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The United States will accelerate the resettlement of about 7,000 Iraqis referred by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and will contribute $18 million to the agency's appeal for Iraq, about one-third of the total, Undersecretary of State Paula J. Dobriansky said Wednesday. — Washington Post, 2/15/07 I hope it won't be thought impertinent, over-inquisitive, or — Heaven forfend! — mean-spirited of me to ask, but: Just what, exactly, are these refugees seeking refuge from? Us? A few more questions come to mind. Let us suppose, for example, that Sergeant John Q. American, a serving member of the U.S. armed...

... The topic here is of course my Taki’s Mag column of last week, which has brought me worldwide fame, though no doubt only for the proverbial fifteen minutes. ... Was it a suicide column? Many people have surmised that I was fed up with National Review and wanted to go out with a bang. Nothing of the sort. I was comfortable at NR and honestly thought I was writing a routine column on a website that anyway never references my NR connections. The results were entirely unanticipated. Grassy knolls. Some people went berserk overanalyzing the situation. Guys: Most things...

London Mayor Boris Johnson spoke the other day about the riots that devastated London and other English cities last summer: The biggest shock for me from the riots was the sheer sense of nihilism—perhaps I should not have been shocked, but in my view literacy and numeracy are the best places to start. In seven particular boroughs in London one in four children are leaving functionally illiterate. In a few schools it is nearer 50%. We have to intervene at an earlier stage, and I think the mayor can help. Here is a thing that The New York Times said...

Say this for John Derbyshire – he thinks what he thinks and doesn’t care who knows it. In fact, he’s willing to give an interview to arguably one of the most likely sites to be hostile on the internet. To that end, Derbyshire has given his first interview after being let go by National Review for writing a racially controversial article to the hipster-focused website Gawker, on the condition that they not censor any of his answers. As it turns out, that’s not a problem for them. Here are some of Derb’s most interesting observations: --------------------------------------------------- I liked working with...

<p>I didn’t agree with Derb on many things, from Ron Paul and talk radio to God and science. For his part, he reckoned I was a bit of a wimp on what he called “the Great Unmentionables.” He thought that neuroscientists and geneticists’ understanding of race trumped my touching belief in “culture.” I’m not so sure: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados? Why is India India and Pakistan Pakistan? Skin color and biological determinism don’t get you very far on that.</p>

John Derbyshire has set off a mini firestorm by responding to an article which details advice that black parents give their kids about coping with "White America", by giving advice to his own kids about coping with black America. And imagine White America's collective shock... he has been denounced for it as being racist. (actually I think it's ... "RACIST!!!") Racism, as we know, is the ultimate liberal heresy. There are difference between black (ethno-African) Americans, and White (European) Americans which are obvious at a distance. And there are dramatic difference between the sub culture of Black America and the...

I've been a subscriber to NRODT since 1986, but Rich Lowry's mewling, whingeing, trembling mischacterization of Mr. Derbyshire's article is unacceptable. It is time for NRODT and me to part company. This is my Chuck Turner moment. I had subscribed to the Boston Globe, forever. But after they printed those fraudulent photos from Chuck Turner I got the motivation to drop my subscription. Well, I'll take the 50 bucks or so a year that NRODT costs and use it to support whatever enterprise has the savvy to scoop up Mr. Derbyshire.

Derbyshire doesn't do the really obvious racist stuff -- the stuff that goes up at FreeRepublic.com, for example -- like post photos Obama in stereotypical tribal garb with a bone through his nose.

... There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following. (1) Among your fellow citizens are forty million who identify as black, and whom I shall refer to as black. The cumbersome (and MLK-noncompliant) term “African-American” seems to be in decline, thank goodness. “Colored” and “Negro” are archaisms. What you must call “the ‘N’ word” is used freely among blacks but is...

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, or any one of his “Straggler� columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. 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...

TItle form John Derbyshires site April 5, 2012 Taki's Magazine The Talk: Nonblack Version Teach your children well.

