The Z Blog

Trump has only been in office for five months, but he has quickly managed to smash up a bunch of things. One of those things is the relationship with Europe, which has been in place since the end of the Cold War. By walking away from Project Ukraine, he is putting the world on notice that things will never be the same between the United States and the rest of the NATO countries.

Something similar seems to be developing in the Middle East. He went for the homerun shot against Iran, but that failed, leaving the region on the edge of war and Israel scrambling to avoid Iranian missiles. Trump is left with two terrible choices, either of which probably breaks the old order in the region. He can launch and attack that probably fails or cut a deal, either option looks like a loss.

There is the third option to commit to a long air war against Iran, but you do not win wars with just air power. That was the lesson of Iraq. It took a million-man army to topple the regime. Iran is bigger, tougher, and more stable than Iraq under Saddam, so toppling the government will be much more difficult. The long air war would most likely be a very expensive failure.

The way things currently sit, the end result of this Iran – Israel war will be a new security arrangement in the Middle East. Israel will not be able to threaten her neighbors, expecting the United States to cash the checks she writes. That will be a revolutionary change in a region that needs it. Whatever it looks like in the end, it will be the result of Trump smashing and breaking things.

That is the show this week. As with so many other things, Trump is not the man with a plan, but a man with a hammer. He breaks the old stuff, often by his mere existence, but this opens the way for new stuff. He has broken the political order in Washington and now that he has real power, he is breaking the order abroad. He is the Mule, the destroyer of worlds, bringing the end of empire.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

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Full Show On Odysee

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The show was recorded while the usual suspects were starting yet another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran. At this point it is hard to know where it leads, but we know Trump is powerless to do anything about it. It is sadly clear over the last three administrations that no White House runs foreign policy. The important decisions are made by people outside the political system.

That is why war is on the list of things that could bring doom to America. The people making these decisions are not thinking about what is best for the United States or the American people. Therefore, the United States and the American people could easily be sacrificed, deliberately or accidentally, in service to the alien cause. Civilization ending wars tend to be tragic accidents.

Even so, America is in no danger of being conquered militarily, so it is hard to see war as the direct cause of our demise. War could trigger other things, like a massive spike in oil prices that then set off a financial collapse. If Iran decides it needs a regional war and blows up Saudi oil facilities, then we could see an energy crisis. Unlike the 1970’s, an energy crisis today could trigger collapse.

That is the show for this Friday the 13th. I go through the possible end times scenarios and rank them on a scale of one to ten. A bit of a spoiler, but war is pretty far down the list of possible doomsday scenarios. It could be a triggering event that eventually leads to one of the other items on the list, but war itself is not a likely end for us. The most likely cause of our doom is, well, you will just have to listen.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

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Full Show On Odysee

This Week’s Show

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

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Full Show On Odysee 

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is your conclusively genial host John Derbyshire with the D-Day edition of Radio Derb. I know of course that most of you listen to the show on Saturday, which will be the 7th; but Friday is when I sit down to record it, so “D-Day edition” is valid.

Calendrical matters are at the front of my mind this week as Tuesday, June 3rd, was my birthday, my 80th birthday. I didn’t broadcast that fact in advance, so I was pleasantly astonished at the number of emails I got wishing me a happy birthday. How did people know? A moment’s reflection reminded me that my birth date is there for all to see on my personal website. It’s also on Twitter, if you go looking; and it’s on my Wikipedia page in between the descriptions of me as a hate-filled far-right homophobic racist misogynist full of hate.

Even after remembering all that, I was still surprised by the number of emails that came in: surprised, and stirred. I offer my sincere, heartfelt thanks to all who emailed, most especially to those of you who told me you’ve been following me ever since such-and-such, with some of the such-and-suches going all the way back into the 20th century. Thank you, thank you!

And yes, I had a very happy birthday. It was a lovely June day. I did some garden work and some undemanding household chores. For dinner my wife and kids took me to an excellent Italian restaurant in the village here and let me make a complete pig of myself. Life is good; all the better with a loving family and friends far and near. Thank you, again thank you!

I shall have more calendrical observations later. First, a glance at the week’s news. It’ll only be a brief one; I’m still in a holiday mood.

02 — Lunacy, Muslim-style.     Sunday last came another attack on Jews by an anti-Zionist lunatic. This was just eleven days after the murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim by Elias Rodriguez in Washington, D.C.

Sunday’s attack happened in Boulder, Colorado. The attacker was a lone male, 45-year-old Mohamed Soliman, an Egyptian national. His target was a group of mainly-elderly local Jews conducting a weekly walk to remind us of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas in the October 7th raid.

Mohamed Soliman is — please try to control your astonishment — an illegal alien. He came here on a tourist visa three years ago. After six months that visa expired; he applied for asylum. While waiting for a hearing, which could be years away, he applied for and got a work permit. That expired back in April, though, so he’s been here illegally since April. Nobody seems to know what kind of work he’s been doing, if any.

Soliman had been planning the attack for months. His initial idea was to just shoot the Jews, but he couldn’t get a gun permit because of his expired visa. He therefore went with Molotov cocktails after learning from YouTube how to make them. Fifteen of the Jews and one dog suffered burns. Twelve of the people were hospitalized, two in serious condition. I don’t know how the dog is doing.

Thursday afternoon Soliman was charged with 118 state criminal charges, including 28 counts of attempted murder. There will be federal hate-crime charges, too. His wife and five children, all here illegally, were arrested to be held for deportation, but a lefty district judge — a Biden appointee, of course — is blocking the deportation. There’ll be a hearing on the judge’s block June 13th.

From his nationality and name it’s fair to assume that Soliman’s particular style of lunacy is Moslem style. That at least makes his anti-Zionism a tad more comprehensible than Elias Rodriguez’s. Rodriguez was afflicted with woke lunacy, not Moslem lunacy, although the two seem to be inseparable nowadays.

Nasty as it undoubtedly was, this little incident did generate one memorable tweet.

News reports made much of the fact that the oldest of the Jews injured by Soliman, 88-year-old Barbara Steinmetz, is a Holocaust survivor. Strictly speaking, that’s not true. She was born in Hungary, which wasn’t systematically rounding up Jews for the camps until the Germans occupied the country in 1944. Her family had left well before that. They were on the run, though, and having a rough time until they got asylum in the Dominican Republic in 1941. However, I’ll give Ms Steinmetz a pass on “Holocaust survivor” on account of her age and those traumas of her infant years.

Well, a tweeter with the tag “Oilfield Rando” posted a tweet showing a news picture of Ms Steinmetz with a picture of Soliman alongside it. That latter picure was taken outside the courthouse where Soliman launched his attack. Above the door of the courthouse there is hanging a big rainbow-and-pastel Pride flag.

Ms Steinmetz, in her picture alongside, is wearing a jacket decorated with a big lapel button reading MY PEOPLE WERE REFUGEES TOO. That suggests open-borders sympathies. Nothing surprising there: Jewish Americans of her generation are almost invariably hostile to almost any kind of immigration restriction, for reasons suggested by that lapel button. When I’ve written about immigration myself — which I have, a lot — some of the angriest responses have come from Jews.

Well, “Oilfield Rando” picked up those details in the two pictures and ran with them, or rather tweeted with them. Tweet:

I had my doubts. I really did.

Then a turd world immigrant hate-crimed an open borders activist in a gun free zone in front of a courthouse flying a DEI-Pride flag, and at that moment I was 100 percent positive we’re in a simulation.

End tweet.

03 — Imaginative warfare.     There was another attack last Sunday: a military one, in the war between the world’s two most corrupt white nations. Ukraine pulled off a very imaginative operation, using drones to damage or destroy Russian aircraft parked at their bases.

Very imaginative. Apparently, unsuspecting Russian truckers were hired by undercover Ukrainians in Russia to deliver modular houses. Then, when the truckers got near to airbases, the lids of their cargo loads opened automatically, drones flew out and attacked parked planes.

This method of attack allowed the drones to penetrate deep into Russia. One of the bases attacked, the Ukrainka airbase, is way out east in Upper Manchuria on the Chinese border, four thousand miles from Ukraine.

A lot of planes were destroyed in the operation, including at least five TU-95 strategic bombers, the U.S.S.R’s answer to our own B-52. We don’t know the full tally yet, but it’s plain from satellite imagery that Russia lost a lot of planes.

Of course you don’t stomp on the bear’s tail and get away unhurt. Sure enough, the Russians have been pounding Ukraine. In the five hours from midnight Thursday to 5 a.m. Friday they launched 407 drones and decoys, nearly 40 cruise missiles and six ballistic missiles from land, air and sea at towns and cities across the breadth of the nation, the Ukrainian Air Force reports.

Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, was a main target. The New York Times report tells us of attack drones swooping in, quote: “their ominous buzz trailing over neighborhoods,” end quote.

I don’t want to sound heartless — Heaven forbid! — but this isn’t exactly the London Blitz. As the Times went to press Friday morning only four people were known to have been killed in Kiev and 22 injured. That’s like a bad night in the South Bronx. Although to be perfectly fair, Ukraine only publishes civilian casualties, we don’t know the tally for military targets.

Our President seems not to want to get involved, for which I give thanks. He’s compared the combatants to two boys in a schoolyard fight, who need to work out their differences before the fighting could end.

I just wish he’d say out loud what I myself believe: that the territorial squabbles of the Eastern Slavs are no business of America’s. Let ’em go at it. It’s Europe’s business, and the Euros need to get their act together. It’s nothing to do with us, though — or wouldn’t be, if we’d had the good sense to pull out of NATO thirty years ago.

I’m sure you’ve heard this quip, or some variation on it, quip: “Why are 500 million Europeans calling on 300 million Americans to protect them against 140 million Russians?” End quip.

