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[Music clip: Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is back on the air! Groveling apologies here from your resurgently genial host John Derbyshire for my absence from the airwaves last week. It was a health issue, as described in a blog post I put up at VDARE.com on Wednesday. Other people's health issues are intrinsically boring, so I'll say no more about mine here. The VDARE.com blog post tells as much as you'd want to know. There are a couple of things I should say before proceeding with this week's podcast, though. First: THANKS! to the many readers and listeners who have emailed in with words of sympathy and concern. It's wonderful to be reminded that there is far more kindness and human fellowship in the world than you'd think from just reading news headlines. God bless you all, and apologies if I fall behind with individual acknowledgments. Second: Doped up with painkillers and unable to move at more than hobbling pace, all my familiar routines have been disrupted, including my work routines. I'm not sure exactly how Radio Derb will be impacted, but the podcast will be shorter than customary. I promise, however, that it will not be any less vituperative. OK, let's see what's been happening in the world. |
02 — Give 'em an inch, they take a Yard. Can I call 'em, or what? Yes, folks: You heard it here first. Heard what? Here was Radio Derb on November 10th, seven weeks ago. I'll just give you the whole short segment. Quote: Reading the news about our universities taking the side of Hamas after October 7th, I was a bit surprised to see that the President of Harvard University is a black woman. End quote. The particular black woman I was referring to there is Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard University. Well, President Gay has been in the news again this past few days on account of some answers she gave when questioned at a December 5th congressional hearing held by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. President Gay was one of three university presidents being questioned about campus antisemitism. The other two, presidents of M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania, were also gyno-Americans, although both are white. The issue of campus antisemitism had come to the attention of Congress because of demonstrations against Israel following the October 7th Hamas attack. The question that got President Gay in trouble was: Would calling for the genocide of Jews violate her university's code of conduct? President Gay replied, quote: "It is at odds with the values of Harvard," end quote. When the congresscritter pressed her for a direct answer, President Gay just descended into waffle, quote: "We embrace a commitment to free expression, and give a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable, outrageous and offensive … blah di blah di blah di blah," end quote. That generated much mockery and some stern reproofs from the respectable commentariat. It also got curious reporters digging around in Harvard Yard for details of President Gay's background. |
03 — President Blackety-Black. The first thing to be said here is that President Gay is full of it. "We embrace a commitment to free expression, and give a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable, outrageous and offensive …" The hell you say, Madame President. FIRE, F-I-R-E, that's the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, publishes annual rankings of U.S. colleges for student free speech and open inquiry. You can look up the current rankings online. There are 248 colleges in the list. Top ranked: Michigan Technological University with an overall score of 78. Three other schools are also ranked "Good." Below them are 43 colleges ranked "Above average." Then there are 91 ranked "Average" and 90 "Below average." Below those are 19 ranked "Poor" or "Very poor." That's a total of 247 colleges. Wait, though: I said there were 248 colleges in the list. What's the missing institution? It's Harvard, ranked 248 for student free speech and open inquiry with an overall score of zero. (The score was actually negative; the compilers of the freedom rankings rounded it up to be polite.) Harvard is so unfree the compilers had to assign it a category all its own: "Abysmal." Hmm. Still, it's Harvard. This President Claudine Gay must be quite a scholar to have been made president of the place, right? Apparently not. Digging through her published researches, reporters were surprised at how few of them there were — just eleven peer-reviewed articles. They also couldn't help noticing big slabs of prose lifted from other scholars' work without attribution. This plagiarism was particularly noticeable in Ms Gay's 1997 dissertation, which contains solid blocks (sometimes with slight adjustments) from a paper published the previous year by two scholars she does not name in her citations. OK, but perhaps Ms Gay drew from that plagiarized material dazzling new conclusions that the plagiarized authors had not seen? If so — if she had, in her dissertation, made some brilliant conceptual breakthrough in her field — might we not forgive the transgression out of gratitude for these new insights? And yes, I see that the dissertation did win a prize: The Robert M. Toppan Prize, awarded for, quote, "essays or dissertations of exceptional merit," end quote, in her field. What is her field, by the way? Comp-Sci? Physics? Anthropology? History? Did her dissertation give us a possible new way to get