Mr. Derbyshire, Get Right with the Lord
It’s hard to believe it’s been four and a half years since I wrote a column about British polymath John Derbyshire. That was well before Lehman Brothers collapsed, before the world economy teetered on the brink, before the U.S. government gave untold bailout money to the largest banks and corporations.
In my column, I was critical of Derbyshire’s views on the writings of our editor, Kevin MacDonald. The column discussed Jewish power and the taboos surrounding that very power. (See a recent account of Jewish power here —”Elena Kagan’s “diversity problem” and Jewish privilege” by Patrick Slattery.)
Derbyshire began his ruminations on MacDonald’s writings in the March 10, 2003 issue of The American Conservative under the title “The Marx of the Anti-Semites.” There his take on the books was mixed, beginning with “The Culture of Critique includes many good things. . . . Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field.” Derbyshire even validated an important point in MacDonald’s work: “These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena that The Culture of Critique is concerned with — Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and so on — were they a net negative for America? Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were.” Read more





