Why MSNBC Dumped Pat Buchanan: His 10 Most Outrageous Statements

By Adam Peck/Think Progress

Yesterday, Pat Buchanan announced that his tenure as a commentator at MSNBC was finally over, ending months of speculation about his absence from his once-frequent perch aside morning anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

Calls for Buchanan’s firing by groups like Color of Change, Credo, and Media Matters had been loud and growing, following years of controversial, offensive and outright bigoted statements made by Buchanan without apology or remorse. Here is a look back at 10 of the most offensive and outrageous statements made by Pat Buchanan:

1. Wanted to close the borders to protect white dominance. As he wrote in his 2006 book State of Emergency: “If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built.”

2. Blamed lower test scores on minorities. In his most recent book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, he blames minorities for dragging down the country’s test scores. “[T]he decline in academic test scores here at home and in international competition is likely to continue, as more and more of the children taking those tests will be African-American and Hispanic.

3. Claimed Jerry Sandusky’s atrocities are because of “Homosexual marriage.”Buchanan appeared on a right-wing radio show on November 15 to make some convoluted comparisons: “Let’s take this Penn State thing…these horrors, there’s an organization that marches in the gay pride parade in New York called—used to—called the North American Man Boy Love Association, which advocated voluntary sex along the lines of exactly what was going on at Penn State. Many of our political icons have marched in that parade right behind that NAMBLA float […] This is now, homosexual marriage is now the civil rights cause of the decade.”

4. Said the Jewish population in the United States dropped in the 90s because Jews aborted all their babies. Buchanan explains that the decline in the American Jewish population during the 1990s (a decline that a Brandeis studysays never occurred), “is a result of the collective decision of Jews themselves. From Betty Friedan to Gloria Steinem in the 1970s to Ruth Bader Ginsburg today, Jewish women have led the battle for abortion rights. The community followed.”

5. Asserted Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people including 69 teens in Norway, “may have been right.” Buchanan called Breivik a coward, evil, and cold-blooded, and then proceeded to defend his twisted rationale for the killings: “As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.”

6. Claimed that all great nations punish the gays. In a Human Events column, Buchanan attacked California’s 9th Circuit Judge Vaughn Walker after his ruling of Proposition 8 as unconstitutional as a “judicial tyrant,” before going on to explain that “through history, all the great religions have condemned homosexuality and all the great nations have proscribed or punished it. None ever placed homosexual liaisons on the same plane as traditional marriage, which is the bedrock institution of any healthy society.

7. Penned “The Affirmative Action Nobel.” That’s the title of Buchanan’s October 13, 2009 column on Townhall.com in which he claims that President Obama’s Nobel Prize was simply the result of affirmative action. And the column only got worse from there: “They have reinforced the impression that Obama is someone who is forever being given prizes — Ivy League scholarships, law review editorships, prime-time speaking slots at national conventions — he did not earn.”

8. Argued that Poland and the United Kingdom had it coming in World War II.Buchanan seems to suggest in a 2009 column that World War II—and all the atrocities that accompanied it—was really the fault of Poland and Britain, for refusing to engage in diplomacy with Germany. “Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britainand her empire would come to Poland’s rescue.”

9. Dabbled in Holocaust denial. Pat Buchanan danced alarmingly close to denying key facts of the Holocaust. In a 1990 column for the New York Post, he defended convicted Nazi war criminal Ivan Demjanjuk (whom he latercompared to Jesus Christ) against charges from Holocaust survivors that he was guilty of murder by accusing the survivors of misremembering all of it: “This so-called ‘Holocaust Survivor Syndrome’ involves ‘group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.’ Reportedly, half of the 20,000 survivor testimonies in Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem are considered ‘unreliable,’ not to be used in trials[…]The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.”

10. Argued Hitler was an individual of “great courage.” That’s just one of the quotes that the Anti-Defamation League attributes to Buchanan in theircompendium of offensive remarks from Buchanan over the years. In 1977, he qualified his labeling of Hitler as racist and anti-semitic by adding that “he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him[…]His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.”

With views like this, Buchanan would probably be a nice, cozy fit for Fox News.

MSNBC OUSTS CONTRIBUTOR PAT BUCHANAN OVER RACIST BOOK

By Marie Diamond/Think Progress


Conservative contributor Pat Buchanan’s tenure at MSNBC may have finally come to an end. APreports that MSNBC president Phil Griffin has indicated the controversial former presidential candidate will not be allowed back on the network after the release of his latest book. “Suicide of a Superpower” has been roundly condemned for its racially-charged content, including chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.” Griffin said, “When Pat was on his book tour, because of the content of the book, I didn’t think it should be part of the national dialogue much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.” As ThinkProgress has reported, Buchanan has a long history of bigotry and has made many offensive statements while in the network’s employ. 275,000 people signed a petition calling on MSNBC to fire him.

Highlights From Pat Buchanan's Bigotry Tour

by Bradley Herring, Jon Salvia, & Doug Stauffer/Media Matters

While promoting his new book "Suicide of a Superpower," MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan has made the rounds on talk radio defending his past anti-LGBT bigotry, knowingly appearing on a pro-white radio show, and refusing to disavow genetic theories of racial superiority and inferiority.
Visit http://mediamatters.org/action/buchanan/ to take action.

