printWrites Facebook friend Aditya Vivek Barot:
Ms Mercer:
Mr. John Derbyshire, the man whose blurb appears on your book, has been unceremoniously sacked by the eunuchs at NRO.
What an apt appellation for that castrate, Rich Lowry.
Adds Peter Brimelow of VDARE.COM:
“[T]o appease a Left-wing lynch mob, John Derbyshire has just been fired from the new, Politically Correct National Review—despite (or perhaps because of) his unmatched brilliance there, to say nothing of his cancer and his years of loyal service.”
National Review has been PC—and worse, boring—for as long as I can remember.
John, who, as Aditya mentioned, had endorsed my book without flinching, was fired by the intellectual pygmies of NRO, for a tract titled “The Talk: Nonblack Version,“ published at Taki’s Magazine.
UPDATE I: NRO did at least employ John for a long time. They have never considered my work and have never replied to submissions.
UPDATE II: When you read Amy Davidson’s inane histrionic piffle, published in an elite magazine, you realize that ousting John for his views is more about enforcing mediocrity than enforcing conformity.
Americans cannot abide enormous talent, unless it is in a mindless or uncontroversial field such as sport or hard science. You have to be mediocre in writing and thinking and echo one of two party lines. I lived in Canada (I’m a Canadian) where my stuff appeared in the national press, no less. That could never happen in the US.
UPDATE III: Richard Spencer: “… it’s hard to mistake the trajectory of official ‘Conservatism’ as anything other than a gradual degeneration and dumbing-down. NR has gone from James Burnham and Russell Kirk to Kathryn Jean Lopez and various man-children spouting human-rights doctrines. … the mainstream Right [is] much stupider…more defined by the Goldbergs, Ponnurus, Lowrys, and Lopezes of the world…and more obviously a racket and dead-end. …”
UPDATE IV (April 10): In reply to the Facebook thread. Aditya, AMM, and others: To me, the Derb issue is never about whether you agree or disagree with his article, as Richard Spencer does (on FB, I quoted a slice of Spencer’s piece with which I agree). This perennial Soviet-style purging is never about “agreement,” to me. I do not know why people think that if you want to see a lot of well-written, wickedly witty, controversial writing in print (pixels or paper), as I do—you necessarily endorse all of it.
NONSENSE.
During the Iraq war, when the likes of Paul Craig Roberts, myself and other non-Beltway libertarians and paleos were writing up a storm against Bush’s barbarity–and being ousted and banished for it—Roberts noted that readers wanted to see a mirror of their opinions in his writing. This is so true. Readers judge me not in terms of style, thinking; quality of writing, a challenge to consensus, etc., but in accordance with how much I reflect their opinions; do they agree with me.
Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about.
The narrowing of the American mind is not the fault of corporations; its The People’s fault, for heaven’s sake. Corporations would not survive if they ceased to cater to The People, who are tyrants in their own right. This leftist argument misconstrues the direction of the dumbing of America.
I am on record as saying that I am not comfortable with the racialist right’s tack. (To quote: “I think I reflect Western man’s disdain for race as an organizing principle, and for broad generalizations. Good luck with organizing modern westerners around race. I prefer to beat back the state so that individuals regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will. That’s the route to freedom.”)
But I simply love—and think it is necessary to a free society—to see all well-expressed, eloquent opinion and argument in print, at the pleasure of that print’s owners.
Of course, self-interest plays a role in wanting to see Derb and his work prevail. Derb is one of many canaries in this minefield of our own making.
UPDATE V: Maureen O’Connor of Gawker.com has actually done the job of a journalist in interviewing Derb. I hope he gets a book deal or makes a ton of money out of this shameful episode in the annals of NR.
UPDATE VI: “The first pessimists were the Old Testament prophets.” I love the Prophets, Jeremiah being my favorite. John Derbyshire on The B.S. of A. with Brian Sack (Full)
Humans, and things have changed. Free speech don’t make me laugh. No pigs flying .
