Buchanan, Pat
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hired by koch to help launch Cato?
kpfa 6/22/17 gmu 1st big hire
henry manny, koch, james buchannan
https://kpfa.org/episode/behind-the-news-june-22-2017/
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pete smothered
...
But back to Buchanan: Utilizing the prestige he had amassed as a White House staffer for two powerful Presidents, Buchanan opened his tent to an unholy alliance of anti-semitic and white nationalists on the political fringes. The extremists included William Luther Pierce, whose novel, The Turner Diaries, features the hanging of ‘race-traitors’ (like Caucasians and plantation owners who have sex with African Americans) and bodies dangling from street lamps, while armed white ‘Americans’ who all look like Chris Evans, Austin Butler or Tatum Channing roam from house to house executing miscreants.
The Turner Diaries became a playbook for Timothy McVeigh, the white nationalist later executed for bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Kansas City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 men, women, and children. McVeigh was a follower of Buchanan’s and the Spotlight, a newspaper published weekly by the Liberty Lobby, which supported segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as Buchanan. In many respects, Buchanan was ahead of his time. His calls to fringe groups and armed extremists anticipated Trump’s calls (under Steve Bannon’s advice) to many of the same factions, which culminated in the failed insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Such groups have always existed in America and however fantasy-filled, and weapon-eroticized they may be, a number have maintained their military “readiness” awaiting a call to action by those they considered their superiors....
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RWW
08/25/2025
by
- Michigan state Rep. Josh Schriver announced that he has "sent a letter to President Trump urging him to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Patrick J. Buchanan."
- Jason Rapert is outraged over Colorado Gov. Jared Polis' response to the death of James Dobson: "Governor Polis, you are in the hands of God and will be accountable for your actions and your sin. May you never serve in another elected office position ever again. The posting of this unnecessary personal attack on a man of God who taught the Word of God that you have rebelled against is truly wicked."
- Mark Meckler cheers on Trump's takeover of Washington, DC: "This should happen all over the country. This is what should be forced on mayors all over the country."
- Shane Vaughn cheers on President Trump's threat to send troops to Chicago: "Trump stepping in is not tyranny — it’s the restoration of justice where justice abdicated."
- Jackson Lahmeyer cheers on the Trump administration's raid on the home of John Bolton: "We need more of this. We need this happening every day, multiple times a day."
- Finally, William Wolfe declares that "the Democrats hate God, they hate family, they hate marriage, they hate children, they hate our nation."
an 5 25
More than 100 days into his return to the White House, the conclusion is stark: Donald Trump is no longer the same president he was during his first term. His familiar nationalist and populist rhetoric is now openly paired with an authoritarian turn – one without precedent in US history. He has adopted a neo-imperial view of the economy, treating the global order as a zero-sum contest of winners and losers. In this worldview, cooperation gives way to domination: what matters is power and the accumulation of wealth.
Having withstood two impeachment procedures, numerous lawsuits and at least one assassination attempt, Trump now governs with what can appear to be unchecked authority. To his followers, he has become a hero, a martyr – almost a messianic figure. He no longer sees democracy as a framework to be honoured, but as a tool to legitimize his hold on power. His decisive electoral victory now serves as a mandate to cast aside institutional limits.
Three key features define his style of governance: a radical centralization of executive power grounded in the theory of the “unitary executive”; the politicization of the Department of Justice, used as a weapon against rivals; and the manipulation of federal authority to target cultural, media and educational institutions. His playbook is chaos: unsettle opponents, dominate the media narrative and blur the boundaries of democratic norms. Impulsive and reactionary, Trump often governs in response to Fox News segments or trending posts on Truth Social. Instability has become a strategic tool.
But Trump is not a historical anomaly. While his 2016 victory may have seemed unlikely, his re-election reflects a deeper, long-term transformation rooted in the post-Cold War era.
From an external to an internal enemy
The collapse of the USSR – a structuring external enemy – redirected political confrontation toward the designation of an internal enemy. The culture war has become the dominant ideological battleground, driven by two closely linked forces. On one side, a religious radicalization led by nationalist Christian movements – such as the New Apostolic Reformation – seeks to roll back social progress and promote the vision of an outright theocracy. On the other, growing racial anxiety is fueled by fears of white demographic decline and resistance to civil rights gains.
The commentator Pat Buchanan saw it coming as early as the 1990s., he warned: “There is a cultural war going on for the soul of America… as critical as the Cold War itself.” Too radical for his time, Buchanan championed a white, Christian, conservative US hostile to cosmopolitan elites. Though marginalized then, his ideas laid the groundwork for what would become Trumpism.
Newt Gingrich, who served as Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999, played a pivotal role in reshaping both the Republican party and US politics. A Republican group he chaired famously distributed a pamphlet to Republican candidates titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”, advising them to use uplifting language to describe themselves, and inflammatory terms like “corrupt”, “immoral” and “traitor” to describe their opponents. This aggressive rhetoric redefined political rivals as enemies to be defeated – helping pave the way for a right-wing politics in which winning trumps democratic norms.
At the same time, the rise of a new conservative media ecosystem intensified polarization. The launch of Fox News in 1996, the growth of right-wing talk radio shows like Rush Limbaugh’s and the later explosion of social media gave the US right powerful tools to shape and radicalize public opinion. Today, algorithm-driven information bubbles trap citizens in alternate realities, where misinformation and outrage drown out reasoned debate. This has deepened polarization and fractured society as a whole.
Channeling anger
This ideological and media realignment has unfolded alongside a broader crisis: the unraveling of the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus. Promises of shared prosperity have been replaced by deindustrialization, deepening inequality and widespread resentment. Successive traumas – from 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash to the Covid-19 pandemic – and foreign wars without real victories have eroded public trust in the establishment.
Trump channels this anger. He offers a vision of a restored and idealized America, a rollback of recent social gains, and a reassertion of national identity grounded in religion and race. His populism is not a coherent ideology but an emotional response – born of perceived injustice, humiliation and loss.
Trump is more than a symptom of America’s democratic crisis: he is its most vivid manifestation. He embodies the legacy of the 1990s – a foundational decade of identity grievance, culture wars and media deregulation. Viewed as a political outsider, he has never been judged as a traditional politician, but rather embraced, by some, as the archetypal “self-made man” – a successful businessman and reality TV celebrity.
His rhetoric – transgressive, provocative and often cruel – gives voice to what had been repressed. The humiliation of opponents becomes part of the performance. For his supporters, it’s exhilarating. It breaks taboos, flouts political correctness and feeds the fantasy of reclaiming a lost America.
And he’s no longer alone. With the vocal support of economic and tech elites like Elon Musk – now a central figure in the radicalized right on X – Trumpism has entered a new phase. Together, they’ve outlined a new kind of authoritarian, cultural and digital power, where influence matters more than institutions.
The US re-elected not just a man, but a style, an era and a worldview built on dominance, disruption and disdain for rules. Still, history is unwritten: intoxicated by hubris and undermined by incompetence, Trumpism may yet crash into the wall of reality – with consequences far beyond America’s borders.
Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, Spécialiste de la politique américaine, Sciences Po
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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4 25
REF NyT MAG
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What explains the Trump administration’s radical reversal toward Moscow?
By Jonathan Mahler
April 12, 2025
In 1989, shortly before the fall of communism, Boris Yeltsin — the reformer who would soon become the first freely elected president of post-Soviet Russia — visited a supermarket in Houston, Texas, and was overwhelmed by the dizzying array of meats and vegetables on offer. “What have we done to our poor people?” he later asked an associate traveling with him. The story became instant fodder for the crusade to convert Russia to capitalism.
