01:37 Flickers of sanity. (In Europe.)
10:44 The Two-Party Trap. (Just imagine.)
19:25 Don, Nikki, and Ron. (GOP probables on immigration.)
31:05 Edbiz bureaucrats: ”Nothing to see here!” (Urban education, 2023.)
39:29 South Africa's illegal-alien problem. (Say what?)
43:10 The OpenAI fracas. (Bad for containment.)
45:34 Peak DEI? (Iowa Regents expel it.)
46:25 Equity v. merit in D.C. (Dumping the test.)
48:11 The Fall of Minneapolis. (Political trial, dubious verdict.)
52:13 Signoff. (With 70s rock.)
01—Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! This is your appreciatively genial host John Derbyshire with VDARE.com's weekly roundup from the news wires.
Before I proceed this week let me just urge you to check out, if you haven't already, the video clip of Lydia and Peter Brimelow talking about the latest developments in New York State's Attorney General Letitia James' lawfare assault on VDARE.com. The clip is not very long—less than twenty minutes—and easy to follow: plain, temperate talk from two eloquent patriots.
The video clip is right there, with an accompanying transcript, on the website, and also at Twitter under the VDARE handle. Watch or read; and, if you can, please donate. Thank you!
Now for a glance at the news. First, Europe.
02—Flickers of sanity. Mass migration from the barbarous to the civilized zone continues apace. Regime media in the civilized countries mostly prefer to say nothing about it; and of course politicians in those countries strongly prefer to do nothing about it. There are some flickers of sanity in the gloom, though.
There was for example Wednesday's election in Holland. The biggest share of votes was won by Geert Wilders' PVV, the Party for Freedom. Wilders is a veteran of twenty years' campaigning against Muslim immigration into Europe. If the Muzzies have a master list of targets for assassination somewhere, he's got to be top of the list.
That biggest share of votes was 24 percent. It doesn't actually sound very big; but there were eighteen parties on the ballot for voters to choose from. Holland is one of those proportional-representation parliamentary democracies that always end up with a coalition government. There were, as I said, eighteen parties to vote for. The runners-up to Wilders' 24 percent were parties with sixteen, fifteen, and thirteen percent.
Wilders' populism doesn't stop at immigration control. For years he's been stamping on the toes of Dutch goodthinkers. He's scoffed at climate change as a leftist fad. He wants Holland to leave the European Union, go back to having its own national currency, and stop sending weapons to Ukraine.
Dutch News, an English-language left-wing outlet, noted with dismay that less-educated voters favored Wilders by much higher margins than did those with college degrees. They sobbed that, sob:
This election blew open the myth of the Netherlands as a land of equal opportunities and exposed a sense of despair at the lower end of the social and educational scale. For whatever reason, those voters connected more strongly with Wilders's rhetoric blaming their difficulties on migrants than the concrete plans by other parties to raise minimum wages and ease the tax burden.
End sob.
Populism is stirring all over Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen's National Rally is at second place in the polls, nipping at the heels of President Emmanuel Macron. Germany's AfD party is also now second in that country's polls. Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy party is in power.
There are counter-currents elsewhere in Europe. Lefty Pedro Sánchez remains Prime Minister of Spain after the July election, although not without huge populist protests, still ongoing.
Last month's election in Poland will likely produce a center-left government, although a coalition is still being negotiated; while on the upside, a concurrent referendum turned up a 97 percent vote against mass Third World immigration.
And in all these multiparty parliamentary democracies, coalition governments are the rule, with all the compromises that involves.
There are Deep States to be reckoned with, too, as I spoke about last week in relation to Britain.
"Man proposes, God disposes," goes the old saying, with equivalents in every language known to me. French: L'homme propose, Dieu dispose. German: Der Mensch denkt's, Gott lenkt's, … and so on. Oh, you want the Chinese? Móushì zài rén, chéngshì zài tian—there you go.
In the managerial state, which is today the style of government all over the civilized world, voters and politicians propose, human-rights lawyers and bureaucrats dispose. Giorgia Meloni learned that in the Lampedusa crisis two months ago.
Still there are these flickers of sanity, though. I'll take what I can get.
