Nineteen Eighty-Four style Two-Minute Hates against alleged anti-Semites have become a regular feature of American political discourse. The most recent victim (of all people): Democrat Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Days earlier, Chronicles columnist and acerbic DeSantis influencer Pedro Gonzalez may have survived the publication of private Judeocritical text messages [Rising Conservative Influencer Pedro Gonzalez Regularly Espoused Racist and Anti-Semitic Sentiments in Private Messages, by Matthew Boyle, Breitbart, June 27, 2023] only because too many conservative contemporaries could also be outed—as urged by Ben Domenech in the Spectator [Release the full Pedro files!, June 29, 2023].
I am blown away by the amount of support I’ve received from every corner amid this smear campaign by Trump’s camp. I cannot express in words how much it means that so many are standing with me—even those who have vehemently disagreed with me in the past.
— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) June 28, 2023
The only reason my…
But contrast his escape to Nick Fuentes after he endorsed the Ye West campaign: already banned from YouTube, exiled by Twitter just hours after he was reinstated under Elon Musk [Nick Fuentes Twitter account suspended less than 24 hours after reinstatement, by Julia Shapero, The Hill, January 25, 2023], debanked, relegated to Rumble and his own self-developed platform, Cozy TV. All of which has caused me to reflect, from personal experience, on the ordeal of Patrick Joseph Buchanan, increasingly obviously the great Lost Leader of American politics.
Lest we forget: Buchanan’s vindication was celebrated by a 2017 article in Politico [‘The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t,’ by Tim Alberta, May June 2017], which, n.b., was more than a year after Donald J. Trump’s astonishing Presidential Election victory.
Buchanan announced his retirement in January 2023. The communist Mainstream Media mostly ignored it, but New York magazine couldn’t resist a parting shot:
[N]ow that Buchanan has put down his pen as a writer after just over 60 years of scribbling, it’s a good time to recognize his evil influence and unholy prescience. …
The scarier Buchanan legacies don’t involve old-school American protectionism or isolationism but an attraction to very un-American authoritarian traditions. He was an inveterate fan of the lethal dictators Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet. While not in any respect a defender of Nazism, Buchanan spent a lot of time defending individual Nazis accused of crimes against humanity. His ideological heirs have made connections with culturally reactionary regimes in Poland and Hungary. He likely has admirers in Russia as well.
[Pat Buchanan, a Vindicated Extremist, Packs It In, by Ed Kilgore, New York, January 25, 2023]
And The Nation’s “Time of Monsters” podcast declared that Buchanan cast a “long shadow.” (Good!)[Pat Buchanan’s Long Shadow, by Jeet Heer, February 22, 2023]
In denouncing Gonzalez and Fuentes, Leftists toss around “anti-Semite” and “Holocaust denier” in exactly the same way they tossed those smears at Buchanan, starting in 1991, when he quite reasonably stated that Capitol Hill is “Israeli-occupied territory” [McLaughlin Group, June 15, 1990]. Weeks later, he uttered this undeniable truth:
There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its Amen Corner in the United States.
[The McLaughlin Group, August 26, 1990]
Everyone knew Buchanan was right, Amen Corner included, but there followed reputational arson. Accusing Buchanan of a “blood libel” and “venom about Jews,” the New York Times’s Abe Rosenthal lit the fire, complaining about a column in which Buchanan “denounced five people for supporting military action against Iraq—all Jews, including me.”
Continued Rosenthal:
I did not address the Buchanan situation before because it was so distasteful. I was sick at the thought of the Buchananian nastinesses I would have to recount: the demeaning of the Holocaust, the phony “evidence” to question a crime of the gas chambers, the smarmy defense of war criminals and the attacks on American prosecutors who dared chase them down, the crack that Congress was “Israeli-occupied“ territory, the code words about the “de-Christianization” of America, the spreading of tensions between Catholic and Jew while Catholics in the Vatican are trying to lessen them.
[Forgive Them Not, September 14, 1990]
Subsequently, neocon Joshua Muravchik offered 7,560 words for the American Enterprise Institute that, unsurprisingly, concluded the same thing—Buchanan was unclean [Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews, January 1, 1991].
William F. Buckley Got The Call, and on December 30, 1991, published In Search of Anti-Semitism in National Review, a bazillion-word, typically sesquipedalian screed that became a book and smeared Buchanan and his own long-time NR colleague Joe Sobran. Buchanan’s words, Buckley pronounced, “could not reasonably be interpreted as other than anti-Semitic in tone and in substance.”
All the right people were pleased, or “relieved,” as Neocon Mafia boss Norman Podhoretz put it [What Is Anti-Semitism? An Open Letter to William F. Buckley, Jr., Commentary, February 1992].
On McLaughlin, when Buchanan said he detected “a preplanned, orchestrated smear campaign against me,” of course he was right [The Heresies of Pat Buchanan, by Jacob Weisberg, New Republic, October 22, 1990].
My personal Conservatism Inc. recollections: a year or so later, I was at a rubber-chicken, white-tablecloth dinner and overheard two high-level neocons discussing their plan to “get him” and wreck his coming candidacy for president.
It didn’t work, but the Times’s Dishonest Abe unloaded with another angry column. Ovens and gas chambers were an election away:
Political bigots everywhere will correctly draw the lessons. And they had better be learned by all people who consider Mr. Buchanan just one more politician, all politicians who failed to condemn his cracks about Jews and “Zulus” and those journalists who ran from confrontation with their good old pal. They had better learn damned quick before they hear the bell tolling too close to their ears.
