Hogwash
Here’s a pretty limp statement Rich Lowry:
Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb’s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here.
I don’t believe him. I think there are probably a few people who share his views, but just won’t say it out loud. And you can be damned sure that a large portion of the NRO readership absolutely believes in Derb’s views.
And why hasn’t he been fired? This isn’t something you need to debate or think about, it should automatically lead to his dismissal.
*** Update ***
And now he is gone.
Someone should ask Lowry to reveal his view of what “parents should supposedly tell their kids about” blahs. I, for one, would be interested in hearing the answer.
Yeah, I see good ol’ Vox Day is already defending Derb’s “calm and perfectly reasonable collection of observable realities of race in America”.
So stand up for racism, guys! Stand up and be counted! Stop hiding your theories on us “the Blacks” behind closed doors!
How many are willing to come to the defense of the Derb?
Let’s see ya out in the sunlight.
I think there are probably a few people who share his views, but just won’t say it out loud.
If by “a few” you mean “all of the people at NRO” I agree.
which is why he felt the need to publicly disclaim the in-house white supremacist
Its just exceedingly hard for me to think that anyone at NR will take responsibility for this. Taking responsibility isn’t exactly a hallmark of the modern conservative movement. Besides, they’d lose a lot of people over to the Steve Sailer/Takimag/Daniel Larison-when he’s not talking about foreign policy to liberals/side of conservatism.
Like you said, there are probably a few people who dare not admit they share John Derbyshire’s toxic views. And also probably these people make up a good part of the National Review’s ranking editorial staff.
@efgoldman: Whatcha want me to do bout it?
who, Lowry or Derb?
Eh…just a wild guess, but I’d say it’s because he only said what they all think, except he wasn’t ever supposed to say it out loud where other people could hear it, and now they’ll be forced to mount a phony “freedom of speech” defense in order to justify not firing him.
More on the subject here: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/.....ss-to-say/
Comments closed at NR today? I can’t imagine why.
@John Cole: Post a Tunch pic, always works to soothe the howling or is it snarling, jackals.
@John Cole: like five frontage posts on poor old Derb’s latest gaffe?
haven’t you beaten this horse enough yet?
you are sawing sawdust here too.
Lowry has to disavow Derbs blatant racism, because it alienates dark-skinned voters and youth, two demographics the GOP desperately needs.
OF COURSE Derb is just saying what they all believe in their hearts.
And OF COURSE they are not going to fire him in the middle of chemo.
He would lose his health insurance.
;)
Have you read Republican Brain yet?
All I can say is, I’m a bit surprised we’re actually still in a place where he would feel the need to deny this. That actually makes me feel a tad bit better.
@John Cole:
If it can’t be attended to right away, which is understandable given the long weekend and all that stuff, you could always say something like:
“We are aware that you maybe experiencing some difficulties with the site. We apologize for the inconvenience, mild though it is, and we hope to resume normal service as soon as possible.”
Then everything will be cool.
@Xecky Gilchrist:
If by “a few” you mean “all of the people at NRO” I agree.
I don’t think that’s entirely true. I suspect a large number of the folks at NRO hate blacks because they assume they’re poor instead of their skin color.
oooh, oooh – me…me
First Amendment?
ahahahahaha
excuse me please…
So you think that, since Romney is now the nominee-presumptive, all the wingers feel free to vent about those troublesome colored? You think?
Kind of weird to say that no one at NRO believes this, because Derbyshire is still at NRO, and he certainly believes it… Right? Not the last paradox NRO will create.
@efgoldman: Thanks for the summary. I was going to state that NRO has always been racist because of the stuff the founder, Buckley, wrote. I didn’t have the time to enlighten the idiot who writes at Forbes who was distressed because someone who is published in the same racist rag as him would write something so outrageously racist. He called for Lowry to fire Derb. Why doesn’t he just denounce NRO, apologize for ever being associated with them, and declare he’ll never write for them again? No self awareness, I guess.
If I was to judge people by the comments alone that I read on various sites about any topic relating to black people I’d conclude that a majority of white people believe this, but just don’t say it out loud.
@Zandar: VoxDay, that’s a name I haven’t seen in a while (thankfully). My first time running across him, he was arguing for a Final Solution to the immigration problem. That’s not a Godwinated exaggeration, his argument was literally “If the Nazis could move several million Jews around Europe, there’s no reason why we can’t move several million Mexicans out of the US”.
Charming.
Back in the late 80s I took a free trial subscription to the NR to see if they could at least live up to WFB’s prose. Heh. The only thing that could pass for something beyond sophmoric scribbling was the editor’s piece – WFB’s. After two issues I cancelled it because even the cause of researching the right wasn’t worth the damage to my intellect from that scribbling.
It wasn’t just bad as ideology, it was really piss poor writing and worse logic. I have neve since paid much attention to it, other than the occassional link from somewhere like here mocking it – then I tend to just read the quotes and not go there.
That the thing is regarded as more than a middle school copy book astonishes me. (I’m not easily astonished)
It’s very useful when conservatives show their ass – I have no idea what the ultimate outcome of all this freak flag flying will do, but when fucktards who live in a bubble feel emboldened and emerge to drop trow, it often surprises them to be bitten in the ass. They’re not very bright.
Well shite shite shite…
In a saner world, John Derbyshire would have never been given a soapbox to stand up on and screech his insane nonsense at the world in the first place…
why fire someone that you completely agree with….
