Ro Khanna Goes to Bat for Pat Buchanan, Hasan Piker, and Nazi Tattoo Guy in Wild Tweetstorm

LEFT: Pat Buchanan (Fred Jewell/AP Photo) RIGHT: Ro Khanna (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) responded to a critical column in The Washington Post by throwing his weight behind a trio of controversial — and arguably anti-Semitic — political personalities on Thursday.

The column, written by conservative commentator James Kirchick, takes Khanna to task for flip-flopping on issues ranging from Israel to the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, as well as excoriates him for his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

“Khanna has apparently decided that exploiting the Epstein scandal, facts and propriety be damned, is the way to remedy that obscurity,” argued Kirchick before characterizing the congressman as “a man whose lust for power is unseemly even by Washington standards.”

In a tweetstorm on Thursday, Khanna objected strenuously — if not substantively — to the charges against him.

⁦”@jkirchick⁩ does a hit piece on me for standing up to the Epstein Class. His real beef with me has been that I have called what happened in Gaza a genocide. I welcome the hatred of Netanyahu apologists,” he wrote in his opening parry on X.

It only got more interesting from there.

During a heated exchange with Commentary‘s John Podhoretz, Khanna leveled a series of accusations against the Jewish-American journalist.

“You cheerled us into the war in Iraq. You called Pat Buchanan antisemitic for criticizing Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in 2006. You are one of the loudest supporters for Netanyahu’s war in Gaza. Your neocon ideology has done so much damage to America and people are on to it,” he submitted.

Buchanan is a former presidential candidate and longtime Republican politico who has been widely criticized for his rhetoric, which both National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. and Tucker Carlson concluded crossed the line into anti-Semitism.

Then, after Third Way’s Lily Cohen expressed her desire to see “more Dems calling out antisemitism on their own side with the same fervor” as Ted Cruz and others have for Republicans, Khanna declared, “I am proud to stand with @grahamformaine @ZohranKMamdani & join @hasanthehun feed.”

“The problem is with the neocons in our party who blundered into Iraq, 20 years in Afghanistan, Libya, Gaza, & now support the Iran war. Out with the old guard. We need a new moral direction,” he added.

Khanna’s full-throated endorsement of Graham Platner, a Democrat running for Senate in Maine, is notable given the large Nazi tattoo Platner only recently covered up on his chest, as well as his  admission that he is a “longtime fan” of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Nate Cornacchia.

Moreover, the pride inspired by his appearance on far-left streamer Hasan Piker’s program stands out as odd given Piker’s downplaying of the October 7 surprise attack on Israeli civilians, characterization of Orthodox Jews as being “inbred,” and the comparisons he’s drawn between Zionists and Nazis. There is also the matter of his celebration of the 9/11 terror attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered.

“It was once easy to dismiss Khanna as just another overly ambitious politician. But his recklessness concerning the Epstein affair — fomenting a moral panic the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since the 1980s child sexual abuse hysteria — crosses a line,” concluded Kirchick. “Desperate for attention and willing to engage in the lowest forms of demagoguery to achieve it, Khanna once might have been deemed unfit for public office, but these days, there’s no telling how far he could go.”

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