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New Public TV Star Pat Buchanan Crusaded To Defund PBS

New Public TV Star Pat Buchanan Crusaded To Defund PBS

Pat Buchanan, a white supremacist and anti-LGBTQ bigot, will soon co-star in public television’s relaunch of The McLaughlin Group. Buchanan has spent decades calling for the defunding of public broadcasting. He even made it an issue in his 1992 presidential campaign by attacking PBS for having “glorified homosexuality” because it aired a documentary about gay Black men.

PBS member station Maryland Public Television (MPT) recently announced that it “will market, promote, and distribute the program nationally through an agreement with American Public Television, a leading syndicator of programming for U.S. public television stations. The McLaughlin Group will begin airing exclusively on public television stations nationwide and digital platforms in January 2020.” The program, which was briefly relaunched last year on Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s D.C. station, also featured Buchanan as a panelist in its prior iterations.

Media Matters criticized MPT for giving a platform to Buchanan given his toxic history. Buchanan, for instance, has complained that the United States is “committing suicide” because “Asian, African, and Latin American children” are replacing whites; said that undocumented immigrants are conducting a “third world invasion” of the country; defended Adolf Hitler as “an individual of great courage” who didn’t want to go to war; and argued that homosexuality should be “contained, segregated, controlled, and stigmatized.”

Baltimore Sun TV/media critic David Zurawik rebuked MPT for Buchanan’s inclusion, writing: “I cannot help thinking: Just what America needs right now, another platform for an incendiary voice from the right who predates Donald Trump on some of the president’s most controversial views. And he’s brought to you by public television.” Esquire writer Charles Pierce also criticized the station for bringing back Buchanan at a time when white supremacy is “literally getting people killed.”

A spokesperson for the station gave the following statement to Media Matters in response to questions about Buchanan’s history: “Public media provides a big tent for the expression of many points of view. The McLaughlin Group has been a long-time staple on public TV. It’s a program series viewers appreciate for its wide range of views and perspectives, as well as the lively debate on issues that takes place among its panelists.” McLaughlin Group host and conservative writer Tom Rogan, meanwhile, attacked Media Matters as “being insane as usual.”

Buchanan has been one of the most vocal critics of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the federal government-funded nonprofit which provides support for public broadcasting. Buchanan himself has frequently appeared on public broadcasting, including on the original McLaughlin Group, which aired on many PBS stations. (Like with the upcoming relaunch, PBS did not produce the original McLaughlin Group.)

When Buchanan unsuccessfully ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, he aired a bigoted campaign ad attacking public broadcasting because it aired a pro-gay documentary.

In 1989, Black documentarian and gay rights activist Marlon T. Riggs released the film Tongues Untied. The American Film Institute wrote this year that the film “broke new ground by mixing poetry, music, performance and Riggs’ autobiographical revelations. Giving voice to communities of black gay men as they confront racism, homophobia, and marginalization, the film was embraced by black gay audiences for its authentic representation of style and culture, as well its fierce response to oppression.”

Buchanan, however, demonized the film and its inclusion on public television. As The Associated Press noted at the time, he produced a campaign ad featuring “scenes of undressed gay black men from a Public Broadcasting System documentary ‘Tongues Untied’ that was partially subsidized by the National Endowment of the Arts.” A narrator stated: “In the last three years the Bush administration has invested our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art too shocking to show. This so-called art has glorified homosexuality, exploited children and perverted the image of Jesus Christ.” Buchanan’s 1992 campaign specifically opposed federal funding for the arts. In an April 9, 1992, CNN interview (via Nexis) about the ad, campaign chair Bay Buchanan said of arts funding: “It shouldn’t be federal government level at all. … This is something that should be supported by the private sector and if it doesn’t hold up, it means the community doesn’t want it.”

PBS stated at the time of Buchanan’s ad: “It’s unfortunate that the ad presents images out of context. It’s ironic that the film addresses the issue of tolerance.”

