»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Yes, ladies and gents, this is your indomitably genial host John Derbyshire with VDARE.com's survey of the week's events.

These are challenging times for those of us promoting patriotic immigration reform. The election of Donald Trump raised the political temperature as no other event since the Civil War, and it remains just as high as it was a year and a half ago.

The Cultural Marxists, globalists, open-borders fanatics, white ethnomasochists, and haters of legacy America are fired up with rage and self-righteousness. We do have a sympathetic ear in the White House; but they still control the commanding heights of our economy and culture — business, the media, the academy, the churches.

They are using that power in every way they can to suppress dissent. Every week there is news of some new push against the expression of heterodox opinions; every week there is some new piece of sinister jargon in circulation — this week it was "shadow banning."

An Irish poet a hundred years ago wrote of a time when

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yes, they're full of passionate intensity, all right. The good news is that we on the Dissident Right do not lack all conviction. Heck we're just as fired up with conviction as our enemies are fired up with hatred of our culture, our history, our nation.

What we lack is not conviction. Nor, as 2016 demonstrated, do we lack widespread public support for the positions we take. What we lack is the billion-dollar treasure chests the globalists can draw on: Zuckerberg and the Koch brothers, Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos, the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable.

That's all by way of urging you to read Lydia's eloquent fundraising post on the website today. It offers a glimpse of the soft totalitarianism we have to battle against to get our viewpoint out on the internet these days. And yes, it's a fundraiser, a plea for your help. Please do what you can. THANK YOU!

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02 — House Republicans throw borders open.     This week demonstrated once again, as if it needed demonstrating, that there are two major political parties in the U.S.A.:

• The party of open borders on behalf of big-money business donors, and
  
  
• The party of open borders on behalf of Cultural Marxists, anti-white ethnic lobbies, and public-sector employee lobbies.

What, you don't think open borders is a good idea? Well, shame on you, you racist; but hey, by all means enjoy having your weird cranky opinion in the privacy of your chambers. Just don't expect to have any political representation in the nation's legislature.

Those thoughts were of course inspired by this Wednesday's vote by the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee. The purpose of the vote was to approve a budget for the Department of Homeland Security to cover DHS operations through the coming fiscal year, which starts October 1st.

Fair enough. DHS operations have to be funded, and the House is the place to authorize the funding. Which they did: $51.4 billion for the coming fiscal year. The problem is with some of the amendments that got tacked on to the budget bill.

You'll recall that a few weeks ago Attorney General Jeff Sessions tightened the rules on granting asylum. Obama had loosened them so that any foreigner showing up with a sob story about an abusive husband or gang violence in the neighborhood back home could go into asylum proceedings … with permission to stay and work in the U.S.A. until the proceedings, which are backed up for years, take place.

No, says Jeff: asylum can be claimed only if you have a well-founded fear of persecution at home because of your race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. That's still too broad in my opinion — what counts as "a particular social group"? Bird-watchers? Skate-boarders? Mixed Martial Artists? Alcoholics? It's way better than what went before, though.

Not to the congressweasels on the Appropriations Committee. One of them, Rep. David Price of North Carolina, may his name live in infamy, proposed an amendment to reset grounds for asylum back to the Obama standard. Congressrat Price is a Democrat, so while this is deplorable, it's what you'd expect.

What's far worse is that the Price amendment passed the committee on a voice vote, with the approval of the committee chairman, Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, and the chairman of the homeland security subcommittee, Kevin Yoder of Kansas … who are both Republicans! Yoder actually spoke in favor of the Price amendment.

Since it was a voice vote we don't have a precise tally of what committee members thought about the Price amendment — which, of course, basically throws open our borders to anyone who's been coached with a sob story. We do know, however, that only one of the committee's thirty Republican members spoke out against it: Rep. John Carter of Texas. Blessings on you, Congressman; shame on your GOP colleagues.

Not content with sabotaging the administration's efforts to tighten up border control, congressreptiles Frelinghuysen and Yoder allowed three other amendments, each one opening our borders wider. All three passed on voice votes. One of them — proposed by Yoder himself! — expanded chain migration and employment-based settlement. The other two, both proposed by Republicans, expanded the H-2 programs for low-skilled workers.

Way to go, Republicans! That's what the country voted for in 2016: more low-skilled workers, more chain migration, and asylum for anyone that got yelled at in the street in Tegucigalpa.

