02:02 The Trump verdict. (The hunt will never end.)
07:16 Narcissism, hypocrisy, Clintons. (How’s Hillary?)
15:33 Lionel Shriver on demography. (We need to talk about Africa.)
22:53 DEI is existential. (A disappointing pier.)
30:45 South Africa’s election. (Mandela plus 30 years.)
32:55 A midwit gynocrat speaks. (Insolence will creep out.)
34:42 Kim Jong Un’s poop bombs. (A bad precedent.)
36:19 The coming Antarctic War. (No hiding place.)
38:24 Signoff. (With Schumann.)
[Music clip: The Beatles: "It was twenty years ago today …"]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the voice of your pertinaciously genial host was first heard on the internet twenty years ago, although not precisely twenty years ago today.
My first podcast went out on May 27th 2004, twenty years ago last Monday. I would have alerted you in last week's podcast to the upcoming anniversary; but May 27th this year was Memorial Day and I didn't want to upstage our nation's heroes.
All twenty years of the show are archived at my personal website johnderbyshire.com, both audio files and text. Should you choose to listen to the audio you will need to set aside 605 hours 4 minutes and 15 seconds. On a regular working week of five days, nine to five, that will be fifteen weeks and another half-day. Happy listening!
02 — The wound that will not heal. This week's news has been dominated by the verdict in Donald Trump's Manhattan trial.
The jury found Trump guilty on all 34 charges of having falsified business records in 2017 with the intent to cover up another crime. What was that other crime? I don't know. Does anybody?
Trump's real crime, the one for which our managerial elites will never forgive him, was defeating the elites' candidate, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 Presidential election. That was his real crime, the one for which he must ever be hounded and persecuted. That was the wound that will not heal.
There are already other criminal charges against Trump elsewhere.
That's 54 charges to add to the 34 Trump was found guilty of on Thursday. So not yet a hundred counts in total, but you can be sure we'll get there. The Trump-hunters will never quit.
There are plenty of other jurisdictions where the D.A. and his prosecutors are plump from feeding at George Soros' trough and the jury pool is reliably woke. The wound will never heal, the hunt will never end.
What came to my mind on hearing the verdict was an old legal story from 19th-century Ireland when, to quote a history of the time, "violence and sectarian tensions abounded" and "the jury system came under considerable strain." Juries often sympathised with the accused.
In one of these cases a judge is said to have dismissed a prisoner with the words: quote, "You have been acquitted by a Limerick jury, and you may now leave the dock without any other stain upon your character!" End quote.
Thursday's verdict was of the opposite kind. We can fairly say to Trump: "You, Sir, having been doggedly outspoken against the ideology of our ruling class and having defeated one of its champions, you have been pronounced guilty by a Manhattan jury, and you may now leave the dock without any stain whatsoever on your character."
I wasn't surprised by the result and I doubt it will much affect what will happen in November's Presidential election. What will happen is, the ruling class will rig the vote counts just as they did in 2020, and the Democratic Party's candidate will win.
The only thing I'm curious about is: Who will that candidate be? I can't believe that even our elites are cynical enough to dump Bumblin' Joe Biden on us for another four years.
A Democrat victory, though, is pre-determined. The only election result I'll take at all seriously is one where voters, other than serving military, had to show up and identify themselves at a properly-supervised location on a specific day.
A franchise that I'd take seriously would be one limited to married tax-paying citizens with children. That's in the realm of pure imagination, though …
03 — Narcissism, hypocrisy, Clintons. Having mentioned Mrs Clinton just there, I got to wondering how she's doing.
You know how it is with geezers: we like to keep track of each other. That's partly for actuarial purposes, but there's also a fascination to it: seeing our schoolyard playmates, or guys and gals that might have been our playmates, at the other end of life.
We remember, or we can imagine, what they were like in the schoolyard. It's surprising how similar they can be seven and a half decades on.
Hillary's two years younger than me; Donald Trump's one year younger than me; Biden, two and a half years older. The clock's ticking on all of us. So … how's the lady doing?
Well, she's keeping herself busy. Late February, for example, she gave an interview for a forthcoming book, title: The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America. Amazon gives the publication date at June 4th, next Tuesday.
The authors of this book are two New York Times reporters, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer. In last Saturday's edition of the newspaper they retailed some of the interview Hillary gave them for the book.
The book's title, once again, is The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America. That "Roe" is the one in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that abortion is a constitutional right. The ruling was struck down by the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson ruling that returned abortion regulation to the individual states.