A footnote to that: Not only are there flickers of sanity against the Great Replacement over in Europe. In Ireland, a proud member of the European Union and a popular destination for illegal aliens from Africa and the Middle East, there have also been flickers of rebellion.
Thursday afternoon an immigrant from North Africa stabbed a woman and three children outside an elementary school in inner-city Dublin. The woman and one of the children—a five-year-old girl—are in a serious condition in hospital as I go to tape here. The other two children, aged five and six, have less serious injuries.
When the news came out people took to the streets. There have been major riots. A hotel housing illegal aliens has been burned, as well as a tram, a double decker bus and a police car.
There was kindling lying around before this spark landed in it. Quote from the Newsweek report:
There have been ongoing protests across Ireland against asylum centers amid a housing crisis. Many hotels and guest houses have been converted to asylum accommodation, leading to protests by people in towns affected by lower tourist income.
End quote.
This violent street reaction to the school stabbing may have been inflamed by the fact that the elementary school attacked is run with the Irish language—Gaelic, that is. As a person born and educated in England, I well know how inflammable Irish patriotism is.
In fact I shall offer a word of advice, free of charge, to any illegals on their way to the Emerald Isle: Don't mess with the Irish!
Oh, the Irish government's response to the riots? They have promised more laws against "hate speech." As Keith Woods tweeted, tweet:
The government is more concerned about natives expressing "hate" than they are about migrants stabbing children on the street.
More new laws to silence the Irish people. This is a state at war with its nation.
End tweet.
03—The Two-Party Trap. For all the drawbacks of multiparty coalition-building government, they are at least spared the Two-Party Trap.
What's the Two-Party Trap? Well, imagine you are a voter in a nation that's had just two major parties alternating in government for as long as anyone can remember. Go on, just try to imagine it.
Sure, there are third parties you can vote for: but those two big parties have the mighty force of inertia on their side. Campaign funding has been directed to them for so long that huge, powerful blocks of voters are locked into them: labor unions on the left, for example, and big corporations on the right.
There's an inertia of voter psychology, too; a reluctance to take third parties seriously. Heck, I've ALWAYS voted for the People's Progressive Party. It's the party of the Little Guy, isn't it? Or contrariwise: I'm a National Salvation Party loyalist, same as my Dad. The People's Progressives are just a bunch of commies.
Thence to the Two-Party Trap. What if you strongly favor some policy—immigration restriction, for example—but both the big parties oppose it? You can vote third party; but (a) they are poorly funded and not likely to win, and (b) at least the two big ones have lots of experience at operating the machinery of government. If that third party gets in, how long will it take them to climb the learning curve?
Britain's voters face a particularly nasty version of the Two-Party trap in 2024. I apologize for falling back on the Old Country as a news source after last week's Brit-a-thon, but the parallels here are obvious and instructive.
Under Britain's constitution the Prime Minister has to call a general election before January 2025, although the precise date is his to choose. So 2024 is election year over there, same as over here.
And yes, there are two big parties over there: the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, a.k.a. the Tories.
There is also a significant third party, the Liberal Democrats. They actually formed a European-style governing coalition with the Tories from 2010 to 2015. That was highly unusual, though. The Liberal Democrats currently hold fifteen seats in the 650-seat House of Commons—less than 2½ percent.
Sure, the Lib-Dems might do better next year, but voter inertia will keep them down. Current polling has them at twelve percent; the Tories at 25, Labour at 46. It'll be a two-party election.
Immigration should be a huge issue; all the huger because of figures released this week when the Office for National Statistics published the number for net immigration in 2022: 745,000—nearly three-quarters of a million.
That is a sensational number, and a politically scandalous one for the Tories. Prior to the 2010 election, when the number was coming close to 300,000, Tory candidate David Cameron promised voters that if they elected a Tory government, net migration would be, quote, "reduced to the tens of thousands," end quote.
The Tories were duly elected; but the reduction didn't happen. Five years later in 2015 the number was heading for 400,000. There was enough dissatisfaction over this to fuel the 2016 Brexit vote to leave the European Union, which voters thought would restore Britain's ability to control its own borders.
