One of the more tiresome things is the rant we always hear from a-holes who get fired for making offensive remarks in our media. It’s always the same. They claim that people are taking away their First Amendment rights. It may have seemed otherwise for the last decade, but Patrick Buchanan never had a constitutional right to live on a cot in the Green Room at MSNBC. The fact that I just linked to an article he authored is proof that the government has not abridged his right to complain about our country becoming less uniformly white and Christian. In fact, there are white supremacist websites all over the InterTubes where you or I can go if we want to read racist crap. NBC would be foolish to employ any of those writers.
In Pat’s twisted mind, he has a constitutional right to be employed, and at a high salary and with a guaranteed audience. He’s wrong. But we have a constitutional right to boycott anyone who does employ him. We can boycott any company that advertises with his employer. We can say that his views are repugnant and offensive, just as he can say the same thing about our views.
MSNBC took way too long to fire Buchanan. And we weren’t trying to take away his right to speak. We were trying to take away his ready-made audience. If he’s as good as he thinks he is, he can build his readership up without the help of a syndicated column or a permaspot on cable teevee.
