The Fulford File | More (Coordinated) Attacks On John Derbyshire, And VDARE.com
05/16/2012
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John Derbyshire and VDARE.com are both being attacked by raging pundits again. See Google News for more. It started with this in the Atlantic Wire by Elspeth Reeve [Email her/Twitter]:

Racism for Dollars: John Derbyshire Turns White Supremacist Pitchman Elspeth Reeve, May 14, 2012
John Derbyshire's first column VDARE after being fired from the National Review— besides one dedicated to thanking generous readers — includes a defense of white supremacism. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that one of Derbyshire's most explicitly racist essays is packaged with a very explicit request for donations. It seems Derbyshire has discovered one of the benefits of turning off lots of mainstream readers by writing a racist essay about advising his kids to avoid black people is that it earns the loyalty of a smaller number of racist readers who will pay money for more racist stuff. Derbsyhire, the conservative writer fired from the National Review for, has a new column for VDARE.com, Derbyshire's case for white supremacy at VDARE.com, a site for "Immigration Patriots," noticed by Think Progress' Ian Millhiser, goes like this: [Links and typos, et cetera, in original]

Reeve quotes the two paragraphs of Who Are We?—The “Dissident Right”? in which Derbyshire’s actual argument is

“I actually think ‘White Supremacist’ is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don't see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.” [Links in original, Reeve copied the link to A Farewell To Alms: Why Did The Industrial Revolution Happen Where It Did? from Derbyshire’s piece.]

Note: real "white supremacy" societies of South Africa, Rhodesian, or pre-civil rights Alabama kind require a white minority. (It's not often appreciated that whites were a distinct minority in large parts of the South, so that allowing black to vote meant immediate black rule—Atlanta hasn't had a white mayor since 1974.)

There were complaints about white minority regimes like South Africa and Rhodesia. But it turns out that they were more fair and stable than the black-ruled societies that succeeded them—in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Noxubee County, Mississippi. (See a recent poll of Jamaicans here: Give us the Queen! Jamaica Gleaner, June 28, 2011).

Reeve complains that Derbyshire quotes

"…a personal essay, called "A White Teacher Speaks Out," from the "race realist" website American Renaissance. According to the author, who is white, even poor black children in Zimbabwe agree it's better for white folks to control things. Otherwise, "'We screwed,' a young, pitch-black boy screamed back.")[Links in original]

This is a reading failure on Ms. Reeve's part. The "poor black child" in question is in an American school. When this child imagines what would happen if all the whites in America went away, he may be thinking of places like Detroit…which hasn't had a white mayor since 1974, and is in terrible shape.

Reeve continues:

It's blatantly racist stuff, but it's also blatantly a fundraising pitch. Ron Paul demonstrated how much money can be made by pandering to racists when, during the Iowa primary, it was revealed that Ron Paul made almost $1 million in a single year off his racist newsletters in 1993. But Brimelow must be really frustrated now. More than a month later, the fundraising is still going on, though you can get to the site after a page asking for money. A key part of Brimelow's ask: Keeping Derbyshire from being silenced:

Actually, we stopped our fundraising appeal long before this. (Our spring appeal asked for $25, 000 dollars AND WE’RE HAPPY TO SAY WE GOT IT, so there!)

But I suppose if the Atlantic had to run appeals, they'd reverse it, and say "We silence John Derbyshire, and people like him."

The Atlantic, however, doesn’t have to ask for sums like, as Dr. Evil put it in Austin Powers, "One MILLION Dollars."

The Atlantic, which pays Ms. Reeve to attack people and try to silence them, is the property of David G. Bradley, who feeds sums like "One MILLION Dollars" to the birds, and pays "top journalists" like Jeffrey Goldberg up to $350,000 annually. [The Atlantic's Owner Ponies Up, By Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, August 6, 2007] Mr. Bradley’s net was estimated by Forbes in 2002 as over half a billion dollars.

Bradley is one of what Slate Media Critic Jack Shafer called The New Vanity Press Moguls [Slate, June 22, 2006]…a class of plutocrats who aren’t making money out their papers, as traditional press barons like Hearst or Rupert Murdoch tried to do, but are spending money in the interests of being influential players in Washington and New York.

This is sometimes a harmless way for a rich man to spend money. Well, fairly harmless—in Kurtz piece, Bradley describes himself as a “neocon guy" who was "dead certain” about invading Iraq, in spite of the fact that James Fallows, who he hired to be an expert on the subject, told him different.

By 2007, Bradley had changed his mind. But it was a bit late. Then, in 2007-8, the Atlantic made a major push for Barack Obama, spearheaded by Andrew Sullivan, who may have been in love. Perhaps now Bradley regrets that.

But there’s an astonishing difference in scale between what VDARE.com is trying to do, and the amounts of money we need to do it, and the amount of money being spent attacking us.

The Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) raises millions of dollars to attack us and people like us.(See Patrick DerbyshireCleburne’s analysis of what it actually does with its money).

ThinkProgress.org, upon which Ms Reeve apparently depends, is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

John Derbyshire was also attacked by the New York Observer, [John Derbyshire Thinks White Supremacy is Pretty Great, Historically Speaking, By Drew Grant, May 14, 2012] (which produced the graphic on the right.)

Ms. Grant [Twitter], who used to write for Salon, says “John Derbyshire, whom you might remember as the guy too blatantly racist for the much more subtly racist National Review–has found himself a new gig.”

Memo to Rich Lowry [Email him]: This shows, one more time, that nothing is gained by appeasing these people.

Ah, fuhgeddaboutit.

John Derbyshire’s VDARE.com column was also attacked in Gawker, Mediaite, and the Huffington Post. All are multi-million dollar media enterprises, and all of them are run either by fashionable left-wing Democrats, or people to the left of them.

And they have all developed a suspiciously simultaneous passion for attacking us. As Atlantic’s Reeve puts it above “It doesn't seem like a coincidence”.

Of course, it may be just liberal Hive-like behavior.

But it may not. We discovered after the 2008 that there actually was a liberal media conspiracy—called Journolist—among liberal media types to hide Obama’s flaws, and attack his enemies.

That’s obviously what’s going on here—using VDARE.com to attack Romney and mainstream Republicans for being like us here at VDARE.com.

Unfortunately, Romney and mainstream Republicans are not like us. VDARE.com’s positions on immigration are similar to those held by the broad mass of the American people—but not the GOP Establishment or its surrogate Conservatism Inc.

We don’t know which way Romney will jump. But we’re not holding our breath.

Occasionally it happens that a journalist-employee of press baron like David G. Bradley will say to an elected politician that he “represents the people.”

If the politician is very brave, he will say that he, being democratically elected, and having taken an oath under the Constitution, represents the people. The reporter represents one man—his extremely rich employer.

Here at VDARE.com, we really do represent “the people” a lot more than any one at the Atlantic.

And, with the help of our readers, we will continue to do so.

James Fulford [Email him] is a writer and editor for VDARE.com.

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