I had no
idea! Were the authors of U.S. History books lying liberals going all the
way to when we were in high school, or was I just not paying
attention?
The
Marine Hymn ''To the shores of Tripoli"....... Interesting concise history
lesson and a good reminder. A bit long but very good
reading!
A 232
Year History of our fight against Islam & why it is no longer taught in our
public schools...
When
Thomas Jefferson saw there was no negotiating with Muslims, he formed what is
now the Marines (sea going soldiers). These Marines were attached to U. S.
Merchant vessels. When the Muslims attacked U.S. merchant vessels they were
repulsed by armed soldiers, but there is more.
The
Marines followed the Muslims back to their villages and killed every man, woman,
and child in the village.
It didn't
take long for the Muslims to leave U.S. Merchant vessels
alone.
English
and French merchant vessels started running up our flag when entering the
Mediterranean to secure safe travel.
Why the
Marine Hymn contains the verse, "To the Shores of Tripoli
".
This is
very interesting and a must read piece of our history. It points out where we
may be heading.
Most
Americans are unaware of the fact that over two hundred years ago the United
States had declared war on Islam, and Thomas Jefferson led the
charge!
At the
height of the 18th century, Muslim pirates (the "Barbary Pirates") were the
terror of the Mediterranean and a large area of the North Atlantic
.
They
attacked every ship in sight, and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. Those
taken hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart-breaking
letters home, begging their governments and families to pay whatever their
Mohammedan captors demanded.
These
extortionists of the high seas represented the North African Islamic nations of
Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco , and Algiers - collectively referred to as the Barbary
Coast - and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American
Republic .
Before
the Revolutionary War, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of
Great Britain. When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the
ships of the United States were protected by France.
However,
once the war was won, America had to protect its own
fleets.
Thus, the
birth of the U.S. Navy. Beginning in 1784, 17 years before he would become
president, Thomas Jefferson became America's Minister to France. That same year,
the U.S. Congress sought to appease its Muslim adversaries by following in the
footsteps of European nations who paid bribes to the Barbary States rather than
engaging them in war.
In July
of 1785, Algerian pirates captured American ships, and the Dye of Algiers
demanded an unheard-of ransom of $60,000. It was a plain and simple case of
extortion, and Thomas Jefferson was vehemently opposed to any further
payments.
Instead,
he proposed to Congress the formation of a coalition of allied nations who
together could force the Islamic states into peace. A disinterested Congress
decided to pay the ransom.
In 1786,
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli's ambassador to Great Britain
to ask by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American
citizens, and why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with
which they had no previous contacts.
The two
future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had
answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was
written in their Quran that all nations who would not acknowledge their
authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them
wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as
prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in battle was
sure to go to Paradise."
Despite
this stunning admission of premeditated violence on non-Muslim nations, as well
as the objections of many notable American leaders, including George Washington,
who warned that caving in was both wrong and would only further embolden the
enemy, for the following fifteen years, the u\American government paid the
Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return
of American hostages.
The
payments in ransom and tribute amounted to over 20 percent of the United States
government annual revenues in 1800.
Jefferson
was disgusted. Shortly after his being sworn in as the third President of the
United States in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli sent him a note demanding the
immediate payment of $225,000 plus $25,000 a year for every year
forthcoming.
That
changed everything.
Jefferson
let the Pasha know, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with his demand. The
Pasha responded by cutting down the flagpole at the American consulate and
declared war on the United States.
Tunis,
Morocco, and Algiers immediately followed suit.
Jefferson,
until now, had been against America raising a naval force for anything beyond
coastal defense, but, having watched his nation be cowed by Islamic thuggery for
long enough, decided that it was finally time to meet force with
force.
He
dispatched a squadron of frigates to the Mediterranean and taught the Muslim
nations of the Barbary Coast a lesson he hoped they would never forget. Congress
authorized Jefferson to empower U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods of the
Pasha of Tripoli and to "cause to be done all other acts of precaution or
hostility as the state of war would justify".
When
Algiers and Tunis, who were both accustomed to American cowardice and
acquiescence, saw the newly independent United States had both the will and the
right to strike back, they quickly abandoned their allegiance to
Tripoli.
The war
with Tripoli lasted for four more years, and raged up again in 1815. The bravery
of the U.S. Marine Corps in these wars led to the line "to the shores of
Tripoli" in the Marine Hymn, and they would forever be known as "leathernecks"
for the leather collars of their uniforms, designed to prevent their heads from
being cut off by the Muslim scimitars when boarding enemy
ships.
Islam,
and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of their prophet and
their god, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply.
America
had a tradition of religious tolerance. In fact Jefferson, himself, had
co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam
was like no other religion the world had ever seen.
A
religion based on supremacy, whose holy book not only condoned but mandated
violence against unbelievers, was unacceptable to him.
His
greatest fear was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even
greater threat to the United States.
This
should concern every American. That Muslims have brought about women-only
classes and swimming times in America at taxpayer-funded universities and public
pools; that Christians, Jews, and Hindus have been banned from serving on juries
where Muslim defendants are being judged; Piggy banks and Porky Pig tissue
dispensers have been banned from workplaces because they offend Islamist
sensibilities; ice cream has been discontinued at certain Burger King locations
because the picture on the wrapper looks similar to the Arabic script for Allah;
public schools are pulling pork from their menus; on and on and on and
on..
It's
death by a thousand cuts, or inch-by-inch as some refer to it, and most
Americans have no idea that this battle is being waged every day across
America. By not fighting back, by allowing groups to obfuscate what is really
happening, and not insisting that the Islamists adapt to our culture, the United
States is cutting its own throat with a politically correct knife, and helping
to further the Islamists' agenda.
