It’s a sad story. MSNBC, having employed paleoconservative commentator Patrick Buchanan for 10 years—barely a decade!—fired him after suspending him a few months ago following the publication of a book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, that is allegedly racist and homophobic. A look at Buchanan’s explanation today reveals that he is not a retrograde idiot but rather a martyr for truth.
“Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on,” Buchanan recalls.
“Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite,” said Foxman. Buchanan “bemoans the destruction of white Christian America” and says America’s shrinking Jewish population is due to the “collective decision of Jews themselves.”
Well, yes, I do bemoan what Newsweek’s 2009 cover called “The Decline and Fall of Christian America” and editor Jon Meacham described as “The End of Christian America.” After all, I am a Christian.
And what else explains the shrinkage of the U.S. Jewish population by 6 percent in the 1990s and its projected decline by another 50 percent by 2050, if not the “collective decision of Jews themselves”?
Of his persecutors, Buchanan warns, “I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats, and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.” Truly, it’s enough to make one terrified of ever venturing near a closed door, holding a meeting off-the-record, or answering a phone call ever again.
And Buchanan has an ace in the hole, one that truly proves that he has been wronged. “If my book is racist and anti-Semitic,” he asks, rhetorically, “how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs, and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism? How did Michael Medved miss its anti-Semitism?”
Yeah, how did they?
Blacklisted, But Not Beaten [The American Conservative]
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.