So the book, and the interview Mrs Clinton gave for it, is all about abortion. She blamed her own party for the Dobbs decision, quote from her in that interview:
We didn't take it seriously, and we didn't understand the threat. Most Democrats, most Americans, did not realize we are in an existential struggle for the future of this country. We could have done more to fight.
End quote.
With true Clintonian narcissism, she lets herself off the hook. Quote from the Times:
Mrs Clinton did not express regret for any inaction herself. Rather, she said her efforts to raise alarms during her 2016 campaign went unheeded and were dismissed as "alarmist" by voters, politicians and members of her own party. In that race, she had talked about the threats to abortion rights on the campaign trail and most memorably in the third presidential debate, vowing to protect Roe when Mr Trump promised to appoint judges who would overturn it.
End quote.
And of course, everything is "existential." The managerial elites love that word. Here's Hillary again, this time talking about the current election campaign. Quote:
This election is existential. I mean, if we don't make the right decision in this election in our country, we may never have another actual election. I will put that out there because I believe it. And if we no longer have another actual election, we will be governed by a small minority of right-wing forces that are well organized and well funded and are getting exactly what they want in terms of turning the clock back on women.
End quote.
Right. Opening the borders to twenty million illegal aliens isn't "existential." Discouraging military enlistment by loading up the armed services with DEI head-counters isn't "existential." Ending our fossil-fuel independence isn't "existential." But letting the voters of the separate states make their own decisions about abortion regulation — that's "existential."
From there, the lady's off and running, to ever greater heights of narcissism and hypocrisy. She accuses Trump's Supreme Court nominees Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett of lying in their confirmation hearings. Quote:
They just flat-out lied. And Democrats did nothing in the Senate. If I'd still been in the Senate, and on the Judiciary Committee, I think, you know, I hope I would have tried to do more about what were just outright prevarications.
End quote.
And back, back, to the wound that will not heal: her defeat in the 2016 election. Quote from the Times:
Mrs Clinton said she saw her defeat in that election as inextricable from her gender. As she has in the past, she blamed the former F.B.I. director James Comey's last-minute reopening of the investigation of her private email server for her immediate defeat. Mr Comey had raised questions about her judgment and called her "extremely careless" but recommended no criminal charges. Other political strategists have faulted her message, strategy and various missteps by her campaign for her loss in 2016.
[Inner quote.] "But once he did that to me, the people, the voters who left me, were women. They left me because they just couldn't take a risk on me, because as a woman, I'm supposed to be perfect." [End inner quote.]
End quote.
No, Hillary, you're not supposed to be perfect. You are, though, supposed to be a person with some track record of real accomplishment, who cares about something other than her own precious self.
Still, I guess there's been progress here. To judge from those extracts in the Times, at least she's no longer blaming her defeat on Russia Russia Russia …
04 — Matters existential (1): Demography. Hillary Clinton has one child; I have no information on the numbers for Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, the authors of that book I've been quoting.
I mention that because, if we want to talk about matters truly existential, we should start with demography.
For those of us interested in demography, the London Spectator ran an interesting piece May 25th. Title: "What will Europe look like in the future?" The author of the article is novelist Lionel Shriver, whose books I have reviewed at various times this past five years.
(Before proceeding I should note that Ms Shriver — and yes, she's female, that "Lionel" notwithstanding — published a new novel last month, title Mania, about our current culture wars. I haven't read it yet.)
In this May 25th piece at the Spectator Ms Shriver does not mince words. Quote:
A leading reason that continental Europe is shifting to the political right is popular concern about mass immigration. So I'm putting Europeans and their short-sighted representatives on notice: you folks haven't seen anything yet.
End quote.
She then writes at length about — Oh, my God! — sub-Saharan Africa. Sample quote:
Experts regard it as inevitable that as poor countries develop, the birth rate drops. But last year, Africa's TFR was 4.2, sub-Saharan Africa's 4.6. This fertility rate has barely changed for 70 years. Africa is not getting with the programme.
Take Nigeria, whose population is expected to rise from 225 million now to about 375 million by 2050, vying with the US to become the third-most populous country in the world. Nigeria still has a TFR of 5.1. Twenty years ago, its TFR was 6.0 — so the decrease in family size has been slow. Yet half the country lives in extreme poverty, one of the highest rates on the continent.
Are elevated birthrates simply due to inadequate provision of contraception? Probably not. For example, in West and Central Africa in 2015, women averaged 5.5 children. But they undershot their desired family size by half a child. They'd rather have had six. Most Africans don't accidentally have big families. They want big families.
End quote.
I can claim some primacy here. Radio Derb, September 4th 2015:
[Pips.]
