02:16 The United States of Black Racial Grievance. (Pampered pets whining.)
08:19 Good luck to the January 6th Committee! (That is, the Stop Trump committee.)
12:54 Drain that swamp! (Advice to a Trumpist president.)
18:27 No money, no honey. (When congressmen had wit.)
22:06 Make red states red again. (Let the RINOs have D.C.)
26:57 Re-institutionalize America! (But what about the staff?)
33:18 Bennie Thompson no insurrectionist. (Just a hypocrite.)
34:16 Bye-bye Boudin. (Soros reaches for checkbook.)
35:17 Dangerous knowledge. (AI gaydar.)
37:02 Blinken's Equity Tsar. (Sunbeams from cucumbers.)
37:52 Miss Bumbums prepare. (Circumferentially impressive.)
39:27 Signoff. (With Brendan O'Dowda.)
01—Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your institutionally genial host John Derbyshire, with some reflections on current events.
I regret to confess that I did not follow the opening session of the January 6th committee with close attention. You can only ask so much of a man. I shall have things to say about the committee, but they will be general, not particular. If it's particular you want, go to the regime media, who today, Friday, are speaking of little else.
"Speaking of little else," yes. That brought to mind an ancient joke from Ireland's courts of justice. There are rather a lot of those jokes. Here's a different one.
A certain Judge Adams was presiding over cases in the county of Limerick, which was notorious for the reluctance of its juries to convict local criminals. One such was duly acquitted. Judge Adams, closing the trial and giving the defendant his freedom, famously said: "You have been found not guilty by a Limerick jury and you may leave this court with no other stain on your character."
That story came to mind when I heard about Hillary Clinton's campaign lawyer Michael Sussman being acquitted by a Washington, D.C. jury.
02—An opening salvo for 2024. Top of the news today, at any rate in the establishment media, is the first of the six congressional hearings we've been promised on last year's Capitol Hill protests against the 2020 election.
The chairman of this event is some congresscritter named Bennie Thompson, of whom I had never heard until yesterday. Representative Thompson is black, as he was at pains to make clear for those people watching who may have failed to notice the fact.
From Rep. Thompson's opening remarks, edited quote:
Thanks to everyone watching tonight for sharing part of your evening, to learn about the facts and causes of the events leading up to and including the violent attack on January 6th, 2021 … on our democracy, electoral system, and country.
I am Bennie Thompson, Chairman of the January 6th, 2021 Committee. I was born, raised and still live in Bolton, Mississippi, a town with a population of 521, which is midway between Jackson and Vicksburg, MS, and the Mississippi River.
I am from a part of the country where people justified the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I'm reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021.
End quote.
Ah, the romance of American blackness! Thirty seconds into the committee hearings and we're already deep into black narcissism. I didn't stick around for the obligatory mention of Emmett Till.
Do black Americans—the pampered, privileged pets of our society—do they really not have any idea how much so many of us resent their endless whining? We have twisted and deformed our entire society—our justice system, our educational system—in efforts to appease them, but they only ask for more.
To anyone claiming to conduct an investigation of the January 6th protests there is an instance of that deformation staring right back at you, Mr Chairman: the killing of unarmed white female Ashli Babbitt by armed black male Capitol Police Lt Michael Byrd. After a perfunctory inquiry, Lt. Byrd was cleared of any wrongdoing.
I know it's trite to say it, Mr Chairman, but do you really believe that a white male cop who shot an unarmed black woman under any circumstances whatsoever would get away without a word of reprimand? You believe that? Really?
Now tell me what federal statistics show about black assaults on whites. A respectable commentator has written the following thing, quote:
In the U.S., blacks commit the vast share of the interracial violence between blacks and whites that is not classified as a hate crime: 88 percent.
End quote.
Is that figure wrong, Mr Chairman? As a federal legislator, do you have federal statistics that contradict it?
Accumulated over the 157 years since the Civil War ended, what are the numbers for (a) blacks killed by whites using any method, including lynching, and (b) whites killed by blacks? Do you have an estimate for those numbers, Mr Chairman?