Speaking of gutless, spineless congressional RINO cuckweasels sabotaging our President, Paul Ryan crawled out of his burrow the other day to denounce what he called "identity politics." Sample quote:

That is not conservatism. That is racism, that is nationalism, that is not what we believe in, that is not the founding vision, that is not the Founders' creed, that is not natural rights, that is not natural law. ["Paul Ryan: 'White Identity Politics' of Alt-Right Isn't Conservatism, but Racism" by Rachel del Guidice; Daily Signal, July 19th 2018.]

End quote.

Just one more time, listeners, if you'll please excuse me. I know you've heard this before, but it can never be quoted too often; so one more time. Quote:

In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.

End quote.

That was of course the late Lee Kuan Yew, speaking in 2005.

As VDARE.com's own Twittermeister has noted, congressional Republicans aren't much interested in doing politics. They shuffle around for a few years doing the bidding of donors, then quit and go to work as consultants to those donors on fat contracts.

Paul Ryan might of course prove me wrong when he leaves Congress in January, but … that's not the way to bet.

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03 — Birthright citizenship gets an airing.     For those of us working the immigration beat, birthright citizenship is a familiar old chestnut. Every so often in our commentary we take it out, toss it around a bit, then put it back in the closet.

There are never any political developments on the issue. The political establishment decided long ago that birthright citizenship for the children of non-citizens, including illegal aliens, is implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment. There are constitutional scholars who say no, it isn't, and Congress could end birthright citizenship for children of illegals via legislation, or perhaps even the President could end it by executive order.

We know of course that any legislative or executive efforts of that kind would end up in the Supreme Court; and if the Supremes ruled that yes, birthright citizenship for children of illegals is implicit in the Fourteenth, we the people could move for a Twenty-Eighth Amendment to end it. Hey, it's high time we had a new Amendment. They used to come at a pretty steady clip: twelve of them in the twentieth century, average one every eight years. We haven't had one since 1992, though. Come on, citizens, let's give those ratification muscles some exercise!

This is all well-trodden territory among patriotic immigration reformers. We tend to forget, though, how radioactive the topic is among mainstream pundits, especially for some reason Jewish-American Republicans. Whisper the faintest skepticism about birthright citizenship to John Podhoretz, he turns purple and starts screaming. I speak from experience.

I spotted a similar case this week, reading Monday's New York Post over my breakfast oatmeal. There was an op-ed by Karol Markowicz, one of the Post's regular columnists.

Markowicz is not a bad sort. She's originally Russian-Jewish, brought here as a small child in the big wave of Jewish emigration from the U.S.S.R. after 1975. Politically she's center-right; probably a Never Trumper, though I haven't checked. Most of the things she writes about aren't interesting to me, but that's not her fault. So, jolly good luck to Karol Markowicz from Radio Derb, with no animosity at all.

But here she was in Monday's Post writing about birthright citizenship. Quote:

Michael Anton, a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College and a former national-security official in the Trump administration, argued in The Washington Post last week that the US should end birthright citizenship. His idea is noxious — and unconstitutional, as the 14th amendment grants birthright citizenship. ["How to turn immigrants into full-blooded Americans" by Karol Markowicz; New York Post, July 22 2018.]

End quote.

Markowicz is wrong, of course: the Fourteenth Amendment did not grant birthright citizenship to every person born in our territories. It didn't, for example, grant it to American Indians. They had to wait until 1924 to get citizenship by act of Congress.

Leaving that aside, though, before the lady said that ending birthright citizenship is unconstitutional, she said it was, quote, "noxious." My dictionary defines "noxious" as "poisonous, harmful, injurious to health." Pretty strong language, then.

You might therefore assume that ending birthright citizenship is an idea way out of the mainstream, with very little currency among civilized people.

Let's run a check on that. Pop quiz: Which of the following ten nations give birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens?

Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom.

Answer: None of them. Only thirty countries grant automatic birthright citizenship, and only two of the thirty are on the International Monetary Fund's 31-country list of advanced economies: us, and Canada.

That does not of course prove anything about the desirability or otherwise of giving birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. It may be that the thirty countries that do it are right while the 145 countries that explicitly don't are wrong. I'll certainly allow that possibility.

It does, though, make Karol Markowicz's usage of the word "noxious" look mighty strange. A rule in place in twenty-nine advanced nations but not in the other two is "poisonous, harmful, injurious to health"? And it's not Maxine Waters saying so, or Luis Gutierrez, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; it's a mild-mannered, smart, generally sensible, center-right opinionator.