It’s a good question. If, after defeating Ukraine — which they will surely do — the Russians roll West and occupy all of Europe, what would have been lost? Europe under Russian imperial rule would be better off than Europe taken over by Islam, which is the most probable alternative.

04 — Rumors of war.     Here again is that little passage from the New York Times report about attack drones swooping in, quote: “their ominous buzz trailing over neighborhoods,” end quote.

That really snagged my attention. It’s creepy. Drones are creepy altogether. They are a key component of modern warfare, though.

It is of course a cliché that generals always want to re-fight the previous war. With the advances in tech this past couple of decades, the difference between this war and any previous one is big indeed. Do the world’s generals understand that?

We don’t even really know how big that difference is. For example: What part will AI play in the next and future wars? I have no idea, but I am certain there are teams of very smart people in Russia, China, India, and I hope the U.S.A. cooking up plans.

And then, robots. Some of us have been consoling ourselves that no big old-style wars will be fought because, with the worldwide demographic implosion, there aren’t enough young men to fight them. The fact that both Russia and Ukraine have had declining fertility for decades casts doubt on that theory; but anyway robots might take up the slack.

Sorry, but that’s got me recalling once again that Philip K.Dick Cold War short story The Defenders. The Cold War goes hot; the entire populations of the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. retreat to huge bunkers deep underground. They leave the fighting to robots up on the surface, monitoring the war via video that the robots send down to them. Then one day the humans send a team up to the surface to check. The Earth is a lovely, peaceful park; the robots quit fighting long ago. They’ve been having fun staging war scenes to film and send to the humans down below.

Hey, it’s possible. However it plays out, I feel sure that day when the human race ain’t going to study war no more is a long way off.

The more attention I pay to the news, the more I think that even a superpower war is very possible. I hate the thought — not on my own account: now in my eighties, what do I care? — but for my kids and my grandson. Uncle Sam spent four years and a lot of dollars training my son to be a warrior. Presumably my boy is on some kind of reserve list, liable for call-up. If that happens, I shall zip-tie him and smuggle him down to Uruguay in a boat.

People who make a living trying to figure out what the rulers of China have in mind seem to be in consensus that 2027 is the year Taiwan will be returned back to the warm bosom of the Motherland. That’ll be Year Three of the current Trump Presidency. Will Trump show the same restraint he is showing towards Russia today? Oh Lord, I hope so.

And then, nukes. They’re all over. Even some crazy nations are nuked up, nations you wouldn’t want to trust with your lawn mower: North Korea, Pakistan.

Iran? Last week I mentioned Iran’s nuclear weapons. Quote from me:

They don’t actually have any. At least, that’s what we’re told, and we can only hope the intelligence is good. Iran’s been working on nuke development for at least twenty years, and it’s not that difficult.

End quote.

Here’s something fortifying my skepticism: a report that came out last week from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA. Sample quote from today’s New York Post, quote:

The IAEA last week released a long-awaited comprehensive report on Iran’s violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The report details Tehran’s failure to comply with a nearly eight-year IAEA investigation into the regime’s illicit nuclear-weapons work. It also shows an elaborate Iranian coverup that continues today.

End quote.

So yes: I’m betting, now with more confidence than before, that the Mullahs are nuked up, or could be at a day or two’s notice. They jeer at Israel, calling it “a one-bomb country.” The Israelis are ready for them with the Samson Option: “If we are nuked,” they say, “we’ll nuke back without mercy.”

I was born midway between V-E Day and V-J Day. I’ve lived a long life without ever experiencing war. As human history goes, that’s pretty unusual. I pray the peace will continue.

05 — Trump and Musk.     Sorry, that was pretty depressing. Realistic, I like to think, but definitely depressing. Don’t you hate reality?

For light relief, in today’s news we have Elon Musk breaking up noisily with Donald Trump. Is anyone really surprised? I sure ain’t. Quote from myself, Radio Derb last November 22nd, quote:

Some commentators have expressed doubts that the Musk-Trump bromance can endure for four years. I share those doubts. History doesn’t offer many examples of two strong-willed, energetic men sharing power amicably at a high level. “There can only be one Sun in the sky …” But we shall see.

End quote; and … we’ve seen.

If you have read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk you’ll know that Musk is a very volatile person. He’s a great man who’s accomplished amazing things, I won’t dispute that. He is also, though, an Aspergery nerd, deeply unskilled at relationships with his fellow human beings.

Those relationships aren’t just clumsy, they’re repetitively clumsy. Musk’s armory of insults is way too small. Example: the charge he made on Thursday that Trump is named in the so-far-unreleased papers on pedophile financier the late Jeffrey Epstein.

Readers of the aforementioned biography will recall the fuss back in 2018 when Musk referred to Vernon Unsworth, in a tweet he later deleted, as, quote, “pedo guy,” end quote.

If you don’t know the story, this all started when twelve schoolboys in Thailand, ages 11 to 16, got themselves trapped in a cave system in the mountains of that country. Heavy rainfall flooded the cave complex so the boys couldn’t get out.

The story went worldwide. Elon Musk heard it and had his engineers build a mini-submarine that he said was small enough to pass through the flooded cave system and get the boys out. He shipped the sub to Thailand and followed himself.

The Thai authorities decided not to use it, though. A British expert on cave exploring, name of Vernon Unsworth, lived in Thailand and knew this particular cave complex. He helped organize parties of divers from the American, British, and Thai navies to rescue the boys, which they at last did.

Unsworth scoffed at Musk’s mini-sub. He called it a, quote, “PR stunt,” end quote, which, quote, “had absolutely no chance of working,” end quote. Musk, Unsworth further said, could, quote, “stick his submarine where it hurts,” end quote. That was in a CNN interview.

Musk was not pleased. He tweeted out insults, calling Unsworth “pedo guy.” Unsworth sued him for that, but the federal jury in Los Angeles said he hadn’t proved his case so Musk walked free.

Perhaps President Trump and Vernon Unsworth should compare notes …

06 — Valediction.     That’s all the news I’m going to cover this week, ladies and gents. I shall now proceed straight to signoff, and this week’s signoff is somewhat out of the ordinary.

I have already mentioned — and please forgive me mentioning it again — that Tuesday this week, June 3rd, was my 80th birthday. As it happens, that wasn’t the only memorable milestone for me this week. Today’s Radio Derb — the one you are listening to or reading — is Number One Thousand. It’s my one thousandth podcast since the show began in May 2004. I think Radio Derb may be the oldest continuous dissident-right podcast on the internet.

I can hear arithmetically-inclined listeners muttering: “Wait a minute, Derb. May 2004? That was 21 years ago, plus a few days. There go 52 weeks to the year; this is a weekly podcast; and 21 times 52 is 1,092. How can this be only issue number one thousand? Where did the other 92 go?”

Answer: We took a while to settle down into a regular weekly podcast; and even when we had, I sometimes missed a week. In all those years there were only two years with 52 podcasts, four years with 51, and six with 50. All the rest had fewer than 50.

The total, first to last, is one thousand — trust me. Or if you don’t trust me, go to my personal website johnderbyshire.com, select “Opinions” from the navigation box, then “Radio Derb.” They’re all listed there, with transcripts. You can count ’em for yourself.

The audio is there, too, so you can listen to them all if you want to. It’s only fair to warn you, though, that while I don’t yet know precise minutes and seconds on today’s podcast, the previous 999 add up to 38,541 minutes and 41 seconds; or, if you prefer, 642 hours, 21 minutes, and 41 seconds. If you were to listen for 8 hours per day, that would keep you busy for 80 days, 2 hours, 21 minutes, and 41 seconds.

So: 80th birthday, podcast number one thousand. You’d think that two milestones in one week would be enough of a coincidence, but there’s a wee bit even more.

If you were following me back in 2007 you’ll recall from my monthly Diary in April that year that I have a harmless eccentricity: I count my days, from the day of my birth as day number one. Well, Tuesday this week — my 80th birthday — was day number 29,221; and that, ladies and gentlemen, is [drum roll] a prime number !

That’s not a sensational coincidence, but it’s against the odds. As numbers get bigger and bigger, the primes thin out. In the neighborhood of a decently big number N the frequency of primes is roughly one in log(N), where that’s the natural logarithm of course. The natural logarithm of one million is approximately 13.8, so in the neighborhood of one million, only slightly more than one number in fourteen is a prime number.

The natural logarithm of 29,221, my birthday day number last Tuesday, is 10.28264 and change; so in that neighborhood, slightly fewer than one number in ten is prime. Sure enough, 29,221 is preceded by eleven non-primes and followed by nine more.

The day number of my birthday being prime isn’t a miracle; but, as I said, it’s against the odds.

So: podcast number one thousand this week, birthday number eighty this week, day number of the latter a prime against the odds. Pondering these coincidences, I have concluded that the universe is trying to tell me something. What it’s trying to tell me is, it’s time to hang up my mike and my keyboard.

To be perfectly open about it, the numerical coincidences only served as prompts. I’ve been feeling for a while that I spend way too much time at my computer when there are other things I should be attending to. I have a hundred-year-old house I need to keep from falling down. I have a nearly forty-year-old marriage that needs time and attention, as all marriages do. I have a son and a daughter nearby to worry about, and a three-year-old grandson to fuss over, and a dog to walk.

There are friendships to keep up, church responsibilities to fulfil, books to read, jigsaw puzzles and crossword puzzles to do, shooting skills and my cribbage game to keep honed. I’m blessed with good health; but inevitably, entering my eighties, I tire more easily than I used to, and get less accomplished per hour of waking life.

So this edition of Radio Derb is the last.

I won’t be giving up opinionating altogether. I’m a chronic writer by nature, cacoëthes scribendi. I shall keep up my monthly column in Chronicles magazine for as long as they want me to, and I’ll do occasional book reviews for them and for any other of the dwindling number of outlets that still publish book reviews for the dwindling number of people who still read books. I may try to take full advantage of social media, which up to now I never have … although, as I said, I’m aiming to spend a lot less time at the computer.