Pat Buchanan: The Supreme Court Is Way Too Diverse

by Simon Maloy/Media Matters

In 1971, Pat Buchanan wrote a memo to his then-boss, Richard Nixon, advising the president to "stop concentrating on the 'media's minorities' (Blacks, Mexican Americans, Spanish-speaking)" as part of his reelection bid and instead make plays for Irish, Italian, and Eastern European votes. Part of the strategy Buchanan devised was to use a Supreme Court nomination to appeal to Italian Americans. "Give those fellows the 'Jewish seat' or the 'black seat' on the Court when it becomes available," Buchanan counseled.

Forty years later, Buchanan is still clamoring for a Supreme Court with fewer minorities, even as he foretells the death of white America, using some indelicate demographic analysis-cum-butchery to argue that minorities are overrepresented on the high court.

In his new book, Suicide Of A Superpower, Buchanan argues that increased diversity in America, and the concomitant decline of the long-held white majority, is slowly and inexorably destroying the country. He lays much of the blame at the feet of affirmative action programs, and casts the Republican opposition to Sonia Sotomayor's nomination as a long-overdue "backlash" to the "regime of racial and ethnic entitlements."

Opposition to race, ethnic, and gender preferences was behind the thirty-one GOP Senate votes against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. On the only two previous court nominations by Democratic presidents in forty years, the Senate voted 87-9 for Stephen Breyer and 96-3 for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To conservatives, the Sotomayor nomination was an Obama declaration that affirmative action is forever. [page 156]

(Buchanan's treatment of Sotomayor in his book is actually tamer than his commentary during her nomination, when he called her an "affirmative action pick," an "anti-white, liberal judicial activist," and a "quota queen" who subscribes to "tribal justice.")

His digs at Sotomayor were just a set-up for Buchanan's broader argument on the ethnic dynamics of Supreme Court nominations, which is fairly confusing and silly. On page 251, Buchanan nods at Nixon and Gerald Ford for being "the last presidents to maintain WASP hegemony on the court" and stays true to his 1971 ethnic analysis, writing:

Even before Nixon, however, Democrats were into the "new" ethnic politics. Most of the older ethnics -- Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, Greeks -- were out. Since 1940, no Democratic president has named an Irish Catholic to the Court. No Democratic president has ever named an Italian or Polish Catholic. [page 251]

He goes on to ding the Democrats for nominating, since 1962, "one African American, one Puerto Rican, and five Jews. This is the Democratic Party's idea of diversity on the Court. It might also be labeled: no white Christians need apply." But after critiquing the Democrats for ignoring Italians and Catholics, he complains that Bush's nominations of Catholics (one of whom is Italian) left the Court with no Protestants:

In replacing Rehnquist and O'Connor with John Roberts and Samuel Alito, George W. Bush replaced two white Protestants with two white Catholics, one of whom is only the second Italian American nominated. Thus the Court today consists of six Catholics and three Jews, but not a single Protestant for the first time in U.S. history, although Protestants make up one-half of our entire population.

[...]

For the most underrepresented group on the Supreme Court is evangelical Christians. More numerous than Catholics and Jews combined, who hold all nine seats, Evangelicals have not held a single seat in modern times. George W. Bush tried to remedy this with his nomination of Harriet Miers, but failed.[pages 252, 253]

That's all Buchanan had to say about Harriet Miers. You'll recall that Harriet Miers' nomination was scuttled by conservatives who lambasted her as wildly unqualified. You'll also recall that Pat Buchanan disliked the nomination of Sotomayor so much because he considered her an unqualified jurist who was nominated based solely on her background.

Buchanan's landed himself in trouble in the past for this sort of ethnic analysis, most famously when hecomplained that Elena Kagan's nomination meant that the Court would have way too many Jews, given their percentage of the total population. And it's ridiculous for Buchanan to suggest that the Court has somehow become an experiment in diversity run amok.

Using his own seats-versus-population metric, one immediately notices that white men remain the overrepresented majority on the Court. John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer represent 55 percent of Supreme Court Justices even though white males account for just 36 percent of the population. Blacks and Hispanics make up a combined 32 percent of the total population, but have just 22 percent combined representation on the Supreme Court.

And, of course, if you stretch the timeline out a bit, you'll see that of the 112 people who have served as a Justice of the Supreme Court, all but six have been white men. That the (very) recent cracks in that power structure are enough to send Pat Buchanan into a sepulchral gloom about the death of America says a lot more about Buchanan that it does the health of the nation.

PAT BUCHANAN DECRIES LACK OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR ‘WHITE MALES’

From Think Progress

showing selective concern for the number of white men killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan took his white man’s grievance road show to the Laura Ingraham program today, where he lambasted the Obama administration’s effort to hire more minorities to the civil service. He complained that, if anything, there are too many people of color in the federal bureaucracy as it is. Saying minorities are “inordinately overrepresented” in the civil service, Buchanan said there’s “affirmative action for women, for Hispanics, and for blacks, but none for white males.” The oppressed majority’s numbers “are diminishing, dramatically,” he warned. Listen here:

In fact, racial minorities and women are underrepresented in the federal civil service.

