01:13 Preference revealed. (Immigration hypocrisy, too.)
07:04 Elections in, N. (Nationalists rising.)
12:12 A lefty you can like. (Europe is waking up.)
17:08 The most incredible statistic, cont. (Any Muslims in the GOP?)
23:26 Good Sense 1, Progressives 0. (Oberlin College caves.)
31:10 Meet the ELFs. (Or are they ELVes?)
32:59 China ponders skeetercide. (But bunts.)
36:42 Killer kangaroo. (He’ll jump you to death.)
38:06 Hongkong mourns QE2. (And remembers their freedom.)
40:30 Signoff. (With Gracie.)
01—Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. That was a snippet of Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, and I am the guy whose ancestors took the name of the English County for whose cavalry regiment Haydn composed the march. Yes, this is your preferentially genial host John Derbyshire with some fragments of the week's news.
The news this week has been more upbeat than usual—I mean, there has been more in it to bring a smile to the face of a National Conservative, especially one with a focus on immigration and demographics. No prizes for guessing the topic of my opening segment this week.
02—Preference revealed. Here at VDARE.com we've had some sport over the years with the expression, originally coined by economists, of revealed preference. The general idea of revealed preference is that people's beliefs, desires, and intentions are best judged not by what they say but by what they do.
Millions of Third Worlders in recent years have migrated to the white First World in both hemispheres: from South and Central America to the U.S.A. and from Africa and Islamia to Western Europe. They have done so in willful defiance of laws and regulations in the destination countries. Often they have paid their life savings to do so, and risked danger and disappointment.
Among those millions there must be many who, if questioned, would repeat the cant condemnations of white supremacy and colonialism that are the common currency of the media and educational establishments all over the globe.
Yet there they are, in the throng, facing the costs and the risks, to move to nations created and maintained by white people, some of those nations trailing long histories of colonialism. To live in such nations is their revealed preference, whatever they may have said.
The revealed preference of the migrants has a mirror image in the receiving nations. In the populations of those nations—our nations—are many who, if questioned, would express sympathy and support for those entering our countries illegally. "Let them come!" they say, "No human being is illegal!"
This week we have been seeing the revealed preference of those people—or at least some of them—and it's been very sweet to see.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida flew fifty illegal aliens to the ruling-class enclave Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. Outrage has ensued, with much bleating about "playing politics with human beings, using them as props." Those words were actually Joe Biden's, speaking on Thursday.
I anticipate a new genre of virtue-signaling suburban lawn signs saying NO HUMAN BEING IS A PROP.
That is of course naked hypocrisy. Why have First World ruling classes encouraged and abetted mass illegal immigration? To stick it to their own working and middle classes, of course, that's why—to stick it to the bitter clingers, the deplorables, the semi-fascists whom they loathe and despise and want to replace.
Illegal aliens being used as props for political purposes? See how you like it, Joe.
Governor DeSantis's move was a supercharged version of what Governors Greg Abbot of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona have been doing to our so-called "sanctuary cities." Those governors have been busing illegal aliens to New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. to shrieks of outrage from the mayors of those cities.
Thursday morning two busloads of illegals were dropped off outside the U.S. Naval Observatory in D.C., official residence of Vice President Kamala Harris, courtesy of Greg Abbott. Fair enough: Harris wouldn't go to the southern border, so Governor Abbott brought the border to her.
The Observatory neighborhood is the toniest district of our nation's capital—fine old elegant town houses and diplomatic missions—so I'd guess there is some revealed preference being revealed in the clubs and drawing-rooms there, but so far I haven't seen any residents interviewed.
I like the growing audacity of these southern governors, and I love the revealed preference on display.
03—Elections in Sweden and Italy. Over in the other major part of the white First World, which is to say Europe, the dynamic is somewhat different.
Immigration scofflaws who arrive in southern Europe don't need buses and planes chartered by politicians to take them north. The north is where they want to be. For one thing, that's where relatives and friends from their home countries mostly are—millions of them now. For another, the lush, soft, woke welfare states of northern Europe are more hospitable than Spain, Italy, and Greece.
