01m39s Italy leads the way. (Salvini gets it right.)
06m07s Insane in Spain. (But hope is never vain.)
11m55s Small election in Africa, not many dead. (And Cyril promises ... again.)
17m20s Ice People against illegals. (Arctic Alliance swings into action!)
23m48s The crisis of self-awareness. (There's a shortage among the elites.)
29m11s Fields Medals announced. (The r-word? Really?)
31m05s Sweden's very own Rosa Parks. (But a plane, not a bus.)
33m26s Charlottesville one year on. (Southern efficiency on display.)
35m10s Signoff. (Don't lose your hat.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was Franz Joseph Haydn and this is of course your dialectically genial host John Derbyshire with news of the hour.
Before proceeding I should tell you that Radio Derb will take our summer break next week. There will be no August 10th podcast. Our next effusion will be two weeks from now, August 17th. Mark your calendars!
Also on the bulletin board, heartfelt thanks to the many listeners and readers who are asking about Toby. The little pooch is bearing up with a good spirit, though he's lost the use of his back legs and has trouble eating anything more challenging than boiled eggs. We're taking good care of him, though, and so long as he's not in any obvious distress we shall continue to look after him and encourage him.
OK, to the week's news. What's been happening? This will be one of those Radio Derbs where we span the world, leaping from continent to continent. First, Europe.
02 — Italy leads the way. Over in Europe, the nationalist revolution made further advances, with Italy taking the lead.
Italy's Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has actually been visiting the U.S.A. this week. Monday he had a meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office. The two leaders got along famously, both agreeing that Western nations need to take a strong line against mass illegal immigration, which both have recently been plagued with.
Even the New York Times editorial board had to acknowledge the harmony. In an editorial on Thursday they called the Trump-Conte meeting, quote, "a smashing success."
Not that the Times approved of that. They were in schoolmarm mode, rapping the two national leaders over their knuckles for their hateful hatefulness towards the wretched of the earth. Quote:
The love-fest between Mr. Trump and the new Italian government marks another step in the evolving network of right-wing, populist governments in Europe and the United States …
That editorial had drawn only three published comments as I write. The one with most upticks was from a reader in Texas saying, quote: "Italy or any country should not have to deal with an influx they can't control or adequately support," end quote. Plain common sense in the New York Times, if only from a reader — wonders will never cease.
Giuseppe Conte is actually something of a nonentity, appointed Prime Minister as the person least objectionable to both the two big parties in Italy's governing coalition. The real force behind Italy's nationalism, the guy making all the news, is Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini.
In a speech on Monday this week Salvini promised his fellow countrymen he would defend Italy's borders, quote, "with all my energy and all the means at my disposal." It's a work in progress: almost 2,000 illegals from Africa came ashore in Italy last month. That compares with 24,000 in July two years ago, though, so there is real progress.
Salvini really gets the demographic issue. In an interview with the London Sunday Times last weekend he said he's pushing for social and fiscal policies to raise Italy's birthrate, like the policies Viktor Orbán's put in place in Hungary.
Salvini himself has two children: not sensational, but still two more than the total for Germany's Angela Merkel, Britain's Theresa May, France's Emmanuel Macron, Sweden's Stefan Löfven, Ireland's Leo Varadkar, and Holland's Mark Rutte combined.
Lots of luck with that, pal. As explained in my July Diary here at VDARE.com, it seems to be a very difficult thing to raise a country's birthrate by government action.
Bless Signor Salvini for trying anyway. His heart's in the right place — for his own countrymen, against foreign scofflaws. A country can never have too many politicians like that, although a country can, alas, have too few.
03 — Insane in Spain, but hope is never vain. While Italy's giving a good example, Spain's giving a bad one.
Spain had a wee political upset a few weeks ago when the center-right ruling party lost a vote of confidence following a corruption scandal and had to resign. Since then Spain's Prime Minister has been Pedro Sánchez, who is a socialist, leading a coalition of left-wing parties.
