»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! This is your obstinately genial host John Derbyshire with yet another edition of my weekly podcast.

If you are listening to this podcast, or reading the transcript, you will know that there has been a shift in Radio Derb's fortunes. VDARE.com has finally succumbed to the lawfare assaults of New York State Attorney General Letitia James; the website has been suspended indefinitely, although we may hope not permanently.

That leaves the Radio Derb podcast with no host. In case you are hard of hearing, that's "no host," not "no hope." There is always hope. I am currently engaged in seeking a new host and I am sure I shall find one.

This is, after all, the third time in Radio Derb's history that we've had to seek a new host. In 2012 we left National Review Online for Taki's Magazine, I forget why; in 2015 we moved the operation from Taki's Magazine to VDARE.com.

Radio Derb is for the ages. We laugh at the buffetings of fate.

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02 — VDARE suspended.     Yes: VDARE.com has been obliged to suspend operations. Peter and Lydia Brimelow have described in full detail their travails at the hands of Attorney General James and the many Social Credit cancellations they have undergone, depriving them of professional and commercial services.

Both Peter and Lydia express themselves very eloquently in the joint post they put up midweek. Lydia gives an unsparingly full account of the insults and cancellations VDARE has endured from banks, credit card companies, payment processors, Facebook, YouTube, and innumerable other enterprises.

This is truly totalitarian stuff, against a foundation that publishes thoughtful, literate, well-supported articles on what we call the National Question: Who are we? What do we want our nation to be like?

VDARE has picked nobody's pocket and broken nobody's leg. The people who post there are, like your genial host here, law-abiding, mild-mannered types. Many of our articles on immigration are written by active or retired law-enforcement professionals. The statistics we quote are from public databases.

Perhaps the most depressing thing you will come away with from reading that joint post by Peter and Lydia — and again, I do urge you to read it, the whole thing — is the indifference of those governmental institutions who should be safeguarding our freedom of speech.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James has duties to the people of her state, duties spelled out in statutes. She apparently believes that those duties include suppression of viewpoints that are displeasing to her.

Is that in fact a part of her statutory duties to the citizens of her state? If it is not, why has there not been even the softest whisper of protest from state legislators?

What about state courts? VDARE's case has reached the state appeals courts more than once, but the justices turned away with a collective yawn. Federal courts likewise.

On the executive front, where is law enforcement? Here I'll just quote Peter from the joint post. Quote:

VDARE.com has been subject to extraordinary cyberattacks.

We can't figure out where they're coming from, but they're extremely agile.

They were the things that knocked out our ability to accept e-checks.

Our techies are baffled. They say there's obviously somebody behind it, there's a human intelligence behind it, probably using AI.

But nevertheless, somebody's working away on this.

Of course, in a sane world, we would go and complain to the FBI.

But they're probably doing it!

Obviously, we don't want to get involved with the FBI at all.

End quote.

This is really nasty, totalitarian stuff. Listen to one of the most poignant episodes, as told by Lydia. Quote:

The terrible battle we waged against Facebook a.k.a. Meta, which we abandoned only because a New York judge disappointingly allowed the case to be transferred to California where loser-pay rules are prohibitive, was all documented on VDARE.com. (In a tellingly vindictive act, Facebook also confiscated my family pictures, graduation pictures, baby pictures etc. from my totally non-political personal account, begun when I was a student at Loyola Chicago, long before I met Peter, and has refused to return them).

End quote.

You see these crude insults in all their full, spiteful malevolence if you have worked, as I have, with the Brimelows and their foundation across many years. You could walk a long mile before meeting another such cheerful, hard-working, patriotic, philoprogenitive American family with such enthusiastic and professional employees. VDARE is the enemy of no-one but liars, thieves, and traitors.

And speaking of VDARE's enthusiastic and professional employees, I'll just close this segment with a shout-out to James Fulford, who edits most of what I publish on the site.

As a freelance writer of more than forty years' standing and the author of several books, I can testify that the writer-editor relationship is often fraught and sometimes openly hostile.

For James I have only respect and affection. As a writer I rely far too much on my own leaky memory when I really should learn to use the many, many facilities available online for checking facts and quotations.

James, who is master of all those facilities, does the necessary corrections with only some gentle, humorous chiding of me. Thank you, James.

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03 — Biden dropped.     Joe Biden has abandoned his candidacy for President in this coming November election. We learned this on Sunday, and he made a televised speech Wednesday evening affirming it.

If, in that speech, he gave a clear endorsement of Kamala Harris as his replacement, I missed it; but then, my two-year-old grandson was bouncing around the room so I didn't watch Biden with much attention.