This is the weird warped spacetime in which we have to debate immigration policy in the United States. No wonder nothing ever gets done.

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04 — Absimilation (cont.).     In thirty-five years of writing for the public prints I have made numerous attempts to float a neologism, with essentially no success at all. I guess I'm just too far ahead of my time, darn it.

Of all those attempts, the one I most regret not having gotten airborne is the word "absimilation." From my book We Are Doomed, Chapter Ten, quote:

The English word "assimilation" derives from the Latin prefix ad-, which indicates a moving towards something, and the same language's verb simulare, "to cause a person or thing to resemble another." You can make a precisely opposite word using the prefix ab-, which marks a moving away from something. Many immigrants of course assimilate to American society … Many others, however, especially in the second and following generations, absimilate.

End quote.

That came to mind yesterday when I was reading a post at the Inductivist blog, which is run by a fellow Dissident Rightist who goes by the pseudonym Ron Guhname.

Ron directs our attention to a study out of the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, which is one of the myriad offspring of our federal Department of Justice.

The context here is immigrant crime. We all know that any time we see an open-borders apologist on TV or in a public debate, not more than ninety seconds will pass before he tells us that immigrants in the U.S.A. have lower rates of crime than American citizens. I yearn to see someone shoot back at this idiot with the question: "OK, but is their crime rate lower than that of white Americans?" Of course nobody ever does. Anyone who raised that issue would be banned from public forums for life. Fora, whatever.

Well, this study that Ron, the Inductivist, directs our attention to is titled "Immigrants and Criminality: A Cross-National Review." It dates from 1997, which weakens its force somewhat, though doesn't invalidate it.

The study reviews 125 surveys from several different countries; and yes, it finds that first-generation immigrants are less criminal than natives. But, quote from Ron:

All research indicates that second- and third-generation immigrants are much more criminal that their parents and grandparents. This is a universal finding. The author chalks it up to social factors like not being able to mainstream, etc.

End quote.

Absimilation, see?

Ron wonders if there's a genetic angle. We immigrants are peculiar people — sports of nature, freaks. We're curious, adventurous, footloose. Genetics has a way of damping down oddities like that. The subsequent generations are more like the schlubs back home in Guatemala.

I have no idea whether that's right, though it seems like the kind of thing someone could do research on. Whatever; I'm just happy to have another shot at re-floating my word "absimilation."

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05 — War Party defends NATO.     I've made repeated calls for our leaders to get us out of the worldwide alliances we're tangled in — NATO and the rest. They cost us a ton of money; they absolve other nations from looking to — and paying for — their own defenses, and they put us in constant peril of getting into a war when our own national integrity and security is not threatened.

People sometimes come back with the rejoinder: If we don't defend little countries, who will? If we pull out of NATO, what's to stop Russia re-occupying Lithuania? If we withdraw from Asia, what's to stop China taking over Taiwan?

I'm not impressed by the rejoinder. Hasn't anyone heard of regional alliances? Can't the Europeans defend Lithuania without us? Can't the West Pacific nations — Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia — be allies in common defense, and bring Taiwan in with them?

If they can't, that's tough on the Lithuanians and Taiwanese, but I can't see why we should go to war over it.

There are of course important people who can see why — who, you can be excused for thinking, rather relish the thought of us going to war for any reason at all.

Here are four of those people, all with seats in the United States Senate, two Democrats and two Republicans: Tim Kaine of Virginia (last seen carrying Mrs Clinton's parasol for her in the 2016 campaign), Jack Reed of Rhode Island (who is the only Democratic Senator other than Tim Kaine to have a two-syllable name spelled with only eight letters — sorry, can't find anything else interesting about him), Cory Gardner of Colorado (of whom I can't find anything interesting to say at all), and — can you guess? — yes, John McCain of Arizona.

Thursday this week these four worthies proposed a bill that would prohibit the President withdrawing from NATO without a two-thirds majority vote of the Senate.

As things stand the President can apparently withdraw us from NATO at his whim. I didn't know that, and it sounded improbable when I heard it; but commenters are citing Jimmy Carter's withdrawing from the mutual defense treaty with Taiwan in 1980. There was actually an appeal to the Supreme Court over that; but the Supremes said it was a political issue, not a legislative one, and declined to give a ruling.

I think this is just gesture politics by the War Party. Should it actually come to a vote, though, I urge the President to pull us out of NATO the day before.

