On Laura Ingraham’s radio show on Monday, conservative author and columnist Pat Buchanan, an attendee of the 1963 March on Washington, took on some of the claims made in last weekend’s 50th anniversary march, saying that they missed a lot of the problems plaguing the society.
“Folks like the Rev. Sharpton and the others, I mean, this is their stock and trade — the grievance industry — that ‘We have not been given enough,’ they’re still being abused,” he said. “And they’ve seized lately, of course, upon the Trayvon Martin case, which was a matter in serious dispute, after a fight, that someone was shot. You know, Marx, Karl Marx — and I don’t usually quote him, Laura — he said that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. And I think that’s what we saw up there at the Lincoln Memorial.”
Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?,” recounted being at the original March on Washington, reminding listeners that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech wasn’t even covered by The Washington Post the next day. And he noted that while there were strides made during the civil rights era, it was still fraught with race riots and incendiary language from some black leaders, including Malcolm X.
But then he took another shot at Al Sharpton and other so-called modern civil right leaders.
“All of these things took place in that decade, and the idea from Rev. Sharpton that we had not changed, or the others up there, this is part of a great racket,” Buchanan said. “What would these folks do if they had to get up there and admit ‘We have got more opportunities than any large group of black folks anywhere on Earth today and our community is not making the most of it?’”
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“What it did raise is this: When you see the contrast of how he dealt with the Trayvon case and how he dealt with this, is there is a very serious problem in this country, people have said, of white racism,” Buchanan said. “And they have got to start to address the problem of black racism — that is black-on-white assaults, rapes, robberies, attacks, murders. They occur … at eight times the rate of white-on-black attacks in the 2007 statistics. And since the black community is only one-fifth the size of the white community, that means it’s 40 times as likely to have these kinds of crimes come out of that community as the white community. And the black leadership, if it is leadership, has got to begin to address this outrage and this phenomenon.”
Later, Buchanan referenced remarks from Ann Coulter about the deterioration of the black family, agreeing that societal problems were a result of that more than poverty, noting America has been a far poorer place in the past.
“The disintegration of the society, I think, has taken place because of all the revolutions that took place in the ’60s, and we’re living in the second and the third generation after that,” he said. “But it’s certainly not poverty. America has been a far poorer place in the black community than it is today, but we’ve never had this degree of social, moral disintegration. And the problem is, I don’t call these people ‘leaders’ who won’t address that. The real leaders are the few guys I think left in those black churches who are standing up and telling the truth to their communities.”
