Cancel culture before it had a name
The "Defenestration of Buchanan" and a real-life Mississippi legal thriller
A dozen years or so ago, I used to keep a much different schedule and MSNBC, though tilting aggressively leftward, did not have as its editorial policy “to hate each and every American with impunity” as it does now.
I watched Morning Joe regularly. Generally, the show was quite intelligent. Lots of panel discussions, rather than the hot-take debate situation that you see on the morning sports shows or the evening cable “news” programs.
That all screeched to a halt when MSNBC fired regular contributor to Morning Joe, Pat Buchanan, from its network entirely.
Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025 by Buchanan was published on October 18, 2011. He was fired that day.
Technically, he was fired in February 2012 or had his contract run out, but he hadn’t appeared on the network since the book was released.
MSNBC vetted the book prior to its release and there had been no issue. Once release day came, however, Buchanan was a victim of “Cancel Culture” before it had a name.
Buchanan made some “controversial comments about race” is about all you’ll hear about that episode today.
Perhaps such chapters as “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America” got the left in a tizzy. Hard telling, not knowing…for the left rarely reveals its hole cards.
Whatever the case, most of those who clamored for Buchanan’s dismissal probably didn’t get past the Table of Contents, for if one had read the tome, one could understand—even if he did not agree—with the cogent arguments Buchanan put forth.
“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC,” said network president Phil Griffin at the time.
Buchanan’s ideas were nothing new nor were they particularly unique to him.
Let’s take just one passage that I marked back in 2011 myself, page 128 of the hardback.
“In October 2010, the Washington Post reported that from July 1, 2009, to July 1, 2010, foreign-born Hispanics gained 98,000 construction jobs while U.S.-born Hispanics lost 133,000. Black and white construction workers lost 511,000 jobs that same year. In the second quarter of 2010, foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs. Native-born workers lost 1.2 million jobs.”
The endnote points to an article in the Washington Post, no bastion of conservatism it, from October 30, 2010, written by Shankar Vedantam.
This is the data. Frankly, if the numbers are shocking to the ostriches out there, I’d certainly recommend not to take a gander at the 2022 numbers.
Some say Pliny the Elder was wrong—that ostriches do not “bury” their heads in sand, but the point is that if Buchanan offended you in 2011 by pointing out the stark reality, one should probably avoid digging any deeper into reality in the “post-covid” world of today.
“After 10 years, we have decided to part ways with Pat Buchanan,” said a February 2012 statement released by MSNBC. “We wish him well.”
Buchanan on the ordeal:
“My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end. After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.”
Buchanan has since landed on his feet and put out a few more books, notably about his days with Richard Nixon. I still read his column each week.
Surprisingly, co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough dissented from the orthodoxy inherent in the liberal network.
Scarborough wrote in his blog at the time:
“Everyone at Morning Joe considers Pat Buchanan to be a friend and a member of the family. Even though we strongly disagree with the contents of Pat’s latest book, Mika and I believe those differences should have been debated in public.
…
Because we believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, Mika and I strongly disagree with this outcome. We understand that the parting was amicable. Still, we will miss Pat.”
In the days since Trump, such conciliatory remarks by leftists have since vanished.
(Yes, I am aware Scarborough fancies himself a “conservative,” but if one has done any sort of analysis of the post-Cold War conservative “movement,” one must come to the conclusion that it is part of the fabric of the cultural left, just like Scarborough.)
Prior to the Buchanan kerfuffle—I stopped watching the network altogether once I figured out Buchanan was never coming back—I watched the show all the time. Most of it would upset me, but it was by far the best show on television from 3 AM – 6 AM Pacific.
I remember an interview one morning with author Curtis Wilkie. I believe Tom Brokaw was sitting in on the panel. Just the brief description of Wilkie’s book got me fascinated with the story.
The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer
I bought it on Amazon, read the first few pages once it arrived and was looking for the “right time” to read it.
Eventually, years later, I bought the book on Audible also.
It wasn’t until last year or the year before that I committed to finishing this book. Man, I should NOT have let it sit for a decade.
I went back and forth between the audiobook and the hardcover and finished it in a couple days.
