00:51 Trump is shot. (Feds screw up.)
05:40 Killing the King. (Assassinations, failed and successful.)
12:02 Shooting my Member. (It’s personal.)
16:19 Spectacle in Milwaukee. (The GOP Convention.)
25:33 The long slow Biden slide. (Keeping us in suspense.)
31:56 California totalitarianism. (It’s the same everywhere.)
34:39 Suicide pods for rent. (Demography at the other end.)
37:32 A what point? (Midwits talk math.)
38:39 Signoff. (With Fred & Ginger.)
01—Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. This is your asymptotically genial host John Derbyshire with my weekly glance at the news.
This was a very newsy week in American politics, a week of shock, spectacle, and suspense. Our Republican Party delivered the shock and the spectacle; the Democrats gave us the suspense. I shall take them each in turn.
02—Trump is shot. The shock of course was the attempted assassination of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in Pennsylvania last Saturday evening.
Trump was giving a speech in an outdoor location at Butler, thirty miles north of Pittsburgh. A young white man named Thomas Crooks positioned himself on a low rooftop 130 yards away and fired off eight rounds from a semiautomatic assault rifle belonging to his Dad.
One round took off a piece of Trump's right ear; the others killed one spectator and badly injured two others.
Secret Service agents pulled Trump down and hustled him off the stage. At one point in the process, while still on stage, Trump got upright, made a fist salute, and shouted, "Fight! Fight!"
An Associated Press photographer named Evan Vucci took a great picture of that: Trump shouting and fist-saluting, his face smeared with blood; the agents trying to pull him back down to cover; Old Glory waving above it all in a cloudless blue sky.
I don't know how copyrights and compensation work in the news-photography business, but if there is any justice there Mr Vucci will never have to work again.
The shooter, Thomas Crooks, was swiftly dispatched by a Secret Service sniper.
Shall I always remember where I was and what I was doing when I got the news about this event? Probably not; I can't remember my kids' names.
For the record, though, I was at the desk in my study browsing X. So I got the news the same way as, I am told, all the Millennials and Gen-Z-ers get their news nowadays: from social media.
Mrs Derbyshire gets most of her news from WeChat, a Chinese-language social medium. Over breakfast Sunday—which is to say, twelve hours or so after the event—she was showing me WeChat clips of T-shirts printed with the Vucci photograph that Chinese vendors were already online with, 68 renminbi per item, which is a bit short of ten dollars.
There have of course been all kinds of questions and criticisms after the event. Crooks was in plain sight well before he started shooting. Local law enforcement, and presumably then the Secret Service squad, had been notified by spectators who'd spotted him. Why did Trump's bodyguards let him stand up and speak?
DEI seems to have been a factor, the case there supported by news photographs of plump female agents with confused expressions trying unsuccessfully to holster their sidearms.
Staff availability was likely an issue, too. President Biden and Vice President Harris were both on the road at the time, in separate locations. Possibly other cabinet members were, also.
So protecting an ex-president would have been—and should have been—at best a third-level assignment. To put it in Trumpian terms: the Secret Service were not sending their best.
Still, there was a serious screw-up here by the feds. Someone should take responsibility.
But then, if federal bureaucrats ever took responsibility for their screw-ups, there would be a lot of empty office space in Washington, D.C.
03—Killing the King. Just a couple of points on political assassinations and attempted assassinations in general.
These events are rare, for which we should give thanks. They are sufficiently rare that in between them, we hardly ever think about them.
They're not all that rare, though. July 8th 2022—two years almost to the day before this attempt on Trump—Japanese politician Shinzo Abe was giving a speech in public when a lunatic shot him dead with a home-made handgun.
Abe was in the first rank of Japanese politicians, having served nine years as Prime Minister before stepping down at age 67 with health problems.