Or any other day, Mr President. Just get us out of the darn thing. NATO's opponent, the Warsaw Pact, folded up its tents and went home twenty-seven years ago. If the Europeans want collective defense, let them organize it. Why is it our business?

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06 — Gene studies: the oncoming locomotive.     To people who scoff at genetic explanations for human behavior and abilities, Charles Murray likes to say, quote, "there's a locomotive coming down the tracks," end quote. The name of the locomotive is GWAS — genome-wide association studies, where you get a big pool of people — the bigger the better — collect DNA samples from them, and see if you can match up some trait you're interested in — perhaps a disease some of them have — with markers in the DNA.

How fast is that locomotive coming down the track? I actually did a wee calculation on that the other day.

This was while I was reading about this stupendous new GWAS focusing on educational attainment. How far you get up the educational ladder is of course in part a function of your personality and intelligence, both of which are partly under genetic control. So which genes are involved? Finding that out was the object of the study.

And "stupendous" is no exaggeration. Title of the study, which was published in Nature Genetics, July 23rd, title: Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. One point one million is a lot of individuals.

Quote from geneticist Razib Khan, who gives a very good overview of the study at his blog. Quote:

The authors [of the study] identified 1,271 independent genome-wide-significant SNPs. This is a big achievement, considering that five years ago a paper with ~125,000 individuals identified just 3 SNPs that were significant for this trait!

End quote.

SNPs are point locations in the genome, the building blocks of DNA.

That was when my arithmetic module kicked in. Going from 3 SNPs to 1,271 in five years is a compounding annual multiplier of 3.35225. Five more years gets you over half a million; three years more — so now it's 2026 — you're over the twenty million mark.

That's a lot of SNiPs — more, probably, than are actually involved in governing educational attainment … which would mean that by that point we had identified all the SNiPs involved.

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

Imprimis:  I have often voiced the opinion here at Radio Derb that well up there on any thinking person's list of Worst Ideas of the Twentieth Century, along with World Wars, Communism, Free Verse, and deep-fried Twinkies, are public-sector employee lobbies — or, as they shamelessly call themseves, "unions."

They are not unions. A union seeks a fair share of some corporation's profits; a public-sector employee lobby seeks as much of a share of the public fisc as it can get by bribing legislators. Different thing.

A very successful thing, though; to the degree that many states are deep, deep in debt, largely because of pension and retirement healthcare promises their state legislatures have made to state employees. Connecticut has over 53 billion dollars of debt — more than the gross domestic product of 120 nations on the CIA World Factbook table.

Here's a word of advice to our President. Two words, actually: the two words that President Gerald Ford was reported to have said to New York City back in 1975.

The city had gotten itself into a fiscal hole under mismanagement by mayors John Lindsay and Abe Beame. The President gave a speech saying the federal government would not intervene to save the city from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the following day had the headline: "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD."

President Ford hadn't precisely said that, but he should have done. Likewise, when Connecticut, California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York come to Washington begging for help with their debt, there is President Trump's proper response, all lined up for him and ready to go.

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Item:  Sometimes you have to wonder about the direction society's going. Might we, for example, be headed into a new era of Puritanism?

I wouldn't rule it out. Here for example is a story about the Dallas Mavericks, which is a professional basketball team based in, believe it or not, Dallas, Texas.

The Mavericks have a dance team; a troupe of pretty young women who dance in skimpy costumes for the entertainment of the crowd. It seems to me they should be called cheerleaders, but the news reports all say "dancers," so I'll go along with that. After forty years in this country I'm still a tad insecure about the finer details of American culture — especially in anything to do with sport, where my interest is close to zero. So the ladies are dancers — very good ones: I was just watching a YouTube clip.

Well, there's been some kind of sexual harassment scandal. I don't know the details. Probably some guy told one of the dancers, "You look really nice in that outfit." [Scream.] Whatever it was, it's caused some serious thinking among the Mavericks' management.

The fruit of that thinking is, that the Mavericks' outfits will be changed to something more modest. Also, the Mavericks are, quote, "hoping to include dancers with different body types in the future," end quote.

You have to wonder how far this will go. Shall the Mavericks, ten years from now, be fielding a troupe of 300-lb dancers in full burkas? Nothing would surprise me.

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Item:  One more on the sartorial front. Over in England they're having a heat wave, with some alarming social consequences.