Try Audible Premium Plus and Get Up to Two Free Audiobooks
As we talked about in yesterday’s podcast with Sean Edrington, retention of information is much higher for most folks when reading as opposed to hearing or watching. On the other hand, there is only so much time in the day and if you want to get through important books, Audible is an indispensable application. I’ve been a member for years.
Back to The Fall of the House of Zeus …
The author, Curtis Wilkie, is a 1963 University of Mississippi graduate. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe for 26 years until he went back to Oxford, Mississippi to teach journalism at Ole Miss.
Mississippi politics is a strange game. Wilkie is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat as is the subject of his book, Dickie Scruggs. In fact, Scruggs and Wilkie are or were friendly, if not friends.
Wilkie treats Scruggs fairly throughout, regardless of their relationship. High points and low points.
I’d describe Wilkie as a liberal—heck, he worked for the Globe for a quarter-century—but a somewhat fair one in the style of the mid-20th century of which he is a product.
Scruggs, though, is a political opportunist. For instance, he’s a Democrat, yet his brother-in-law is former Republican senator Trent Lott. Both were willing to cross party lines to “get things done.”
I’ll save you the deep background—that is what the book is for—but Scruggs is actually an impressive guy. Or was. Maybe still is.
After graduation from Ole Miss, Scruggs became a naval bomber pilot, then went back to Ole Miss to get a law degree.
Scruggs made a name for himself in asbestos litigation and then again in the major tobacco litigation of the 1990s, made famous in the Russell Crowe movie, The Insider.
The Pascagoula home of Scruggs—along with the man himself—appeared in the movie.
The tobacco cases are where Scruggs started going off the rails. Representing several states, Scruggs and his other lawyers brought in a settlement worth over $248 billion. His firm took in roughly $900 million and about a third of it went to Scruggs.
Then Scruggs went after Ritalin, raked in claims against insurance companies in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and sued and won a class action lawsuit against Lehman Brothers worth $51 million.
I believe the question as to why Scruggs didn’t retire after the tobacco cases is the key to this book. A few hundred million or more dollars in net worth in Mississippi is probably a good nest egg. Why was that not enough?
It could have been.
Came Hurricane Katrina which ravaged Mississippi’s gulf coast, including the Scruggs home.
The book’s subtitle is “the rise and ruin of America’s most powerful trial lawyer.” We saw the rise, especially with the tobacco settlements. Katrina was the beginning of the ruin.
Wonderful tale. I came out of it still kind of liking Scruggs. I don’t know if it was because of Wilkie’s writing or if I am just whistling Yankee.
Tom Brokaw said about the book:
“The Fall of the House of Zeus is a riveting American saga of ambition, cunning, greed corruption, high life, and low life in the land of Faulkner and Grisham. These are good ol’ boys gone bad with flair, private jets, and lots of cash to carry. Curtis Wilkie, a child of the South and a reporter’s reporter, is the perfect match for this wild ride.”
One of my favorite living novelists and writers, Richard Ford, grew up in Mississippi. Ford had this to say:
“Addictive reading for anyone interested in greed, outrageous behavior, epic bad planning and character, lousy luck, and worst of all, comically bad manners. Wilkie knows precisely where the skeletons, the cash boxes, and the daggers are buried along the Mississippi back roads. And he knows, ruefully—which is why this book demands a wide audience—that the South, no mater its loony sense of exceptionalism, is pretty much just like the rest of the planet.”
Finally, from the jacket cover:
“In gripping detail, Wilkie crafts an authentic legal thriller propelled by a ‘welter of betrayals and personal hatreds,’ providing large supporting roles for Trent Lott and Jim Biden, brother of then senator Joe, with cameos by John McCain, Al Gore, and other D.C. insiders and influence peddlers.
Above all, we get to see how and why the mighty fail and fall, a story as gripping and timeless as a Greek tragedy.”
Yes, “The Big Guy’s” brother figures in quite well to this story.
There’s no real underlying point to all of this, other than I noticed The Fall of the House of Zeus on my bookshelf the other day, started poking through it again, and figured I had to get the good word out to the Good Folks out there about this book.
Brian O’Leary