In Book, Pat Buchanan Thanks Karate-Chopping Racist for Research
splcenter.org
The Forward praises the woman attacking racist, Marcus Epstein.
In a few weeks, MSNBC commentator Pat Buchanan will unleash his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? According to its amazon.com product description, the lyrically titled screed “traces the disintegration [of America] to three historic changes: America’s loss of her cradle faith, Christianity; the moral, social, and cultural collapse that have followed from that loss; and the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation.”
Weighty topics. Fortunately, Buchanan wasn’t alone in sussing them out. As Media Matters pointed out yesterday, in his acknowledgements, Buchanan extends “special thanks” to one Marcus Epstein, “for the invaluable assistance and untold hours he devoted to researching ideas, issues, and anecdotes.”
Epstein, a loyal acolyte who in a blog post for the white nationalist hate site VDARE (named for Virginia Dare, the first English child to be born in the New World) praised Buchanan as “the lone voice of sanity in a nation driven mad,” must be delighted. Once moderately notorious as an early associate of the ultraconservative student organization Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), Epstein is these days much better known for his drunken assault on a black woman who happened to be passing by as he wandered the streets of Washington, D.C., in July, 2007. According to court records, Epstein was making offensive comments about non-whites and decided to express himself more dramatically by calling an African-American woman passing by a “nigger” and then attempting to karate chop her in the head. He was briefly detained by the woman’s husband, but escaped only to be taken into custody minutes later by a Secret Service officer who witnessed the altercation. He pleaded guilty in 2008 and agreed to continue mental health counseling, complete an alcohol treatment program, write a letter of apology to the victim and donate $1,000 to the United Negro College Fund.
Epstein’s arrest became public in 2009, leading the supposedly non-racist YWC (which nonetheless associates with unapologetic white nationalists like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, who wrote in 2005, “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”) to distance itself from him completely.
Fortunately, he had friends in other places. After graduating from college in 2006, the young white nationalist was hired as executive director of American Cause, a group led by Pat Buchanan and his sister Bay that seeks to “promote traditional American values.” Epstein also became executive director of Team America, a political action committee “dedicated to securing our nation’s borders”; it’s headed by Bay Buchanan and Tom Tancredo, who would later become YWC’s honorary chairman.