Once Again, Buchanan Cites Racist Sources
MSNBC cable television commentator and two-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has once again relied on white supremacist sources for inspiration and information. In his May 2 column “The Way Our World Ends,” Buchanan complains that people of European descent are being wiped out worldwide and even in their own backyards, where “[t]he Third World is coming to colonize the mother countries.” Buchanan bemoans the prediction that whites, who were some 28% of the global population in 1950, will be only 9% by 2060. “The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans,” Buchanan laments.
And what brought on Buchanan’s gloomy mood? Apparently, he was greatly bothered by a new report put out in early April by the National Policy Institute (NPI), a white nationalist research group. Entitled “Global White Population to Plummet to Single Digit – Black Population to Double,” NPI’s research supposedly spells doom for the white “race.” In so many words, the report argues that by 2060, blacks and Asians will have whites on the run. This “status reversal” will lead to countries like Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Russia being “pressured to accept collectively hundreds of millions of refugees from India, and sub-Sahara Africa,” according to the report.
That thought has Buchanan mightily worried. “Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them,” he frets.
That may be the closest thing to a criticism of the white “race” that Buchanan has ever uttered. Just last month, his writing had a more familiar whites-are-the-best tone, as reflected in his “A Brief for Whitey”: “It was [in America] that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. … No people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans.”
As usual, Buchanan was underestimating and minimizing the effect of slavery on Africans. In fact, scholars say that more than 1 million slaves survived the trip to the United States from Africa (about 10 times that number were sold in other countries) between the 15th and the 19th centuries. Buchanan also made no mention of the huge numbers — an estimated 1 million people — who died during the Middle Passage across the Atlantic because of abominable conditions in the slave ships.
It’s not surprising that Buchanan relies on suspect research put out by white nationalists. After all, he has done the same in prior columns and in his books, The Death of the West and State of Emergency, both of which could fairly be described as white nationalist tracts. What is surprising is that someone pushing racist views so far out of the mainstream can be regularly found on mainstream media organizations like MSNBC.