Regular listeners know that at this point I reach for my grandfather's 1922 atlas, which includes population numbers. Back then the British Isles had a population of 47.31 million. British West Africa, for contrast, had a population of 22.48 million. So the British Isles had over twice the population of British West Africa 93 years ago.
Forward to today. The British Isles are still here, now the U.K plus Ireland: total population 68.97 million. British West Africa is nowadays the independent nations of Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Gambia: total population 215.74 million. That's over three times Britain's number.
Once again: 1922, British Isles had over twice the population of British West Africa. 2015, British West Africa has over three times the population of the British Isles.
Birthrate differentials will do that.
[Pips.]
Back to Lionel Shriver. After some more scary statistics about black Africa, she remarks that, edited quotes:
This massive demographic shift is this century's most momentous development, yet it's barely ever discussed …
This is certain to get ugly … No one is planning for this.
End quotes.
That Spectator article comes along with a YouTube clip that I recommend to your attention. It's 21 minutes long, but worth your time. In it one of the Spectator staffers jointly interviews Lionel Shriver and professional demographer Paul Morland, whose work I have mentioned more than once in these podcasts.
In the clip, Paul Morland, who holds academic positions at the universities of Oxford and London, treads carefully around the black-Africa issue. Lionel Shriver, by contrast, addresses it with almost VDARE.com levels of frankness. I really must read her new novel …
05 — Matters existential (2): DEI. Here's another issue that can fairly be said to be "existential": DEI.
James Joyce, in his novel Ulysses, describes a pier as, quote, "a disappointed bridge." Whether a pier can itself be disappointed, I don't know, but a pier can definitely be disappoint-ing. We saw that this week in the eastern Mediterranean.
The pier in question is the one Joe Biden promised in his State of the Union address to build for delivery of food aid to Gaza. The pier was accordingly built by our military engineers, at a cost to us American taxpayers of $320 million.
So the food aid was delivered by ship to the pier starting on May 17th. From there it was supposed to be taken by truck to the U.N. warehouse eight miles inland, for distribution to the Palestinians.
May 20th, which is to say three days later, Reuters reported that no food had actually arrived at the warehouse for two days. The trucks were looted and the food stolen before they could set out for the warehouse. Whether the looters were local civilians acting on their own initiative or Hamas operatives acting under orders, isn't clear.
So yes, definitely disappointing. A bigger disappointment was yet to come, though.
Wednesday this week — so now the pier has been operating for eleven days — it was announced that it was no longer usable and will be out of operation for at least over a week.
The problem here was that the pier as designed and implemented was not intended to be used in waters with waves higher than three feet. Unfortunately waves three feet high or higher are common in that part of the Mediterranean.
Quote from Jim Geraghty at National Review, May 29th, quote:
We don't know who, precisely, came up with the idea to build a pier. Perhaps on some future date, we'll hear that it was the proposal of national-security adviser Jake Sullivan or Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin or someone else. The buck stops with the president, anyway; he's the one who authorized the mission.
But … come on. The plan was to build a pier on the front door of a war zone, in the absolute minimally acceptable environmental conditions, and hope for the best? That has Joe Biden's fingerprints all over it.
End quote.
I'm wondering if there isn't maybe another factor here. Military engineers are … engineers, with appropriate skill sets. There are regular news stories about how DEI in the military is hurting recruitment. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that it's also impacting the levels of expertise in units like the Corps of Engineers.
A structure not intended to be used in waters with waves higher than three feet, erected where waves are regularly higher than three feet? This isn't rocket science, just basic engineering. Can our DEI-addled military still do basic engineering?
If I'm right about this as a military issue, you can file the Gaza Pier story with those reports from earlier this year about problems with the CHIPS Act.
Just to remind you: The U.S.A. has been way behind in manufacturing high-end computer chips. Those chips, essential to modern industry — to modern life — come mostly from Asia, with Taiwan a particularly key supplier. In hopes of getting more high-end chip production going here, and safeguarding our chips supply chain against a Chinese takeover of Taiwan, last year Congress passed the CHIPS Act, with lots of subsidies and incentives for domestic makers of chips.
Results have been disappointing. The foreign firms whose expertise we hoped to draw in, like Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung, after dipping their toes in the water have quickly withdrawn. Why? With all those subsidies and incentives, why?
A long March 7th article at The Hill explains the problem. Sample quote:
What explains chipmakers' apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.
Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven't noticed is that it's because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can't move …
requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as "justice-involved individuals," more commonly known as ex-cons.
End quote.
