This document is an archived copy of an older ADL report and may not reflect the most current facts or developments related to its subject matter.
As an author, media figure, and political commentator, Patrick Buchanan publicly espouses racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti-immigrant views. At one time an influential staff member in the Nixon and Reagan Administrations, Buchanan has gone on to write a number of books and articles that focus on the decline of Western civilization due to what he refers to as the “invasion” of non-European immigrants in the United States and Europe. His books, along with his weekly appearances on NBC’s The McLaughlin Group, have given him substantial mainstream exposure. Buchanan has affiliated himself with extremists in the United States and abroad, including deceased racist Sam Francis and the leaders of the Vlaams Belang, a xenophobic, racist political party in Belgium.
On American Jews and the Pro-Israel Lobby
2010
“If [Elena] Kagan [President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court] is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this Democrats’ idea of diversity?”
-- Column, “Are Liberals Anti-WASP?” May 14, 2010
2008
“Israel and its Fifth Column in this city seek to stampede us into war with Iran. Bush should rebuff them, and the American people should tell their congressmen: You vote for 362, we don’t vote for you.”
-- Column, “A Phony Crisis — and a Real One,” July 15, 2008
2007
“If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is at….”
-- On The McLaughlin Group, February 2, 2007
2005
“Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon.”
-- Neo-Conned! Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq, P.136
“They charge us with anti-Semitism…The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a 'passionate attachment' to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America.”
-- Neo-Conned! Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq, P.137
“Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.”
-- Neo-Conned! Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq, P.142
2004
"[Richard] Perle's depiction of his delight at first meeting the future president reads like Fagin relating his initial encounter with the young Oliver Twist."
-- Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, P.42
"Who would benefit from these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America-save oil…Who would benefit from a 'war of civilizations' with Islam? Who other than these neoconservatives and Ariel Sharon? Indeed, Sharon was everywhere the echo of his American auxiliary…."
-- Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, P.52
"Israel is in an existential crisis. It can wall itself off and annex what it wants on the West Bank, and leave Palestinians in tiny truncated, nonviable bantustans that will become the spawning pools of terror. Or it can give the Palestinians what Oslo, Camp David, Taba and the 'roadmap' promised; a homeland, a nation and a state of their own. Israel is free to choose. But American needs a Middle East policy made in the USA, not in Tel Aviv, or at AIPAC or AEI."
-- Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, P.241
"America has given up its role as 'honest broker.' President Bush no longer sits at the head of the negotiating table, but directly behind Sharon."
-- Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, P.242
"Dissent to the neocon line on Iraq or Israel has come to be equated with treason."
-- Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, P.248
BUCHANAN: [N]eoconservatives…Perle and Wolfowitz and Wurmser and the others, working with Netanyahu, had an agenda for war with Iraq that was going nowhere.
9/11 happens, and they put this agenda before a president, who in my judgment was untutored, as his father was not. Reagan would not have done this. I don't think his father would have done this.
They captured Rumsfeld, and they captured Cheney, and I think they captured the president…
BLITZER: Did you think of the Jewish line of Fagan [sic] when you wrote that and Richard Perle being Jewish?
BUCHANAN: Well, I mean, obviously Fagan was Jewish. But the thing about it is he was a leader of pick-pockets in a fictional book. Why is it unacceptable for me to use a literary allusion when I am called routinely Father Charles Coughlin of the modern era who was alleged to be an anti-Semitic priest? That is an outrage because that's a real character.
But I'll tell you this. Look, my views with regard to the security of this country - I disagree with Sharon's agenda. I think we have outsourced Middle East policy to Ariel Sharon. I think that's a disaster for this country. It's damaging our relations over the world.
And we cannot allow ourselves to be silenced because people call us names. My objection to the neoconservatives is not their ethnicity, Wolf. It is their war-mongering.
-- CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, September 12,2004
"Washington today is rife with reports the FBI has been investigating whether or not a nest of Pollardites in the Pentagon has been transmitting American secrets, through the Israeli lobby AIPAC, to the Reno Road embassy and to Sharon…
"AIPAC and the Israelis deny any spying. Cooperation between the Bush and Sharon governments is so close, they insist, there is no need to commit espionage or thieve U.S. documents. Perhaps, but the men about whom the FBI is inquiring have old, deep and questionable ties to Israel and the Likud Party of Ariel Sharon…
"Having promised him a cakewalk to Baghdad and a rose garden thereafter, neoconservatives misled President Bush. He should have fired the lot of them. Having failed to do so, he ought now, in his own interests, as well as our nation's, name Patrick "Bulldog" Fitzgerald, now heading up the investigation into the Valerie Plame leak, to head up the investigation of Israeli espionage, and possible treason, against the United States. If there has been a recurrence of Pollardism at the Pentagon, we need to know and the president needs to act, as Truman did not with Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White."
-- "Pollardites in the Pentagon," Creators Syndicate, September 12,2004
"We also need to investigate whether there is a nest of Pollardites in the Pentagon who have been transmitting American secrets through APAC, the Israeli lobby, over to Reno Road, the Israeli embassy, to be transferred to Mr. Sharon. Now, I did not know until this weekend's stories in The Washington Post that this is exactly what is being talked about; that certain individuals over there in Mr. Feith's shop or beneath him have been transmitting these secrets.
"Now, the FBI have been asking questions. There are no conclusions. No one should assume guilt on anyone's part. But if this has been going on, Tim, we are getting dangerously close to the T-word."
-- Meet the Press, September 5,2004
"I believe the mistake the president is making is outsourcing American Middle East policy to Ariel Sharon."
-- Real Time with Bill Maher, September 3, 2004
2003
“Tony Blair has assured his countrymen the United States does not intend to attack Syria or Iran. Colin Powell has assured the Muslim world the United States does not intend to attack Syria or Iran.
“But did the British prime minister or U.S. secretary of state clear their statements with Richard Perle? For the War Party has blood in its nostrils and is headed for Damascus….
“We are fighting ‘World War IV,’ said [former CIA Director James] Woolsey….
“’World War IV’ is a term popularized by militant Zionist Norman Podhoretz, who has been shrieking for war on no fewer than six or seven Arab countries. But why should anyone care what Woolsey says?
“Because James Woolsey is slated for a position of power in the U.S. reconstruction of Iraq. Moreover, Woolsey echoes John Bolton at State and Israel’s Ariel Sharon, who has also been howling for the United States to take down Iran and Syria, as soon as Baghdad falls.
“This is the neocons’ hour of power, and they do not intend to lose this chance to remake the Middle East in their own image.”
-- Column, “On to Damascus?”, April 9, 2003
"The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged."
"Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group."
"We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity."
"A list of the Middle East regimes that Podhoretz, Bennett, Ledeen, Netanyahu, and the Wall Street Journal regard as targets for destruction includes Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and 'militant Islam.'
"Cui bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
"Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud."
"What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it."
"The principal draftsman is Richard Perle....In 1996, with Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, Perle wrote "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," for Prime Minister Netanyahu....In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel's enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad. Their plan, which urged Israel to re-establish 'the principle of preemption,' has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States."
"President Bush is on notice: Should he pressure Israel to trade land for peace, the Oslo formula in which his father and Yitzak Rabin believed, he will, as was his father, be denounced as an anti-Semite and a Munich-style appeaser by both Israelis and their neoconservative allies inside his own Big Tent."
"Though we have said repeatedly that we admire much of what this president has done, he will not deserve re-election if he does not jettison the neoconservatives' agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect."
-- "Whose War? The Loudest Clique Behind the President's Policy," The American Conservative, March 24, 2003.
"Sharon was first elected on a pledge to ditch the Camp David and Barak plans. His new cabinet contains militant Zionists who consider the West Bank sacred Jewish land. They will not give it up. They will not permit Jerusalem to become the capital of a Palestinian state even if Bush, triumphant in Iraq, tells them it must be done. They will fight him as they fought his father. And they will have the War Party in their corner....
