»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! This is your luxuriantly genial host John Derbyshire with comments on the passing scene.

My comments this week came out a bit longer than usual, so I shall preserve housekeeping issues for a future edition and proceed directly to my first segment.

[Permalink]

02 — What would Confucius do?     OK, news story of the week: this fuss over a security breach in the messaging app called Signal, used by senior people in our nation's security apparatus.

Signal's pretty fancy, with encryption at both ends of the phone call. It's by no means the last word in secure communications, though. Quote here from the BBC description of the app, quote:

Data expert Caro Robson, who has worked with the US administration, said it was [inner quote] "very, very unusual" [end inner quote] for high ranking security officials to communicate on a messaging platform like Signal.

[Inner quote]: "Usually you would use a very secure government system that is operated and owned by the government using very high levels of encryption," [end inner quote] she said.

She said this would typically mean devices kept in [inner quote] very secure government controlled locations" [end inner quote].

End quote.

Well, somehow a journalist called Jeffrey Goldberg got his phone number included in the group chat list used by all those senior security people of ours — a list assembled by Mike Waltz, our President's National Security Adviser, or more likely by his staff. That resulted in Goldberg seeing exchanges about the recent bombing of the Houthis in Yemen shortly before the attacks actually happened — a pretty serious security breach.

Goldberg is Editor-in-Chief at Atlantic magazine. That's not a publication I follow, and I can't recall ever reading anything Jeffrey Goldberg ever wrote. The word on the street is that he suffers from Stage Four Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I'm in no position to confirm or deny that.

The central mystery here is how Goldberg's name got on Mike Waltz's chat-group list. Did he do it himself, or have it done for him at his request? Did someone else do it for him without his knowing? Or was it just a fat-finger blunder by one of Waltz's people?

I think we can rule out the second possibility there. If some third party — the Chinese Embassy, perhaps — figured out how to insert names in the list that shouldn't be there, they'd have much better things to do with their knowledge than pass it off to some magazine editor.

The first possibility — that Goldberg did it himself, or paid to have it done — can't be ruled out. Journalists will do anything for a story. A journalist afflicted with Stage Four TDS will do anything, and then anything else, and then sell his wife and children into slavery, to get a story that wounds our President.

Still, Goldberg certainly doesn't know enough Computer Science to crack end-to-end encryption, and I'm not sure anyone else does. Nor does his behavior after the breach became known seem at all triumphal. So if I were betting on this, I'd take the fat fingers. This was carelessness, not malice.

And if that data expert I just quoted via the BBC is correct, it was a particular carelessness inside a larger carelessness. Waltz's people shouldn't be using Signal for their working exchanges.

I guess we'll find out. Trump has asked Elon Musk and his DOGE investigators to figure out what happened. That's a super-smart group of people. If this little mystery survives the month, I'll be surprised.

Meanwhile there's the politics to be dealt with. The Democrats have of course been making hay with it. It's the only good news they've had for months. The responses by Trump's people on sessions of public questioning have been less than impressive. "The information in the Signal chats wasn't classified." Uh-huh.

There was a serious breach at a high level. Shouldn't someone pay a price for that? If DOGE comes up with an individual whose fat fingers made it happen, I hope that person gets fired with loss of pension.

Meanwhile, at higher levels, there is the matter of executive authority. Someone at a higher level than the fall guy, with a way higher status, salary and pension, let it happen — albeit unknowingly (we hope). Shouldn't the Gentleman's Code kick in? Shouldn't the senior join the junior in disgrace? If this were Japan, wouldn't the senior commit seppuku?

There's a case against that — several cases, in fact.

First case against:  The Gentleman's Code only works when gentlemen fight gentlemen. There aren't any gentlemen on the other side. Just the number of actual males seems to be dwindling. For Mike Waltz or Pete Hegseth to resign over the Signal breach would just be feeding the jackals.

Second case against:  The last administration did far worse and got away with it. It wasn't just the Afghanistan pullout: the Biden family's corruption scandals and the all-hands-on-deck effort by federal agencies and their media allies to cover up those scandals; the bare-faced lying about our border being secure and inflation under control; the relentless lawfare against Trump …  this security breach, although deplorable, is very small potatoes alongside the past four years' malfeasances, for which no-one resigned.

