This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m13s Trump’s second first hundred days
• 08m26s The players, the field
• 13m42s The passing of a Pope
• 19m28s Cardinal Witch-Hunter
• 25m30s Shakespeare’s what?
• 28m29s Conspiracizing the space gals
• 32m09s Meritocracy restored
• 34m35s Signoff with Jimmy Castor

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. This is your perfectly genial host John Derbyshire with commentary on the passing scene.

A thing that is actually passing, and a week from now will have altogether passed, is the month of April 2025. Next Tuesday, the penultimate day in April, will also be the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second Presidency, counting January 20th — Inauguration Day — as Day 1.

That’s a handy hook on which to hang the question: How are they doing? I shall attempt an answer.

02 — Trump’s second first hundred days.     To get a handle on the matter, I thought I’d glance back through the archives to see what I had to say when Trump’s first first hundred days were winding up back in April 2017.

So what did I have to say? Nothing good. I was already suffering the pains of Trump Disappointment Syndrome.

In my podcast for April 28th that year I vented my disappointment by asking Trump ten questions. You can read all ten in the archived transcript of that podcast. Just a sample few of those questions in summary.

• A Filipino named Jose Antonio Vargas had become a celebrity illegal alien. Resident in the U.S.A. for 23 years without a visa, he’d written for all the big mainstream newspapers, made a documentary movie about himself, and founded a nonprofit to change our immigration laws — in favor of illegals, of course. Why, I asked, had he not been deported?
• The government of Australia was abolishing its main guest-worker program because, said that nation’s Immigration Minister, it wasn’t in the national interest. Why had Trump not taken steps to likewise end our equivalent, the H-1B visa program? I noted also that Australia had abolished birthright citizenship back in 1986. Why had we not taken steps to do the same?
• Full quote: “Europe has a population three and a half times greater than Russia’s and a GDP ten times greater. Europe’s two nuclear powers, Britain and France, have more than five hundred nuclear weapons between them. Mr President: Is Europe sufficiently threatened by Russia to require continued military alliance with the U.S.A.?” End quote.
• In what was then the sixteenth year of our military engagement in Afghanistan, quote: “Why are political outcomes in Afghanistan sufficiently important to the U.S.A. to justify sixteen years of military engagement?” End quote.

Those were some of my 2017 questions to Trump.

Trump had already kicked me in my isolationist sympathies at the beginning of that April by sending cruise missiles against a Syrian air force base, reported to be one from which the Syrian government had launched a poison-gas attack on a rebel town, an incident in the apparently endless Syrian civil war which is still going on today. Yet that poison-gas attack, as deplorable as it no doubt was, had killed no Americans and harmed no American interests. “So I guess we can kiss goodbye to ‘America First’,” I had snarled in my April 7th podcast.

So there was my Trump Disappointment Syndrome on display at the end of Trump’s first first hundred days. How do matters compare now, at the end of the second?

On the particular issues I picked on back in 2017, there hasn’t been much action by the new administration. Jose Antonio Vargas is still with us, doing very nicely for himself as an activist, impresario, writer, and lecturer. He’s still not a citizen, but one of the Biden administration’s last acts was to issue him a 3-year (but renewable) special visa.

Trump has acted on birthright citizenship. One of his first executive orders instructed federal agencies to stop recognizing it. The order has of course been appealed; the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the arguments in May.

Our guest worker program, however, continues, although the screening and vetting procedures for applicants are being tightened.

We are still in NATO, God only knows why. Exit from NATO should have been a Number One priority in Trump’s first first hundred days; likewise in the second. Instead, our President is today wasting his time and political capital meddling in the eternal, intractable squabbles of the Eastern Slavs.

It’s no credit to the new administration, but our Afghanistan involvement has at least been resolved. True, it was resolved with all the finesse and skill of the proverbial monkey trying to get intimate with the proverbial football, but at least Trump 47 has one less item of Save-the-World idiocy to grapple with.

So … a mixed bag there, mostly negativities. Aren’t there more positives to be noted? Of course there are. Next segment.

03 — The players, the field.     In all fairness, it’s not easy to achieve real, lasting accomplishments in just a hundred days. The positivities I see, looking at the new administration, are positivities of personality and the political environment — positivities of potential.

Our President himself is a much wiser man politically than Trump 45. His engagements with the Deep State, both in and out of office, have taught him a great deal, and he’s been an attentive student.

