01m43s — Somali averages are terrible. (And we've imported them.)
11m08s — Somalis' twofer privilege. (Un-identifiable, un-prosecutable.)
19m03s — It ain't over till the alien wins. (Also un-deportable.)
26m20s — MS-13 among the kulaks. (News from Derbland.)
38m58s — Immigrants are better than us, series #22,894. (Burn down the Ivy League!)
47m50s — Vexed by the Pope. (And the Archbishop, too.)
50m48s — Strategic deportation. (An idea to propagandize.)
52m57s — Thoughts of Chairman Blair. (He deplores, I applaud.)
56m48s — Snake bites woman. (Call the Humane Society!)
57m25s — Signoff. (With a song you can understand.)
[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire Marches, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air. End of year greetings, listeners, from your resolutely genial host John Derbyshire, stirring from my torpor of seasonal satiation to bring you VDARE.com's weekly commentary on the news.
And yes, it's cold, really cold, with a bitter arctic wind keening over Long Island. We're not getting the worst of it, either. In Minnesota, I was just reading, the temperature hit 37 below zero Wednesday morning. If you're wondering whether that's degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Centigrade, allow a veteran arithmetician to tell you that it barely matters: at forty below the two scales coincide.
Well, well: Everyone talks about the weather but no-one does anything about it. Let's check the news. Have I got a smooth segue here? Minnesota, Minnesota … what comes to mind for an immigration patriot when he hears the word "Minnesota"? Somalis, that's what.
02 — Somali averages are terrible. Six years ago I wrote a piece for Taki's Magazine with the title "Somalis All Over." It was about, of course, Somalis. I cast my net worldwide, or at any rate Anglosphere-wide, quoting issues with Somali immigrants in Tennessee, Oregon, Britain, Canada, Australia, and even New Zealand.
If you don't mind, I'll just quote my wrap-up from the end of that article. Quoting myself, quote: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.End quote.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.
That was me writing in 2011. I am sorry to report that the State Department did not rise to my suggestion.
Things in Somalia have actually looked up somewhat since then. They got a regular government the following year; and earlier this year they had a presidential election, followed by a peaceful transition of power to the winner.
That winner, now President of Somalia, was a chap named Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed. Now, you might perhaps think that having one "Mohamed" in your name should be enough. Possibly you are right; but hailing as I do from the nation that engendered Captain Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache, I reserve judgment.
The really objectionable thing about the new President of Somalia, in my opinion, is that he's a dual citizen. He holds both U.S. and Somali citizenship. I don't think that should be allowed. You can only have one mother; you can only have one country. What does this guy do if America goes to war with Somalia?
Well, setting that aside, the main point here is that Somalia is in better shape than it was ten or twenty years ago. The Saudis and the Gulf emirates have been buying up land, and there's a flourishing export trade in meat. If you want a seasonal angle, Somalia is the world's leading exporter of frankincense and myrrh.
Before you get on the phone to your broker, I should say this is all relative. The civil war rumbles on at a low level. October this year a truck bomb in Mogadishu killed more than three hundred people, the worst single terrorist attack in the country's history.
And long-term, Somalia doesn't look like a good bet for stability and prosperity. Total fertility rate is close to six children per woman, fifth-highest in the world behind Niger, Angola, Mali, and Burundi. Lynn and Vanhanen estimate Somalia's mean IQ as 68, which is low even for black Africa. The Somali Wirtschaftswunder is still some way off, would be my guess.
Still, the place is in better overall shape than it was when we took in tens of thousands of refugees in the 1990s and 2000s. So … shouldn't the refugees go home? Isn't that the idea of being refugees: that you get a temporary refuge until it's reasonably safe to return to your homeland?
In the case of a civil war, also, shouldn't it only be women, children, and old folk who get refugee status? In a civil war, men of fighting age should pick a side and fight.
There I'm betraying myself as hopelessly naïve. In the United States, refugees are big business, as Ann Corcoran over at the Refugee Resettlement Watch website has been documenting for more than ten years now. Tens of millions of dollars sluice though annually from U.S. taxpayers to the resettlement agencies, most of which have deceptively churchy-sounding names. Then, after refugees have been settled in our country a few weeks, the agencies hand them over to municipal, state, and national welfare services, with untold billions of further costs to the public fisc for healthcare, education, housing, and law enforcement stretching away into the future.