Now jump ahead to last year, when the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson provided a mirror image of Yeltsin’s supermarket visit, only this time the supermarket was in Moscow. Carlson was in Russia to conduct a sympathetic interview with President Vladimir Putin. While he was there, he went grocery shopping and professed to be similarly overwhelmed by the range of options and affordable prices. The superpowers had traded places. It was America that now apparently needed to be converted — to Putinism. “Coming to a Russian grocery store — ‘the heart of evil’ — and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders,” Carlson said after passing through the checkout line. “That’s how I feel anyway — radicalized.”
President Trump, it seems, has also been radicalized. During his first term, he made no shortage of startlingly pro-Putin comments, and even sided with Russia’s president against his own intelligence agencies. But in the first few months of his second term, Trump has gone much further, overturning decades of American policy toward an adversary virtually overnight. He has claimed that Ukraine was responsible for its own invasion by Russia and berated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, during a televised meeting in the Oval Office. His administration also joined North Korea and several other autocratic governments in refusing to endorse a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for the attack. And he has filled his cabinet with like-minded officials, including his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been described as a “comrade” by Russian state TV.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of this pivot, as Sasha Havlicek, the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes global extremism and disinformation, points out. “If, in fact, we are witnessing a total ideological shift of America away from its post-World War II role as guarantor of the international order and an alignment with Putin and other authoritarian nationalists against the old allies that constituted the liberal world order,” she says, “there couldn’t be anything more dramatic than that.”
Russia has long served as much more than a geopolitical rival for America. It has been an ideological other, a foil that enabled the United States to affirm its own, diametrically different values. In the words of the historian David S. Foglesong, Russia is America’s “imaginary twin” or “dark double,” the sister superpower that the United States is forever either demonizing or trying to remake in its own image. Or at least it was. Trump’s policies and rhetoric seem aimed at nothing less than turning America’s dark double into its kindred soul.
Some administration officials and their allies have characterized this as a strategy — a “reverse Kissinger.” Rather than trying to undermine Russia by making peace with China, the argument goes, Trump is trying to isolate China — an even more daunting rival — by building closer ties to Russia. It’s the America First version of realpolitik. As Vice President JD Vance has said, it would be “ridiculous” for the United States “to push Russia into the hands of the Chinese.”
Others see it as primarily personal. Trump has never made a secret of his affinity for Putin, and the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election only brought the two leaders closer together. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during his meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky. Putin has worked the personal angle. Last month, he told Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, that he went to his local church to pray for Trump when he was shot last summer and gave Witkoff a portrait of the American president that he had commissioned. Witkoff, in turn, eagerly shared these stories in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
Seen through a different lens, though, the reorienting of America’s relationship with its imaginary twin is not about geopolitical maneuvering or the president’s personal proclivities. It’s about the improbable triumph of a set of ideas — political and cultural — that have been bubbling up on the American right for years.
‘The Focus of Evil in the Modern World’
Before Trump’s recent reset, the dark-double framework defined the Russia-U.S. relationship going back to the last decades of the 19th century, when the United States first took up the cause of trying to redeem Russia. In the summer of 1882, an American journalist named James Buel traveled across the country and returned with an account of a “barbarous” nation that desperately needed to be freed from tsarist oppression — “whether with bayonet or psalm-book,” he wrote.
In the decades after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when Russia became the Soviet Union, it morphed into a different, more menacing other — “not just despotic but diabolical,” as Foglesong writes in his book “The American Mission and ‘The Evil Empire’” (2007). The Bolshevik ideology of global revolution represented the ultimate threat to the United States, spurring the paranoia that fueled Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous witch hunts. The specter of nuclear warfare only intensified the panic over the Red Menace — or, as President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union in 1983, “the focus of evil in the modern world.”
The collapse of the Soviet state over the next decade brought a fresh campaign to Americanize Russia by cajoling it to build its post-Communist future around the beacons of democracy and capitalism. Things didn’t work out as either Russia or the United States hoped. By the end of the 20th century, Russia’s G.D.P. had collapsed, its new stock market had crashed, it had defaulted on its foreign loans and a former K.G.B. spy — Putin — had become president.
After his re-election as president in 2012, Putin took Russia in a new direction. He adopted a crusade of his own against Western “decadence” and “the destruction of traditional values,” beginning with a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. “propaganda,” part of an effort to win over conservative Russians who had been disillusioned by their country’s post-Soviet turn toward the West. The familiar pattern seemed destined to repeat itself, and for a while it did. The United States had a new foil, and it was an old foil. Asserting America’s moral superiority in response to Putin’s crackdown on gay rights, President Obama included three retired gay athletes in the official American delegation to the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2013.
Putin has since done just about everything in his power to reinforce Russia’s identity as America’s spiritual adversary, even describing the West as “satanic.” Harking back to the Cold War, he embarked on a global campaign to upend the United States-led international order, creating troll farms that flooded the internet with social media posts designed to spread misinformation and sow discord. At the same time, he reasserted Russia’s imperial ambitions, first annexing Crimea in 2014 and then invading the rest of Ukraine.
And yet with Trump now back in the White House, the cycle of history may finally have been broken.
An Alliance Against Liberalism
Whether he knew it or not when he began his campaign to defend traditional values in 2012, Putin was aligning himself with a small cadre of conservatives inside the United States who shared his disdain for modern liberalism. That common cause would become a genuine alliance.
Its roots can be traced back to 1995 — before Putin was even president — when two Russian sociologists, Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, summoned Allan C. Carlson, an academic and the president of a conservative think tank in Illinois, to Moscow. Carlson had published a book in defense of traditional families, “Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis.” Antonov and Medkov were worried about the population decline in Russia, and were convinced that the solution was contained between the book’s covers.
Out of this meeting sprang a new organization, the World Congress of Families, whose aim was to foster a global network of like-minded conservatives to fight feminism, homosexuality and abortion.
In America, this fight had a prominent spokesman: Patrick J. Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses and a Republican presidential candidate in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Buchanan represented the paleoconservative wing of the party, which was articulating a very different vision of the post-Cold War world from that of its neoconservative rivals.
As Buchanan saw it, the great struggle of the 21st century wasn’t a geopolitical battle between East and West, or freedom and oppression. It was a cultural battle between traditionalists and the secular, multicultural, global elite. In this context, America’s crusade to spread democracy was bound to lead it astray. “If communism was the god that failed the Lost Generation,” he wrote in the early ’90s, “democracy, as ideal form of government, panacea for mankind’s ills, hope of the world, may prove the Golden Calf of this generation.”
Buchanan had a following, but he was very much on the margins of a party dominated by neocons, who saw America’s victory in the Cold War as the decisive triumph of liberal democracy. The post-Cold War world order appeared to be set; history had ended. The attacks of Sept. 11, and the overwhelming bipartisan support for America’s military response to them, only reaffirmed the urgency and righteousness of the cause.
In 2013, Buchanan turned his gaze toward Russia. He had recently published his best-selling book “Suicide of a Superpower,” bemoaning what he saw as America’s ongoing social, moral and cultural disintegration. It was an apocalyptic warning about the country’s declining birthrates, the diminishing influence of Christianity, the vanishing nuclear family and what Buchanan called “third world” immigration. Chapter titles included “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.”
Against this backdrop, Buchanan saw Putin as an inspiration. While Obama condemned the Russian president as an enemy of American values, Buchanan embraced him as one of his own. “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he wrote in 2013 in The American Conservative. “In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” When Russia annexed Crimea the following year, Buchanan characterized the invasion as part of Putin’s divine plan to establish Moscow as “the Godly City of today and command post of the counterreformation against the new paganism.”