That’s reflected in his staffing choices. The new administration’s senior personnel are a huge improvement on the Swamp critters and neocon opportunists of Trump 45. Tom Homan and Stephen Miller are worth the ticket price just by themselves. J.D. Vance against Mike Pence? No contest. Karoline Leavitt against the Haitian gal — the one Jesse Watters called “Binder”? A clear win on both smarts and looks. Game, set, and match.

Pete Hegseth? Yes, there’s some sort of campaign against him in the media. Who are the campaigners, though? I’m inclined to agree with Glenn Greenwald on X, April 22nd. Partial tweet:

That Hegseth of all people is deemed insufficiently pro-war demonstrates the extremism of the D.C. war machine. He’s enthusiastically bombing Yemen; got Trump to pardon U.S. war criminals in Iraq; has cheered multiple wars.

But any reluctance to attack Iran is supremely heretical.

End tweet.

But didn’t Hegseth’s recent air strikes against the Houthis of Yemen stir my isolationist wrath just as much as those 2017 bombings of Syria did? No, they didn’t.

The Syrians of 2017, or any other year, were just bickering among themselves. It was none of our business. The Houthi, by contrast, are the Barbary Pirates of our time, interfering with key international shipping lanes. Any nation with the ability — ourselves, the Europeans, India, China — is perfectly entitled to bomb them for good commercial reasons.

There have been major changes to the playing field, too — changes the new administration is aware of and can take advantage of. Chief among these is the descent of the Democratic Party.

The descent was already under way in 2017. Hillary Clinton was a strong contestant for the title Worst Presidential Candidate Ever Put Forward By A Major Political Party until that title was snatched from her by Kamala Harris. The Biden Presidency brought to everyone’s mind the importance of Energy in the Executive.

Donald Trump’s Republican Party has some internal issues to resolve, but he and we are not short on energy. Nor on popular support: what were for decades reliably Democratic voting blocs — blacks, Hispanics, Jews, working-class men — have swung Republican to varying degrees.

So we have a wiser Trump with a better staff, and a more favorable playing field.

Hope, goes the saying, is a good breakfast but a bad supper. Trump 47’s White House is still clearing away the breakfast things, and it’s a long time to supper. Let’s hope!

04 — The passing of a Pope.     The Pope died on Monday after twelve years in office. He was 88 years old and died of a stroke and heart failure — in other words, as we used to say in a simpler time, of old age.

That was, of course, the day after Easter Sunday, which His Holiness had observed in the traditional fashion, giving a public blessing to cheerful crowds from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. That very same morning, Sunday morning, he had given an audience to our Vice President J.D. Vance, who is a convert to Roman Catholicism.

I am not a Roman Catholic and take little interest in that church as an institution. Friends who are better-informed tell me that among Roman Catholics of a Populist-Nationalist inclination, especially in Europe, Pope Francis was disliked because of his enthusiasm for mass Third World immigration. If that’s true, Francis was wrestling with a deep religious conundrum.

Most of the world’s major religions have a strong ethnic component. Islam is Arabic and Turkic in ethnicity; Hinduism is South Asian; Judaism is of course Jewish; Taoism is Chinese; Zoroastrianism is Persian; Buddhism is East and Southeast Asian. (Yes, I know: Buddhism has Indian origins. That was a l-o-n-g time ago, though.) They all accept converts, but the foundational ethnicity is hard to miss, and none of them has much of a missionary impulse.

Christianity, however, is explicitly universalist. Saint Paul told us that, quote: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” The Christian communities of Africa, India, even Japan and China, are substantial and long-established — more so than Muslims in South America or Buddhists in Scandinavia.

That was a stable situation until the world opened up to cheap international travel. Centuries of Christian universalism had weakened ethnic loyalties. Nations where Christianity had long been dominant opened their borders. “Come on in! Neither Jew nor Greek!” The Third World duly came.

So today the advanced, prosperous nations of Europe, North America, and Australasia are struggling with large-scale ethnic conflict.

That conflict is most acute where the incoming settlers are Muslim. Islam is universalist in a way very different from Christianity. It is aggressively, militaristically universalist.