This valediction, like the famous poetic one, forbids mourning. In these 21 years of podcasting I’ve engaged with a mighty host of listeners and readers. I’ve learned a lot from them that’s improved my understanding, and I flatter myself that they may have learned something from me. Like that poet and his sweetheart — I think it was actually his wife — whose love keeps them spiritually united even when physically far apart, those mutual improvements in understanding will keep me and my followers bonded together at some level above the everyday transactional.

My heartfelt thanks to all those who’ve engaged with me by following Radio Derb, the thanks doubled to those who’ve emailed in with wit and/or wisdom, tripled to followers who’ve blessed me with donations and gifts. And I must add my gratitude once again to the surprising number of listeners and readers who have emailed in since Tuesday to wish me a happy birthday. It was a happy birthday, made even happier by your kind thoughts. God bless you all!

There will be no more from Radio Derb next week, nor in any following week.

Fifty years ago, the word “antisemitism” did not often turn up in everyday discourse and when it did it lacked the punch of today. The person who thought poorly of Jews was like the guy who was into conspiracy theories. Only in the upper reaches of society was it a fearsome accusation. That changed and now it is the worst thing that can happen to someone with a professional career.

The funny thing about the term and the meaning behind it is that it now has a definition that only professional anti-antisemites can explain. Fifty years ago, an antisemite was someone who hated Jews. Today, it is complicated. The determination as to whether someone is an antisemite requires a team of experts who have not only studied the man’s life but have also been trained in anti-antisemitism.

Eric Hoffer noted that mass movements in America become a religion, a corporation, or a racket, but in reality, they often become all three. You see it here. For some, anti-antisemitism is a way of life, like a religion. For others, it has become a lucrative career that provides them with regular appearances on television. For most now, it is a racket that lets them earn more than their talents warrant.

Ironically, this is only possible because America has no history of antisemitism and never possessed a critical mass of people who were hostile to Jews. The great wave of immigration in the 19th century that brought Jews to America delivered Jewish people into a land that was largely indifferent to them. Like the rest of the migrants, they had a rough go of it at first, but otherwise they encountered no opposition.

This is what makes the present moment interesting. Just as America is becoming something like medieval Spain in terms of demographics, we are seeing the first flickers of hostility to Jews. They are at the forefront of the open borders policies that have wrecked American demographics, thus creating conditions for the sort of tribalism from which most stereotypes about Jews arose.

That is the show this week. It is mostly an exploration of the anti-antisemitism world in search of a definition for it. Sprinkled in is the usual commentary about the weird things one finds when he goes down this rabbit hole. Unlike the anti-racism rackets, the anti-antisemitism rackets are far more complicated and have a logic to them that explains both anti-antisemitism and antisemitism.

It also explains why it must always bee looking for or producing antisemites that paly the familiar role of Old Scratch. One the one hand, the industry is ready accuse anyone of being an antisemite. On the other hand, it does produce people who think they are in a great struggle with the Jews. Negative identities, which is anti-antisemitism, must always preserve that which it claims to oppose.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>

Full Show On Odysee 

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is of course your provocatively genial host John Derbyshire with commentary on the news this penultimate day of May 2025.

Just a wee housekeeping note before we start. I took my signoff music last week from a YouTube clip of two Chinese ladies playing Chinese music on Chinese instruments in a big public square. The people passing by in the square who stopped to listen didn’t look Chinese; neither did the buildings around the square. I surmised that it was a European city, and noted that someone in the YouTube comment thread thought it might be Munich.

A friend more resourceful than myself emailed in to tell me he had copied and pasted a couple of screenshots from that YouTube clip into Grok. Grok, he said, seems confident the video is shot in Milan, identifying the Castello Sforzesco and the Piazza del Duomo. Thank you, Sir!

Grok describes itself as, quote, “your truth-seeking AI companion for unfiltered answers with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing,” end quote. In other words, it’s an Artificial Intelligence chatbot. Let’s have a starting segment on AI.

02 — Open the pod bay doors, Hal.     AI sure can be handy, as my friend’s use of Grok there illustrates. I’ve never engaged with Grok myself, though. In fact I confess that I’ve never engaged with AI at all.

That’s a bit odd considering that my favorite reading matter in my late-childhood, young-teen years was science fiction, which of course had plenty of smart robots in its stories. It’s even odder when I recall that the first opinion piece I had published, back in my 1960s college days, contained the following prediction, quote:

The problem of the twenty-first century will be the death of science, in the sense of man’s achievements through science. Advances in automated labour and information-processing will result in men having nothing much to do but gaze in awe and incomprehension at the works of the superior intelligences we are creating.

End quote.

AI still scares me. Perhaps adolescent Derb read too much sci-fi. Or perhaps we really should be scared.

If you put the words “Artificial Intelligence” into the YouTube search bar a high proportion of the results you get are AI scaremongering. The first time I noticed that I wasn’t surprised, let alone scared. YouTube leans hard towards negativity. I guess that brings in the clicks. That’s especially true if you search by nation.

Russia is facing a demographic collapse; China has already had one; South Africa is collapsing. Britain? Fuhgeddaboutit. That, apparently, is what people like to read. I’ll admit I get a tingle out of it myself, even while the angel sitting on my right shoulder is whispering: South Africa’s been collapsing for twenty years, but it never happens. China’s been around for four thousand: they’re not going anywhere …

The clips you get from putting “Artificial Intelligence” into the YouTube search bar have an extra dimension of scariness, though, in that a high proportion of the scariest speakers and interviewees in the clips are themselves pioneers in the development of AI: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever, Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, and yes, Elon Musk.

Browsing through some of those clips, in fact, I turned up one in which actual AI bots were asked about the prospects for homo sapiens surviving the AI revolution. Their first estimate was, quote, “I’d give humanity a 30 percent chance of surviving,” end quote. Later in the clip we were offered revised estimates, but none of them was good.

If all those pioneers and experts in the field, and the AI itself, think we are doomed, perhaps it’s time to stock up that bunker under the back yard.

03 — AI scrapes Grub Street.     As a footnote to that, here’s a phrase you may not be familiar with: “content provider.” In the last few years it’s been elevated somewhat to “content creator,” but to-may-to, to-mah-to.

I’m very familiar with the phrase “content provider,” having actually been one for forty-some years. The phrase is useful for fending off enquiries about the work — I mean, the work of content provision — that I don’t want to answer. Asked about VDARE.com’s business plan, for example, or, further back, office politics at National Review, I would smile innocently and murmur: “Sorry, don’t know: I’m just a content provider.”

Content providing is an ancient and honorable profession. Homer, if he actually existed, was a content provider. So was Shakespeare; so were the translators of the Bible (although they were generating new content from content provided to them by earlier content providers).

What’s this got to do with Artificial Intelligence? Well, content provision is a form of work, albeit a low one by comparison with heart surgery or the building of cathedrals. A worker should be paid for his labor. Before settled copyright law came up in the nineteenth century, a content provider was paid — if he was paid — just once, by contract with the printer or bookseller.

Nowadays there is a complex body of law concerning a content provider’s rights regarding the copying, distribution, and translation of the content he’s provided, the rights sometimes limited by “fair use” rules and usually lapsing after some set number of years. I still get a small but welcome check for content I provided twenty years ago.

Now here comes AI. How does it work? By scraping. That’s the word they use, scraping. It means using specialized software — scraping tools — to extract and interpret data from the internet. There are many, many such scraping tools with names right off the kindergarten brochure: Octoparse, Diffbot, Scrapy of course, ScrapingBee, AnyPicker, Apify, Gumloop, ScrapeStorm, …

Here’s the thing, though. A lot of that data being scraped is content provided by, yes, content providers to some publishing outlet. The texts of entire books — perhaps millions of them — are on the internet.

I don’t think you’ll be astounded to hear that the content providers who provided that content are not being remunerated by the AI firms who are scraping it up — copying it — for use by their bots.

With a personal publication record going well back into the last century, AI scraping has probably left me several thousand dollars poorer than I ought to be. Copyrighted content that I’ve provided has been stolen by — to name just one billionaire thief — Elon Musk. Lawsuit!

In fact lawsuits are under way. The inspiration for this segment of my podcast was an op-ed in todays’ New York Post by Danielle Coffey, CEO of something called the News/Media Alliance. Quote from that Op-Ed, edited quote:

To protect their work, over a dozen members of the News/Media Alliance recently sued [AI platform] Cohere, Inc. for unauthorized use of their content. They joined other publishers, including News Corp and The New York Times, that are suing various AI companies to enforce their rights.

Some in Big Tech are beginning to recognize the problem. We’ve seen a proliferation of licensing agreements in which AI companies pay publishers to use their content, over the last year. A News/Media Alliance collective is currently licensing content at scale.

But without reinforced legal protections, bad actors will continue to exploit publishers and creators — undermining America’s creative industries to further tech’s commercial interests.

End quote.

Content provision has never been much of a living, other than for a few big names or strokes of luck. Sure, Dr Johnson got fifteen hundred guineas for his Dictionary — worth $300,000 today — but that was after years of poverty.

Unless the lawyers pull off some big, permanent courtroom victories, content provision will be even less of a living in the Age of AI than it currently is.

04 — Trump 47 report card: (1).     I make today, May 30th, the 131st day of the Trump 47 presidency. How’s our guy doing?

A mixed report from me. On immigration, I’ll grade A-minus. The minus is for that dumb investor’s gold card, which with any luck will never become reality. Trump has delivered elsewhere on immigration, though. Federal law-enforcement officers are actually enforcing federal laws, to screams of outrage from the open-borders nation-wreckers.

He’s even going after student visas, as I’ve been urging him to. Until recently he was wont to blather about stapling a green card to the diploma of every foreign student who graduated from one of our colleges. We haven’t heard that from him recently … or at any rate, I haven’t. Perhaps he’s been spending time with Stephen Miller.

