John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire: Blacks are 'Radically Ill-Fitted for Life in Bourgeois Society'

After losing his job at the National Review, John Derbyshire has found a new home at the White Nationalist website VDARE where he can even more openly spew vitriol at minorities, as he did yesterday in his column comparing the situation of African Americans in the U.S. to the Roma, better known as gypsies, of Europe. “In both cases you have a big racial-ethnic bloc of people who are, for whatever reason—discuss among yourselves—radically ill-fitted for life in bourgeois society,” Derbyshire writes. “In both cases, actual bourgeois citizens opt for ethnic disaggregation: for the gypsies to be moved on, for separation by white flight from the underclass blacks. National authorities respond appropriately, with expulsion and incarceration.”

With views like these, it makes you wonder why National Review took so long to fire him.

The thing I find myself wondering is: are these truly, as I said back then, different kinds of problem—underclass blacks in America, gypsies in Europe?

In both cases you have a big racial-ethnic bloc of people who are, for whatever reason—discuss among yourselves—radically ill-fitted for life in bourgeois society.

…

In both cases, well-intentioned Left activists—under the banner of Civil Rights in the U.S.A., Human Rights in Europe—propose social-engineering solutions that would cost scads of public money, even as all our public money is vanishing into chasms of debt. Many of the proposed solutions have already been tried; all of them rest on implausible assumptions about human nature.

The best that either bloc has come up with on its own is the absurd-yet-sinister crackpot mock-militarism of the Nation of Islam.

In both cases, actual bourgeois citizens opt for ethnic disaggregation: for the gypsies to be moved on, for separation by white flight from the underclass blacks. National authorities respond appropriately, with expulsion and incarceration.
Brian Tashman's blog

Foreigners Are Like Seasoning, Put in Too Much and You Ruin the Soup: John Derbyshire

White nationalist and former National Review columnist John Derbyshire has a new column on VDARE about this: 

In the column, “On Immigration, Liberty, and Mating Choices,” Derbyshire tries to explain his Asian wife to his racist buddies:
VDARE.com contributors and readers all want the same thing: a rational immigration policy that preserves the historic white-European ethnic core of the American nation[.]
 
I have signed on to it; I have for 12 years been writing in support of it; and yet … here am I with an Asian wife!
 
What's up with that?
Derbyshire, after explaining that he’s not a “racial purist” and is “fine with miscegenation,” argues that the VDARE position on immigration (which he calls V1) is not compatible with untrammeled liberty – one that would enable the individual to move freely from country to country. However, he thinks it is likely compatible with the freedom to marry people of other races, so long as only a small percentage of whites actually do so:
Much as we love liberty, a liberty that would swamp our ethnic core, from which all our liberties derive—a liberty incompatible with V1—is not to be tolerated. So forget about that liberty.
 
All right, let's try a different liberty: the liberty to marry whomsoever you want to marry. Might that be incompatible with V1?
 
Yes, it theoretically  might; though I don't, in present circumstances, think it is. It depends on your estimate of how wide, and how unsatisfied, is the desire of white Americans to marry people of other races. […]
 
With all due allowances, though, marrying out doesn’t seem to be a huge enthusiasm among white Americans.
Derbyshire immigrants are like seasoning. A little bit makes your soup taste great, but put it too much, and it’ll be ruined:
In the end, it's a question of numbers. If, in some given decade, a thousand, or ten thousand, Chinese or Mexicans settle in the U.S.A., no-one should mind or care. If they were all to marry U.S. citizens, it's still no-one's business. It's not the thousand or the ten thousand that effects demographic revolution: it's the million and ten million. As the late great Enoch Powell used to say: "Numbers are of the essence."
 
To put it slightly differently, it's how you salt your stew. A little salt actually improves the taste; but if the chef were to dump a whole box of salt in there, you'd have a reasonable complaint against the chef.
Quoting the “race-realist blogger” OneSTDV, Derbyshire argues that there’s little desire for overly seasoned soup:
‘Less than 1.5 percent of middle-class white women and about 3.0 percent of lower-class white women are sexually attracted to black men.’
 
He added: ‘Whopping numbers, huh? Hide your daughters and girlfriends!’
Derbyshire’s argument, then, is that we must be racist at the macro level but provide at least some liberty at the micro level for “marrying out,” so long as it doesn’t affect the overall macro trend:
A crowd, a neighborhood, a race, a nation, is unfortunately not an individual, and in many life situations statistics—what baseball managers call “going with the percentages” —must be our guide. 
 