Clearly, Derbyshire represents the absolute cream of the crop of conservative intellectual thought.
that wasn’t a statement it was a nudge, wink, and a link. in case any nro types missed it.
@Amir Khalid:
Or, we could all email John.
WP is having a bit of trouble today.
@Chuck Butcher: I haven’t paid any attention to NRO in the last few years and even find the sites that mock them getting old. I checked today and it looks like an Onion parody written by junior high students. Like you state, its the piss poor writing and flawed logic that spoils it for me too.
Clearly, Derbyshire represents the absolute cream of the crop of conservative intellectual thought.
…except possibly one writer on the masthead of the National Review, a John Derbyshire.
@dmsilev: It doesn’t surprise me in the least. If you go through blogs that deal with immigration issues, the xenophobia and racism in the comments section is so over the top, that one feels the need to take a shower after reading the comments. The focus of the mouthi breathers right now is illegal immigration but their goal is to have all immigration slow down to a trickle and be only open to the people they approve of.
Paul Constant of The Stranger had a pretty solid response to the infamous Derb column; an excerpt:
@MattF:
This stuff has obviously been building for a long time, and has accelerated since the 2008 presidential election, and no need to guess why.
One of Derb’s rancid pearls of wisdom is to say that his kids should not live in a community governed “by black politicians.” Not much further to go from here to the idea that Real White America ™ is endangered by a black president.
Firing this creep won’t do much. The bile he spews runs deep in many parts of this country. It is noteworthy though to see so many conservatives who, in the past have been very comfortable with these views, now scurrying to disavow them. Must be an election year. The GOP can’t win black votes, but they need Latinos. Unfortunately, you don’t have to dig too deeply to find conservative pundits like Steve Sailer and others declaring that Latinos are also deficient and a threat to Real White America ™.
Inevitably, someone like Rush or Ann Coulter will find a way to blame libruls for fanning this controversy.
Limp Rich Lowry? A Palin video’ll fix that shit — for a few seconds anyway.
that wasn’t a link, that was a nudge, wink, and a link. in case any of the nro fans missed it.
Limp Rich Lowry? A Palin video’ll fix that shit — for a few seconds anyway.
Obviously IOKIYAR
But they’ll keep him on, all in the interest of diversity! Ah, the irony.
Do people still use the word “blacks”? Every time I hear it I cringe, but maybe that’s just me. Sounds like “blacks” should go the way of “coloreds”, no?
Of course that fine gentleman should not be fired! That would violate his 1st amendment rights! Besides, its not like he said something completely unacceptable like he is embarrassed that Bush was from Texas or the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards.
@eemom: Wow, this place is turning into a literal echo chamber.
I wonder how many times this will rebound.
@Sad Iron:
They still do, I guess, when “African-American” is too much of a mouthful, or when the African-descended people they refer to aren’t Americans.
Fired? !
National Review was founded by William Buckley. 4 years ago, his son, Christopher Buckley endorse Obama. He was fired. Fired. Fired from his dad’s magazine for simply revealing his vote.
Yet, Derbyshire racist diatribe isn’t a fireable offense.
@Richard: Cream? I thought Derb was a milk and water conservative.
I was 100% convinced of the racism of the Republicans in the nineties when all that GHWB could say about David Duke was that Mr. Duke was a charlatan.
Lowry’s statement falls in the same category as GHWB’s disavowal without denunciation.
This is all within keeping of National Review’s theology. As St. Buckley wrote 50-odd years ago:
The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.
In other news, Sen. Grassley(or whoever writes his tweets) called the President stupid.
@efgoldman: And then they wonder why black people won’t vote Republican.
It is certainly not “needless to say,” as if no-one could POSSIBLY think that a right-wing ideological magazine, with a history of vocally opposing the Civil Rights Act, would EVER employ bigots. My assumption is that a good proportion of the staff agree with Derbyshire even if they would never express such.
@Hill Dweller: Jesus, this is the man to whose ‘friendship’ Max Baucus pretty much sacrificed health care reform.
Barack?
Ahh… speaking of Tulsa, the WaPo headline is “Black community fearful after 5 shot in Tulsa; neighbors say random shootings unusual.” Well, that makes me feel muuuuch better.
LInk:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....ml?hpid=z6
Hogwash? Not quite.
Balderdash!
Fire ‘im? Hell. I say nominate him for Rmoney’s running mate.
(OK, maybe you can’t nominate a Brit. But still…)
Cool.
I did not realize we were in another one of these fun faux outrage/demands for dismissal/followed by faux apology cycles…these are entertaining.
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Larison is a proud member of the Neo-Confederate League of the South.
Derbyshire too would fit right in at the League of the South.
@MattF:
Some people want a race war, its their own take on the apocalypse & they are anxious to get it started. Pasta save us all if these bastards actually make it happen.
I hope these shooters are brought down soon & brought down hard.
@Mark C:
Buckley was certainly racist back when he founded NR, but then a lot of folks were. Was he racist at the end? As has been pointed out countless times by the Right, Sen. Byrd was a member of the KKK in his early days. He apparently sincerely repented that when he got older. Folks do change.
Don’t know if Buckley did change, but saying someone was racist 40 years ago doesn’t mean much…except about where they were 40 years ago.
@efgoldman:
Of course you haven’t.