I can’t understand why Newt Gingrich is getting such a pass on his Freddie Mac consulting. He claims to have been a historian for this outfit? FHLMC needs a historian like the U.S.A. needs a Department of Education, like Europe needs a common currency, like … like … I dunno, like Michelle Obama needs another $12,000 accessory. I sputtered about this on last week’s Radio Derb: Newt’s trying to ju-jitsu the thing, telling us that his experience as a shill for Freddie Mac gave him valuable insider understanding of governmental affairs. Isn’t that what we want in a candidate, valuable...

Front-page headline in my New York Post this morning: 2 + 2 = 5 NY passes students who get wrong answers on tests The accompanying story describes a further dumbing-down of state math tests for kids in grades 3 to 8. Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: “A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12 . . . ” For us New York parents the only surprise here is that any...

Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor-for-life, has announced that the city will not go ahead with a publicly funded CCT program. A what? “CCT” stands for “Conditional Cash Transfer,” the current fad among anti-poverty campaigners. The name, unusually for social-policy onomastics, clearly describes the program. Cash ($$$$) is transferred (from some funding source, most likely an anagram of PAXTAYERS, to poor people) with conditions (“If you make sure your child attends school regularly, we’ll give you $50 a month”). CCT is not particularly a New York thing; there have been CCTs all over the world since the late 1990s. Nor...

Thank you, Madam Moderator. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am here this evening in the capacity of a wet blanket. I am here not to take one side or the other on the topic under debate, but to say that the topic, as written, is based on a false premise, and therefore has no satisfactory answer. I don't believe the disparities under discussion can be eliminated. Debate about whether government should play a greater or lesser role in eliminating them is therefore, in my opinion, otiose. When the organizers first emailed me to suggest I appear on the panel,...

As the fugleman for conservative despair, I am of course neither shaken nor stirred at the passing of the health-care bills. It was to be expected. I see plainly that Western civilization, over my lifetime, has been a slow-sinking ship. The few who have known what is happening have worked desperately to seal the watertight doors, repair the fissures, pump out the flooded zones. It's been a losing fight, though. The tilt of the decks is harder and harder to ignore. Last night, a major bulkhead gave way. Soon a funnel will topple over with a great crash and a...

Many readers have responded with sympathetic, er, vigor to my Tuesday posting about Assistant Professor Katynka Z. Martínez. Several of these outraged readers have directed me to the wbsite for SFSU's Raza Studies Department. Prof. Martínez is not toiling away there alone: there are thirteen profs and assistant profs on the faculty. What goes on in a Raza Studies Department? Let them tell us. Roberto [Rivera] is presently finishing a book on Liberation Discourse which examines the semantics of counter-hegemony in the philosophies of Gustavo Gutierrez and Paulo Freire [Prof. Tomas Almaguer] is currently completing work on a book manuscript...

March 24, 2009, 4:00 a.m. Will Obama Kill Science? (Cont.)Science vs. political correctness. By John Derbyshire Back in October of last year, I wrote a column titled “Will Obama Kill Science?� arguing that an Obama administration, stuffed as it surely would be with postmodern leftists, would do what they could to kill off some key branches of the human sciences, for fear of what they might turn up. I concluded with: We are about to find out whether our traditional devotion to free speech and free enquiry can survive real, incontrovertible results from the human sciences; and in particular,...

You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States. Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You...

You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States. Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You...

You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States. Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You...

I’ve never understood why liberals thought of conservatives as religious fundamentalists. Yes, there are some conservatives who are led to their views by their strong religious beliefs. Yet there are other conservatives who reject liberalism not because of their feelings about faith, but because conservatism simply makes more sense to them than liberalism. These conservatives believe that logic and reason will lead the average person to veto the Obama-Kennedy vision. John Derbyshire, the fiercely brilliant National Review writer, is a member of the latter group. He has started an already-outstanding blog, www.SecularRight.org, that reflects the views of this faction of...