Socialism is in the air here in the U.S.A., with Bernie Sanders out campaigning again, young people flocking to join the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, and that Puerto Rican bimbo winning a Democratic House primary in New York City. So for a glimpse at what socialism might have in store for us should it come to power, Spain might offer some clues.
The main thing it has in store, if the Spanish example is anything to go by, is open borders and great swelling numbers of illegal aliens. With Italy turning back the boats, Spain is now the destination of choice for people-smugglers. In late June Spain actually volunteered to take a boat full of African illegals that Italy had turned away.
The smugglers got the message and now the illegals are pouring in. One boatload came ashore on a nude beach in late June, generating some fascinating video clips. The same thing happened again in July. Meanwhile a little patch of sovereign territory Spain owns on the shore of North Africa is under constant siege from illegals trying to get in: In one concentrated assault July 26th, six hundred got over the fence and are now being looked after on Spanish territory.
Spain's socialist government is blithe about all this. Monday this week Spain's Foreign Minister Josep Borrell denied that the country was experiencing mass immigration. Europe needs "new blood," he said, to compensate for a low birth rate.
I'm not sure what's going on here or where things are headed. The illegals swarming into Spain are, as those video clips show, almost all healthy young men. Spain's youth unemployment rate is very high for a developed country — currently around 33 percent. The U.S.A. rate, for comparison, is nine percent. So why are the Spaniards cheerfully opening their arms to tens of thousands — it's been twenty thousand just this year, with fifty thousand currently waiting for a boat in North Africa — why are the Spaniards welcoming these illegals? Is there an opening here for populists?
I don't know enough about Spanish politics to tell you. If you cleave to the principle that where politics is concerned, you can never be cynical enough, it might occur to you that these Spanish socialist politicians are just virtue signaling. Spain's economy is in such poor shape, these young African men won't want to hang round in the country. They'll pass on through to northern Europe, where work is easier to find and benefits more lush. So Spain's politicians get all the virtuous glory, without having to shoulder any of the actual costs.
I wouldn't be surprised; although with nationalism and demographic conservatism rising all over Europe, if Spain's politicians really do plan to just sluice the illegals through to France and Britain, they'd better hurry it up a bit.
As for populism: Well, the Citizens Party looks promising, and their poll numbers have been rising this past few months. If they go full populist, though, they'll hit the same wall as the Sweden Democrats and Geert Wilders' party in Holland: it'll be tough getting other parties to work with them. In countries generally governed by coalitions, that keeps populists out of power.
Still, the Italians got there; and what are Spaniards but just Italians speaking Latin with a lisp instead of hand gestures? Good luck to the populists in Spain, wherever they are; and may the slow awakening of Europeans speed up, while there is still time to avert demographic catastrophe in the old continent.
04 — Small election in Africa, not many dead. Africa,yes. The Dark Continent. It never seems to get much lighter.
In Zimbabwe they had an election this week. The choice was between Robert Mugabe's old party, now headed up by a 75-year-old chap named Emmerson Mnangagwa, and an opposition party, the MDC, led by 40-year-old Nelson Chamisa. Guess what: The Mugabe party won.
Was it a free and fair election? You kidding? This is Zimbabwe. In Africa.
Associated Press, August 3rd, quote.
So far international observers have issued mixed reviews, calling Monday's election peaceful and a break from the past but expressing grave concern about the military's "excessive" use of force. They criticized the delay in releasing the results of the presidential vote, saying it raised concerns about possible manipulation.
End quote. You get the picture. On the bright side, as I write, there seem to have been only six deaths in post-election violence. By African standards that's a bagatelle.
The opposition has said they will challenge in court the results of the election. Lots of luck with that, guys. If it doesn't work, you might try accusing President-elect Mnangagwa of colluding with Russia. That probably won't reverse the result, but it'll give people something to talk about for a couple of years while the national legislature takes a long nap.