MSNBC Contributor Pat Buchanan’s New Book Includes Chapter Entitled ‘The End of White America’

By Tanya Somanader/Think Progress

MSNBC contributor and long-standing bigot Pat Buchanan has a new book coming out called: Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? This upbeat future “best-seller” will hit the shelves in October, but this morning, Politico Playbook provided those waiting with race-baited breath a preview of the wisdom within. Chapter 4, entitled “The End of White America,” lauds:

“[The] radicalization of the working and middle class, such as occurred in the Truman-McCarthy era, during the George Wallace campaigns, and in the anti-amnesty firestorm that killed the Bush-Kennedy-McCain push for a path to citizenship for illegal aliens.”.

To Buchanan — a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans — these “movements” shared a “populist rage” and a “sense that they are losing their country. And they are right.” George Wallace, of course, was the stauchly pro-segregationist former governor of Alabama and presidental candidate, know for his most famous quote: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Other chapters of Buchanan’s book include, “The Death of Christian America,” which explains President Obama’s “campaign to expel Christianity;” and “Demographic Winter,” which links the West’s downfall to the fact that “children are no longer desirable” here.

Top ten crazy sh*t Pat Buchanan says

By Katie Halper/Raw Story

Talking to Reverand Al Sharpton this week, Pat Buchanan described Obama as "your boy." But while some became outraged at his comments, they came as no surprise to others more familiar with Buchanan's rich history of bigotry. Below are 10 of his most outrageously bigoted comments on everything from African-Americans to Jews to immigrants to women and beyond.

1. Obama has benefited from being African-American.
First, Buchanan said, "Look, if Barack Obama thinks there‘s no correlation between the fact he‘s an African-American and his career has been so spectacular, he would be as delusional as George W. Bush saying the fact, he‘s president of the United States."

Then he told political analyst, author and blogger Keli Goff, an African American woman, to "shut up." In all fairness he only asked her to shut up "for a second" and added a "please."

2. White People built America

Buchanan gave voice to the voiceless white men, explaining that affirmative action is a way to increase diversity at the expense of downtrodden white males, who he says built this country. "This has been a country built basically by white folks," he said, adding that white people were "90 percent of the entire nation in 1960, when I was growing up." (It was actually 85%.)

3. White people are to the Supreme Court as black people are to Olympic track races

As if the previous clip weren't enough, Buchanan then suggested that white people are just naturally better at being Supreme Court justices, just as "black folks" happen to be the fastest runners: "But if I look at the U.S. track team in the Olympics, and they're all black folks, I don't automatically assume it's discrimination. I will say, "I think maybe those are the fastest guys we got, that maybe they're the fastest guys in the country, maybe they're the fastest in the world."

4. Pedophiles are all gay

When Eleanor Clift asked Buchanan, "Have you renounced and rejected the Catholic priests that have disappointed you over the years?" he responded, "You mean the ones involved in this gay stuff? You're dead right." When John McLaughlin clarified, "Pat, they're not necessarily gay," Pat responded "It's little kids."

But that wasn't his first time conflating gay men and pedophiles. In reference to Mark Foley, the Congressman who sexually harassed several House pages, Pat focused on the real problem -- the fact that this man is a "flamer." Talking to Joe Scarborough, Pat said, "I mean, look, we are now hearing that this flamer, Mr. Foley, was going after kids as early as 19 -- I mean, 20 -- I mean, 1998. I mean, you knew Foley. Did you know he was this kind of flamer who was after pages?"

5. The minorities are "invading"

Buchanan warned MSNBC host Joe Scarborough that "We got an invasion of our country, and you‘re going to lose this country, Joe, if you do not stop this invasion which is altering the character of the country! It‘s turning us basically into what Teddy Roosevelt called a tangle of... of squalling minorities!"

6. Hitler was a genius and the Holocaust is exaggerated

In a column designed to promote his book Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War", Buchanan described Hitler as "an individual of great courage.... Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." Buchanan also openly doubts that Jews were gassed to death in Treblinka, writing that, "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody."

7. AIDS is God's punishment for being gay

In addition to calling gay people "sodomites," Buchanan once wrote, "The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution on the gays." On another occasion, he added that "AIDS is nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature."

8. Women are not discriminated against and housework is liberating

On women, Buchanan wrote: "Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism." And in his book Right from the Beginning Pat added that "The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer."

9. Segregation kept politics from being too polarizing

In Right from the Beginning, Buchanan wrote "There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." But, as Nixon's White House adviser, Buchanan told his boss not to visit Coretta Scott King because it would "outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse.... Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history."

10. Immigrants are killing "us"

On This Week With David Brinkley in 1991, Buchanan said "If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?"

More recently in his book Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America ApartPat warned "America [Is] Committing Suicide" while "Asian, African, And Latin American Children Come To Inherit The Estate." And this past month, in response to the killings spree in Norway, Pat wrote "As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right."