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Patrick J. Buchanan - The American Conservative
Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of The American Conservative and a former presidential candidate. He writes on foreign policy, politics, and history.
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Contributing Editors
W. James Antle IIIJames BovardTed Galen CarpenterRyan GirduskyPaul GottfriedJames P. PinkertonMatthew WaltherJohn A. Burtka IVPeter TonguetteDoug BandowBill KauffmanPeter Van BurenDouglas MacgregorJack HunterKelley Beaucar VlahosTed Snider
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off bs 7 26 About Us - The American Conservative
The American Conservative was founded in 2002 to reignite the conversation that conservatives ought to have engaged in since the end of the Cold War, but didn’t. TAC’s founders—Scott McConnell, Patrick J. Buchanan, and Taki Theodoracopulos—believed, in different but compatible ways, that what passed for conservatism in the United States wasn’t conserving much of anything. At the time, the American right was marching in lockstep towards a disastrous regime change war in Iraq, and an increasingly globalist domestic agenda at home. TAC would offer a different voice.
The very name chosen for the publication was a challenge to the GOP Beltway conservative establishment. TAC’s vision was actually seeking to conserve what’s best about America. As Scott McConnell wrote in the magazine’s founding editorial:
We believe conservatism to be the most natural political tendency, rooted in man’s taste for the familiar, for family, for faith in God. We believe that true conservatism has a predisposition for the institutions and mores that exist. So much of what passes for contemporary conservatism is wedded to a kind of radicalism — fantasies of global hegemony, the hubristic notion of America as a universal nation for all the world’s peoples, a hyperglobal economy. In combination with an increasingly unveiled contempt for America’s long-standing allies, this is more a recipe for disaster.
Against it, we take our stand.
McConnell’s vision continues to guide the publication today. Twenty years on, TAC has flourished from an upstart journal into a vibrant institution working to advance this vision across multiple fronts. Never have the political and cultural circumstances been more favorable to our ideas and the opportunity for building a movement of “Main Street” conservatives more promising. The American Conservative is working to make this vision a reality. We aim to be the leader of a new movement of conservatives with the resources to educate America’s political and cultural leaders in the values of Main Street America.
You can be a part of this effort by becoming a member of The American Conservative today.
TAC is published by the American Ideas Institute, a 501c3 nonprofit, and donations are tax-deductible. Learn more about our donor clubs here. For the latest audited financial report and 990 tax filing, click here.
More:
We Take Our Stand, Founding Editorial, October 2002
TAC at 15: Still Fighting After All These Years, Scott McConnell, May 2018
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MMA
Right-wing ghouls revive the Seth Rich conspiracy theory 10 years after his murder
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 07/09/26
It's 2026 and MAGA lickspittle Benny Johnson is hosting a discussion of whether Hillary Clinton had former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich killed in 2016.
“This is why it's called a conspiracy theory,” former American Conservative contributing editor Chris Brunet told Johnson during a lengthy interview about Rich’s tragic murder on Johnson’s show Wednesday. “It's because it's a conspiracy of top DNC officials, including Hillary Clinton, to essentially murder Seth Rich in cold blood, is the conspiracy theory. And I believe that's what happened. I don’t believe he was the victim of a random mugging.”
Brunet added that President Donald Trump “should open a new investigation into the murder of Seth Rich to try to find his killers.”
“I would love for there to be a full investigation into this,” Johnson replied, later telling his audience to subscribe to Brunet’s Substack and “send tips if you know anything about this.”
Video
Citation
From the July 8, 2026, edition of The Benny Show as aired on YouTube
These ghouls are reviving the Seth Rich conspiracy theory nearly a decade after it first became a cause célèbre for the online right, which baselessly linked Rich’s tragic murder on July 10, 2016, in what police determined was an unsolved botched robbery while he was walking home late at night in Washington, D.C., to WikiLeaks’ release 12 days later of thousands of internal DNC emails whose contents damaged Clinton’s presidential campaign.
News accounts citing intelligence sources quickly suggested that Russian hackers had stolen the emails and provided them to WikiLeaks; the U.S. intelligence community publicly stated in October 2016that Russia had hacked the DNC; and the final report from then-special counsel Robert Mueller, who secured indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers for the DNC hack, concluded that the emails were stolen and released through WikiLeaks as part of a Kremlin plot to undermine Clinton’s campaign. But right-wing conspiracy theorists, seeking to undermine arguments that Trump was too close to the Kremlin, claimed based on just about nothing that Rich had been the true source of the emails, and that he had been murdered — perhaps on Clinton’s order — in retaliation for their release.
The conspiracy theory was relegated to far-right fever swamps at first. But the story burst into the mainstream 10 months after Rich’s death, after Fox News published a thinly sourced online article and aired a series of on-air segments that bought into the far-right narrative.
Veteran Fox host Sean Hannity became the conspiracy theory’s biggest champion, arguing that it debunked “the whole Russia collusion narrative.” Meanwhile, Rich’s anguished family begged him and the rest of the conspiracy theorists to stop. “With every conspiratorial flare-up, we are forced to relive Seth’s murder and a small piece of us dies as more of Seth’s memory is torn away from us,” his parents wrote in The Washington Post. Ultimately, Fox retracted its article, claiming that it had not met the network’s standards, and Hannity stopped talking about the story.
This was perhaps the saddest and most grotesque saga I’ve seen come out of the right-wing media in my 19 years at Media Matters. And as the 10th anniversary of Rich’s murder approaches, the conspiracy theorists are back.
The hook for Brunet’s appearance on Johnson’s show is an allegation from attorney Ty Clevenger, posted online Monday and boosted the next day by the conspiracy theory site Gateway Pundit, claiming that “an attorney for the government told me that I would soon be getting confirmation that several hundred pages of documents related to Seth Rich were found in a previously-hidden room at FBI headquarters” where they were supposedly “among the files designated for destruction.”
Jim Hoft, an endless font of credulity and stupidity, explained in his post why this is supposed to matter:
This is the same FBI that originally told Clevenger back in 2017 it had zero records on Seth Rich because the bureau “was not involved” in the investigation of his death. They claimed it was nothing more than a “botched robbery” handled solely by local D.C. police.
Over the years, through relentless FOIA litigation and court pressure, the FBI has been forced to admit it actually possesses thousands of pages of Seth Rich documents, including his work laptop, an image of his personal laptop, and a DVD. Yet they continue to fight tooth and nail to keep the full truth hidden.
One possible explanation for this alleged disparity is that while the FBI did say in May 2017 that it was not involved in the investigation of Rich’s death, Mueller’s April 2019 final report suggests that some investigation did subsequently take place: It specifically confirms that Rich was not the source that provided the DNC emails to WikiLeaks. The records, in other words, could have been created while the FBI was knocking down the online right’s conspiracy theory.
The fever-swamp explanation, however, is that the FBI was in on the conspiracy in which Clinton had Rich killed for leaking the DNC emails to WikiLeaks, covered it up, kept all the evidence through the four years of the first Trump administration and the four years of the Biden administration and only decided to destroy them when Trump came back into power, but waited too long and his minions found it.
Dabbling in this particular insanity is not without risk. While Fox did not hold its employees accountable for their repulsive behavior, the network paid what was reportedly “a lucrative seven figure payment to the Rich family” to get them to settle a lawsuit. But the story offers Johnson’s ilk a priceless opportunity to talk about FBI documents that aren’t the Epstein files that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is illegally withholding.
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05/24/17 4:15 PM EDT
05/17/19 8:33 AM EDT
11/30/20
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