01:00 Ivies go wild. (Our higher education catastrophe.)
08:10 Book report. (Arnold Kling’s The Three Languages of Politics.)
15:15 The Jew thing. (Legislating against anti-Semitism.)
21:56 Let a hundred flowers bloom. (I agree with Mao.)
26:25 Minorities can hate, too. (New vocabulary needed.)
30:20 ”Anti-white” gets traction. (From the Donald!)
32:42 Ron and Don make up. (Good to hear!)
35:08 Starving a bereaved American family. (To feed illegal aliens.)
38:19 Signoff. (With an old favorite.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your contentiously genial host John Derbyshire, now fully recovered and back in the saddle after the rigors of April.
Our institutions of higher education have been in the news — all over the darn news, in fact — this past week: not in any proper educational context, but in the context of law, order, and authority. I shall start with that; then I shall continue with it, to see where it goes.
02 — Ivies go wild. Yes: our institutions of higher education led the news this week, but not for anything they did to advance human knowledge or add luster to Western civilization. Very much the contrary, in fact.
Harvard University has a flagpole out front, right by the statue of the university's founder and namesake John Harvard. Last Saturday that flagpole was flying the flag of Palestine, a nation that only exists as a couple of ambiguous territories controlled by anti-Western fanatics.
(Until seven months ago I would have closed that sentence with the words "… under the watchful eye of Israel." Alas, Israel's eye turned out to be not very watchful.)
Yale University's Cross Campus on Sunday became an encampment, filled with strangely similar tents occupied by protestors chanting hatred for Israel. Negotiations with the college administration broke down, and on Tuesday morning the campus was cleared by Yale and New Haven police. There don't seem to have been any arrests.
At Columbia University in New York City, the historic Hamilton Hall was taken over by rioters, who committed much vandalism there. Tuesday evening hundreds of cops stormed the place, climbing in through the windows, and arrested about a hundred protestors. This followed days of equivocating by the college administration while the protestors got more and more numerous and violent.
At Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, protestors occupied and trashed the university library. Some valuable collections in the library were stolen. By week's end the library had been cleared of protestors, but it will be a while before students can use it again.
And so on. A report on that Portland event includes the sentence, quote, "police arrested 12 people, including four students," end quote. Similar numbers are given for the other occupations. This wasn't just students. There were faculty involved, and outside organizers.
And, yes, administrators — certainly at Columbia, where the university authorities have been flapping their arms uselessly since mid-April while the campus sank into disorder and all instruction ceased.
None of this should be surprising. I've been reading for years how the number of self-identifying conservatives in our university faculties has dwindled steadily, while those who remain are ever more intimidated by radical leftists in the college administrations.
Here's a quote from a report out of the American Enterprise Institute in March last year, quote:
There is real concern about job security in this charged ideological climate. Faculty were asked if they were concerned about losing their jobs or suffering reputational costs in cases where someone misconstrued what they said or did, took it out of context, or posted something about them regarding a past action or episode. Again, conservatives were the most concerned: 72 percent were somewhat or very worried, compared with 40 percent of liberals and 56 percent of moderates.
End quote.
I've likewise been reading for years about the bloated DEI staffing — that's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — in higher education. There's been modest progress in that, with Florida and Texas passing laws to altogether eliminate their DEI bureaucracies, and colleges elsewhere reducing their DEI staff.
Others, however, are doubling down. The College Fix reported January 9th this year that the University of Michigan plans to increase DEI staffing from 142 last year to 241 this year, at a cost of over thirty million dollars. Economist Mark Perry, who conducted that analysis for The College Fix, quipped that, quip: "University of Michigan has become a DEI ideological complex with a university attached," end quip.
Of course the colleges have to spend their money somewhere and they have lots, lots of money. This morning's New York Post tells me that, quote, "Columbia is New York City's largest private landowner, and New York University is not far behind," end quote. I did not know that.
Punch line: They are exempt from property taxes!
So yes, these recent ructions at our universities should be seen in the context of what American higher education has become: a huge amoral money racket, devoted to the promotion of a narrow anti-Western ideology.
It is time — in fact, way past time — to shut off all public funding … and tax relief.
03 — Book report: Kling's three languages. Above all, this week's riots illustrate the terrible destructive power of the Woke ideology.
I mentioned in my Diary at the end of April that I had been seeing so many references in news commentary to Arnold Kling's 2013 book The Three Languages of Politics that I had ordered a copy through my local library, but had not yet gone down there to pick it up.
Since then I have done so, and read the book. (The copy I got was actually the 2022 edition.) The book is shorter than I expected, not much more than a pamphlet, and I wasn't very impressed by it.