Once again, repeat after me, please: Higher education is a precious, finite national resource. Our own citizens should have first call on it.

In this, as in everything else he’s trying to do, Trump is being resisted by our lefty judiciary. Thursday this week, in fact, a federal judge in Massachusetts — an Obama appointment, natch — issued an injunction blocking Trump’s efforts to freeze Harvard University’s extravagant admissions of foreign students — currently more than 27 percent of students enrolled.

Law professor Jonathan Turley has coined the phrase “chronic injunctivitis” for this swelling flood of “national or universal injunctions issued by federal district courts against the Trump Administration.” These are district courts, mind. Their proper scope is ruling on whether Daisy Dickerson’s parking ticket is valid or not. They have no business rapping the President’s knuckles over the issuance of visas.

On the fuss over tariffs, I’ll grade B-plus. The case for major tariff reform seems to me sound, but I think Trump went at it too fast and loud. A slower and more deliberate approach would have worked better.

I do understand the case for speed. Congress is on a knife-edge and the mid-terms come next year. On seriously disturbing issues like this, there needs to be time for the dust to settle. Sure; but I just think the President was too fast, too abrupt.

Had you ever heard of the Court of International Trade before this week? Me neither; but on Wednesday a three-judge panel of that court tried to stop the implementation of Trump’s tariffs. Latest I have on this is that an appellate court has just put a hold on that ruling, so the tariffs will go ahead while the lawyers argue it out.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote in a column on Tuesday, quote:

Clearly, a significant portion of the federal judiciary is hostile to Trump’s policies and is happy to thwart them in any way it can.

End quote.

As Glenn also points out, though, the doctrine of separation of powers was never intended to mean that unelected judges have final authority on every point of policy. If they did, in what sense would we still be a democracy? Presidents from Thomas Jefferson on have been defying judicial rulings. I hope Trump will join the list.

05 — Trump 47 report card (2).     Foreign policy? I wish we didn’t have one. Can’t we please pull out of NATO, Mr President?

In the matter of the war between the world’s two most corrupt white nations, our President has, to put it gently, not distinguished himself. Vladimir Putin has treated him with frank contempt. Putin has grudgingly allowed that if negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are satisfactory, he might then agree to include Trump in the next round.

Translated from the Russian that means: “Don’t call us, we’ll let you know.” Trump is fuming; Putin is sniggering quietly to himself and his aides while stepping up the war.

He seems to be getting plenty of support from China in the war. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out long-term. China will of course want something in return for her trouble. How about … Siberia?

The other war — the one Israel is fighting against Iran and Iran’s proxies, all openly dedicated to Israel’s annihilation — that war is currently revolving around Iran’s nuclear weapons.

They don’t actually have any. At least, that’s what we’re told, and we can only hope the intelligence is good. Iran’s been working on nuke development for at least twenty years, and it’s not that difficult.

The Trump administration at any rate doesn’t want Iran to nuke up. They’re in negotiations with the Ayatollahs to open up the country’s nuclear research labs to full inspection, in return for us lifting trade sanctions and unfreezing Iranian funds.

Last week, we’ve been told, Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and warned him against striking Iran’s nuke-development sites.

My guess is that Netanyahu will consider that restraint a fair price to pay for being allowed to continue his war against Hamas in Gaza. Whether Trump sees it the same way is not clear. Relations between the two leaders are … cool, especially since Trump backed off from helping Israel fight the Houthis of Yemen, who are still lobbing missiles at Israeli targets.

My grade for foreign policy is B-plus. The B is for us still being in NATO, which Trump used to tell us he himself was against. The plus is for zero American combat casualties in this administration so far — I don’t think we lost anyone in the Campaign against the Houthis.

06 — Trump 47 report card (3).     On presentation, I’ll grade Trump 47 a plain A.

To be honest, I don’t watch the President’s public performances much. That A grade is based pretty much entirely on his Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, which I thought a good stirring speech.

It had some Trumpish braggadocio in it, to be sure, but no surprise there. After praising our country, he called it, quote:

… a republic that I am fixing after a long and hard four years. That was a hard four years we went through.

Who would let that happen? People pouring through our borders, unchecked, people doing things that are indescribable and not for today to discuss. But the republic that is now doing so very well …

End quote.

If they’re not for today to discuss, why mention them, Sir? But hey, that’s Trump for you.

Later in the speech the President congratulated himself on the 2026 soccer World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics both being scheduled to happen in his term of office, along with next year’s celebration of 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. He added, quote:

Can you imagine? I missed that four years, and now look what I have. I have everything. Amazing the way things work out. God did that. I believe that too. God did it.

End quote.

The audience laughed and applauded. They didn’t seem to mind. Whether or not God minded, I shall not venture to speculate.

I minded somewhat. A Memorial Day address in the national cemetery, with loved ones of those who died for our country present, along I guess with some veterans who were maimed in the nation’s service — a speech given in such a place, on such an occasion, should be solemn all the way through.

That’s Trump for you, though, warts and all. Before I could form my features into a proper frown I recalled the quality of national leadership we had this time last year, and the frown turned into a smile of relief.

As a lover of numbers, I did do a full wince when the President referred to, quote, “us, an American nation, 325 million strong,” end quote.

Way back in my monthly Diary for October 2016 I looked forward to the day when the U.S. population would reach one-third of a billion, 333,333,333. I estimated that day would be January 25th, 2020. I think in fact it was slightly later, in February 2021. Whatever: On Monday this week, Memorial Day, our population was just short of 342 million. It had passed the 325 million mark about eight years ago.

Please, Mr President, if you’re going to quote numbers at us, try to make sure they’re the right numbers. If you need a fully numerate assistant to help out your speechwriters with these issues, I can make myself available at a few days’ notice.

But for those few slight negativities, I would have graded the speech A-plus. Room for improvement, Sir.

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

Imprimis:  Back to Harvard for a moment. Last week a professor at Harvard Business School was stripped of her tenure and fired for having fabricated data in a study she published. She was the first Harvard professor to lose her tenure since the 1940s.

The defenestrated professor there was 47-year-old Francesca Gino. She’d been a permanent faculty member at Harvard since 2010.

Would you like to know her field of specialization? Wait for it: … her research focused on honesty and ethical behavior.

The particular study for which she cooked the data claimed to show that requiring individuals to sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form rather than at the end significantly boosts honest responses.

You might further be interested to know that Professor Gino was, before she fell under suspicion, one of Harvard’s highest-paid employees, actually the fifth highest from 2018 to 2020. In that last year she pulled down $1,049,532, according to Wikipedia.

What portion of that salary was paid out of grants to Harvard from the American taxpayer? We have not been told.

Item:  June is of course Pride Month. Quote from its website, quote:

[A] vibrant and inclusive celebration that honors the LGBTQ+ community, their history, achievements, and ongoing struggle for equality.

End quote.

That gives me an opportunity to once again promote my call for dumping the ugly, clumsy, and all-too-mockable expression “the LGBTQ+ community” for the much briefer, neater, and totally non-abusive alternative “the prouds.”

Alternatively, of course, those organizing the festivities could follow their own logic and rename Pride Month as “The LGBTQ+ Community Month.”

Item:  It isn’t just in the U.S.A. that the judiciary leans heavily to the crazy left. Things are just as bad in Britain.

In March 2022 the High Court of that nation (or former nation) ruled that it was unlawful for border law enforcement to seize the mobile phones of illegal alien boat people arriving across the English Channel from France. It was, the court ruled, a violation of the invader’s human rights.

That was three years ago. There’s a new Border Security Bill currently before Parliament, actually going to the upper chamber — that’s the House of Lords — next week. I haven’t been able to find out whether it includes a clause restoring the right of border officers to seize invaders’ phones. If anyone can enlighten me on this, or knows an AI bot that might, I’d be much obliged.

08 — Signoff.     And that’s it, boys and girls. Thank you yet again for your time and attention.

Yes, the VDARE Foundation is still with us, and planning (I think) for a conference at the castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia later this year. Please give us your support by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check payable to the VDARE Foundation 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 listed at my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine, who publish my stuff. Thank you!

To sign off with, here’s something a day or two ahead of the calendar. It’s an old favorite of mine, though. Just listen to the word-play in the lyrics; these guys really knew their business.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

While everyone is enjoying a bit of a respite from the crazies flying their freak flags in our faces, it is important to remember that they have not gone away. Like cicadas, they have merely gone into hibernation. There they will rest up and conjure some new versions of their egalitarian lunacy. A decade from now they will spring forth and start the cycle of madness over again.

In the interim, the people who orchestrated the freakshow will be busy gnawing away at the fibers of society in an effort to prevent regeneration. They can still use Trump to generate support and get money from soulless oligarchs, who think underwriting this stuff will bring them peace. The lawfare we see against the Trump admin is a good example of what will be the norm now.

The crazies will also refit their image by disposing of the old freaks and finding new freaks to be the face of their craziness. Expect new faces in the media saying the same old things but with new language. Just as the New Democrat was the old crazies in new baby boomer wrappers, the next round of freaks will be the same freaks but dressed up in the garb of the new generation of millennials.

That is the show this week. It is a vacation week for many and a slow week in general, so I am trying to keep in light. Even though it is fun to mock these people now that the tide has turned against them, it is important to remember that the freaks never change, and they never quit. The coming peace in the culture war is a false dawn. True peace only comes when freaks are permanently forced to the margins.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

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This Week’s Show

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Full Show On Rumble

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was of course Franz Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your indigenously genial host John Derbyshire. What does it mean to be “indigenously genial”? I’m not sure, but give me a break here, I’m running out of adverbs.

I’ll open today with a segment on a peculiar way of thinking which I shall call “mortalism,” although I’m not at all sure that’s the correct descriptor.

