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[This is adapted from an address by John Derbyshire to the First VDARE.com Webinar on January 19 2013. We hope to make recordings available shortly. For information when available, email office@vdare.com with “Webinar recording” in subject line]

1. Introduction: Name, Rank, Serial Number

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is John Derbyshire. I am a freelance writer.

When I tell people that, quite a common response is: Yes, but what do you do for a living? Incredible to report, this is my living, and has been for the past twelve years. I have published four books and a CD, and self-published a fifth book. I have written a vast amount of fugitive journalism of the lower sort—opinionating, book reviews, travel diaries—all of which can be found on my website, johnderbyshire.com.

I was briefly the subject of widespread attention—widespread, I mean, by the standards of the world of opinion journalism, which is not very widespread—last Spring, at the time of the Trayvon Martin business.

Black journalists were writing solemn two-hanky pieces about how they have to give their kids “The Talk,” to make them aware how dangerous white people are to them. In fact, of course, blacks are far more dangerous to whites than whites are to blacks, by a factor of about five to one on the Department of Justice’s published statistics.

I wrote up for Taki’s Magazine the kind of “Talk” a nonblack parent might give to his child, to apprise him of the facts about race in America. The leftists raised a hue and cry, and one of my main outlets, National Review, jumped on the bandwagon and banished me from their pages and screens.

My other conservative outlets showed stiffer spines, and you can read my stuff regularly at Taki’s Magazine, VDARE.com, and The New Criterion. You can also hear my weekly podcast, Radio Derb, now hosted by Taki’s Magazine. My thanks to the various proprietors for not having joined in the Leftist lynch mob.

2. The National Question: What is the Answer?

VDARE.com is a website dedicated to news, research, and opinions relating to the National Question.

What is the National Question? Well, if you want it phrased as an actual question, I can’t improve on the title that the late Professor Samuel Huntington gave to his final book, published in 2004: Who Are We?That is the National Question.

If that’s the question, what’s the answer? Again it’s hard to improve on Huntington. Here is what he said:

The [American philosophical-Constitutional] Creed is unlikely to retain its salience if Americans abandon the Anglo-Protestant culture in which it has been rooted. A multicultural America will, in time, become a multi-creedal America, with groups with different cultures espousing distinctive political values and principles rooted in their particular cultures.

The National Question thus embraces issues of immigration, population, race, culture, language, religion, and national identity. Those are the topics you will most frequently encounter on VDARE.com.

That’s not to say you won’t encounter other topics. We VDARE.com contributors are a lively lot, with active and enquiring minds. You might find yourself looking at a movie review, a table of sport statistics, or a blog post on education, crime, opera, or Chinese onomastics.

We stay mostly on-topic, though, and the topic is the National Question, with a particular emphasis on patriotic immigration reform.

That makes us seriously unpopular with some important and powerful people and institutions. Why? Let me try to explain.

3. The Dissident Personality: On Being a Good Citizen

Please permit me to quote myself. This is from Chapter Seven of my book We Are Doomed  (a title which, I should say, was not intended as an answer to Prof. Huntington). The chapter topic is human nature.

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

For those of us who write about the National Question, it’s the social aspect of human nature that keeps pushing itself to the front of our minds.

The reason is that we are citizens living in society, like the rest of you. We are mostly of a law-abiding, bourgeois temperament. As my colleague James Fulford likes to say: We brush our teeth. We do not relish the sound of breaking glass. Like Sir Thomas More in the play, we think none harm, we speak none harm, we do none harm.

Why, then, are we unpopular? Why are we actually regarded as dangerous by multitudes of our fellow citizens?

The reason is, that if you conduct careful empirical inquiry into National Question issues, you often come up with results that throw doubt on the idols of the tribe—on what Kipling called “the Gods of the market-place.”

That, to right-thinking citizens, is a very shocking thing to do. Recall that Socrates was tried and sentenced to death for “failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges.” If you fail to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges, you are not a good citizen.

There is no need for the gods, the idols of the tribe, to be actual deities. They can be abstract principles welded together into an ideology. The dissidents who plagued the rulers of the old U.S.S.R., and who still plague the rulers of Communist China today—people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Wei Jingsheng and Liu Xiaobo—have been brought to trial in officially atheist states for the same reason Socrates was brought to trial in Athens: They failed to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges.

I was surprised to find, when living in Communist China, that citizens—including sensible and well-educated citizens, including people who grumbled about the system they lived under—did not like these dissidents. In their minds, private grumbling did not make you a bad citizen; but making a fuss with your complaints in public did. It was seen as a selfish indulgence. “He should think of his family,” people would say; or, “He’ll weaken the country behaving like that.”

