Last week, MSNBC fired Pat Buchanan following a four-month suspension. The proximate cause of his dismissal was the publishing of his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? That tome, which included chapters like “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America,” crystallized the central themes of Buchanan’s four-decade oeuvre as a political commentator, namely, lamentation over the fact that America is becoming less white and less Christian.

“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC,” network president Phil Griffin said last October. And indeed, the ideas espoused by the former Richard Nixon speechwriter and two-time independent presidential candidate—which, at their most extreme, have drifted into nostalgia and outright support for fascism—have no place at an ostensibly mainstream television network, never mind one which recently adopted the slogan “Lean Forward.” In a blog post for The American Conservative, the paleo-conservative magazine he helped found in 2002, Buchanan blamed his firing on an array of American minority groups—racial, religious, and sexual—the very people he has long demonized in his writing.

The best that can be said about Buchanan is that he was consistent in his extremism; he never wavered in his belief that America’s racial stock was being diluted by non-whites, that gays were “immoral,” or that Jews were exercising a pernicious grip on American politics. Nor did he ever try to obfuscate these views. Which is why the real scandal here is not that Pat Buchanan wrote a book replete with racist, anti-Semitic drivel. What else would he write? The scandal is that a major cable news channel—indeed, the go-to source of news and information for progressives—ever hired him in the first place.

Buchanan claims that it was “an incessant clamor from the left” which led to his firing from MSNBC. While it’s true that the website which led the charge against Buchanan—colorofchange.com—is on the left, it is only recently that any appreciable effort was made by liberals to question Buchanan’s place at the network. That’s because the very same “left” which Buchanan decries today as unwilling to hear his voice was more than happy to lap up his commentary in one crucial realm: foreign policy.

While Buchanan was a hardened Cold Warrior willing to support any Third-world leader, no matter how repugnant, claiming anti-communist bona fides, he reverted to isolationism immediately after the twilight struggle came to an end. This predilection manifested itself immediately with the first international conflict to emerge after the break-up of the Soviet Union: the Gulf War. But Buchanan didn’t merely oppose the American-led effort to repel Saddam Hussein’s absorption of Kuwait; he implied that those who supported the war were doing so at the behest of a foreign power.

“There are only two groups that are beating the drums … for war in the Middle East,” Buchanan said at the time on the McLaughlin Group, “the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” Buchanan was playing on the trope—deployed by anti-Semites around the world from the Crusaders to Mel Gibson—that Jews are the cause of the world’s problems. Lest there be any doubt about to whom he was referring, days later he wrote a column naming four people from that “amen corner,” then-New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal; former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle; columnist Charles Krauthammer; and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. All, needless to say, Jews. And then, in case the point still wasn’t clear, he followed up with a column specifying just who would be doing the fighting and dying in the amen corner’s war: “Kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown.” Buchanan was unfazed by the outcry. “I don’t retract a single word,” he told Time. “The reaction was simply hysterical and is localized to New York.” Not Washington or Los Angeles or Peoria. New York.

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