Mortalism isn’t crazy in itself; it’s actually quite logical, although in my opinion misguided. Like so many other ways of thinking, though, it has a lunatic fringe. This week we encountered that lunatic fringe. Here we go.

02 — Mortalism in the news.     A story that particularly snagged my attention in this week’s news was the one about the attempt last Saturday to destroy an IVF clinic in Palm Springs, California.

This was a one-man operation, or attempted operation. The actual one man was 25-year-old Guy Bartkus. His plan was to blow up the clinic with a car bomb. However, he screwed up somehow. The bomb went off before he could get the vehicle properly positioned, the explosion wiping out himself and the car but leaving the clinic, which was closed at the time, damaged but by no means destroyed.

IVF, if you’re not up-to-date on your reproductive abbreviations, stands for “in vitro fertilization.” In vitro is Latin for “in glass.” A human female egg is fertilized by a human male sperm in a glass apparatus — there you go — instead of in the more conventional way. The fertilized egg is then closely watched until it has definitely become an embryo, at which point it is transferred to a human womb for gestation to birth.

So the zone of lunacy we’re in here is something to do with reproduction. Most of the cultural warfare waged in this zone is pro-abortionists versus anti-abortionists. Since an IVF clinic exists to produce viable embryos, it sounds as though Guy Bartkus was some particularly crazy kind of pro-abortionist.

I bet he was pro-abortion, but his lunacy went way deeper than that. From quoted remarks of his, together with an online manifesto he posted, it appears that Bartkus was a mortalist, the opposite of a natalist.

Natalists believe in encouraging human procreation — urging people to have more children to keep the human stock replenished. Elon Musk is a natalist. I am another one, at least so far as civilized nations are concerned.

Mortalists go the opposite way. They believe human life is a big negative and want to do what they can to shut it down.

There are different schools of thought within mortalism. The most common and longstanding one is driven by concern for the environment.

Here’s an edited extract from the mission statement of VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, one of the oldest mortalist associations — it was founded in 1991. Quote:

The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth’s ecology.

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens …  us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

End quote.

Weird? For sure; but dedicated to persuasion, not violence. To the best of my knowledge, no-one belonging to VHEMT has ever, in the movement’s 34 years of existence, tried to car-bomb a natalist clinic, or any other establishment.

These are sober, thoughtful citizens who just believe that Mother Earth would be a better place without human beings — a defensible position on strictly logical grounds.

There’s another school of mortalist thinking that’s more personal and introspective. I’ll do a segment on that, if you don’t mind.

03 — Regretful mortalism.     Here’s that other school of mortalist thinking. There doesn’t seem to be a name for it, but it sometimes crops up in literature and biographies. I’m going to call it regretful mortalism.

Whether they care about ecological issues or not, regretful mortalists believe that since human life is more pain than pleasure, procreation is unethical and unjustifiable because, by increasing the quantity of human life in the world, it can’t help but increase the quantity of suffering.

Regretful mortalism is, from a strictly logical point of view, just as valid philosophically as ecological mortalism.

Guy Bartkus seems to have belonged to the regretful mortalist school of thought — or more precisely, to have been out on the lunatic fringe of that school. Most people who take that rather negative view of life don’t go in for car-bombing.

Regretful mortalism in fact has a long and respectable pedigree. The ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles, in one of his plays, has the chorus tell us that the greatest blessing of all is to not have been born.

A milder version of this line of thinking is to look back across one’s life to some earlier spell of happiness or fulfillment and wish one could have died right after it.

The other day I was reading a review of Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain. Chernow, according to the reviewer, tells us that Mark Twain, who of course invented the boys Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, had no interest in exploring them as adults, as if he couldn’t bear to imagine them stripped of their youthful appeal. Twain once wrote the following thing, quote: “I should greatly like to relive my youth. And then get drowned.” End quote.

Another case that I recall from my own reading is the late British politician and classicist Enoch Powell. Powell’s classicism went very deep indeed. In his high school years, to win a Divinity prize Powell memorized the whole of St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians in the original Greek. He must surely have been well-acquainted with Sophocles.

Powell, who was born in 1912, had a distinguished military career in World War Two. He advanced from Private First Class to Brigadier in five years, although without ever being in combat.

Much later, giving a radio interview at age 73, Powell was asked how he would like to be remembered. He answered, quote: “I should like to have been killed in the war.” End quote.

That answer considerably upset his wife and daughters. However … and here I’ll quote from Simon Heffer’s biography of Powell, page 901, quote:

After broadcasting that remark, he [inner quote] “received dozens of letters from people saying I’m glad you said that because I felt the same and I’ve never known it before. There’s a secret guilt about those who served and were not killed that they too … were not killed.” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

I think the pro- and anti-abortion activists have drowned out a whole lot of other views about life — both one’s own life and human life at large — that are worth pondering.

I’ll add my two-pennyworth here. I’m not a mortalist. I’m a natalist, at any rate where the civilized part of the world is concerned. Nor am I in that box with Mark Twain and Enoch Powell, looking back at some golden spell in my life and regretting having gone on living after it.

My childhood was happy, with playmates and books and loving parents. My adolescence, however, was a bit of a disaster, best forgotten. My young-adult years were nothing to write home about, either, although I did write home about them.

What, looking back over my life, I think of as the meaningful part started when I got married at age 41, and continues down to the present day, and I hope will continue for many more days.

Not only do I hope that I myself will continue to exist, I also hope the same for Western Civilization, with which I strongly identify. History shows us that a slide back down into barbarism, either by outside assault or internal rot, is always possible. Today, even here in the United States, there are some disturbing signs.

04 — A clumsy Commencement.     The most dependable source for those disturbing signs is our institutions of higher education — our universities and colleges.

In my May 9th podcast I took a swipe at Columbia University in New York City. Quote from that:

I don’t know how Columbia has fared in Trump’s campaign to cut back on federal funding for well-endowed Ivy League universities, but if the stinking place is getting any of my tax money, I strongly resent every damn penny.

End quote.

I see that in fact Columbia was stripped of $400 million in federal funding back in March, in response to last year’s campus riots. The Trump administration might be contemplating further penalties, it’s not clear.

A leading foreign activist in those riots, Algerian Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested, also in March, and is awaiting deportation at a detention center in Louisiana.

Those campus riots last year were so bad, Columbia canceled its main graduation ceremony, scheduled for May 15th. In the year since, and especially after that federal funding cutback, administrators at the university have made some grudging concessions to the feds, in hope of getting their funding restored of course. I was interested to see how they’d manage this year’s graduation ceremony.

Answer: clumsily. The ceremony was held Wednesday this week. Claire Shipman, Acting President of the university, gave the Commencement Speech. It wasn’t very long, less than twelve hundred words. One quarter of the way in the speech included this, quote:

More than 6,800 of you represent 141 countries outside the United States. And let me say — we are glad you chose to be here. We need you. We draw strength from our identity as a global institution. And we firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to freedom of speech as everyone else, and should not be targeted by the government for exercising that right. And let me also say that I know many in our community today are mourning the absence of our graduate, Mahmoud Khalil.

End quote.

A couple of things struck me about that. First, 6,800 foreign students? There were nearly sixteen thousand students graduating on Wednesday. Six thousand eight hundred is more than 42 percent of that. I’ve said it before — many, many times — and I’ll say it again: higher education is a precious, finite national resource. American citizens should have first dibs on it.

A few foreign students, sure; but forty-two percent? Of course they are paying full tuition, to Columbia’s great financial advantage. End of explanation.

And then, “freedom of speech”? So if student groups at Columbia invite Jared Taylor to address them on white advocacy, or Peter Brimelow on immigration patriotism, or Charles Murray on race realism, or J.K. Rowling on sex realism, or Douglas Murray on the Israel-Hamas War, students who try to shut down those speakers will be disciplined, right? Ri-i-ight … Sure.

And then, mourning Mahmoud Khalil’s absence? The guy’s not dead. He’s awaiting deportation for making an almighty nuisance of himself in our country. The detention center he’s in is a humane facility, giving him three hots and a cot while lefty judges allow his case to be lawyered to death.

Acting President Shipman’s speech wasn’t altogether well-received by the graduating students. There was loud booing and chanting of Mahmoud Khalil’s name and “Free Palestine!” all through the speech. Meanwhile, outside the ceremony, a cluster of graduates gathered to burn their diplomas.

That was Commencement Day at Columbia University, where a four-year course for a bachelor’s degree will set you back about $360,000.

05 — A joyful Commencement.     Turning from barbarism to civilization, I’m glad to report that not all of this week’s Commencement ceremonies cast such dark shadows.

Also on Wednesday, as it happens, was the graduation ceremony at the Jane F. Shearer School of Nursing in Suffolk County — my own county, here on Long Island.

Why do I care? Because my beloved daughter Nellie was among those graduating into the nursing profession there, and the rest of us Derbyshires were in the audience: myself, my wife, our son Danny, and Nellie’s three-year-old boy Michael.

The ceremony is actually known as a “pinning.” As the school website explains, quote:

A nursing pin is worn in order to identify the school from which a nurse has graduated. Pins often have a symbolic meaning, illustrating the history of the nursing program.

End quote.

There is a picture of the actual Shearer pin at that website, with an explanation of all its symbols.

This was, I should say, a historic ceremony for the school. The nursing program started up in 1963 and the first graduation ceremony was in 1965 — exactly sixty years ago. Thanks to the Jane F. Shearer School for generating so many trained nurses over so many years!

The Derbs — well, the three adult Derbs — of course shouted with joy as Nellie stepped up for her pin. For me there was also a surge of deep sentiment almost bringing me to tears.

My own dear mother was a professional nurse all her adult life. She loved her work, and would have swooned with happiness to see her grand-daughter take up the torch.