to quantum computing or cheap fusion energy? Did it uncover some startling truths about the prehistory of our species, or something we never knew before about Bronze Age trade routes in the Mediterranean? Er, no. Her 1997 dissertation was titled "Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics." Her most notable paper prior to that was a 1993 essay titled "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations." Harvard apparently considers those topics to belong to the field of Political Science. I myself would categorize them as being in the field of Blackety-Black, along with Michelle Obama's 1985 Princeton thesis. Remember that one? The title was "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." A seven-word title, two of the words being "black." Michelle tried to squeeze out the "and" or the "the" to get another "black" in there, but an IQ of 91 will only get you so far. President Gay is, in other words, just another Affirmative-Action mediocrity, wafted up into the academic stratosphere on thermals of white ethnomasochism. If not for this antisemitism fuss, we might never have known that … although plenty of us, at this stage of the race game, would have guessed it with a high level of confidence. Harvard's governing body, the Harvard Corporation, was coming under pressure to fire President Gay, with major donors pulling their support. After a long debate into Monday night this week, they issued a statement saying they would not fire her. Perhaps they just couldn't. To fire a black person — a black woman — from a prestigious position in the Establishment: that needs an Act of Congress, doesn't it? |
04 — Calling for genocide? To the main point here: Should calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard University's code of conduct? If that was what the student protestors were calling for, the answer has to be yes. "Genocide" means killing an entire race of people. If you want to do that, you are a homicidal psychopath. In a civilized society there should be no institution whose code of conduct validates homicidal psychopathology. Is that what the Harvard protestors were calling for, though? Not that I could see. The commonest evidence that it was what they were calling for is offered with the slogan: "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," and the single word "Intifada." The second item there, the word "Intifada," just means "uprising," so far as I can discover. There doesn't seem to be any genocide in its etymology. I'm not an Arabist so I can't be certain; I'll take correction on this from someone better informed. The first thing there, that slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," might be interpreted as calling for all Israeli Jews to be killed. Probably the fiercer kind of Hamas supporters mean it that way. I doubt that's much of an element among the Harvard protestors, though. These are American college kids, who wouldn't know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of unless they could look it up first on their smartphones. These are pasty soy-fed feminized midwits who turn pale and swoon if you address them with the wrong pronoun. Sure, you could say that by chanting Hamas slogans they are indirectly supporting genocide; but then you're getting deep into motives and intentions, and things get lawyerly. Apologists for the Palestinian Arabs tell us that the "river to the sea" slogan just means Jews and Arabs living happily together in a state not run by Jews. Probably a lot of them believe this themselves. Probably most of the college kids do. So, "calling for the genocide of Jews"? Not really. I always smile at the second line in that slogan: "Palestine will be free." Under Arab rule Palestine would of course not be free. It would be another corrupt trashcan gangster despotism like all Arab states, ruled by some amoral thug like Gaddafy, Assad, or Saddam Hussein. My old colleague David Pryce-Jones wrote a good book about this twenty years ago, title: The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. I recommend it to your attention. Might not the Arab despot in charge of Palestine from the river to the sea leave his Jewish subjects alone? I suppose might if he were paid to; but it's not something you'd want to bet your life on. So where the Harvard student protestors are concerned, I'd give them a pass. There are among them likely some, surely a minority, who would like to see all Palestine Jews murdered. If that minority can be identified they should be expelled; but how do you identify them? Most of those protesting just believe in the fairy tale of a free Arab Palestine with some Jewish citizens and take the word "Intifada" to mean what I take it to mean. That's dumb and antisemitic, but it's not "calling for genocide." |