Resistance to the demographic replacement is stirring in Northern Europe, though. Sweden, the beating heart of white ethnomasochism, had a general election on Sunday. The result was a defeat for the ruling Social Democrats, a narrow win for a coalition of more conservative parties.
Included in that coalition were the Sweden Democrats (SD), described by The Washington Post as, quote: "a party founded in 1988 by ultranationalist extremists and neo-Nazis." End quote.
I have not sufficient acquaintance with Swedish politics to tell you whether that description is a fair one. Did Sweden Democrats start out wearing jackboots and giving their party leader straight-arm salutes? Did their original policy platform call for euthanasia of the mentally retarded and an invasion of Poland? I have no idea.
Whatever, the Sweden Democrats are plainly a nationalist party. Party leader Jimmie Åkesson wrote Wednesday on Facebook, quote:
Now we will get order in Sweden. It is time to start rebuilding security, prosperity and cohesion. It's time to put Sweden first.
End quote.
The references to "order" and "security" there point to the swelling lawlessness in Sweden's cities, all driven by high levels of immigration from the Balkans and the Middle East.
It's good that this nationalist party has a share in Sweden's new ruling coalition. I note, though, that their share of the total vote was only around twenty percent. That zone, twenty to twenty-five percent, was for years the ceiling for the AFD party, Germany's equivalent of the Sweden Democrats. The AFD have struggled to break through it, but with only occasional and local success.
So we're still waiting for a nationalist party in Western Europe to win a big, robust electoral majority. We may see that next weekend, when Italy goes to the polls on September 25th.
Polls tell us that the favorite to be Italy's next Prime Minister is 45-year-old Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy party. Quote from her back in June:
Yes to the natural family. No to the L.G.B.T. lobbies. No to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people. No to major international finance.
End quote.
As a political party platform, that's not bad. It's one Americans could only dream of.
04—A lefty you can like. The next best thing to a straightforward victory for some nationalist party in Europe would be for one of the big old dominating social-democratic parties to steal some of the nationalists' clothes.
That seems to be happening in Denmark. The Prime Minister of that country is 44-year-old Mette Frederiksen of the, yes, Social Democratic Party. Here's a thing that she said last month, quote:
Unfortunately, the truth is that immigration policy is closely linked to crime, and that there is too large a group that is not part of Denmark. At the same time, we are seeing a crime picture that is changing, which in my eyes is one of Denmark's biggest challenges of all, because being unsafe is a huge loss of freedom.
End quote.
Oh, here's another thing she said, this one at the opening of parliament last October, quote:
Every fifth young man with a non-Western background born in 1997 had broken the law before turning 21. It's not everyone. But there are too many young men who take the freedom of others, steal children's futures, intimidate prison guards—and leave behind a long trail of insecurity.
It has been going on for too many years. Girls who are called derogatory names because they are Danish. Or girls who are subjected to social control because they have become too Danish. A sausage cart in Brønshøj that is attacked with firecrackers because it sells pork …
End quote.
That's coming from the leader of a European Social Democratic Party, the equivalent of our own Democratic Party. Incredible!
Denmark's Social Democrats aren't stopping at words, though. Last year this same government passed a law saying that foreigners applying for asylum in Denmark could be made to wait in a third country. Now we've just been told that Denmark has signed a third-country agreement with Rwanda in South-Central Africa.
That's the same deal the British government struck, also with Rwanda; but that deal was then scotched by the European Court of Human Rights which, for reasons I don't understand, apparently still has authority in Britain even after Brexit.
Denmark's in the EU, so perhaps that same court will stop their Rwanda plan. Possibly Prime Minister Frederiksen is hoping that will happen and is just playing four-dimensional chess to appease Denmark's nationalists, I don't know.
If her words are empty, though, they're still pretty good words and there are plenty of nationalists in Denmark who will like them. In a 2019 poll 31 percent of Danish respondents said that immigration brings no benefits, only harms. The year before that, 65 percent of respondents to a different poll said Denmark should not take in any more migrants, legal or illegal.
