JOHN DERBYSHIRE AND THE REEMERGENCE OF POLITICAL INCORRECTNESS CHIC

By now I imagine you know about this:

Popular conservative columnist and National Review writer John Derbyshire topped all of his previous racist screeds (and sexist rants) today by posting a long breakdown of all of the important lessons he has taught his children about race -- and he's outdone his own racism with this one....

(10a)Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.
(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.
(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot)....

This was published online at Taki's Magazine. If you think Derbyshire is appalling, meet his publisher:

Taki Theodoracopulos ..., originally named Panagiotis Theodoracopulos is a Greek/American journalist, socialite, and political commentator.

... Due to Taki's characterization of himself as a "soi-disant antisemite", coupled with strong criticism of the Israeli government and its supporters in the United States, The Spectator no longer permits him to write about Israel or Jewish affairs. In March 2010 Taki, in an article in Chronicles magazine, said of the last Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld that "he's a very homely, simian-looking Jew who couldn't punch his way out of a nursery".

... He has expressed his admiration of the German Wehrmacht in his "High Life" column in The Spectator: "And speaking of the Wehrmacht, if I couldn't have been a German officer in Paris 1940, being an expatriate American there would have suited me fine." ("High Life", The Spectator, Wednesday July 1, 2009)...

Taki, who's in his seventies, has written the "High Life" column for Britain's Spectator since 1977, but he began to be more visible in the U.S. media in the 1980s and 1990s -- the backlash years of Reagan, Bush, Ed Koch, Howard Stern, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, and Rudy Giuliani's cops. Those were the years when being proudly "politically incorrect" made you seem fabulous and dangerous in some circles, in contrast to PC lefties, who were being stereotyped as humorless and drab. Taki wrote for Vanity Fair and Esquire and the then-hip Village Voice competitor New York Press.

I see that Jim Goad is listed as the editor of Taki's Magazine. He was a pure product of that era: publisher of the 'zine Answer Me!, which reveled in its political incorrectness and goaded feminists with a notorious "rape issue." If you criticized anything Goad did, you were obviously just the sort of person whose humorlessness and hypocrisy and pathetic white-liberal guilt Goad was put on this earth to expose, or at least that was the line he was selling. Eventually Goad went semi-mainstream, if briefly -- he got a book deal from a division of Simon & Schuster for a screed titled The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats. After that, though, he spent a couple of years in prison for beating up his girlfriend. He's back to being a revered cult figure, though it's unlikely he'll get close to the mainstream again.

Racism is timeless, but racism chic, as a supposed corrective to the unspeakable awfulness of liberalism, has faded from the scene somewhat. It still lives on Fox and talk radio, but it's a little less proud of itself. It's rarely as unabashed as this Derbyshire screed. Taki has set up a safe space for it, but, sorry, Taki (and John), it's on the Internet -- we can read it. It's not safe. Say what you want, but run the risk of being (deservedly) marginalized if you do. At least I hope that's the outcome.