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As we already know, Pat Buchanan has been out there pushing a new book of his Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? Buchanan showed up on Hannity's show earlier this week where he was treated to the softball interview I posted about here -- Pat Buchanan: America is Disintegrating Because White America is an Endangered Species.
Needless to say, he didn't get quite the same treatment when he appeared as a guest on Thom Hartmann's radio show this Thursday. The relevant portion of the interview starts at just over three and a half minutes into the video above and the portion quoted below is about eight and a half minutes in.
From Media Matters -- Pat Buchanan Won't Disavow Idea That Minorities Have Inferior Genes:
Yesterday, radio host Thom Hartmann challenged guest Pat Buchanan over his recent writing about minorities and test scores. Hartmann said that "a lot of people are taking what you're saying as code for inferior genes" and twice pressed Buchanan to disavow that theory. Buchanan did not, instead claiming that he doesn't "know anything" about the topic.
From The Thom Hartmann Program:
HARTMANN: A lot of people are taking what you're saying as code for inferior genes. Please tell me that's not what you're talking about.
BUCHANAN: Well look, I'm not -- don't know anything about what genetics or something like that. What I'm saying is, is these are the test scores and we haven't been able to --
HARTMANN: So do you disavow that?
BUCHANAN: Pardon?
HARTMANN: Do you disavow that idea, that concept --
BUCHANAN: Well, I don't know anything about being -- look. The Coleman Report --
HARTMANN: I mean, you're being quoted over on --
BUCHANAN: The Coleman Report, and I think I've got in my book, the Coleman Report said what a child brings to school is far more important than what he finds in schools, in other words, heredity and home environment, nature and nurture. Do I know the differences, or what percentages, or this and that, of course not. I'm not going to get into that. I'm saying is here's the test scores now, and this is the problem, and in our future, quite frankly, Hispanic Americans, and African Americans, because of test scores, because of the dropout rate is fifty percent, they're going to be in the service economy and the rest of us are going to be up there in the knowledge industry and that doesn't make for a united America.
Much, much more that in the Media Matters post with details following this statement up so go read the entire post, but as they noted, Buchanan is actually fully aware of what Hartmann was asking him about, so his denial that he doesn't "know anything about what genetics or something like that" is just flatly false.
While Buchanan didn't disavow the idea, he's written about the matter throughout his career and was forced to clarify a controversial memo regarding the subject he wrote to President Nixon.
The Boston Globe reported in a January 1992 article that as a White House aide, 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."
At the time of the report, Buchanan was running for president and under criticism for his history of controversial racial statements. The Globe reported that "Buchanan said yesterday he does not believe blacks are genetically inferior to whites and did not have that belief in the past. Buchanan said he sent the memo to Nixon as a routine matter of intellectual curiosity."
They wrapped the post up by noting Buchanan's praise for some of the writings of white supremacist Sam Francis on the same topic he denied knowing anything about to Hartmann here:
Near the conclusion of his section on race and education, on page 224, Buchanan quotes the writing of white supremacist Sam Francis, in which Francis writes that "the doctrine of equality is unimportant, because no one save perhaps Pol Pot and Ben Wattenberg really believes in it, and no one, least of all those who profess it most loudly, is seriously motivated by it.... The real meaning of the doctrine of equality is that it serves as a political weapon."
Buchanan eulogized Francis in a May 2005 column, writing, "When God created him, He endowed Sam with a great gift - one of the finest minds of his generation. Sam did not waste it." In Buchanan's book State Of Emergency, as noted by Think Progress' Judd Legum, Buchanan lamented that Francis was fired after he suggested that only whites have the appropriate "genetic endowments" to keep America from collapsing.