I'm wasting my breath, of course. This is the United States of Black Racial Grievance. The whining, the narcissism, the twisting and deforming: these are our nation's reason for existing. Without them we would drift aimlessly, without purpose or goal.
And this committee and its so-called "investigation" is, as most of us understand, nothing to do with justice, constitutionality, or national security. It is the opening salvo in a crudely political campaign to prevent Donald Trump from running for president in 2024. That's the beginning and end of it.
03—Good luck to the January 6th Committee! I'm sorry: the sheer volume of dishonesty and hypocrisy, of disregard for truth and facts, gets me sputtering. We're really getting up to North Korean levels of establishment lying.
Although unlike North Korea, we still have a few news outlets that resist posting regime propaganda, for which we should be grateful.
The front page of my New York Post this morning had no mention of the committee hearings. It was entirely given over to the story about a 15-year-old girl sitting at home doing her homework when she was hit by a stray bullet—although not fatally, thank goodness. No doubt that bullet was fired by a Klansman—just another incident in the "dark history" that Chairman Thompson reminded us of.
The New York Post print edition did have one page of somewhat-skeptical coverage of the committee hearings—page 7—(considerably enlarged and somewhat slanted in the online version) but nothing in the op-ed pages, no editorials. For this relief, much thanks.
Fox News, the one cable channel that did not snap to attention and yell "Sir, yes Sir!" when our rulers told them to give full coverage, Fox hit back hard, with an exceptionally vigorous and well-researched edition of Tucker Carlson's show, uninterrupted by commercials. (I hope sales of MyPillow and Relief Factor were not too badly impacted.)
So yes: for a little longer at any rate we shall be free to scoff at the regime lies. Let's take comfort in that.
Meanwhile I feel bound to say that while I think it's deplorable for our national legislature to sink to these depths in order to prevent one particular candidate running for office in 2024, I wouldn't mind much if they were to succeed.
I don't want Trump running in 2024. He'd be 78 on Election Day and that's too old. Enough with these geezers. I'm in the same zone myself, and I am all too well aware of how my energy level—my willingness and ability to get things done—has faded.
"Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government," wrote Alexander Hamilton. We'd get more sense from a President Trump than we're getting from Joe Biden—how could we get less?—but we wouldn't be getting any more energy.
And his age aside, I just don't think Trump's a good candidate. Sure, he had some positive accomplishments, on federal regulations, for example, and energy independence, and telling foreigners to keep out of our business.
There was too much I find hard to forgive, though: his failure to exercise his will over Congress in that two years his party controlled both houses, the lack of any urgency in building the border wall he'd promised, his shameful treatment of Jeff Sessions and Ann Coulter, his indulgence of the slimy subversive Jared Kushner, … Too many negatives.
I want Trumpism, but I don't want Trump. Yeah, sure: if he is the GOP candidate in 2024 I'll clench my teeth and vote for him, just to stick a finger in the ruling class's collective eye.
04—Drain that swamp! The hatred our ruling class has for Trump is manifest. It still, after six years, burns fierce and bright. It's really an extraordinary thing.
I can remember the hatred those same people—well, their 1970s equivalents—had for Richard Nixon, who was a much better president—and a much better man—than Trump.
One of my workmates at Savin Business Machines in the mid-1970s was proud owner of some rolls of toilet paper with Nixon's portrait on each sheet. Even at the time, when I was still a liberal twenty-something, I thought that was a bit over the top. Or under the bottom, perhaps …
The regime's hatred of Trump is far beyond that. It's really a wonder to behold, and drives much of our national policy.
And this hatred, this Trump Derangement Syndrome, is just the emblem, the outward symbol, of their hatred for us, normal white Americans. Sixty-three million of us voted for Trump in 2016 because, I think the ruling class know, we were fed up with having their anti-white, anti-American ideology rammed down our throats, and with having no real policy alternatives to vote for.
Trump was an outsider, not one of them, not a member of the Uniparty establishment. That's why we liked him; that's why they hate him.