Third case against:  It's very plain, and has often been noted, that Donald Trump learned a lesson from his first term: not to fill key positions in his administration with critters lifted out, still slimy, from the Washington, D.C. Swamp. This time around he's been more meritocratic, just hiring in the best he could find from anywhere. Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth may not know which knife and fork to use first at a state banquet, but they are better public servants — better patriots — than Antony Blinken or Merrick Garland.

Anything that might turn the President's hiring preferences back towards people who are more canny in the ways of high government but less loyal, if not actually dis-loyal, heads us back towards Trump 45.

So there you have three reasons for there not being a resignation. The only reason I can think of for a resignation is to keep the Gentleman's Code alive: to push forward a decade or two the dark day when our two big political parties are just wild beasts fighting over the corpse of our Constitution.

Perhaps it's far-fetched of me, but I can't help thinking of the tension in old China between Confucianism and Legalism. Confucianism, which came up in the fifth century B.C., taught about the maintenance of social order by the cultivation of correct behavior. A couple of hundred years later there came Legalism, a different philosophy, which taught about the maintenance of social order by state power.

All right: I have grossly over-simplified there. There is a binary pattern to political philosophy, though, and not just in old China. Our own Gentleman's Code, to the degree it still survives, would have got a welcoming smile from Confucius; the unprincipled machinations of the Biden Presidency would likewise have met with a nod and a grunt of approval from Shāng Yāng, the father of Legalism.

[Permalink]

03 — Place Your Betz.     Here's a bloke who's been showing up on social media the past few weeks: David Betz, Professor of War Studies at King's College London. I'll say more about his background in just a minute. First I'll just explain how he's ended up on Radio Derb.

A few days ago, idly browsing X, I spotted a video posting with the title "Civil War is Coming: Britain & America's Violent Future." How could I resist that? I started watching the video.

It's from the YouTube account of The New Culture Forum, a British outfit founded by British journalist, TV producer, and politician Peter Whittle. Whittle was a figure in the U.K. Independence Party in the last decade and campaigned for Brexit.

In this New Culture Forum video that got my attention, Peter Whittle was interviewing the aforementioned Professor David Betz about those prospects for civil war in Britain and America.

On civil wars in general, Betz is somewhat of an authority. He explains himself in a different video (which I'll get to shortly) as follows, quote:

I'm a Professor of War in the Modern World in the War Studies Department at King's College London. I've been employed there for coming on to 25 years now. My area of specialism is contemporary strategy.

My interest in this subject came relatively recently and somewhat surprisingly. I have a specific background in irregular warfare, propaganda, strategic communications; and I've been very involved in the discussions surrounding counterinsurgency and specific strategies and techniques in, let's call them, the expeditionary wars of the War on Terror.

So I've spent most of my professional life being concerned with irregular warfare; or fundamentally with the ways in which societies tear themselves apart and attempt, in various ways, to put themselves back together … Nearly all of that, and in which course, I've written extensively all kinds of academic work.

End quote.

This New Culture Forum video interview with Peter Whittle lasts for 42m16s. Now, I'm not a great watcher of videos, nor even a great listener of spoken audio. I'm a bookish person. I like to read the material. That's why I send out Radio Derb in both audio and transcript versions, to cater to people like myself who'd rather read than listen. No offense to anyone, of course. If you're listening to this, THANK YOU! I just try to cater to all tastes.

In this particular case it didn't help that Professor Betz is a slow speaker with lots of "ums," "ahs," and pauses. Again, no offense to the good Professor, who seems to know his stuff. He's just not a natural speaker.

So I bailed out on this video around the halfway mark without finding out why a credentialed, seasoned academic expert on irregular warfare thinks that civil war is coming to his country and ours.

Forward to Monday this week, March 24th. I got an email from a friend alerting me to a YouTube post, this one audio only, of Professor Betz talking to a different person on the same topic. My friend urged my attention to this second posting. He noted that Mark Steyn had already passed comment on it, calling it, quote: "the most important thing I linked to this week." End quote.

The host for this one is Louise Perry, a British journalist not previously known to me, although Mark Steyn says she's been a guest on his show. Her YouTube account is called "Maiden Mother Matriarch," and describes itself as, quote, "a podcast about sexual politics."

What does sexual politics have to do with Civil War?  I hear you ask. So you're not married, are you?

One more quote from Mark Steyn about this interview, quote:

Louise has the voice of a lovely English rose and Professor Betz is a mild-mannered soft-spoken Canadian, and such accents calmly discussing the road to "civil war" makes it far more unsettling than if it were just another blowhard roaring from his cyber-bunker.

