Seems appropriate, seeing as how I mentioned him here last night and all.

Before settling in at his current home at VDare, Derbyshire spent years as the black sheep on Conservatism Inc, writing for National Review and Weekly Standard. Derb was to Conservatism Inc. was Larry Bird was to basketball or Eminem was to rap, a sort of reactionary Great White Hope in a sea of unevolved neocon cucks. Derb also wrote for the “kinda-sorta Alt Right” website TakiMag and hosts the longest running Dissident Right podcast on the internet: Radio Derb.

Derb was my and many others’ first exposure to truly reactionary ideas. Well, there was Pat Buchanan, I guess. Pat was a sort of a proto-Alt Right figure himself, but Buchanan was steeped in sentimentality and Christian traditionalism. Derb believed everything Pat Buchanan believed but was a lot more scientific and racist about it and without all the Jesus stuff.

But it was in 2009 with the release of his landmark bestseller We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism that Derbyshire laid out the scale of our problems: demographic decline of whites and our replacement by low-IQ Third Worlders, totalitarian egalitarianism running rampant in all our institutions, monumental wastes of resources in futile quests to close racial achievement gaps, and all the while, a cheery tone of Reaganist optimism coming from a Right who should be scared to death.

With the Left triumphing on all fronts, the Right with its head in the sand, and the whole damn system rigged against us, Derbyshire concluded that America, conservatism, and the West in general were basically doomed. Doomed to become a Brazil-style multicultural Third World hellhole, and there wasn’t a lot we could do about it.

But now we are ten years in the future and much has happened since. How does We Are Doomed hold up today?

All too well, I’m afraid. The man was—is—a true visionary.

We’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of your earth-shattering best seller We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. Nearly a decade later, are you more or less convinced that we are in fact doomed?

Define “we.” As mortals we are of course all doomed; but that wasn’t what I was writing about. The first sentence in my book reads: “This book is addressed to American conservatives.”

Yes, small-government, restrained-foreign-policy, ordered-liberty American conservatism is not merely doomed, it’s dead and gone. We’re close to the point – maybe past it already, it’s hard to keep track – where the federal government can tell you which pronoun to use.

We’re in a shooting war in Niger, a place hardly any American could find on a map, or should need to. We have 26,000 troops stationed in Korea, and 13,000 in Italy for crying out loud. Gotta stop Mussolini!

Freedom of speech is being stamped out by the tech monopolies and universities, with the eager help of lefty judges. Freedom of association is a fading memory – killed by the Civil Rights acts. Small government? You looked at the federal budget lately?

Has anything happened in the last decade that you did not anticipate?

I got cancer.

Ouch. Nice to see he retains his sense of humor in the face of it, I suppose. Actually, John’s sense of humor—puckish, dry, intelligent, subtle—is on display several other places in this interview, which is entirely too damned short if you ask me. Most fascinating takeaway from the whole thing? The link to this:

John Derbyshire?!? MAN. I had no idea that clip existed until just now. Makes me wonder what the hell else this man might have gotten up to over the course of his, shall we say, eclectic career. Anyways, like I said, the interview is great, and I only wish it was longer. Who knows, maybe I’ll drop Derb a line care of VDare as he suggests at the end and see about doing one myself.

Update! Okay, so I found my curiosity piqued all to hell and gone over the Bruce Lee thing, poked around a bit, and found this in John’s website archive:

So I was sitting there reading when a young Chinese guy came in. Seeing that I was the only person in the lounge, he addressed me. “Do you speak English?” I said I did. “Know any martial arts?” I said I had taken a few lessons. “Want to be in a movie?” I asked him if it paid. “Sure. Seventy bucks a day.” (Hong Kong dollars, he meant — around US$12 at that time.) I said I was game.

“Good. Be outside the Miramar Hotel front entrance tomorrow morning, seven thirty.”

