Surprise! Pat Buchanan Reads VDARE

I know, there's something of a dog-bites-man quality to learning that Pat Buchanan reads a rabidly anti-immigrant website. But Buchanan continues to enjoy the favor (or at least acceptance) of a not-insignificant portion of the media elite, so the fact that he apparently browses a white nationalist site for column ideas is worth noting.

Here's a portion of Buchanan's latest column:

Among the OECD members, the most developed 34 nations on earth, Mexico, principal feeder nation for U.S. schools, came in dead last in reading.

Steve Sailer of VDARE.com got the full list of 65 nations, broke down U.S. reading scores by race, then measured Americans with the countries and continents whence their families originated. What he found was surprising.

Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese. White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests.

African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.

America's public schools, then, are not abject failures.

They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America.

Steve Sailer has been an advocate of the Pioneer Fund, which has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its support for white supremacists. Sailer has written that African Americans “tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society,” a passage conservative columnist John Podhoretz aptly described as “shockingly racist.” VDARE is an anti-immigrant website that publishes what its editor describes as “white nationalist” works, and is also identified as a hate group by SPLC.

That's who Pat Buchanan turns to for inspiration: an author of “shockingly racist” screeds for a white nationalist website. But, hey: Big day for Steve Sailer, right? For a VDARE columnist, getting cited by Pat Buchanan must be like an aspiring writer finding out that Tom Wolfe is a fan.