Pat Buchanan Admits: I've Been Dumped by MSNBC, A 'Victory for the Blacklisters'

In his Creators Syndicate column on Thursday, Pat Buchanan admitted what he had been denying for months: "My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end. After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous."

The column was titled "The New Blacklist" and he declared "my departure represents an undeniable victory for the blacklisters....prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent."

While some blogs tried to claim Buchanan "quit," AP's David Bauder reported: "MSNBC dropped conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on Thursday, four months after suspending him following the publication of his latest book."

The network said on Thursday that "after 10 years, we have decided to part ways with Pat Buchanan. We wish him well."  Buchanan cried foul:

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"

A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it "exists to strengthen Black America's political voice," claimed that my book espouses a "white supremacist ideology." Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, "The End of White America."

Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!

A Human Rights Campaign that bills itself as America's leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people said that Buchanan's "extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world."

Their rage was triggered by a remark to NPR's Diane Rehm — that I believe homosexual acts to be "unnatural and immoral."

On Nov. 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on.

"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"?

I haven't read the passages about Jewish population decline, but some conservative Jews like Elliott Abrams have lamented how inter-marriage has led to a serious decline in Jewish identity.

Buchanan's fears about the "end of white America" might seem awfully overblown, but there is no doubt that Buchanan crossed enough liberal lines of "decency" that MSNBC felt they had to dump him. Recall that when MSNBC started putting radicals like Rachel Maddow on the air nightly, they tried to use Buchanan as a friendly sparring partner to make Maddow more "mainstream." Now they just don't care at all how radical they look. Buchanan continued:

In the 10 years I have been at MSNBC, the network has taken heat for what I have written, and faithfully honored our contract.

Yet my four-months' absence from MSNBC and now my departure represents an undeniable victory for the blacklisters.

The modus operandi of these thought police at Color of Change and ADL is to brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate.

All the while prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.

Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more.

Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.

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.

Speculation is rampant that Buchanan will end up contributing at the Fox News Channel.