Some of the same leftist activists that campaigned to get Glenn Beck removed from the Fox News Channel are now demanding Pat Buchanan be removed from the MSNBC lineup. The Color of Change, formerly run by Obama-appointed Marxist Van Jones, is running a campaign headlined "Tell MSNBC: Fire Pat Buchanan." Not in that campaign: "and appoint a different conservative." They want the MSNBC airwaves purely liberal.
"For years, Pat Buchanan has passed off white supremacist ideology as legitimate mainstream political commentary. And MSNBC continues to pay him and give him a platform on national TV to do it," they argue. "Buchanan just went on a white supremacist radio show to promote his new book -- which argues that increasing racial diversity is a threat to this country and will mean the 'End of White America.'"
Buchanan clearly writes with a white racial consciousness, even a tribalism. This was also true of Buchanan when he first joined MSNBC. Some of the passages singled out by the lefties (on TPM Muckraker) do argue that whites are being submerged, even vanishing under diversity. I find this pessimism overwrought. But can blacks like Van Jones say with a straight face that they don’t have an angry racial consciousness, a tribalism? It’s only that they’re the oppressed ones? With a black president, when does this stop being true?
It's almost comical that they would claim with some sort of shock that Buchanan "takes every opportunity to stoke the racial anxiety and fear that exists among some white people. In short, Buchanan wants to pit white people against people of color." And what has Al Sharpton done, and the other black race-baiters, constantly pitting black people against allegedly racist Republicans? If stoking racial anxiety is disqualifying, why does Sharpton been awarded a nightly platform?
In passages singled out, Buchanan wrote:
The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear. Hispanics already comprise 42 percent of New Mexico's population, 37 percent of California's, 38 percent of Texas's, and over half the population of Arizona under the age of twenty. ... Mexico is moving north. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the verdict of 1848 is being overturned. Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution-to "insure domestic tranquility" and "make us a more perfect union"? Or has our passivity in the face of this invasion imperiled our union?
...Those who believe the rise to power of an Obama rainbow coalition of peoples of color means the whites who helped to engineer it will steer it are deluding themselves. The whites may discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.
Most Americans today don’t want to be that racially conscious, that white Americans panic over still “steering” the national wheel as a racial royal "We." Conservatives often especially want to prove they’re not racially obsessed. This (in some part) explains the current wave for Herman Cain – which is not to dismiss his successful life and leadership.
But some of Buchanan’s allegedly offensive prose is simply true. Take the passage about minority journalism organizations: “Half a century after Martin Luther King envisioned a day when his children would be judged ‘not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character,’ journalists of color are demanding the hiring and promotion of journalists based on the color of their skin.” Merit is not completely overlooked, but it can certainly seem secondary when groups are organized around skin color.
Buchanan then mars that thought by getting overwrought, by somehow finding this to be “Jim Crow is back.” Buchanan writes books like he’s a historian, but that’s a poor attempt at a historical analogy.
California's Courage Campaign is also urging Buchanan be silenced on MSNBC. "Sane, clear-thinking people everywhere are asking why does MSNBC continue to give political commentator Pat Buchanan a stage for him to spout his hatred," said Rick Jacobs, the group's chair and founder. "And ironically, MSNBC's motto is 'lean forward,' but if they don't do something about Buchanan soon, they might as well change their motto to 'look backwards.'
You have to love how liberals think of themselves the only "sane, clear-thinking people."
The Human Rights Campaign also wants Buchanan removed, for his statement in a recent interview on public radio that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral. "While Pat Buchanan is free to hold and express his views, the fact that MSNBC has given him a public platform to spew this sort of dangerous rhetoric is unacceptable, "said HRC President Joe Solmonese. "MSNBC should sanction Mr. Buchanan, as his extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LGBT people around the world."
Again, you have to laugh at the idea that Buchanan's the "extremist," while gay groups that want to teach sex education to six-year-olds and let seven-year-old "transgendered" boys join the Girl Scouts aren't extreme. They're the "sane, clear-thinking people."