To add to all the happiness, there was nothing at all political in the pinning ceremony to subtract from it. On a civilizational level, with Columbia University scoring about three out of ten, the Jane F. Shearer School hit a clean ten.

There were a lot of speeches from the platform — a lot:  administrators, alumni, local notables, and of course representatives of the graduates themselves. All were plainly congratulatory, full of good-natured optimism.

None of the speakers mourned the absence of alien troublemakers or congratulated the school on having excluded Americans from forty-two percent of the graduating class. Nobody in the audience shrieked out “Free Palestine!” I’m pretty sure, although I didn’t do a thorough check, that no graduates of the school gathered outside to burn their diplomas.

Nellie’s classmates there on Wednesday gathered to get their nursing pins were not scowling, shrieking misfits graduating from courses in Critical Race Theory and Gender studies, their heads swathed in Arabic kitchen towels, looking forward to careers as Community Organizers or Establishment mouthpieces in media or the academy, or to government jobs handed to them by their uncles in corrupt Third World kleptocracies.

No:  The graduates getting pinned at our graduation ceremony were happy, cheerful young Americans, already smart in their nursing uniforms, ready to embark on necessary, useful, often difficult work to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. God bless them all!

Here’s a modest suggestion from me to the authorities at Columbia University.

Get in touch with your counterparts at the Jane F. Shearer School of Nursing in Suffolk County Community College. Have them explain to you the right way to assemble a student body, and to supervise student affairs in such a way that the graduation ceremony is an occasion of joy and pride, not embarrassment.

You can find the Jane F. Shearer School’s address, email address, and phone number right there on the school website. No need to thank me; I’m glad to be of help.

06 — Hesperophobia (cont.).     Atrocity of the week, not altogether unconnected to the foregoing, was the Wednesday night murder of two young Jews in Washington, D.C.

This happened just outside the Capital Jewish Museum in central D.C. The victims were a young man, 28-year-old Yaron Lischinsky, and a young woman, 26-year-old Sarah Milgrim. They were in fact a loving couple, just about to get formally engaged.

Lischinsky was Israeli, born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother. He himself was a devout Christian. He’d moved to the U.S.A. in 2022 to work in the Israeli Embassy there in D.C.

Sarah Milgrim was American. She grew up in Kansas City. She was Jewish, had spent summer vacations in Israel. She was also employed at Israel’s D.C. Embassy.

The couple had a trip planned this weekend to Jerusalem, for Sarah to meet Yaron’s family for the first time, and for Yaron to formally propose to her. He’d just this week bought the engagement ring.

So on Wednesday they attended a reception given by the American Jewish Committee at the museum. The purpose of the reception was to discuss how more aid could be brought into the Gaza Strip. Sarah and Yaron were both keen activists for peace between Israel and her neighbors.

As they came out of the reception to the street outside they were shot by 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez, an American from Chicago wielding a 9mm handgun. Police tell us he fired 21 rounds, reloading twice. The second reload was to finish off Sarah, who — already mortally wounded — was trying to crawl away along the sidewalk.

I would not have been the least bit surprised to read that the killer, Elias Rodriguez, is a graduate of Columbia University. In fact his bachelor’s degree, in English, was from the University of Illinois. He works writing content for the American Osteopathic Information Association.

After killing the two lovers, Rodriguez ran into the Museum. People in there had heard the shots and assumed he was seeking refuge from the shooter. He was agitated. They tried to calm him, sat him down and brought him a glass of water.

When the cops arrived to arrest him, Rodriguez cheered up. He took the Arabic kitchen rag from his bag and declared, quote:

I did this. I did this for Gaza. Free, free Palestine! From the river to the sea and there’s only one solution, intifada revolution.

End quote.

Those are of course the cant slogans of far-left anti-Zionists. Far-right anti-Zionists have different slogans, but I forget the details …

Rodriguez, it has turned out, is far-left from way back, with connections somehow to an outfit called the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He’s been well-known to Chicago law enforcement for at least ten years as a prominent figure in every kind of lefty street demonstration.

Now of course he’s a hero to the anti-Zionist mob. Their commentary has been captured by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. Random sample: This is from a media outlet called Gaza Now, quote:

In a moment of courage, he [that is, Rodriguez] decided to make his voice heard and boldly confront the killers. He opened fire, killing an Israeli employee, and stood defiantly, handcuffed, to raise the banner of justice in the face of injustice as he shouted free Palestine.

End quote.

I guess we should brace ourselves for a new outbreak of hybristophilia, with ditzy females all over sending love letters to Rodriguez in his jail cell. You have to feel sorry for Luigi Mangione; now the hybristophiliac fangirls will forget all about him.

In an editorial on the shooting of Lischinsky and Milgrim, this morning’s New York Post concluded thus, quote:

Old-school right-wing antisemitism is still real and periodically deadly, but it’s astonishing how far the global left has interpenetrated with Islamist antisemitism: Hamas, after all, imposes sharia law in Gaza.

It’s not just the lust for violence that unites them, but a hatred for Western civilization.

End quote.

That jogged my memory. Way, way back, just three days after the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center towers, I wrote a column for National Review Online under the title “Hesperophobia.” I explained that title thus, edited quote:

This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words έσπερος (hesperos), which means “the west” and φόβος (phobos), which means “fear,” but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning “hate.” Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West.

Here is the news: a lot of people out there hate us …  In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa and in the Arab countries, European civilization — the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.

End quote.

If anything much has changed in the 24 years since I wrote that, it’s been the quantity of hesperophobia here in the U.S.A. This week’s poster boy: Elias Rodriguez.

[A footnote to that. Five and a half years later I had another try at floating the word “hesperophobia” in the title of a column. Here are the concluding sentences of that 2006 column. quote:

The Hun is at the gate. In the case of most European countries, in fact, the Hun, the hesperophobe, is inside the gate. We can dream on for a while, dream that our cultural superiority, our technological superiority, our political superiority, will preserve us against all assaults. Perhaps we should remember that the Huns were cultural illiterates, technological ignoramuses, and political incompetents. It doesn’t take much in the way of culture, technology, or statecraft to deliver a crippling blow to a weary, sybaritic, over-governed civilization that is near the end of its allotted span and has lost all faith in its own founding values. Time is short.

End quote.

Today, nineteen years on, time is shorter.

That 2006 column, by the way, was spiked by National Review for being too race-realist — a portent of things to come. It survives in my archives.]

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

Imprimis:  From the London Daily Mail, May 18th, quote:

The age-old semicolon is dying out as Britons admit to never or rarely using the punctuation mark, a study has found.

End quote.

Interesting. However, the story fails to note that George Orwell disliked the semicolon. He so disliked it that he wrote his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, without using a single semicolon.

He then recanted, though, and put semicolons in his later novels. Or perhaps his publishers just nagged him. Publishers generally get their way in such matters.

Back in my wasted youth — this was the early 1980s — while living in London I dated a German girl. It didn’t last long before I broke it off. She was a nice girl: pretty, honest, plain-spoken. She was, however, very very German.

In a conversation about writing once I mentioned that I felt insecure with the semicolon, never quite sure if I was using it properly. “Ach!” she responded. “In Cherman zere are exactly tventy-seven vays to use ze semicolon correctly.”

I wouldn’t swear that the number was twenty-seven; but it was some exact, and remarkably large, number.

As I said, the relationship didn’t last long.

Item:  Romania has a new President: elected in a two-round election earlier in May, he will take the oath of office on May 26th. Name: Nicuşor Dan, 55 years old.

No, I don’t know diddley-squat about Romanian politics. What got my attention about Mr Dan was his mathematical talent.

I commented frequently on VDARE about the International Math Olympiad for high-schoolers, held annually in a different location each year. The point of my comments was to make race-realist observations about the personnel in the U.S. team. This year’s Olympiad will take place July 10th to 20th in Sunshine Coast, a district of Australia.

Romania has an utterly disproportionate share of the world’s mathematical talent. If you have a college library near you, go in there and pull down one of the math journals: AMM Monthly, The College Mathematics Journal, Mathematics Magazine, … there’s any number of them. Open it at the “Problems” page — they all have one — and scan down the pages looking at the names and locations of the puzzle posers and solvers. You won’t get very far before you see a Romanian name.

So I wasn’t terrifically surprised to see that President-to-be Nicuşor Dan won gold medals for himself at the 1987 Finland Olympiad and then again at the 1988 Olympiad in Cuba. He would have been aged 15 and 16 respectively at those events.

That’s quite an achievement. Those Olympiad problems are tough. It’ll be interesting to see how well such a capable mathematician does at running a country.

Item:  The news from the Mother Country just keeps getting worse. Here’s the latest.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the so-called “grooming gangs” in Britain. The expression “grooming gangs” is elite media sugar-coating. They are actually rape gangs: groups of Pakistani Muslim men kidnapping and raping young — sometimes pre-pubescent — English girls for sex.

There have been these rape gangs all over England, but the authorities there have gone to great lengths to hide the truth about them, terrified of legacy English people reacting violently if the facts came out.

The best-known case, and the one most feverishly covered-up, was in the town of Rotherham, in the North of England. The gangs there operated from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, with police, social-welfare agencies, and of course politicians all looking the other way.

Well, guess what: Rotherham just got itself a new Mayor. It’s actually a Mayoress, name of Rukhsana Ismail. She is — can you guess? — a Pakistani Muslim. She gave her opening address to the Rotherham townsfolk in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.

Poor England! Poor, dear old England. She’s gone — gone into the long, sad register of dead nations.

08 — Signoff.     That’s it, listeners and readers. Thank you as always for your time and attention.

Please allow me my usual reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation 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 listed at my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine … which you should anyway, it’s an excellent magazine. Thank you!

For signoff music, a little Cultural Appropriation.

A friend sent me a link to a YouTube clip that caught my fancy. The clip shows two young Chinese ladies playing instrumental music in a large public square. The passers-by in the square who stop to listen don’t look very Chinese, so I think this is in a European city. Someone in the comment thread says it’s Munich, but I can’t confirm that.