That's the process by which the U.S.A. acquired a big population of Somalis — around 150,000, of whom about half live in Minnesota. The Census Bureau estimates that 74,000 people in Minnesota speak Somali. There's the Minnesota connection.
Why so many Somalis in Minnesota? It's a combination of things. First and foremost, there's the curse of Midwestern Nice. If you're pimping for one of those resettlement agencies and you go to the mayor of some town and say: "There are all these poor refugees desperate for some place to lay their heads. Would you consider taking a couple of thousand?" you're more likely to get an affirmative answer from Minnesota than you are from, say, Arkansas.
And then, once the so-called refugee is settled in the U.S.A., he's free to move from one place to another. The most attractive place for him to move to is whichever place has the biggest concentration of his fellow-countrymen. So there's a snowball effect: augmented, once people have been here long enough to get citizenship, by chain migration.
Somalis are black; they're also, for the most part, Muslim. So they are twofers for Designated Victim Status, and white Americans better not even hint at anything negative about them.
This has consequences. Let me give over two more segments to some recent consequences.
03 — Somalis' twofer privilege. One consequence of Somalis being Designated Victim Status twofers is that news media are deeply unwilling to identify them as perps in crime reports.
We had an example of this just the other day. On the evening of December 13th in Minneapolis, a young white woman named Morgan Evenson was walking home from her job as a computer-store clerk when a man unknown to her got out of a car, chased her down, and stabbed her multiple times, wounding her seriously.That was a Wednesday. Local media reported the attack Thursday, Friday, and Saturday with no description of the attacker. By Sunday night the police had still not released a description, nor had any of the media offered one.
There were several witnesses to the attack, and Ms Evenson herself remained conscious throughout, but … no descriptions. Even the GoFundMe page to help with her medical bills gave no description of Ms Evenson's attacker.
It was the following week before the local ABC affiliate told viewers, near the end of a two-minute report, that the attacker was a Somali.
It's not just that those nice Minnesotans don't want to identify Somali perps, they are even reluctant to prosecute them. Current exhibit on that: the case of the young white Australian woman, Justine Damond, shot by a Somali police officer in Minneapolis last July.
Just to remind you: Forty-year-old Ms Damond came to Minnesota from Australia to marry the love of her life. That evening, a month before the wedding, she heard a disturbance near her home and called 911. A patrol car arrived and Ms Damond went out in her pajamas to speak to the officers.
As she approached the drive-side window to speak to the officer at the wheel, the other officer, from the passenger seat, took our his sidearm, leaned over his partner, and shot Ms Damond multiple times through the driver-side window, killing her.
The officer who shot Ms Damond is a Somali, 31-year-old Mohammed Noor. Mr Noor's parents are philoprogenitive — he is the eldest of their ten children — but onomastically parsimonious, having put just one "Mohammed" in his name.
He is of course, as former Representative Michelle Bachmann said, an affirmative action hire, put on the police force partly to make local Somalis feel good, but mainly to make local white liberal ethnomasochists like Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges feel good. In less than two years on the force Officer Noor has accumulated at least three complaints against him. His next-door neighbor described him as moody and twitchy, with a short fuse.
Well, that shooting was five and a half months ago. Has there been any determination as to Officer Noor's responsibility for Ms Damond's death? Was it justifiable homicide? Straining to be fair here, you can imagine circumstances where it might have been. Officer Noor's partner in the car reported hearing a loud noise nearby as Ms Damond approached the patrol car. Police officers live on their nerves … I was going to add: "… especially in a city like Minneapolis, with a big population of twitchy low-IQ Africans," but that would of course be shamefully racist of me.
On the other side, Ms Damond was approaching the officers, not fleeing from their custody after assaulting them, as was the case with Walter Scott in South Carolina when officer Michael Slager shot him. As reported here two weeks ago, Officer Slager, who is white, was sentenced December 7th to 20 years in jail for violating the rights of Walter Scott, who was black.
So how's the investigation into Ms Damond's death going? Real slow, that's how. Thursday this week the County D.A. told us that there will be no decision on bringing, or not bringing, charges in the case until next year. The investigation hasn't been helped by the facts that, (a) Officer Noor has refused to speak to the investigators, and (b) neither officer's body camera was recording at the time of the shooting, and the patrol car's dashboard camera was also switched off.
