Jacob Weisberg

Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, the World Wide Web arm of Washington Post Company. He joined Slate in 1996, then succeeded Michael Kinsley as its editor, becoming group editor-in-chief in 2002 and was replaced by David Plotz.

Before coming to Slate, he was a political writer for publications including The New Republic, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine.

On Patrick Buchanan

In a 1990 column in The New Republic, he wrote of Patrick Buchanan's problems with Jews. "He does not speak of cutting the Jews down to size, or of being sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust. If he has expressed negative sentiments about Jews in the past, they are not quite the crude ones vented by his colleague from National Review," Joe Sobran, whom Weisberg does call anti-semitic.

Weisberg finds the strongest argument against Buchanan is his ostensible affection for fascism. Even posthumously, he defends the Falangist strain of Francisco Franco , the "soldier-patriot" of Spain, and Antonio Salazar of Portugal. On the German variety, Buchanan's attitude is more equivocal. In 1977 he wrote:

Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him. But Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.

Weisberg found "Buchanan's entire worldview is deeply disturbing. His instincts are powerfully authoritarian and anti-democratic, and, in a distinct sense, fascistic. A conspiratorial frame of mind and a misguided sense of loyalty lead Buchanan to view the world in terms of eternal struggles between Catholics and Jews, conservatives and liberals, anti-Communists and Communists, Americans and anti-Americans. These opinions should be cause for alarm, whether the person who holds them is anti-Semitic or not." Weisberg sees them as rooted in the 1930s American nationalism of Father Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh. The hallmarks of this tradition are a fierce and unselective anti-communism, an animosity toward Britain, and an eccentric obsession with the menace of "Jewish internationalism.