The big chip firms would rather build their plants some place where they can hire the best workers, selected solely on merit — not on race, sex, or "justice involvement."
I don't think it's a stretch to say that if we want to talk about matters "existential," we need to include DEI.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: "It was thirty years ago today …" Well, no, actually it was thirty years ago on May 10th, May 10th 1994, that Nelson Mandela became the first black President of South Africa at the head of his party, the African National Congress, ANC.
Wednesday this week South Africa had a general election. As I record here on Friday afternoon, we still don't have complete results. It looks, though, as if the ANC, after thirty years in power, is going to have to go into coalition with someone or other. With 80 percent of votes counted, the ANC has only 41 percent.
Who are the possible partners? Well, in second place is the center-right and relatively white-friendly Democratic Alliance, with 22 percent of the vote. Way out on the left are the anti-white communist parties MK and EFF with a combined 22 percent.
The country's a wreck, of course. At least 33 per cent of all adults are out of work — the highest tally of any nation in the world. The homicide rate is the world's third highest, worse than Haiti (although not as bad as Jamaica). There are power blackouts, the rail system's collapsed, ships have difficulty unloading, and of course the levels of corruption are sensational.
Not to worry. I'm sure whover wins this week's election will put things right.
Item: Just to return to Hillary Clinton for a moment: We all remember when, in the 2016 election, she called half of Donald Trump's supporters "a basket of deplorables." Well, these lefty broads — these midwit gynocrats — just can't help themselves.
So here was New York State Governor Kathy Hochul commenting on a very successful rally that Donald Trump held May 23rd in the Bronx, which is heavily black and Hispanic.
Interviewed on CNN by Jake Tapper, our Governor extruded the following, quote:
I'll tell you what won't make a difference at all Jake and that's for Donald Trump to be the ringleader and invite all his clowns to a place like the Bronx.
End quote.
Said Dr Johnson to Boswell: "Sir, the insolence of wealth will creep out." That was back when wealth was the great social divider.
What mostly divides us nowadays, snobs from slobs, is having correct opinions; but, just as in Johnson's day, the insolence of the snobs will creep out.
Item: Did you hear about Kim Jong Un's poop balloons? Quote from aljazzera.com, May 29th, quote:
North Korea has sent hundreds of balloons loaded with rubbish and faeces across the heavily fortified border to the South.
The South Korean military released photos on Wednesday, some showing rubbish strewn around collapsed balloons, with the word "excrement" written on a bag in one photograph. The North said that the swarm, containing toilet paper and suspected animal faeces, was a response to South Korean propaganda campaigns using balloons.
End quote.
Strange story. I'm sorry to say it stirred an evil thought in me.
As a responsible dog owner I take my pooch for a good long walk every morning, coming home with a little plastic bag of poop that I have to dispose of.
Now, that neighbor in the adjoining garden, the one who goes out of his way to be obnoxious to us. What if he were to look out one morning and see a little balloon sailing over his lawn with a package attached …
Item: Of the world's five great continents, only one has never been visited by war. That may soon change.
DailyMail.com, May 19th, quote:
For more than 150 years, wars have been fought for access to oil, the thick, black ooze that the world has come to rely on.
Despite the growth of renewable energy in recent years, almost all of the world's energy, 84 percent as of 2020, runs on fossil fuels, including oil and gas.
And with the Russian discovery of an estimated 511 billion barrels of oil and gas in the Antarctic, the race for Black Gold is on once again, as nations across the world claiming they alone own the land above the fossil fuel reserve, even though a historic treaty prevents anyone from accessing it.
But experts have warned that Russia and China should not be trusted and that the West ought to make preparations to prevent them from getting their hands on it.
Russia's discovery underneath the Antarctic is already starting to spook the West, with the issue being brought up at a [parliamentary] Select Committee this week.
End quote.
My apologies to any survivalists out there who were thinking of evading World War Three by relocation to the South Pole. I'm sorry to have burst your balloon … I mean, bubble.
07 — Signoff. That's it, listeners. Thank you for your time and attention, especially those of you who intend to take up my challenge and listen to all 605 hours 4 minutes and 15 seconds of Radio Derb.
To sign us out, a little concert music. A friend has gifted me with a period-instrument recording of Robert Schumann's String Quartets, Opus 41. Here is a bit of No. 3, the A major quartet, this passage marked as adagio molto.
I shall have more to say about Schumann and his work in my monthly Diary, which will be posted at VDARE.com sometime this weekend or very soon thereafter; and there will of course be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: The Eroica Quartet, Schumann's string quartet in A major, Op.41, No. 3.]