It would be impertinent for me, living a comfortable life and so far in no danger of being shipped to a labor camp—let alone of having to drink hemlock—to claim identity with the great dissidents of history. I will unblushingly claim some similarities of personality, though.

In our lesser way, we are dissidents, and VDARE.com is a dissident website. We do not acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges, the idols of the tribe. As Socrates described the accusations against him in the Apology: We speculate about the earth above, and

Ron Unz’s The Myth of American Meritocracy: How corrupt are Ivy League admissions? [American Conservative, November 28, 2012] was one of the most devastating magazine articles I have ever read. It revealed the Ivy League admission process’s bias against White Anglo Saxon Protestants—a.k.a. WASPs, America’s founding stock—and in favor of Jewish applicants. (The Ivy League is also anti-Asian—the only aspect of Unz article that got any Main Stream Media attention).

This adds perspective to the Trend to WASP Dispossession, which did get a little MSM recognition when WASPS vanished from the Supreme Court with John Paul Stevens’ replacement by Elena  Kagan.

Thus, last summer, the Christian Science Monitor carried a portentous article on America’s founding stock (of which Christian Scientists are of course an offshoot): US Government and Politics No Longer Run by WASPs, Do It Matter? By Brad Knickerbocker,  August 19, 2012. It declared White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism moribund and bereft of social and political weight.

If true, this constitutes a sociological seismic shift—and it bodes ill for America’s future. Will WASP a.k.a. American values continue without WASPs?

What is happening here? I can offer a unique perspective: I was born, the child of WASP and French Canadian-descended parents—a common New England mix—in Newport, Rhode Island, the playground of America’s Gilded Age capitalists. As an energetic ten year old, I rode my Schwinn down streets crowded with reproduction Italianate and XVIIIe Siècle chateaus.

Raised an Episcopalian, I received First Communion and Confirmation at Trinity Church, which was the “society” parish and flaunted gaudy stained glass windows dedicated to various Vanderbilt family members.

I became quickly familiar with the characteristic sartorial choices considered eccentric by most Americans: pink trousers, madras jackets etc. (I was sensible enough not to wear them myself). Many of my childhood playmates boasted names readily found in the Social Register—and access to trust funds when they reached twenty-one.

Yet I personally was not of them. I came from a solidly middle-class family and lived in a respectable neighborhood, but one removed from Bellevue Avenue’s grandeur. To put it simply, I lived in Newport but was not of it. This allowed me to observe American Old Money society for years, and to reflect on its attributes and limitations, as an intimate outsider.

Alas, I can agree with much of Knickerbocker’s assessment of American WASPdom. One notices immediately the utter lack of energy on the part of so many within this subculture. After spending an evening with them, one comes away thinking, “These are the descendants of the men who built America into a world power?!”

They seemingly spend much of their waking lives in a state of languid ennui. Armed with a gin and tonic and the Wall Street Journal, many doze away their afternoons at exclusive clubs such as the Newport Reading Room and the Spouting Rock Beach Association.

This is also a distinctly geriatric crowd. But their progeny

Longtime fans of Paul Gottfried, the distinguished political theorist who recently retired as Professor of Humanities at Pennsylvania’s Elizabethtown College, know that much of his best work is found in the periodical press (including VDARE.com). So it may surprise that Arktos’s new collection of his occasional essays and reviews, War and Democracy: Selected Essays 1975-2012, is the first ever published.

Included are appreciations of significant figures important in Gottfried’s own thinking: Oswald Spengler, Herbert Marcuse, George F. Kennan, Theodor Adorno, Joe Sobran, and Gottfried’s own father, born in the Hapsburg Empire in 1911. There are reflections on ethnic masochism, especially in its postwar German form, as well as the semantic dérapage undergone by terms such as fascism, liberalism, conservatism and democracy.

Of course, there is no lack of abrasive commentary on the fanatical Wilsonian will-to-power, disguised as morality, which now rages under the name of neoconservatism.

A small but telling example of Gottfried’s acumen: his explanation of why mainstream conservatives such as Jonah Goldberg call everyone and everything they don’t like “fascist:”

1)      It allows self-styled conservatives to have some fun by applying to the other side a pejorative term that the Left has had a monopoly on.

2)      Historically, critics such as John T. Flynn had interpreted Roosevelt’s New Deal as the American equivalent of the Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism (an analysis Dr. Gottfried considers flawed).

3)      The “fascist” label is a thinly disguised reductio ad Hitlerum.

4)      Most importantly (in Dr. Gottfried’s view) because the neoconservatives who have taken over Conservatism, Inc., are in fact unreconstructed leftists to whom the identification of everything evil with “fascism” comes naturally.