Kling's three languages of politics, just to remind you, are:
The currently dominant ideology in the Western world, the one we call Woke, is entirely Progressive. Once you have decided who is oppressing whom, you are off and running with ideological passion.
I'm a temperamental conservative, speaking the second of Kling's three languages. I'll certainly grant that there is cruel oppression in the world, but nothing like as much as Progressives tell us — in the Western world, really none at all. It's certainly not a major organizing principal of any society outside a few hell-holes like Iran and North Korea.
I'm sympathetic to Israel because it is a small island of civilization in a region with a whole lot of barbarism. I'll allow some qualified certificates of civilization to Jordan and some of the Arab monarchies, but Syria? Iraq? Yemen? Iran? Egypt I'm not sure about, but Libya? Oh my God!
(I'll note in this context that the Trump administration pretty much agreed with me on this. They tried, and very nearly succeeded, to bring the Arab kingdoms together with Israel in an alliance of civilization against barbarism. That all ended in January 2021 because, you know: Orange Man bad!)
Libertarianism? Well, I enjoy my liberties and shall do what I can to defend them. However, I think civilization needs to defend itself against barbarism with some firm controls. Lunatics should be institutionalized, criminals should be incarcerated — humanely in both cases, of course. Rioters should be put down with … hey, why not water cannon?
Where rioting and disorder are concerned, I favor what a great British journalist called "the smack of firm government."
Arnold Kling is a libertarian. His book is in fact published by the Cato Institute. So on his own thesis, I speak a political language different from his. Since the author's libertarianism comes on quite strongly in his text, this makes much of it hard for me to take in, as if indeed it was written in a foreign language. Perhaps I'll give it another try.
Whatever: Kling's insight about the oppressor-victim axis around which Progressivism — our dominant politic ideology — revolves, is good and useful.
Immature young minds — especially female ones — yearning to be in line with the latest fashion will greet the appearance of a new victim group with wild celebration.
As well as being new to their young ears, "Gaza" has the further advantage of being easy to spell and remember, so the war over there, with Israel seen as oppressor and Gaza as victim, has had all the young air-heads fired up.
Until last fall none of them had heard of Gaza; then, with some prodding from professional agitators, in no time at all they were running out to buy Palestinian head scarfs and spit on their Jewish classmates.
The remedy for this barbarism is good social control: parental, administrative, municipal-state-and-federal — the smack of firm government.
Unfortunately we don't do that any more, certainly not at the college-administrative level. The presidents of our elite universities might, with some prodding, offer the feeble, hesitant tap of limp authority, but nothing more.
This is the legacy of Woke. If we don't get control of it, our civilization will fall. Watching these ructions, I slip into Oppenheimer mode: "I am become Woke, destroyer of nations."
04 — The Jew thing. Wednesday this week our House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, giving the federal Department of Education the power to cut off funding to schools and colleges that tolerate antisemitism as defined in the Act.
From the account given in The Washington Post, which is the only one I've read, it seems that anti-Zionism could count as antisemitism under the law.
This stuff soon gets knotty. Antisemitism, anti-Zionism: is there really any difference?
There sure is. Anti-Zionism has two main divisions: Gentile anti-Zionism and Jewish anti-Zionism.
Those two branches both subdivide. A Gentile anti-Zionist may be an antisemite who doesn't like seeing Jews get their way in anything; or he may have no issue with Jews per se — may even be a philosemite and a friend of Israel — but can't see why we, the United States, should have any official policy of support towards a small country six thousand miles away.
April 23rd, a week before the House passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, the House and Senate both passed a spending bill authorizing, among much else, quote from ABC news:
About $26 billion for supporting Israel and providing humanitarian relief for people in Gaza. About $4 billion of that would be dedicated to replenishing Israel's missile defense systems. More than $9 billion of the total would go toward humanitarian assistance in Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war.
End quote.
An American nationalist, even a well-wisher of Israel, might call that pointless governmental extravagance. He might ask: "Aren't there enough wealthy Jews in the world to pony up $4 billion for Israel's defense? And there are surely enough wealthy Arabs to keep the welfare queens of Gaza fed, clothed, and sheltered. Why should American taxpayers be involved?"
Jewish anti-Zionists divide into the religious and the secular.
Religious Jewish anti-Zionists belong to a splinter sect of Orthodox Judaism called Neturei Karta. They believe it goes against God's will to establish a Jewish state until the Messiah arrives — which, according to them, he so far hasn't. Neturei Karta has, the ADL tells us, quote, "a strong base of support in the U.S.," end quote.
Secular Jewish anti-Zionists are also numerous, and surprisingly fierce in their hostility to Israel. Any time I wish Israel well I get incoming emails starting with something like: "I'm an ethnic Jew, but …" then heading off into some heated rhetoric about the wickedness of the Israeli government and those crazy settlers.