Mainstream conservatives distanced themselves from Buchanan — and Putin — but the ground was shifting beneath them. A backlash was brewing on the right against immigration and progressive social change, as well as America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American project to export liberal democracy. A new generation of nativist, reactionary thinkers gravitated toward Putin’s Russia as an ally in their culture war to turn America instead toward an antiglobalist nationalism. Putin’s critiques of Europe’s liberal immigration policies and his talk of rebuilding a Russia with citizens who felt “a spiritual connection to our Motherland” resonated. “In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European,” the right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter said in 2017.
During Trump’s first term, many of the ideas that Coulter and her fellow reactionaries were expressing began migrating toward the Republican Party’s power center. This new, more favorable vision of Russia was developing its own intellectual architecture, one that married isolationism, nationalism and traditionalism with a growing appreciation for autocratic strongmen who were bending their countries to their will.
Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has cracked down on immigration and put in place policies to raise birthrates, has been the most widely and openly admired of these European strongmen. But Putin, too, has his admirers, and they are no longer just fringe characters.
In 2017, Christopher Caldwell, now a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a think tank closely aligned with the Trump movement, paved the way with an address at the conservative Christian Hillsdale College titled “How to Think About Vladimir Putin.” He praised Putin’s refusal to accept a “subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders,” and described him as “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”
Soft Power Pays Hard Dividends
Putin originally embraced the conservative side of the culture war for domestic reasons. It was a way to reassure Russians that he was attuned to their concerns about a rapidly changing world, and to provide a new binding ideology for generations weaned on communism. But this morphed into what Mikhail Zygar, an exiled Russian journalist, has called “a form of statecraft” — a means by which to build support on America’s far right and, in so doing, undermine its politics from within.
Putin’s rhetoric and policies are designed, in part, for American consumption. “He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the 20th century,” Zygar wrote last year in Foreign Affairs.
The strategy seems to have worked out better than even Putin could have imagined. In the many years since Buchanan first praised the Russian president, his fans have moved from the margins of conservative media to the center of White House decision-making. The soft power is paying hard dividends as American foreign policy bends in Russia’s direction.
As ambitious as it is, though, the Trump administration’s Russia reset may have its limits. According to a Quinnipiac poll released in mid-March, only 7 percent of American voters have a favorable opinion of Putin, while 81 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him. Similarly, 55 percent of American voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war in Ukraine, and only 38 percent approve of it. Trump and his cabinet may look at today’s Russia and see a kindred soul. But most of America still sees a dark double.
The right-wing politicians and pundits who view Russia as an ally appear to be a disproportionately powerful minority driving an agenda that is out of step with most of the public they represent. As radical as this particular agenda may seem, the broader phenomenon is one that the United States has seen before. “America’s foreign policy is conducted by elites,” says Jacob Heilbrunn, the author of the 2024 book “America Last,” a history of America’s modern romance with foreign dictators. “You’ve just got a new one that has come into power now.”
The reorientation of America’s Russia policy, then, may say less about the persuasiveness of a set of beliefs than it does about the takeover of the Republican Party by a group of ideologues who have been welcomed in from the fringe. In this sense, they are no different from the neoconservatives and globalists who drew Buchanan’s wrath 20 years ago by committing the United States to unpopular wars in the name of ideology.
Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, has been writing for the magazine since 2001.
See more on: Vladimir Putin, Russia-Ukraine War, Republican Party, Patrick J Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump
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an 4 24
the culture wars now ripping through American politics — especially noticeable in before the last midterm elections, when Trump was trying to lay the groundwork for an authoritarian takeover — arguably began on May 8, 1970 in New York City.
That day happened to be the 25th anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany in World War II. It was also weeks after Richard Nixon expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia. And it was just four days after Ohio National Guardsmen shot dead four students during antiwar protests at Kent State University.
I recall it vividly.
On May 8, 1970, a riot broke out in New York City.
READ:[From 'really rich' to begging: Inside Trump's U-turn on one of his first campaign lies
Around noon, near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street in Lower Manhattan, more than 400 construction workers — steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers, and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the emerging World Trade Center — attacked around 1,000 student demonstrators (including two of my friends) protesting the Vietnam War and the May 4 Kent State shootings.
The workers carried U.S. flags and chanted “USA, All the way” and “America, love it or leave it.” They chased the students through the streets — attacking those who looked like hippies with hard hats and weapons, including tools and steel-toe boots.
I heard about it when several friends from New York who were active in the anti-Vietnam War movement phoned me later that day. To characterize them as upset understates their emotions.
As David Paul Kuhn reports in The Hardhat Riot, the police did little to stop the mayhem. Some even egged on the thuggery. When a group of hardhats moved menacingly toward a Wall Street plaza, a patrolman shouted: “Give ’em hell, boys. Give ’em one for me!”
The workers then stormed a barely-protected City Hall where the mayor’s staff, to the hardhats’ rage, had lowered the flag in honor of the Kent State dead. They pushed their way to the top of the steps and attempted to gain entrance, chanting “Hey, hey, whatcha say? We support the USA!”
Fearing the mob would break in, a person from the mayor’s staff raised the flag.
It was a small precursor to the attack on the U.S. Capitol more than a half-century later.
The workers ripped down the Red Cross flag that was hanging at nearby Trinity Church because they associated the flag with the anti-war protests. They stormed the newly built main Pace University building, smashing lobby windows and beating students and professors with their tools.
More than 100 people were wounded. The typical victim was a 22-year-old white male college student, though one in four was female. Seven police officers were also hurt. Most of the injured required hospital treatment. Six people were arrested, but only one construction worker.
My friends escaped injury but they were traumatized. I remember them describing the rioting construction workers as a “pack of animals.”
The hardhat riot had immediate political consequences. Richard Nixon exploited it for political advantage. It was the first salvo in America’s culture wars.
Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman wrote in his diary: “The college demonstrators have overplayed their hands, evidence is the blue-collar group rising up against them, and [the] president can mobilize them.”
Patrick Buchanan, then a Nixon aide, wrote in a memo to his boss, saying “blue-collar Americans” are “our people now.”
Peter Brennan, then president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, claimed “the unions had nothing to do with” it — although just before the riot, Brennan had held a rally of construction workers to show support for Nixon’s Vietnam policies.
Brennan explained that workers were “fed up” with violence and flag desecration by anti-war demonstrators.
At Nixon’s invitation, Brennan then led a delegation of 22 union leaders, representing more than 300,000 tradesmen, to the White House. They presented Nixon with several hard hats and a flag pin, after which Nixon praised the “labor leaders and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism”.
After the 1972 election, Nixon appointed Brennan labor secretary. Brennan did not distinguish himself in that position. He strongly opposed affirmative action. He also prevented Labor Department officials from investigating allegations of corruption in the Teamsters Union and of its president, Frank Fitzsimmons, who had helped secure labor support for Nixon’s election.
The hardhat riot revealed a deep split in America’s left — in the coalition of workers and progressives that Franklin D. Roosevelt had knitted together in the 1930s, and the wished-for alliance of Blacks, liberals and blue-collar whites in the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide 1964 re-election.
The riot’s class-based and race-based tensions would worsen over the next half century, as America’s upper-middle class and wealthy began pulling away from white Americans without college degrees.
The construction workers who attacked the demonstrators on May 8, 1970, and the police who egged them on, were more likely to have family and friends in Vietnam than the college students who demonstrated. Many were veterans of World War II and Korea. They also lived in the same working-class neighborhoods.
They despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, longhaired, draft-dodging, flag-desecrating snots.
They felt abandoned by the middle class and the college-educated, stiffed by the clever kids with draft deferments, forced to bus their kids to Black neighborhoods they didn’t trust and accept Black kids into their schools, and burdened by an economy no longer delivering the possibility of upward mobility.
As the journalist Pete Hamill observed at the time, the workingman “feels trapped and, even worse, in a society that purports to be democratic, ignored.”
The former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, writing in 1988 about the future of the GOP, arguedthat it should have embraced these growing working-class resentments.
The Republican moment slipped by, I believe, when the GOP refused to take up the challenge from the left on its chosen battleground: the politics of class, culture, religion, and race.”
Three years later, Buchanan openly questioned whether democracy was the best form of government. “The American press is infatuated to the point of intoxication with democracy,” he wrote, comparing the Marine Corps and corporations like IBM to the federal government. “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic principles. Yet who would choose the last as the superior institution?”
Buchanan sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, 1996, and 2000. He lost, of course. But over the course of the 1990s, his ideas began taking root in the GOP.
When I was secretary of labor, I spent much of my time in the Midwest and elsewhere around the country where workers felt abandoned in an economy taken over by Wall Street. I witnessed their anger and resentment. I heard their frustrations.
The nation could have responded, but did not.
NOW READ:[Busted: Paul Gosar campaign consultant linked to antisemitism and white nationalism
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/right-wing-white-male-resentment/
Countless articles by Never Trump conservatives have lamented the demise of Reagan conservatism and Goldwater conservatism in the Republican Party. Such articles often long for the days when Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill could have major policy disagreements while maintaining a cordial relationship — or how now-President Joe Biden, during his decades in the U.S. Senate, could work out bipartisan bills with conservative GOP senators like John McCain and Bob Dole.
Yet according to journalist Nicole Hemmer, there was a dark side of the GOP long before Donald Trump, in 2015, announced that he would be running for president in the 2016 election. In a think piece published by The Atlantic on September 19, Hemmer stresses that parts of the Republican Party had MAGA-like qualities well before Trump’s presidency.
Hemmer recalls that in 1992’s presidential election, two candidates challenged President George H.W. Bush on the right: Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan. While Perot didn’t run as a Republican, Buchanan took on Bush 41 in a GOP presidential primary — and Hemmer obviously considers Buchanan the darker of those two candidates and a much greater influence on Trump and the MAGA movement. Hemmer describes Perot’s campaign as one of “flexible, heterodox politics” rather than “hard-right reactionary politics.”
READ MORE: [How Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 campaign became the blueprint for Trumpism: conservative
“Buchanan, a former communications director in the Reagan White House and a popular television personality, felt unconstrained by party orthodoxies,” Hemmer explains. “He had long professed his belief that the ‘biggest vacuum in American politics today is to the right of Ronald Reagan,’ and he set out to prove that in his 1992 campaign for the Republican nomination. He ran well to the right of Bush, not just taking hardline positions on issues such as immigration — he called for a ‘Buchanan fence’ at the border — and affirmative action, but also, resurrecting themes of the Old Right of the 1930s and ’40s: a closed, cramped vision of an America that needed to be protected from foreign trade, foreign people, and foreign entanglements. He carried out an ‘America First’ campaign that argued against U.S. involvement abroad and denounced free-trade deals such as the newly negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement.”
According to Hemmer, “(Buchanan) also brought a dark note to the campaign, calling for a revolution against a whole slew of enemies: liberals, feminists, immigrants, even Republicans such as George Bush. Running against Bush for the nomination, Buchanan took to calling him ‘King George,’ promising that his supporters, the ‘Buchanan brigade,’ would lead a new American revolution if Buchanan won. Even Buchanan was stunned by how well his message resonated.”
Perot and Buchanan both campaigned on angry right-wing populism in 1992, and both of them were scathing critics of NAFTA. But Buchanan was much more of a culture warrior. Ultimately, Hemmer argues, Buchanan’s 1992 campaign proved more influential in the GOP than Perot’s.
According to Hemmer, “The agenda that the right built over the course of the 1990s would be far more Buchanan than Perot. When an anti-government militia movement gained power in the early ’90s, the right saw it as an opportunity, not a warning…. On issue after issue, the right developed a politics of resentment. Feminism was to blame for flooding the workplace with women who not only competed for wages, but raised complaints about harassment and unequal treatment. Immigrants were to blame for overcrowded schools, high housing costs, and lower wages. Government agents were coming for your guns, your land, your money, and your rights, using immigration policy and affirmative action to ensure that White men would not have the resources or the power they once enjoyed.”
READ MORE: Conservative: ‘Authoritarian’ Ron DeSantis may be even more ‘dangerous’ than Donald Trump
When Trump ran for president in 2016, Hemmer emphasizes, he appealed to a movement of “White male resentment” that had been brewing in the GOP for many years.
“The party had been preparing for a quarter century for a figure like Donald Trump: a bombastic television personality whose solutions to voter frustrations involved pointing at the very same groups that Buchanan once had,” Hemmer observes. “Trump was not an exception; he was simply the next step on a path the right had started down almost three decades before.”
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how Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 campaign became the blueprint for Trumpism: conservative
July 17, 2021
When Donald Trump defeated all of the other Republican candidates in the 2016 GOP presidential primary and went on to defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election — even though
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https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-27-2019/
indymedia DN
tried to hijack 1st anti-globalization protest after seattle, white nat'l dogwhistle
foner 2nd revo 1--15 amend
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/why-nixons-vp-spiro-agnew-attacked-the-new-media-50-years-ago/
no lnx
Why Nixon’s VP Spiro Agnew attacked the new media 50 years ago
Spiro Agnew, Wikipedia
Written by Thomas Alan Schwartz, The Conversation November 8, 2019
Americans witnessed an unprecedented event 50 years ago: live television coverage on all three national networks of a speech by the vice president of the United States.
Speeches by vice presidents never received such attention. But the address on Nov. 13, 1969, by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew to the Midwest Regional Republican Committee Meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, blandly titled “The Responsibilities of Television,” set off a public uproar.
Almost overnight, it made Agnew one of the most significant conservative political leaders in the country.
Agnew, delivering the speech in Des Moines.
‘Querulous criticism’
Agnew argued that the television network news programs, and the“tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men” who produced them, had acquired “a profound influence over public opinion,” with few checks on their “vast power.”
He then attacked their treatment of President Richard Nixon’s recent speech on the Vietnam War, known now as the “Silent Majority” speech.
According to Agnew, after the president finished the “most important address of his administration,” a “small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts” subjected it to instant and “querulous criticism,” demonstrating their outright hostility to the president’s policy.
In Agnew’s view, their opposition was at odds with how the majority of Americans viewed the speech.
Although he said he was not calling for any censorship, Agnew posed the question of whether it was “time that the networks were made more responsive to the views of the nation and more responsible to the people they serve.”
Suspicious of the media
In many respects, Agnew was Donald Trump before Donald Trump. He was a polarizing political figure, beloved by conservatives, hated and mocked by liberals, yet favored as the likely Republican nominee to succeed Richard Nixon.
In his attacks on television news, Agnew struck a chord with conservatives who had long regarded the media with suspicion. Nixon later called Agnew’s speech a “turning point” in his presidency. He described how “within a few hours telegrams began arriving at the White House; the switchboards were tied up all night by people calling to express their relief that someone had finally spoken up.”