"Where will...President Bush go after Baghdad? If he seeks to pressure Israel into what the Israeli Right and the War Party think are premature and foolish negotiations, he will court a savage backlash in an election year, and fail. If he embraces the Sharon Doctrine and puts military pressure on Syria and Iran, he will do so without Tony Blair, without NATO and without U.N. backing, and he will be seen world wide as the leader of a rogue superpower."
--"After Baghdad, where do we go?"
townhall.com, March 3, 2003.
"Israel, recipient of $100 billion in U.S. aid, is demanding another $15 billion to hold our coat as we fight her war against Iraq."
--"With friends like these,"
townhall.com, February 24, 2003.
1999
"After World War II, Jewish influence over foreign policy became almost an obsession with American leaders."
-- A Republic, Not an Empire. P. 336.
"I know the power of the Israeli lobby and the other lobbies, but we need a foreign policy that puts our own country first."
-- Meet the Press Interview. September 12, 1999.
"Even if his veto of the (loan) guarantees is overridden, he will have won high marks for his courage, and exposed congress for what it has become, a Parliament of Whores incapable of standing up for U.S. national interests, if AIPAC is on the other end of the line."
-- Syndicated column, December 18, 1991
1990
In an August 25,1990 column, Buchanan criticized commentators urging military intervention in Iraq, naming Abe Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthamer and Henry Kissinger. On August 29th, he wrote the following:
"’The civilized world must win this fight,’ the editors thunder. But, if it comes to war, it will not be the ‘civilized world’ humping up that bloody road to Baghdad; it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown."
- Washington Times, August 29, 1990
"There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."
-- The McLaughlin Group, Aug 26, 1990
"Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory."
-- McLaughlin Group, June 15, 1990
"That the United States would sit still for anything was brought home to the Israelis, long ago, on the third day of the Six-Day War, when Lyndon Johnson ordered a coverup of an Israeli rocket-and-machine gun attack on the U.S. intelligence ship Liberty off the Sinai, an attack costing the lives of 37 brave American soldiers.
When it suits them, our Israeli allies launch air strikes on Tunis, Baghdad or Beirut; they invade Lebanon; they even enlist U.S. traitors, like the Pollards, to loot the secrets of a nation that has manifested toward them an extraordinary indulgence."
-- January 1990
On Nazis and the Holocaust
1999
"Senator Joseph McCarthy, in his career fighting communists, did nothing to their collaborators, sympathizers, and defenders to compare with what was done to the patriots of America First. But the acolytes of FDR won the great debate as decisively as America won the war. To this day, any who oppose U.S. commitments to fight wars in Europe or Asia, or new global entanglements, must first answer to the intimidating charge that they are nothing but ‘isolationists.’"
-- A Republic, Not an Empire, P. 250
1990
"The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody."
-- NY Post, March 17, 1990 (from a column about the trial of accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk)
"Whatever Rudolph did during World War II, his quarter century of service to the United States entitles the old man to a public hearing before he goes to his grave."
-- NY Post, July 14, 1990, on Arthur Rudolph, Nazi rocket scientist investigated by OSI who aided the American space program
1983
"Perhaps this endless search for Nazi war criminals, these endless re-enactments, on stage and screen, of Hitler’s concentration camps are good for the soul. To what end, however, all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime when there is scarcely a peep of protest over the prison camps, the labor camps, the concentration camps operating now in China and Siberia, in Cuba and Vietnam."
-- Washington Times, August 24, 1983
1977
"Those of us in childhood during the war years were introduced to Hitler only as a caricature…Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also 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. But Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path."
-- St. Louis Globe – Democrat, Aug 25, 1977
On Segregation and Affirmative Action
1999
"If the GOP wants to represent Middle America, it must address the concerns of Middle America. Among these is the deeply ingrained leftist and anti-Christian bias on elite campuses that are the breeding stables of future American leaders."
