Pat Buchanan Out at MSNBC

Conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, known for offending LGBT people as well as racial and religious minorities, is not coming back to MSNBC.

Buchanan has been on suspension for four months after having been a contributor to the cable network for several years. MSNBC announced today that he will not be back, the Associated Press reports.

Buchanan, a syndicated columnist who once was an aide to President Nixon and later sought the presidency himself, has never made a secret of his ultra-right-wing views, but opposition to his presence on MSNBC grew after the publication of his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower, in October. The book includes chapters lamenting "The Death of Christian America" and "The End of White America," and in it Buchanan also calls marriage rights for gay couples "an absurd notion of equality." He has come under fire as well for columns suggesting that the United States should not have become involved in World War II.

In a column posted online today and excerpted by watchdog group Media Matters, Buchanan describes himself as the victim of a "new blacklist," run by groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, Anti-Defamation League, and Color of Change. He writes, "Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their 'smelly little orthodoxies.' They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more. Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers."

For further reading, Media Matters has compiled some of Buchanan's choice comments on LGBT people and others. And Talking Points Memo offers a dozen quotes from Suicide of a Superpower that it calls "pretty racist or just crazy."