The conventional wisdom is settling in: It's awful, and terribly un-conservative, to nationalize a big lump of the financial industry, but the alternative is too awful to contemplate. Baloney. It may be politically too awful to contemplate, i.e. hazardous to the well-being of our political class, but that's the kind of short-termism that got us here. Once this thing is done, it's done, and the dollar is a few inches closer to being a Soviet rouble. The conviction that government will always bail out a financial catastrophe will be factored into all future trading and financing decisions. Down the road...

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And order'd their estate. The 1982 Episcopal Hymnal omits that stanza, the second of Mrs. Alexander’s original six (not counting the refrain). It also omits her fifth: The tall trees in the greenwood, The meadows where we play, The rushes by the water, We gather every day … Understandable, in both cases. The fifth stanza might possibly be re-cast for a modern child (the hymn comes from Mrs. Alexander’s 1848 Hymns for Little Children), perhaps along lines like: The Xbox and the...

Derbyshire may have 'oldest' dog Bella's owner says she is at least 28 years old A Derbyshire couple are trying to prove their pet Labrador cross is the oldest dog in the world. Bella's owner David Richardson, 76, said he bought the mixed breed dog from the RSPCA 26 years ago when she was "at least three years old". That would make Bella's age more than 200 in canine years. But the RSPCA said it does not have any records for Bella and Guinness World Records said without the appropriate paperwork it could not be proved. Mr Richardson said he...

A reader: John, I think you and other conservative critics of Ben Stein's movie are overlooking a significant part of the damage this film is doing: it diverts attention away from the areas of the academy, such as English, Poli Sci, Sociology, gender studies, black studies, etc. that really have become real cesspools of leftist dogma and actually are dire need of reform. Conservatives who care about higher education ought to be scrutinizing the pseudo-scholars in these disciplines and leaving the real scholars in the natural sciences alone. Ben Stein is diverting resources away from where they could actually be...

In an essay published recently on National Review Online, John Derbyshire has declared that the documentary Expelled contains a blood libel against Western Civilization. His is an exercise of striking vulgarity, the more so since, as he insouciantly admits, he has not “seen the dang thing.� A blood libel, one might recall, refers to the charge that the Jewish people are irredeemably stained by their occasional, if modest, need for Christian blood. Some terms have acquired through their historical associations a degree of repugnance that persuades sensitive men and women not to use them. If Derbyshire has been repelled by...

... When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?...

It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?" I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and...

What on earth has happened to Ben Stein? He and I go back a long way. No, I’ve never met the guy. Back in the 1970s, though, when The American Spectator was in its broadsheet format, I would always turn first to Ben Stein’s diary, which appeared in every issue. He was funny and clever and worldly in a way I liked a lot. The very few times I’ve caught him on-screen, he seems to have had a nice line in deadpan self-deprecation, also something I like. Though I’ve never met him, I know people who know him, and...

“In Nature,� said Coleridge, “there is nothing melancholy.� I don’t know about that. I suppose there are lots of people who will greet American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau with joy, but both politics and temperament predisposed me against the book.[1] I had agreed to review it in a moment of weakness, but when it thumped down onto my desk—115 extracts from 101 authors in close to a thousand galley pages of almost nothing but text (“80 pages of color inserts� will be included in the finished product, the publisher assures me), melancholy is what ensued.Politics. The presence of that...

America's voters need to know why Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, praised Barack Obama at the annual Nation of Islam conference as "the hope of the entire world that America will change and be a better place" and Mrs. Obama's thesis suggests why. John Derbyshire, in "The Corner" at National Review Online: "...Mrs Obama's senior sociology thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community"....will... have on the presidential campaign....a moderate positive, offset by a slight negative." If that's so, then Barack Obama will be the next President. Mr. Derbyshire was impressed that the thesis was released, making...

Oh, stop whining. So what if the likely GOP nominee believes in restraints on free speech, higher taxation, bigger government, open borders, and 100-year U.S. armies of occupation everywhere from Albania to Zimbabwe? Romney believes in those things too — at least, he does when he's in a room full of people that want him to. You already have a genuinely conservative candidate on offer. He's just not slick enough for you. What, he has positions you don't agree with? More than the other guys? Actually, I have heard very little complaining about Paul's positions. What I have mostly heard...