Needless to say, the average Conservatism Inc. columnist would be satisfied with any one of these explanations. Gottfried’s care in distinguishing four is just one small example of why your time is better spent reading him than them.

Thanks to the neoconservatives, Gottfried argues, millions of Americans now believe that the very essence of conservatism lies in “defending wars that our government involves us in.” Such wars, we are assured, are our only guarantee of peace. For America is a democracy, and, as Gottfried summarizes,  only democracies, according to every neoconservative scribbler on the planet, can be peaceful; indeed, non-democratic governments are compulsively mischievous and will, unless brought to see the light, unleash war on the bearers of democratic virtue.

Democracies are thus morally obligated to wage what neocon theorist Max Boot calls “wars of peace” until

I am a VDARE.com reader who resides in one of the major swing counties in the United States—Loudoun County, Virginia. Loudoun is the most affluent and one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. About a 45 minute drive to Washington D.C. (which takes about 2 hours or more during rush hour), Loudoun was mostly farmland 25-30 years ago. Today it is a slice of stereotypical suburbia.

New, sprawling housing developments and strip malls have long crowded out the old farms and family businesses that used to mark the area. Where I live you can go from strip malls to century-old farm houses (some still inhabited) on dirt roads in a matter of two minutes. But it is clear that the old farm houses will not last much longer.

During the recent election, I—along with my neighbors—was was bombarded with campaign literature and robo-calls. Every single Romney piece focused solely on economic issues. My wife was particularly targeted with invitations to attend “Women for Romney” events with Ann Romney. Loudoun was clearly a major target for the Republicans.

They didn’t hit that target.

Obama received 81,900 votes (51.52 percent) in Loudoun County to Mitt Romney’s 74,793 votes (47.05 percent). This was unquestionably a stunning defeat in an affluent, mostly white county that had just elected an all-Republican Board of Supervisors.

Republican strategists don’t likely read VDARE.com. But I can give them an insider’s view as to why they are not winning in Loudoun.

Rapid demographic change is certainly part of the reason for Loudoun turning blue. The county voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964. But in 2008 it went Democrat for the first time since Lyndon Johnson.

As of 2011, the demographics of Loudoun are as follows:

• White                 61.6%
• Asian                 14.7%
• Hispanic            12.6%
• Black                   8.0%  

There are no stats for the racial breakdown of the Loudoun 2012 vote, but here is how the presidential vote in Virginia broke down by race:

• Whites           61% for Romney
• Asians           66% for Obama
• Hispanics      64% for Obama
• Blacks           93% for Obama

The GOP did marginally better among Asians and Hispanics in Virginia than they did nationally (25 % and 27% respectively). But the fact remains that only whites will vote for Republicans in great numbers.

And the GOP white share in Virginia was only slightly above the national average (59%). VDARE.com has argued that the GOP (or GAP) must nationalize Southern voting patterns i.e. the GOP gets 73% of the white vote in Texas—and 88% in Mississippi. But in this putatively Southern state, the reverse seems to be happening.

Most of the Loudoun Hispanics are recent arrivals. They are settling in the town of Sterling, which

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) outlined his yet-to-be introduced immigration bill in a Wall Street Journal interview on Monday [Marco Rubio: Riding to the Immigration Rescue, By Matthew Kaminski, January 14, 2013]

Predictably, coming from the WSJ Edit Page, the interview missed no cliché—unpicked fruit, E-Verify beingunreliable, “nativists” hurting the G.O.P., Hispanics being “natural conservatives,” blah blah…But for the purpose of simplicity, I will simply focus on Rubio’s proposed policies.

Before going through the details, I must point out that the actual legislation that Rubio introduces will no doubt be much worse than what he said in the interview. This is the pattern with all “comprehensive immigration reform” bills: the increased enforcement measures always have loopholes, while the amnesty and increases to legal immigration are wider than advertised.

Rubio more or less conceded this by suggesting a “comprehensive package of bills,” rather than an omnibus bill, to prevent those loopholes. But even the smaller amnesties like the DREAM Act have the same problems.

That being said, what Rubio is advertising as his immigration plan is already God-awful.

The “comprehensive” in comprehensive immigration reforms generally means that the bill (or for Rubio, bills) will

1) grant amnesty

2) increase legal immigration, and

3) at least pretend to increase border security and enforcement.

So with no more ado, let me Comprehensively address how Rubio’s plandeals with each aspect.

1. Amnesty:

According to Rubio’s scheme, some form of legal status would be available to virtually all of the illegal aliens. Illegals who committed a “serious crime” would not get amnesty. All others would have to pay a fine, pay back taxes, maybe even do community service. They

would have to prove they've been here for an extended