As a footnote to this story: An informal memorial to Ms Damond was removed by local police last weekend. The memorial was set up by a white-advocacy group, Identity Evropa. News stories about this were all carefully framed in CultMarx diction. "Hate group," check. "White supremacist," check. Respectful references to the Southern Poverty Law Center money racket, check. References to the antifa riot in Charlottesville this July with no mention of antifa: check.
You know the drill. Mainstream-media hacks certainly do; they can turn out this propaganda in their sleep.
So there are two consequences of Somalis' twofer privilege, black and Muslim. I'm not through yet, though. The strangest, most bizarre Somali Privilege story deserves a segment of its own.
I've covered reluctance to identify Somali perps, and reluctance to prosecute. Here's the strangest one: reluctance to deport.
04 — It ain't over till the alien wins. As I've said, there is no strong case for having any Somali refugees in the U.S.A. The case for tolerating illegal aliens from Somalia is even weaker; and the case for tolerating illegal Somalis who've committed further crimes — which, Somalis being Somali, is rather a common occurrence — is surely nonexistent.
A little background here. Illegals from Somalia have been getting deportation orders for years. Deportation, however, requires some co-operation at the other end.You might fantasize, as I have sometimes done, about operations where we give the deportees some basic parachute training, load them into a cargo plane, overfly some nice sandy territory in the target country, and push 'em out. It wouldn't work for countries with efficient air defenses; but Somalia isn't in that category. There'd be no harm done, other than the occasional twisted ankle. Parachuting's not difficult; I've done it myself after a half-day's training.
That's fantasy, though. No white government has the guts to tip a plane-load of illegals into their home sky, however well parachuted-up. So we need some co-operation from the home government before we can deport people.
In the case of Somalia, that co-operation was not forthcoming until the place began to stabilize five years ago. Either there was no functioning government at all to issue the necessary travel documents, or else whichever warlord was in charge any given week saw no reason to do Uncle Sam any favors.
As Somalia has inched closer to being a civilized state, these difficulties have lessened. In 2014 we successfully deported 65 Somalis. The next year Somalia reopened their embassy in Washington, DC, and 120 Somalis were deported. The year after that it was 198.
In fiscal 2017, which ended this past September 30th, ICE reports having deported 521 Somalis on five chartered plane flights. That's real progress.
The deportation process hit a speed bump earlier this month, though. Ninety-two Somalis were loaded on a chartered plane and flown off to Africa. These are illegals with outstanding deportation orders against them, not previously enforced because of either lack of co-operation at the Somali end, or ICE had trouble finding the deportee. Most have criminal convictions, including some with convictions for murder, rape, aggravated assault, and sexual assault.
There was a stopover in West Africa for a change of crew. The relief crew, however, had had issues with their hotel. They said they didn't get enough sleep and weren't in a fit condition to take the plane forward to Somalia. After dithering for several hours, ICE instructed the plane to return to the U.S.A..
It's all a bit peculiar. For example: If there was enough of a crew somehow available to fly this plane five thousand miles back to Miami, why couldn't it be flown four thousand miles on to Somalia? This was a government operation, though, so I guess government logic applies.
Whatever the reason for returning these 92 deportees to the States, once they were back here, leftist lawyers descended on them like flies on meat. The deportees were kept on the plane in, quote "slave ship conditions," we've been told. They weren't allowed to use the bathroom, we've heard. ICE agents, quote "kicked, struck, or dragged detainees down the aisle of the plane, and subjected some to verbal abuse and threats," end quote.
That last quote is from a class-action lawsuit filed December 19th by the University of Miami Law School and various open-borders activist groups, calling for the deportees' cases to all be reopened. A federal district court judge — who, by the way, is another un-criticizable twofer, black and homosexual — happily signed an order putting the illegals' deportations on hold while all 92 cases are re-litigated.
It's now highly unlikely that any of these illegals, murderers and rapists included, will ever be deported. Michelle Malkin stated the principle that applies here, quote: "It ain't over until the alien wins."
Given those claims of mistreatment, there's also an excellent chance that these 92 criminal aliens will end up with big cash awards for having been obliged to pee their pants while bureaucrats dithered. Oh, the humanity!