And if we are talking about close anniversaries, I hope it won't be considered in bad taste for me—a Trump voter, let me affirm, and a longstanding opponent of anyone comparing anyone to Adolf Hitler—to note that the Stauffenberg Plot to assassinate Hitler occurred on July 20, 1944—eighty years less one week before last Saturday's event.
Political history is full of assassinations, both failed and successful. Julius Caesar was by no means the first victim.
Nearly two hundred years prior to Caesar getting his ticket punched China was coming to the end of the historical period called Warring States, an era of many small kingdoms struggling against each other. One of those states, the state of Qín, had conquered most of the others.
The ruler of one of the so-far-unconquered states, the northeastern state of Yan, sent a young knight named Jing Ke to assassinate the King of Qín.
The assassination failed, Qín conquered Yan and then all the other states, and six years after the assassination attempt against him the King of Qín declared himself First Emperor. And that, boys and girls, is why his empire is today named China.
For a consolation prize, that young knight Jing Ke, the failed assassin, became a folk hero. If you want to show off to a Mandarin-speaking acquaintance, when last Saturday's attempt on Trump comes up in conversation just murmur "Jing Ke cì Qín" (荊 軻 刺 秦).
And of course it's not just ancient Rome and China. "When you strike at the King you must kill him," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, and probably every civilization that's ever existed has some equivalent nugget of wisdom.
(Donald Trump himself, by the way, once deployed that Emerson quote himself on Twitter in regard to his own impeachment, although he seems to have got the quote second-hand from The New York Times, not from reading Emerson.)
Yes, history's full of assassinations and attempted assassinations. For a really full account I refer you to my favorite history buff Ed West, posting on his substack account July 18th.Teddy Roosevelt, Lenin, FDR, Charles de Gaulle, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, … Ed covers the whole field. I didn't know until reading his piece that Queen Victoria survived eight assassination attempts.
A thing I sometimes ponder is assassination tech. This attempt on Trump by firing at him with a rifle, is kind of … old school. Are there somewhere would-be political assassins getting themselves technologically up to date with, for example, drones?
There surely are. In fact Nicolás Maduro, President-for-Life of Venezuela, claims that he was attacked six years ago by drones carrying explosives.
His claim has been disputed but it's plausible. And true or false, tech advances fast in these areas.
Now, six years later, with near-infallible facial recognition to guide them, one of those wee beasties could pick out the target victim in a crowd, whizz over there and blow his head off. With remote control, it could be hard to identify the drone operator.
I'm sorry to say it—I mean, I don't wish death on anyone—but I'd bet a modest sum of money that there's a successful political assassination by drone somewhere before January 2030.
04—Shooting my Member. On the matter of political assassinations, I have a very tenuous connection to one.
This one occurred nearly 200 years ago in 1812. British politics at the time was dominated in foreign affairs by the wars against Napoleon and the differences with the U.S.A. that led to the 1812 War; in domestic matters, by the social and economic stresses of the early Industrial Revolution and the descent into madness of King George the Third.
The Prime Minister in early 1812 was a chap named Spencer Perceval. In May of that year Perceval was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons by a disgruntled businessman, name of John Bellingham.
Spencer Perceval died on the spot after uttering the last words, quote: "I am murdered. I am murdered." End quote, end of Prime Minister Perceval. He was the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated, although Margaret Thatcher had a narrow escape in 1984.
So what's the personal connection to your genial host? Well, the British Prime Minister sits in the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for some constituency. Spencer Perceval's constituency was Northampton, the small provincial town where, a century and a half later, I was born and grew up. Hey, I told you it was very tenuous.
The murder of Spencer Perceval by John Bellingham has an odd little footnote.
In the late 20th century there was a Member of Parliament named Henry Bellingham, of the same extended family as John, although whether a direct descendant or not isn't clear.
Like Spencer Perceval, Henry Bellingham belonged to the Conservative Party—the Tories. He was first elected to Parliament in 1983, to a safe Tory seat—not Northampton: from the mid-20th-century on we were a safe Labour seat.
