Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively at VDARE.com

I’m in a very bad mood about President Trump’s failure to keep his promise to pull out of Afghanistan, but I must admit there are some glimmers of hope this week on VDARE.com’s key issue. This week has seen some action, some hints of further action, and some positive rhetoric on immigration.

The most important action, too late for me to conclude in this week’s Radio Derb , was Trump’s pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. VDARE.com has long regarded Sheriff Arpaio as a national treasure: his prosecution was simply a political lynching by an Obama Administration that was treasonously determined not to enforce immigration law; as Powerline.com’s very moderate Paul Mirengoff puts it in a good summary, the pardon “a political end to a political case.” Well done, Mr. President.

Another Trump Administration action involved countries that won't take back their citizens when those citizens have committed crimes in the U.S.A. This is itself a subset of the larger problem of violent alien criminals who you'd think would get deported but never were; not necessarily because their home countries wouldn't take them back, but often just because our own government couldn't be bothered to deport them. Read more >>

There’s an interesting moment in Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign when two obscure Democrat operatives who involved in her presidential debate-prep sessions, Karen Dunn and Ron Klain, “stressed that Trump, contrary to popular opinion, had actually put forth a lot of policy ideas.” (VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow had the same perception). President Trump just done it again. In his August 15 press conference, he very reasonably asked the Main Stream Media/ Opposition Party, in the context of their Charlottesville Fake News, “What about the Alt-Left that came charging at the, as you say, the Alt Right?” And in his August 23 Phoenix speech, as Leftists rioted in the streets and the MSM covered for them, he called out “AntiFa” by name. [ Donald Trump Calls Out Antifa for Violence, Breitbart, August 23, 2017]

Neither of these concepts are welcome to our Ruling Class. An ADL analyst sniffs “the word was made up to create a false equivalence between the far-right and ‘anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn’t like’ “.[ ‘No such thing as the alt-left:’ Donald Trump’s phrase for counter-protesters dismissed by extremism experts , by Liam Stack, UK Independent, August 16, 2017] Read more >>

In the week after the Charlottesville disorder, several notable things happened 130 miles to the northeast in Baltimore. Several public statues commemorating Civil War-era figures were hustled away in the dead of night. Five new homicides were chalked up. And Nathan Connolly, an African American associate professor of history at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University penned an op-ed for the Washington Post that may—depending on how you parse it—have called for terrorism against civil society.

Actually, five murders in a week wasn’t notable in Baltimore. In mid-June, six people were killed in a single 24-hour period. The dog days of summer have sapped everyone’s energy.

Nor, really, were the monument removals remarkable. They followed years of pandering to African-American sensibilities, which are both fragile and volatile, bouncing from angst over the death of a small-time (but persistent) drug-dealer in 2015 to complaints about a subsequent absence of policing in black neighborhoods.

The WaPo Op Ed was particularly striking. Its premise was that liberalism has failed to deal with racial injustice in the U.S.—and its conclusion was that blacks need to resume throwing rocks. Whether the rocks are to be literal or metaphorical is only somewhat in question.

Baltimore’s murder problem, like its drug problem, police corruption problem, subliteracy problem, tax-base problem, and population-decline problem, has a distinctively demographic component. The racial mix of the city is now approximately 63% African-American, 29% white, with allegedly undercounted Latinos making up most of the rest. Those numbers accompany an eye-catching murder rate. So far in 2017 (through August 22) there have been 225 homicides. If the pace continues and the city closes the year with a record 355 murders, that would be 12% more than last year and a handful more than the city’s annus mirabilis 2015, in which 344 were killed. Read more >>

Decades ago, a debate over what kind of nation America is roiled the conservative movement.

Neocons claimed America was an "ideological nation" a "creedal nation," dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal."

Expropriating the biblical mandate, "Go forth and teach all nations!" they divinized democracy and made Read more >>

I'm dying to hear about the "3-D chess" Trump is playing with his announcement on Monday that he's breaking his promise on Afghanistan and throwing more forces into that utterly pointless war. Will he be sending the transgender troops?

But then the Emperor God gave a magnificent speech in Arizona Tuesday night. Curiously, when he talks to voters—as opposed to his Cabinet and White House staff—there's very little about sending more U.S. troops to die in the human meat-grinder of Afghanistan.

Trump got thunderous applause from his 30,000-person focus group for the wall, stepped-up deportations and Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio—recently convicted of contempt for "racially profiling" Hispanics. But you could hear a pin drop when he mentioned Afghanistan, Nikki Haley and Gen. John Kelly. (At least he had the good sense not to bring up Goldman Sachs' Gary Cohn again.)

There were long faces all over cable news after Trump's speech, which surely triggers the reward center in his brain, like giving a mouse cheese. Read more >>