Topic: WorldNetDaily
John Derbyshire's racially charged screed -- in which he advised that parents tell their children to be wary of black people -- which got him fired from National Review even though said screed appeared in a different publication -- has been endorsed, implicitly if not explicitly, by two WorldNetDaily columnists.
In an April 12 column, Ilana Mercer proclaimed Derbyshire an "iconoclast" and proudly noted that he contribnuted a blurb for one of her books. Mercer then runs to Derbyshire's defense:
Tons of pixels have since been spilt in response to Derbyshire’s article and subsequent dismissal. The dimwitted discourse reflects a polemical landscape from which the Derbs of this world have been uprooted. None of John’s critics can write or reason as he does. None has his “range of historical and literary allusion,” as Mark Steyn observed. John Derbyshire’s is pellucid prose at its best.
A staff writer at The Atlantic epitomizes this fluffy, unfocused, Meghan McCain-like waffle (punctuated with a lot of, “I feel”) that lands you a job at a top publication. “As someone who places a high value on both robust public discourse and the fact that racism is now taboo,” he whimpered, “I won’t even try to mediate between these two except to say that … Derbyshire’s piece was wrongheaded.”
That’s it? A feeble, frightened assertion is a substitute for an argument?
Such cyber-ejaculate gushed from similar androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome.
Mercer added:
For my part, I cop to Western man’s individualist disdain – could it be his weakness? – for race as an organizing principle. For me, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state, so that individuals may regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire and, generally, associate at will.
Of course, Mercer kinda misses apartheid, so this was not unexpected.
Vox Day devoted his April 15 column to an interview with Derbyshhire, in which Day notes: "For the most part, there’s been a tremendous amount of support for you across the right blogosphere, whereas there hasn’t been much defense of Rich Lowry’s position except by the other writers at National Review. I would estimate that 80 to 85 percent of the comments have been running in your favor. I thought that was really striking, because I’m not sure that would have been the case 10 years ago."
Day goes on to ask Derbyshire: "National Review has a long and rather Stalinist history of purging its writers, including Joe Sobran, Samuel Francis and Ann Coulter, and now you. Is this part of National Review’s culture or is there something else going on there?" If Wikipedia is to be believed, Sobran was dismissed from National Review after William F. Buckley called Sobran's writing "contextually antisemitic." Sobran also spoke at conferences organized by Holocaust denier David Irving. Francis, meanwhile, held some rather racist views, including calling interracial sexual relationships "an intentional act of moral subversion" and declaring that "neither 'slavery' nor 'racism' as an institution is a sin."
Does Day agree with the extremist views of Sobran and Francis? That may explain his fealty for Derbyshire.