Sweden, Italy, Denmark: Europe is waking up. When will America?
05—The most incredible statistic (cont.) I have several times opined that the most astonishing, most incredible statistic of our age is that the U.S.A. admitted more Muslims for settlement in the fifteen years after 9/11 than it did in the fifteen years before.
Well, we're now 21 years on from 9/11 and Muslims are firmly, and increasingly imbedded in our politics … and all on the same side.
Keith Ellison was elected to Congress by the nice people of Minnesota back in 2006. He's currently the Attorney General of that state; he was responsible for the savage prosecutorial assault on Officer Derek Chauvin and three other cops on the scene when junkie street hooligan George Floyd died under police restraint in 2020.
And then there are Representatives Ilhan Omar, also of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Less well-known is Abdullah Hammoud, elected Mayor of Dearborn, Michigan last November and formerly a member of Michigan's House of Representatives.
Then there is Deqa Dhalac, Mayor of South Portland, Maine. South Portland is a city just, believe it or not, south of Portland.
Mayor Dhalac is, like Rep. Omar, Somalian by birth. She has ambitions to get herself elected to Maine's own House of Representatives. If she pulls that off she will almost certainly join Mana Abdi, another Somali gal, who is standing for election to that house against no opposition at all.
Ellison, Omar, Tlaib, Hammoud, Dhalac, Abdi. That's six Muslims I just named. By birth they break as three Somalis, one Palestinian, and two Americans. Every single one belongs to the Democratic Party. The three who have any significant track record—Ellison, Omar, and Tlaib—are way out on the woke left of that party.
Writing in Life magazine back in 1949, the English novelist Evelyn Waugh spoke of the Irish coming to America where, quote, "they have settled in their millions, bringing with them all their ancient grudges and the melancholy of the bogs." End quote. I think that's an ignorant slander on the Irish, with whom I have had considerable acquaintance, both in Ireland and abroad. Melancholy? I've found Irish people more cheerful than the human average.
That phrase "carrying everywhere with him his ancient rancour" is certainly applicable to Muslims, though. In the case of Somalis like Omar, Dhalac, and Abdi the rancor is double strength: the rancor of religion and also of race.
We have been fools to admit Muslims to the U.S.A. in such numbers, and fools twice over to admit Somalis. Here's a thing I wrote eleven years ago, quote from myself:
Now look: any population has a lot of variation, and I have no doubt there are many law-abiding and industrious Somalis. When you take in 4,000, or 16,000, or 100,000, though, the law of averages is going to kick in—as of course it kicks in unmistakeably in Somalia itself. Human-capital-wise, the Somali averages are simply terrible.
Things are rough in Somalia: chronic civil war, recurrent famine, disease, piracy. Private persons who are distressed by the plight of the Somalis should by no means be discouraged from doing anything they can think of to relieve the distress over there.
The reason nations have governments, though, is to protect and advance the interests of their own citizens. How the interests of Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders have been advanced by having thousands of Somalis settled among them, is not clear to me. Perhaps the State Department could send someone round to explain.
End quote. Why don't people listen?
06—Good Sense 1, Progressives 0. The philosophy of American progressives has now advanced to the point of holding that blacks should not be arrested for anything at all short of homicide, and should only be arrested then if there is clear video evidence of the event.
That is the deep background to this week's news that Oberlin College in Ohio will not attempt any further appeals against a ruling that they had libeled Gibson's, a local bakery now in the fifth generation of ownership by the Gibson family.
All this sprang from an incident back in 2016. A young black shoplifter, challenged by the white store clerk, assaulted the clerk and ran out with the goods he'd stolen, assaulting the store owner as he ran. The clerk caught and tried to hold the shoplifter, but two young black women, friends of the shoplifter, piled on the clerk. He was down on the sidewalk being punched and kicked when cops arrived.
All three of the blacks here were students at Oberlin. They were arrested and charged with assault and robbery.