Make Your Yuletide Gay An olive branch. Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor December 20, 2001 9:15 a.m. At the beginning of Robert Aldrich's 1962 movie Sodom and Gomorrah, Anouk Aimee sets out to deliver a message to the Elamites. Halfway across the desert she encounters a stranger, who helpfully warns her: "Watch out for Sodomite patrols!" Where is that guy when I need him? In Tuesday's column, which was about ballet, I passed a comment on the movie Billy Elliot, expressing the opinion that it was "not bad, if you ignored the ingredient of homosexual propaganda ...

December 20, 2007, 6:00 a.m. Liberty! Liberty!Why I’m for Ron Paul. By John Derbyshire You can waste a lot of time in my line of work, noodling around on Internet search engines to not much effect. If the matter is sufficiently pressing (translation: remunerative), when the Internet has comprehensively failed you, you can head to your library. If that fails, you can head to the nearest university library; and if that fails, to some mega-resource like the New York Public Library. If the matter isn’t that pressing, you give up and think of something else to write about. I...

Eliot Spitzer, the Governor of my state, has achieved a thing I would have though impossible: He has made me yearn for the days of George Pataki. Spitzer's latest wheeze, to give state driver licenses to illegal aliens, was actually state policy for most of Pataki's term as Governor, until Curious George changed the rules in 2003 (causing 150,000 illegals to lose their licenses). Oddly, under the pre-2003 Pataki rules, illegals could get licenses without showing a Social Security number provided they supplied documentary proof that they were ineligible for Social Security. Under Spitzer's proposed change, an illegal no longer...

September 20, 2007, 0:36 a.m. Islamophobophobia By John Derbyshire I boxed a couple of brief rounds with Robert Spencer over at Pajamas Media last month. Robert is the author of a raft of books on the general theme that Islam is a bad religion — not merely bad in some current misinterpretation, but bad root and branch, its badness planted right there in the Islamic scriptures. Spencer himself is a devout Christian, and the Pajamas Media exchanges started when I posted a review of his latest book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t. I don’t really...

Is 2008 The New 1964? [John Derbyshire] There's a Pro-Ron-Paul meme going around, to the effect that 2008 is the new 1964; i.e. that on the premise—debatable in itself, of course—that the GOP has no chance of winning the presidency next year, conservatives should run a Goldwater-style insurgency to remind the party we're here & set up some influence for 2012. Bruce Bartlett floated the meme here. I got a thought-provoking e-mail along similar lines (one of dozens like it I've had on that Paul column) from Ben Novak, who lists himself as "founder of the Americans in Europe for...

That Old-Time ReligionThe Ron Paul temptation.By John DerbyshireGo on, admit it: you have felt the Ron Paul temptation, haven’t you? And it’s not just the thrill of imagining another president named Ron, is it? Ron Paul believes a lot of what you believe, and what I believe. You don’t imagine he’s going to be the 44th POTUS, but you kind of hope he does well none the less.And why not? Look at those policy positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO; end the War...

On “The Corner” the other day, by way of commemorating the centenary of the sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein, I posted Heinlein's contribution to the 1950s radio series “This I Believe.” Eschewing any religious or metaphysical affirmations, Heinlein laid out his social credo: “I believe in my neighbors... in my townspeople... in my fellow citizens.” He went on to write about his local priest, whose “goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. ... If I’m in trouble, I’ll go to him.” (Heinlein was an atheist, by the way.) Heinlein’s next-door neighbor, he tells us, was a...

What a Waste. Steve Sailer said it all. [L]et's stop and think about what an enormous waste of six years it has been for the President, aided and abetted by the almost the entire American Establishment, to pursue his delusion of imposing his immigration obsession on the citizenry. Even leaving aside how much better the immigration situation would be if Bush had followed his oath and simply enforced the damn laws, imagine what he would have been able to accomplish legislatively in other areas without wasting time, energy, and political capital on a losing proposition like this. Well, why...