NR has been a joke since Buckley first truckled to Norman Podhoretz and the Israel Ueber Alles crowd. I’m only surprised Derbyshire lasted as long as he did. The real conservatives – Brimelow, Oliver, Sobran – left decades ago. On the plus side, Derbyshire’s courageous embrace of race-realism and the MSM’s squawks of outrage.
With the cowardly dismissal of John Derbyshire, I perceive the uncomfortable fact that I have seen the future of intellectual life in America.
It is … intellectual life in Australia. And in Canada. And in New Zealand. And everywhere else in the Anglosphere where there isn’t even the pretense of a First Amendment.
Finally read Derbyshire’s essay via Ilana’s link. He is a superb writer, and told all the truths race liberals (and neoconz) don’t want to hear.
The saddest part is that they do not even attempt to refute anything Derbyshire wrote in his essay.
Ironic that Derbyshire’s article and NRO firing came at the same time of the Baltimore tourist beating from the St. Patrick’s day celebration. Briefly, a white tourist from Virginia was at a St. Patty’s day celebration and found himself in a part of Baltimore where he was surrounded by blacks. The tourist was subsequently robbed (of his watch, iphone, car keys), beaten and kicked, stripped naked in the middle of the sidewalk, and no one helped him; in fact, the throng of people laughed at him. No decency whatsoever. It conforms to every stereotype about black urban youth, and, indirectly, lends credence to the concerns stated in Derbyshire’s article.
Warning: It’s rough to watch..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdmaYeWfmGQ
Presumably, any statements involving stereotyping are racist – even a statement such as “Black men are more likely to be NBA players than Asian women” – but most people would not challenge the statement. On the other hand, if someone said “All Jewish women have 5 ears” and one proves that Ilana Mercer, who is a Jewish woman with only two ears exists, then that statement is not valid.
So why didn’t Lowry write a REFUTATION of Derbyshire in his statement?:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/295514/parting-ways-rich-lowry
Is it that Lowry believes that Derbyshire’s points are valid but just “nasty” and that therefore the National Review crowd are just “polite” racial profilers? If it is “indefensible”, why not attack it point-by-point?
The “conservatism” of the National Review is, ironically, the 2012 equivalent of the “Dime Store New Deal” that Goldwater and Buckley used to criticize in the 1950’s:
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/30/us/barry-goldwater-is-dead-at-89-conservatives-standardbearer.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
e.g. an insipid, intellectually void, Wonder Bread of vapidity worthy of John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Robert Dole, and Mitt Romney. Buchanan, Sobran, Roberts, Francis, Gottfried, Derbyshire, Coulter, Fred Reed, and Ilana Mercer who cross over the boundary from the insipid to the controversial must be purged. What remains are oxymoronic attacks on Obamacare for “endangering Medicare”!
What was it that Jack Nickleson said in that movie? “You can’t handle the truth!” Mr Derbyshire’s article was the truest piece of logic on the subject that I’ve read. He must have had a death wish, about his employment, to write such brutal truth. My hat is off to him.
Maybe the Derb realized his mortality (he has cancer after all) and figured speaking the Truth was the right thing to do.
In the city of Chicago, I can attest to the fact that Mr. Derbyshire’s talk is called “street smarts” among the people.
I’d like to link to a video related to the topic that I found very delicious. It really gives me pleasure and giggles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LONUecnsMb8&feature=player_embedded#!
Last October, in his review of Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower, at Takimag, Mr. Derbyshire remarked, in reference to the chapter on “The End of White America”, that “At age 72, Pat may feel tempted to succumb to Elderly Tourette’s Syndrome.” There was a hyperlink in those words that went to Mr. Derbyshire’s website, to a column he wrote for National Review Online on March 7th of 2001 about Senator Byrd’s use of the n-word.
He wrote that when some people grow older they “might decide to have a little valedictory fun by shocking the easily-shocked” and concluded by saying “If a speaker is taken by that spirit nowadays, his fun is guaranteed, for there has surely never been a society as easily shocked as ours.”
I wonder to what extend Mr. Derbyshire had that in mind as he penned the article that led to his being thrown under the bus by National Review?