Riggs responded to Buchanan in a March 6, 1992, New York Times op-ed, which began: “Patrick Buchanan’s most controversial campaign ad has given politics a new cast of characters to demonize, then scapegoat. The specter of Willie Horton has returned, but this time, at least in Mr. Buchanan’s distorted view, he is a leather-clad bare-chested, sadomasochistic homosexual dancing shamelessly in the street.” Riggs died in 1994 at the age of 37 from AIDS complications.

Buchanan also fought against public broadcasting while working in politics as an aide to President Richard Nixon. He wrote in his 2017 book Nixon’s White House Wars that “taxpayer TV was becoming an upholstered playpen for liberal broadcasters” and that he had unsuccessfully “urged Nixon to terminate all federal funding. After he left office, he told me he should have done so, leaving those who cherish what public broadcasting has on offer to pay for it themselves.”

He has repeated those calls to defund public television as a commentator. (Media Matters has campaigned against efforts to defund public broadcasting in the past.)

During a February 15, 2005, edition of MSNBC’s Scarborough Country (via Nexis), while discussing controversy over a PBS cartoon featuring lesbian parents, Buchanan said: “All government funding ought to be phased out. Then PBS, like us, Joe, ought to be allowed to do what it wants to do, put on the programs it wants, as long as we the taxpayers are not paying for it. And I think that’s the solution to PBS.” In an October 2010 syndicated column, Buchanan urged congressional Republicans to defund PBS and NPR (which have purportedly shown “consistently leftist bias”), saying that if they don’t, “the tea party folks should start recruiting candidates to run against GOP incumbents in 2012.”

Pat Buchanan, White Supremacist, To Co-Star On PBS’s Relaunched McLaughlin Group

Pat Buchanan, White Supremacist, To Co-Star On PBS’s Relaunched McLaughlin Group

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

Pat Buchanan is a white supremacist who has complained that the United States is “committing suicide” because “Asian, African, and Latin American children” are replacing whites; said that undocumented immigrants are conducting a “third world invasion” of the country; defended Adolf Hitler as “an individual of great courage” who didn’t want to go to war; and argued that homosexuality should be “contained, segregated, controlled, and stigmatized.”

Maryland Public Television (MPT) will feature him in a public affairs program starting next month.

The public television station announced on August 12 that it will relaunch The McLaughlin Group in the Maryland and Washington, D.C., area in September. MPT also plans to expand the program nationally in January 2020 “through an agreement with American Public Television.” The program was briefly relaunched last year on WJLA, Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s D.C. station. The weekly program will feature host Tom Rogan and panelists Buchanan, Eleanor Clift, and Clarence Page, as well as guest panelists. Clift, Page, and Buchanan were panelists on the original McLaughlin Group, which was hosted by the late John McLaughlin.

Buchanan is a former aide to President Richard Nixon and a longtime media personality who worked for MSNBC and CNN. He also ran for president as a Republican and third party candidate.

In 2000, he won the Reform Party’s nomination. At the time, Donald Trump said of Buchanan: “He’s a Hitler lover. I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the blacks. He doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.” In 2016, Buchanan said that “Trump has raised the very issues I raised in the early nineties.” Trump has flip-flopped on Buchanan, praising him for being “way ahead of your time!” and quoting him on immigration.

Media Matters asked MPT about Buchanan’s history of white supremacist and anti-LGBTQ comments. A spokesperson for the station responded with the following statement: “Public media provides a big tent for the expression of many points of view. The McLaughlin Group has been a long-time staple on public TV. It’s a program series viewers appreciate for its wide range of views and perspectives, as well as the lively debate on issues that takes place among its panelists.”

Buchanan is a white supremacist who has pushed virulently racist rhetoric.

  • Buchanan said that the United States is “committing suicide” by “not reproducing itself” while “Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate.”

  • Buchanan has repeatedly referred to undocumented immigrants as invaders. His 2006 book is titled State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. He said on Fox News: “You’ve got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country.”

  • Buchanan declined to disavow the idea that people of color have inferior genes compared to white people when pressed by a radio host. And as a Nixon aide, The Boston Globe reported, Buchanan “suggested in a memo to President Nixon that efforts to integrate the U.S. might only result in ‘perpetual friction’ because blacks and the poor may be genetically inferior to middle-class whites.”