This whole circus will also cast a pall over the deportation process in general. That 521 number for Somali illegals deported last fiscal year was certainly encouraging, after climbing upwards for the previous three years. If the number for this fiscal year comes out anything like as high, I'd be very surprised.
I'd be less surprised, in fact, if it came out at zero.
05 — MS-13 among the kulaks. That last story illustrates a general truth about illegal immigration: That while it's great that we now have an administration in Washington, at any rate a Justice Department, willing to round up and deport illegals, federal officers charged with doing so are opposed by a mighty army of lawyers, products of our CultMarxified law schools this past forty years.
They also face a lot of local apathy and cuckery. I see this here on Long Island, where I live, in the outer-outer suburbs of New York City. My county, Suffolk County, has a million and a half people — 630 per square mile average, though of course concentrated in towns and villages.Close to twenty percent of that million and a half are Hispanic, a colossal increase across the 25 years we've lived here. The biggest single group is Salvadorans. They started coming during the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s. Lax enforcement, high fertility rates, and chain migration have done the rest.
Somalia, El Salvador: Why are other countries' civil wars any of our business? Is everything that happens everywhere in the world our business? Although, to be fair, given the shape of U.S. foreign policy this past few decades, I guess you can't blame foreigners for thinking it is.
Sorry, that's editorial. So, El Salvador. Here's a fact about El Salvador: On the latest numbers I can find, El Salvador ranks fourth in the world for intentional homicide. The rate is over 41 per hundred thousand.
To give you some benchmarks, with that 41 in mind, here are current homicide rates for some U.S. cities, also per 100,000 inhabitants: Boston 3, Washington, DC 8, Chicago 12, Detroit 20, and the winner is … St Louis at 29.
So El Salvador, not much of which is urban, is more than twice as homicidal as Detroit. That's what we've been importing into Suffolk County in battalions and regiments this past forty years.
And I should say that you can get some seriously different figures by going to different sources. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, for example, gives a 2015 figure of nearly 109 for El Salvador, ranking the country world homicide leader. My figure of 41, from the List25 website, is towards the low end of estimates I found.
Every one of those estimates, though, has El Salvador in the top five nations by homicide rate. If you were to implement a rational immigration policy, with well-informed analysts sitting around a table deciding which nations we should be really careful about taking immigrants from, there'd be a row of big bold asterisks next to El Salvador.
There are some counter-arguments you can make here. First off, while looking up those city homicide stats, I checked the figure for Suffolk County. It's 0.9. That's higher than the rate for Germany or Italy, and three times the rate for Hong Kong or Japan. Still, set against St Louis or Chicago, we're pretty non-homicidal out here on the island. So what's to worry about?
And then, still playing devil's advocate here, those multitudes of Salvadorans coming to my county were escaping from that astronomical homicide rate back home. They were looking for a peaceful life.
To both points I'd refer you to Jonathan Blitzer's piece in the current issue of The New Yorker. Title: The Teens Trapped Between a Gang and the Law. Subtitle: "On Long Island, unaccompanied minors are caught between the violence of MS-13 and the fear of deportation."
Sample quote:
In September, 2016, Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas, aged fifteen and sixteen, were found dead in Brentwood, killed with machetes and baseball bats and mutilated beyond recognition. Thirteen members of MS-13 … were charged in their deaths. Between the beginning of 2016 and May, 2017, authorities in Suffolk County attributed seventeen killings to MS-13, and the county's police department identified at least eighty-nine gang members who were undocumented immigrants.End quote. So while a 0.9 homicide rate is pretty nice, without MS-13 hacking teenage girls to death, we'd be even safer, perhaps down to German or Italian levels.
And if all our Salvadoran illegals are gentle peace-loving types striving to escape from the gangs back home, what are these MS-13 killers doing here?
Of course most of the Salvadorans are non-homicidal. So are most Salvadorans back in El Salvador. So are most people anywhere. If you import a great mass of people from one place, though, you'll get a slice of that place's culture. Salvadoran culture is homicidal.
It's the non-homicidal element that propagandists like the New Yorker writer want you to know about, of course. Blitzer starts us off with a long sob story about a Salvadoran lass, Juliana, whose father was killed by MS-13.
The gang then chased Juliana's mother around El Salvador until the mother escaped, ending up an illegal immigrant on Long Island. Juliana was left behind. She got kidnapped, raped, and beaten — so she says — until eventually she headed north. She ended up on Long Island with her Mom, both illegal.