The networks themselves calculated that the messages they were receiving were running almost five to one in support of Agnew.
Why did Agnew speak out when he did?
The immediate background to the speech involves the intersection of two developments, both connected to the long, bloody war in Vietnam that appeared to have no end.
The first was the rise of adversarial journalism during the Vietnam War. Before Vietnam most news coverage “tended to be bland and deferential to government.” The government’s lies and false optimism about the war, revealed most dramatically after the losses of the Tet Offensive, fundamentally changed the relationship.
Vietnam, as the historian of journalism Matthew Pressman argues, “established a baseline level of antagonism between the press and the government.”
Most famously, Walter Cronkite, the anchor of CBS News and the “most trusted man in America,” delivered an unusual editorial in February 1968 calling on the Johnson administration to negotiate an end to the war.
Walter Cronkite, delivering his Vietnam editorial.
In the weeks before the Agnew speech, television news provided extensive and overwhelmingly positive coverage of the large antiwar protests, including the October “moratorium” against the war.
The second development was the failure to end the protracted war. Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger tried a variety of military threats and enticement to convince North Vietnam to negotiate. They even launched a secret nuclear alert to intimidate Hanoi.
Nothing worked, and Nixon’s Silent Majority speech was a plea to the American people to give him more time to achieve a “peace with honor” in Vietnam.
The absence of any dramatic new steps toward peace in Nixon’s speech was the main reason the network’s “self-appointed analysts,” including the former Paris negotiator W. Averell Harriman, engaged in the “instant” and “querulous criticism” that Agnew described. Their abrupt dismissal of the speech infuriated Nixon and his aides and motivated them to respond forcefully.
Justified aggression or ‘appeal to prejudice’?
Patrick Buchanan, Nixon’s ultra-conservative speechwriter, encouraged the president to launch an attack on the networks, and drafted the speech for Agnew.Buchanan later remembered that as Nixon read his proposed draft, he heard him mutter, “This’ll tear the scab off those bastards.”
The networks reacted strongly, with NBC’s President Julian Goodman calling it “an appeal to prejudice,” implying that Agnew’s focus on the small group of “privileged men” living in New York was a code for anti-Semitism.
Both Goodman and CBS President Frank Stanton accused Agnew of trying to undermine the freedom of the press, especially in the attempt to “intimidate a news medium which depends for its existence upon government licenses.”
Some journalists saw this as an overreaction, and viewed Agnew’s attack as part of the larger challenge to the country’s traditional institutions that the war in Vietnam had catalyzed.
Richard Harwood and Laurence Stern wrote in the Washington Post that “the issue of media performance is not going to evaporate in this country simply because publishers and network presidents wrap themselves in the First Amendment and sneer at Spiro Agnew. For the facts are that the media are as blemished as any other institution in this society and that there is growing public concern over their performance.”
But CBS’s renowned news magazine, “60 Minutes,” devoted an hour-long special to rebutting Agnew’s criticism, featuring Walter Cronkite speaking at a Chamber of Commerce function in his hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri.
Cronkite rejected the idea that the media overreacted, and maintained that “What we’re defending is the people’s right to know, and we have to be at the frontline of that battle at all times.”
Populist attacks
This early version of a government war on the news media did not give Agnew what he and the president wanted. Although the networks eventually abandoned the “instant analysis” of presidential speeches in favor of giving the opposition “equal time” to respond, TV network news continued to retain the trust of most Americans as the most objective source for their news well into the 1970s, particularly during the Watergate period.
And when Agnew himself resigned in disgrace, brought down by his own greed in a bribery scandal, his assault on TV news seemed discredited as well.
But Agnew had demonstrated the vulnerability of the mass media to populist attacks, firing some of the first shots in a culture war that persists to this day.
Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.
Thomas Alan Schwartz, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
==
:{White supremacist Pat Buchanan will co-star on public television’s relaunched McLaughlin Group:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:flex;height:1.5em;margin-right:1em;width:1.5em"):}:08/14/19
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pat-buchanan-donald-trump-stole-my-playbook
In Buchanan’s 2001 book, Death of the West, he had a chapter title, “White Party.”
...Trump rode this wave of white rage and fear to the White House. He had many criers on that damnable highway. Extreme right-wing opinion columnist and occasional Republican presidential primary candidate Pat Buchanan was and is one of the loudest and most panicked. Writing in Monday's New York Times,Charles Blow observed how:
Last week Pat Buchanan was on “The Laura Ingraham Show” to discuss the humanitarian crisis Donald Trump has created at the border by ripping children away from their parents.
He was not particularly sympathetic to these families’ plights, instead choosing to focus on thedemographic danger facing whiteness: “This is the great issue of our time. And, the real question is whether Europe has the will and the capacity, and America has the capacity to halt the invasion of the countries until they change the character — political, social, racial, ethnic — character of the country entirely.”
A few days earlier on his blog, he expanded on this point: “The existential question, however, thus remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization?”He continued: “You cannot stop these sentiments of people who want to live together with their own and they want their borders protected.” Make no mistake here, Buchanan is talking about protecting white dominance, white culture, white majorities and white power.
In describing Western liberals’ aversions to instituting racist, xenophobic immigration policies, he wrote: “We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western suicide.” He ended with this: “Trump may be on the wrong side politically and emotionally of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents. But on the mega-issue — the Third World invasion of the West — he is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future.”
Blow continued:
Strip all the other rationales away from this draconian immigration policy. This is at the core: White extinction anxiety, white displacement anxiety, white minority anxiety. This is the fear and anxiety Trump is playing to.
Much of this echoes an observation I made in 2015 where I explained how:
Pat Buchananpossesses gifted insight into powerful appeal of Donald Trump for the Republican base. Both men are nativist, xenophobic, right-wing populists who understand the allure of white alienation and racial resentment in the post civil rights era. Pat Buchanan is more of a “culture warrior” than Donald Trump. But like George Wallace in the 1960s, the Know-Nothings in the 19th century and the Black Legion in the 1930s, Buchanan and Trump are recent iterations in a long history of right-wing demagoguery and false populism in American politics.
Stephen Miller, a driving force behind the current zero-tolerance border crossing policy and one of Trump's closest advisers, also shares Buchanan's worries and anger about a White America "under siege" by waves of "inassimilable" nonwhites.
And in an appearance on Fox News last Friday,Michael Anton (who is one of Donald Trump's other white supremacist advisers) made the Trump administration's de facto crusade of "blood and soil" old fashioned white racism even more clear when he said:
The United States has a huge heart. We’ve welcomed millions of people, including my ancestors, but we’ve got to have limits or we don’t have a country.
Anton was in the "safe space" provided by Fox News where he would feel comfortable enough to make such a vile racist comment without being properly challenged.
This echoes Anton's infamous white supremacist "The Flight 93 Election" screed from 2016 where he argued that:
“The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”
Anton's comments on Sunday are just a reflection of how Fox News and its hosts, such as Tucker Carlson and other members of the right-wing commentariat, trade in white supremacist talking points on a near-daily basis.
Of course, these claims and worries that whiteness (and white people) in America will be eclipsed or annihilated are ahistorical, lack proper social and political context in the present, and in total are nightmares of shadow and fog without any real substance.
Throughout American history the boundaries of who is considered "white" have changed to include new groups of people in response to the demands and needs of white elites to maintain power.
The Irish, Italians, the Polish, Jews, Russians, and other Europeans have, over the centuries and decades, completed this journey from the periphery of whiteness to being fully considered white.
