Public television to bring back racist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semite Pat Buchanan as show panelist

Pat Buchanan, a noted white nationalist, racist, anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, Islamophobe, homophobe who even President Donald Trump once denounced for being too pro-Hitler, is coming back to public television.

Buchanan will be a regular panelist on the relaunched political discussion show The McLaughlin Group, which Maryland Public Television announced this week it will revive and co-produce. He was a regular panelist on the show for many decades; it went off the air in 2016 following the death of host John McLaughlin.

Media Matters for America, a progressive research organization, reported on the reboot on Wednesday and noted Buchanan’s long history of opposing those who are not straight white Christians:

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.”

A spokesperson for Maryland Public Television did not immediate respond to a ThinkProgress inquiry about Buchanan’s compensation and views, but a representative of the network did tell Media Matters: “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 served in various roles in the administrations of Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in both 1992 and 1996 and was Reform Party nominee in 2000.