End quote.

Anyway, my friend who'd emailed me this link was really enthusiastic about it; so much so he'd made a transcript in Microsoft Word, which he attached to his email. So now I could read what Professor Betz has to say! This was just as well: the interview with Louise Perry is more than twice as long as the one with Peter Whittle:  1h29m05s.

I agree with my friend and Mark Steyn: that hour and a half of audio is worth the attention of any thoughtful person. But what about a thoughtful person like me, whose attention won't survive an hour and a half of audio, without even video to at least keep my eyes open?

So as a public service, and for my own future reference, I took my friend's Microsoft Word version of the Louise Perry - David Betz interview, converted it to HTML, and added it as a single page to my personal website.

And there it is. Listeners, go to johnderbyshire.com, click on "Opinions" in the Navigation box, then on "The National Question." It's the first item listed.

Since then I've spotted several other interviews with Professor Betz, all on that same theme. British politician and charity organizer Nick Buckley has one on his YouTube account; British nationalist commentator Richard Inman has one on his; a YouTube account called "Skeptical Waves" has one titled "Civil War comes to the West"; and there may be others I've missed.

So yes: Civil War is in the air, and Professor Betz is riding the thermals. What does he actually say, though? Next segment.

[Permalink]

04 — Downgrading, legitimacy, and feral cities.     Before proceeding, I should let you hear the man himself talking. Here's a two-minute clip from the Nick Buckley interview. Not only is Professor Betz making a key point, but the clip demonstrates what I said about him not being a gifted speaker. For the transcript I've stripped out all the "ums" and "ahs" and pauses, but I've left them in the audio.

[Clip:   Betz:  Let me explain what I think is going to happen. It's sad because I think fundamentally the most important fissure is between nationalism and post-nationalism.

Nationalism is in bad odor and has been, in elite circles, since the world wars, really. But essentially, if one understands it as a love of one's place and people, then that idea …  I think that idea is one that appeals to Britons across a range of ethnicities.

And if you think of it that way the problem is, our elite — our political, media, certainly our corporate elite — they're all post-nationalist in their orientation. They don't think in terms of national interest. In fact they're suspicious of people who talk about national interest. They think there's something actually disreputable about that, and rather suspicious — basically, morally suspect — to talk in those terms.

Buckley:  And Keir Starmer perfectly highlighted this when someone asked him on the BBC, "What do you prefer, Davos or Westminster?" and he went: "Davos!"

Betz:  Keir Starmer is the epitomization of this, I think. I mean, he's hardly alone. He's an epitomization of an ideal that is, I think, very broadly evident throughout the British establishment.]

End quote.

That's just a snippet. For the full Betz, listen to the hour-and-a-half Louise Perry interview, or read the transcript at johnderbyshire.com. Be warned, though: it runs to over twelve thousand words. That's longer than St. Mark's Gospel.

Just a few points from it.

• Downgrading:  At one point Betz uses the word "downgrading." Louise Perry asks him for a definition. He replies, edited quote:

You can't just say very factionalized societies are very prone to civil war, because it turns out that the most factionalized societies are to some extent secure from civil war, because there is no single group which is sufficiently dominant to coordinate revolt on its own. So, if your country is broken up into ten or fifteen different factions, then it's very hard to get a mass movement going because you have to coordinate multiple factions to do so.

On the other end of the spectrum, you could say a country that is very homogeneous (i.e., unfractionated on an ethnic or cultural level) is less prone to civil conflict because it's easier to arrive at consensus positions, or easier to appeal to pre-political loyalty, as I said.

The danger area is in the middle where you have a previously dominant faction, or a previously dominant identity, that is losing its place in society; and that's precisely where we are now, where there is the potential for a mass movement. Which is essentially why most of the governments of the Western world (or the internal security forces of the Western world) evince terrible concern with white identity movements …

So "downgrading" is the technical term in the civil war causation literature that refers to a situation in which a formerly dominant social majority fears that it is in peril of losing that dominance; and that is considered to be a highly important factor in civil war causation.

End quote.

• Elite betrayal: edited quote:

A secondary impulse, that is very clear in popular discourse now, is to punish our domestic elite for having failed willfully or simply negligently for this perceived failure to maintain the social contract.