One of the ladies is playing the èrhú, a two-stringed instrument played with a violin bow. The other’s playing the pípa, a sort of chinese lute played by plucking with the fingers. They play two tunes, both the work of present-day composer Guān Dàzhōu.

To see us out I’ll give you the first of those two tunes, title Shuĭ Lóng Yín, “Song of the Water Dragon.”

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

This weekend is the official launch of summer in America. It does not feel like the first weekend of summer, but that is probably due to the weather. It has been cool and rainy here for most of spring. Even so, it is the start of the summer season. That means the A-list fabricators will be taking off, leaving the media mendacity to the second string for the next few months. The quality of lies will be low.

It will be interesting to see if the Trump admin maintains the pace. The last four months has been a whirlwind. This week we got the South Africa stuff, which is one of those things that no one thought possible six months ago. The Overton window is moving so quickly it is hard to keep up with it. Now that official Washington is heading off for the summer, it will be interesting to see if the admin takes a break

The other thing to watch for this summer is if the crazies get brought out of storage to riot somewhere. If you scan Bluesky, they are depressed. The money dried up and then the jobs dried up. Now they are left to trade scare stories to one another in the weird echo chamber that is Bluesky. If it is an Orange Man Summer, the fever swamp could be on suicide watch by August.

Normally there would not be a show this week, as the Friday before a holiday weekend is a good time for a break. I had some time to kill, so I threw something together that was light and not too taxing. It is a good time to relax and not think about the madness of this age, so the show is easy listening. I hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day weekend and thank you for reading and listening.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners and readers. That was some of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is of course your significantly genial host John Derbyshire, with observations on the news at precisely the middle of May 2025. Fifteen days gone, fifteen still to go.

It sometimes happens, by sheer good fortune, that one week’s lead segment follows naturally from the previous week’s lead segment. That’s what has happened this week.

In last week’s podcast my lead segment was headlined “The decline of Jim Snow.” I defined Jim Snow as, quoting myself:

The social dogma on race that has prevailed since the 1960s … characterized by white guilt and favoritism towards blacks (a/k/a “affirmative action”) and by deference to what I have called “the romance of American blackness” — narratives about cruel leering white people beating up on helpless pleading blacks.

End quote.

My thesis was that the case of Shiloh Hendrix, the young white Minnesota lady who made a pile of money via crowdfunding following a heated exchange with a black man that the man posted on social media — that case, I argued, was yet further evidence that Jim Snow, as a social dogma, is losing its force.

I think one of the lead news stories this week may further reinforce that thesis; so that is my first segment today.

Before proceeding with it, I’ll just note as a matter of general interest, following on that segment from last week, that as I speak here on Friday afternoon the crowdfunding site for Shiloh Hendrix shows donations now up to $779,158. This time last week they were $759,786; so that’s a one-week increase of $19,372, damn near twenty thousand dollars.

02 — Welkom in Amerika!.     So what’s my follow-up story that, according to me, may offer further evidence that the Jim Snow dogma is losing its force? The follow-up story is the arrival on Monday of 59 white South Africans as refugees.

The backstory here is that back in late January, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted a new law, the Expropriation Act, that allows authorities of the state to take private land without compensation so long as it’s done, quote, “in the public interest,” end quote. The definition of the public interest in the nation’s Constitution includes the redress of historical discrimination.

The Expropriation Act is obviously aimed at white farmers, most of whom are Afrikaners — that is to say, they are descended from Dutch settlers, not British ones, and speak Afrikaans, not English.

President Trump reacted to that in early February with an Executive Order that that halted all foreign aid to South Africa and declared that American officials should do everything possible to help, quote, “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” End quote.

Hearing of that, close to seventy thousand South Africans asked the U.S. embassy or its website for more information.

What are the rights and wrongs here? Historically, of course, from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, racial discrimination was institutionalized in South Africa in the system of Apartheid — racial discrimination that favored whites over blacks. So if today the government seizes the land of some white farmer without compensation so that some nephew of the President can have it, that will be legal under this Expropriation Act — the redress of historical discrimination.

All right, it’s legal; but is it just? I guess you could argue it either way, is or isn’t; but that’s deeper into the internal affairs of foreign countries than this isolationist wants to go. Let South Africans sort it out.

Same response to Trump’s declaration that “It’s a genocide,” by which he means it’s an effort on behalf of black South Africans to altogether exterminate white South Africans.

For sure there are some blacks who have that in mind — the ones chanting “Kill the Boer, the farmer,” at rallies of South Africa’s fourth largest political party [sound clip]. We have blacks like that in the U.S.A. too, as I have previously remarked.

What are the numbers, though? What are the prospects of an actual genocide? We know the numbers who called the U.S.Embassy to ask about refugee status: seventy thousand. The white population of South Africa is about four and a half million, so that seventy thousand represents one and a half percent. Not really a rush for the lifeboats.

From what I have gathered from news reports and from speaking not long ago with an actual white South African — a middle-aged male college professor — the country’s a mess. Crime is at appalling levels; and yes, a lot of it is targeted by blacks against whites. Public utilities are all failing, the economy’s in the tank, and so on.

It’s not Haiti, though. South Africa’s been a mess for years and citizens have adapted or left. There’s a flourishing tourist trade — the climate is superb. You want to talk immigration? The country has an estimated five million illegal aliens in residence, three million just from Zimbabwe.

So what with one thing and another, I think Trump’s February Executive Order was a bit of a stretch. I welcome it none the less, and I welcome these 59 Afrikaners who landed on Monday. I welcome it, and them, as further portents of the decline of Jim Snow — of institutionalized anti-whiteness here in the U.S.A.

If Trump 45 had tried this eight years ago, when Jim Snow was riding strong and anti-whiteness was the order of the day, the elites would have been howling blue murder. All I’ve heard so far has been some genteel negativity from the BBC and a slightly more combative version of the same from The New York Times.

To be sure, social media’s been lighting up. One black American female posting on X has openly threatened the Afrikaners, quote: “I just want to let you know that our President, he has Secret Service protection and you will not.” End quote.

Several others have jeered at us immigration restrictionists along the lines of, quote: “You’re against the asylum and refugee programs, aren’t you? So why are you smiling at these white South Africans coming in?”

I’d amend the wording there to “asylum and refugee rackets,” which is what they mostly are — more on that in the next segment. That aside, why would I object to well-dressed, well-mannered white Europeans getting some help to settle in the U.S.A.? Why should I not object to the uncouth, lawless, ignorant dregs of Somalia, Venezuela, and Pakistan being ushered in?

I live just twenty miles from New York City, which — as the song says — was once New Amsterdam. Why would I object to the assisted arrival of farmers with Dutch ancestry?

I won’t. I don’t. [Attempting Afrikaans.] Welkom in Amerika!

03 — A church that won’t help white people.     The arrival of those Afrikaners has supplied me with yet another link between last week’s podcast and this one.

Speaking about the newly-elected Pope, I made some side comments about the Anglican church, my childhood introduction to institutional Christianity.

The Episcopal Church here in the U.S.A. is closely related to the Anglican Church of England. There was a spot of bother after the War of Independence when the Church of England priests and worshippers already settled here were no longer sure what to do with themselves in this new country.

They didn’t have any bishops to guide them — Britain’s colonial policy hadn’t allowed it — and they could no longer accept the authority of the bishops over the water because that would put them, at one remove, under the authority of the British monarch whom their fellow-countrymen had just defeated in war. They could elect themselves a bishop, but the English church wouldn’t consecrate him.

American Anglicans squared the circle in 1784 by electing Samuel Seabury of Connecticut as bishop and sending him over for consecration by bishops in Scotland, where the church was separated from the English King. Once he was back in the U.S.A., we had a Protestant Episcopal church under Anglican rites … and we still have it.

It now has lots of bishops — around 140 currently active. One of them, the Presiding Bishop, is supreme. That title is currently held by a chap named Sean Rowe: fifty years old, born in Pennsylvania, married with one daughter.

Well, the Episcopal Church has been in the news this week. They run an outfit called Episcopal Migration Ministries, EMM for short, which works with the federal government on resettling refugees. The Church gets a nice big federal grant for that, of course.

At the end of last month the feds informed EMM that they’d be expected to help out with resettling those white Afrikaners. Monday this week Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe sent a letter back telling the feds that the Church had decided not to comply. Key quote:

In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.

End quote.

So: “No,” says the bishop, “We’re not here to help white people.”

There’s actually a bit more to it than just plain woke anti-whiteness. That reference to the Anglican Church of Southern Africa offers a clue.

During the heyday of the British Empire, Anglicans didn’t just set up an offspring church here in North America, they set up such churches all over, from the Episcopal Church of Sudan to the Shèng Gōng Huì in Hong Kong … Although, while I hate to pick nits, if that latter one is in Hong Kong it ought to be spelt as Cantonese, not Mandarin: Sing Gùng Wúi.

Today there are 46 of these churches, spoken of collectively as the Anglican Communion. And yes, that includes one in Southern Africa, first bishop appointed 1847.

With that in mind, and scrolling through the faces of worshippers at the Anglican Communion website, you can see where Presiding Bishop Rowe is coming from.

In the previous segment I referred to the “asylum and refugee rackets.” EMM was one of them. Now it is apparently one no longer. That, if you set the race issue aside, is at least a small moral advance on the part of the Episcopal Church.

If you were interested in immigration issues from 2007 to 2022 you probably remember the website called Refugee Resettlement Watch, run by a doughty Maryland lady named Ann Corcoran. Ann’s self-appointed mission was to expose the scandals, lies, and injustices inflicted on the people of the U.S.A. by the refugee agencies. The website remains online although Ann no longer posts to it.