The clinically insane Governor of Florida signed legislation lifting the 45 year old ban on dyeing baby rabbits and chicks…just in time for Easter.
Hahahha WHOOPS
The NRO has been “accidentally” promoting white supremacy for decades at this point
@Sad Iron:
These days people prefer nouns to go with their adjectives. When one says “blacks” rather than “black people” (or “gays” rather than “gay people”) it sounds as if you’re denying the second half of that equation to the people in question, even if that isn’t your intent.
This is being described as a “column”, not a blog post, correct? Which implies an editor signed off on it. Which means the senior editor takes executive responsibility for it. NRO owns the racism in this piece. It’s that simple.
I agree that John Derbyshire should stay out of a number of American neighborhoods, including mine, if he wants to leave with his teeth
@Sad Iron: Sure they do. “Blacks” in and of itself isn’t all that jarring IMO but that changes when it’s “THE blacks,” which is a variant of “those people.” You pretty much know whenever you hear either of those that what’s about to come is some racist statement.
“The black community” of course is still very widely used.
I noticed that part of Derbyshire’s screed was that “blacks” now often wish to be called “African Americans,” shorthand for “Americans of African descent” and somehow this common courtesy of referring to people by the term they wish is a dreadful inconvenience; almost as big of an inconvenience as not being allowed to call “blacks” or African Americans “ni**ers”. I have to say I was surprised that Derbyshire did not openly refer to this verbal oppression and tyranny as the 21st century White Man’s Burden.
He probably would have gotten around to it on the re-write, as it’s quite obvious he wasn’t concerned with being veiled or nuanced.
The people who run Taki’s magazine where Derbyshire’s article was posted, by the way, are Greek fascists, in the literal sense – Greece has a number of class-spanning gangs that carry around symbols of the fasces that they use to beat left-wingers and minorities
Here is a story about how they are taking over the Greek ‘austerity’ government
@Clime Acts:
I’m concerned as much as you are.
Mostly because your candidate is a lying Mormon loon.
@MattF:
This is Tulsa after all. With a history of whites massacres on AA’s. “Black Wall Street, 1921. Negroes getting uppity again with black POTUS?, history does not repeat itself, except when it does. When I lived in Tulsa, the actions of whites in 1921 was not spoken of in polite anglo circles. It is 2012, but still, Tulsa AA;s are well aware of that past, and we white folk can only imagine their fear in that city, right fucking now.
The handling of commenters on this is really something. NRO closes comments. Redstate flat out said, “Agree with Derbyshire here and you’re banned.” Hotair just didn’t do a post. They are clearly clearly shocked and horrified to learn that their readers heart “Derb.”
As was mentioned previously, here is what National Review’s founder had to say on the subject of civil rights:
Derbyshire was just channeling the toxic spirit of the late Bill Buckley.
Also, fuck Robert Byrd, his career should have been ended
@Schlemizel:
If they keep it up, they may very well find the having not nearly as pleasing as the wanting. Note to NeoConfederates: This is a SPECTACULARLY bad idea.
Robert Byrd was not an example of anything except the legacy of the poor job Democrats have done at purging their party of undesirable elements
I am more than willing to forgive when people change their minds but that doesn’t mean you should be a U.S. Senator who goes on CSPAN and uses the N-word
Fuck Robert Byrd and while we’re there, fuck Bill Clinton; you don’t see Republicans going to bat for H.W. Bush
Aside from the fact that National Review Online was itself founded by a racist, NRO wouldn’t sack Derbyshire for a racist article when so many of its readers are racists too. They’d see him as a martyr, and would protest by pulling their donations, which William F Buckley’s legacy survives on. The print mag lost US$25 million over its first half-century, and is almost certainly even deeper in the red now. NRO doesn’t even charge for access.
NRO Sacks Derbyshire
http://www.nationalreview.com/.....rich-lowry
“Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.”
Hang all white supremacists
@Svensker:
Unless he explicitly reputiated his past writings, I assume he followed the Lee Atwater model and stopped shouting “nigger, nigger, nigger” right about the time it became socially unacceptable.
Does anyone know where Derbyshire is? Could he be in Tulsa..
Enquiring minds want to know. Earlier today I read that someone saw a white guy with a pick-up truck in the vicinity. Good luck hunting that guy down in Oklahoma.
@WhoopTDu:
And as soon as I commented that they wouldn’t, they did …
Dang.
@David Koch: At the National Review, endorsing the Negro Obama is racism.
Word on the Twitter is that Derbyshire has been fired from National Review.
ETA: http://www.nationalreview.com/.....rich-lowry
That’s the official word at their website.
Damn. BJ is faster than twitter. Just saw the firing notice myself. Really didn’t think they would do it, but good that they did. However reluctantly.
@Joseph Nobles: So is Tucker Carlson gonna hire him?
Even though comments are turned off at Derb’s post, check out other posts. People are using them to comment on Derb.
http://www.nationalreview.com/.....omment-bar
You’re kidding, right? I mean, this is the NRO we’re talking about. Derbyshire probably got a raise and a corner office for writing this.
ETA @ WhoopTDu #79: OK, I really am surprised.
@WhoopTDu:
Good. But it’s limp. “He’s a great guy, just got a little too racist for us.” And comments closed. Those guys really are wusses, aren’t they?
Needs more amulets.
