Derb’s erudition and clever one-liners cannot salvage what otherwise tends to be a slow and boring podcast. The problem with the topical news format is the news is either boring or has already been covered in every conceivable angle by other pundits by the time Derb gets to it. While Derb can be funny, he’s not in the league of professional comics and he doesn’t have a staff of writers; so given the material and the radio medium, there isn’t much to work with. It’s not an insult at Derb, but maybe he needs to find a way to speed up the delivery or maybe change the content to be less about the news and more about whatever is on his mind. Maybe have callers or guests.
At the end of the podcast he takes a jab at Ivy League graduates
Today’s Ivy League students are tomorrow’s highest income earners and society’s future business, technology and economic leaders. They create the cool technologies and apps that millions of Americans use today, while getting instantly wealthy in the process. Going to a no-name college or no college is a track for mediocrity, unless you otherwise have superior intellect and work ethic to compensate. Like their war on the 1% and finance, Liberals are waging war against the elite of higher education because higher education is contributing to wealth inequality, reminiscent of how the far-left communist leaders of the last century persecuted the intelligentsia. Liberals want America to be poor and dumb. They are blaming colleges, employers and student loan issuers for the bad choices of students that didn’t choose high enough paying majors or get into good enough school. Derb cites a study that most Ivy League students identify as liberal, but the ideological mix is about the same as found in most colleges; secondly, people without a high school education more likely identify as liberal whereas those with some college or a degree are more likely to identify as conservative:
This could explain how the populist, anti-establishment left is not as entrenched in higher education as some conservatives may want to believe, nor are democrats the smarter and more educated political party that they purport to be.
As explained in Is College a Scam?, getting into an elite college is valuable not for the degree, but because it signals to employers that the applicant has superior cognitive abilities, because elite colleges, unlike the vast majority of colleges, specifically screen for the best and brightest among a very large and growing applicant pool. The is the anathema of the left because they want to believe everyone is equal when that’s just not the case. Some people are better adapted for success in today’s economic environment and therefore become wealthy while others fail to participate in the recovery and stay poor or just get by.
The problem is people like John Derbyshire that otherwise identify as conservative joining the ‘woe is me, let’s blame the elite’ chorus of the left.