-- NY Post, January 2, 1999
1998
"If proportional representation (in Ivy League admissions) is the name of the game, Christian and European Americans should get into the game, and demand their fair share of every pie: 75 percent, and no less."
-- NY Post, November 28, 1998
1990
"In the late 1940’s and 1950’s…race was never a preoccupation with us, we rarely thought about it….There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The ‘Negroes’ of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."
-- Right From the Beginning
On Immigration and Ethnicity
2007
“How is America committing suicide? Every way a nation can. The American majority is not reproducing itself. Its birthrate has been below replacement level for decades. Forty-five million of its young have been destroyed in the womb since Roe v. Wade, as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see…our minority population rose 2.4 million to exceed 100 million. Hispanics, 1 percent of the U.S. population in 1950, are now 14.4 percent. Since 2000, their numbers have soared 25 percent to 45 million. The U.S. Asian population grew by 24 percent since 2000, as the number of white kids of school age fell 4 percent. Half the children five and younger today are minority children….The Anglo population of California is down to 43 percent and falling fast. White folks are now a minority in Texas and New Mexico. In Arizona, Hispanics account for more than half the population under twenty. The America Southwest is returning to Mexico.”
-- Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed are Tearing America Apart, Pgs. 8-9
“In 2007, on the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement, Queen Elizabeth II arrived to commemorate the occasion…For the queen had been there before, fifty years ago, for the 350th anniversary, in a less progressive era…And the queen was quick to recognize and embrace the change: ‘Since I visited Jamestown in 1957, my country has become a much more diverse society just as the Commonwealth of Virginia and the whole United States of America have also undergone a major social change.’ Both nations are indeed more diverse. But the most recent reminder of diversity in Virginia, to which the queen alluded, was the massacre of thirty-two students and teachers at Virginia Tech by an immigrant madman.”
-- Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed are Tearing America Apart, Pgs. 169-170
“The point here is unpleasant to modernity but critical to recognize: The United States, the greatest republic since Rome, and the British Empire, the greatest empire since Rome, may be said to have arisen from that three-cornered fort the Jamestown settlers began to build the day they arrived. But that Republic and that empire did not rise because the settlers and those who followed believed in diversity, equality, and democracy, but because they rejected diversity, equality, and democracy. The English, the Virginians, the Americans were all ‘us-or-them’ people. They believed in the superiority of their Christian faith and English culture and civilization. And they transplanted that unique faith, culture, and civilization to America’s fertile soil…This was our land, not anybody else’s. But today America and Britain have embraced ideas about the innate equality of all cultures, civilizations, languages, and about the mixing of all tribes, races, and peoples, that are not only ahistorical, they are suicidal for America and the West.”
-- Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed are Tearing America Apart, P. 173
2006
“Today, we find such world views repellent. But, if racism means a belief in the superiority of the white race and its inherent right to rule other peoples, American history is full of such men. Indeed, few great men could be found in America or Europe before WWII who did no accept white supremacy as natural.”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 85
“Paralyzed by guilt, we are inviting La Reconquista, the reconquest of the Southwest by Mexico, even as Ferdinand and Isabella affected La Reconquista of Spain in 1492 from the Moors who had invaded eight hundred years before. What Mexico’s elites have in mind, what they are systematically pursuing, is a sharing of sovereignty in these lost lands and their ultimate recapture, culturally, linguistically, by Mexico, no matter which nation holds title to them.”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 107
“The presence in the United States of a vast diaspora that retains its emotional and blood ties to Mexico provides Mexico City with immense leverage to advance an agenda that entails the steady diminution of U.S. sovereignty and economic and political merger of the United States with Mexico.”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 125
“Regimes like Mexico’s now look on citizens who leave to work or study in the United States as agents of influence, a fifth column inside the belly of the beast.”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 126