Note this bit of humbug from Lowry’s statement:
“Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise.”
As has been noted upthread, National Review was founded by a racist.
(Can I please have my block quote, italics etc. buttons back? I’ll be good, I promise.)
So, when will Derb get picked up by Faux News?
My epic takedown of Derby’s bunker style of racism, boiled down to bite-sized chunks point by point.
Funny you should ask why he hasn’t been fired yet…
http://www.nationalreview.com/.....rich-lowry
@JPL: Matt Yglesias suggested Derb could now dedicate his time to informing us all which days too many black people would be at Disneyland.
I’m impressed. There’s not even a whiff of “we regret that Derb sunk to the level of lefties” or any similar bullshit.
National Review did good today.
@JPL:
@Cacti:
They’ll have to fight over him with BigDeadShriekingDrunk.
Gotta love the plugs for the books in the firing post.
@Joseph Nobles:
attackerman @attackerman Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
Derbyshire’s next job: developing an app to inform whites about the concentration of black people in their immediate vicinity.
So has anyone else noticed that although Lowry was intending to distance himself from racism, in this quote ‘parents’ quite obviously means ‘non-black parents’. Blacks may not be how Deb represents them, but they sure are Other.
The reason they haven’t fired that shitstain is because there’s nobody better to replace him with.
When will NRO have a special feature from Larry Elder, praising Derb for his bold truth-telling, and calling liberals the real racists for denying the violent nature and intellectual inferiority of the coloreds.
@Amir Khalid: African-American? That’s way esoteric. They can’t even wrap their lips around “Democratic”.
@WhoopTDu:
It’s the Ben Domenech dance. He’ll end up at Big Government, sniffing panties for freedom.
How long till Sully writes a post about how Derbyshire should not have been fired and how Derbyshire was nice to him personally?
And still the Corner has their comments turned off. I think Charles Johnson’s work in cataloging the constant barrage of racism and sexism at these right-wing sites is starting to spook them. The whole “anti-racists are the real racists” thing only works when the racists can plausibly seem not racist. Turning off comments is becoming a regular thing at places like Hotair and the Corner.
Obama drove them nuts. They can’t keep it on the dl anymore. The base doesn’t want to pretend to be decent anymore.
Okay, can anyone explain to me how a deranged racist fuck like Derbyshire gets referred to matter-of-factly as “Derb” by his peers?
Anyone? Because What.The.Fuck.?
@Alexander: Same way that Buckley, quoted above, refers to “the South” as though black people that had lived there for generations were still separate.
When people–right or left–go on today about “southerners think blah blah blah…” it drives me nuts, because they mean white, evangelical, Republicans. Black southerners don’t count? South Asian southerners? Jewish? Liberal? Buddhist? Etc.
@schrodinger’s cat:
I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s often got good instincts, but he’s a sucker for racism if you dress it up with a little science jargon.
DougJ keeps saying we need scalps…
@Ben Cisco:
If it does go down I have to figure out how I can join the AA side & kill whitey. There is going to have to be some sort of signal that those of us who would laugh to see the demise of those KKK/CSA scum & want to help.
Derbyshire’s “talk”
If you want to denounce Derbyshire, please go ahead. I disagree with him too. I just hope you will expend the same energy denouncing Marion Barry for the racist comments he made about driving “dirty Asians” out of the District of Columbia last week. Derbyshire has no real power. Marion Barry is a mayor. Oh wait, Barry is a Democrat. So that gives him cover.
BTW, Derbyshire was fired from National Review today. No word on Marion Barry though.
@Thymezone:
Because deranged racist fucks are revered at National Review Online and offline. The place was founded by one, after all.
@Laertes: I don’t think they needed to start with complimenting him but for National Review that’s probably as good as it’ll get.
@Ben Cisco:
If it does go down I have to figure out how I can join the AA side & kill whitey. There is going to have to be some sort of signal that those of us who would laugh to see the demise of those KKK/CSA scum & want to help.
@Thymezone:
Because deranged racist fucks are revered at National Review Online and offline. The place was founded by one, after all.
@MikeJ:
God, I hate the superstition that holds that less concise is more correct.
The meaning of “people of color” being different than that of “colored people” how.
Tongue -thickening mouth lard.
@Ben Cisco:
If it does go down I have to figure out how I can join the AA side & kill whitey. There is going to have to be some sort of signal that those of us who would laugh to see the demise of those KKK/CSA scum & want to help.
Pretty great that Takimag calls itself libertarian. At last! Truth in labeling.
@wrb: Nobody is telling you what you can and can’t say. Feel free to go around talking about the coloreds all you want. Just don’t expect decent people to associate with you.
Goat cheese and kale quesadilla’s, grilled mahi with pineapple salsa and grilled avocado!
I had never seen a picture of Derbyshire before. Reading the article and looking at the picture it seems fairly obvious – he is terrified of black people. Really scared of physical harm and uses all the other issues as a screen to make himself feel mentally superior. I found myself wondering if someone had kicked his butt years ago, or made him piss his pants. Kind of sad. Wonder if this is the story for many racists…
@Persia:
I’m fine with the compliments. They’re arguably true, and they don’t seem to be intended to downplay the offense. Lowry opens by saying what nice things he can, but then brings the hammer down with authority. The contrast between this move and, say, Limbaugh’s bullshit non-apology couldn’t be clearer. Lowry did good.