Sadly, it
appears that today America's leaders would rather be politically correct than
victorious!
IF YOU DO
NOT REMEMBER THE PAST, YOU ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT.
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
HERE IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF THE DEEP STATE TAKES DOWN PRESIDENT TRUMP & IT’S NOT PRETTY … FOR THEM
HERE Is WHAT WILL HAPPEN If The DEEP STATE TAKES DOWN PRESIDENT TRUMP & It’s NOT PRETTY … FOR THEM
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” – Thomas Jefferson
ELDER PATRIOT – Corrupt politicians ignore Jefferson’s directive to their own detriment. It’s no longer political, it’s personal.
Americans have had their eyes opened by the ascension of Donald Trump and no amount of leftwing money can put the Freedom Movement genie back in the bottle.
Conservative Senator Ted Cruz made that observation after reviewing the results of the 2016 elections and the expectations of the voters.
Cruz, who had the most high profile personality clash with Donald Trump during the Republican primary process nevertheless embraced Trump’s America First agenda and said, “If we’re given the White House and both houses of Congress and we don’t deliver, I think there will be pitchforks and torches in the streets. And I think quite rightly.”
Candidate Trump promised many things – border control, lower taxes, fairer trade relations, a balanced budget, healthcare that puts the people first not the government, safer communities, and – to the extent possible – an end to foreign wars. What, among those promises, should any Republican, nay any American, have a problem with?
After four months without a single legislative achievement, Congressional and Senatorial Republicans – notably John McCain, Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham – have joined the Democrats in investigating President Trump absent a single shred of evidence that an underlying crime has been committed.
So, what gives?
Well, there was one additional promise that Trump made on his way to the White House that has some Republicans joining with Democrats and quaking in their boots, Trump’s promise to “Drain the Swamp.”
As we reported yesterday, “An F.B.I. agent with ‘intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton case’ told us that they uncovered evidence of such massive corruption that the agents involved realized that damned near the entire government could be brought down.”
The criminal co-conspirators in both parties realized almost immediately that the new sheriff wasn’t interested in joining them in the swamp so they launched, what can only be characterized as, a coup attempt.
Democrats are well schooled in such things probably because of their close alliance with Marxist regimes that can only gain power by seizing it through bloody civil wars. It should be noted that the Democratic Party has already done this once before.
One Hundred and Fifty-Seven years ago the Democrats waged a war against the First Republican President Abraham Lincoln for giving Blacks their freedom. That war came at a high price, as many as 700,000 Americans died fighting for what they believe in. To put that in perspective, these casualties exceed the nation’s loss in all its other wars, from the Revolution through Vietnam.
Today, Americans are still prepared to fight and die to protect their children’s God-given freedoms. Despite what you are reading and hearing in the mainstream media, they aren’t the leftwing-funded rioters, the pussy hat-wearing feminists, or the cuck bois that cant handle a micro aggression. No, the Americans that back Donald Trump are well armed.
Donald Trump’s presidency will move forward politically lest the sixty million patriots who voted for him, that are comprised of the large majority of military voters, police, and NRA members, move it forward by force.
These patriots are armed, trained, prepared, and have proven their discipline. They have grown disgusted by the corruption in Washington and will do whatever is necessary to make sure Trump’s Freedom Agenda moves forward and under the direction of Donald Trump himself.
No amount of fake news based on unsubstantiated charges by unnamed sources is going to change that. The battle lines have been drawn and no amount of finger pointing is going to convince these patriots to let anyone overturn the election results.
So why are establishment politicians courting a bloodbath on the streets of America that will also threaten them personally when they could be part of Making America Great Again? It’s because they have been caught red-handed and up to their eyeballs in a worldwide criminal conspiracy that has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with defrauding the American taxpayers.
And, now that they’ve been caught robbing the world’s largest bank – the U.S. treasury – they have chosen to go out in a blaze of glory rather than try to defend the indefensible at trial.
Washington’s criminal elites have chosen to go to war to unseat our duly elected president. It’s time to make our voices heard before this turns very ugly. Buckle your chin strap, America is counting on you.
EDITORS NOTE: THIS IS NOT A CALL TO ARMS BUT RATHER AN ANALYSIS OF WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF THE DEEP STATES OVERTURNS A DUELY ELECTED PRESIDENT.
HERE IS A LIST OF EVERY SINGLE TIME OBAMA COMMITTED AN IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE THAT DEMS & MEDIA COVERED UP “Impeach!” It’s been more than eight years since Democrats uttered that word – long enough for anyone to wonder if it was still in their vocabulary, considering the deafening silence through the dozens of serious scandals during President Obama’s administration – but now that President Trump is the man in the White House, it’s back with a vengeance.
Democrats everywhere are wildly slinging the “I” word, hoping to nail Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors after the New York Times claimed a memo written by former FBI Director James Comey said the president urged him to end the federal investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Some members of Congress are getting in on the action. They include Reps. Maxine Water, D-Calif., and Al Green, D-Texas. Even a Republican, Rep. Justin Amash, claimed Wednesday there are grounds to impeach President Trump. House Oversign Committee Chair Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, asked for the alleged Comey memo and other documents. Chaffetz tweeted that he is prepared to subpoena the information. And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., invoked “Watergate.”
Now the Democratic Party is reportedly poll testing impeachment as a 2018 election issue. More than 1 million people signed a petition calling on Congress to impeach Trump.
Wasting no time Wednesday, the mainstream media sprang into action, enthusiastically echoing the left’s impeachment calls. MSNBC launched a Watergate ad implying Trump is America’s new Richard Nixon.
