In a May 26, 2016 column for VDARE, Pat Buchanan — paleoconservative author, former Special Assistant to Richard Nixon, and Nazi sympathizer — declared Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to be “the Great White Hope” of “our anti-white age.”

After running through data on the elevated levels of drug use and suicide among middle-aged white Americans (the “social disaster of white Middle America” as he put it, Buchanan declared that our society is openly hostile toward its white majority. Buchanan lamented the fact that “the popular culture of the ’40s and ’50s” depicted white men as “role models” — portrayed as detectives, cops, war heroes, doctors, lawyers, and skilled workers.

“Lincoln and every president had been a white male,” he wrote. They were “great inventors” and “great capitalists,” but today the “world has been turned upside-down for white children,” who are now taught that “America was ‘discovered’ by genocidal white racists, who murdered the native peoples of color, enslaved Africans to do the labor they refused to do, then went out and brutalized and colonized indigenous peoples all over the world.”

The truth is mixed, of course. America’s white founders and settlers were capable of great innovation and great cruelty. They were both inventors and imperialists, presidents and slaveholders. Buchanan seems to want to whitewash history to blot out any inconvenient stains on their record, however.

Buchanan’s list of grievances continues, as he criticized Hollywood for depicting white working-class men as “white trash” and conflated affirmative action policies with invidious state-sponsored discrimination. “White males, now down to 31 percent of the population, have become the only Americans against whom it is not only permissible, but commendable, to discriminate.”

This, he wrote, is why “people of that derided ethnicity, race, and gender” view Donald Trump with approval — a strongman who “unapologetically berates and mocks the elites who have dispossessed them, and who despise them” — and join anti-government militias. This absurd belief in anti-white persecution is why Trump is “seen by millions as ‘The Great White Hope.'”

In the popular culture of the ’40s and ’50s, white men were role models. They were the detectives and cops who ran down gangsters and the heroes who won World War II on the battlefields of Europeand in the islands of the Pacific.

They were doctors, journalists, lawyers, architects and clergy. White males were our skilled workers and craftsmen—carpenters, painters, plumbers, bricklayers, machinists, mechanics.

They were the Founding Fathers, Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton, and the statesmen, Webster, Clay and Calhoun.

Lincoln and every president had been a white male. Middle-class white males were the great inventors: Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers.

They were the great capitalists: Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. All the great captains of America’s wars were white males: Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant and John J. Pershing, Douglas MacArthur and George Patton.

What has changed in our culture? Everything.

The world has been turned upside-down for white children. In our schools the history books have been rewritten and old heroes blotted out, as their statues are taken down and their flags are put away.

Children are being taught that America was “discovered” by genocidal white racists, who murdered the native peoples of color, enslaved Africans to do the labor they refused to do, then went out and brutalized and colonized indigenous peoples all over the world.

In Hollywood films and TV shows, working-class white males are regularly portrayed as what was once disparaged as “white trash.”

Republicans are instructed that demography is destiny, that white America is dying, and that they must court Hispanics, Asians and blacks, or go the way of the Whigs.

Since affirmative action for black Americans began in the 1960s, it has been broadened to encompass women, Hispanics, Native Americans the handicapped, indeed, almost 70 percent of the nation.

White males, now down to 31 percent of the population, have become the only Americans against whom it is not only permissible, but commendable, to discriminate.

When our cultural and political elites celebrate “diversity” and clamor for more, what are they demanding, if not fewer white males in the work force and in the freshman classes at Annapolis and Harvard?

What is the moral argument for an affirmative action that justifies unending race discrimination against a declining white working class, who have become the expendables of our multicultural regime?

“Angry white male” is now an acceptable slur in culture and politics. So it is that people of that derided ethnicity, race, and gender see in Donald Trump someone who unapologetically berates and mocks the elites who have dispossessed them, and who despise them.

Is it any surprise that militant anti-government groups attract white males? Is it so surprising that the Donald today, like Jess Willard a century ago, is seen by millions as “The Great White Hope”?