Mate selection is not one of those situations.
That, I suppose, is about the best argument a white nationalist can make to his buddies about his Asian wife. But it’s worth pointing out that Derbyshire’s own “mating choices” are in line with the thoroughly debunked racial theory of IQ famously set forth in the Bell Curve and promoted by VDARE and the affiliated – and more aggressively racist – Alternative Right:
The differences in average IQ among races has been fairly well-established, with Asians having the highest IQ scores, whites next, and blacks third. This order – Asians, whites, blacks – or the reverse order, can be seen in many aspects of life and society.
Josh Glasstetter's blog

Derbyshire's White Nationalist Savior Still Working for MarketWatch

Former National Review columnist John Derbyshire was back in the news last week over a piece he wrote for the white nationalist site VDARE in defense of white supremacy. Later in the week, as Brian reported, Derbyshire responded to his critics by claiming that “the overwhelming majority of Black Americans agree” with his assessment that “white supremacy” is “one of the better arrangements History has come up with."


VDARE’s founder, Peter Brimelow, swooped in to rescue Derbyshire last month after he was fired by the National Review for encouraging whites to avoid interacting with blacks. In late April, Brimelow announced that VDARE’s spring fundraising effort had “started off well enough,” “but now it’s stalled.” He speculated that they had “cannibalized our donations by pointing our readers to John Derbyshire’s donation link after he was abruptly fired” but said it was worth it:
We don’t care about that. We’d do it again.  In fact, we are doing it again—by providing a link by which you can earmark (tax-deductible!) help for us to finance the columns we hope John Derbyshire will write for us—when his chemotherapy allows him to. 
Brimelow had another fundraising appeal at the top of Derbyshire’s column last week on white supremacy:
John Derbyshire has begun his second round of chemotherapy since being fired from National Review, but we are delighted to say he was able to write this column for us this after emerging from his first day of treatment, a Stakhanovite performance.
 
Remember, you can help finance his VDARE.com columns (tax-deductibly!) here.
In addition to running VDARE, Brimelow is a regular columnist for MarketWatch, the financial news site run by News Corp.’s Dow Jones division. Brimelow even brought on a regular VDARE contributor, Edwin Rubenstien, as a frequent co-author of his MarketWatch column. If Derbyshire plays his cards right, maybe he can become the third white nationalist to draw pay from Dow Jones.
 
Given Derbyshire’s recent coming out as a full-blown white supremacist, and the key role Brimelow has played as his savior and enabler, it’s worth revisiting the question of why MarketWatch is employing a national racist organizer. I posed the question here in April, and sent it, along with the relevant background, to executives and editors at MarketWatch and Dow Jones. Matthew Fleischer at Fishbowl LA asked the same thing, as did Mark Lacter of LA Observed and Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider, both of whom requested comment.
 
Thus far, MarketWatch and Dow Jones have refused to answer. Meanwhile they continue to provide a platform and paycheck to a notorious white nationalist organizer, who has a new column today:

 

Josh Glasstetter's blog

John Derbyshire Claims 'Overwhelming Majority of Black Americans Agree' with His Column Defending White Supremacy

Former National Review columnist John Derbyshire returned to the white nationalist website VDARE, headed by his colleague Peter Brimelow, to defend his earlier VDARE column arguing that “White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with.” In a post published yesterday, Derbyshire claimed that “the overwhelming majority of Black Americans agree with me” because only a small fraction of freed slaves left the U.S. to Africa after the abolition of slavery, noting that Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln had at times supported efforts to resettle African Americans in Liberia:

What generated the most shrieking and swooning from the guardians of racial orthodoxy in this cycle was this remark in my VDARE.com column:

"White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with."

On the John Locke principle, though—i.e. "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts"—the overwhelming majority of black Americans agree with me, and always have. From very early in the Republic, free blacks not only had the opportunity to escape from white supremacy, they were encouraged to do so by abolitionists.

…

But with all this opportunity and encouragement, how many freed blacks actually chose to escape from under the iron heel of white supremacy? Most sources give 15,000-20,000—out of a Civil War-era black population of around four million. That’s less than half of one percent. Ninety-nine point five something percent preferred white supremacy. That's an even bigger proportion than voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

Apply John Locke's apothegm to the sloppy, dishonest, thuggish, anti-intellectual actions of the guardians of racial orthodoxy in today’s America, and you get a pretty good insight into their thoughts.
Brian Tashman's blog

Second White Nationalist Writing for Dow Jones’ MarketWatch

This has been a bad week for white nationalists at National Review – John Derbyshire was fired over the weekend and Robert Weissberg was fired on Wednesday. Both men were also contributors at VDARE, the white nationalist website run by Peter Brimelow, who moonlights at Dow Jones’ MarketWatch when he isn’t calling for end to immigration or promoting racial theories about genetic inferiority. 