“Watergate. We know its name because there were reporters who never stopped asking questions,” says MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who hinted that Trump is next on the impeachment chopping block. “Now, who knows where the questions will take us. But I know this: I’m not going to stop asking them.”
Meanwhile, some overzealous members of the left plastered fliers around Washington, D.C., demanding all White House staffers resign Wednesday.
The posters read: “If you work for this White House you are complicit in hate-mongering, lies, corrupt taking of Americans’ tax money via self-dealing and emoluments, and quite possibly federal crimes and treason. Also, any wars will be on your soul. … Resign now.”
But constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, who voted for President Obama, warned “impeachment” enthusiasts not to get ahead of themselves with President Trump. Why?
At this time, there’s no evidence Trump actually committed a crime.
“The criminal code demands more than what Comey reportedly describes in his memo,” Turley wrote in a May 17 opinion piece posted at the Hill. Turley explained:
For the first time, the Comey memo pushes the litany of controversies surrounding Trump into the scope of the United States criminal code.
However, if this is food for obstruction of justice, it is still an awfully thin soup. Some commentators seem to be alleging criminal conduct in office or calling for impeachment before Trump completed the words of his inaugural oath of office. Not surprising, within minutes of the New York Times report, the response was a chorus of breathless “gotcha” announcements. But this memo is neither the Pentagon Papers nor the Watergate tapes. Indeed, it raises as many questions for Comey as it does Trump in terms of the alleged underlying conduct.
A good place to start would be with the federal law, specifically 18 U.S.C. 1503. The criminal code demands more than what Comey reportedly describes in his memo. There are dozens of different variations of obstruction charges ranging from threatening witnesses to influencing jurors. None would fit this case. That leaves the omnibus provision on attempts to interfere with the “due administration of justice.”
However, that still leaves the need to show that the effort was to influence “corruptly” when Trump could say that he did little but express concern for a longtime associate. The term “corruptly” is actually defined differently under the various obstruction provisions, but it often involves a showing that someone acted “with the intent to secure an unlawful benefit for oneself or another.” Encouraging leniency or advocating for an associate is improper but not necessarily seeking an unlawful benefit for him.
. Obama’s Iran nuke deal Obama knew about Hillary’s private email server Obama IRS targets conservatives Obama’s DOJ spies on AP reporters Obamacare & Obama’s false promises Illegal-alien amnesty by executive order Benghazi-gate Operation Fast & Furious 5 Taliban leaders for Bergdahl Extortion 17 ‘Recess ‘ appointments – when Senate was in session Appointment of ‘czars’ without Senate approval Suing Arizona for enforcing federal law Refusal to defend Defense of Marriage Act Illegally conducting war against Libya NSA: Spying on Americans Muslim Brotherhood ties Miriam Carey Birth certificate Executive orders Solyndra and the lost $535 million Egypt Cap & Trade: When in doubt, bypass Congress Refusal to prosecute New Black Panthers Obama’s U.S. citizen ‘hit list’
No
more face book for this old war horse. I have had all the anger, hate
and cruelty that is allowed into my life. If people have the right to
shout and rant and rave because they did not get what they wanted, I
have the right to keep it outside my door. I love my friends on face
book and you are the ones that have brightened my days and will be
missed. My PawPaw taught me that if something is really wrong, work
with all your might to fix it. Standing in the corner and screaming
that you feelings are hurt and that makes you unhappy does not fix
anything. Making ugly wise cracks and hateful, hurtful remarks about
someone or something you know nothing about does not fix anything. My
politics and belief system are mine, your politics and belief system are
yours. I am always amazed that you think screaming in my face will
change that. Ok, I am off my soap box. As my beautiful, intelligent
oldest son would say, "Wishing you peace, love and dope. Mostly dope".
Signing off
The last words of Steve Jobs - I have come to the pinnacle of success in business. In the eyes of others, my life has been the symbol of success. However, apart from work, I have little joy. Finally, my wealth is simply a fact to which I am accustomed.
At this time, lying on the hospital bed and remembering all my life, I
realize that all the accolades and riches of which I was once so proud,
have become insignificant with my imminent death. In the dark, when I
look at green lights, of the equipment for artificial respiration and
feel the buzz of their mechanical sounds, I can feel the breath of my
approaching death looming over me. Only now do I understand that
once you accumulate enough money for the rest of your life, you have to
pursue objectives that are not related to wealth. It should be something more important: For example, stories of love, art, dreams of my childhood. No, stop pursuing wealth, it can only make a person into a twisted being, just like me.
God has made us one way, we can feel the love in the heart of each of
us, and not illusions built by fame or money, like I made in my life, I
cannot take them with me. I can only take with me the memories that were strengthened by love. This is the true wealth that will follow you; will accompany you, he will give strength and light to go ahead.
Love can travel thousands of miles and so life has no limits. Move to
where you want to go. Strive to reach the goals you want to achieve.
Everything is in your heart and in your hands. What is the world's most expensive bed? The hospital bed.
You, if you have money, you can hire someone to drive your car, but you
cannot hire someone to take your illness that is killing you. Material things lost can be found. But one thing you can never find when you lose: life. Whatever stage of life where we are right now, at the end we will have to face the day when the curtain falls. Please treasure your family love, love for your spouse, love for your friends... Treat everyone well and stay friendly with your neighbours.
Pat Buchanan won after all. But now he thinks it might be too late for the nation he was trying to save.
His first date with his future wife was spent in a
New Hampshire motel room drinking Wild Turkey into the wee hours with
Hunter S. Thompson. He stood several feet away from Martin Luther King
Jr. during the “I Have a Dream” speech. He went to China with Richard M.