In character, I think the conflict is probably going to echo the peasant revolts of the distant past more so than the progressive leftist revolutions of the previous century and a half. It's essentially a conservative reaction against the perceived elite alteration or elite betrayal (again a term that one hears a lot now) of the previously understood social rules of the game.

End quote.

• Dirty war:  Betz warns us that we — Americans especially — have an image of Civil War based on the 1861-1865 unpleasantness, quote: "uniformed armies fighting each other essentially conventionally on a large scale using regular operations that could be represented on a map," end quote.

What he's predicting is much more like what academics in his field call "dirty war": the kind of thing we've seen in Latin American countries with death squads, assassination, kidnappings, and so on, countered by brutally repressive government responses. Quote:

If you imagine a spectrum of civil war, and you imagine the American Civil War on one end of the scale (which is effectively a big conventional conflict within a society, which prior to the outbreak of the conflict was under one sovereign authority), then dirty war is on the other end of the spectrum. It doesn't have, you know, big conventional military operations, but there is endemic political violence of a relatively organized and systematic nature.

End quote.

• Urban-rural conflict:  Betz talks a lot about this. The big cities, after all, are where our treacherous elites are concentrated. He points out that in Britain — and I think it's true in the U.S.A., too — the infrastructure that supports city life is often located in rural or suburban areas. Edited quote:

I don't want to go into details because I don't want it to turn into a tactical manual — but you can think of the gas.

Just simply put, a really obvious one is the gas network. Gas is explosive. It is its own bomb. Its location? It's a national grid. The Major Accident Hazard Pipelines (that is their name, Major Accident Hazard Pipelines …) are very easy to access. They're very big, their locations are publicly known. They have to be because of the danger of accidental explosion if you dig around them.

The electrical grid is very vulnerable. It doesn't take very much to take down an electrical pylon.

End quote.

He talks about social instability in our cities themselves, introducing us — well, introducing me — to the technical term used by scholars of his subject: "feral cities."

• Legitimacy:  Professor Betz leans hard on the concept of legitimacy. Longish edited quote:

Legitimacy is a is a tremendously important idea, but one that's highly under-theorized …  People like me who have been looking at insurgency and counterinsurgency —we talk about legitimacy all the time, but definitions of it are quite complicated, because it's not just legality. The problem is it overlaps with legality but it's not exactly the same thing.

I tend to think of legitimacy as a kind of kind of magic that makes a government work. It is the key variable that determines whether your cost of government is high or low.

If you have high legitimacy then your cost of government is very low. People tend to do the correct thing voluntarily and your symbols of power are in fact powerful: so, coats of arms, flags, policemen's badges. These things have a kind of material power in a high legitimacy system because that magic is working.

When legitimacy collapses, then your government costs are very high. You have to police everything. You have to watch people because they won't do the right thing; and indeed, if people are really pissed off, as soon as they're unobserved they'll do the wrong thing. They'll do things to further kludge up the system because they're angry.

In the current context, I think that governments around the world have been persuaded by certain factors, and by certain people, (notably the tech sector) to believe that they can make up for the problems of cost of governance in a low legitimacy environment through technology — that surveillance is going to bring down the well-known increased costs of governing in a low legitimacy environment.

The problem there is …  that the whole of the kind of electronic surveillance architecture has as its Achilles heel that you can break it. You can cut the cameras down; or —to my point, I think —once things get really serious, you switch off the electricity.

End quote.

Professor Betz's final conclusions are pessimistic. Louise Perry asks him what the British government can do to head off a civil-war-scale crisis. Betz replies, quote: "Well, in short, I don't think there's anything they can do." End quote. He then qualifies that with some suggestions about preserving cultural artefacts, safeguarding nukes, and being alert to hostile nations taking advantage.

Perry asks him for a time frame. The good Professor replies, quote:

If we can make it through the next five years without it happening, that would be a good sign. I think the rupture is going to come before then, on current trajectory.

End quote.

It's interesting to hear (or in my case, mostly read) a salaried and respected academic talking calmly about these matters in plain language. I spend a fair amount of time reading — and yes, occasionally listening to or watching — what Mark Steyn referred to back there as "blowhards roaring from their cyber-bunkers." I guess, on an academic scale, Mark and I myself could be filed under that heading. So it's good to hear a sober, learnéd voice on our pet topics.

Academics can be wrong, of course. There are no guarantees in the prediction business. That said, Professor Betz's guess of five years for Britain to go over the cliff seems to me to be all too possible.