Brimelow is already rallying to the defense of Derbyshire and Weissberg, but with any luck he’ll be able to land them jobs at MarketWatch like he did another of his white nationalist collaborators – Edwin Rubenstein. Rubenstein, an economic consultant, is a frequent contributor to MarketWatch and VDARE. He also provides research and analysis for the National Policy Institute, which was founded in 2005 to “elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights.” Here’s NPI’s “about” page:
 
Rubenstein’s writing at VDARE seems to focus on three themes:
  • Americans (i.e. European whites) are on the verge of losing their country if they don’t take drastic steps to stop immigration
  • Education and affirmative action won’t help blacks and Hispanics because they can’t, or won’t, improve and assimilate
  • Not only are blue collar whites getting crushed by immigration, but so are white professionals, including doctors and PHDs in the sciences
This partial archive of Rubenstein’s writing for MarketWatch, which he does in conjunction with Brimelow, shows that he’s been working for them since 2003. That’s also when he began writing for VDARE.
 
MarketWatch, part of News Corporation’s Dow Jones division, has thus far refused to comment on why they employ a disgraced white nationalist leader who was fired back in 1998 from the right-wing National Review over his racist views and writing. Now it turns out that they employ not one – but two – prominent white nationalists. They have some explaining to do.
 
I’ve collected some of Rubenstein’s greatest hits on VDARE. Since the entire site has been temporarily given over to a fundraising appeal by Brimelow, I’ll instead link to Google cache versions of the articles:

 

 

Josh Glasstetter's blog

Purged White Nationalists Circle the Wagons at VDARE and Alternative Right

Former National Review contributing editor John Derbyshire has friends in low places. Derbyshire, who was fired for a racist article he wrote for Takimag, told Gawker that he plans to write for a series of white nationalist publications:

Will you continue at Taki's Magazine?
 
Derbyshire: Haven't thought much about it. Yes, Takimag is very congenial. I'll probably try to write for other opposition-conservative outlets too, if they want me: VDARE, AltRight, American Renaissance, and so on. I know a lot of the proprietors there.
VDARE itself was founded by Peter Brimelow, who himself was a senior editor at National Review from 1993 to 1998. He was eventually purged for his explicitly racist views and founded VDARE to provide a forum for like-minded reactionaries.
 
Currently, VDARE is running a personal fundraising appeal from Brimelow concerning Derbyshire’s firing under the headline “Help VDARE.com Save Immigration Patriots From Living In “A State Of Constant Fear”!”:
I always hate closing VDARE.com during appeals. And it’s particularly frustrating now, with the continuing Two-Minute hate of John Derbyshire. Note that, as far as I can see, not one Establishment Conservative voice has been raised in his defense—indeed, many are joining in the Hate. These cowards are practically begging Obama to play the race card against them in this fall’s election. But our Spring Appeal is always critical to getting us through the cash drought in the summer. And it’s now more obvious that ever that VDARE.com must survive if voices like Derbyshire’s are to be heard. I was delighted to see that, in his remarkable Gawker interview posted last night, Derbyshire named VDARE.com as one of the sites he hopes to write for—if his health permits. […]
 
John Derbyshire is merely the latest victim.
 
Without betraying confidences, I hope that John Derbyshire will resume writing for us—he was prevented from doing so by NR’s current degenerate (and fearful) management.
 
But we will need to pay him. We need to pay all our writers.
While Brimelow is best known for VDARE, he is also the driving force behind one of the other publications that Derbyshire mentioned – AltRight (short for Alternative Right). Brimelow announced the launch of Alternative Right in March, 2010:
Our friend Richard Spencer, until recently editor of Takimag, has launched his new webzine, Alternative Right. It features an excellent essay by Richard Hoste on the need for an “Alternative Right” here. You can donate to Alternative Right here. Alternative Right is currently a project of the VDARE Foundation and donations are tax-deductible.
Alternative Right often manages to make VDARE look moderate by comparison. Here, frequent contributor Colin Liddell says that European colonialism of Africa should be seen as a “vote of confidence” in the “Black man”:
So, what use does the global economic order have for Africa? Sadly, the Africans are terrible producers, lacking the precision, conscientiousness, group ethic, and self-sacrificing qualities needed to constitute a hard-working, reliable industrial population. Not to mention the issue of IQ! They are equally inept when it comes to consumption, and not only because of their proverbial penury and otherwise laudable penchant for reusing every piece of junk that comes their way. Even when they have money to burn, they seem more attracted to simple bling than to acquiring the wide variety of gizmos, gadgets, home appliances, bric-a-brac, and exotic interests that support vast export industries. [...]
 