I hope for a Trumpish victory in 2024: not Trump, but someone bearing that same banner, the banner of truth, justice, and patriotism, of secure borders and equality under the law, of fiscal restraint and avoidance of foreign entanglements.
If such a victory happens, here's my advice to the victor: Drain that swamp! In particular, end the naked politicization of federal law enforcement. There need to be mass purges, mass firings, from the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense.
I'm not sure how deep the purges would need to go. At the bottom levels—border security officers in Homeland Security, for example—there must be many federal employees who'd be glad to do their jobs if they were allowed to. Perhaps the same is even true of the FBI.
In the upper ranks, though, where the decisions are made to hunt down and persecute dissidents and turn blind eyes to real crime, I want to see mass layoffs. I'll even pay their damned inflated federal pensions; just get them out of Washington, D.C.
Calvin Coolidge fired the Boston police force; Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers: there are two fine examples to guide you, Mister President.
For a really radical approach, consider just shutting down departments and agencies altogether. Our nation got along for 157 years without an FBI; do we really need one? We managed for two hundred and twenty-seven years without a Department of Homeland Security; how on earth did we cope?
And if you're going to be that radical, go further and move federal departments out of Washington, D.C. The city is a hive of intrigue. What would be wrong with the Justice Department being based in Idaho, Defense in Kansas, Treasury in Arkansas, the State Department in … oh, I don't know … Alaska?
Let's have some real reform: reform in the direction of more of our traditional liberties, more local control of our affairs, less power to the administrative state. The course we are currently on leads to despotism and despair; let's change course.
05—No money, no honey. Did I say "a hive of intrigue"? I believe I did. That brought to mind an extract from the Congressional Record I was browsing earlier this week. Let me explain.
In my Miscellany at the end of last week's podcast I had an item about California's Appellate Court ruling that bees are fish.
That triggered a very faint recollection of something from many years ago. After some diligent research I tracked down the source. Here it is in the Congressional Record for July 16th 1973.
The speaker here is Silvio Conte, who represented the 1st Congressional District of Massachusetts for 32 years, 1959-91. He was a Republican, and a remarkably conservative one considering his constituency was in Massachusetts.
Conte was particularly strongly opposed to lavish federal spending. Well, there came up a bill that included a beekeepers indemnity program to give federal compensation to beekeepers whose bees had been killed by careless use of pesticides. Rep. Conte was of course opposed to this program, which he called "honey money." He moved an amendment to stop it.
Edited quote from his address.
This federal giveaway should really set my colleagues off buzzing, if it does not make them break out in hives …
My waxing rhetorically would be very funny if it were not for the taxpayers who are getting stung …
If Congress were to continue this program, it would lay itself bare to the stinging indictment of taxpayers that it has, may I say, bees in its bonnet.
I urge my colleagues to take the stinger out by passing this amendment to end the beekeeper indemnity program.
End quote.
Unfortunately the amendment failed to pass. Following the vote, Rep. Conte left his seat and made a beeline for the exit.
It was a worthy effort, though: not just for a restraint on federal spending, but also to introduce some wit into congressional proceedings, which as a rule are unimaginably boring.
Do any members of the current House have Silvio Conte's talent for verbal humor? I seriously doubt it. We are duller and stupider than we were fifty years ago, and that goes double for the congresscritters.
06—Make red states red again. Sorry, that was just a detour. Returning to the substance of our nation's politics: What can be done to prevent the November midterms being a RINO triumph?
Republicans, as I'm sure you know, are polling well to win the House and quite likely the Senate, too. What will that avail us, though, if it just results in more H-1B visas to sideline American middle-class workers, more pointless foreign wars, more handouts to GOP donors, more Uniparty assent to revolutionary cultural change, more Mitch McConnells, Lindsey Grahams, and Mitt Romneys, more Liz Cheneys and Adam Kinzingers?