Nixon and walked away from Watergate unscathed. He survived
Iran-Contra, too, and sat alongside Ronald Reagan at the Reykjavík
Summit. He invaded America’s living rooms and pioneered the rhetorical
combat that would power the cable news age. He defied the establishment
by challenging a sitting president of his own party. He captured the
fear and frustration of the right by proclaiming a great “culture war”
was at hand. And his third-party candidacy in 2000 almost certainly
handed George W. Bush the presidency, thanks to thousands of Palm Beach,
Florida, residents mistakenly voting for him on the “butterfly ballot”
when they meant to back Al Gore.
If not for his outsize ambition, Pat Buchanan might be the
closest thing the American right has to a real-life Forrest Gump, that
patriot from ordinary stock whose life journey positioned him to
witness, influence and narrate the pivotal moments that shaped our
modern world and changed the course of this country’s history. He has
known myriad roles—neighborhood brawler, college expellee, journalist,
White House adviser, political commentator, presidential candidate three
times over, author, provocateur—and his existence traces the arc of
what feels to some Americans like a nation’s ascent and decline. He was 3
years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and 6 when Harry
Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now 78, with
thick, black glasses and a thinning face, Buchanan looks back with
nostalgia at a life and career that, for all its significance, was at
risk of being forgotten—until Donald Trump was elected the 45th
president of the United States.
A quarter-century before Trump descended into the atrium of
his Manhattan skyscraper to launch his unlikely bid for the White
House, Buchanan, until then a columnist, political operative and TV
commentator, stepped onto a stage in Concord, New Hampshire, to declare
his own candidacy 10 weeks ahead of the state’s presidential primary.
Associating the “globalist” President George H. W. Bush with
“bureaucrats in Brussels” pursuing a “European superstate” that trampled
on national identity, Buchanan warned his rowdy audience, “We must not
trade in our sovereignty for a cushioned seat at the head table of
anybody’s new world order!” His radically different prescription, which
would underpin three consecutive runs for the presidency: a “new
nationalism” that would focus on “forgotten Americans” left behind by
bad trade deals, open-border immigration policies and foreign
adventurism. His voice booming, Buchanan demanded: “Should the United
States be required to carry indefinitely the full burden of defending
rich and prosperous allies who take America’s generosity for granted as
they invade our markets?”
This rhetoric—deployed again during his losing bid for the
1996 GOP nomination, and once more when he ran on the Reform Party
ticket in 2000—not only provided a template for Trump’s campaign, but
laid the foundation for its eventual success. Dismissed as a fringe
character for rejecting Republican orthodoxy on trade and immigration
and interventionism, Buchanan effectively weakened the party’s defenses,
allowing a more forceful messenger with better timing to finish the
insurrection he started back in 1991. All the ideas that seemed original
to Trump’s campaign could, in fact, be attributed to Buchanan—from
depicting the political class as bumbling stooges to singling out a
rising superpower as an economic menace (though back then it was Japan,
not China) to rallying the citizenry to “take back” a country whose
destiny they no longer dictated. “Pitchfork Pat,” as he was nicknamed,
even deployed a phrase that combined Trump’s two signature slogans:
“Make America First Again.”
“Pat was the pioneer of the vision that Trump ran on and won
on,” says Greg Mueller, who served as Buchanan’s communications
director on the 1992 and 1996 campaigns and remains a close friend.
Michael Kinsley, the liberal former New Republic editor who
co-hosted CNN’s “Crossfire” with Buchanan, likewise credits his old
sparring partner with laying the intellectual groundwork for Trumpism:
“It’s unclear where this Trump thing goes, but Pat deserves some of the
credit.” He pauses. “Or some of the blame.”
Buchanan, for his part, feels both validated and vindicated.
Long ago resigned to the reality that his policy views made him a
pariah in the Republican Party—and stained him irrevocably with the
ensuing accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia—he has lived
to see the GOP come around to Buchananism and the country send its
direct descendant to the White House.
“I was elated, delighted that Trump picked up on the exact
issues on which I challenged Bush,” he tells me. “And then he goes and
uses my slogan? It just doesn’t get any better than this.” Buchanan, who
has published such books as The Death of the West, State of Emergency, Day of Reckoning and Suicide of a Superpower, admits that November’s election result “gave me hope” for the first time in recent memory.
But none of this means he’s suddenly bullish about America’s
future. Buchanan says he has “always been a pessimist,” and despite
Trump’s conquest, two things continue to color his dark forecast for the
nation. First, Buchanan harbors deep concerns over whether Trump, with
his off-topic tweeting and pointless fight-picking, has the requisite
focus and discipline to execute his nationalist agenda—especially over
the opposition of a media-establishment complex bent on his destruction.
Second, even if Trump delivers on the loftiest of his promises,
Buchanan fears it will be too little, too late. Sweeping change was
needed 25 years ago, he says, before thousands of factories vanished due
to the North American Free Trade Agreement, before millions of illegal
immigrants entered the country, before trillions of dollars were
squandered on regime change and nation-building.
He has lived to see the GOP come around to Buchananism and the country send its direct descendant to the White House.
He’s not unlike the countless Trump voters I met across
the country in 2016, many of them older folks yearning for a return to
the country of their youth, a place they remember as safer, whiter, more
wholesome, more Christian, more confident and less polarized. The
difference is that Buchanan refuses to indulge in the illusion that a
return to this utopia of yesteryear is even possible. Economically and
demographically and culturally, he believes, the damage is done.
“We rolled the dice with the future of this country,” he tells me. “And I think it’s going to come up snake eyes.”