The Tories continued in power down to the present day. Cameron resigned after Brexit, though, and a succession of Tory Prime Ministers followed, all of them promising to get net immigration numbers down.
None of them did so. When Boris Johnson resigned last July following scandals and rebellions in his party, the latest number was over 450,000 for 2021. Now we know that the number for 2022, Johnson's last year, was 745,000.
Executive summary: After thirteen years of Tory government under five Tory Prime Ministers, every one of them vowing to get the immigration number down, starting from under 300,000 and a promise from the Tory candidate to get it down to five digits, it is today heading fast towards seven digits.
Inescapable conclusion: The Tory party is utterly useless at immigration control.
So what's a British voter to do next year? If two-party inertia holds, which I hereby predict it will, he'll vote for the Labour Party candidate.
What's the Labour Party like on immigration? They love it! Let's bring in more!
Legacy white British are now just 37 percent of the population of London. When I went up to college there in 1963 it was 97 percent. Other big cities likewise. Nationwide, legacy white British were 78 percent in 2019, likely 76 percent now. The Great Replacement is seriously under way over there.
So on an issue they are seriously troubled about, British voters next year face the Two-Party Trap. On immigration, the Tory Party is useless, the Labour Party worse than useless.
Disaffected Tory voters can't stop the Great Replacement by voting. They can, however, vote Labour and thereby at least derive some grim satisfaction by poking their collective finger in the eye of the Tory Party. That is what they'll do.
04—Don, Nikki, and Ron. Do we in the U.S.A. face a Two-Party Trap of our own? The regime would sure like us to, but we may have an out.
Our two parties are of course the Democrats and the Republicans. We don't have to speculate about the Great Replacement consequences of a Democrat win next November. We've been living with those consequences for nigh-on three years already. One of the lesser consequences, just down the road from me, is the impending bankruptcy of New York City, city finances being crushed under the weight of illegal aliens.
Are Republicans any better? That will depend who's on the ticket in November. Present odds are it will be one of the following three, in order by probability: Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis.
To take them in reverse order: Ron DeSantis sounds fine. Six months ago he signed into law a bill for the state of Florida that mandates punishment for employers of illegal aliens and prohibits them presenting any kind of ID card, among other things. A few weeks later he publicly promised to end birthright citizenship.
He's also said he'll tax remittances to family members abroad, deport Biden's illegals, and send our military to the southern border.
DeSantis hasn't spoken much about legal immigration; but the little he has said has been sensible and patriotic: promoting training and education for jobs in financial technology, for example.
What's not to like? There will of course be obstacles to overcome: the seriously cucked Republican Party to begin with, then the Deep State "culture of defiance." On his record, though, DeSantis seems to be an honest man who knows how to get things done. We can hope.
Nikki Haley? Her most recent reported statement on immigration—or at any rate, the most recent one I've noticed—was a couple of weeks ago at a campaign stop in New Hampshire when she told her supporters, quote:
So for too long, Republican and Democrat presidents dealt with immigration based on an annual quota. We'll take X number this year, we'll take X number next year, the debate is on the number. It's the wrong way to look at it. We need to do it based on merit. We need to go to our industries and say, [inner quote] "What do you need that you don't have?" [End inner quote.]
So think agriculture, think tourism, think tech, we want the talent that's going to make us better.
End quote.
Breitbart, whence I am quoting this, adds helpfully that, quote:
Haley's reference to "think tech" refers to the many white-collar careers that are now being filled by cheap and compliant foreign graduates instead of available and trained American graduates.
End quote.
Straight-down-the-line Chamber of Commerce stuff, in other words. Nikki, Nikki: Cast down your bucket where you are.
And then, Trump. I told you two weeks ago, when I gave you a full three minutes of the man himself, that he's taking a strong line against illegals: "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history," et cetera.
That's good; and we can be sure it's good because when he used that same phrase, "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history," back in September it sent the New York Times to the fainting couch.
They ran a breathless report in the November 11th edition of the paper gasping that, for example, quote: "He [that is, Trump] plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year." End quote.