At the center of the resettlement racket are a handful of NGOs, most with reassuringly churchy names. If you scroll down some on Ann’s website she gives a list: Church World Service, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, and yes, Episcopal Migration Ministries.

These NGOs drive the refugee and asylum rackets, taking in great scads of taxpayers’ money from the federal government while doing so, paying their operatives handsome salaries of course, and imposing all kinds of problems on American communities, as documented by Ann Corcoran. Also, of course, giving the finger to the principle of church-state separation.

If the Episcopal Church has given up its involvement in this sleazy business — well, that is, as I said, a moral advance, balancing out the anti-white message to some degree.

04 — Death of a church.     Just a footnote to that last segment.

If the Anglican Church is spread all around the world like that, shouldn’t it have a Pope, like the Roman Catholic Church?

Eh, it does have … sort of. In England, where of course Anglicanism got its start, there are arch-bishops with authority over the bishops, and one of those archbishops is supreme above the others. That’s the Archbishop of Canterbury.

As it happens, the position is currently vacant. The last Archbishop of Canterbury, a bloke named Justin Welby, resigned in January. There’d been a sex scandal: a leader of church youth camps who’d been abusing young boys for years. Welby wasn’t directly involved, but he’d failed to take sufficiently strong action against the abuser when he knew about it and should have acted.

So there was a spell there when both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican one were without a head — the first time that had happened since 1691.

The Roman Catholics got themselves a new Pope pretty briskly, but it’ll take months for the Anglicans to install a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Meanwhile the Archbishop of York is carrying out Welby’s duties, notwithstanding there’s a fuss about him not acting forcefully enough when he should have in a separate child-abuse case.

(If you’re getting the impression that senior Anglican clergy are kind of limp, well … they are.)

While the Archbishop of Canterbury is head cleric in the Anglican Church, he himself has a superior he must report to. That would be the British monarch, one of whose ceremonial titles is “Defender of the Faith.”

So you’d think that King Charles would be exerting himself to sort out the mess in the Church he presides over. Perhaps he would be if he wasn’t so busy kissing up to Islam.

Does any of this matter? Will there even be a Church of England five or ten years from now? Not if it depends on involvement by the ruling dynasty, the Windsors. Charles, as we’ve seen, finds Islam more to his taste. He’s 76 years old, though, and not in good health.

His first son, heir to the throne Prince William, may not be much more use to the Church than Charles is. Quote:

England’s heir, Prince William, does not go to church every Sunday and was said by a palace insider to feel [inner quote] “not instinctively comfortable in a faith environment” [end inner quote] — ominously weasel words for someone who will bear the title of “Defender of the Faith.”

End quote.

I took that quote from a column about the Church of England in last week’s Economist magazine, column title: “The Church of England is dying out and selling up.”

Things really don’t look good. Three thousand five hundred churches have closed just in the last decade. Sixteen thousand remain open; so if the rate of church closures stays constant, the Church still has forty-five years of life in it. That’s a big “if,” though, with Muslims pouring into the country unchecked and taking over Britain’s cities and towns … and monarchs.

In 2012 the late Roger Scruton, a conservative philosopher, published a book about the Church of England, title Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England. I reviewed that book for the American Spectator. Closing sentence of my review, quote:

I liked this book. However, I was raised, like Scruton, in mid-20th century England, in a culture now as comprehensively extinct as that of the Moabites. Whether Our Church will find favor with, or even be comprehensible to, readers of different nativity, I would not venture to speculate.

End quote.

Yes, it made me sad. Watching the old country die makes me sad. Sorry, sorry: I shouldn’t inflict my sadness on you.

The sadness is widely shared, though, even among unbelievers. Where the national Church is concerned, it was all foreseen 71 years ago by Philip Larkin, one of the best British poets of the 20th century.

Larkin was a complete atheist; but one of his best-loved works, by believers and unbelievers alike, is the poem Church Going, written in 1954. YouTube has a recording of Larkin himself reading the poem. I strongly recommend it to your attention.

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

Imprimis:  One of Trump 47’s first Executive Orders after he took office in January was to end the birthright-citizenship interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Local judges from coast to coast promptly issued nationwide orders of their own blocking the President’s order.

Yesterday, Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for and against both issues: birthright citizenship, and the power of a single local judge to temporarily block a president’s agenda nationwide.

On birthright citizenship, the President posted the following thing at X yesterday, quote:

Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the “SUCKERS” that we are!

End quote.

Like too many of the President’s posts, that doesn’t actually make much sense, but he’s surely right that foreigners are taking us for suckers. Trump’s next assertion, however, is just plain false. Quote:

The United States of America is the only Country in the World that does this, for what reason, nobody knows.

End quote.

In fact about thirty countries, including most of the Latin American ones, have birthright citizenship.

Whether or not birthright citizenship is constitutional depends on which interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” you favor. The writers of that Amendment should really have been more explicit.

The Supreme Court’s term ends in late June; we’ll likely get a decision about then. On birthright citizenship I’m betting they’ll leave it as is, telling us if we want it changed we should lobby Congress to amend the Amendment. Which of course they never will.

[Permalink]

Item:  Whatever is changing out here in reality, academics are still deep in the world of woke, where there is no such thing as sex and no such thing as race. Latest news from that strange world: pregnancy is just a social construct.

The academic here is Carlo Sariego, a Ph.D. student at — wait for it — Yale University. I’ve stared at Carlo Sariego’s picture for a couple of minutes, but I still have no idea whether he or she is male or female. For pronouns I’ll go with “it.”

It has just recently put out a paper with the title “Transfeminist Pregnancy: Reproductive Speculation, Genre, and Desire.” Sample quote from the introductory abstract:

I argue that pregnancy is not to be defined by biological phenomena but instead as a genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience and expectation. As a multidimensional genre of experience, rather than merely a biological datum, pregnancy can potentially establish a shared ground between trans and cis women.

End quote.

Yale University was once one of our foremost seats of learning. Can we call in the U.S. Air Force yet?

Item:  Did you know — I bet you didn’t — that this week has been National Police Week? Whether you did or not, I recommend to your attention Ryan Zickgraf’s May 14th article “The Fading American Police Officer” at UnHerd.com

New York City Police Department headcount has fallen by eleven percent since 2019, the author tells us. Nobody wants to be a cop any more. Why is that, I wonder?

To cheer myself up, and as a personal tribute to the boys in blue, I’ve pulled down one of my favorite books: Connie Fletcher’s 1990 classic What Cops Know. Sample passage from page 83 in the paperback. Quote:

There’s something we call the “Guilt Indicator.” Over and over and over again we see it. I can’t tell you how many scores of times I’ve seen it myself. This is it: We have three suspects for murder. You throw them all in the interrogation room, handcuff them to a wall. Come back later, one guy’s asleep. That is an absolute indication of the person’s guilt.

End quote.

I love this book. Cops really know stuff.

06 — Signoff.     That’s it, listeners and readers. Thank you for your time and attention.

I have some date-appropriate signoff music for you, but first I’ll just give my customary reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation 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. Thank you!

Signoff music. We’re coming up to high school graduation time, with its accompanying events. Those events of course include the prom, with all its teenage joys, pains, stresses, and ambiguities. For us in the geezer cohort, watching the young folk frolicking at their graduation prom is also of course an occasion for nostalgia.

Back in the Mother Country there was actually no tradition of a high school prom, or indeed of anything ceremonial about graduation. We seniors finished classes, sat our final exams, then spent the tail-end of the term goofing off — playing card games in the science lab until the school shut down for summer vacation. That’s how I remember things, anyway.

We had our teenage years, though. We had dances, and we had those joys, pains, stresses, and ambiguities. Nothing brings them back so clearly as the popular music of that time — in my case, the early sixties. A character in one of Noel Coward’s plays remarks, quote: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” end quote. Indeed it is.

I’ll sign off with what is, for me, one of the most potent examples, nostalgia at the max. Eh, where did all those years go? You younger listeners, gather ye rose-buds while ye may, and don’t be put off by the fact that rose-buds come with thorns.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

After finishing the show last week, I thought I left too much on the cutting room floor, so I picked up those scraps to make a follow on show this week. With next weekend being Memorial Day, there may not be a show on Friday, so I figured a sequel to the original while the ideas were fresh in my mind made some sense. If I do a show next week it will be on short topics, so send your suggestions.

The thing I wanted to get to last week, but spent too much time bashing the Protestants, is that we are in an age in which we not only have a fractured morality, but we also have a fractured metaphysics. The extreme example is we have some people who think their sex is assigned to them at birth. If they wish hard enough, they can change their sex and transcend the two-sex paradigm.

Crazy people are a part of every society, so while these people are fringe weirdos, they get support from a large and powerful segment of society. Many of our ruling class question the basics of reality. They are open to sex being imaginary because they are open to reality being a shared delusion created by the pale penis people to dominate the nonwhite population.

It is exceedingly difficult to have a society composed of people with differing opinions about how society ought to be organized and how we ought to live in it. If the differences are not too wide, then some compromise can be made. It is not possible to have a stable society when large parts of it have a different conception of reality from other parts of society, which is the present situation.

This new paganism is in some way an effort to create a new universal morality to replace the old one and use it to clear the decks of the alternatives. In another way it is an acknowledgement that the differences in how these different groups understand reality is too different to ever have a shared morality. Attempts to impose a new morality just highlight these differences in how we perceive reality.

The Gaia worshippers, for example, are not dealing in practical issues like the physical world when they demand sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. These are not real things that can exist in the physical world as most people understand it. Therefore, it is probably not possible for them to share the same society as those who think we should exploit our resources to advance our material existence.

The race issue is where the differences in morality and metaphysics make clear that the gaps are two large to traverse. If you think magic is why black people commit so much more crime than whites, you can never find a compromise with those who think behavior is rooted in biology. There can be no agreed upon ways to deal with black crime that are satisfactory to both camps.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

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