So we are coming to the end of Biden's national political career, which started in 1972 when he was elected to the U.S. Senate, aged not quite thirty. That's fifty-two years of making speeches, and the guy still can't make one that holds my attention over a bouncing toddler.

Biden's career has an interesting class aspect. This hasn't gotten much attention because Americans don't think about class as much as people in other nations do — for sure, not as much as Brits used to do when I was growing up over there.

Class systems come in many varieties, some of them quite complex. In ancient China the hierarchy was shì, nóng, gōng, shāng (士, 農, 工, 商):  scholar, farmer, artisan, merchant. The three estates in medieval Europe were: those who fight, those who pray, those who work. That translates as: the lords and knights, the priests and monks, the artisans and peasants. And so on, all over.

At an everyday level, however, most people in most times and places have worked on a simple binary model. There are those who look down on great swathes of their fellow-countrymen, and there are those swathes themselves, who know they are looked down on and to some degree resent it.

More concisely: there are snobs and there are slobs. That's my choice of terminology for today, anyway. There are many other ways to express the divide. The blogger and podcaster Z-man says "cloud people" and "dirt people." I myself sometimes flip to "Tutsis" and "Hutus." Just the fact that there are so many ways tells you how widespread the perception is.

It's not a matter of wealth. Donald Trump is a very wealthy man; but a lot of what we call Trump Derangement Syndrome is a belief among snobs that Donald Trump, is, in his essence, a slob who should never have been allowed to rise so high.

Broadly speaking, with some oddities and exceptions, the Democratic Party was until recently the party of slobs — of non-rich people with small houses, dirty hands, and rough manners.

I first got a job with a Wall Street firm in late 1985. When the midterms came up the following year I listened with interest to the political talk going round the office.

One of the managers I worked with was a smart young lady who'd risen by ability to a salary well into six digits — much more notable forty years ago than it would be today. I knew from chatting with her that she came from a lower-middle-class New York City family, her Dad I think some kind of bookkeeper.

When I asked her which way she would vote, she replied firmly: "Democrat!" Why? "It's the party of the little guy," she replied.

So it still was in 1986, even in the minds of successful young career women. The party that Joe Biden had by then represented in the Senate for fourteen years was the party of the little guy — the slob party. Lunch-bucket Joe, right? The Republicans were the party of business people, professional people, college graduates and well-off suburbanites.

Then across the following decades there was a strange inversion. The Democratic Party today is the snob party: the party of college professors, tech and finance billionaires, above all of the managerial elites who carry out most government functions. The Republican Party, as it clearly and shamelessly showed at its convention this month, is the slob party — the party of the dirt people, the Hutus.

And yet Lunch-bucket Joe is still the lead Democrat. By canny maneuvering and a great deal of luck he rode out the inversion. Still clutching his lunch-bucket, he's out there on stage with Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros … At any rate he would be but for the fact that Zuckerberg and Soros prefer to keep themselves out of sight.

It's been quite an achievement on Joe's part. Decades of political experience helped him negotiate his way up. There was, too, a big element of luck — notably in getting picked as Barack Obama's V.P. The party managers in 2008 understood that Obama was an obvious snob. To keep the traditional voters on side, they needed to add a dash of slobbery to the ticket.

I'm pretty sure, though, that Biden's single-mindedness played a part. A completely un-intellectual person, he never wasted his time on ideology. He wouldn't have been able to understand it anyway, although he learned some rote phrases for use in appropriate surroundings.

While the tides of intellectual fashion and ideology swirled and inverted around him, Joe kept his mind fixed on what for him was the one, the true goal of being in politics: to make money.

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04 — Kamala chosen.     Although it's not yet certain, it's likely that the Democratic Party's candidate for President in November will be current Vice President Kamala Harris.

On the snob/slob divide, there is no ambiguity about Harris. She is pure unadulterated snob. She was born, a late Boomer, to professional-class parents who'd met in graduate school. Harris herself went to law school and acquired a full set of luxury beliefs.

Her term as Attorney General of California was a mixed bag, although with a progressive slant. She did useful things on cross-border trafficking of drugs and people, but opposed the state's Proposition 209 banning affirmative action in college admissions.

In the U.S. Senate during Trump's presidency she went full left, in fact getting herelf ranked in 2019 by an independent outfit as, quote, "the most politically left compared to all senators," end quote.

As Vice President she did not engage much with domestic issues. The administration's managers kept her busy with minor diplomatic initiatives.

She visited Central America to tell the inhabitants there not to come to the U.S.A. She went to Eastern Europe to urge support for Ukraine. Earlier this year she joined the chorus telling Israel to agree to a cease-fire in Gaza.