This is how 19th-century colonialism really should be seen—as a vote of confidence by Europeans in the capabilities and ultimate potential of the Black man.
And here, blogger Richard Hoste sets out the mission of Alternative Right:
We've known for a while through neuroscience and cross-adoption studies--if common sense wasn't enough--that individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do, too, with whites and Asians on the top and blacks at the bottom. The Alternative Right takes it for granted that equality of opportunity means inequality of results for various classes, races, and the two sexes. Without ignoring the importance of culture, we see Western civilization as a unique product of the European gene pool. [...]
 
For example, low-IQ Mexican immigration is the greatest threat to America. Anti-discrimination laws should be repealed not only because they're unconstitutional and infringe on the right to free association, but because whites have very good reasons for avoiding NAMs. Schools should stop wasting time trying to close achievement gaps. And not only do whites have nothing to feel guilty about, they are the best thing to ever happen to blacks. Even ignoring race, humanity will not move forward through equality or by raising up the really stupid to the level of just plain stupid. 
It appears that John Derbyshire will fit right in.
Josh Glasstetter's blog

John Derbyshire and National Review – What Took So Long?

Over the weekend, National Review editor Rich Lowry ended the magazine’s long relationship with contributing editor John Derbyshire (“Derb”) over a racist article he wrote for another publication: 

His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise.
Lowry is certainly right to call Derbyshire’s piece “nasty and indefensible,” but I’m not so sure about his claim that National Review would never associate itself with such views. After all, they’ve been associated for years with people who hold such views, despite efforts to purge the magazine of so-called paleo-conservatives.
 
Here’s a taste of the article that got Derbyshire fired, which consisted of a list of suggested items for white and Asian parents to tell their teenage sons:
  • (10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.
  • (10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.
  • (10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).
  • 10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.
  • (10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.
  • (10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.
  • (10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
Back in February, Derbyshire appeared on the notorious CPAC panel on the “Failure of Multiculturalism,” which featured prominent white nationalist Peter Brimelow. Brimelow himself was a senior editor at National Review from 1993 until he was purged by William F. Buckley, Jr in 1998. He then went on to found VDARE.com, which he named after the first white child born in the Americas to English parents.
 
At CPAC, Derbyshire argued that society could avoid disaster and racial violence by accepting that some groups (e.g. blacks) are inherently inferior and other groups (e.g. whites) are inherently superior. Once society accepted this premise, Derbyshire argued, individuals would be happier and know their stations in life:
Imagine you are a member of a group that, in the generality, underachieves socially and economically: a black in the U.S.A., an Inuit in Canada, a Pacific Islander in New Zealand, even a Malay in Malaysia. If the Standard Model is true, the only possible explanation for your group's underachievement is malice on the part of other groups. Hence the rancor, resentment, rage, and division.
 
If, on the other hand, group underachievement is a consequence of the laws of biology working on human populations, there is no blame to assign. The fact of group inequalities, even in societies that have striven mightily to remove them, is as natural and inevitable as individual inequality, which nobody minds very much. The only proper object of blame is Mother Nature; and she is capable of inflicting far worse things on us than mere statistical disparities between ancient inbred populations.
 
Under a reigning philosophy of candor and realism, each of us can strive to be the best he can be, to play as best he can the hand he's been dealt, in liberty and equality under the law.
The CPAC speech, which was published verbatim on VDARE, is arguably even more offensive and racist than the one that got him fired, but it wasn’t as explicit. The National Review apparently tolerates racism so long as there’s a sheen of intellect or sophistication. Derbyshire made the mistake of being too honest about his extremist views, and Lowry was forced to act.
 
UPDATE: Peter Brimelow is currently running a fundraising appeal on VDARE that suggests that National Review editors knew about Derbyshire's racist inclinations and were keeping him on a short leash: "Without betraying confidences, I hope that John Derbyshire will resume writing for us—he was prevented from doing so by NR’s current degenerate (and fearful) management."

 

Josh Glasstetter's blog
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