“This then is the Aztlan Strategy: endless migration from Mexico north, the Hispanicization of the American Southwest, and dual citizenship for all Mexican-Americans. The goals: Erase the border. Grow the influence, through Mexican-Americans, over how America disposes of her wealth and power. Gradually circumscribe the sovereignty of the United States. Lastly, economic and political merger of the nations in a bi-national union. And in the nuptial agreement, a commitment to share the wealth and power. Stated bluntly, the Aztlan Strategy entails the end of a sovereign, self-sufficient, independent republic, the passing away of the American nation. They are coming to conquer us.”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 128
“La Reconquista is not to be accomplished by force of arms, as was the U.S. annexation of the Southwest and California in 1848. It is to be carried out by a non-violent invasion and cultural transformation of that huge slice of America into a Mexamerican borderland, where the dominant culture is Hispanic and Anglos will feel alienated and begin to emigrate, as, indeed they already have – back over the mountains their fathers and grandfathers crossed generations ago. Each year now, 250,000 native-born Californians pack up and leave forever in what demographer William Frey calls the ‘flight from diversity.’”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 132
“But when it comes to the ability to assimilate into a nation like the United States, all nationalities, creeds, and cultures are not equal. To say that they are is ideology speaking, not judgment born of experience.”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 146
“Should America lose her ethnic-cultural core and become a nation of nations, America will not survive.”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 150
“It is not true that all creeds and cultures are equally assimilable in a First World nation born of England, Christianity, and Western civilization. Race, faith, ethnicity and history leave genetic fingerprints no ‘proposition nation’ can erase…Race matters. Ethnicity matters. History matters.”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 248
2002
“Mexicans not only come from another culture, but millions are of another race. History and experience teach us that different races are far more difficult to assimilate. The sixty million Americans who claim German ancestry are fully assimilated, while millions from Africa and Asia are still not full participants in American society.”
-- Death Of The West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization), P. 125
1991
"David Duke is busy stealing from me. I have a mind to go down there and sue that dude for intellectual property theft."
-- Manchester, NH Union Leader, December 15, 1991
"I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?"
-- This Week With David Brinkley, December 8, 1991
1990
"Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country? Because that is our destiny if we do not build a sea wall against the waves of immigration rolling over our shores…..
"The Negroes of the ‘50s became the blacks of the ‘60’s; now, the ‘African-Americans’ of the 90’s demand racial quotas and set-asides, as the Democrats eagerly assent and a pandering GOP prepares to go along.
"Who speaks for the Euro-Americans, who founded the U.S.A.? …Is it not time to take America back?"
-- NY Post, June 20, 1990
On Women
2007
"The rise of women to power in a civilization is very often the mark of its decline."
-- On The McLaughlin Group, July 6, 2007
2002
“In short, the rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and end of the West.”
-- Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, P. 42
"What is going to convert American women to wanting what their mothers wanted and grandmothers prayed for: a good man, a home in the suburbs, and a passel of kids? Sounds almost quaint.”
-- Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, P. 47
1983
"Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism…The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this; God is."
-- Washington Times. November 18, 1983
On Homosexuality and AIDS
2002
“For homosexuality is not liberation, it is slavery. It is not a lifestyle; it is a death style.”
-- Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, P.197
1992
"Yes, we disagreed with President Bush. But we stand with him for freedom to choose religious schools. And we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women."
-- Republican National Convention; August 17, 1992
1983
"The poor homosexuals – they have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution."
-- NY Post, February 24, 1983
On a Christian America
2006
“And as we remain a predominantly Christian country, why should not a preference go to Christians?”
-- State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, P. 252
1984
"Should the United States be a pagan or a Christian country?…America was a Christian country. A quarter of a century ago, without prior consultation with a democratic people, without support in precedent or the Constitution, the Warren Court undertook the systematic de-Christianization of America, beginning, but not stopping, with the public schools…..
"The school prayer crusade, then, is the first great counteroffensive of a badly routed Christian community to recapture their occupied public schools and re-establish their beliefs as the legitimate moral foundation of American society."
- San Diego Union, February 25, 1984