You probably know about cricket: not the chirping insect, nor one of Buddy Holly's backing group, but the bat-and-ball sport played in England and the old colonies (except this one).

Cricket is terrifically English. When I was a kid, in fact, the actual English class system was knitted into the game. Professional cricketers, who played the game for, eiuw, money were officially known as "players": the leisured upper-class types who played solely for amusement were officially known as "gentlemen": and every year there was a Gentlemen v. Players match — that's what it was called, no kidding — at one of the big cricket grounds. (The Players usually won.)

Well, one of the most prestigious institutions in England is the Marylebone Cricket Club, the MCC. It was for a long time the governing body for cricket, setting the rules and so on, though I see that's no longer the case. Regardless, the MCC is still at the pinnacle of cricketing orthodoxy and maintains strict standards.

That includes sartorial standards. The MCC is domiciled at Lord's cricket ground in northwest London, and the heart of Lord's is the Pavilion, which cricketers retire to when not on the field, and where officials officiate, club members socialize, and guests are entertained.

The Pavilion has a very strict dress code, which you can read on the website. It begins, quote:

Gentlemen shall wear lounge suits or tailored jacket and trousers, shirt, tie or cravat and shoes with socks.

End quote.

In this heat wave, however, MCC has relaxed the rules. They have put out a tweet saying, tweet:

Due to the abnormally warm temperatures, MCC has decided to dispense with requirement for gentlemen to wear jackets in the Pavilion and arrive wearing one.

End tweet.

As you may imagine, this has caused consternation and dismay from Gosforth to Godalming, and from Margate to Mousehole. Indignant cricket fans are forecasting the end of Western Civilization — of which, in their minds, the MCC is one of the main pillars. The outrage is compounded for many by the MCC having written "due to" when they should more properly have written "owing to."

Will England survive? Or will these vandals at the MCC succeed where the Spanish Armada, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and Tony Blair all failed? The world is on tenterhooks.

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Item:  This one is tenuously connected to the earlier piece about the Dallas Mavericks babes.

If we are turning to a new Puritanism, that may be connected to a general weakening of interest in sexual intercourse, which may in turn be connected — though the arrow of causation could go in either direction — may be connected to the well-documented decline in sperm counts over recent years.

There is now quite a panic about this. The New York Times ran a story about it last week. Headline: The Dawning of Sperm Awareness.

Apparently guys all over are worried about this. Capitalism is responding with companies offering at-home sperm tests, sperm health scores, sperm cryobanking services, and centrifuges to separate out the sperm so that … what? so that you can count the little buggers? I dunno, I didn't read to the end.

What's causing the sperm dearth? Popular explanations are soy, tight underwear, and the feminization of society. Why produce more sperm if you're just going to get ticketed for toxic masculinity?

What comes to my mind is Mousetopia. Forty-odd years ago animal behaviorist John B. Calhoun (not to be confused with John C. Calhoun) built a mouse paradise: a little city for mice, with apartments for the little critters, play areas, plenty of food, and so on — Mousetopia. He put eight breeding pairs in there and watched what happened.

What happened was, the population ballooned to over two thousand, then began to decline. They stopped having sex, stopped doing pretty much anything except for the occasional fight. After a couple of years the entire population had died off.

I don't know if Calhoun monitored the sperm count of the male mice, but I think I know what he would have found if he did.

As a footnote to that I should say that the word "Puritan" is actually out of place there. Social historians are agreed, and the rate of population increase confirms, that the actual Puritans of 17th-century northern England and the American colonies had energetic and enjoyable sex lives, once they got out of their heavy woollen breeches and gowns.

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Item:  Finally, a story from the West Coast, again tenuously connected to what has gone before.

Headline: Flight attendants to be deported over turtle-smuggling operation. This is from the New York Post, July 23rd, but the turtle-smuggling was from Los Angeles to China.

Apparently there's a species of turtle that has a lovely decorative shell and whose meat is believed by Chinese people to increase a man's sexual prowess. Two flight attendants from Chinese Eastern Airlines had been smuggling these turtles on to their planes then selling them in China on the turtle black market.

This might be something our President could bring up next time he meets with Xi Jinping. I mean, China's welcome to the shells; but if what they believe about the turtle meat is true, we might have a solution to the American sperm count problem right there.

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08 — Signoff.     That's it for this week, listeners. Thank you for your attention, and please do check out Lydia's Friday fundraiser post, and do what you can to help support us.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

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