***
The living room of Buchanan’s home in McLean,
Virginia, a wealthy suburb of Washington, could be mistaken for a
museum. Between this wood-paneled space and his red-carpeted basement
there must be 3,000 books on the shelves, meticulously categorized by
genre, author or time period, a classical backdrop to Buchanan’s
extensive collection of historical guns (including a rare replica of
Robert E. Lee’s revolver) and a lifetime’s accumulation of family
photographs, newspaper clippings, campaign keepsakes and miscellaneous
relics.
His house is a monument to failed uprisings against the
political establishment. Above the mantel rests a spectacular painting
of Buchanan gazing out a bus window during a ride through scenic Iowa.
Across the room, encased in wood and glass and standing some 4 feet
tall, is the gilded pitchfork he received from “the Buchanan Brigades,” a
group of campaign supporters, symbolic of his populist insurgency (and,
unintentionally, of his paradoxical existence as a Georgetown-educated
tormentor of the Washington elite). Resting on the coffee table is the
most delicate souvenir of all, a piece of pristine stained glass gifted
to him by a New Hampshire voter. The size of a nightstand surface, its
craftsmanship is immaculate, with a dove’s red-and-white tail weaving
through blue scrawl in memory of the year, 1992, and the motto of his
presidential campaign: “America First.”
It all feels like ancient history, and Buchanan himself
these days looks, well, rather ancient; the wrinkles run deep across his
brow, and untamed wisps of gray hair shoot divergently from the back of
his head. This aging exterior should not fool anyone. He is as mentally
agile and rhetorically sharp as he was during his heyday on CNN and
PBS, before the star commentator turned into a presidential candidate.
As we talk for hours, Buchanan recalls those three campaigns—and the
rest of his half-century in public life, not to mention his childhood,
adolescence and early career—with a vivid clarity and a command of
detail.
Buchanan has had plenty of titles over the years, from
spokesman to candidate, but his favorite is historian. He cherishes
history not just for its drama but for the lessons bequeathed and the
parallels he can extract: the seductive appeal of populism, the rising
tide of nationalism, the similarities between the current president and
the two he worked closely alongside. Above all, Buchanan loves history
because, in his mind, it contains our civilizational apex; he treasures
the past because he is convinced that his beloved country, these United
States, will never again approach the particular kind of glory it held
for a middle-class family in the postwar years.
Such assured pessimism is somewhat surprising, given that
Buchanan’s boldest achievement—and perhaps the most lasting aspect of
his legacy—was being Trump before Trump was Trump.
“The ideas made it,” Buchanan tells me, letting out a belly laugh. “But I didn’t.”
There is some sad irony in the fact that Buchanan, whose
vision is finally penetrating and driving the uppermost echelons of
government, has seen his public profile diminished to an all-time low.
This is somewhat intentional: Since being fired from MSNBC in 2012, he
has hunkered down, content to make occasional Fox News appearances,
write two columns a week for Creators Syndicate and spend more time at
home with his wife, Shelley, binge-watching television shows such as
“24” and “Homeland.” (“I dated a girl who reminded me of Claire Danes,”
Buchanan grins. “She was crazy as a hoot owl.”) The couple doesn’t get
out too often. They attend 9 a.m. Sunday Mass at Saint Mary Mother of
God Church near Capitol Hill, then shop at their local Safeway and
settle in for the coming week. They have an occasional dinner out at J.
Gilbert’s steakhouse in McLean but mostly have simple meals at home;
when it’s not Lent, Buchanan has two glasses of Grgich Hills Chardonnay
each night. The slower pace suits a man who has battled heart problems
and had several hospital stays in recent years.
His intellectual metabolism, however, remains turbocharged.
After he walks a half-mile each morning around his neighborhood,
Buchanan and his wife—Nixon’s former secretary, whom he calls “junior”
and “kiddo” despite the fact that she is slightly older than he is—brew
eight cups of coffee in a pot that is often finished by noon. In those
intervening hours, Buchanan reads and annotates copious amounts of news;
he begins with Drudge Report and AntiWar.com—two aggregators of
reporting and opinion, one from the right and one from the
libertarian-leaning left—before weaving his way, red markup pen at the
ready, through the print editions of his five preferred newspapers: the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. (He used to read USA Today,
too, but recently canceled the subscription.) This daily intake informs
Buchanan’s well-considered stances on every current event we discuss
during our conversation and provides fodder for his columns, which,
however distasteful they may be to many on the left (and some on the
right), cannot possibly be mistaken for material poorly researched.
Buchanan loves to write; he spends more time on his columns
today than ever before, he says, about five hours on each one. The rest
of his time, in recent years, has been consumed by books. He offered an
ode to his former boss Richard Nixon in 2014 with The Greatest Comeback, an unappreciated tale of Tricky Dick’s political resurrection, and this May will release his 13th book, Nixon’s White House Wars,
which is something of a sequel, offering a thorough and mouthwatering
insider’s account of one of history’s most bellicose presidencies. “The
first one had a happy ending,” Buchanan says. He shrugs his shoulders.
“The second one, not so much.”
