Free Republic

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...