At school — at school on Long Island — she was pestered by MS-13 gang members. Quote: "Juliana's mother called the school to complain, but she was undocumented and didn't press the issue," end quote.
It's a moving story to be sure. Dreadful things happen in the world, especially in countries with low levels of civilization like El Salvador and Somalia. Again, though, why is this any business of mine? I'm a suburban homeowner, raising a family in a quiet neighborhood. Is my bourgeois suburban lifestyle something that someone should be indignant about? What am I, a kulak?
It's hard to avoid the impression that Jonathan Blitzer, the New Yorker writer, is indignant about it. His contempt for white suburbanites seeps out from between the lines of his article. Quote:
Schools in Hempstead required the families of incoming students to produce documents proving guardianship and residency in the district, which very few of them had. This was illegal, and, when New York's Attorney General threatened a lawsuit, the children were admitted.End quote. Local property-tax payers are supposed not to mind this? And since when is it illegal for public schools to require proof of district residency? I wish I'd known: I'd have sent my kids to school in the much richer village down the road a couple of miles.
Juliana's story has a happy ending. Happy for her, I mean, not for us Suffolk County homeowners who've paid her schooling and Medicaid bills the past few years. Something called the Safe Passage Project, a non-profit legal-aid group in New York City, worked the system and got asylum for Juliana and her sisters. The Safe Passage Project looks to be pretty well funded, by George Soros would be my guess.
That's part of the army of lawyers I spoke about, working busily to thwart sensible immigration and to privilege undesirable foreigners over American citizens.
The local apathy and cuckery, I've watched develop. Twenty years ago my county was abuzz with citizens' groups agitating for immigration law enforcement. I wrote articles about it for National Review.
There's not much of that now. The local newspapers editorialized about "hate" and "bigotry," the cucks scolded and threatened, and we kulaks tired of fruitless protesting and got on with our deplorable whitebread suburban lives.
In a last sputter of resistance, though, we voted for Donald Trump last November: he carried the county by seven points.
06 — Immigrants are better than us, series #22,894. One more on immigration, this time from West Africa.
My source story here is from the New York Times, December 24th. Headline: As Trump Rages About Immigrants, They Go to the Ivy League.From that headline you know what you're going to get here: Immigrants are better than us!
The immigrants here are a family from Cameroon, in West Africa. The father is Francois de Paul Silatchom, an Economics professor at the State University of New York. They are black, of course — full-blood Negroes, I'd judge from their appearance.
Professor and Mrs Silatchom have five daughters, three of whom have been accepted at Ivy League universities. The oldest of the three is a junior at Dartmouth; the middle one is a sophomore at Yale, and the youngest has just been accepted at Harvard.
The first thing to be said about this article is that it's all framed as a refutation of President Trump and his policies. The writer, a Rhodesian-American named Tariro Mzezewa, can hardly get through a sentence without taking a sneering swipe at our President.
The Silatchom girls are, she writes, quote: "far better ambassadors for this country and exponents of its ideals than the 45th president," end quote. The DACA illegals are "undocumented youth." Trump's ban on travellers from terrorism-heavy nations is "cruel." Immigration enforcement agents are "separating families." And so on, and so on.
Ms Mzezewa's parting shot, the last sentence in her piece, is, quote: "Who are the young women the Trump administration is currently keeping out?" end quote.
Ms Mzezewa has a nasty case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
This is, in short, CultMarx agitprop, at a rhetorical level with Stalin-era Pravda profiles of heroic female tractor drivers. The intent is to insult and humiliate legacy Americans, especially white male ones.
Especially, but not exclusively. Black Americans have just as much right to be insulted by this piece. If immigrants are so much better than us fat, lazy, dull-witted, un-entrepreneurial legacy Americans, they must be better than American blacks as well as whites.
Why don't black Americans take offense at this kind of thing? Well, you know why, and so do I: They see it as aimed against Whitey, which it mainly is, and anything that pokes a finger in Whitey's eye is just fine with blacks, even if it simultaneously shoves them off the sidewalk.
There is of course no mention in the article about the shadow of doubt cast over the Silatchom girls' achievement by affirmative action. Would the girls have got into Ivy League schools with the high-school records they have, if they had been white? Or Asian?