The path Buchanan took to becoming one of Nixon’s key
loyalists was unusual, to say the least. Raised in a middle-class Roman
Catholic family of nine children in Washington—back when the District of
Columbia was “a sleepy and segregated Southern city,” he once
wrote—Buchanan excelled in his parochial-school education and, despite
an appetite for troublemaking and partying while he was a student at
Gonzaga High School, he earned a scholarship to attend Georgetown
University a few miles away. When Buchanan was expelled from Georgetown
in his senior year for hospitalizing two D.C. cops during a traffic
altercation that degenerated into fisticuffs, he and his father
successfully petitioned the university to reduce his expulsion to a
one-year withdrawal. Buchanan went to work in his father’s accounting
firm during the suspension, began rethinking his life ambitions and,
upon returning to finish college, decided to pursue a career as a
columnist. (He had developed an interest in journalism as an 11-year-old
boy, when he wound up in a full-body cast thanks to a football injury
and spent four months doing nothing but reading newspaper and magazine
coverage of the Korean War.) After Georgetown, Buchanan won acceptance
to Columbia University’s journalism school, where he was surrounded by
brilliant liberals who would go on to populate the nation’s most
prominent newsrooms—an experience that shaped Buchanan’s distrust of the
media’s objectivity. Upon earning his master’s, he sent out 17 job
applications and fielded offers from three other newspapers—the New York Daily News, Charlotte Observer and Albuquerque Journal—before packing his bags for the Globe-Democrat, a conservative newspaper in St. Louis.
His break arrived quickly. After five weeks of reporting for
the business section, an editorial writer position opened, and Buchanan
never looked back. Three-and-a-half years later, in 1965, when Nixon
came to town for a local party function, Buchanan cornered him in a
kitchen and offered his services ahead of Nixon’s imminent 1968
campaign. “The Old Man,” as Buchanan still calls Nixon—“He was like a
father to me at times”—hired him, and they became conjoined: Buchanan
was a speechwriter, political adviser and special assistant in the White
House. He gave famously defiant testimony in front of the Senate
Watergate Committee and remained loyal to Nixon until the end, yet
somehow emerged with his reputation enhanced even as, in his own
recollection, “All those friends of mine went to the penitentiary.”
For all the comparisons of Trump to his own campaigns,
Buchanan argues the more relevant parallels are between the 45th and
37th presidents. “They both confronted bureaucracy and a hostile media
that hated Nixon and hates Trump,” he says. “The ‘deep state’ wants to
break Trump’s presidency, just like it tried to break Nixon’s.” One
difference between the two men is restraint: Whereas Trump appears
consumed by “irrelevant things and peripheral attacks,” Buchanan says,
“Nixon told me, ‘Don’t ever shoot down. Always shoot up.’” He lets out a
sigh. “I feel for the guys that are in there,” Buchanan says of Trump’s
team. “The problem is the president is distracted—and his adversaries
know it. If I were them, I’d keep egging him on.”
Certainly, though, Nixon—and nearly every other former
president—benefited from the absence of social media and the insatiable,
24-hour news cycle. Buchanan remembers his old boss occasionally
calling him late at night, raving about some perceived slight and asking
him to write and distribute something in response. By the next morning,
Nixon had cooled off. “You didn’t do that, did you?” the president
would ask him. (Buchanan recalls a former colleague once joking,
“Watergate happened when some damn fool came out of the Oval Office and
did exactly what Nixon told him to do.”)
Buchanan says Trump has “tremendous potential,” but adds,
“This is my great apprehension, that the larger issues—the taxes, the
Obamacare thing, the border security agenda, the trade agenda—could be
imperiled by unnecessary fights.” He thinks for a moment. “It’s not a
bad instinct to be a fighter. But sometimes you have to hold back.”
When it comes to Trump’s fight with the news media, however,
Buchanan wants the president to keep swinging. Not only is it
justified, he says, based on recent coverage, but Buchanan—a journalist
by training—believes undermining the media’s legitimacy is essential to
winning popular support for the president’s agenda. Here again, he
speaks from firsthand experience in yet another American political war,
the Nixon administration’s assault on the Fourth Estate. After the
president’s November 1969 speech responding to nationwide protests
against the Vietnam War was panned by all three major television
networks, Nixon asked Buchanan to craft a memo detailing the president’s
successes in his first year; instead, the young speechwriter advised
the White House to wage “an all-out attack on the media.” Nixon liked
the idea, but he didn’t want to be the messenger. Buchanan drafted the
speech, and 10 days after Nixon’s nationally televised address, Vice
President Spiro Agnew, an imposing figure who was then one of the most
popular Republicans in America, delivered his now famous speech in Des
Moines slamming “a small and unelected elite” who possess a “profound
influence over public opinion” without any checks on their “vast power.”
It’s not a bad instinct to be a fighter,” Buchanan says of Trump. “But sometimes you have to hold back.”
Conservatives loved it, especially on the heels of Nixon
calling them “the great silent majority,” a phrase Buchanan had coined.
The entire sequence remains one of Buchanan’s career highlights—“it was
a sensation,” he says of Agnew’s speech—and he says it holds important
lessons for Trump. For starters, the president needs a strong and
reliable surrogate. “Nixon would give Agnew all the lines he wanted to
say, but couldn’t say because he was the president. Trump needs somebody
like that—he’s doing it all by himself,” Buchanan says. He smirks. “Is
Mike Pence going to do that?”
Moreover, Buchanan argues, calling out media bias has
consistently worked in the 48 years since Agnew’s speech—and still does.
“What we did was call into question their motives and their veracity.
We said they are vessels flying flags of neutrality while carrying
contraband,” Buchanan tells me. “And that’s a message that is still well
received today, because people know it’s true.”
***
The architect of Nixon’s “all-out attack on the media”
never strayed far from the media himself. He went on to became one of
the best-known television personalities of the modern political era, a
celebrity pundit who parlayed his popularity and visibility into a
presidential bid two-and-a-half decades before Trump did the same.
After a brief stint as a holdover in President Gerald R.