  • Buchanan has repeatedly defended Adolf Hitler, including claiming that he was “an individual of great courage” and that he didn’t want war. He also complained that the Supreme Court had too many Jewish justices after Eleana Kagan was nominated to the court.

  • Buchanan defended Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial dating (the prohibition was removed in 2000).

  • Buchanan was asked if he had a problem with California becoming “majority Hispanic, majority Latino.”  He replied: “Yes, I do. Yes, I do. If their — because of the Mexican situation, Mexico has a claim on this country.” He also complained that immigration would turn the country into “a polyglot boarding house for the world, a tangle of minosquabbling rities.” He additionally warned against the country becoming “multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic,” explaining: “I prefer the kind — I grew up in a different country.”

  • Buchanan said that “in a way, both sides were right” during the Civil War.

  • Buchanan falsely claimed that “this has been a country built, basically, by white folks” and that only “white males” died at the battles at Gettysburg and Normandy.

  • Buchanan said that “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. … We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

Buchanan also hates LGBTQ people. He has claimed that gay people are “sodomites” and said they are “literally hell-bent on satanism and suicide.” He falsely claimed that homosexuality is a “disorder” that can be handled with therapy (attempting to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity — also known as conversion therapy — is a discredited and harmful practice). And he said that in “a healthy society, [homosexuality] will be contained, segregated, controlled, and stigmatized.”

More on Pat Buchanan’s history, and what Maryland Public Television is bringing to television sets across the country, can be found here.

Update (8/15/19): McLaughlin Group host and conservative writer Tom Rogan responded to this post by tweeting: “Media Matters being insane as usual.”

Trump Wished For A Whiter America All Along

Trump Wished For A Whiter America All Along

So the cover has now been ripped off the rationalizations about President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, the tissue paper peeled away from his insistence that he only wanted to get rid of terrorists, rapists and drug-dealers. Back during the campaign, you’ll recall, Trump and his supporters insisted that their goal was to rid the country of criminals who were sneaking in illegally.

Even then, most voters knew better. Trump was clearly pandering to those white Americans who were unhappy with the cultural changes of the last half-century, including the shifting demographics that are weakening their political and social influence. Trump’s election was, in large measure, a backlash against the first black president.

Now, Trump has enthusiastically embraced a new Senate proposal that would limit legal immigration, with a goal of cutting the number of immigrants in half within 10 years. It’s refreshing, actually, to have this agenda out in the open: Trump and his allies want to make America white again.

That’s a longstanding goal of some of his closer compatriots, including his chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Indeed, Bannon’s views are more xenophobic than those of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA).

Their bill would limit the ability of naturalized American citizens and legal residents to bring in their relatives, something current law generously allows. They would grant preferences to English-speakers, business owners and the highly educated.

Bannon, by contrast, once ranted that “engineering schools are all full of people from South Asia and East Asia. … They’re coming in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, he claimed, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because all these foreign students come.”

That’s of a piece with the nationalism of some of the Republican Party’s more xenophobic thinkers. Several of them have complained for decades about a change in immigration policy pushed through by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in the mid-1960s. It allowed people from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East to come to the United States in large numbers, rather than restricting legal access mostly to people from Western Europe, as was the case before.

The ultraconservative Pat Buchanan wrote a book called Suicide of a Superpower, in which he forecasts a swift decline for a nation that has allowed itself, in his view, to be overrun by people of color. Journalist Peter Brimelow — himself an immigrant from Great Britain — founded a web-based magazine called VDARE, which traffics in ugly racial stereotypes and longs for a whiter America.

Cotton and Perdue claim that their bill is copied from policies put in place by Canada and Australia, both of which use a “merit-based” system that awards points for job skills and English-language proficiency. But both of those countries take in more immigrants, based on their populations, than the United States does. (Immigrants account for about 22 percent of Australia’s population, about 20 percent of Canada’s and about 13 percent of ours, according to the Migration Policy Institute.) The United States is not in danger of having its social safety net overwhelmed by foreigners.