If American history is any guide, a good number of Hispanics and Latinos (as well as Pacific Islanders and other East Asians) will likely complete some version of that journey from honorary to full whiteness as well.
White Americans will not be a "minority" in America. They will still be the single largest group.
Moreover, this hysteria about a unified black and brown horde that will act in lockstep to pursue shared interests against white Americans is based on a fiction. Blacks, Hispanics and Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and other nonwhite groups and individuals do not share a hive mind; they are not the Borg from "Star Trek"; their interests and goals are not always the same.
Most importantly, white Americans, regardless of demographic change, will still control every major social, political, economic and cultural institution in the United States.
Population numbers may fluctuate, but this deep institutional control of power in America has historically and will continue to remain in the hands of White America.
The concept of "race" does not reflect empirical reality as it actually exists.
Racism and white supremacy are based on a concept which is a "true lie" that dominant society makes real, both for those who benefit from racial inequality as well as those who suffer under it.
In all, Charles Blow's sharp observation that, "This is at the core: White extinction anxiety, white displacement anxiety, white minority anxiety. This is the fear and anxiety Trump is playing to" actually rests up something deeper, more existential, and in many ways more sinister both because of the collective psychology involved and what such a conclusion then mandates as a necessary and reasonable response to an existential threat.
It is not just white anxiety about changing demographics which drives Trumpism and the Republican Party's white identity politics. It is actually a fear that black people specifically, and nonwhites more generally, will seek revenge against white people once the former are the numerically larger group. This conclusion is based on a very narrow and distorted understanding of power as a type of zero sum game where it is considered "human nature" for one group to dominate another by any means necessary.
Here white racial paranoia — as a function of the absurd race concept — is based on contradictions and hypocrisy that nonetheless somehow cohere together.
Social science research, public polling, and other data consistently shows a deep divide in America between how whites and nonwhites understand the impact of racism, both in their personal lives and across society as a whole. Many of these differences are truly ridiculous and bizarre.
Before the Civil War and through to Reconstruction and afterwards, white Americans were afraid of "negro domination" if black slaves and then free people were given access to the vote and other civil rights. During the legal white supremacy of American Apartheid and Jim and Jane Crow, white Americans, by large and consistent margins, told pollsters that black Americans had an equal opportunity to succeed in America.
These divides continue into the present with white Americans — despite mountains of empirical research and increasingly also near instantaneous real-time video evidence — are largely still in denial about the impact of racism on nonwhites more generally, and of how cultural institutions such as the police, education, banking, finance, real estate, and the political system through gerrymandering and other voter suppression techniques, discriminate against nonwhites.
Against all facts and evidence, matters have become so absurd in the age of Donald Trump that almost half of white Americans actually believe that they are more likely to be victims of racism than are black and brown people. Moreover, Donald Trump and the Republican Party's voters are so drunk on white victimology that they think that it is white people and not nonwhites who are the "real victims" of racial discrimination in America.
All of these delusions revolve around a basic contradiction: many white Americans have convinced themselves that black and brown people exaggerate, are too sensitive, and outright lie about their experiences as victims of racism and white privilege. Yet, this racism — which according to the white gaze does not really exist except in extreme forms such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis — somehow does exist, but manifests itself in the form of so-called "reverse racism" against white people.
Furthermore, if black and brown people have been exaggerating, lying about, and misrepresenting the realities of racism and white supremacy in America, then why would white folks have anything at all to fear from racism themselves, not to mention "revenge" for sins and crimes and transgressions which actually never took place?
It all boggles the mind. This does not make the cocktail of white privilege and white supremacy any less potent a social and political drug.
What does history actually teach us?
In the United States black Americans and other people of color have only wanted full and equal rights with white Americans. For example, from the Civil War to the great experiment in democracy that was Reconstruction, black Americans worked very hard to expand opportunities for all people, including poor and working class whites. This dynamic continues into the present where public opinion polls show that black and brown American consistently support policies which would expand the social safety net, civil rights and economic justice and opportunity for the average American — on both sides of the color line. Black and brown people are also on the frontlines of saving American democracy from the fascism and authoritarianism of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Black (and brown) Americans, as a group, have never sought to retaliate against white Americans — even when such an act and desire would have been perfectly reasonable, just, and yes, moral. But there are millions of white Americans in Trump's camp and also outside of it who are terrified that with increasing racial and ethnic diversity they will be victims of racially-motivated revenge and violence. This makes these millions of white voters easily manipulated by racist demagogues who use political sadism to stab at the worst parts of human nature. In response, it will take require a united front of black and brown and white folks to save the United States from Donald Trump and the Republican Party's fascist and authoritarian campaign against democracy. Unfortunately, too many white Americans would rather live under an authoritarian regime that supposedly empowers white people like them than a real democracy which provides equal opportunities for all people.
==
==
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nancy-maclean/democracy-in-chains/
How American democracy is being destroyed by powerful libertarians.
Focusing on Nobel Prize–winning economist James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013), whom Charles Koch funded and championed, MacLean (History and Public Policy/Duke Univ.; The American Women's Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents, 2008, etc.) elaborates on the revelations about the Koch brothers’ insidious, dangerous manipulation of American politics that has been presented forcefully by Jane Mayer in Dark Money (2016) and Daniel Schulman in Sons of Wichita (2014). Based on Buchanan’s papers as well as published sources, MacLean creates a chilling portrait of an arrogant, uncompromising, and unforgiving man, stolid in his mission to “save capitalism from democracy.”
To Charles Koch, he seemed a kindred spirit. Buchananbelieved that growth of government undermines individual freedom. Government overreach, he maintained, included public schools, the Postal Service, prisons, labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, guarantees of voting rights, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the graduated income tax. Government’s only role, Buchanan and his followers believe, “is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense.”
MacLean traces Buchanan’s career at several universities—the last was the fledging George Mason, which the Wall Street Journal called “the Pentagon of conservative academia”—where he reigned over his own economics institutes, backed generously by wealthy libertarians; and his embrace by exclusive think tanks, such as the Mont Pelerin Society, the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, the Club for Growth, and the Heritage Foundation, among many other Koch-funded organizations. Besides influence at home, Buchanan helped design a constitution for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a document that ensured constraint of majority power. MacLean offers a cogent yet disturbing analysis of libertarians’ current efforts to rewrite the social contract and manipulate citizens’ beliefs—e.g., by spreading “junk pseudo science” about climate change.
An unsettling exposé of the depth and breadth of the libertarian agenda.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
==
===
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nancy-maclean/democracy-in-chains/
How American democracy is being destroyed by powerful libertarians.
Focusing on Nobel Prize–winning economist James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013), whom Charles Koch funded and championed, MacLean (History and Public Policy/Duke Univ.; The American Women's Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents, 2008, etc.) elaborates on the revelations about the Koch brothers’ insidious, dangerous manipulation of American politics that has been presented forcefully by Jane Mayer in Dark Money (2016) and Daniel Schulman in Sons of Wichita (2014). Based on Buchanan’s papers as well as published sources, MacLean creates a chilling portrait of an arrogant, uncompromising, and unforgiving man, stolid in his mission to “save capitalism from democracy.”
To Charles Koch, he seemed a kindred spirit. Buchananbelieved that growth of government undermines individual freedom. Government overreach, he maintained, included public schools, the Postal Service, prisons, labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, guarantees of voting rights, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the graduated income tax. Government’s only role, Buchanan and his followers believe, “is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense.”