Ford’s administration, Buchanan returned to writing, pouring himself
into a syndicated column that quickly became an acerbic must-read on the
right. Radio opportunities weren’t far behind, and after five years of
co-hosting a D.C.-based program alongside liberal journalist Tom Braden,
the two took their act to CNN for an experiment called “Crossfire.” It
was a hit, and so was “The McLaughlin Group,” an argumentative public
affairs panel show that also began airing in 1982. Buchanan, suddenly
the star conservative on two of political television’s premier programs,
had emerged as one of the most influential media voices in the country.
There was a vacuum of compelling content in those early days of
always-on news—and Buchanan eagerly filled it with forceful opinions
that were encouraged by producers who discouraged compromise and common
ground. It’s the one element of his legacy to which he attaches some
regret, repeatedly citing the poisonous tone of cable news discourse as a
culprit in our societal and cultural disunion.
A decade after Buchanan left, the White House again came
calling. This time, Ronald Reagan wanted him to serve as communications
director. Buchanan had no choice but to accept—“the Gipper himself!” he
recalls of receiving the offer—and spent two years, starting in the
winter of 1985, steering the 40th president’s press operation. Buchanan
sees fewer parallels between Reagan and Trump, though he offers two
cautionary notes from his experience in that administration. First, he
says, Trump must be “conscious of the coalition that brought him here”
the way Reagan was responsive to the concerns of working-class cultural
conservatives; Buchanan is particularly concerned that Trump, in
addition to not following through on border security and protectionism,
could hurt his own older and blue-collar voters with any type of
dramatic health care overhaul. Second, Buchanan, in a nod to Trump’s
testy public demeanor, remembers that Reagan’s famously sunny
disposition wasn’t always on display—he just made it seem that way. “I
saw Reagan explode a number of times in private. He was an Irishman, and
you could see that temper go off,” Buchanan tells me. “But he never let
the anger show in public.”
Eleanor Clift, the liberal longtime Newsweek
journalist, first met Buchanan while covering the Reagan White House.
“Everybody knew where he was ideologically,” Clift recalls, “and he was
far to the right of President Reagan, and you could get him to tell
stories about Reagan making fun of him and tasking him with selling
things to conservatives.” She says Buchanan wasn’t much of a source for
mainstream reporters because most of his energy was spent wooing the
right. It was several years later, when the two began sharing the set on
“The McLaughlin Group,” that Clift realized Buchanan’s gift for framing
a political argument. “When he puts his analyst hat on, there’s nobody
better,” she says. (Clift and Buchanan are in talks with television
executives to bring “The McLaughlin Group” back on air, they tell me,
but decline to elaborate.)
Buchanan was such a lucid communicator, in fact, that some
conservatives wanted him to run for president. Having remarked shortly
before leaving the White House in 1987 that “the greatest vacuum in
American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan,” Buchanan re-entered
the media realm—resuming his roles on “Crossfire” and “The McLaughlin
Group”—only to face mounting pressure from the right to enter the race
for the Republican nomination in 1988. He ultimately declined, but
published a page-turning autobiography in that presidential year, Right From the Beginning,
that seemed a preliminary step toward a potential run for something,
someday. The book is fascinating for its glimpse at Buchanan’s idyllic
America, the earnest age of sprawling middle-class families and booming
church attendance and fistfights at the local hangout after one six-pack
too many. What it barely mentions, in making the case for a return to
this safer and gentler society, are the dangers of trade and
immigration—two issues that would animate Buchanan’s campaign against
George H.W. Bush four years later.
“Between the years on ‘Crossfire’ and the years he ran for
president, he was conservative but became very protectionist and
nationalist, and that was of course a surprise,” Kinsley tells me. “The
Republican Party stood for free markets completely and the Democratic
Party stood for protectionism, and the idea that Pat Buchanan, who had
worked in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses, would become an ardent
protectionist was shocking.”
When I ask about the transformation, Buchanan tells me the
story of his uncle, a Republican activist who hailed from industrial
Pennsylvania, confronting him at the 1976 GOP convention. “Free trade is
killing us, Pat,” he told him. Buchanan says the incident “planted a
seed in my mind,” but that a decade later he was still an avowed
free-trader working in the Reagan White House. It was the winding down
of the Cold War in the twilight of Reagan’s presidency that Buchanan
says refocused his attention away from international dilemmas and toward
those at home. Free trade had never seemed problematic; nor had
Reagan’s 1986 amnesty that legalized some 3 million undocumented
immigrants. The more he studied domestic policy problems, though, the
more convinced Buchanan became that the country needed a drastic course
correction. “We had carried the load for the West all throughout the
Cold War. All of these allies had been essentially freeloading off the
United States,” he recalls thinking. “And I said, ‘If the Russians are
going home, it’s time for us to come home and look out for our own
country first.’”
His only regret is that he didn’t take up the fight sooner,
when he could have had a greater impact, and maybe could have headed off
some of the decline he sees when he gazes across the modern American
landscape. “Look at Detroit in 1945 and Hiroshima in 1945. And look at
the two of them today,” Buchanan says. “Something went wrong.”
***
By 1992, the evolution was complete—“I was a
full-fledged economic nationalist,” Buchanan says—and his crusade
against the embodiment of globalism, President George H. W. Bush, became
a surprise 10-week proxy war for the future of the Republican Party.
Buchanan’s allies held out hope he could pull a historic upset in New
Hampshire that would throw the entire nominating process into turmoil.