For the most thorough exposition of secular Jewish anti-Zionism I refer you to the essays of Ron Unz. (I've been assuming that George Soros is another case; but reading his Wikipedia page just now to confirm, it's not at all clear.)
So there are some fine distinctions to be made here. How would those fine distinctions be dealt with by our federal Department of Education under this proposed new law?
How do you think? How do the seat-warmers of our federal bureaucracy deal with any complex issue? With about as much finesse and thoughtful consideration as the proverbial monkey trying to get intimate with a football, that's how.
By the way: What happened to conservatives wanting to get rid of the Department of Education? The damn thing is no use. Does Donald Trump have any stated policy on this?
Sorry: back to the anti-antisemitism bill. It is of course not law yet until the Senate votes and the president signs.
The first is not impossible: the House passed the bill on a vote of 320-91. Of that healthy 320 majority, 133 were Democrats. As to the president signing it, that will depend on exactly how terrified he is of Muslim voters in Michigan and Minnesota.
Where does Radio Derb stand on this? Next segment.
05 — Let a hundred flowers bloom. I'm against the anti-antisemitism bill. As a legislative matter, I'm anti-anti-antisemitism.
Antisemitism's not nice, but it's a point of view of the kind that is bound to exist at some level in a multi-ethnic society. It's entitled to free expression, or else it will only fester in silence.
And what about anti-Gentilism? When, four or five generations ago, great numbers of East European Jews migrated to the U.S.A. and Britain, they brought with them the old ghetto hostility towards the brutish, drunken goy. Some of that survived down to our own time; in the Borat movies of Sacha Baron Cohen, for example.
Stirred by the Civil Rights movement and the great Thought Revolution of the 1960s, some of that anti-Gentilism morphed into anti-whitism. It was a Jew, Susan Sontag, who told us in 1967 that, quote, "the white race is the cancer of human history," end quote.
Given that Ms Sontag was as white as I am, what should we make of her usage of the word "white" there? Is it unreasonable to suppose that it is just lazy talk for "Gentile"?
And so to the present. A few weeks ago everybody — including VDARE.com — was passing comment on a new book titled White Rural Rage which according to the Amazon blurb (I haven't read the book) warns its readers about the "existential threat" posed to the U.S.A. by angry rednecks.
The book's two co-authors are named … what? Can you guess? O'Flanagan and MacGregor? Cholmondely and Featherstonehaugh? No; they are Schaller, spelt S-c-h-, and Waldman. Uh-huh.
What is really an existential threat to the U.S.A. is the Great Replacement policy being energetically carried out by the current administration. Key movers of the policy are Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland, both Jewish. Is it really far-fetched to see anti-whiteness as being in direct line of descent from ghetto anti-Gentilism?
My very strong impression from surveying current social and political discourse in the Western world is not that there are too many things our laws permit us to talk about, but that there are way too many things we're not supposed to talk about.
So again: concerning this bill the House passed on Wednesday, put me down as against it — as anti-anti-antisemitism.
Antisemitism, anti-Gentilism, anti-whitism, … I'm with Mao Tse-tung here: 百 花 齊 放, 百 家 爭 鳴 (Băihuā qífàng, băijiā zhēngmíng) — "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend."
06 — Minorities can hate, too. Just a footnote to that last segment, in particular to the notion of anti-Gentilism.
Back in 1985, writing in National Review, the late Joe Sobran reminded us that where negativity between minorities and the majority in a multi-ethnic society is concerned, the negativity can go both ways.
I'll just give you a sample from his article. I've actually lifted it from Chapter 5 of Peter Brimelow's book Alien Nation, where Peter works over the same territory.
Current American political language, Sobran said, longish quote:
abounds in words for the hostility of the native for the alien, the majority for the minority, the respectable for the marginal, white for black, Christian for Jew, and so forth. We have prejudice, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, xenophobia, bias, discrimination and so forth. But these words are themselves prejudicial: They sum up, one-sidedly, a vast range of sentiment and behavior without admitting reciprocal moral realities: the hostility of Jew for Christian, black for white, marginal for respectable, minority for majority, alien for native, abnormal for normal …
… If we can sum up the worst attitudes of one side in the term "Nativism," then we ought to have some such term as "Alienism" (with apologies to the psychiatric profession) to sum up those of the other.
End quote.
The word "alienist," I should explain for listeners who weren't around in 1985, is an old term for "psychiatrist."
There's more to be said, of course. There is for example the power balance: Which party most likely has the power to push the other party around? Of course, it's the one with the most numbers — the majority.
