John Derbyshire | |
|---|---|
 Derbyshire in June 2001 | |
| Born | (1945-06-03)3 June 1945 (age 80) Northampton, Northamptonshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | University College London, University of London |
| Occupation(s) | Computer programmer, journalist, political commentator |
| Website | JohnDerbyshire.com |
John Derbyshire (born 3 June 1945) is an American journalist and political commentator. He was one of the lastpaleoconservatives at theNational Review,[1][2] until he was fired in 2012 for writing an article forTaki's Magazine that was widely described as racist.[3] Since 2012 he has written forwhite nationalist websiteVDARE.[2][4]
In the article that caused his firing, Derbyshire suggested thatwhite andEast Asian parents should talk to their children about the threats posed to their safety byblack people. He also recommended that parents tell their children not to live in predominantly black communities.[3] He included the line "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."[3]
He has also written for theNew English Review. His columns cover political-cultural topics, including immigration, China, history, mathematics, andrace.[5][6] Derbyshire's 1996 novel aboutChinese American immigrants,Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, was aNew York Times "Notable Book of the Year".[7] His 2004 non-fiction bookPrime Obsession won theMathematical Association of America's inauguralEuler Book Prize.[8] A political book,We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, was released in September 2009.[9]
Derbyshire attended theNorthampton School for Boys and graduated fromUniversity College London, of theUniversity of London, where he studied mathematics. Before turning to writing full-time, he worked onWall Street as a computer programmer.
Derbyshire worked as a writer atNational Review until he was terminated in 2012 because of an article published inTaki's Magazine that was widely perceived as racist.[10][11]
Derbyshire began writing for the far-right websiteVDARE in May 2012.[2][4] In his first column for the website, Derbyshire wrote "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."[4]
Derbyshire's bookPrime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics was first published in hardcover in 2003 and then paperback in 2004. It focuses on theRiemann hypothesis, one of theMillennium Problems.[12] The book is aimed, as Derbyshire puts it in his prologue, "at the intelligent and curious but nonmathematical reader ..."
Prime Obsession explores such topics ascomplex numbers,field theory, theprime number theorem, thezeta function, theharmonic series, and others. The biographical sections give relevant information about the lives of mathematicians who worked in these areas, includingEuler,Gauss,Lejeune Dirichlet,Lobachevsky,Chebyshev,Vallée-Poussin,Hadamard, as well asRiemann himself.[citation needed]
In 2006,Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of theNational Academies Press, published another Derbyshire book of popular mathematics:Unknown Quantity: A Real And Imaginary History of Algebra.[13]
Derbyshire had an uncredited role inWay of the Dragon (released in the United States asReturn of the Dragon), a 1972 martial arts film directed by and starring, actor and martial artistBruce Lee.[14] Of landing the part, Derbyshire said: "The casting director had obviously just trawled around the low-class guesthouses for unemployed foreigners of a sufficiently thuggish appearance."[15]
Derbyshire writes in general from a small government conservative perspective. He notably ridiculedGeorge W. Bush's "itty-bitty tax cut, paid for by dumping a slew of federal debt on your children and grandchildren,"[16] derided Bush as too sure of his religious convictions and for his "rich-kid-ness".[17] He has noted that small-government conservatism is unlikely to ever take hold in the United States (although he is personally sympathetic to it), called for immediate U.S. withdrawal fromIraq (but favoured the invasion), opposed market reforms or any other changes inSocial Security, supported legal access to abortion, supportedeuthanasia in a fairly wide range of circumstances, and suggested that he might (in a time of international crisis) vote forHillary Clinton as president.[18] Derbyshire wrote about American schooling in his bookWe Are Doomed, "Education is a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist log-rolling." He further argued that people "had better brace ourselves for the catastrophe" coming as a result.[19]
Derbyshire once argued that America would be better off if women did not have the right to vote.[20]
Derbyshire was one of the inaugural speakers at theH.L. Mencken Club, a far-right club formed byPaul Gottfried andRichard B. Spencer, and has spoken at the group several additional times. The H.L. Mencken Club has been described by theSouthern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist organization.[21][22]
Derbyshire differed from other writers atNational Review magazine on many subjects. For example, Derbyshire supportedMichael Schiavo's position in theTerri Schiavo case. Derbyshire's views on the Schiavo case attracted criticism from colleagues such asRamesh Ponnuru.[23] The Derbyshire–Ponnuru dispute arose again over Ponnuru's 2006 bookThe Party of Death. Derbyshire reviewed the book harshly in theNew English Review,[24] and Ponnuru replied onNational Review Online.[25]
Though Derbyshire broadly agreed with other writers atNational Review Online on immigration, he encountered strong opposition from formerNational Review Online bloggerJohn Podhoretz, who described Derbyshire's comments on restricting immigration to maintain "ethnic balance" in severe terms: "But maintaining 'ethnic balance' is not fine. It is chillingly, horrifyingly not fine."[26]
Derbyshire has been married to Lynette Rose Derbyshire, a Chinese immigrant, since 1986.[27] The couple were married in the city of Jilin, in Jilin Province, northeast China, and have a daughter and a son. He has lived inLong Island, New York since 1992.[28] In early 2012, he underwent treatment forchronic lymphocytic leukaemia.[29]
He has also written numerous articles for various publications, includingNational Review,The New Criterion,The American Conservative andThe Washington Times.
Derbyshire recorded a weeklypodcast called "Radio Derb," from 2004 to 2025, in which he comments on current events. The podcast was hosted on theNational Review website before being moved toTaki's Magazine. It was later hosted onVDARE and then the ZBlog. The podcast was the longest runningPaleoconservative podcast at the time of its completion with 1000 episodes (over 600 hours of content).[citation needed]
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.
Right wing voices that claim to have been purged from the conservative movement, like Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire, have formed part of the alt-right.
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