April 10, 2012
John Derbyshire
Black hatemongers rarely provoke the public tongue-lashing that a scientifically literate English gentleman elicits by pointing out cognitive and social differences between races. Would any academic or journalist create the same brouhaha if a black “vocalist” called for “raping white bitches” or a professor of Black or Women’s Studies grossly insulted white males? Not on your life. No disparagement of whites in favor of blacks, or of men in favor of feminists, or of straights in favor of gays would cause discomfort in our PC-drenched country or in any other Western nation in a comparable state of cultural disintegration. Not even sadistic black murders of defenseless whites can produce this effect. I am stating this as my fellow whites are still exhibiting ritualistic shock over a partly white male shooting a black teenager in circumstances that are still to be clarified.
I am impressed by the alacrity with which The Guardian and other leftist opinion sources close off discussions of non-approved subjects. The editors presume to speak for the rest of us. It was no surprise that the pint-size Stalins who run our ideologically controlled opinions would try to bully John’s employer into firing him for something posted on Taki’s Mag. And this is only proper. Were maverick writers and thinkers allowed to publish things free of PC gatekeepers, there’s no telling how far this exercise in intellectual freedom might go. The Guardian and likeminded publications are correct to insist that even the opposition should play by rules that favor them. This is not a double standard, since the left always and everywhere is totalitarian. When it tries to suppress dissent, it is being most thoroughly itself.
I was not disappointed that Lowry and his fellow intellectual pygmies caved in and fired their most talented thinker and writer. But there was an amusing side to this outrage. Before the adolescent crew kicked John out, they raked him slowly over the coals. While groveling toward the left as he was “parting ways” with John, Lowry complained about how Derb’s piece “lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible.” My thought at the time was that I”d like to see the clueless Lowry match wits with John by trying to prove that John’s assertions were “indefensible.” It would be like having a featherweight pick a fight with Mike Tyson during his prime.
I”d be delighted to see the utterly vapid NR go down the tubes now that its editors have humiliated and fired a brilliant, principled subordinate. But I doubt that will happen. However worthless the magazine is likely to become (and even with John it wasn”t very good), its neocon and GOP donors will probably continue to keep it afloat. At my age, I was hoping to see at least one pillar of the neocon agitprop empire collapse before I leave this vale of tears. Unfortunately, given its continued usefulness to its masters, this fate is not likely to befall NR.