The Times was especially horrified by Trump's intention to build big holding camps for illegals awaiting deportation. Quote, with inner quotes here from Stephen Miller, Trump's White House aide:
Mr Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.
Because of the magnitude of arrests and deportations being contemplated, the plan is to build [inner quote] "vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers" [end inner quote] for immigrants as their cases progress and they wait to be flown to other countries.
Mr Miller said the new camps would likely be built [inner quote] "on open land in Texas near the border." [end inner quote]
He said the military would construct them under the authority and control of the Department of Homeland Security. While he cautioned that there were no specific blueprints yet, he said the camps would look professional and similar to other facilities for migrants that have been built near the border.
End New York Times quote.
George Fishman, who is Senior Legal Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, had fun with that over at the CIS website, November 20th.
Fishman reminded us of the Hesburgh Commission, full name the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, set up by the Jimmy Carter administration in 1978. The Commission's recommendations included, in edited summary:
The Commission explained that among the important benefits of these processing centers would be, more edited summary:
So forty years ago this Commission, this Hesburgh Commission, was proposing steps that look very much like Trump's plans for detention and removal. The proposals were incorporated in immigration law in the 1980s and 1990s, although they seem not to have been very vigorously acted upon.
And this was a very hifalutin' Commission. The Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, the chairman, was as respectable as it is possible to be: President of the University of Notre Dame, former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, awardee of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Then later, in 1999, long after the Commission had finished and published its recommendations, The Reverend Hesburgh was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. That award was approved in the House of Representatives by voice vote and passed in the Senate by unanimous consent.
Fishman concludes his piece at the CIS website with the following rhetorical questions, quote:
Should the Trump campaign rebrand its plan by calling for "processing centers"? For that matter, should Congress award Stephen Miller the Congressional Medal of Honor?
End quote.
My advice to Stephen Miller would be: Don't hold your breath.
Oh, you want to know where Donald Trump stands on legal immigration? I'm sure he will tell us, any day now.
05—Edbiz bureaucrats: "Nothing to see here!" Thanksgiving dinner with old friends at their house. We have known each other for thirty years, since Mrs Derbyshire and Mrs Oldfriend both took their toddlers—our daughter, her son—to a local playgroup.
The toddlers are now working adults. All through those decades, excepting a pause in COVID time, we've kept up the custom of Thanksgiving dinner at their house, July 4th or Labor Day barbecue at ours.
Their family is bigger than ours, so there was quite a host around the table. Mr Oldfriend has a son from a previous marriage. The son is himself married now, with two fine young sons of his own. All were present, together with Mrs Oldfriend's sister and her husband.
The dinner was great, especially the stuffing. There seems to be some kind of anti-turkey movement under way on social media: "Turkey tastes awful, why do we eat it? Duck is way better …" etc. etc. As a reactionary traditionalist I am naturally of the other party. Who cares which bird tastes better? It's Thanksgiving.
Oldfriend Jr. teaches in a New York City public school. He has stories. I used to think that cops have the best stories, followed by military men and then doctors. Listening to Junior I find myself reflecting that big-city public-school teachers should be in the list somewhere.
Me, across the dinner-table: "You been getting any of the illegal aliens the city's taken in?"
He: "Oh yeah. One or two in every class."
Me: "How are they? Trouble, or what?"
He: "Not much trouble, but I can't teach them anything. They don't speak English."
Me: "Really? So what do they do in class all day long?"
He: "Just sit there. Play on their phones, the ones that have them."
Urban education in the mid-21st century. Tell me again, if you can, that we're not in steep civilizational decline.
And Junior's school is in a not-bad neighborhood of New York City. (You know what I mean by "not-bad neighborhood," right? Of course you do.) There is much worse elsewhere. Quote from a news story out of Charlottesville, Virginia, quote:
Friday was a breaking point for teachers at CHS. Students roaming the hallways during class. Brawls in the common areas. Intruders let onto school premises. Teachers afraid for their own safety. Administrators unwilling or unable to discipline.
Things are not OK at Charlottesville High School.
On Friday, classes were abruptly canceled when teachers did not show up to work. The decision by so many school employees to call out appears to have been prompted by a series of wild student brawls that occurred the day before.