Speaking of national legislatures, a member of our own upper house, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, was in Zimbabwe to observe the election. He thought it went just fine. In a tweet on Thursday he wrote, tweet: "The people of Zimbabwe have endured enough. It's time for a new era of peace and prosperity." End tweet.
Given that Senator Flake is an open-borders crapweasel of the darkest stripe, I guess we should just be thankful he didn't propose shipping the entire population of Zimbabwe stateside … but I should stop here, I don't want to give him ideas.
Across the border in South Africa meanwhile, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared on Tuesday this week that his party, the ruling ANC, will definitely, absolutely support a constitutional amendment to confiscate land from white farmers without compensation.
It's hard to know how seriously to take this. The ANC has been saying the same thing for years. It may be just boob bait for the South African bubbas, like Republican politicians in the U.S.A. swearing that they will do something or other about immigration any day now …
Ramaphosa's no dummy. He's moved among business and financial people for years, gotten himself very rich thereby — how honestly, I do not know — and even dabbled in farming. He surely knows that expropriating white farms would be an economic catastrophe for South Africa. Ramaphosa may fear the far-left EFF party of anti-white zealot Julius Malema. They poll in single digits nationwide; but they have some strong local bases of support and are gaining adherents among young South Africans.
I doubt Ramaphosa really wants that constitutional change. He likely just figures he'll never be forced to it. As in the old story about teaching the king's horse to sing: the horse may die, the king may die, or Cyril Ramaphosa may die — he's 65 years old.
Or the horse may sing, and white farmers be driven from their land. In that case, Heaven help South Africa.
But Heaven doesn't have a good record of helping African countries. You could ask Zimbabwe.
05 — Ice People against illegals. Over to Asia. Last month I told you about the thousand or so foreign nationals, most from Yemen, who took advantage of a wrinkle in South Korea's visa policy to enter that country as tourists and then apply for refugee status. Here's a follow-up on that.
The South Korean government has dithered over the issue, but South Korean people have made their opinions known via a petition asking the authorities to tighten up on foreigners claiming refugee status. In just a week the petition drew 350,000 signatures. It's now at over 700,000.
That has stirred the government to action. They are promising to do the tightening-up.
Publicity about the Yemenis has also dragged immigration issues to the front of people's awareness. It turns out there are 35,000 foreigners with applications for refugee status outstanding. That does not of course include North Koreans, who get South Korean citizenship automatically.
A bad sign here is that, so far as I can judge from English-language South Korean outlets, is that there's a be-nice-to-the-illegals lobby opposing the restrictionists. It's understandable if you look at Korea's modern history. Many older South Koreans have bitter memories of being refugees themselves. Of course practically none of the illegals are genuine refugees, any more than the Central Americans flooding into our country are; but words have power and the r-word has been let loose in South Korea.
Could Northeast Asia, with its prosperity and cratering fertility, go soft on us? Could the Japanese, the Koreans, maybe even the Chinese, turn to open borders? If you'd asked me ten years ago I'd have laughed and said, "Impossible!" Stranger things have happened, though.
More encouraging is news from Markham, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto with a big concentration of Chinese immigrants.
This started when Toronto found they had more illegal aliens than they could find accommodation for. Numbers coming across the border from the U.S.A. have been swelling the past couple of years, and of course they are all claiming to be refugees from something or other.
Canada's rules on claiming asylum and refugee status are even more FUBAR than ours, so numbers have been backing up.
That's the background to this little disturbance in Markham last weekend. Markham has its own elected mayor, currently a bloke named Frank Scarpitti. The rumor started that Scarpitti had agreed with the mayor of Toronto to take and house five thousand of these illegals.
Once that got around, a demonstration was organized. To judge from videos and press accounts, the demonstrators were all Chinese. There were big signs on display in English, Chinese, and Chinglish. Samples:
MARKHAM SAY NO TO ILLEGAL BORDER CROSSERS
SAY "NO" TO MAYOR FRANK!
