Pat Buchanan

Patrick Joseph Buchanan (born November 2, 1938) is an American politician and political commentator. Buchanan was an assistant and special consultant to U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election.

He co-founded The American Conservative magazine and launched a foundation named The American Cause. He has been published in Human Events, National Review, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. He was a political commentator on the MSNBC cable network, including the show Morning Joe until February 2012, and now appears on Fox News. Buchanan has been a regular on The McLaughlin Group since the 1980s. His political positions can generally be described as paleoconservative, and many of his views, particularly his opposition to American imperialism and the managerial state, echo those of the Old Right Republicans of the first half of the 20th century. In recent years he has associated himself with the Alt-Right.

Biography
The first time he ran for president in 1992, he challenged George H. W. Bush for the Republican party nomination, and after he failed, he gave a speech at the convention that hit every single culture war target. In fact, he was the one of the first to use the phrase "culture war" in that very speech. Many have suggested that the speech he gave so frightened moderate Republicans that they swung to either Perot or Clinton.

In his second run for the Republican nomination in 1996, he managed to eke out a victory in the New Hampshire primary along with three other early contests. This gave the Republican establishment a brief scare but Bob Dole easily steamrolled him in "Super Tuesday."

His third run was on Ross Perot's Reform Party ticket in 2000. There was much controversy over his run, as many said he essentially took over the party in a coup, lured by the prospect of $12 million in federal matching funds, then left the party in a shambles. He did very poorly, though the design of the "butterfly ballot" ended up giving him quite a lot of votes in certain liberal, predominantly Jewish precincts in Florida. He was willing to acknowledge that those votes were not likely for him, especially given that he is seen as very antisemitic by Jewish advocacy groups, and even fellow conservatives. That and the fact that he rants about the "Israel lobby" every chance he gets.

He is, along with Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, and a handful of other people, among the only categorical anti-war voices since the end of the Cold War. (As opposed to people like Howard Dean who was only against the second Iraq War but supported the first, John Kerry who was against the first and for the second, and Pat Robertson who was only against the NATO bombing of Serbia but supported bombing everyone else.) Of course, this is because Buchanan describes himself as neo-isolationist. By this, he does not mean that the US should not involve itself in other people's disputes; rather, he seems to believe that the US government should have no foreign policy, period. That means no UN, no NATO, no NORAD, etc. To a layperson, he could easily be considered an "economic nationalist"—but his isolationism and hatred of anyone who isn't a heterosexual WASP make it more likely he is just xenophobic. Buchanan's rationale, of course, is that American lives are much too precious to be wasted on pagan filth.

Following the Russian annexation of Crimea, Buchanan declared that God was on Russia's side and "the West is Gomorrah." He also spoke in favor of Vladimir Putin's anti-Gay law, calling on Americans to implement similar bulwarks against "gay propaganda".

Despite being against the "War on Terror", he has supported the use of torture on potentially innocent people suspected of terrorism.

Buchanan has spoken favorably about Adolf Hitler, once describing him as "an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him."

In a 1989 column, Buchanan called for the lynching of a 16-year old black teenager and the horsewhipping of four other younger African-American and Hispanic teenagers for having allegedly raped a white jogger in the Central Park Five case. He also called for the civilization of "barbarians" by putting the "fear of death" in them. Robert C. Smith, professor of political science at San Francisco State University, characterized the column as racist. Although the five teenagers were convicted, in 2002 the actual perpetrator of the crime confessed and DNA testing showed that he was guilty, and the convictions for the five teenagers were overturned.