MacLean traces Buchanan’s career at several universities—the last was thefledging George Mason, which the Wall Street Journal called “the Pentagon of conservative academia”—where he reigned over his own economics institutes, backed generously by wealthy libertarians; and his embrace by exclusive think tanks, such as the Mont Pelerin Society, the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, the Club for Growth, and the Heritage Foundation, among many other Koch-funded organizations. Besides influence at home, Buchanan helped design a constitution for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a document that ensured constraint of majority power. MacLean offers a cogent yet disturbing analysis of libertarians’ current efforts to rewrite the social contract and manipulate citizens’ beliefs—e.g., by spreading “junk pseudo science” about climate change.
An unsettling exposé of the depth and breadth of the libertarian agenda.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
==
==
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/pat-buchanan-supports-donald-trump
By now, one would think that Pat Buchanan would have long ago been relegated to the trash heap of history. Buchanan, a senior advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and who was once considered the go-to guy for paleoconservatives, seemed to have faded in importance from those heady days when he co-hosted CNN’s Crossfire, and gave the rousing and incendiary culture war speech at the 1992 Republican Party convention.
As The Australian’s Nikki Savva recently wrote, Buchanan “ran against the first George Bush for the Republican nomination, promising to build a wall or dig a giant ditch along the border between the US and Mexico. So it’s not a new idea. The same people cheering Trump now applauded Buchanan then — it’s just their numbers have grown.” Now, thanks to Donald Trump’s candidacy, and the band of white nationalists supporting him, Buchanan is in full pundefocating mode.
According to People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch, Buchanan, the author of the new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority,” is all in with Trump’s claim that if he loses it will be because the election is rigged. And, furthermore, according to Buchanan, Trump’s loss could signal the beginning of a revolution in America.
In a WND column headlined “Yes, The System Is Rigged,” Buchanan – whose column is syndicated in a number of mainstream newspapers -- maintains that if the election “ends with a Clintonite restoration and a ratification of the same old Beltway policies, would that not suggest there is something fraudulent about American democracy, something rotten in the state?”
Buchanan: “The Czechs had their Prague Spring. The Tunisians and Egyptians their Arab Spring. When do we have our American Spring? The Brits had their ‘Brexit’ and declared independence of an arrogant superstate in Brussels. How do we liberate ourselves from a Beltway superstate that is more powerful and resistant to democratic change? Our CIA, NGOs and National Endowment for Democracy all beaver away for ‘regime change’ in faraway lands whose rulers displease us. How do we effect ‘regime change’ here at home?”
He goes on to quote John F. Kennedy saying, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” and closes with a reference to Credence Clearwater, “But if Hillary Clinton takes power, and continues America on her present course, which a majority of Americans rejected in the primaries, there is going to a bad moon rising.”
In a previous column headlined “Path for Trump is still open,” Buchanan argued that the election is still winnable if Republicans band together, and he has the audacity to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. advising to “Keep your eyes on the prize.”
Interestingly, in a post-GOP convention column, Slate’s Reihan Salam argued that Trump missed a golden opportunity to soften his image: “He should have taken a page from Pat Buchanan, a man who is in many ways Trump’s spiritual predecessor. Though both Buchanan and Trump have indulged in inflammatory racial rhetoric, and though both stood against the conservative mainstream to champion economic nationalism, the two men couldn’t be further apart in their intellectual sophistication and their sense of poetry. And while Buchanan came to his blend of traditionalism and nationalism honestly, one still gets the sense that Trump simply saw an opportunity to exploit the GOP’s working-class primary electorate and went for it.”
In addition to his “inflammatory racial rhetoric,” in recent years, Buchanan has not been shy in expressing his admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin. As Boulder Weekly’s Dave Anderson recently pointed out, in a 2013 column titled “Is Putin One of Us?” Buchanan “noted that while a ‘de-Christianized’ United States has been embracing ‘homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values,’ the Russian president has stood up for traditional values. He praised Putin’s disparaging of homosexuals, feminists and immigrants.”
“Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm,” Buchanan wrote. He also reassured readers that “Putin says his mother had him secretly baptized as a baby and professes to be a Christian.”
In 2011, Leonard Zeskind, president of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, told me that while Buchanan no longer had “the influence he did in the 1990s when he commanded a following inside the Republican Party, he remains an influential, even cutting edge figure among a significant sector of extreme paleoconservatives."
Trump’s candidacy has given Buchanan multiple opportunities to weigh in on the presidential race, and advance his paleo ideas. And with Trump tweeting, “I love watching these poor, pathetic people (pundits) on television working so hard and so seriously to try and figure me out. They can't!” GOP leaders may be yearning for those good old days of yesteryear when Buchanan’s culture war rhetoric dominated the Party’s populist/nationalist politics. After all, as Salam admiringly pointed out, while Buchanan infamously sprinkled his speeches with “inflammatory racial rhetoric,” unlike Trump, he at least had a poetic sensibility.
==
But we did not stop with scientists. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. sought out spies and informants who had participated in genocide. For these agencies, engaging in murder was acceptable as long as the recruits did not lie about their record. Ultimately, most of these “informants” never provided any valuable information. Some even offered bogus reports.
But these intelligence agencies remained their greatest protectors. In the 1980s, when the Justice Department began to hunt war criminals who had lied in order to enter this country, both agencies actively obstructed the investigations. They were also protected by White House officials such as Pat Buchanan, then a top aide to Ronald Reagan, who denounced the Justice Department’s “revenge obsessed” and “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” as dupes of the Soviets. And the largest group of Nazis who entered America simply slipped in through “the back door,” according to Lichtblau. They gamed the system and immigrated as “refugees,” starting new lives as thousands of people perished in the Allied camps.
Lichtblau brings ample investigative skills and an elegant writing style to this unsavory but important story. “The Nazis Next Door” is a captivating book rooted in first-rate research.
THE NAZIS NEXT DOOR
How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men
By Eric Lichtblau
Illustrated. 266 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.
==
Last night, Pat Buchanan wrote these words: “My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.”
Those of us who have fought to keep hatred and bigotry off the airwaves let out a collective sigh: It could not have come soon enough.
Voices from Color of Change and CREDO Mobile along with tens of thousands of Media Matters supporters made this possible. 2/12
===
But Pratt and the GOA were involved in more than just state politics. In the early 1980s, Pratt and the Gun Owners of America were outspoken supporters of the white rulers in South Africa during apartheid, calling a press conference in 1984 to present "evidence" that allegedly tied Bishop Desmond Tutu to an effort to violently overthrow the white minority regime in the country. "Bishop Tutu's idea of Christianity, rather than one of bringing reconciliation of the divisions within South Africa is one that would welcome the extension of the atheist slave state from Russia to his own country," Pratt said. Bishop Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that same year.
At the time, Pratt was on the ALEC board.
Also in 1984, while he sat on the ALEC board, Pratt and GOA presented a plaque to notorious El Salvador death squad leader Robert D'Aubuisson in 1984 for his "continuing efforts for freedom in the face of communist aggression which is an inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere." D'Aubuisson, known as "Blowtorch Bob" for his use of a blowtorch to torture political opponents, also was involved in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
In 1990 Pratt wrote a book titled "Armed People Victorious" based on his study of death squads in Guatemala and the Philippines, and advocated for similar "citizen defense patrols" in the United States. The idea reportedly caught on in 1992, when Pratt addressed a three-day meeting ofneo-Nazis and Christian Adherents organized by white supremacist Pete Peters. He shared the stage with a former Ku Klux Klan leader and an Aryan Nation official.
Pratt's lengthy ties to white supremacists forced him to step down from his role as co-chairman of Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential campaign, after his racist connections were publicized by the Center for Public Integrity and others.