Oberlin College, students and faculty both, went collectively nuts. There were huge repeated protests by the students, and boycotts of the store, boycotts in which members of the college faculty participated. The Dean of Students printed up and handed out a stack of flyers saying the bakery had a long history of racial profiling.
Gibson's had indeed suffered a lot of shoplifting, but police records showed that of the 40 shoplifters arrested, 32 were white, six were black and two were Asian—more or less precisely the racial demographics of the town. Six out of 40 is fifteen percent; just hold that number in your mind for a moment: fifteen percent black. That is the percentage of blacks among shoplifters and also the percentage of blacks in the town of Oberlin.
I'll admit to having been surprised when I read that. In my forty-odd years living in the U.S.A. I've have several conversations with people who own or work in retail stores. When the subject of shoplifting's come up, I've heard many, many times that it's a disproportionately black thing. The rise of smartphone video I think has confirmed that.
It may of course be that the town's store owners are more reluctant to challenge black shoplifters precisely for fear of accusations of racism; or perhaps, having seem the same video clips you and I have seen, just from fear of black violence. I don't know.
To confound the issue, the Legal Insurrection website turned up a 2017 article in an Oberlin College student publication about the college's, quote, "culture of theft," end quote. According to the article, 82.5 percent of arrests for shoplifting in the town of Oberlin overall are of students, and shoplifting levels drop dramatically in the college vacations. With forty arrests altogether and 82.5 percent of forty being 33, if students and nonstudents are equally likely to shoplift, there were 33 student shoplifters and ony seven nonstudents.
The student body at Oberlin College is just six percent black. Six percent of 33 is two; so on a strictly proportional basis, two of those blacks arrested for shoplifting out of the total six should be black Oberlin college students. The expected number of black non-student shoplifters would then be four—six minus two.
However, with blacks at fifteen percent of Oberlin town, there being seven nonstudent shoplifters, and fifteen percent of seven being one, the expected number of black nonstudents should be one. So why is it four?
That's too much arithmetic—sorry, I got carried away there. I'll leave you to juggle with the numbers.
The owners of Gibson's sued the college in 2017. They said they had been libeled and their business harmed. A jury eventually, in June of 2019, awarded them $44 million in compensatory and punitive damages. That was later reduced to $25 million to comply with a state cap on punitive damages.
Oberlin College of course appealed. The appeal was turned down and the court unanimously upheld the $25 million judgment against the school. The Court of Appeals in Akron also added a $6.3 million payment by the college for the bakery's legal fees. Total, with accumulated interest charges: $36.59 million.
Last week Oberlin college finally agreed to pay the bakery the entire amount.
This is a victory for good sense and a big loss for progressives. That it will cause them to rethink their assumptions, I seriously doubt, but I'm cheering anyway.
07—Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: My acronym of the week: ELF, E-L-F. That stands for "Educated Liberal Female." I've borrowed it from a column by Jack Cashill over at American Thinker, September 9th. Says Jack, quote:
These are the women who will proudly vote Democrat regardless of soaring inflation, rising gas prices, rampant crime in the streets, the unchecked flood of illegal aliens, and oppressive COVID policies that have irreparably damaged all children, the poor most notably.
End quote.
Jack then goes into some very plausible analysis of ELF psychology and the factors that shape it—college attendance, late marriage, risk avoidance, and others.
I think he's on to something. Before I can whole-heartedly embrace the ELF acronym, however, I'd like to get a ruling on the proper plural form. Should I say "ELFs," as Jack does, or would "ELVes" be more grammatical? Similarly with the adjectival form: "ELFish" or "ELVen"? All advice gratefully received.
Item: Faithful readers of my monthly diary will know that I am a martyr to small biting insects. You may therefore imagine the smile on my face when reading this headline at Breitbart, September 15th, headline: China Seeks to Legislate Extinction of Mosquitoes.