But then, in the Labour Party landslide of 1997, Henry Bellingham lost his seat. Tony Blair's Labour Party won it, much helped by the fact that a third party, a forerunner of Nigel Farage's U.K. Independence Party, took a lot of votes away from the Tories.
Who was the leader of that third party? It was a certain Roger Percival, a descendant of Spencer Perceval (who, by the way, had 13 children).
So Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was murdered in 1812 by John Bellingham. Then, 185 years later, a descendant of Perceval caused a descendant of Bellingham to lose his seat in Parliament.
What goes around comes around, although sometimes it takes a while.
05—Spectacle in Milwaukee. All right: I opened by describing this week in American politics as one of shock, spectacle, and suspense. I'm pretty sure I've given sufficient coverage to the shock: what about the spectacle and the suspense?
To cover the spectacle first, it was of course the Republican Party's National Convention in Milwaukee, Monday through Thursday. And yes: It was quite a spectacle.
To begin at the end, though, I have a confession to make. Checking in on X this morning, Friday morning, I saw a tweet from Rod Dreher, whom I knew slightly in my National Review days and still follow. Rod is currently in Budapest, several hours ahead of New York time. Tweet from Rod:
Woke up here in Europe to see what ppl were saying about Trump speech, which I was too sleepy to stay up and watch. All my pro-Trump friends thought it was dull and Castro-like in length. Most bailed after an hour.
End tweet.
My confession is: Although I didn't communicate with Rod, like him I bailed out and went to bed a half-hour before Trump finished his speech. If I'd watched the whole thing I have no doubt I would have belonged in that company of Rod's pro-Trump friends.
Worse yet: Having made my confession there, for penance I really should read the transcript of Trump's speech, but … I'm not going to. I have the New York Times version here on my laptop and I keep scanning through it, hoping for some long theme I can follow with interest, but … no.
I did, like the conscientious VDARE.com veteran that I am, I did do a Ctrl-F on "immigr." There were five hits.
In hit number one Trump was talking about the moment he got shot last Saturday, quote: "I was discussing the great job my administration did on immigration at the southern border." End quote. In hits numbers two through five the word "immigration" was immediately preceded by the word "illegal" every time.
So: in an hour-and-a-half speech, not a word, not a whisper, about legal immigration. Over at the U.S. Tech Workers X handle, they are weeping softly.
All right: I'm a lukewarm Trumpster. He'll make a far better president than anyone the Democrats have on offer and I'll be voting for him in November. He'll be better for the economy, better for our National Security, better for our demography, better for Supreme Court nominees, better all over; not only better than any Democrat, also better than most Republicans.
He's still a blowhard, though, with a tendency to shirk the difficult stuff—especially the legislatively difficult stuff—and to forget promises he's made.
That's just me grumbling, mind. There was nothing lukewarm about this week's convention. The delegates were fired up: waving their placards, calling out witticisms, cheering at every opportunity, breaking into chants of patriotism or mockery: "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! …" … "Joe must go! Joe must go! …"
It was hard not to catch the enthusiasm, even for a lukewarm sourpuss like your genial host here. This is what a party convention should be like.
The high spirits were raised even higher by Trump's selection of J.D. Vance as his partner on the November ticket. The delegates weren't just being polite: this was a really popular choice.
There's been some crowing from lefty outlets that Trump blew it with the Vance pick. Someone named Andrew Feinberg, writing at the U.K. newspaper Independent, tells us Vance will be easy for the Democrats to take down, quote: "the millennial freshman who has exactly one election and two years in the Senate under his belt," end quote.
My own impression is that Vance is well smart enough to take care of himself in debates with progressive nation-wreckers.
I'll admit, though, that I have quietly wondered whether Trump nurses some sort of superstitious belief that his VP must have a five-letter, one-syllable surname ending in "-n-c-e."
I did also find myself thinking that maybe the organizers of the convention had let their class condescension show a bit too plainly.