===
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan
new auto?bio: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/how-buchanan-helped-nixon-become-more-nixonian
Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan (born November 2, 1938) is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's *Crossfire*. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election.
He co-founded *The American Conservative* magazine and launched a foundation named The American Cause.[1]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan#cite_note-0) He has been published in *Human Events*, National Review, The Nation and *Rolling Stone*. He is currently a political commentator on the MSNBC cable network including the show *Morning Joe* and a regular on *The McLaughlin Group*.
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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_Buchanan
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hmmn
http://www.realchange.org/buchanan.htm
Allied with Fringe Anti-Semite Socialists -- Did Venereal Disease Keep Him Out of the Army? -- Watergate -- dirty tricks, IRS abuses, obstruction of justice -- Disgruntled Staff -- Hypocrite -- Praise for Hitler -- Racist -- Holocaust Revisionism -- Anti-Semitic Statements -- Defender of Nazis -- Sheltered Washington Insider -- All talk, no action (the Republican Jesse Jackson) -- Flirting With Fascism-- Assaulted Police Officers -- Good Points -- Character -- Quotes -- Sources
Nixon's "Dirty Tricks" against Political Opponents
Buchanan was not just another aide when it came to dirty tricks -- he was one of the leaders in pushing them. According to John Dean, one of Nixon's top aides, Buchanan relentlessly pushed underhanded methods, talking H.R. Haldeman's assistant Gordon Strachan into it, and even popularized the very phrase "political hardball." His view was that opponents would probably nail you, so you should hit them first, harder.
According to Anthony Lukas' book "Nightmare", Buchanan took part in Nixon's "Dirty Tricks" another way -- editing a phony pamphlet pretending to be from a liberal Democrats group that attacked Muskie. (His assistant Ken Khachigian wrote it.) Many investigators also think Buchanan or Khachigian wrote the infamous "Canuck letter", a forged letter claiming Muskie has slandered French Canadians as "Cannocks" (sic). The Canuck letter was one of two slams against Muskie that caused the Democratic front runner to break down crying in frustration at a New Hampshire news conference, crippling his candidacy.
In the current campaign, Steve Forbes' strong lead in Iowa and New Hampshire disappeared in part because of a series of anonymous phone calls attacking him on abortion, and from phony "polls" whose questions insinuated attacks against Forbes. Buchanan's campaign and Bob Dole's campaign are the prime suspects (Dole has also pulled similar dirty tricks in tight spots in the past); in fact they may well have worked together, as the campaigns admit to doing in Louisiana, where their combined effort aborted Phil Gramm's campaign.
Also, in Louisiana (where only Buchanan and Phil Gramm campaigned), a flier was distributed pointing out that Gramm had married an "Asiatic" after leaving his "white wife". (Gramm's 2nd wife is Korean.) Buchanan's campaign workers have been accused of distributing it, and no one else was running. -- **Back to the top**
blog stone is going to hell
Though both Labash and Toobin indulge Stone greatly in his claimed achievements, they shy away from this one. Toobin does not mention it at all; Labash gives it mention, then seemingly appears to wave it away: “After having recruited Pat Buchanan to seek the nod (“You have to beat somebody,” Stone says), he pushed Trump into the race. Trump relentlessly attacked Buchanan as having “a love affair with Adolf Hitler,” but ended up folding. A weakened Buchanan went on to help the Reform party implode, and Republicans suffered no real third-party threat, as they had in 1992, thus helping Stone accomplish his objective. If, in fact, that was his objective. These things are often hard to keep track of with Roger Stone.”207(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-eight/#ftnote207) I’m not quite sure why there’s the hesitation – “If, in fact, that was his objective” – since Stone has been very explicit that this was his objective, and the elimination of a vote splitting party on the right has an obvious tangible benefit for the Republicans. The man who goes further than both writers is, once again, Wayne Barrett, with “The Sex Scandal That Put Bush in the White House”: “The Buchanan saga remains important not only because it reveals the seamy underside of Bush II’s ascent to power, but because it shows how the GOP virtually eliminated a national centrist party that could’ve altered the 2004 race.”208(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-eight/#ftnote208)
Roger Stone would meet with his old colleague from the Nixon White House, Pat Buchanan, and encourage him to leave the Republicans and run for the head of the Reform Party. Buchanan declined, but things were soon going badly for him in Republican primaries, where the Iowa straw poll had him behind far right fringe candidate Gary Bauer. Stone commissioned a poll showing Buchanan doing very well on the Reform party ticket and sent the results to Buchanan. A close associate of Buchanan, Pat Choate, would become chairman of the party, and Buchanan would head up the ticket, but only after a very nasty public fight. Donald Trump, who had briefly made public consideration of heading the ticket, called Buchanan a nazi. So did Jesse Ventura, who’d successfully won the governorship of Minnesota on the Reform Party line, and who left the Reform Party after Buchanan was selected. Bay Buchanan, sister and close confidant of the candidate, was bewildered by Stone’s actions, saying she “doesn’t understand why he would want us in the Reform Party in the first place” and then use proxies like Trump and Ventura to go after the candidate as a nazi. Choate would describe the efforts by Trump and Stone as a “Republican dirty trick”, with the intent “to disgust people and drive them away from the Reform Party. They were doing everything in their power to make a mess. You had Ventura leaving and Trump all over TV saying that Buchanan loved Hitler, ignorant statements.”209(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-eight/#ftnote209)
Stone would also go after Buchanan with an old rumor that had dogged the candidate when he ran for president in 1992 and 1996. The rumor was that he’d fathered an illegitimate child while he was an undergrad in Georgetown, sometime between 1957 and 1961. In 2000, there was another element. Buchanan, in 1992, had made a series of payments, personal checks from him to his sister, who in turn sent personal checks to an aide, who then delivered cashier checks to a Washington lawyer. Pat Buchanan would call the baby story an “unsubstantiated rumor”. Bay Buchnanan would call the story “false”. Of the payments, Pat Buchanan would say “I’m not going to go into that. I don’t know the details of anything. It deals with a private matter. We did nothing wrong.” Bay Buchanan would confirm that these payments had been made. She would also confirm another detail: that the lawyer to whom the payments were made had once been married to a woman Pat Buchanan had dated when he’d been at Georgetown210(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-eight/#ftnote210).
Roger Stone would aggressively push the illegitimate baby story early on in the 2000 campaign. He was explicit and public in his belief in the story. “Everyone who worked for Nixon knew about” this story, said Stone. “There’s no doubt this illegitimate child story is true. My understanding is that Buchanan supported the child and made educational payments. It would be honorable.” Whenever Buchanan did well, the illegitimate baby story would get pushed. The nasty fight within the Reform Party eliminated the possibility that Perot would run for the ticket, which was always a worry for Bush during the 2000 election. Buchanan would purge the Reform Party of Perot loyalists. This would further intensify strife within the party, and cause Perot to endorse Bush. Buchanan’s ten million dollars in matching funds were used entirely in a near unnoticed media buy in Texas. After the election, Buchanan would say “I’m glad we didn’t take Bush down with us.” Buchanan would deny the possibility that the illegitimate baby story played a role in any of his decisions. “If you’ve got Roger trying to smear me,” said Buchanan, “it had no influence over what I did. I wasn’t intimidated into backing off the campaign by anyone or anything.”211(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-eight/#ftnote211) As for Bay Buchanan’s bewilderment, the part where she “doesn’t understand why he would want us in the Reform Party in the first place,” we have the answer openly given in the opening of a piece about the Reform Party of the time, a “Politics & Prose” column by Scott Stossel:
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