04m30s Song of the Illegal Immigrants. (They'll be comin' through the border when they come.)
08m07s Congress prepares immigration reform. (Lock'n'load!)
11m01s The 2007 Senate immigration bill crashes and burns. (A victory for popular democracy.)
15m38s Brush up your Chhokey. (And don't confuse a Sharchop with a Ngalop.)
19m10s Too fat to Immigrate. (Immigration policy as it should be done.)
22m51s Methodists ♥ illegals. (Scofflaw clerics.)
26m47s Obama's relatives. (Can't deport 'em, they have an important nephew.)
31m42s The trial of Edwin Ramos. (Pols laugh at widow's tears.)
39m32s Signoff.
01—Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! … sort of.
This is not a normal Radio Derb. For a normal Radio Derb, I sit down on Friday and pass comment on the week's news. When I'm done, we post it to the VDARE.com website and on iTunes.
That is not what's happening this week. I am in fact far away—far away from my recording equipment—in the first week of a three-week holiday in China. I have deliberately gone off the grid for these three weeks. This podcast, and those for the next two weeks, were pre-recorded and stored in the capacious vaults at VDARE.com world headquarters, to be brought out and posted on-site around midnight each Friday according to the usual Radio Derb schedule.
In the nature of things, therefore, this and the next two weeks' podcasts must eschew topicality. Instead, they will be trips down Memory Lane with your remotely genial host John Derbyshire.
Radio Derb has now been on the air more than fifteen years, since May of 2004. All the sound files and all the transcripts are archived on my personal website, johnderbyshire.com, click on "Opinions." In case you can't remember how to spell my name, you can also get directly to my website by entering dissidentright.com.
There are now more than seven hundred of those transcripts, each one with a sound file imbedded in it. For the last few months I have been toiling away to bring them under a standard format for ease of reading, listening, and linking. I started back there in May 2004 and have been plodding steadily forward. As I head off on my vacation this week, I have reached June 2012.
Radio Derb started off in 2004 being hosted by National Review Online. National Review dropped me eight years later, in April 2012. So my standardization effort now encompasses the entire eight years I podcast from National Review Online. Those eight years included, amongst of course many other events, two and a half Presidential election cycles.
So for these three weeks I'm away from the microphone I'm just going to post assembled clips of segments gathered from those eight years. I'll be cutting'n'pasting the sound clips right out of the original audio files, so sound quality might be somewhat variable—I'll do my best to even it out.
I'll bracket each segment with a couple of quick pips [pips] so you know when it's 2019 Derb talking and when it's 2004 or 2008 or 2012 Derb.
Each of these three weeks' podcasts will have a theme. Because this is VDARE.com and our main issue is immigration, I'll give over this first week's podcast to things I was saying about immigration topics in those eight years, 2004 to 2012.
Here we go.
02—Song of the Illegal Immigrants. I wanted to start with something from 2004. Reviewing the transcripts, it turns out I didn't have much to say about immigration in 2004.
I did, however, do a Christmas sing-along for NRO that year: spoof lyrics that I made up to familiar tunes, mainly Christmas carols. My songs had titles like "God Rest You, Yasser Arafat" and "Frosty the Candidate" (a reference to John Kerry).
I posted all those lyrics at NRO but Radio Derb was still just a ten-minute affair, so not all of them got recorded at the time. This one I sang on Radio Derb a couple of years later, May 2006. I'm going to claim it as a 2004 contribution, though.
[Pips.]
Song of the Illegal Immigrants
[Pips.]
03—Congress prepares immigration reform. The Republican Party got well and truly beaten in the 2006 mid-term elections. They lost both the House and the Senate. President George W. Bush gave a post-defeat presser. Here's some commentary from Radio Derb, November 10th 2006.
[Pips.]
Suit up for next year's immigration fight.
[Pips.]
04—The 2007 Senate immigration bill crashes and burns. In all those years of commentary about immigration at National Review, did I give any shout-outs to VDARE.com?
Indeed I did. I was a freelancer, never a salaried employee of the magazine, and contributed to all sorts of other outlets, including VDARE.com. I'd been contributing to VDARE since 2000.
After Bill Buckley died in early 2008 and VDARE published what the National Review suits thought were unacceptably disrespectful remarks about him, the magazine blacklisted VDARE. I didn't contribute to VDARE again after that until 2012, when National Review blacklisted me.
So here I was in June of 2007 giving VDARE a shout-out, by way of celebrating the failure in congress of the appalling, anti-American "Immigration reform" bill of that year, the brainchild—though the word "brain" isn't really appropriate here—of George W. Bush and Edward M. Kennedy.
[Pips.]
Senate immigration bill crashes and burns.
[Pips.]
05—Brush up your Chhokey. Here's another segment from 2007, a short one.
The precise topic here is the refugee rackets, for full and comprehensive documentation of which across many years I refer you to the bloggings of Ann Corcoran, currently at the website Frauds, Crooks, and Criminals, formerly at Refugee Resettlement Watch.
As Ann has uncovered many, many times over in exhaustive detail, the entire refugee-resettlement business is a scam. Worse than that, in fact: It's a scam run by the United Nations. That we permit this hustle to operate on our territory, is a standing disgrace to our elected representatives and public officials.
[Pips.]
[Pips.]
06—Too fat to immigrate. In commenting on immigration, I haven't restricted myself to the U.S.A. When the immigration policies of other nations present some kind of model for what ours should be, I promote them, as I did here in November 2007.
[Pips.]
[Pips.]
07—Methodists ♥ illegals. Among the loudest opponents of proper, humane immigration law enforcement are our churches. The villains in this segment from February 2008 were Methodists: Southern Methodist University down in Dallas and one particular Methodist church in Chicago.
[Pips.]
[Pips.]
08—Obama's relatives. The U.S.A. is, we like to boast, a nation of laws, not men. It doesn't matter who you are: rich or poor, high or low, well-connected or unconnected, you will be treated equally under the law.
For those of us who cherish that ideal, one of the most outrageous stories from the past few years was the favoritism shown to Barack Obama's relatives. Obama's aunt and uncle were both shameless immigration scofflaws; both were treated with tender consideration by our courts.
I passed comment on them several times. Here's a segment from September 2011.
[Pips.]
[Pips.]
Obama's aunt Zeituni died from natural causes in Boston, 2014, aged 61. His uncle was granted permanent residence in 2013.
09—The trial of Edwin Ramos. Here is an immigration-related segment from one of the last Radio Derbs I did while at National Review.
The date here is March 16th, 2012. The subject is the trial of Edwin Ramos in San Francisco. If you've forgotten the name, that's entirely excusable at this distance in time, but I give full background for the case in the segment.
[Pips.]
[Pips.]
That clip included a mention of the San Francisco D.A. being up for election to a higher position in the 2010 cycle. The D.A. won that election and got that higher position—California State Attorney General.
What was the name of that ambitious, duplicitous D.A., who showed such cold indifference to the distress of Danielle Bologna? Her name was Kamala Harris.
10—Signoff. That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening.
There'll be another trip down Memory Lane next week, when I shall look at Radio Derb commentary during that same period, 2004 to 2012, on our Presidential elections, with special reference to podcasts from the same point in the 2008 and 2012 cycles as we are currently at for the 2020 cycle—a point, that is, a year and two months before the actual election.
Who knows? Perhaps that will give us some guidance as to what to expect next year.
Until next week this is your nomadically genial host John Derbyshire wishing you joy of these last few days of summer.
[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire Marches]