For the U.S.A. I'd guess the danger is more remote. If our new administration does enough things right, the danger might disappear altogether. That's a big "if"; but while we breathe, we hope — dum spiro, spero.

[Permalink]

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

I gave over a lot of air time there to Professor Betz — not more than he deserves, I hope — so the brief items are even briefer than usual.

Imprimis:  Readers of the transcript probably noticed a hyperlink back there to the British Royal Family, key members of which seem to be hovering on the edge of conversion to Islam.

Meanwhile, last Thursday the Daily Mail reported that His Britannic Majesty King Charles the Third would make a "secret" offer to President Trump for the United States to become the next "associate member" of the British Commonwealth. Having heard about this, our President responded on Truth Social that he liked the idea.

(If you're not clear what the British Commonwealth is and what membership in it involves, I refer you to my summary in the March 14th edition of Radio Derb. Probably the President was listening to me.)

If he's listening to me now, I would strongly urge the President to not take this matter any further. Britain is sinking fast. Any kind of formal diplomatic association carries a risk she might drag us down with her, or at least litter our shores with the wreckage of what was once a nation.

Our President should acquaint himself with Professor Betz's forecasts and drop the whole stupid idea …  inshallah.

[Permalink]

Item:  The Biden administration was truly awful, perhaps the worst ever. That sounds like the squawking of a party hack; but I believe it's objectively true, and will be the judgment of History.

There were many victims of its lies, corruption, and injustices. One who should not be forgotten was Ashli Babbitt. You no doubt recall that this 35-year-old woman, a 12-year Air Force veteran, was shot dead without warning by Capitol Hill Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd on January 6th 2021 while in a small — and of course unarmed — crowd of demonstrators outside the House Speaker's lobby.

Last year Judicial Watch filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Babbitt's estate, seeking $30 million in damages from the federal government. Lieutenant Byrd meanwhile got a promotion, a raise, and a medal. He's still on duty.

On Newsmax this week Greg Kelly, interviewing President Trump, told the President that his Department of Justice is still trying to block that lawsuit. Trump admitted he hadn't known that, and promised to, quote, "take a look at it."

Thank you, Sir!

[Permalink]

Item:  Had you ever heard of Andrius Kubilius before last week? No, me neither.

Looking him up, I see that the 68-year-old Mr Kubilius is a Lithuanian. That excuses us: there aren't that many famous Lithuanians. He is currently serving in the executive of the European Union as the Commissioner for Defence Industry and Space.

What's endeared him to me — and to any other American who, like me, can't figure out what the hell we are still doing in NATO thirty-four years after the Warsaw Pact was disbanded — what's endeared him to us were remarks he made March 18th at a gathering of the European Commission. Quote:

Four hundred and fifty million EU citizens should not have to depend on 340 million Americans to defend ourselves against 140 million Russians who can't defeat 38 million Ukrainians.

We really can do better.

It's time for us to take responsibility for the defence of Europe!

End quote.

I wish I could tell you truthfully that I stood up and cheered when I read that. In fact I stayed rooted to my seat, stunned to immobility by seeing a high official of the European Commission talking sense. God bless you, Mr. Kubilius!

[Permalink]

06 — Signoff.     And that's all I have for you, ladies and gentlemen — the latter group, I hope, ever loyal to the Gentleman's Code.

Thank you for your time and attention, and please allow me to remind you yet again that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow's Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-"t", CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine, who publish my work. Thank you!

I have a confession to make prefatory to the sign-out music clip. I have occasional spells of nostalgia for my English childhood. Sometimes in those spells I recall the popular lounge singers of mid-twentieth-century England.

Looking back, I think there was a widespread feeling of national inferiority among the English: America's lounge singers were so much better than ours. The Yanks had Frank Sinatra and Doris Day, we had Frankie Vaughan and Alma Cogan. I imagine English adults were grumbling among themselves something like: "Darn it, it was bad enough being their junior partner in the war; can't we at least out-sing them?"

And then, reminiscing, I go to YouTube and pull down one or two of those English crooners I was hearing from the family radio seventy years ago. No, they weren't as good as their American equivalents, but they mostly weren't bad. Painted over with a good coat of nostalgia, they were quite listenable.

So here's one: Dickie Valentine. I'd like to think that as Elon Musk's guys advance their investigation, whichever dumbo in our national-security bureaucracy put Jeffrey Goldberg on that Signal list is listening, and … sweating.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

[Permalink]