Social Commentary on Race by Pat Buchanan – Authorship Confirmed!
Summary of eRumor:
A social commentary penned by Pat Buchanan about race relations in America has appeared in many forwarded emails.
The Truth:
It’s true that excerpts from this forwarded email were taken from a column that was posted on Pat Buchanan’s personal website in 2008.
But there are a number of differences between the eRumor and Buchanan’s original column. The original column appeared under the headline, “A Brief for Whitey,” not under the headline,“The White Side of the Story of Negroes,” as the eRumor reports.
The eRumor also omitted the original column’s introduction in an apparent attempt to make it more applicable to current unrest over Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Gardner’s choking death in New York City. The original version opens:
“How would he pull it off? I wondered. How would Barack Obama explain to his press groupies why he sat silent in a pew for 20 years as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright delivered racist rants against white America for our maligning of Fidel and Gadhafi, and inveting AIDS to infect and kill black people? How would he justify not walking out as Wright spewed his venom about ‘the U.S. of KKK America,’ and howled, ‘God damn America!’”
Taken in its original context, the column was directed toward controversial sermons given by Wright that surfaced during the presidential election in 2008. Still, the majority of the eRumor was excerpted from Buchanan’s original column, often with slight variations.
But the eRumor’s claim that CNN had “dropped” Buchanan over the column is false. Buchanan worked as a political analyst for MSNBC from 2002-2012, which is when the column was published. Buchanan was fired over the release of his book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” Buchanan said in a 2012 column:
“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 calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
TruthorFiciton.com reached out to a Buchanan rep for comment on the social commentary. Future updates will be posted here.