A minibus arrived and drove us out to the New Territories — that is, the countryside that stretches out back of urban Hong Kong forty miles or so to the Chinese border. (Beyond which Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was going through one of its nastier phases. Rafts of rotting corpses would occasionally float down the Pearl River past the colony.) Here there was a movie studio. We were led into a huge shed used for indoor sets, and spent the next two days filming fight scenes in that shed.

Bruce himself directed Meng Long Guo Jiang. He was on set all the time, setting up the fights, working out positions, talking to the lighting crews and the cameramen.

There was, by the way, no sound crew. Chinese movies at that time were shot without sound. The sound was dubbed in later. When you watch a Bruce Lee movie, you are not hearing Lee’s voice, though I think they might have inserted his qi-ai — the intimidating yells, grunts and howls he used when fighting — into the soundtrack of Meng Long Guo Jiang. The qi-ai sound like his, anyway.

In fact the first dubbing was always into Mandarin, and the on-screen lip syncing was to Mandarin words. Bruce, though fluent in English and Cantonese, could not speak Mandarin, so this was a constant vexation to him when filming, and probably the main reason he has very few speaking lines in his movies.

Bruce Lee’s presence was as striking in person as on screen. I have never seen a man who gave such an impression of concentrated energy. If he got animated when talking to you, he would make little springy skipping movements with his feet, as if warming up for a fight. When nothing much was happening, he would drop down and do one-arm finger-thumb push-ups at one side of the set, or have someone hold up a board he could practice high kicks on.

Just as a skilful schoolteacher knows how to get the class’s attention by speaking very softly, you were most aware of Bruce’s presence, and he was most intimidating, on the rare occasions his body was dead still. In the relaxed state, he was in constant motion. Crouching tiger, indeed.

Movie fight scenes are a devil of a thing to get right. We did everything a dozen times, levels of frustration and discomfort rising each time.

This was summer in the tropics, and if the place had any air conditioning, it wasn’t adequate. There were huge electric fans everywhere, but they had to be switched off for filming, or the actors’ hair would all be streaming out horizontally from their heads. Yet through the entire two days I was on the set, I never saw Bruce lose his temper, or display any negative emotion stronger than momentary mild annoyance. He was just as I had seen him on TV:  smiling, cracking jokes, smoothing out difficulties and differences, coaching, teasing, encouraging, cajoling.

I have a tall, lean physique, so he addressed me as “Slim.”

“Hey, Slim, let’s try that again — and this time look mean. You hate me, remember? I’m a runty obnoxious little Chink, just stole your woman, trashed your car and pissed in your beer. Whaddya gonna do to me? Huh? Whaddya gonna do? Come on …” (He spoke perfect idiomatic American English the whole time.)

The fight scenes were all improvised out of his head. I can say this authoritatively, as I got a chance to read one of the scripts. The entire section I was involved in — two days filming, though of course less than five minutes in the finished movie — was encompassed by four Chinese characters in the script:  Li da xi ren — “Lee strikes the Westerners.”

We had some visitors on the set those two days. Chuck Norris showed up, though goodness knows why, as his scenes, later in the movie, were filmed on location in Rome.

Bruce’s wife Linda also made an appearance at one point, with either one or both of the kids, I can’t remember. (Brandon, whom Bruce described as “the only blond-haired, blue-eyed Chinaman in California,” would have been five and a half at this point, Shannon just over two.)

If my very brief acquaintance with Bruce Lee is any fair grounds for judgment, he was a lively, witty, charming man who thoroughly enjoyed life, a gifted natural stage and screen performer, liked by everyone around him and dedicated to his art — his martial art, I mean. It was a tragedy he died so young.

There’s a whole lot more to this story—a WHOLE lot, the above excerpt is heavily abridged—and it’s all perfectly spellbinding. Honestly, you probably shouldn’t click the link if you don’t have some time on your hands, because I absolutely defy you not to read every word of it once you get started. A great story, well told by a gifted writer—hey, what’s not to like?