Dear Pat Buchanan: You're Not Helping With Your Anti-Latino Vitriol

Dear Pat, 

I like you, I really do. You were a ground-breaking pundit on “The MacLaughlin Group” and “The Capitol Gang” THIRTY YEARS AGO.  But, something happened after your bitter, fruitless and destructive presidential runs in 1992 and 1996. You became a caricature and it isn’t pretty. 

And now, just as conservatives are gaining traction in their principled opposition to the “Gang of Eight” amnesty monstrosity known as “Immigration Reform,” you chime in with your opinion that can only be understood as culturally-based prejudice against Latinos. 

This week on “The Andrea Tantaros Show,” you embraced your nativist leanings and threw a Molotov cocktail onto those of us opposing the amnesty bill on the high-minded and popular grounds of basic fairness, rule of law, national security and skepticism of government effectiveness. Not to be lost on the sideline, enter the attention-starved Buchanan with Anti-Latino vitriol: 

“You put 100 million Hispanic folks in the United States and, say, 70 million on the southwest border. That becomes as much as part of Mexico as it is the United States. If they have a different language, different culture, a different faith — basically you get two peoples. And two peoples eventually become two countries. This is what I see as the future of America — the Balkanization and the disintegration of a country which become one nation back around 1960 when all the immigrants who came from Eastern and Southern Europe, 1890-1920, had been assimilated and American-ized. We all had gone through the Depression together, heard radio together, went through World War II together and American television — that brought us all together. And now we’re coming apart.”

Well, I will give you a little credit, at least you didn’t mention the color of “Hispanic Folks'” skin. This is exactly the kind of divisive argument that gives fuel to the Left’s attack against opposition to amnesty as being rooted in some sort of ant-Latino, nativist hate. 

Mr. Buchanan, I understand it must be hard to be fired by the likes of MSNBC, but please understand, you were their foolish caricature of an angry white man conservative for a reason. And now, to be honest, we don’t want you playing that clownish role any more. You’re not helping. You’re not helping at all. 

But seriously, great job thirty years ago on MacLaughlin… wish you would have left it there before you started killing trees for the sole purpose of making the case for the Third Reich. 

Sincerely, 

Larry O’Connor (And not the official position of Breitbart News, as far as I know)

Listen to the entire radio interview here: