Controversial author and pundit Pat Buchanan went to Fox News on Friday for his first television appearance since his stormy departure from MSNBC the day before. Speaking to Sean Hannity, Buchanan lashed out at his critics and staunchly defended the book that got him kicked off of the network he had called home for ten years.
The book, "Suicide of a Superpower," was published in October. Almost immediately, Buchanan was roasted for writing chapters such as the one entitled "The End of White America," and for appearing on a white nationalist radio show to promote the book. Gay rights and Jewish and civil rights groups launched a campaign against him. MSNBC president Phil Griffin said that sections of the book were not "appropriate for the national dialogue" and kept Buchanan off the air for months until letting him go.
Buchanan still has friends at MSNBC -- Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Chris Matthews all made public statements about their regret over his departure -- but he turned to another friend, Hannity, on Friday. Before appearing on Hannity's Fox News show, he called into his radio show on Friday afternoon, where he said that his departure from MSNBC was "not my idea."
On Fox News, Buchanan repeated an argument he'd made in a Thursday column: that a left-wing witchhunt had hounded him off the air.
"I think they're engaged in a blacklist, Sean, a blacklist of conservative and traditionalist thought," he said. Hannity agreed, saying that Media Matters and others were at "the root of an organized campaign to...ultimately silence conservatives."
"There are elements in our society and they are predominantly on the hard left that say it's no longer enough to challenge and contradict or defeat or fight these fellas in arguments," Buchanan said. "We've got to smear them, stigmatize them as racists or homophobic and then we've gotta silence and censor them and the way we do it is go after the media outlets that put them on the air...this is un-American what is going on right now."
Hannity noted that Buchanan's views have not changed in the years that MSNBC has employed him. "So what happened here?" he asked. Buchanan said that MSNBC was worried about the persuasiveness of his words.
"They can't be afraid of me," he said. "I'm not going to be President of the United States. They are afraid of the ideas we express because they're afraid of the people."
Hannity then quizzed Buchanan about the chapter in his book called "The End of White America." Buchanan said that he was merely trying to push back against the idea that the end of the country's white majority was a good thing.
"Why can everybody else celebrate this and say it's wonderful, and I can't even write about it without being blacklisted?" he said. "...I don't know why they say this is going to be better when there's a smaller percentage of white folks."
Hannity asked if Buchanan really meant to warn against cultural, and not racial, shifts in the country. Buchanan rejected that idea.
"If you remove the ethnic core of the country...I think you imperil the unity of the country and the culture," he said. "...My point is, an ethnic core -- in other words the fact that we were a Western and European people predominantly and we had 10 percent African Americans -- this was one of the strengths of this country as well as the culture."
Watch Part 1 above, and Part 2 below.
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