On Fox News Channel’s “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” on Wednesday, conservative columnist Pat Buchanan weighed in on the murder of Australian baseball player Chris Lane who was allegedly shot and killed last week by three “bored” teenagers.
Buchanan said the culture was to blame for the apparent amorality of the alleged murderers.
“It’s not only evil — there’s a sense here of amorality,” Buchanan said. “No sense that anything of real preciousness and value is involved. It’s let’s get our kicks for a couple of minutes by shooting a man to death. And I think it raises a question: Where do these kids come out? Where do they come from to get the idea that this was sort of a fine thing, a good thing to do and a lot of fun? I think if you take a look at the culture — I think we got to take a look at the culture that they grew up in. Look at the — kids when I grew up, you never heard of anything like this. Kid got in fights and there were problems and things like that.”
“But I think what’s happened to the society is that the conscience-forming institutions — the family, that’s disintegrated and collapsed,” Buchanan continued. “You’ve got the school, which is not doing the job it used to. The black churches and many of the white churches are — the country’s been de-Christianized. And these kids have clearly been desensitized. I think what you’ve got here are products of the cultural-social-moral revolution that overthrew all the standards by which previous generations lived. I grew up in D.C., Greta. I was born in the 30s and grew up in the 50s. My father grew up here in the 20s. They had black communities here. Hundreds of thousands of extraordinarily poor people, working class people — you didn’t have things like this going on.”
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Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” noted the components of the culture that have led to this change in society, naming movies and music specifically.
“What are these kids getting from the culture? They listen to radio — they get hip-hop and rap. This one kid on his twitter feed or whatever it is, he’s talking about gangs and colors of gangs. What do they get out of Hollywood? They get movies that, I mean, are pornographic. I mean, I watch a lot of TV and cable. Some of these shows are triple-x. They would never be on before. And this one kid puts out he’s interested in sex and violence. And the movies are extraordinarily violent. I mean, you get guys being shot, almost like cartoon characters being killed. And so where are these kids going to find something which says, ‘No, that is wrong. You can’t do that, and you shouldn’t do something like that?’ Where is the voice that says ‘no?’”
When asked whether or not he thought President Barack Obama should denounce this crime, Buchanan said he should, adding there were racial elements to this crime.
“He sure should,” Buchanan said. “I mean, Trayvon Martin was a tragedy, but you had two people mixed up. They got in a horrible fight. One of them was winning. One was panicked, screaming, yelling, shot a gun. That is different than driving along in a car and saying, ‘Let’s kill this guy,’ and murdering him. Now, my guess what is going to come out of this, quite frankly, is that it is racial. Why would you pick a 22-year-old white male if you’re just shooting anybody?”
Buchanan also said statistics say black-on-white crime is the most prevalent and yet under-reported aspect of interracial hate crime.
“We’re going to find that out. But I will say this — the most common form of interracial hate crime is black on white,” he added. “Greta, when I did a book one of my recent books, I went down to the FBI statistics because the Post doesn’t do it. More than one year, 2007, 433,000 attacks by black on whites. And one-eighth of that [is] by whites on black. At the same time, the black community was five times as small — I mean one-fifth the size of white community. Add it up — the idea of racial hate crimes is 40 times more prevalent in the black community than the white community. And nobody talks about it.”