Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips defended Pat Buchanan against charges of racism by African-American civil rights group Color of Change, arguing that “the racist in this story is the group, the Color of Change.”
Phillips, in a blog post on Tuesday, wrote that “despite my opinions of Pat Buchanan, he is clearly a man of accomplishment who does very intelligently express the sentiments of parts of the conservative movement. It is no shock that the left is going after him.”
“Let’s be blunt,” he added, “the racist in this story is the group, the Color of Change. They are a very anti-American, far left group.” These “left wing racist nuts,” Phillips said, are “a danger to America and to freedom.”
Phillips was responding to Color Of Change’s call for MSNBC to fire Buchanan, who is a contributor on the network, after he appeared on the radio program The Political Cesspool to promote his new book.
“This weekend Pat Buchanan showed us where he really belongs — on white supremacist radio, not on national television,” Rashad Robinson, Executive Director of ColorOfChange.org, said in a statement on Tuesday. “MSNBC’s motto is ‘lean forward,’ but Pat Buchanan’s bigoted ideology would be backwards for the 1930s. Thousands of ColorOfChange members – Black Americans and our allies of every race – are calling on MSNBC to fire him immediately.”
Color of Change also called The Political Cesspool “white nationalist,” and the show, which is hosted by “Racism, Schmacism” author James Edwards, certainly does not do much to dispute that label. It it pro-secession and “against homosexuality, vulgarity, loveless sex, and masochism.” In its “Statement Of Principles,” it describes itself as “pro-White” and says things like “America would not be as prosperous, ruggedly individualistic, and a land of opportunity if the founding stock were not Europeans” and “we wish to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility and beyond to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races.”
Buchanan’s “Suicide Of A Superpower” waxes nostalgic about the segregation era and cites crime statistics that he says “might explain why black folks have trouble getting a cab. Every New York cabby must know the odds, should he pick up a man of color at night.” Read more excerpts from the book here.
On Tuesday Buchanan defended himself on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show. Rehm pointed out that Edwards and the The Political Cesspool have been called anti-Semitic and white supremacist by the Anti-Defamation League. “I think [ADL Director Abe Foxman] has called me even worse names than he is calling this radio station,” Buchanan said. “I think there’s an awful lot of smearing being done, by the Anti-Defamation League frankly, over the years, of individuals who simply disagree maybe with US policy towards Israel, and a lot of name-calling.”
He added: “Am I supposed to go and vet all the people on these shows, and get the list from Abe Foxman of what shows I can go onto?”
Here’s the audio, via Media Matters:
