One of my favorite opinion journalists, John Derbyshire, was dismissed from the staff of National Review this weekend.
I first heard of it in a roundabout way. I spotted his name in a headline during one of my periodic check-ins at The Nation‘s web site. (That’s an excellent place to monitor ongoing hard left narratives, by the way. If you want the unvarnished views that inform the slightly more nicey-nice and considerably more insidious blather at places like The New York Times and Newsweek, you can do much worse than The Nation.)
Derbyshire was fired for this piece. National Review did not publish it, but as editor Rich Lowry said, it definitely got a lot more “oxygen” because of Derbyshire’s association with National Review, so the magazine had to respond accordingly. (Incidentally, I’m not dissecting the piece. It’s there if you want to read it. In short, it’s deplorable, and National Review did the right thing in terminating his association with them.)
In their blindly sanctimonious rage, liberals are holding this up as some kind of gotcha:
I am not very careful about what I say, having grown up in the era before Political Correctness, and never having internalized the necessary restraints. I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going. – John Derbyshire, 2003
I always took this as refreshingly honest, as opposed to the GO TEAM sentiment any number of tongue-clicking nitwits would like to read into it. (“Aha! He said what he was nine years ago and those racist bastards at National Review gleefully embraced him!”) Please. It’s much more in the vein of “look, this is what I’m carrying. Here it is, so you know about it, and more importantly, that you know I know about it.”
Shall we wait for even 5% of the race-obsessed left to find such clarity of expression in describing its prejudices?
Derbyshire is a tremendously talented writer. Jay Nordlinger said that he makes him read about things he wouldn’t have read about otherwise, simply because Derb wrote about them. I can relate to that. I’m angry with him for so carelessly torpedoing what is likely to be the most prominent magazine spot he’ll ever have, and I hope he’s smarter going forward.
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