Lowry was wise to close comments on the Derb posts. He knows his readership well.
@rammalamadingdong: He looks like Beaker from the Muppets.
am i banned?
testing, testing…
well. i was WRONG. i thought NRO wouldn’t fire Derbyshire in the middle of his chemo.
go figger.
;)
@Svensker: Byrd was the product of a poor southern upbringing who later acknowledged that he was wrong and utterly repudiated his earlier positions on race. Buckley came from an extraordinarily privileged northeast background (although with parents who had southern roots) and never once admitted he was wrong or in any way at all distanced himself from his views on African Americans. The closest he got was saying that Jim Crow Laws needed intervention by the courts as he was wrong that they would evolve over time. But as to the inferiority of the AA race, there is no record that he ever changed his mind. But I admire your attempt at laughable equivalency between Byrd & Buckley.
Derb. It’s what you call your good buddy.
@samara morgan:
He can buy COBRA like the rest of us
@rammalamadingdong:
His picture looks like something cut from a Monty Python box cover.
@Richard:
I’d say it’s a good new slang term for poop. Switch out “turd” for “Derb”? Works for me.
Jonah Goldberg’s tweet
“For the record, I find my colleague John Derbyshire’s piece fundamentally indefensible and offensive. I wish he hadn’t written it.”
My reply to him
“Then perhaps you should reconsider calling him your “colleague” I think “racist” & “bigot” would be more appropriate. #derbyshire”
@rammalamadingdong:
Conservatives as a group are essentially defined by their fears. Change is scary. People who look and/or do things differently are scary. It’s who they are.
@Amir Khalid:
Good answer, but I think the best one is, because people in this “industry” like to call each other by nicknames to show how insider they are and how outsider you are. If the nick-buddy happens to be the intellectual equivalent of Jeffrey Dahmer, well, who’s keeping score? Sure Dahm had a bad diet, but I was on a first name basis with him when he was famous. Amirite? Stay envious, my friends.
@Thymezone: Teez, affectionate insidery nicknames make the world go ’round.
Derp
Since it seems likely my comment will be repeated on this thread, I will say something I won’t mind seeing twice:
I’m amazed and encouraged.
I really expected this would turn into something brushed off with a shrug and a wink; even though it’s possibly the most racist thing I’ve read, written in this century.
Progress? I hope so.
The twisted thing is that, were Derbyshire not pro choice and anti war, NRO probably would’ve kept him on after this.
“Mr. Derbyshire, Marty Peretz is on line three…”
@Shari:
I wouldn’t be surprised if they agreed to continue paying his health insurance for the next year or so. So he’s not on staff, but he still gets benefits. That’s not uncommon at higher levels of compensation.
A friend of mine’s husband works at a well known consulting company. A few years ago they had layoffs. The higher ups got full pay, an office, a phone, a computer, and all benefits for a full year after being laid off.
@Laertes:
Speaking of comments being “closed”, it’s now seems to be impossible to get to the page where “Derb’s” screed actually appeared. I posted a few comments myself, and then it started hanging up. I’m guessing disgruntled NRO racists are now overwhelming that site trying to comment after the firing.
@Mark C: This is too hard on Buckley. He noisily renounced and successfully fringified Birchers in the early sixties. He was also strong opponent of Wallace. I think there is a lot of speculation that these changes in views were due at least in part to his desire to maintain his power within conservatism (Birchers threatened to eclipse him) and also had to do with smoothing the way for his electoral ambitions. But he certainly did recant and quite forcefully his 50s views.
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Really? That’s what makes the world go around?
If you are talking about the world of a self-referential good old boys club … sure. I don’t live in that fucking world, so I wouldn’t know.
@Richard:
It’s been traffic-bound all afternoon, but if you are patient, you will get in.
@Shari: trudat. i just think the optics are bad.
;)
i sent the Derb a copy of Snowcrash once upon a time….to prove some point we were arguing over.
i guess he forgot what Hiro said.
I can’t wait to not read Sullivan’s response to this parting of the ways. Remember, Sully is with us on everything … that concerns gay men. Only because he is one.
@ChrisNYC:
I dunno. I read a lot of Buck (I call him Buck, because, you know, that’s what we do here in the blogoverse) and watched a lot of his tv show and … I could never be sure. My final take on him is that he really thought that intellectual, reasoned racism — and hatemongering in general — was okay as long as you dressed it up in those elegant Buckleyisms and as long as you looked and sounded snooty enough while spewing the crap. That “how dayuh you call me a racist?” attitude.
ahh yesss.
my point to the Derb was the sword is truth, and the handle is science.
i wasn’t a very satisfactory conservative because i was always arguing with them.
@Richard: The screed isn’t at NRO, if you follow JC’s link and click on Rich Lowry’s you’ll see it
Speaking of Starbursts, one of the funniest moments of political performance art was Al Franken challenging him to a wrestling match
still nothing at the Secular Right or Hot Air….but PW is breaking out the sackcloth and ashes.
we already lost.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yes, I know, because I posted several comments to it. As I mentioned, the site eventually became unreachable.
