VDARE.com note: Just over a year ago, National Review fired their most brilliant writer, John Derbyshire—then in the midst of chemotherapy!—over an article he wrote for another webzine flowing out of the Trayvon Martin scam, then being ramped up in the Main Stream Media as part of the Obama re-election campaign. Every last word in Derbyshire’s article was defensible on the basis of truth and National Review’s capitulation was simply an aspect of the Conservative Establishment’s wider capitulation to the Left’s ideological hegemony that, among other things, meant that Mitt Romney lost the 2012 Presidential election because he was too cowardly to mobilize the white (formerly known as American) vote.
We were proud to offer John Derbyshire another home and we are delighted to publish From The Dissident Right, our collection of his columns. As he said gratefully in his first post-firing column for us, he was enormously buoyed up by “the kindness of strangers”—the individual Americans who spontaneously gave money to support him because they applaud his courage in defense of then and their posterity. Similarly, we support John Derbyshire’s writings through our earmarked John Derbyshire Fund (it’s tax-deductible).
Please consider an anniversary donation—and buy his book!
I have a new book out this week, title: From the Dissident Right. You can buy it on Kindle right now;it will be available in paperback shortly (if you’d like to be notified when, email here). is available here
Publishing a book is an act of such antisocial conceit (“this epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper”—Dr. Samuel Johnson), it calls for an explanation. Here’s mine.
I have been posting columns on VDARE.com since mid-2000, but with a four-year hiatus from 2008 to 2012. Let me explain the hiatus.
In February of 2008 William F. Buckley, Jr. died. Peter Brimelow posted some unflattering remarks (positively understated—PB) about his former boss at VDARE.com. Peter does not hold the admonition de mortuis nil nisi bonum in very reverent esteem; but then, as he pointed out, neither did Buckley. Unreceptive to this defense, the editor of National Review, Rich Lowry, [Email him] banned his contributors from associating in any way with VDARE.com.
I had been contributing to National Review since 1998, so I came under the ban, and crossed VDARE.com off my list of outlets. I was, and have always been, a freelancer. Juggling one’s outlets like this is part of the lifestyle.
Hence the beginning of that hiatus.
Four years later, on April 5, 2012, I published a column titled The Talk: Nonblack Version (hereinunder “The Talk”) in a different outlet, Taki’s Magazine. That column, as I explain in the introduction to From the Dissident Right,
while repeatedly stressing openness to the individual personality, points out negative—true, but negative—group characteristics of American blacks, without placing the blame for those negative characteristics on past or present malice by whites. That brings it within the scope of “racism” as currently understood in the U.S.A.
National Review—which, as one of the editors told me once, “doesn’t do race”—took exception to “The Talk.” They called it “nasty.” This time they crossed me off their contributor list. I tell you, it’s swings and roundabouts out here in Freelance Land.
(A few days later they dropped my friend Bob Weissberg from their list because of a speech Bob gave at the 2012 American Renaissance conference. They called Bob’s speech “noxious,” although at the time they did so the speech had not been reproduced in any form and National Review’s only source of information about it was an old Stalinist warhorse named Leonard Zeskind, whom, to the magazine’s everlasting shame, they thanked. Since these events Bob and I hail each other when meeting with: “Good evening, Mr. Noxious!” “Ah, hello there, Mr. Nasty!” Bob has mused that if vaudeville had not died, we could go on the road as a double act: Noxious and Nasty.)
Following my defenestration by National Review Peter Brimelow, to his great credit, at once invited me back to VDARE.com as a contributor. End of hiatus.
VDARE.com has a modest book-publishing operation. Earlier this year Peter Brimelow suggested that we might mark the twelve-month anniversary of “The Talk” by bringing out a book with that column as the lead-off chapter, followed by a selection from columns I’ve posted on VDARE.com over the years.
I accordingly picked a few columns I thought particularly worth reproducing in print, de-webbed them (i.e. added some explanatory sentences in place of hyperlinks), wrote up an introduction, and shipped it all off to Peter.
The VDARE.com editors turned it into a book with amazing speed—amazing, I mean, to anyone experienced at working with big established publishing houses.
We hit a snag with permissions, though—always a headache for authors. Taki’s Magazine had no problem with us using “The Talk,” for which we are grateful to them. As originally planned, however, our second chapter, following “The Talk,” was to be those corrections and additions to “The Talk” supplied by the late Larry Auster and his readers.
Larry was on his deathbed when we asked if we could reproduce that material. He refused permission, for reasons we cannot now know, and his executor feels obliged to respect his wishes.
I therefore replaced that second chapter with the follow-up column I wrote for Taki’s magazine a week after “The Talk.” (Once again, abundant thanks to Taki’s Magazine for their generosity with permissions.) Then I added a third brief chapter describing Larry’s additions, quoting some under the Fair Use Rule of copyright law.
The final plan of the book is therefore:
Included in that last eleven is a speech I gave to CPAC in February 2012 that Peter reproduced on VDARE.com. This was technically inside the hiatus, but apparently not noticed by the National Review enforcers.
I thus commend From the Dissident Right to the attention of thoughtful patriots who, like me, believe that mainstream conservatism—what we at VDARE.com refer to as “Conservatism, Inc.”—has surrendered key positions to liberalism, that globalist elites are waging a ruthless war against white working-class people all over the Western world, that mass Third World immigration into Western countries has been a horrible disaster, that most race talk is hypocrisy and lies, and that utopian egalitarianism is a crock.
The political Left—the fiercest adherents and promoters of that utopian egalitarianism—are operating as far from reality as they were under Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, with results that will likely be just as destructive to the civilization they have infested.
The mainstream right presents a very pathetic spectacle, being as they are in a permanent posture of apologetic cringing before the moral superiority of the left, which they implicitly acknowledge in all but a few isolated and inconsequential areas (abortion, taxation).
The future, if there is to be one, belongs to either some re-energized style of utopian totalitarianism, or to the more imaginative, defiant style of conservatism slowly coalescing around the body of ideas I have called the Dissident Right: ethnonationalism, human biodiversity, paleolibertarianism, traditionalism both religious and secular, skepticism towards democracy.
As I said in one of these essays:
After watching Conservatism, Inc. for a quarter of a century running along behind History's great rumbling juggernaut squealing "Would you mind slowing down just a teeny bit, please?” there is always the faint hope that this other crowd might actually turn us back some way towards liberty, sovereignty, science, constitutionalism.
I am glad to be part of “this other crowd”—the Dissident Right.
If there is hope for the continued existence of our civilization, that hope lies with us.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His latest book is From The Dissident Right. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.