None of this seems to have had much effect; but then, in all fairness, Vice Presidents rarely do have much effect on national policy.

To the degree that Kamala Harris has made herself known at all in a general way, it's for two things.

Thing Number One is for being really difficult to work for. All through her Vice Presidency there have been, to quote the London Times in March of 2022, quote:

reports of a dysfunctional operation and a heavy turnover of exhausted, demoralised staff [which] are typical of her abrasive management style.

End quote.

It seems that she first cultivated that style back in her California days. Further quote from that Times report, quote:

Gil Duran, a former Democratic party strategist who lasted five months in Harris's team when she was California's attorney general, wrote in the San Francisco Examiner in December [2021] that the [inner quote] "tales of chaos have a familiar ring to longtime Harris watchers … Still, it's sad to see her repeat the same old destructive patterns under the harsh gaze of the Washington press corps." [End inner quote.]

End quote.

That's the first thing for which Harris is known in a general way. Thing Number Two is, for popularizing the phrase "word salad."

Examples are legion; I'm sure you've encountered them.

[Clip:  I think it's very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present and to be able to contextualize it — to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.]

That, in the last days of July, is the Democratic Party's most likely candidate for election to President in November. Can she do it? Next segment.

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05 — Election propects.     I wouldn't rule out a Harris victory in November. Huge numbers of voters detest Donald Trump and will not vote for him under any circumstances.

Poll numbers are close: forty-something to forty-something with one-, two-, or three-point differences. If Harris's handlers can raise her game so that all those Trump haters turn out for Harris instead of just staying home, and if the Establishment works its vote-rigging operations to the max, we might very well see a President Harris sworn in next January.

Difficult to work for? She wants the prize so bad, I bet she will be sweet as pie to her underlings right up to the Inauguration. Then in the White House she can be as mean as she pleases. Who's going to do anything about it?

Word Salad? Sure: to people who have a high regard for the meaning of words and the transmission of useful information, the word salad is cringe-inducing. I have to ask, though: How many of those people — how many of us — are there?

To a lot of others, the word salad is just amusing, no more disqualifying than a lisp. To some it is actually impressive. Have you heard the fringier kind of self-help guru or preacher at work? They have audiences who listen with attention and leave the hall saying: "Wow, that's deep stuff …"

In any case, that tendency to word salad is probably something the lady could be coached out of. She's only 59, not too old to learn.

It looked for a while as though a bigger threat to Kamala staying on the ticket might be hostility among senior Democrats. By midweek everybody who is anybody in the Party had stepped up with public endorsements of her … except for Chief Snob Barack Obama and his wife.

Stories were coming out that the Obamas wanted Arizona Senator Mark Kelly at the top of the ticket when the Democrats' Convention opens August 19th. They didn't think Harris could beat Trump.

This morning, however, Friday morning, the Harris campaign released a video of Kamala taking a phone call, on speaker, from the Obamas. Says Barack, quote: "We called to say, Michelle and I couldn't be prouder to endorse you, and do everything we can to get you through this election and into the Oval Office." End quote.

So the Chief Snob and his lady are on board. Unless there is some really deep four-dimensional chess being played among the party leaders, the Convention will declare Harris their candidate by acclamation.

Of course the Fickle Finger of Fate might intervene to derail Harris, or boost Trump, or both simultaneously. Speculation here gets unpleasant; but unpleasant things happen.

There might for example be a terrorist attack traceable to illegal aliens waved in — perhaps even flown in — by the Biden-Harris administration. That would remind voters — perhaps enough voters — what gross folly the open-borders policy has been.

Or the obvious terminal weakness of the Biden presidency might, some time between now and November, tempt an unfriendly power to try their luck against us or our allies.

Wednesday this week a formation of bomber planes, two Russian and two Chinese, were tracked and intercepted in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone. That is not precisely U.S. air space, but it's air space we monitor carefully as a warning zone when hostile intruders do mean to violate our air space.

It's not likely these planes meant us any harm; but it is likely that they had fun poking a finger in Uncle Sam's eye.

If something nastier happens and push comes to shove, the words "Don't mess with the U.S." will sound a whole lot more reassuring coming from Donald Trump than from Kamala Harris, who perhaps might inflate it to: "Don't mess with the U.S. at the moment in time in which we exist and are present …"

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06 — Vance feared.     The great snob-slob inversion that I spoke about back there actually seems to have made more difficulties for the Republican Party than for the Democrats.

The problem with morphing from being the snob party to being the slob party is that snobs have way more money than slobs; and money — money from donors — is really important if you want to win elections.

Back when the Democrats were the slob party they could overcome the disadvantage by mass unionization. All those union dues could counter, at least to a sufficient degree, the money going to the GOP from business donors. Other sources helped, too: Hollywood had plenty of slobs, and there's lots of money in those hills.