I had a mental image of a roomful of those organizers—well-dressed middle-class suburban types with master's degrees and book-cases full of, you know, books—saying to each other: "OK, we're the rube party now. Let's get some rube culture up there on stage! Hulk Hogan—yeah! …"
Don't get me wrong. I like hillbillies. Some of my best friends are hillbillies. There are, however, many thousands of independent voters out there who would prefer hillbillies stay in the hills, yet who can be brought to vote for Trump on sober consideration of the policies he will likely pursue in office.
These people never heard of Kid Rock. They would probably have preferred to hear Anna Netrebko. Yeah, yeah, I know: they got Christopher Maccio at the very end of the Convention; but they had to stay awake through an hour and a half of Trump bloviating before they got it, and Netrebko is way better-looking.
When that Vucci photograph came out Saturday evening, that picture of Trump defiant, there was a lot of crowing on X. "Game, set, and match!" people were tweeting. "It's all over! Trump's a shoo-in for November—this picture alone will see him through!"
I was skeptical and early polling after the shooting confirmed my doubts. A poll conducted on Monday, reported by Newsweek on Tuesday, showed no boost at all for Trump from the assassination attempt.
Yeah, sure, polls are often wrong. From what I know of Trump-haters, though—there are a few among my acquaintance—the Vucci photograph isn't going to flip their vote.
It's the independents that matter, and most are just where they were two weeks ago: still considering, still weighing, and—oh yes!—still waiting to see what the Democratic Party comes up with.
06—The long slow Biden slide. So: that's the shock and the spectacle. What's the suspense?
The suspense is of course all on the other side, the side where the Democratic Party dwells. Will Joe Biden run for a second term in November, or won't he? Will he even see out his first term?
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified February 1967; Section 4, quote:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
End quote.
So to remove Joe Biden from his "powers and duties," a majority of his cabinet must tell Congress, in writing, that he's too ga-ga to go on. Then Cacklin' Kamala becomes Acting President.
Is that likely to happen? A week ago I would have said not, no way. Then on Wednesday we got the news that Biden had tested positive for COVID. Isn't it kind of fishy that that came out just when all the news outlets were full of the dazzle and enthusiasm of the GOP Convention?
Could Joe, or whoever is handling Joe, be setting up an excuse for Joe's cabinet to do a Section 4 on him? I'm just wondering.
Here's a story from my own family.
My mother was a dedicated full-time professional nurse in the small provincial town we lived in. Across thirty years she'd worked all the hospitals, knew all the doctors and senior nursing staff.
My Dad was a cigarette smoker. Now, in the early 1970s, that was starting to be a no-no for older people. Dad was stubborn, though, and wouldn't quit.
Then he got a cough. Mum persuaded him somehow to go get a chest X-ray. The doctor who looked at it said there was a shadow on the lung, possibly malignant. Dad should quit smoking. So he quit.
My sister and I suspected that Mum had had a quiet word with the doctor before he issued his report. We knew from her medical stories that such things happened often enough. She would never admit it, though. Dad stayed a nonsmoker, died ten years later from pneumonia.
Hey, it's just a family story. Would White House medics behave like that? If they hate Trump badly enough—and some of these D.C. types really really hate Trump—and they believe that he's sure to defeat Joe in November … I guess they might, just from misguided patriotism. I'm only speculating.
Whatever: the negativity is mounting. Quote from the New York Post today, Friday, quote:
But sources close to Biden said they weren't so sure—even after a torrent of reports Wednesday indicating that both [former House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had privately warned Biden that polling shows he could lose in a landslide, while Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg reportedly warned that donor funds were drying up.
End quote.
I should add a metadata note for that quotation. I took the words from the paper copy of the New York Post that was delivered to me this morning around 6:15 a.m.
Those words do not appear in the online version of the Post that I just consulted. I scanned in a copy from my paper edition and shall put a link to it in the text transcript that I'll post Wednesday morning at my website.