That gives minorities a moral claim of sorts on their alienism that majorities can't claim for their nativism, xenophobia, etc. That moral claim can then generate irrational guilt in the majority. I mean, it would only be rational guilt if they actually did push the minority around.
Somewhere down this road there's an explanation for that weirdest of all social pathologies, white anti-whitism.
All that aside, Sobran was right to point out that ethnic negativity works in both directions, and needs more of a vocabulary than it had in 1985 … or yet has.
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: If you were at the VDARE conference last weekend, or watched it on livestream, you'll have heard us chuckling about the fact that the expression "anti-white," which would have drawn puzzled glances or angry snarls a year or two ago, is settling down into normal social discourse.
Donald Trump is on board. Tuesday this week Time magazine published an interview with him. One of the questions they asked was about polls showing that most of Trump's supporters think, quote, "anti-white racism now represents a greater problem in the country than anti-black racism." End quote. What did the Donald think of that?
Trump replied very forthrightly as follows, quote:
Oh, I think that there is a lot to be said about that. If you look at the Biden administration, they're sort of against anybody depending on certain views.
They're against Catholics. They're against a lot of different people. They actually don't even know what they're against, but they're against a lot. But no, I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can't be allowed either.
End quote.
OK, not the most articulate answer a politician's ever given to an interviewer, but it shows a frank realism that it would be refreshing to see in the White House.
I'm a Trump voter by default. Another Biden term — Biden-Harris term, whatever — would leave the country in ruins. I haven't been enthusiastic about Trump, though, because of the disappointments in his first term. Now, after reading that and some similar snippets, I'm warming up …
Item: Here's another one of those snippets.
I have been enthusiastic about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. I know, he's not exactly a glamor zone; comes across somewhat geeky, and so on. He's an honest man and a patriot, though, and a very capable Chief Executive.
So I was glad to read in Monday's Washington Post that DeSantis and Trump seem to have cleared the air between them. This followed a private meeting on Sunday — last Sunday, April 28th — in Miami.
There's been bad blood between DeSantis and Trump since last year's primary season, when Trump was quite unreservedly mean to the Governor. They hadn't spoken since.
Sunday's meeting was set up by Steve Witkoff, a Florida real-estate magnate known to both men. Apparently it went on for several hours. Quote from the Post: "The meeting was friendly, according to a person with direct knowledge." End quote.
That's good to hear. Mainly because of the vile way he treated Jeff Sessions, I had Trump tagged as another Bobby Kennedy, of whom Lyndon Johnson famously remarked: "When Bobby hates you, you stay hated."
Apparently not. To quote the Post again, quote: "The former president has shown a willingness to be forgiving and remarkably transactional when it benefits him." End quote.
I hope it does benefit him. DeSantis, too; I look forward to voting for Ron DeSantis on the 2028 presidential ticket. If you need a good speechwriter, Governor, I can be reached at VDARE.com.
Item: As a New Yorker, I've held the New York City Fire Department in high regard since they showed such courage and sacrifice on 9/11. So this story made me seethe.
The background here is the huge number of illegal aliens settled in New York City as a result of the Biden administration's open-borders policy. It's put a terrific strain on the city's budget and huge cuts are being made: $132m to the police department, $32m to the Department of Sanitation, and $74 million to the Fire Department.
One casualty of that last cut was 36-year-old Derek Floyd, married with two little children. Floyd was a Marine Corps veteran, with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. After retiring from military service he joined the city Fire Department. A health condition prevented him becoming an active firefighter, so he was given a desk job.
Then the illegal alien tsunami hit the city budget. Floyd was laid off a couple of weeks before Christmas last year. He was just shy of the point in his employment when he would have vested full benefits for his family — several hundred thousand dollars worth, with medical insurance and all.
So that's tough. But he got another job, right? He's only 36.
No: unfortunately Floyd died of a heart attack April 15th. His family is left destitute. Gotta look after those "asylum seekers"!
The UFA, the Uniformed Firefighters Association, has a page for Derek Floyd; you'll see the link in my transcript when we publish it mid-week. There's a GoFundMe page with a link at the UFA page. That very worthy charity Tunnel to Towers has paid off the mortgage for Floyd's wife. God bless her and the kids.
And to the firefighters of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware: If Joe Biden's mansion catches fire, let it burn.
08 — Signoff. That's all, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention, and particular thanks to all who supported last weekend's conference, either by attending or livestreaming. VDARE.com is still in the arena!
For signoff, a favorite. I probably play this one too much; but you never lose affection for the music of your young years, and this one really is a great favorite of mine. Plus, I have an unassailable excuse for using it as signoff this week.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: The Bee Gees, "First of May."]