Well, all right, the beast is not definitively dead yet. Given the unswerving determination of our president — a quality I have admired, under different circumstances — we may see another effort at “comprehensive immigration reform” before the 110th Congress packs its bags in January ’09. Even if the president can’t be deterred, though, the congressfolk can. They’ve been getting an earful from their constituents. I don’t know what they’ve been hearing, but it can’t be too different from what all the radio and TV talk-show hosts say they have been hearing: “Enforce the law!” This past couple of weeks...

April 26, 2007, 7:15 a.m. Dancin’, YeahPrayin’ for this moment to last. By John Derbyshire For proponents of the theory that everything in the world exists for some good reason, disco music must present a conundrum. What higher purpose could possibly be served by this vapid, thrumping, affectless sound, dragging in its wake a subculture of narcissism, pill-popping, promiscuity both straight and gay, cheesy light shows, and the worst male clothing styles since slashed doublets and neck ruffs went out? Disco was so mockable it had barely got started before it was mocking itself — remember “Disco Duck�? The...

November 06, 2006, 7:15 a.m. To Vote Or Not To VoteA tough call for conservatives. By John Derbyshire Of course, it is not a matter of simply “staying home.� I shall be voting not only for my U.S. senator and representative, but also for a state senator and assemblyman, a county clerk and comptroller, and a town councilcritter. You probably have a similar array of positions to vote for. By all means do the best you can for your state and district. Whether or not it is the case that all politics is local, it is certainly the case...

<p>Nordlinger: Senator Kerry speaks, &c.</p> <p>Q. Are you a Christian?</p> <p>A. No. I take the minimal definition of a Christian to be a person who is sure that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, or part-divine, and that the Resurrection was a real event. I don’t believe either of those things.</p>

Fear of the Horizon Barbary brutality. By John Derbyshire Presented with the word “slavery,” what comes to your mind? If you are an American, it is surely the race slavery that was a feature of life here for 250 years, that continued through the early decades of the Republic in some states, and that caused divisions that led to the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in our history. That is as it should be. We naturally think of our own country first. Slavery, however, has been a feature of life in many societies all over the world, from the most...

August 08, 2006, 3:11 p.m. If— (you want to be a true jihadi) By John Derbyshire For some reason my imagination was caught by the news last week that Osama bin Laden has sent his son Saad off to fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Having Mozart-ized this little snippet in last week’s Radio Derb, I thought I might as well Kipling-ize it, too. Perhaps Rudyard Kipling’s best-known poem, and surely the best-known hortatory poem in the English language, is “If—�  which appeared in a 1910 volume of historical stories for children.  The two children who are principal characters in...

I seem to have got myself elected to the post of NR’s designated point man against Creationists.* Indignant anti-Creationist readers have urged me to make a response to George Gilder’s long essay “Evolution and Me� in the current (7/17/06) National Review Well, I'll give it a shot. I had better say up front that I am only familiar with George’s work — he has written several books, none of which I have read, I am ashamed to say, since I know he has read one of mine — in a sketchy and secondhand way, so what follows is only a...

I see that Namibia has offered citizenship to Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, who was born in that nation on Saturday. Little Shiloh Nouvel is of course the fruit of the union of movie stars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Namibia’s Environment and Tourism Deputy Minister Leon Jooste announced the infant’s citizenship that same day, with the words: “Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt will according to Namibian law be allowed to obtain Namibian citizenship if the parents should choose to do so.” I hope that the many, many National Review Online readers over there in Windhoek, Keetmanshoop, Grootfontein, and Swakopmund will not take umbrage...

CIRA=Corruption, Ignorance, Recklessness, Arrogance [John Derbyshire] The sheer staggering awfulness of CIRA (the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, passed by the U.S. Senate yesterday) is just beginning to dawn on me. Heritage's Robert Rector, who knows what he's talking about, called it "the worst bill I have seen in 25 years." The only thing to question there is the 25. This might easily be the worst bill ever. I've been following immigration issues, in a not-very-attentive way, for 30-something years. I've held five different residence statuses myself (B-2, illegal, H-1B, Green Card, citizen). There are people like Mark Krikorian who have...