05 — Wisdom and hysteria. As for antisemitism in all generality: should it be out of bounds as a topic for student speech and discussion? No, it shouldn't. In a multiethnic society there will always be intergroup grudges and negativity. There should be places where those grudges and that negativity can be aired in an open, civilized way. Where better than a university? Consider for example the idea, widely held among American Gentiles, that our national policies, both domestic and foreign, are too much influenced by Jews. Are they? We had some exchanges about this here at VDARE.com. Here is how that happened. In 2004 Eric Kaufmann, a Professor of Politics at the University of London, published a book titled The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Prof. Kaufmann tackled the question: How did the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America turn into the rootless multicultural mishmash of late-20th-century America? He traced the transformation to self-loathing insurgents among the WASPs themselves, with only a small contribution from immigrant groups. That got a response from Kevin MacDonald, Professor of psychology at California State University-Long Beach. MacDonald had written three books about the Jews from the point of view of evolutionary psychology. The Jews have, he'd argued, for centuries practiced a group evolutionary strategy against the host cultures they found themselves embedded in. In July 2009 here at VDARE.com MacDonald posted a critical review of Kaufmann's book. The death of WASP culture, MacDonald wrote, was not a case of suicide, as Kaufmann had argued: it was murder. WASP-ism was vanquished by the Jews' group evolutionary strategy. Two weeks later we posted a rebuttal by Kaufmann of MacDonald's review. It was suicide, Kaufmann insisted, not murder. We followed that with a posting by MacDonald rebutting Kaufmann's rebuttal of MacDonald's review. Those Kaufmann-MacDonald exchanges were very cordial and academic. Good, lucid arguments were put forward by both professors. They wrote at length. MacDonald's original review was almost four thousand words. Kaufmann's rebuttal was twelve hundred. MacDonald's counter-rebuttal was nineteen hundred. So was the death of WASP America a murder or a suicide? Read their books; or at least, read those 2009 exchanges here at VDARE.com, and make up your own mind. That's how civilized people seek the truth. As I said, and as we surely all know, where a society includes self-consciously different ethnies, there are bound to be grudges and resentments. A wise society will minimize the problems by maintaining an ethnic super-majority, as we argue for here on VDARE. It will also allow tensions to be aired openly, in thoughtful discussion, as we did back in 2009. It will not take every chanted slogan to be a call to mass murder. Nor will it try to eliminate intergroup negativity by censorship and the suppression of peaceful demonstrations. That's not wisdom, that's hysteria. |
06 — The full Derb 2024 GOP ticket. There was yet another debate among GOP presidential hopefuls on December 6th, Donald Trump again not included. I didn't watch any of the debate, being otherwise disposed. I did read the transcript afterwards; it convinced me that I'd lucked out by not being able to sit and watch the thing. Candidate-wise I am still a DeSantis voter. He would, I am sure, be a better-than-average president. He's what I've been hoping for these three miserable years past: 2016 Trumpism without the Trump. And Governor DeSantis sealed the deal for me when, near the very end of the debate, they took one final question before closing statements. The closing question was: Which former president would you draw inspiration from for your own presidency and why? Chris Christie and Nikki Haley were first up with answers. Christie named Ronald Reagan; Nikki Haley offered both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. They weren't exactly striving for originality. Up stepped Governor Ron. Quote: Reagan, Washington, Lincoln, excellent. One of the guys I'll take inspiration from is Calvin Coolidge. Now, people don't talk about him a lot. He's one of the few presidents that got almost everything right. He understood the proper role of the federal government under the Constitution. We need to restore the U.S. Constitution as the centerpiece of our national life. And that requires a president who understands the original understanding of the Constitution, who has a good sense of the Bill of Rights, and who knows how we've gone off track with this massive fourth branch of government, this administrative state which is imposing its will on us and is being weaponized against us. So, silent Cal knew the proper role of the federal government. The country was in great shape when he was President of the United States, and we can learn an awful lot from Calvin Coolidge. End quote. You can imagine how I felt: My own favorite candidate for president praising my actual favorite president as his model. That doesn't happen often — about once a lifetime, I'd guess. There was still one candidate waiting to answer: Vivek Ramaswamy, of course. His choice of model was Thomas Jefferson. Again, no points for originality. Ramaswamy did, however, preface his choice by saying, quote: "Ron picked a president who was born on July 4th. I'll pick one who died on July 4th." End quote. Even with my heart beating double time from DeSantis having named Coolidge, I still had enough breath left to be mildly impressed that Ramaswamy knew Coolidge's birthday. So the debate I didn't watch none the less gave me not only confirmation of my choice for president, it also gave me a definite running-mate for him. That's my ticket: DeSantis-Ramaswamy. If they can somehow pull that off, my faith in the future of our republic will be totally restored. I was anyway primed to be receptive to Ramaswamy having, a day or two before the debate, read the November 30th interview he did with Tom Klingenstein, the Chairman of the Claremont Institute. You can read the entire interview — it's not all that long — at Tom's website, tomklingenstein.com, under the title "My Opponents are Cowards." I urge you to do so. It's straight-up America First patriotism and good sense from both interviewer and interviewee.