Would, for that matter, would Professor Silatchom have his professorship if he were white or Asian? Would Ms Mzezewa have a nice job opinionating at the New York Times if she were white or Asian?
I don't know. Without access to the relevant records it's impossible to form an opinion. I'm only pointing out one of the the evils of affirmative action: that it casts a shadow of reasonable doubt over success stories like this.
And even if you accept the principle of affirmative action — there is a case for it, as I described in my December 1st podcast — even if you accept it, shouldn't it be for the descendants of American slaves? Should black foreigners or first-generation immigrants be favored over not only over white Americans, but also over black Americans? Even given that black Americans go along with this favoritism out of anti-white spite, shouldn't white liberals have something to say about it?
Is it unreasonable to wonder whether the Ivy League universities are padding out their affirmative-action quotas by creaming off the very smartest from black Africa? There are close to a billion people down there. Even with mean IQs down in the seventies, there are still tens of thousands out in the far right-hand tail of the bell curve.
And what of the sending country, in this case Cameroon? With those desperately low average IQs, countries like that need to retain all the smart people they've got. Don't Ivy League admissions officers feel a twinge of guilt at having poached them all away?
Those are rhetorical questions, of course. We know the answers. This is war, the Cold Civil War. Goodwhites and their colored auxiliaries will accept anything, applaud anything, cheer for anything, no matter how illogical or unjust, if it disadvantages those deplorable Badwhites clinging to their guns and their Bibles.
Good luck to the Silatchom girls in their university careers. I'd ask them to pause now and then while pursuing those careers to spare a thought for the kids — white or Asian or perhaps descendants of black slaves — whose places they took. And then, while they're sparing thoughts, I would ask them to spare another thought for the nation of their birth, drained of its most talented people so that gentry liberal American college bureaucrats could signal their virtue to their peers.
I would ask, but it would be a waste of my breath. By Ms Mzezewa's account the girls are already fully invested in the Goodwhite Narrative. They are probably not yet at the Bret Stephens level, believing that American Badwhites should all be deported to make room for wonderful immigrants like themselves; but four years immersion in the Ivy League ethos will probably get them there.
I end this segment, as I have ended others, with the fervent hope that I live long enough to see our elite universities reduced to piles of smouldering rubble, their administrators and liberal-arts faculties shipped off to work at chain gangs in the Aleutian Islands. Speed the day!
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: The Pope has vexed me. I don't imagine that will disturb his rest very much, but I thought I should record it.And I record it diffidently, with proper respect for the office. I'm not a papist myself; but some of my friends are, and I have no wish to hurt their feelings. I'm not anti-papist, anyway — no more than the average English-born person. Bloody Mary, James the Second, and the the Young Pretender? Hey, water under the bridge.
But this Pope's rubbed me the wrong way. My Latin isn't up to following his Christmas speech, but if the translation by Newsweek is accurate, he did trot out the old cliché about Joseph and Mary coming to Bethlehem as illegal immigrants. Quote:
The pope compared the plight of more than 22 million refugees worldwide to that of Joseph and Mary, who traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem but found no lodging, a timeless parable of unwelcome travelers.End quote. With all appropriate humility — after all, I am not infallible — I'm going to say that's just wrong. Luke only says that they went to Bethlehem to register for purposes of taxation, according to Caesar's ordinance, and that "there was no room for them in the inn."
I don't see anything about them being unwelcome. If I pull into the little town of Speed Bump, North Dakota, and there's only one motel in the place, and they're all booked up for a ferret-fanciers' convention, that doesn't mean I'm necessarily unwelcome, does it?
Whatever. To further display my anti-anti-papist credentials, let me just add that the Archbishop of Canterbury vexed me, too. In his Christmas sermon he warned of "populist leaders that deceive [their people]."
I guess that was aimed at our President. Well, Cantuar's entitled to his silly opinion, I suppose. I'm entitled to mine, too, though, so here it is: Faced with Christians like that, I'm rooting for the lions.
Item: Say not the struggle naught availeth. It sometimes seems as though we Dissident Right types are just talking exclusively to ourselves all the time. Then, once in a while, a little bit of our terminology slips out into the public realm, and soon is being heard used by bigfoot newspaper pundits and TV talking heads.