If snob donors desert the GOP, though, there are no million-member unions to fall back on for campaign financing, and Hollywood today is way more snob than slob.

Hence this July 19th story from Breitbart.com, headline: Wall Street Donors, Neocons Seethe Over Populist J.D. Vance Being Trump's V.P.

Sample quotes:

Vance is most at odds with Wall Street brokers and big business groups like the Chamber of Commerce on issues of immigration and trade. Unlike the Republican Party's old guard, Vance backs a tight labor market with reduced immigration levels where the economy is tilted in favor of American employees over employers.

Likewise, on trade, Vance has assailed the job-killing free trade consensus that has reigned in Washington, DC over the last three decades — making multinational corporations richer than ever by allowing them to outsource working and middle class jobs to the lowest-wage countries in the world …

Other neoconservatives, with deep financial ties to military contractors that rely on hawkish foreign policy to line their pockets, told Politico they are [inner quote] "scared to death [end inner quote] of Vance as Vice President because he opposes unlimited spending in Ukraine and foreign interventionism.

End quotes.

Hmm. "Military contractors that rely on hawkish foreign policy"? How about we try having military contractors who rely on government-financed R&D to make sure that our military systems are advanced enough and terrifying enough that no hostile power will dare touch a hair on Uncle Sam's head?

That's what saw us safely though the Cold War, and delivered side benefits like advanced computing and rocketry for civilian purposes. Why can't we get back to the levels of military R&D we had sixty years ago? To a place where we'd have no need of a "hawkish foreign policy" because nobody would dare mess with us?

As for the Chamber of Commerce getting its knickers in a twist over immigration and trade — over, quote, "reduced immigration levels where the economy is tilted in favor of American employees over employers" end quote — well: boo-hoo.

The more I see of J.D. Vance, the more I like him. Campaign funding? There are post-Boomer tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk (53) and Peter Thiel (56) willing to defy the Chamber of Commerce neocons; and coming up behind them new generations of millennials and Gen-Z-ers keen to put America and American people first.

This won't be your grandfather's Republican Party — the party of Boomer snobs — much longer. It'll be the party of smart, patriotic slobs like, oh, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

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07 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Just a couple this week.

Imprimis:  Browsing around for more understanding of J.D. Vance, I came across James Pogue's article in the April 20th, 2022 issue of Vanity Fair, covering the National Conservatism Conference of that year.

It's a long article. Ctrl-F on "Vance" got me 37 hits. That's a lot, but not as many as I got for "Yarvin," which yielded 51 hits.

Curtis Yarvin, in case you don't know, is a major figure in the post-Boomer New Right. He first came to our attention — well, to mine — blogging as "Mencius Moldbug." I always found his style hard to digest, but he is sometimes very quotable. I believe he popularised usage of the word "regime" to refer to our ruling class.

Here's a quote from the Vanity Fair piece, referring to Yarvin. Quote:

As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym RAGE — Retire All Government Employees — as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American "regime."

End quote.

I like that! RAGE — Retire All Government Employees. I bet J.D. Vance likes it, too.

And Yarvin cooked that up in 2012, long before Elon Musk, after taking over Twitter, got us all thinking by firing eighty percent of Twitter's workforce with no noticeable damage to the finished product.

"All Government Employees"? That might be a little extreme. Eighty percent, though? You listening, J.D.?

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Item:  Did you see Hulk Hogan at the GOP Convention? His performance immediately brought to my mind the entrance of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in the 2006 movie Idiocracy.

I didn't see anyone else making the connection on social media, so I thought I was the only one. I therefore prepared to say something clever about it on my podcast.

In aid of that I brought up the relevant clip on YouTube. Did anyone else notice the resemblance to Hulk Hogan addressing the GOP Convention?

Er, yeah. There were two thousand comments following the YouTube clip of President Camacho. Around two-thirds of them referred directly to Hogan, and a few hundred more were likely indirect references.

So my observation was not original. I take comfort in the fact that Idiocracy is still so well known in spite of the studio's efforts to kill it.. It's a fun movie. If you haven't seen it, check it out … if you can find it.

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08 — Signoff.     And that's it, listeners and readers. Thanks for your time and attention, and for your emails of support and encouragement.

I shall continue posting like this to my own website until I have a new host. When that happens, I'll post the fact on X and also here on my website.

For signout, some Gilbert and Sullivan. This one, from The Mikado, I heard by chance earlier this week. It took me back to my days as a young adolescent lad associating mainly with other young adolescent lads, among whom this song was a great favorite, I really can't remember why …

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

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