Politics

WaPo Magazine editor: Pat Buchanan’s book like ‘someone from the KKK had written it’

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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During Thursday night’s “The O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post Magazine contributing editor Cathy Areu called syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan  ‘a white supremacist” and “a white extremist.”

Areu cited a controversy that saw Buchanan exiled from MSNBC, allegedly because network executives objected to his latest book, “Suicide of a Superpower.”

Host Bill O’Reilly argued that MSNBC, a left-leaning cable news outlet, acted unfairly in banishing one of its very few conservative voices for articulating views about the loss of America’s “melting pot” of self-assimilating immigrants.

To Areu, however, the criticism was fair and the book demonstrated Buchanan’s racism.

“A lot of people were suspicious that he was a white supremacist, a white extremist,” Areu said. “And by writing this book it’s clear.”

O’Reilly noted that MSNBC was aware of Buchanan’s views before hiring him, since the commentator has been making many of the same arguments for many years.

“Yes, but it was never so obvious,” Areu replied. “He hinted at it and it was kind of there. But by writing this book it is in black and white. It is written by, as I see it, a white extremist — and if I didn’t know he had written it, I would have someone from the KKK had written it.”

Areu, who has a book of her own called “Latino Wisdom,” also said MSNBC should “absolutely” have fired Buchanan.

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Jeff Poor