John Derbyshire: Geezers Don’t Care! Marc Faber Defies AntiRacist Moral Panic

By John Derbyshire

10/22/2017

Adapted from the October 20 Radio Derb, available exclusively on VDARE.com

See previous incidents under the tag "White Guy Loses His Job"

See also Marc Faber on Zimbabwe: Quite Right Of Course. Here’s Why

Culture hero of the week was surely investment guru and gold bug Marc Faber, proprietor of the Gloom, Boom & Doom market newsletter.

I can’t afford a subscription to that periodical — it’s $300 a year — but of course, as a fellow pessimist, I follow Mr. Faber’s pronouncements with keen attention when I can get them for free.

In the latest issue of that newsletter, Mr. Faber committed the following thing:

Thank God white people populated America, and not the blacks. Otherwise, the US would look like Zimbabwe, which it might look like one day anyway, but at least America enjoyed 200 years in the economic and political sun under a white majority.

'Dr. Doom' Faber: 'Thank God white people populated America', by Jeff Cox,CNBC.com, October 17, 2017

Much shrieking and swooning ensued. CNBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg, all of whom had been using Faber as a talking head for years, said he would no longer be an invited guest on their business programs. As of Thursday at least five companies have dropped him from their boards, a loss of annual income to Faber of around half a million dollars.

Faber is unrepentant. In email exchanges with the Toronto Globe and Mail, he defended himself very robustly: "Why should I regret stating historic facts?" Asked about those corporate boards dropping him, he sniffed that

If saying what I said leads to these consequences I prefer not to be on these boards … I think the corporate world is now run by compliance people. In this context I understand their firing me.

Investor Marc Faber stands by racist remarks as corporate boards cut ties, by Niall McGee Globe and Mail, October 18, 2017

That kind of obstinacy in defiance of Western society’s most holy dogmas of course just baffled the guardians of orthodoxy. Doesn’t Faber know he’s supposed to weep, grovel, and flagellate himself?

Here is someone named Richard Leblanc, associate professor of law, governance and ethics at York University in Toronto. Asked by the Globe and Mail for a comment on Faber’s refusing to apologize and even doubling-down on his remarks, Professor Leblanc honked that "His reaction is odd. It actually makes it worse."

In best Soviet style, some Goodthinkers wondered whether Faber was suffering some kind of mental impairment, perhaps under the influence of narcotics. To that our hero replied: "Since I have only taken cocaine three times and marijuana about ten times in seventy years, I did not think these were appropriate comments."

It goes without saying that we at VDARE.com heartily approves of Marc Faber, of both his original comments and his refusal to back down from them. In hopes of encouraging more such acts of ideological defiance, let’s see if we can uncover some causes for Faber’s.

I can finger three possible causes without thinking very hard.

• Number one, he’s Swiss.

The Swiss don’t always get a good press (remember Orson Welles in The Third Man? "You know what the fellow said — in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”) But like mountain peoples everywhere, the Swiss have a streak of prickly orneriness that no amount of soft lowland living can erase. If I hadn’t known anything about the person in this story but had been asked to guess his provenance, I would have guessed Swiss, or Scottish, or Carpathian, or Afghan, or Appalachian.

Mountain people — gotta love 'em.

If you don’t, they'll cut your throat.

• Number two, Faber lives in Thailand.

• Number three, Faber is a geezer, 71 years old; just nine months younger than me.

There is also the simple fact that when you are old, you don’t much care what anybody thinks about your opinions. You know that your own little show is nearing the end of its run. Soon you will be out of it all, and soon thereafter, unless you were very extraordinary in some way, you and your opinions will be utterly forgotten. You fall into the dull solipsism expressed by the sage in Rasselas

"Praise … is to an old man an empty sound. I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake of the honors of her husband. I have outlived my friends and my rivals. Nothing is now of much importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself. Youth is delighted with applause, because it is considered as the earnest of some future good, and because the prospect of life is far extended: but to me, who am now declining to decrepitude, there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet less to be hoped from their affection and esteem. Something they may yet take away, but they can give me nothing."

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com:FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.