ILLEGAL FREE RIDER NOT INVITED
PROTECT OUR CITY, PROTECT OUR HOME!
NOT IN MY BACK YARD
DOWN WITH THE RUNNING DOGS OF YANKEE IMPERIALISM!
Nah, I made that last one up. It was a good spirited gathering, though. There was a counter-protest on behalf of the illegals, carrying signs of their own: REFUGEES WELCOME, NOBODY IS ILLEGAL, and so on. A lot of them were Chinese, too, but there were also round-eyes in evidence on that side.
Inevitably there were fisticuffs, but no-one was seriously hurt. I would like to have seen some Chinese martial arts on display, but the most fearsome participant was a young Dragon Lady type with an ear-splitting voice out of Chinese opera, who chased some of the counter-protestors right off the field.
Toronto's National Post newspaper tells us that, quote:
The day before [the demonstration] the nomination period had closed on the mayoral election in Markham, in which the incumbent Scarpitti is being challenged by four candidates who signed up at the last minute.
End quote. Be interested to know how that election goes, if anyone up there in Markham could follow it for me please. I'm glad to know, at any rate, that whatever the potential for cuckery among Northeast Asians in the Arctic Alliance, the cucks are clearly outnumbered by Alliance stalwarts … in the Toronto suburbs at any rate.
06 — The crisis of self-awareness. Here, however, is a resident Northeast Asian on the other side.
I mentioned the New York Times editorial board back there somewhere. Well, they have a new recruit.
Meet 30-year-old Sarah Jeong. Ms Jeong was born in South Korea and brought to the U.S.A. by her parents when an infant. She's a graduate of Harvard Law School, and for the last few years has worked as a writer covering issues of law and information technology.
And tweeting very vigorously. Sample tweets.
Sample: "Dumbass f***ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs p***ing on fire hydrants."
Sample: "oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men"
Sample: "I dare you to get on Wikipedia and play 'Things white people can definitely take credit for,' it's really hard"
Sample: "Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins"
You get the picture. Ms Jeong really really hates white people …
Which is a bit peculiar as she apparently lives in Portland, Oregon, one of the whitest cities in the country.
Older listeners will remember the self-esteem movement of thirty or so years ago. This was one of the many, many attempts to offer a non-biological explanation for the poor academic performance of black kids. I think it was the seventeenth or eighteenth attempt, in between lead paint and Stereotype Threat, I think it was.
Anyway, the idea was that black kids didn't do well in school because all those years of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism had left them listless, fearful, and insecure, with low self-esteem.
The theory fell apart when social psychologists started investigating. They found that on any definition of self-esteem anyone could come up with, blacks actually have higher self-esteem than the average. The explainers sighed and moved on to the next non-biological explanation.
Well, self-esteem might have been a bust at explaining anything, but I have a suggestion for adventurous social psychologists trying to make a name in their field. My suggestion is: Try studying self-awareness.
There seems to be a real national crisis, stunningly low levels of self-awareness in key portions of our intelligentsia.
Sarah Jeong, for example. She was born in modest prosperity in South Korea, a nation that only exists because of the sacrifice of 54 thousand American lives, along with a couple thousand more British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and others —a big majority of them white men. You're welcome, lady.
Then Ms Jeong attended Berkeley and Harvard, institutions founded and built up by white men. Then she moved to Portland, the whitest city she could find … Where she sat down at her computer rattling out obscenity-studded tweets insulting and belittling white men.
I'm not sure if anyone has ever quantified self-awareness on a proper numerical scale. If they have, I'd guess that Ms Jeong barely moves the needle on the dial.
And now she has a job on the New York Times editorial board. She'll fit right in!
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Mathematically inclined listeners will know that there is no Nobel Prize in math. Instead there is the Fields Medal, awarded annually to very exceptional mathematicians under the age of forty.
Well, this year's Fields Medals were awarded this week. All four medals, Sarah Jeong will be scandalized to learn, went to white men — although Indian recipient Akshay Venkatesh might more fairly be described as white-ish.