[Victory for Buchanan, by A. M. Rosenthal, New York Times, February 14, 1992]
The next month, the Washington Post’s top neocon Charles Krauthammer offered his take, which the Seattle Times published under this headline: “Pat Buchanan’s Fascist Underpinnings” [March 2, 1992].That meditation discussed “nativism, authoritarianism, ethnic and class resentment.” In rejecting free trade and what he correctly called “vulture capitalism,” Buchanan had, according to Krauthammer, descended into “Peronism.”
There’s more, but you get the idea.
Four years later, the hysterics intensified when Buchanan actually won the New Hampshire primary. GOP leaders “said they could not support Buchanan and ridiculed his positions as anathema to the party’s mainstream,” the Tampa Bay Times reported:
Breaking his silence about the presidential contest since he announced in November that he would not run himself, [Colin] Powell said Wednesday: “Pat sometimes gives out messages that are of intolerance, which I think is very unfortunate. This is not the time for intolerance. This is the time for inclusion.” …
“I believe we have to make sure that Bob Dole’s message of inclusion prevails,” said Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who is supporting Dole. “It’s absolutely essential for the future of the Republican Party.”
Mayor Rudolph Guiliani of New York City, who has stayed neutral in the race, put it bluntly: “We’re going to do everything we can to stop Buchanan.”
[GOP in a tizzy over Buchanan victory, February 22, 1996]
(Curiously, Giuliani’s scruples didn’t last. He toiled mightily for POTUS 45 Donald Trump, who won with Buchanan’s issues. Giuliani apparently didn’t mind Trump’s copyright infringement).
Buchanan was too pessimistic, Dole’s running mate, Jack Kemp, said for a WaPo analysis, while Los Angeles Times writer Robert Shogan said Stupid Party Strategerists fretted about Buchanan’s “belligerent personality and ideas,” and were “outraged and threatened by Buchanan’s nationalist and populist themes—such as his calls for retaliatory tariffs and his denunciations of corporate America.”
The LAT’s far-Left Robert Scheer even invoked You Know Who, while conceding that Buchanan was right on blue-collar issues. “Although he once called Hitler ‘an individual of great courage [and] extraordinary gifts,’ some of his media colleagues insist that Pat is a fun guy in a beer hall,” Scheer wrote. “But that doesn’t make him benign in an election year when a wounded public searches desperately for culprits and Buchanan is out there rounding up the lynch mob” [Democrats Set the State for Buchanan’s Bile, February 20, 1996].
The next month, Rep. Peter Deutsch of Florida entered an indictment from the Jerusalem Post into the Congressional Record. Among other things, cited Buchanan’s skepticism about details of the Holocaust, which naturally invited the label “denier,” and his spirited defense of post–World War II European immigrants accused of being “Nazi war criminals” [Hatred Marks Paper Trail, March 7, 1996]. Most famously, he had argued that the KGB-framed John Demjanjuk, an auto worker from Cleveland, a case Buchanan pressed heroically for 20 years [The Persecution of John Demjanjuk, March 13, 2011].
Eight years after Buchanan’s final run in 2000, his carefully argued polemic against the two World Wars, Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War, invited charges that he was a “Nazi sympathizer,” and not just from the usual quarters. One came from Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft. “If he wants to sympathize with the Nazis—fine,” Hoft wrote. “But, conservatives need to stay away from him [Warning: Nazi Sympathizer Pat Buchanan Is Getting Scary, June 16, 2008].
Hoft declared himself “gay” eight years later after a Muslim berserker murdered 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida [Conservative Blogger Jim Hoft Comes Out As Gay After Orlando Terror Attack, by Brian Flood, The Wrap, June 13, 2016].
Weeks later, on orders from the National Jewish Democratic Council, MSNBC pulled Buchanan’s column Did Hitler Want War? from its website [MSNBC Removes Buchanan column from site, by Michael Calderone, Politico, September 3, 2009].
After Buchanan wrote Suicide Of A Superpower and appeared on James Edwards’ Political Cesspool, MSNBC suspended and then cashiered him. “The ideas he put forth [aka immigration patriotism] aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC,” said network chieftain Phil Griffin [Pat Buchanan axed by MSNBC, by Tim Mak, Politico, February 17, 2012].
Those ideas were in two chapters, “The End of White America,” and “The Death of Christian America.”
The Anti-Defamation League and the anti-white Color of Change went to DefCon 1.
“Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite,” said the ADL’s Abe Foxman, whom the Nazis might have murdered in 1941 if a Polish Catholic family hadn’t taken him in. MSNBC shouldn’t employ Buchanan, Foxman said, because he “continues to show his true colors by espousing hateful, bigoted statements in his new book” [ADL Denounces Pat Buchanan’s Bigoted Views In Recent Book; Urges MSNBC To Reconsider His Role With The Network, ADL.org, November 2, 2011].
Color of Change attacked with the usual farrago of “racist” quotes. Here are two that are, again, undeniably true:
Enclosing Buchanan’s polemics in scare quotes, though, wasn’t the only way to attack him. The point isn’t to refute; it’s to smear, stigmatize, and excommunicate:
Afterward, Buchanan the Heretic nailed the truth to the door of the Commissars’ Cathedral:
The modus operandi of these thought police … 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…
[T]hey 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.
[The New Blacklist—Pat Buchanan On His MNSBC Firing, February 17, 2012]
Bottom line: Pat Buchanan was right on all the issues. That’s why he was attacked—and why his ideas will ultimately prevail.
Pádraic O’Bannon, [Email him] a writer and drinker like many of Celtic blood, thinks deep thoughts about politics, culture and religion.