Daniel Horowitz had a good piece at The Blaze May 19th arguing that the power of the RINOs can be reduced by skillful organization at the state and local levels. I'll give you the intro, quote:
Idaho has long suffered a paradox, in that it is so dominated by Republicans that it is not so Republican at all. Because it is a de facto one-party state, many liberals who are well connected to the woke industries and lobbyists choose to run as Republicans and use their superior campaign cash to campaign as conservatives, the exact opposite of what they plan to do in office. This is why, despite a 58-12 majority in the House and a 28-7 majority in the Senate, conservatives rarely enjoy legislative wins that other red states are able to easily secure. Last night's elections might have changed that in a big way.
End quote.
That phrase "last night's elections" refers to the May 17th primaries to pick candidates for November's elections to seats in the Idaho state legislature. As usual in state-legislature elections, several members of the lower house planned to run for the upper, and of course a lot of incumbents want to run again for the seats they hold.
Well, May 17th was bad news for incumbent RINOs. Twenty of them lost their primaries, pushed aside by conservatives.
Much of this was the work of Idaho's Freedom PAC—that's "PAC" for "Political Action Committee"—which has been actively recruiting candidates to run against against RINO incumbents. Whatever Idaho's Freedom PAC has been doing, PACs in other states should study and copy, especially those states with runoff elections to get around the vote-splitting problem.
It's not going to be easy prising the Republican Party out of the hands of RINOs. Money is the main problem: RINOs are the ones with the big-dollars donor support. Idaho seems to show it can be done, though, at least at the lower political levels.
Horowitz again, quote:
Overall, conservatives would be wise to focus more on state and local races rather than federal races. Making red states red again and state legislatures great again will go a long way in divorcing ourselves from the morass of Washington. The RINOs can have the irremediably broken federal system, while we focus on rebuilding liberty in some of the states.
End quote.
07—Re-institutionalize America! I opened up my May Diary with a call to put criminals in jail, mad people in asylums, homeless people in compulsory shelters (with jail as the alternative), and illegal aliens who for some reason can't be deported in institutions until they self-deport.
A reader remarked that that's a lot of institutionalization. Do we actually have that many institutions? he wondered.
The answer is of course no, we don't. We should have, though. Simple institutionalization is the answer to a lot of our problems.
In the matter of jails, for example: If the tiny proportion of the population that is responsible for nearly all crime is locked away in jails, there is way less crime for the rest of us to trouble about.
It may even be, in fact, that the more people we lock up, the fewer people we'll need to lock up. Nicole Gelinas, who is a very smart lady indeed, made this argument in the June 7th New York Post. Quote from her:
Indeed, what many people miss about the early-1990s "tough on crime" era in New York City is that it wasn't an era of mass incarceration. Between 1990 and 2019, the population held at Rikers Island fell from 22,000 on an average day to 7,000. Though the declines started later, the trend is similar at the state-prison level.
This wasn't because New York had gone soft on crime. It was because people were committing less crime, from shoplifting to car theft to murder.
Why would they do that? … Because people knew that pursuing a career of crime wasn't a rational decision: They would get in trouble.
End quote.
In the case of mad people: We have way less asylum space for mad people today than we had eighty years ago—everyone knows that. And yet, we no more know how to cure mad people today than we did back then; we just have a lot more ways to sedate them.
And those great hordes of impertinent foreigners walking into our country uninvited: If we can't deport them—if, for instance, we don't know their nation of origin and they won't tell us—why not just incarcerate them in institutions for the purpose? Part of the answer is that we don't have enough lock-up institutions. So let's build some.
A deep problem here is that we have become anti-incarcerationist this past hundred years. Carried along on the currents of modernity has been the idea that depriving people of their liberty by locking them in institutions is inhumane. That's been part of the overall softening of sensibilities, along with the movement against capital punishment.
In a way it speaks well of us that we have advanced to such a refined ideal of human liberty that we hesitate to lock up even lunatics, criminals, and street bums. Unfortunately there has been no parallel advance in our development of alternatives.