Traditionally, Islam converted by the sword: “If you don’t accept Allah and his Prophet, we’ll kill you.” Today’s Islam is somewhat lighter in its approach, but the aggression is still hard to miss. We have all seen those news pictures of great throngs of Muslims blocking our streets to perform mass prayer, when they have perfectly good mosques nearby that they could go to.

So mass Muslim immigration has put great strain on institutional Christianity. The Anglo-Catholic Church of England and her American cousin, the Episcopal Church, seem to be responding to the strain with abject surrender. Full-scale Muslim services have been held in both the two Saint Paul’s cathedrals: the one in London and the one in Boston.

I don’t know whether the Roman Catholic Church has surrendered to that degree. My guess is, it hasn’t. Roman Catholics are much stronger in defense of their faith than Anglo-Catholics. It will be interesting to see what stand the new Pope takes on the issue.

Who will that new Pope be? I have no clue, only an opinion to offer.

05 — Cardinal Witch-Hunter.     My opinion is a singular and negative one. There is one candidate who will, I very much hope, not be honored with the Papacy.

That candidate — and I’m assuming, without any knowledge of the process, that he is a candidate — is Timothy Dolan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York. Dolan is also, since 2012, a Cardinal, and so I think a Papal candidate by default. I hope he isn’t chosen, just because I’d hate to see the s.o.b. further raised up in any way.

What’s my beef with Dolan? Well, twelve years ago I engaged with the case of Frank Borzellieri, an exceptionally nasty instance of Progressive witch-hunting. Quote:

Borzellieri (“borza-lerry”) was principal of a Catholic elementary school in New York City for the school years 2009-2011. Before that he was Dean of Discipline at a Catholic high school in the city. His record in both jobs was spotless; and that is an astonishing thing when you consider that both schools were heavily Non-Asian Minority and Frank is white, so that the faintest scintilla of a hint of prejudice on his part, or even a careless word, would have cost him his job for “racism.”

End quote.

I pulled that quote from a column I published at Taki’s Magazine on May 23rd, 2013. The column, which is archived at my personal website, tells the story of Frank Borzellieri at more length. Here I’ll just give a sketch.

Frank was, and I hope still is, polite, well-educated, correct in speech and manner, and a devout Roman Catholic. Before starting his teaching career he’d been a writer, and had written skeptically about progressive orthodoxies.

In 1999 he’d published a book, title: The Unspoken Truth: Race, Culture and Other Taboos that, in a polite and scholarly way, questioned the notion that diversity is a strength.

Frank then became a schoolteacher, and a very good and dedicated one, as noted in that quote I gave you. But then, in 2011, the New York Daily News published a story about him under the headline, quote: “White supremacist principal running Bronx school with majority black and Latino students.” End quote.

It was sheer character assassination, full of lies and unsourced references, but it got a witch-hunt going. Timothy Dolan’s New York Archdiocese joined in; Frank was fired the day after the Daily News story appeared.

Frank wrote a six-page letter to Archbishop Dolan, countering the lies and describing his devotion to the church and his calling as a school principal. Dolan had not yet ascended to the rank of Cardinal, but must have known that the promotion was in his near future if he kept his nose clean. He did not favor Frank’s letter with a reply.

So Dolan lined up with the progressive witch-hunters of our age, in the same spirit as his predecessors back in the Middle Ages gave their support to actual witch-hunters.

Incredibly, it seems to me, Frank Borzellieri remained a devout Roman Catholic for as long as I followed him in after years.

I occasionally catch sight of Dolan’s well-nourished face while I’m TV channel-surfing on a Sunday evening. That, I remind myself, is the face of one who destroyed a good man’s career to preserve his own. Then I have to resist an impulse to smash my fist into the TV screen.

06 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  April 23rd was William Shakespeare’s 461st birthday, or at any rate is traditionally regarded as such. It was also his 409th deathday. The Bard was nothing if not symmetrical.

There have for some years been periodic news stories about Shakespeare being canceled for racism, sexism, colonialism, and so on. I sometimes read through one of them, just to remind myself how batpoop crazy much of the Western world has become.

Doing so the other day, I got a tiny reward for my reading — a new word that I shall try to deploy in my own future writing.

The piece I was reading here was in the Daily Mail Online for March 16th. Headline: “Shakespeare’s birthplace to be ‘de-colonised’ over fears his success ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’.” Three-quarters of the way through we get this, quote:

Writing in School Library Journal, Amanda MacGregor, a Minnesota-based librarian, bookseller and freelance journalist, asked why teachers were continuing to include Shakespeare in their classrooms.