Still, there are thoughtful conservatives — among them, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, an immigrant from Canada — who argue that the United States would be better served by an immigration policy that favors those who are better educated. Indeed, research does show that some low-skilled Americans may be aced out of entry-level jobs by low-skilled immigrants.

But most economists believe that we are better off with an immigration policy that welcomes newcomers. Many of those low-skilled immigrants take jobs that Americans simply won’t do — jobs such as plucking chickens and harvesting crops. Besides, immigrants tend to have more children than native-born citizens, which has helped the United States avoid the economic slump that befalls countries with too many elderly retirees and not enough working-age adults.

Of course, for many Trump supporters, all those black and brown babies are the problem. It doesn’t matter how hard their parents work or how well they speak English. They make the country look different — and that, apparently, is unacceptable.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

Pat Buchanan Saw Trump Coming

Pat Buchanan Saw Trump Coming

During the 1992 Republican National Convention, conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan created a firestorm. In what would later come to be known as his “culture war” speech, Buchanan excoriated the country’s supposed moral decline, calling for an evangelical victory in the “religious war going on … for the soul of America.”

Buchanan—perhaps more than anyone else—should have known that the ascendance of someone like Donald to the nomination would only be a matter of time. The inflammatory, nationalist rhetoric Trump spewed during the Republican primaries can be traced back to Buchanan’s 1992 challenge against George H.W. Bush.

On the campaign trail, Buchanan linked the Los Angeles riots to immigration problems and suggested that Zulu immigrants would create more problems than British ones. At his convention speech, he railed against “environmental extremists who put insects, rats and birds ahead of families, workers and jobs.” Buchanan proposed building “structures” along the U.S.-Mexico border while Trump was still building skyscrapers in Manhattan.

This time, though, these ideas are actually working: While Buchanan’s diatribes against free trade and immigration only saw the former Nixon speechwriter pushed to the fringes by the Republican establishment, they have now allowed Trump to hijack the GOP.

“The people who like the Donald remember America as it was and don’t really like what it’s become,” he told The Daily Beast in June. “If you think America was a good country you grew up in and you prefer it to now, a lot of people think you’re racist, homophobic, and bigoted. By now we’ve been called lots of names. These are the cuss words of a dying establishment.”

Trump’s success capitalized on the fears of the white-working class, who resent the country’s growing multiculturalism and stagnating industry. While Buchanan focused on abortion and gay rights—two issues on which Trump is arguably less of a demagogue—the central tenets of his political views have always been anti-trade and anti-immigration.

In an opinion column last December, Buchanan wrote “Trump’s success tells us that the American people really do not celebrate ‘globalization.’ […] They want people here illegally to be sent back, the borders secured and a moratorium imposed on Muslim immigration until we fix the broken system.”

Interestingly enough, though, Buchanan’s recent political history also shows that Trump wasn’t the most likely candidate to take over his throne of white nationalism.

After coming in a distant second to Bush in ’92 and then Bob Dole in ’96, Buchanan also competed with none other than Donald Trump for the Reform Party nomination in 2000. But true to his reputation for shifting political identities over the years, The Donald was not quite on board with Buchanan’s nativist orthodoxies back then.

Trump spoke about the virtues of “appreciating different cultures” and went after Buchanan for his hateful remarks against nearly every marginalized group in the country. At the time, he even compared Buchanan to “Attila the Hun” and called him a “neo-Nazi.” (Buchanan’s platform then is nearly identical to Trump’s platform now, BuzzFeed has reported.)

As a result, “I was relatively astonished when he came out against trade and immigration—and to Make America First—that’s on my hats,” Buchanan said, according to The Daily Beast. 

Despite his astonishment, Buchanan probably couldn’t be happier: Whereas his 1992 speech was a conciliatory gesture for a primary loser, a racist will finally close out a Republican convention—only a quarter-century later.

Who cares if Donald plagiarized his style?

 

Photo: Pat Buchanan via Wikimedia Commons