This is happening right now with the expression "chain migration." We need to make it happen more.
Here's a phrase I would love to see in general circulation: "strategic deportation." If we could just get people talking and thinking about it, that would be a boost for immigration sanity, I think.
The way to get it out there is just to do it. Send the ICE officers round to collar some high-profile illegal alien and hustle him off to the airport before he can get lawyered up. You listening there, General?
The prime candidate for strategic deportee would of course be celebrity illegal alien and former Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas, who's just copped a book deal with Harper Collins to write his memoirs.
Close runner-up would be another Vargas, first name César, the first illegal alien permitted to practice law in New York State. This Vargas, who is a Mexican, is no relation to the other Vargas, a Filipino. They'd make a nice set, though, if deported simultaneously.
Strategic deportation: let's push for it!
Item: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — who, if there is an afterlife, should spend the first few million years of it being roasted on a griddle over hot coals for what he did to the land of my birth via mass Third World immigration — Tony Blair has started a think tank, the Institute for Global Change.
This think tank's slogan is: "Making globalisation work for the many." For the many who? On Blair's track record, it will be for the many slick, cynical political manipulators like himself, swilling in money from thousand-dollars-a-plate speeches and crony-capitalist deals with Third World dictators, and living in big walled estates well insulated from the peasant masses.
Today, December 29th, they put out a report. Title: "European Populism: Trends, Threats, and Future Prospects." It's a 25-minute read, prompts the website helpfully.
No thanks. The only circumstances under which I'd give 25 minutes of my time to Tony Blair would be to watch the bastard swinging from a lamppost. Twenty-five minutes would be too few to savor that properly.
I did, though, glance through the Daily Mail's coverage of the report. Since year 2000, they say it says, the number of European countries with populist parties participating in government has doubled from seven to 14. Well, good. In the same period, they say it says, voter support for those parties has risen from 8.5 percent to 24.1 percent. Good again.
Blair's outfit of course deplores all this, calling it a threat to democracy. The real threat to democracy, in Radio Derb's opinion, is arrogant, insulated elites subjecting their nations to massive demographic change. One or other of us is right; time will tell.
And while I'm on the subject, I have not yet offered a congratulatory shout-out to Austria's Freedom Party, which on December 18th took joint office in a coalition with the cuckservative People's Party. Congratulations, guys!
The last time the Freedom Party joined a ruling coalition was in 2000, and all hell broke loose. The EU imposed sanctions, Israel withdrew its ambassador, and there were massive antifa demonstrations in Vienna.
This time … nichts. As Foreign Policy magazine put it, quote: "The relative calm that has accompanied the [Freedom Party]'s entry into government is … a measure of how much Europe has changed since 2000," end quote. Just so.
Item: That's pretty much it, folks. I'm just sifting through the tickertape here to see if there's any news I missed … Let's see … mmm … Oh! Good Lord! How did I miss this one?
Ladies and gentlemen: Lindsay Lohan has been bitten by a snake!
I'm sure your reaction to that was the same as mine: that poor, poor snake.
08 — Signoff. That concludes Radio Derb's contribution to the national discourse for this week, ladies and gentlemen. Also for this month and this year. Many, many thanks to all of you for your time and attention, and most especially for your emails and letters. I wish you all everything you hope for in 2018, for yourselves and those you love. Happy New Year!
Western civilization is pitifully short of New Year songs. The only one everyone knows has lyrics in an 18th-century lowland-Scots dialect that only seventeen people worldwide can still understand. So instead, I offer you a novelty song to see us out.This one was a favorite of my childhood. It's silly, it doesn't make much sense, and it's melodically primitive; but that's the whole point of novelty songs, and most of their appeal to kids.
It also comes with a trigger warning. The song's storyline, to the just-barely-perceptible degree that it has a storyline, could be construed, by today's joylessly puritanical standards, as one of sexual harassment. Truly, the past is another country.
The version I knew was recorded by the late great Cockney entertainer Max Bygraves in 1954. Here's a recording from earlier that year by the Four Lads with, says Wikipedia, "teenage girls Lillian Pasciolla and others." I wonder what Lillian's doing 63 years on?
There will be more from Radio Derb next year.
[Music clip: The Four Lads Gilly-Gilly-Ossenfeffer-Katzenellen-Bogen-by-the-Sea.]