Ramaswamy also has a streak of ingenuity that appeals to me. Firing civil servants, for example, is fraught with legal perils. The people you fire are going to be saying you discriminated against them somehow. Ramaswamy's solution to that: just fire all the civil servants whose Social Security number is odd. That would be precisely fifty percent and perfectly random as regards race, sex, etc. So, no grounds for a discrimination lawsuit. And you could change the fifty percent to any other proportion. You want to fire 75 percent on the same random principle? Divide everyone's Social Security number by four. If the remainder is zero, keep him; if it's 1 or 2 or 3, fire him. Easy. That's the kind of imaginative thinking I'd like to see in a president. In fact I'll take the GOP 2024 ticket either way: DeSantis-Ramaswamy or Ramaswamy-DeSantis. Ramaswamy told Tom Klingenstein that, quote: "I would consider DeSantis for a domestic position in my administration … He is competent." End quote. I haven't seen Ron DeSantis asked the corresponding question about a position for Ramaswamy, but I'm sure he'd be amenable. |
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: This is not, I promise, anything directly to do with my ankle, just a generalized grumble about life in the 2020s. I'm now getting emails from the local hospital urging me, quote: "Don't forget to create your … patient portal account …" My what? What the hell is a portal? I tried following the instructions in one of those emails, but pretty soon was up to my knees and sinking fast in the usual case of seriously crappy website design. Screw it: If I want a doctor's appointment, I'll call the office. Was there really a time when doctors made house calls? Yes, there was: I can remember it clearly, and I'm not that old. Posts like the following turn up pretty regularly on social media. They always return an echo from my bosom. Post at X from someone identifying as "Nikolai the Cosmonaut," Post: You need to have an IQ of about 100 just to live — to figure out insurance, tax, car registration, bank accounts, retirement funds, rent, bills etc. The low-IQ live in a baffling hell of piled up reminder letters, confusing forms and forgotten passwords. The IQ needed to live is rising. End post. Thank you, Nikolai. Stay safe up there in orbit. Item: The brilliant Ed West had a good post up on his Substack account December 14th. Title: "Little Palestines across the Americas." The point of the post is to put the Eastern Mediterranean ructions in some sort of historical context. Jews versus Arabs? There's been way more to it than that, all through the last century and more — back to the Balkan massacres of the 1880s. Jews and Arabs? Meet the Palestinian Christians, the Armenians, the Syriacs, Greeks, Turks, Copts, "Greek-speaking descendants of Muslim Cretans," … The folk over there have been displacing, harassing, expelling, and occasionally massacring each other for a hundred and fifty years. They won't be stopping any time soon. You want to pick a side? It's not as easy as the who-whom midwits in Harvard Yard make out. Item: High up there in the ranks of successful antiwhite race grifters stands Nikole Hannah-Jones, onlie begetter of the 1619 Project, which teaches schoolkids that race slavery was not incidental to our nation's founding, it was the entire point of it. Ms Hannah-Jones has chimed in on the Harvard controversy. President Gay's critics, she tells us, are insincere in pretending to care about antisemitism. Quote: They're using the guise of pretending that this is about concern over antisemitism — which is, of course, something that all of us should be concerned about. It really just furthers their propaganda campaign against racial equality. End quote. Executive summary: It's just white people being racist towards blacks. Racist! Racist! Racist! Well, I think that settles it. If you can't believe a fake historian with a blackety-black dissertation of her own, who can you believe? Item: Finally, just one more on political prospects. There's plenty of energy out here on the America First right and we have some good people. I don't mean just DeSantis and Ramaswamy, although I love them both and wish Donald Trump would get out of their way. We have media people, too. I watched Jesse Watters for a long time without getting much of a thrill. Just recently, though, he's changed his meds. He's sharp, funny, to the point, and — yes! — vituperative. Go get 'em, Jesse. And Tucker Carlson's still very much in the fight. A friend sent me the link to his interview Wednesday on Rumble with Steve Bannon: good meaty stuff, well worth your time. So, listeners: Say not the struggle naught availeth. A year from now, at Christmas 2024, we shall be in a very different political landscape. With Ron and Vivek, Jesse and Tucker, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, Claremont and Chronicles keeping the pressure on, and of course all of us here at VDARE.com with our shoulders to the wheel, it could be a much better landscape. As a different pundit is wont to say: Buckle up! |
08 — Signoff. That's it for this week, listeners. Thank you for your time and attention; apologies again for last week's absence; joy to all for the coming Christmas celebrations. And yes: There will be more from Radio Derb next week, under the Derb family banner of Defiant Normality. Here's Gracie to sing us out. |
[Music clip: Gracie Fields, "Sing As We Go."]