@Mark C: um, seems like WFB did repent… for what it’s worth…
The most surprising part of all this to me was just realizing that “Taki” is actually a real person. I was only familiar with him from his occasional columns in New York Press in the ’90s, and since NYP in those days was basically one giant exercise in trolling, I just assumed he was a made-up character– sort of a parody combination of Tom Wolfe and (late, crazy) Kingsley Amis without any of the writing skill. Reading up on him now, I’m extremely entertained to find that he had to defend himself against his own accusations of anti-Semitism by claiming that he didn’t understand what “soi-disant” meant. Truly a 21st-century wingnut ahead of his time.
i bet lowry used those very same free speech arguments during the limbaugh/fluke controversy.
@ChrisNYC: anything to support that assertion would be helpful.
Give Lowry time. I imagine he’s frantically pulling up old issues of the magazine just like Peter Sarsgaard toward the end of “Shattered Glass,” surprised to discover that he missed evidence of Derbyshire’s racism.
@Amir Khalid:
Yeah, but they can change!
@Laertes:
Judging by comments on Lowry’s own Trayvon Martin pieces, comments that disagree with big-name NR authors usually never get approved or posted
Pretty LOL that in this case they need to defend against people who agree with their Kluxer asses
I’d also point out that there are definitely people who work hard through fake comments to draw the racists out of the woodwork on conservative sites, but their work is largely redundant nowadays
Still, they deserve some mention as unsung heroes when Chuck Johnson clearly catches a few trolls in every batch of real Fox racism
Derbyshire is still on the contributors page at the Secular Right.
but you know who isn’t anymore? my old friend Aziz Poonawalla who contributed there as Ibn Sina.
another koombayah project bites the dust.
i totes didn’t think NRO would fire him.
bangarang!
I don’t pay much attention to NR/O–how much credit can you give an outfit that puts someone in charge based on the fact that their mommie rifled around in Monica Lewinsky’s drawers?– but I see that everyone Jon Podhoretz (sp?) to Ramesh Punuru is claiming they’ve always hated Derbyshire
@Thymezone: I don’t mean to argue what was in his heart. I’ve seen lots on the webs about how hateful he was on race but the only quote that I’ve seen used is the 1957 one in the comments here. My point was only that Buckley did renounce that view and NR’s opposition to the ’64 civil rights act (at least publicly) in the sixties and going forward.
At least this has outed Taki’s Mag as the fascist rag it is
As I’ve always said, scratch a libertarian and uncover a brownshirt
@Mark C: Rick Perlstein has written two good books on the conservative movement. The first is Before the Storm. The second is Nixonland. Both cover it. I recommend them.
Derbyshire is a known hate-monger.
Some years ago he wrote a column expressing his hate for Chelsea Clinton, which concluded with this:
http://www.journaltribune.com/.....231789.txt
@KG: Actually no, he did not repent. As I wrote he came to view institutionalized segregation (Jim Crow Laws) as wrong and that equal treatment was a basic right. But he never repudiated his statements regarding the basic social & intellectual inferiority of AAs. After he died I searched every written & recorded statement of his I could find and could not discover anything where he even remotely distanced himself from those core beliefs. At least Jesse Helms was honest & open about it.
Bah… I think the Republican prime time convention lineup should feature, Murray, Derb, and Buchanan back to back. For two reasons:
One, what these guys say often echoes what goes unsaid in the rhetoric of actual national Republican politicians (and explicitly said by their state level counterparts) and would meet with thunderous applause from the throngs of patriotic vessels of victimhood from the seats of their Hoverrounds.
Two, I’m not sure if there’d be a clearer way to draw a distinction and motivate people that aren’t this crazy to go pull a lever for somebody, ANYBODY else, especially in local elections.
The rot in the national political situation starts at the local level. All these crazy yahoos flinging poo in the House of Representatives now? These kooks started out as County Commissioners and City Council members and clawed their way up the wingnut ladder, in many cases by being the craziest one on the ballot. In any place where an election can be close, I’d love to see them all get swept away, never to return. I don’t think it will be that fast or satisfying, but the demographics is destiny line gives me hope that 20 years from now they can scream in the wind all they want and retreat into irrelevance.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: i wonder what my old frenemy razib khan is going to say….
@ChrisNYC:
Well, I will give you that he was conflicted. That’s the best I can do. I never heard him renounce the obvious and rather blatant pandering to the racist element that is so common on the right … on the right that he helped invent. His latter day recants notwithstanding. He is the Robert MacNamara of the culture wars as far as I am concerned. A late declaration doesn’t wipe out several decades of living off the support of crapheads. Like all on the right who are not actual, personal, racists, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
@JWL:
Poppycock!
I don’t understand why we all have to act like we’ve suffered serious head wounds.
Lee Atwater.
Paul Weyrich.
Ken Mehlman.
Michael Steele.
All top ranking Republicans, all have stated on the record the GOP codes racism into their platform. Since they started that, the Democratic presidential candidate has not won the white male vote in this country.
It’s all fine and dandy to play along and pretend they have plausible deniability. But they don’t. At least not if they’ve listened to what their own party has said.
@Thymezone: Yep.
i fail to see how the NRO firing Derb has any effect. They will continue to be stealth racists, and we will continue to understand that they are stealth racists.
This only affects Bobo and Villagers who will inevitably declaim how principled NRO is.
the conservosphere is silent.
i guess they are all as surprised as i am about the firing.
@samara morgan: I saw that, too. John Cole used to defend Jeff Goldstein and claimed to interact with him via instant messenger. I doubt that sort of thing has happened in a while, technological updates and whatnot. But do you think the Cole has a soft spot the hausfrau still?