[Inner quote.] “Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir,” [end inner quote] she wrote, with the last word referring to a hatred of black women.

End quote.

Did you know that there is a word for the hatred of black women — “misogynoir”? I didn’t. Neither did the compilers of my 1971 Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary; nor those of my Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1993 edition. “Misogynoir” … We learn something every day.

Item:  One of my foremost culture heroes is the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson. Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale, in a book of anecdotes about him that she published after his death, commented on what she called Johnson’s, quote, “fixed incredulity of everything he heard,” end quote. It was hard to get Johnson to believe anything but the evidence of his own senses.

She once asked him if, when he’d first heard it, he had believed the news of the great earthquake that destroyed the city of Lisbon in 1755, when Johnson would have been 46 years old. Johnson’s reply, quote:

Oh! not for six months at least. I did think that story too dreadful to be credited, and can hardly yet persuade myself that it was true to the full extent we all of us have heard.

End quote.

I’m like that where conspiracy theories are concerned. I have great trouble taking them seriously.

We live in an age of conspiracy theories, though, and I’m constantly being surprised by the things that conspiracists will conspiracize about.

Most recently: The April 14th flight of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket, with six young female celebrities aboard.

I didn’t take much interest in the story itself. For one thing, only one of the six ladies’ names was known to me: Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’ fiancée. For another, this wasn’t much of a flight. It only lasted eleven minutes. The gals experienced extra gravity as the rocket powered up into the stratosphere; then no gravity at all after the power stopped and the craft traversed the peak of its ballistic parabola in free fall around 66½ miles up; then some gravity again as it came down and parachutes opened to slow its fall.

I was, though, fascinated by the speed with which conspiracy theories appeared, and their number and variety. The zero-g film footage was faked, they told me; so was footage of the passenger-capsule door being opened after the landing; look! — the paint on the capsule shows no re-entry scorch marks; the ladies on board were all members of a Satanic cult; …

I haven’t yet seen any theories involving the CIA, Mossad, or the Russians, but I don’t doubt there are conspiracists somewhere working on them.

Item:  One of the most obnoxious and infuriating concepts to arise from the Civil Rights movement of sixty years ago has been Disparate Impact: the idea that group disparities in outcome — in academic achievement or rates of incarceration, most notably — must be the result of wilful group discrimination.

Disparate Impact is nonsense, and poison to social harmony. To President Trump’s great credit, Wednesday this week he issued an Executive Order eliminating disparate-impact theory from civil rights analysis and enforcement and restoring colorblind meritocracy to that zone.

However, as Heather Mac Donald says in her report on this at City Journal, quote:

His executive order can be reversed by a hostile successor administration; the disparate-impact regime can be resurrected with another flip of the presidential pen. The White House needs to persuade Congress to clarify that civil rights mean freedom from discrimination — not the legitimization of “reverse discrimination.” Congress must amend 1960s-era statutes to confirm explicitly their original colorblind intent.

End quote.

That will require the congresscritters to show some courage, so … lots of luck. President Trump has shown the way, though, and that’s all he has the power to do. Thanks and all honor to him for this order.

07 — Signoff.     That’s it for the month of April, gentle listeners. Thank you as always for your time and attention, and sincere best wishes for you in the merry month of May.

Permit me my customary reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine, who publish my work. Thank you!

OK, let’s sign off here. My frequent references to New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt, possibly fortified by recollections of my past attentions to the Miss Bumbum Pageant, inspired one of my listeners to send me a related link.

The link is to a YouTube clip of a fine American musician named Jimmy Castor, who I confess I had never heard of. Mr Castor passed away in 2012 shortly before his 72nd birthday, but he’d appeared numerous times in the R&B charts from the late 1960s to the late 1980s.

The title of the song my listener directed me to is The Bertha Butt Boogie, in the charts 1975. Our friend Letitia was only seventeen years old back then, so it’s not likely she was the inspiration for The Bertha Butt Boogie, but there’s an obvious resemblance between the two ladies.

If you listen to the song with attention you will learn that the Bertha Butt of the title was one of four sisters. The other three were named Betty, Bella, and Bathsheba. That’s a lot of butts, butt … hey. It’s what appeals to some people.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week