Johnny "Rebel" Derbyshire

One topic that seems to come up a lot here on CBI is open, unrepentant racism. Perhaps this is a matter of my own awareness and perception, but it seems to be in a general way that racists are beginning to feel more and more comfortable with airing their disgraceful personal views in public. I feel like (and again, this is obviously a subjective statement), back when I was coming up, in the 80's and 90's, there was a greater social stigma against publicly declaring your distaste for those of different nationalities, skin colors or religions.

Today, it seems almost like Americans view intolerance as a point of pride. They organize themselves around who they hate.

Please choose the group that you most revile. Remember, choose only one answer!

• Poor black people
• Gay guys who want to get married
• Pregnant women
• Scientists
• Arabs
• Hollywood executives
• The ACLU

Earlier this week, I reported on blogger Dafydd and his revolting assertion that white Republicans are justified in hating uppity, angry blacks. Yikes.

Then there's the sudden fame last year for White Power kiddie pop duo Prussian Blue. And anyone else remember this story from 2005, when a Fox affiliate in South Carolina ran a favorable story on the skinhead homepage, Stormfront, one of the Web's premier sources for incomprehensible, vitriolic hate speech.

But this one...I mean...I'm just aghast. This is shocking, belligerant, open racism. John Derbyshire's post is ugly and foolish even by the standards of the National Review Online. I mean, it's hard to stand out on that website as particularly wrong-headed. The Muppet Babies had more thought-provoking, nuanced discussions than the gang at NRO.

In between our last two posts I went to Drudge to see what was happening in the world. The lead story was about a ship disaster in the Red Sea. From the headline picture, it looked like a cruise ship. I therefore assumed that some people very much like the Americans I went cruising with last year were the victims. I went to the news story. A couple of sentences in, I learned that the ship was in fact a ferry, the victims all Egyptians. I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don't care about Egyptians.

Can you imagine. A website devoting some front-page real estate to the death of hundreds of worthless browns? I mean, surely, somewhere, a white girl has gone missing. Why wasn't she on the front page of Drudge, and every other news source on the Internets? It would take the death of at least 2,500 browns to equal the importance of one missing white girl, if my calculations are correct.

It's a scary time when editorialists for a well-known national magazine feels free to openly declare his disdain for whole nations of people. Not that he shouldn't be allowed to say whatever he wants about Egyptians or anyone else, of course. But that he doesn't fear a massive public outcry or for his future with the organization. In 2006 America, extreme xenophobia and racial intolerance is just another valid perspective, one that deserves equal and unchallenged time in print and on television. I'm disgusted.