@Gex:
This. This. This.
Fucking this.
@clayton: /shrug
i was a guest blogger at PW before my conversion. i had posts linked by NRO and Instapundit when i was a conservative.
Jeff is in a downward spiral of craziness.
a lot of my one time efriends (i guess i can count Derb among them, also razib, thabet, friedersdorf, allahp and reihan) started simply going mad when Obama got elected. i have no other description for the process.
and it sure helped me decide where i should be.
Dr. Manzi is the ONLY one that still talks to me.
via email.
from france.
;)
@clayton:
I used to troll regular Protein Wisdom, back in the day. Just to drive them crazy, as they all think Goldstein is some kind of wingnut Orb, that everything he writes is like sooo profound, and I would refuse to address his hypothesis other than to say the premise of the question I do not accept. I about gave a regular there called JD, a stroke by making his head splode with liberal gibberish. And Darlene would go all lawyerly demanding I answered their stupid questions, mostly concerning types of ideology. That they adopted when George Bush’s presnitcy turned to shit, and they went from worshipping his ass, to claiming they weren’t really conservatives, but were actually Classical Libertines, or some nonsense like that.
This is way down and late, so no one will read it but: Long ago I enjoyed reading Taki Theodorcoupolous’s (sic) tales of the rich life in days of yore. Youthful larks in Monte Carlo, and the like. I just did. I met him once, enjoyed his jet-set stories. So sue me.
I have been waiting for years now for someone to discover what a fucking snakepit of racist, anti-immigrant, pro-white power sentiments Takimag.com is. The comments sections are just astonishing. One gets the feeling that every single poster is white, middle aged, deeply resentful of any minority. Just a cauldron of white male hatred towards anyone else.
Derbyshire, Jim Goad, Gavin MacInness- the writers at Takimag constantly write and talk like this, the commenters agree with a vengeance. Unbelievable nastiness towards anyone who isn’t white or male. Some rich chick related to Taki wrote an article about how she hates those thieving Italians. The site is like some romper-room for white supremacists and racists, who seem to have no idea anyone can read the site and see the horror of their discourse. It’s vile. I only look at that site as a sort of horror-tourism, a truly foreign country.
it’s so ironic. buckley tried to drive out the Birchers, and now they own his magazine.
sad, actually.
why john cole is better than WFB. but he doesn’t have the same status.
@samara morgan: and you are still an idiot.
@General Stuck: He’s fundraising off it.
Pareene tweeted
“John Derbyshire fired after 30-year-long racist outburst”
@General Stuck: Oh, and JD was a particular favorite of mine, too.
Don’t you think “happyfeet” is JG himself? I do.
Derbyshire just seems a sad case.
it’s like what the hell is wrong with him, at his age? why doesn’t he understand reality?
@Arundel:
As a connoisseur of that field I have never really gone more than a couple weeks without checking in with Taki; because people in U.S. discourse are far less likely than, say, Greeks to outwardly display membership in fascist organizations, it’s good to get a perspective of what the Republicans would look like in a different set of circumstances
(There would be pictures of them carrying around fasces in college, otherwise they’d be pretty much the same)
That it took John Derbyshire – definitely one of the tamer writers on the site – to draw attention to it is pretty fuckin funny to me
@clayton:
could be, or just an ordinary circus clown
why is there not more yelling at John?
@Little Boots:
These people are ensconced in a discourse that they know has heavy influence on some very wealthy, non-‘fringe’ people, and so they seriously believe that the difference between them and the sane majority is a lack of good faith on the part of the majority
See: Dartmouth’s unabashed junior fascist league that has brought us Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza – these folks were created by a long-lasting, very organized, and very wealthy Neo-Nazi clique with considerable influence over the United States
They have their own conferences, their own journals, their own regular dinner meetings, and their own networks of employment nestled within magazines such as National Review . . . and again, they have a lot of money, which is incidentally the only reason National Review stays in business, through donations from this set
The difference is that Derbyshire thought he could go off the reservation, while, say, Ann Coulter’s rabid backroom antisemitism is only known through the statements of associates such as David Brock
@AA+ Bonds:
I think you’re right. and it’s very sad.
I think Buckley tried to think, and tried to surround himself with thinkers. but it’s all dead now.
I think John Cole tried to think, and then realized the Conservative Movement is just brain dead.
and it actually is kind of sad.
we need a better conservative movement. we do.
I’m not sure how the NRO staff should hold themselves accountable for this, but mass suicide would be a good start.
john?
am I right?
don’t be silent, goob.
@Gex:
Their whole “we’re not racist” act isn’t aimed at us, or at their own base. It’s aimed at mushy centrist and independent idiots in between us. Those guys spend most of their political lifetimes happily and studiously oblivious to the dog-whistles, but every now and then someone like Derb goes and blows it so fucking loud that even they notice, which is when the NRO fires his ass.
@Little Boots:
I think Buckley’s relationship with the John Birch Society types was a lot like the current NRO’s relationship with Derb, actually. That is, he realized that they were so overtly extreme it would be toxic to be associated with them, but under the surface, his own ideology was almost as radical as theirs. As you can see from the support for white supremacism, and McCarthyism, and fascism in Spain and elsewhere.
Derbyshire used to be a racist.
He still is a racist, but he used to be one too.
