Why Is NBC Bringing Anti-Gay Xenophobe Pat Buchanan Back To Meet The Press?
Written by Eric Hananoki
Published
NBC's Meet the Press this weekend will host Pat Buchanan, a homophobic and racist commentator. MSNBC parted ways with Buchanan in 2012 following blowback over his book Suicide of a Superpower, which claimed to document how diversity and immigration are ruining the country.
The Sunday show states on its website that it will interview Buchanan about “the return of populism” on the presidential campaign trail. Buchanan's brand of “populism” has long included bigotry against minorities, immigrants, and LGBT people during his career as a political candidate and commentator.
Buchanan has repeatedly defended Adolf Hitler and once labeled him “an individual of great courage.” He claimed “in a way, both sides were right” during the Civil War. He declined to disavow the idea that minorities have inferior genes. He defended a school's ban on interracial dating. He opined that “this has been a country built, basically, by white folks” and falsely claimed only “white males” died at Gettysburg and Normandy. He once claimed “conservatives are the niggers of the Nixon administration” and urged President Nixon not to visit Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow because King was “one of the most divisive men in contemporary history.”
On immigrants, Buchanan claimed America is “committing suicide” while “Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate.” He complained that immigration will turn the U.S. into “a polyglot boarding house for the world, a tangle of squabbling minorities.” He objected to states like California having a majority Hispanic population. He said of Mexican immigrants: “They are militant, and they have no interest, many of them, in becoming American.”
Buchanan repeatedly appeared on a white nationalist radio program. He wrote the foreword to a book compiling the works of a white supremacist. He relied on the work of white supremacists for research in his own work. He praised David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, as having a “portfolio of winning issues.”
Buchanan said “homosexual sex is unnatural and immoral” and “that kind of conduct should be discouraged in a good society.” He's written of same-sex relationships: “In a healthy society, it will be contained, segregated, controlled, and stigmatized, carrying both a legal and social sanction.” He once wrote of AIDS: “The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.”
Despite these remarks -- which represent only a small sampling of Buchanan's toxic rhetoric, including on NBC properties -- NBC is inviting Buchanan back to its airwaves.
Fellow Sunday show host Chris Wallace of Fox said Buchanan has said things “I'm not particularly fond of” including “some very incendiary things about Israel, about Jews, about blacks, about other minorities.” As new CNN Sunday show host Jake Tapper once wrote, Buchanan leaves behind “a trail of racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetorical dung” wherever he goes.
Why is Chuck Todd allowing him back on Meet the Press?
UPDATE:
Todd tweeted in response to Media Matters research fellow Oliver Willis that Buchanan will be on the show “as part of a Trump segment. Trump 2015 and Buchanan 1992 share a lot of similarities on issues.”