Reading down into the story I see that this was only a proposal put before China's fake parliament. the National People's Congress. The proposal was, Breitbart tells us, quote, "swatted down," end quote by China's National Health Commission, whoever they are. The Commission declared that, quote:
research on innovative mosquito control techniques remains relatively weak
End quote.
That sounds feeble to me. I suspect that the real reason for the swat-down was the ChiComs' memory of the Chú Sì Hài campaign of the late 1950s.
Chú Sì Hài means "Eliminate Four Pests." The Four Pests to be eliminated were: rats, mosquitoes, flies, and common sparrows. Sparrows were included there because they ate wheat when it was growing.
I don't know how the rats, mosquitoes, and flies fared, but the sparrows took a real beating. Quote from a relevant website:
Millions of people organized themselves into groups to kill sparrows or to wear them out by harassing them by loudly hitting pots and pans. The campaign was a success and almost led to the extinction of the bird in the country. All the people were mobilized, including young, old people, women, and children.
End quote.
Only after two years of this did the ChiComs notice that the sparrows did not only eat wheat, they also ate a lot of insects that were harmful to wheat and other crops—locusts for example.
The commies hurriedly replaced "sparrows" by "bedbugs" in the propaganda, but it was too late. The extinction of the sparrows was one factor in the great Mao famine that saw off tens of millions of Chinese people in 1959-61.
Moral of the story: Don't mess with the animal food chain unless you really really know what you're doing. Secondary moral, highly pertinent to today's U.S.A.: Don't let communists take over your country.
Item: A story from the animal kingdom. Australia has suffered its first fatal kangaroo attack for 86 years.
Yes: 77-year-old, Peter Eades, who had been keeping a wild kangaroo as a pet, was found with serious injuries by a family member on Sunday afternoon. Police had to shoot the kangaroo to get close to Mr Eades, but by that time the poor man had died.
Reading that left me wondering how, exactly, a kangeroo kills you. Do those skinny little arms have razor-sharp claws, or what?
Later on in the story, though, I read of a woman who, back in April, was, quote, "kicked to the ground and stomped on while she was playing golf," end quote. So I guess those big powerful legs do the trick. Kangaroos famously jump; and if you mess with one, he'll jump you to death.
[Added when archiving: I received an email from the Antipodes setting me straight on this. From which: "Hi John — I run a sheep station in Victoria and we have to be on guard against sheep dogs chasing kangaroos and bailing them up. The roo will pick them up with his arms, lean back, balance on his tail and with his enormously strong back legs which are equipped with a long hard claw, rake them down the stomach and disembowel them. I assume that's how they'd kill a man." Ouch!]
Item: With Queen Elizabeth's state funeral coming up on Monday and the British news websites still full of related events, it would be remiss of me not to pass comment.
A story that particularly caught my eye was this one at the BBC website, September 14th. Headline: Queen Elizabeth II: Hong Kong's grief sends message to Beijing.
In last week's podcast I had a segment about the Great Fire of Smyrna a hundred years ago. In that segment I said this, quote:
[Smyrna] was … one of those multi-ethnic cosmopolises—like Alexandria five hundred miles to the south before Nasser took over Egypt, or Hong Kong under British colonial rule, or Beirut before the civil wars. The inhabitants gave all their energies to commerce, hoping the politicians of the world would leave them alone.
They wouldn't, of course …
End quote.
No, of course they wouldn't. These big, bustling, cosmopolitan, mercantile cities hum along happily for a few decades, but then the icy hand of politics takes over and it all ends in tears.
Hongkong's in the tears stage right now following the ChiCom takeover. They are cherishing the memory of the freedom they enjoyed under British rule, and taking Elizabeth as a symbol of all that.
I lived in Hongkong myself fifty years ago when it was free, and cherish fond memories. I still have Hongkong friends; but they have all got out, thank God. I wish them well with all my heart.
08—Signoff. That's it, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and I hope you are making appropriate observances for Hispanic Heritage Month which, as I'm sure you know, began on Thursday.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week. Here's Gracie to sing us out.
[Music clip: Gracie Fields, "Sing As We Go."]