@Chris: EX-FUCKING-ZACKLY. It wasn’t like the William F. Buckley types hated the Birchers because the Birchers were crazy — it was because the Birchers were shunned that he shunned them.
How’s he gonna put food on his family ow, libbats’?
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John Cole:
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I’m honestly surprised. I thought for sure that NR would dance around Derbyshire’s rhetoric and find some way to defend him, if not the piece he wrote for Taki.
It’s not like NR has no history of that kind of racism, Buckley was defending Jim Crow almost from the day NR started publishing. Nor is Derbyshire’s piece significantly different from the shit Charles Murray spewed in The Bell Curve, still defended by myraid NR writers.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad NR disassociated themselves from Derbyshire’s racism. I just didn’t think they had it in them.
.
Ufortunately, I’m sure Derbyshire will weather this setback just fine. After all, some of his best friends are white.
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So long Turdbyshire you’ll be missed by racists and neo-colonialists everywhere.
Lemieux has a post quoting J.Holbos droll remarks regarding the delicious pearlclutching fandango performed by mssrs. Ponnuru&Goldberg as they pretend(Shocked, Shocked I tell you!)to recoil from their erstwhile colleague and regretfully mingle with the DFH mob that is now gleefully pawing poor Derbyshires mangled corpse.I actually think Lowry may have panicked under fire and the Derb will prove to have had a more accurate gauge of the ever moving index of what is acceptable on this subject. Look, the whole elaborate code-talking kabuki that Atwater famously referred to has now more or less been dispensed with as uneccessary old-school politesse. All that remains is a sort of weakly enforced proscription on the UNAPOLOGETIC use of Ni-CLANG!in such a fashion that it can’t be plausibly denied as unintentional–verbal crossed wires or some equally anodyne bullshite.And this is ONLY on-camera or in duly attributed Media–anonymity produces a dystopian free-fire zone. That’s IT,that final gauzy scrim of pretense that keeps us from having to gaze directly into the full-on glare of utterly unashamed Antebellum level savagery. Irrespective of outcome, after the Nov. elections I expect Derbyshire to be rehired with back pay restored. This is merely a sabbatical of sorts.
To quote Charlie Pierce at Esquire – “The National Review has fired John Derbyshire for violating company policy regarding admitting what American conservatism has been all about since 1964. This has forced Rich Lowry to fake it.”
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/p.....z1rRMng9g1
BLACKS ARE THE REEL RASCISTS BECAUSE SHUT UP
@Rogers: still nothing from the conservosphere.
praps you are right, and Lowry went off halfcocked. Only Goldstein didn’t get the message because he’s all OUTLAW! an’ that.
Praps we shall see a different sort of resurrection this easter sunday, with Derbyshire rising unbloodied and whole from the grave of Lowry’s disdain….
;)
@Rogers: hmm. the not-so-bright-barts didn’t get the message either.
Derbyshire as Jesus, both crucified and risen, would be a great motif for chunky bobo…but he’s already written his column last week i expect.
;)
JD said he was a homophobe and a racist but a “mild and tolerant” homophobe/racist. The old saying “like being a little bit pregnant” comes to mind.
@Mark C:
I was not making an attempt at equivalence. I was saying that people do change and that citing 50 year old language was not proof of what people thought in the present. Robert Byrd was an example of that. If you read what I wrote rather than what you assumed I wrote, I said that I did not know what Buckley’s opinion was before he died.
The fact that one started out poor and one started out rich doesn’t have a lot to do with it, I don’t think. Racism was endemic and fairly acceptable in those days. I grew up in a very mixed neighborhood and went to a school where WASPs were a minority then, and I very vividly remember the things white folks would say about black folks that no one considered particularly peculiar to say. The Civil Rights movement wasn’t just about the South and poor folks, you know.
How long until Derbyshire pleads satire?
So, has he been hired by CNN yet?
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MikeF:
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Too late. Derbyshire is already on the record saying it isn’t satire:
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@JGabriel:
Derbyshire’s sin is not racism.
Derbyshire’s sin is not properly encoding it. Of being too overt. Of giving the game away.
@JGabriel: well obvi the next step is the Passion of John Derbyshire, rife with crucifixion metaphors….. who will go there first, do yah think?
Sully or Chunky Bobo?
@samara morgan: My guess would be Bobo would defend Derbyshire before Sully.
I suspect Sully knows that any defense of Derbyshire would call attention to his own association with The Bell Curve — which has now been revealed to be toxic by the outcry over Derbyshire’s Taki essay.
On the other hand, one might expect Douthat or Dreher would be the first to reach for Christian metaphors.
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On the other, other, hand, Derbyshire is currently undergoing chemo.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he apologizes somewhere down the line and blames it on the cancer or the meds. It would probably work too, with the Villagers anyway, despite being undercut by Derbyshire’s decades long history of commentary and statements that foreshadowed and bordered on the blunt racism of his Taki article.
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Interesting that Lowry will call it “nasty,” “indefensible” and “outlandish,” but can’t quite bring himself to use the R word.
@JGabriel: obvi the chemo plays right into the narrative of Derbyshire’s virtual crucifixion by the evul libruul media..
after all, both freddie and forbes called for him to be fired.
heres a pretty accurate sending, from david sessions at TAS, one of the blogs i helped ruin.
Matoko the Destroyer.
;)
Just piling on, here.