At least one of those fights included an 18-year-old intruder who does not even attend CHS and who was let into the school by a student for the sole purpose of perpetrating violence. [The kids are not all right: Violence, intruders and chaos at Charlottesville High School by Jason Armesto; The Daily Progress, November 17th 2023.]
End quote.
The Charlottesville High School student body is white-black-Hispanic-mixed-Asian 45-29-14-7-6 percents. Both the Principal and the town Schools Superintendent are black (although the Principal announced his resignation earlier this month.)
A teacher at CHS told us something I figured out for myself, quote:
There's about 30 kids that never go to class and have not gone to class from the first day. They've never intended to go to class and do nothing but walk the halls and avoid adults. If an adult approaches them, they swear at them, keep walking and there are no consequences. Those 30 kids set the tone for the rest of the 1,400 kids in the school.
End quote.
Just 30 out of 1,400? The solution seems straightforward. Just punish the 30. Make an example of them. Right?
Wrong! This is Wokeland we're in here. Nothing is straightforward. Straightforwardness is old thinking, white thinking, like punctuality, objectivity, hard work, and getting the right answer on a math test. Further quote from the Charlottesville story:
CHS counselor David Wilkerson wrote on Facebook that [inner quote] "The VDOE would prefer that the data shows that no kids are being punished due to the correlation between punishing kids and a poor graduation rate." [End inner quote.]
End quote.
Just roll that around on your tongue for a moment. The Department of Education of the State of Virginia would prefer the data to show that no kids are being punished; that the students in their public schools are flawlessly well-behaved.
That's the preference of Virginia's education bureaucrats as rogue students wander the hallways fighting and screaming obscenities at teachers.
Stock up on canned food, citizens, and big drums of purified water. Get some firearms and training in how to use them. Seek out like-minded citizens and socialize with them: there's strength in numbers.
Civilization? What, you mean that stuff that used to be taught in schools? Fuhgeddaboutit.
06—Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: I mentioned last week the three rocks that British schemes for immigration restriction invariably hit, causing the schemes to founder and sink. The three rocks are:
The first of those rocks is not just a problem for the Brits. Daily Mail Online reported November 21st that South Africa is planning to withdraw from the U.N. Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol on the Status of Refugees.
Why? Quote from the Mail:
So the government can restrict immigration and send refugees back to countries that are not deemed dangerous.
End quote.
You wouldn't think South Africa would be much bothered by illegal aliens. The place is an economic basket case, electricity and other services breaking down, health care and education starved of funding, youth unemployment rate—that's ages 15 to 24—of 61 percent. That's just youth unemployment; the overall rate is somewhere in the range 33 to 42 percent.
Why would anyone want to immigrate, legally or otherwise, into that dump? Just as your Mom told you: There's always someone worse off than yourself.
Dire as things are in South Africa, in neighboring countries they're direr. There are high rates of illegal immigration from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Some South Africans believe the government is whipping up anti-immigrant feeling to deflect attention from its own failings. See, it's not because of our incompetence and corruption that you're unemployed and hungry, it's those foreigners taking your jobs.
Whether they can successfully sell that to the electorate, we'll find out next year: South Africa is yet another country holding a national election in 2024. The exact date is not yet determined; it'll be between May and August.
And since I've added another to your list of 2024 elections, I may as well add yet another: Taiwan, January 13th.
It's going to be a boom year for elections. Let's hope the Taiwan result doesn't cause an actual boom …
Item: You've probably heard about the ructions at OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence outfit allied with Microsoft.
I say "allied with" because OpenAI is actually two things. I refer you to my monthly Diary for September, in which I discussed the new book The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of the AI company DeepMind.
In that book Suleyman discusses at length the prospects for AI in coming years and the problem of "containment." By that he means the importance of directing AI and other cutting-edge technology to social good, when they are also capable of great evil.
I said that OpenAI is two things. One of those things—the one yoked to Microsoft—is a straightforward tech firm looking to make a profit. The other thing, embodied in the OpenAI Board of Directors, is a non-profit to supervise containment—keeping AI on the rails of social good.
Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, was removed by the Board last Friday, no-one seems to know why. Possibly he was being too deferential to Microsoft.
Whatever the cause, the OpenAI development geeks raised an angry mass protest. On Tuesday Altman got his job back, and most of the Board members were out of theirs.
It's hard not to see this as a setback for the notion of "containment." I'd like to hear Mustafa Suleyman's opinion.
Item: Might we be getting close to Peak DEI? The Iowa Board of Regents has voted to abolish DEI in all state universities.
Of the recommendations listed in the announcement I particularly liked this one. Quote:
Explore potential recruitment strategies for advancing diversity of intellectual and philosophical perspective in faculty and staff applicant pools.
Hey, perhaps I should apply for a job over there. Do they need any math instructors?
Item: Elsewhere in EdBiz the evil, stupid doctrine of "disparate impact" is eating its corrosive way through job requirements.
The jobs here are for social workers in Washington, D.C. You have to be licensed to do social work in the capital, and to get a license you have to pass an exam. It's not a severely academic exam, only a series of, quote, "multiple choice tests, which ask social workers what they'd do in hypothetical scenarios," end quote.
As with well-nigh any kind of written test there are, none the less, different pass rates by race. Most infuriating to the Equity people, between 2018 and 2021 76 percent of white test takers passed the bachelor's level exam the first time while the corresponding rate for black test-takers was only 33 percent.
D.C. has a solution, though. The District's City Council is considering dumping the test. That's always the solution, isn't it?
Let's be thankful for small mercies. At least these aren't Air Traffic Controllers.
Item: I have a burr under my saddle about the prosecution and the fantastically long sentences handed out to white people involved in the deaths of black trouble-makers: Derek Chauvin and his colleagues for the death of George Floyd and the Brunswick Three for the death of Ahmaud Arbery, both in 2020.
The verdicts in all these cases seems to me highly dubious—just brazenly political, in fact. The sentences are vindictive and cruel.
A friend I discussed this with said these so-called trials were just legalized lynchings. I disagreed. Lynchings—27 percent of which were of white people, remember—happened in small rural districts where everyone knew who the no-goods were. Some high proportion—I'd guess it was a very high proportion—of lynch victims were guilty of the thing they were lynched for.
Derek Chauvin was no way guilty of murder. A guy committing murder does not look the way Chauvin looked in those pictures at the scene. He got a 22½ years state sentence regardless; then, with the usual double-jeopardy twist, 21 years on federal charges.
Monday this week the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Chauvin on the state charge. They didn't give us any reason why they refused the appeal. He has a separate appeal pending on the federal charges.
Roddie Bryan, one of the Brunswick Three, who did nothing to anybody, got a life sentence from the state and 35 years on double jeopardy. That's not justice; that's flagrant anti-white malice …
And so on. Don't get me started.
I therefore read with interest Miranda Devine's column in the New York Post the other day about the Floyd case.
She is actually writing about a new crowdfunded documentary movie, "The Fall of Minneapolis," which exposes what Miranda calls, quote, "a shocking tale of injustice and perfidy, and a ruthless political operation," end quote.
The film was produced by Liz Collin, a former anchor at a CBS affiliate in the Twin Cities who was taken off air during the riots and demoted because her husband, Bob Kroll, was the Minneapolis police union chief at the time.
The film is an hour and a half long. If you don't have time to watch it, please at least read Miranda Devine's New York Post column online. Our justice system is quite seriously rotten; she describes some of the worst of it, the parts that stink to high Heaven.
07—Signoff. That's all I have, ladies and gents. Heartfelt thanks to you this Thanksgiving week for your time and attention, your emails and donations. Concerning which latter, do please watch Lydia and Peter make their case here at VDARE.com, and help if you can. THANK YOU!
I'd like to offer a rationale, based on some theme in the foregoing, to justify my choice of signoff music. Unfortunately I can't. I just want to hear some righteous seventies rock music. Here's one of my favorites from Dr Hook, vocals here mostly by Ray Sawyer.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Dr Hook and the Medicine Show, "Cover of the Rolling Stone".]
