless office doing your boss's tax returns. I know how much you're looking forward to it. To get you in the right frame of mind, so you can face the new week with proper enthusiasm, here's an old Liverpool song. One of the performers here, by the way — sorry, I forget which one — is Mike McCartney, Paul McCartney's brother. No kidding. More from Radio Derb next week! |
[Music clip: The Scaffold, "2 Day's Monday"]