And the r-word popped up here, too. Medal-winner Caucher Birkar was described by the BBC News report as a Kurd who came to Britain while studying in Tehran and applied for asylum. Quote:
While studying for his undergraduate degree at the University of Tehran, he travelled to the UK and sought political asylum there.
I congratulate Dr Birkar on this very prestigious award and wish him no ill at all, but I'm curious to know on what grounds he was accepted as a refugee. It doesn't sound like he was being chased around the Zagros mountains by the Secret Police.
There are people undergoing things like that, and much worse — people with a genuine claim to refugee status. Loose, casual acceptance of asylum claims don't help those people.
Item: Here's a guy whose asylum claim was rejected. We don't know his name, but he's an Afghan, 52 years old, and he was living in Sweden until last month.
Following rejection of his asylum claim, this Afghan was put on a plane to be deported. There was a young Swedish college student on the plane, name of Elin Ersson. Somehow she found out that the Afghan was being deported, and she determined to save him from that fate.
She refused to sit down. A plane can't take off unless everyone's sitting down, so the deportation couldn't proceed. At last, just to get the plane airborne, the Afghan was taken off.
Ms Ersson became a heroine to the Social Justice bleeding hearts. She had saved this poor unfortunate wretch from deportation! The Washington Post called her stunt, quote, "a dramatic act of civil disobedience," end quote. "A 14-minute act of defiance," swooned the New York Times. Sweden's very own Rosa Parks!
Then this week it emerged that the Afghan had actually received a prison sentence in Sweden for assault. We don't know what kind of assault; but if he got jail for it from a Swedish court, it was likely something worse than stomping on some guy's foot in the subway.
I'm waiting for the news outlets, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, that gushed over Ms Ersson's heroism to tell their readers that what she actually did was give a break to a foreign criminal. Waiting … waiting …
Item: Next week marks the first anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. It's clear from the Heaphy Report on the event that gross incompetence on the part of Charlottesville Police Department allowed — you could even say encouraged — a lawful public protest to turn into a lethal riot. Sample quote from the report, quote:
When violence was most prevalent, CPD commanders pulled officers back to a protected area of the park, where they remained for over an hour as people in the large crowd fought on Market Street.
End quote. One consequence of the CPD's utter failure to control the situation, or even to try to control it, was the death of counter-protestor Heather Heyer and the injury of many others when Unite the Right supporter James Fields hit them with his car.
Fields has been charged with 30 federal hate crimes, and also with crimes under Virginia state law, including murder. He's been in custody for a year. That sounds mighty inefficient to me; but having read the Heaphy Report, I wouldn't be looking for efficiency or competency in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
08 — Signoff. That's all for this week, ladies and gents; and indeed for next week, too. Radio Derb will return in two weeks' time, August 17th. Thank you for listening, and for your many interesting and informative emails. All the non-abusive ones get read, pondered, and plagiarized; but time forbids me answering any but a random minority.
To sing us out, here is Lawrence Morritt with an English song.
Like the people of all old nations, English people, although from a common stock, exhibit regional varieties. Foreigners are mostly oblivious to these varieties, but English people among themselves find them endlessly colorful and amusing.
One local variety of Englishman is the Yorkshireman. Yorkshire is the biggest English county — much bigger than Derbyshire, with which it shares a border. I had relatives in Yorkshire. As I remember it, the county was a place of decaying old industrial towns and windswept moors, the latter made famous by novelist Emily Brontë.
Yorkshire people speak with a thick dialect. Here's a famous Yorkshire song in that dialect, warning you not to go up on Ilkley Moor without a hat … or, should you go walking up there with a young lady, try not to get too energetic and lose your hat.
There will be more from Radio Derb in two weeks' time, August 17th. In the meantime: If ivver tha does owt fer nowt, do it fer thissen.
[Music clip: Lawrence Morritt, "On Ilkley Moor Baht At."]
