Pat Buchanan Again Cites Racist Sources on Black Crime

MSNBC commentator and former Reagan aide Pat Buchanan is citing racist sources again — and mislabeling them as “right-leaning.”

In “The Color of Crime,” an Aug. 21 column posted on his blog and the white nationalist hate site vdare.com, Buchanan attacked The Washington Post for not telling the truth about black criminality in two different stories about race and crime (here and here). Buchanan was incensed that the Post did not say that blacks are more criminal than whites and didn’t mention “white victims” of black crime.

To make his point, Buchanan cited approvingly a report by the white supremacist New Century Foundation, “The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Justice in America”, which purportedly proves that blacks are vastly more criminal than others. Buchanan uses this racist “research” to attack blacks, writing, “The real repository of racism in America — manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder — is to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community.”

As an article in the Intelligence Report pointed out seven years ago, that argument is fundamentally flawed, ignoring decades of real research that shows that poverty is intimately related to crime rates. In fact, race, unlike income, has little, if any, predictive value. The New Century article also conflates interracial crime with interracial hate crime to claim blacks commit vastly more hate crimes than others.

In citing the New Century report, Buchanan utterly mischaracterizes the group, calling it “right-leaning.” That is absurd. The New Century Foundation holds biannual conferences that attract such white supremacists as former Klan boss David Duke and tackle topics like “The Biological Reality of Race.” The organization also publishes American Renaissance, a journal filled with racist articles about blacks and Latinos. A 2002 article, for instance, argued that blacks are inherently pathological, suffering from a “personality disorder of which the central feature is lack of a moral sense.” Among a host of other things, the article alleges that blacks can’t form long-term relationships, stay employed, achieve long-term goals, or restrain their emotions and violent behavior.

This isn’t the first time that Buchanan, a long-time television commentator and sometime candidate for the White House, has gone to the racist well for his “facts.” In the footnotes to his 2002 book The Death of the West, the former Nixon speechwriter cited approvingly the late William Pierce, author of the race-war novel The Turner Diaries (the blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing) and the founder of America’s then-leading neo-Nazi group. In his 2006 book State of Emergency, Buchanan cited a host of haters including white supremacist James Lubinskas; Edward Rubinstein of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute; Clyde Wilson, a board member of the racist and secessionist League of the South; and Wayne Lutton, a veteran immigrant- and gay-hater. (See SPLC book review here.)

What’s mystifying about all this isn’t that Buchanan pushes racist ideas. He’s been doing that for a long time now. It’s that he gets away with it while holding on to his high-profile job as a mainstream TV commentator.