When a lunatic shrieks at me in the subway, or a mugger with a thirty-page rap sheet knocks me down and steals my wallet, or a vagrant poops on the sidewalk in front of my local drugstore, it's time to show a little less concern for their right to liberty and a little more concern for my right to get through my daily life without intolerable disturbances.
So yes: I'd like to see America re-institutionalize. Discussing this with friends, though, someone always says: "What about the staff?"
We know what he means. Stories about corrections officers beating up inmates, or giving them sexual favors; nursing-home staff—the nearest thing we still have to asylums—being cruel to their elderly charges; homeless shelters too scary even for street people to use; we've all heard 'em.
Is it really not possible to develop training and remuneration for the staff of institutions that will keep them behaving with decent humanity to those in their charge?
When I get to the point in our conversation where I ask that, the talk goes off in a direction I'll pursue some other time. It's not a direction that leads to anywhere happy.
08—Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Concerning Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the January 6th committee, a different representative tweeted on Thursday that, tweet:
Bennie Thompson voted to object to the 2004 election.
He's not an insurrectionist, he's just a hypocrite.
End tweet.
The tweeter there was Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, a B-plus on the congressional score card at NumbersUSA. Yes, we always check …
I have not yet fact-checked the tweet; but Jim Banks is a U.S. congressman so I shouldn't have to …
Whoa, what did I just say?
Item: The good news from San Francisco is that crazy-progressive D.A. Chesa Boudin lost his recall election.
The bad news is that he lost by sixty percent to forty. Put it another way, forty percent of San Franciscans are fine with having their car windows smashed, their streets full of homeless addicts, and their drugstores looted without penalty.
There'll be a temporary replacement until November, appointed by Mayor London Breed, who is only a tad less barmy than Boudin. Then in November there'll be a special election for a permanent successor. George Soros is reaching for his checkbook already.
Item: Artificial Intelligence marches on … into controversial territory.
There was a study five years ago out of Stanford University claiming that AI could tell gay from straight at high success rates by scanning faces. There was some similar study earlier than that about AI being able to spot the gay voice, although I can't find it on the internet.
This has got the guardians of our culture worried. Will artificially intelligent robots soon be hunting down homosexuals and taking away their Freddie Mercury albums?
Among those worried is a very learned journal named Philosophy of Science, published by Cambridge University Press. May 30th this year Philosophy of Science had an article titled: "Responsible dissemination in sexual orientation research: the case of the AI 'gaydar'."
There are, says the abstract, "good reasons to limit at least the dissemination of applied research on the etiology of homosexuality."
It's dangerous knowledge, see? Ah, there's a lot of that around in the human sciences.
Item: Apparently our State Department is going to announce the appointment of a Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice.
What will this person do? Why he, or much more likely she, will advance equity worldwide. "Equity" means no statistical differences in outcome between different races.
In related news, the Department of Energy has begun a program to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. It is hoped that the first results will be delivered before November's midterm elections.
Item: Finally: The contestants for this year's Miss BumBum pageant have been announced, 27 of them. The final competition will take place in São Paulo in August.
Scrutinizing the contestants online—strictly as a matter of journalistic due diligence, you understand—I was interested to see that their promotional material now comes with a number measuring the circumference of the asset to be judged. Sample quote:
Thaynna Dantas has a 115cm butt, which she isn't afraid to show off to her 457,000 Instagram followers.
End quote.
That's 45 and a quarter inches—impressive.
I have also learned a new word. When one of these ladies takes a picture of her bottom to show on social media, that is known in their line of work as a "belfie."
Hmm. There are all kinds of places you could extend that principle to … but I think I'll butt out here.
09—Signoff. That's all I have, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention. Should an operative of your state's Freedom PAC come calling, give him a few minutes of your time. You may be able to contribute some small step to the extinction of the entire RINO species.
To play us out, I feel like something Irish. Here's an Irishman with a broken heart. Irishmen's hearts don't break easy; but when they break they really break—it's bad. By way of illustration, here's Brendan O'Dowda lamenting the departure of Molly Brannigan.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Brendan O'Dowda, "Molly Brannigan."]
