Image Credit: White House 
When I was in America at the beginning of last month, I was given an unwanted copy of the new Collected Essays of John Derbyshire, from Passage Press. I’ll admit, I’d never heard of the man, and as I flicked through the book, reading the occasional bit here and there from some essays already published on VDare dot com, I didn’t find much to hold my attention.
Derbyshire, I did learn, coined the term “dissident right” in the early 2010s. I’ve always hated that term, mainly because of its self-dramatising overtones, as if being on the semi-fringes of the right today somehow equates with the perilous existence of a critic of the Soviet or Maoist regimes. If you hadn’t noticed, many on the right have a persecution complex fed by embarrassing self-destructive behaviours and a crabs-in-a-bucket mindset: If I’m not getting out of here, you sure as Hell aren’t! Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to provide further nourishment or an official rubber-stamp for such delusion.
There are, of course, genuine dissidents on the right in the US—people like Douglass Mackey, for example, who was prosecuted under a Reconstruction-era voter suppression statute for the great crime of Tweeting Hillary Clinton memes during an election—and in the UK—look up Sam Melia—and elsewhere in the Western world.
Joel Davis isn’t a man I’ve ever cared for, but he absolutely is a dissident, hounded by a tyrannical regime (the Australian government) for holding views strictly verboten Down Under, where water spins round the plug the wrong way. Back in 2022, when I went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Joel suddenly appeared in my now defunct Telegram chat group to goad me saying he was disappointed I didn’t use my three minutes of fame to talk about a certain wandering desert tribe. I wasn’t quite sure what that had to do with declining testosterone levels, but whatever.
Maybe I just wasn’t smart enough to see?
However dumb and counterproductive I find his behaviour, there’s no question Joel Davis is being denied basic human rights while under lock and key, rights that are not being denied to the surviving Bondi Beach shooter, who killed 15 people, including a ten-year-old child, in Australia’s deadliest ever terror attack. This two-tier justice, like similar instances elsewhere, tells us precisely who the Australian government really fears, and what kind of behaviour it wants to dissuade.
Despite the existence of the Mackeys and Melias and the Joel Davises, the term “dissident right” does little to capture the reality of life as an average Twitter poster or Substack author on the right, the people who’ve embraced the label most enthusiastically. Given the choice, I’d retire the term for good. Just call yourselves “the right” or “the real right”—something like that.
Still making my way through the Derbyshire book, I did finally stop at an essay I read from start to finish. It was the title that got me: “Are white people pussies?”
What a question.
Frankly, it’s not a question I’ve ever asked myself—that possibility hasn’t even flickered across my mind once in the however many years I’ve been terminally online, nor in my prelapsarian state before that—but John Derbyshire clearly thought about it enough to sit down and write a whole essay in response.
I’ve already passed the book on, so I can’t consult it now to summarise or quote exactly what he said, but I remember the gist: a litany of sins, mostly of omission.
Why do white people allow themselves to be singled out and targeted so systematically on the basis of their skin colour?
Why don’t they fight back?
No other race would or does tolerate such treatment. Black people wouldn’t stand for this. Even worse, why do white people feel they deserve to be treated like this?
Is it because they’re pussies?
Of course it f*cking isn’t.
This is a truth so self-evident, I’m not even going to bother offering a detailed argument, just a few thoughts and observations.
If white people have a problem today, it’s that they’re the only race on earth to have extended full moral recognition to all the others, to have believed there is in fact just one race, the human race, and that we can all get along if we’re treated with dignity and respect, and accorded equal rights and opportunities. When this moral recognition was extended within European societies, things worked just fine, more or less, but the extension of these assumptions beyond those boundaries, to non-Europeans abroad and, increasingly, at home, has been an absolute disaster. Everyone else is still stubbornly—indeed, proudly—ethnocentric. They have no qualms about exploiting us for being kind to them in ways they would never, in a million years, reciprocate themselves, and we’re still trapped thinking things will be different the next time—or the next time. Or the next time.
Or the next time…
This isn’t the whole story, of course. Far from it. It’s also true that white people, more than any other race in history, are subject to both indirect—i.e. psychological—and direct repression aimed at preventing a sense of racial consciousness and self-interest from developing, as well as exercising these realizations in any meaningful way.
You might say the entire post-WWII order was erected precisely to prevent these things from happening.
Somebody on Twitter—I think it was Charls Carroll, of Million Dollar Extreme fame—said that when black people get mad, they fight other black people; but when white people get mad, they end up facing the 101st Airborne—as Southern whites did when de-segregation was forced on them, at the barrel of a gun. I think that’s a pretty good way of putting it.
Except it’s not just the military and police. It’s the schools and the universities, the corporations, the mainstream media, Hollywood and Netflix, celebrities, the churches, the UN—all telling white people they have nothing to be proud of as white people, that white history and culture is a uniquely reprehensible catalogue of moral failings and, in any case, white culture doesn’t even exist; that the future of humanity depends on their own self-effacement, which they should speed along by interracial marriage or simply by not reproducing at all. That last option is usually presented as best.
And yet, Europe, America and the West are still full of patriotic men and women of all ages, all struggling to regain control of their nations and their destinies, in the face of the most monstrous opposition.
A couple of days ago, I stood again at the tomb of Napoleon, in Paris, and watched a young Frenchman place a single white rose before the huge sarcophagus of purple quartz. Two hundred years ago, that young man might have followed the Emperor into battle at Marengo, Austerlitz or Borodino; perhaps he would have died in the freezing retreat from Moscow or in the last gasp of the Hundred Days, down in the mud at Waterloo. Europe is not sleeping.
John Derbyshire was, at least, expressing his doubts 15 years ago, when the essay was written, and not today, when you’re most likely to encounter such sentiments on Twitter from attention-seekers like Andrew Tate.
It was quite noticeable how Tate started ragging on white people again within hours of his humiliating recent loss in the boxing ring to “Chase da Moor,” a former reality TV star with zero world kickboxing titles and zero Bugattis to his name. It was as if Tate needed to distract from the devastating blow struck to his credibility as the “Top G”—so of course he decided to call white people bigger pussies than he, to milk the anger and outrage.
Research shows mixed-race children often face a profound crisis of identity, being neither/nor: neither white (like his mum) nor black (like his dad) in Tate’s case. Many tend, in consequence, to overidentify with one half rather than the other. Andrew Tate overidentifies with his father, a man who, like so many black fathers, abandoned his children and, on the rare occasions he was present, humiliated, belittled and abused them.
So when a mixed-race kid like Andrew Tate talks about white people being pussies, I can’t help but think he’s really speaking to himself, and to the half of his lineage he wants to deny, at all cost. The part represented by the mother who did stick around to nurture and protect him, and to whom he owes far more than his feckless “chess grandmaster” father. The part he can’t acknowledge, because he can’t respect it.
Notice how Barack Obama never talks about his white mother either. It’s exactly the same story.
Eventually, Derbyshire snaps out of his funk, attributing his crisis of racial self-confidence to “ethnomasochism.” He ends the essay saying he must “discipline his mind” or something like that. I couldn’t agree more.
We all have moments of self-doubt, but I think they’re usually best kept off the page. No, white people aren’t pussies. But did you ever consider you might be one?