That metadata note may be significant all by itself; I truly have no idea. Concerning Joe Biden's intentions, condition, and prospects, as best I can judge nobody outside the inner chambers of our federal government has any idea, any idea at all.
[Added when archiving: My editor James Fulford, who is much better at finding things online than I am, located the text in the online version of the New York Post. Sorry!]
07—Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Monday this week California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into state law a new act that bans school districts from notifying parents if their child, when at school, presents as a different sex from the one that he or she actually is.
Fox News tells us that the new law has, quote:
won praise from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups who say the ban will help protect transgender and gender-nonconforming students who live in unwelcoming households.
End quote.
Totalitarians have always understood that family affections and loyalties are their enemy. Fourteen-year-old peasant boy Pavlik Morozov was a heroic martyr of the early U.S.S.R. for having supposedly been murdered by angry relatives after he'd denounced his father to the secret police. In Mao Tse-tung's China children were told they should love Chairman Mao more than they loved their parents.
I assume that children in present-day North Korea are given similar instructions—a bit paradoxically, since their country has been ruled by three successive generations of the Kim family.
The viewpoint of our own American totalitarians was expressed very clearly by MSNBC hostess Melissa Harris Perry back in 2016:
[Clip: We've always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of: "These are our children."
So part of it is, we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.
Once it's everybody's responsibility and not just the household's, then we start making better investments.]
Stalinism, Maoism, Progressivism: Call it what you like, it's the same thing everywhere and everywhen, just wearing different outfits.
Item: I talk about demography a lot in these podcasts, mainly about the decline in fertility rates all over the civilized world.
There are also demographic issues at the other end of the age range, though: not just too few kiddies, there are also too many geezers.
I was reminded of this the other day when I pulled up my news aggregator and saw, on the same page, nearly adjacent stories from both ends.
First story: from Newsweek, July 18th, headline: China Is Hiding A Population Secret, Analyst Claims.
The story is about a demography researcher with a Chinese name at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who believes the ChiComs are fudging their population statistics big-time to make their population decline seem less dramatic than it actually is.
Second story: This one's from Agence France-Presse, July 17th, headline: First suicide pod use 'soon' in Switzerland: campaigners.
The text here is about that suicide pod: a nifty little capsule you can climb into, close the lid, press the button, and replace all the oxygen in the thing with nitrogen, causing unconsciousness in thirty seconds then painless death after five minutes.
The society sponsoring this thing tells us that people in Switzerland, where assisted suicide without medical supervision is legal in some of the cantons, are queueing up to use it.
It's not hard to believe. We've all known old people who are sick and/or lonely and would be glad to take a peaceful exit. Let 'em go.
Whatever you think about the morality of this, get used to more news stories about it. Demography is a big topic, and getting bigger … at both ends.
Item: It's petty, I know, but it irritates me when good, solid, well-defined terms from mathematics, my first love, are co-opted into the vocabulary of midwit politicians who wouldn't know a cube from an octahedron.
That has happened with the term "inflection point." "The United States is at an inflection point!" shrieks the midwit pol. Really? Our second derivative just changed sign?
What was wrong with "turning point," or just "corner"? I guess they just don't sound so smart.
To get ahead in politics you have to sound smart. Perhaps one day you'll actually have to be smart. Hey, I can dream.
08—Signoff. And that's all I have, ladies and gents. Thank you as always for your time and attention, for your emails and support.
I am, as regular listeners know, a devotee of the Great American Songbook. Here's one of the classics, written in 1935 by Irving Berlin for a movie that came out the following year.
As well as being a lovely song, the lyrics are prosodically sophisticated. Just listen to the play of internal rhymes here: "ahead" … "fled" … "shed", "soon" … "moon" … "tune" …, "bill" … "still." These guys were geniuses, with both words and music.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Fred Astaire, Let's Face the Music and Dance.]