But they knew it was terribly unlikely, and were thrilled when Buchanan
captured 37 percent of the vote, even though it was still a double-digit
defeat. He wound up winning nearly 3 million votes nationwide against
Bush, and though he carried no states, was invited to speak at the party
convention. When he delivered his fire-breathing “culture war” speech,
urging Republicans to “take back” the country from the alien forces of
militant secularism and liberal multiculturalism, Democrats said it was
proof of a GOP tacking hard and fast to the right. That was the whole
idea: Buchanan, unlike Trump 25 years later, was a committed social
conservative who saw crusades against gay rights and abortion as part of
the campaign to restore his ideal America. But they also limited his
appeal, and some in the party establishment hold a grudge to this day,
convinced Buchanan scared off independents and jump-started the Clinton
dynasty. Buchanan dismisses this notion, but long ago made peace with
the fact that he would need to damage Bush in order to shape the future
of Republicanism. “He wasn’t going to remove the sitting president from
winning the party’s nomination,” says Terry Jeffrey, Buchanan’s research
and policy director that year. “But the question was: Which direction
is the party going to go?”
It was an open question in 1996, when Buchanan mounted a
second and more viable campaign, this time against establishment
favorite Bob Dole, as well as Southern son Phil Gramm and publisher
Steve Forbes, among others. Doubling down on the nationalist
rhetoric—which, unlike Trump, Buchanan continued to combine with heaping
doses of social conservatism—he carved out his role at the far right of
the field. Things looked good when he won a nonbinding contest in
Alaska and even better when he upset Gramm in the first official contest
in Louisiana. Dole edged him by 3 percentage points in the
much-anticipated Iowa caucuses, but eight days later, Buchanan’s
political career climaxed with a 1-point win in the New Hampshire
primary. “We’re going to recapture the lost sovereignty of our country,”
Buchanan cried in a victory speech, “and we’re going to bring it home!”
It was the closest he would ever come to the presidency.
Buchanan won just one of the remaining contests as Dole coasted to the
nomination. Four years later, Buchanan broke from the GOP after years of
tension with its establishment wing and sought the Reform Party
nomination. He won it, over the objections of some activists, but bombed
in November, winning fewer than 500,000 votes nationwide. (Ralph
Nader’s Green Party tallied roughly 2.5 million votes more.) Buchanan,
however, once again put his imprint on history: He won 3,407 votes in
Palm Beach County, Florida—a liberal, heavily Jewish community—thanks to
the “butterfly ballot” famously confusing many voters. George W. Bush
won Florida by 537 votes, and Buchanan makes no bones about what
happened. “The Lord intervened,” he says, grinning. “We sunk Al Gore and
won the election for Bush.”
Less memorably, the 2000 campaign also brought Buchanan into
contact for the first time with Trump. The New York real estate tycoon
and tabloid favorite was also mulling a run for the Reform Party’s
nomination at the urging of Jesse Ventura, the former professional
wrestler who had won Minnesota’s governorship on the third-party ticket
in 1998. Trump never followed through, but true to the form he would
display 16 years later, the future president took pleasure in
brutalizing his potential competition. Trump devoted portions of a book
to highlighting Buchanan’s alleged “intolerance” toward black and gay
people, accused him of being “in love with Adolf Hitler” and denounced
Buchanan while visiting a Holocaust museum, telling reporters, “We must
recognize bigotry and prejudice and defeat it wherever it appears.”
The irony today is unmistakable. “What Trump said about Pat
at the time is precisely what Trump’s opponents are saying about him
now,” says Justin Raimondo, editorial director of AntiWar.com, who gave a
nominating speech for Buchanan at the Reform Party convention.
His only regret is that he didn’t take up the fight sooner, when he could have had a greater impact.
Trump’s attacks stemmed from Buchanan’s suggestion in a
book that year that World War II had been avoidable and that Hitler did
not want conflict with the United States or its Western allies.
Buchanan, who loathes international aggression—he vigorously opposed
George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, further distancing himself from the
GOP—has written and repeated similar sentiments about World War II over
several decades, which, on top of his criticisms of Israeli influence
over U.S. foreign policy, have led to charges of anti-Semitism. (Most
damaging was William F. Buckley writing in National Review,
shortly before Buchanan joined the 1992 race, that he could not defend
his fellow conservative against such accusations. That said, some Jews
in the media who are critical of Buchanan’s politics, including Kinsley,
have defended him on this front.)
Buchanan has faced his share of critiques, but no one has
hit him harder than Trump. In retrospect, it’s astounding that the man
who used Buchanan’s playbook to win the White House had previously
bashed him in the most ruthlessly ad hominem terms imaginable—yet
Buchanan used his columns to cheerlead Trump’s 2016 candidacy from Day
One. The explanation for this became clear once I accepted that Trump
had done something entirely out of character: According to multiple
sources, Trump called Buchanan out of the blue some five years ago, when
the former candidate was a regular guest on “Morning Joe,” and
apologized for all of the hurtful things he had said. “He made amends,”
Bay Buchanan, Pat’s sister and former campaign manager, says of Trump.
“Long before he got into the presidential [race], he reached out to Pat
and apologized for what he’d done, realizing it had been wrong. … My
brother is a very forgiving guy, and if someone asks for forgiveness,
he’s going to deliver it.”
Buchanan himself refuses to comment on private conversations
with Trump but does tell me the president would call occasionally
during the 2016 primary to thank him for kind words during a TV
appearance or make small talk about the campaign. Buchanan also says
Trump mailed three “Make America Great Again” hats to his home—two of
which he gifted to childhood friends, while keeping the other one for
his extensive collection of presidential memorabilia.
“Did you ever offer him any advice?” I ask.
Buchanan begins to shake his head no, then stops himself. “I
gave him some advice once,” he says, a smile spreading across his face.
“I think he took it.”
***
Controversy has been a constant in Buchanan’s life,
and will surely be part of his legacy. Buchanan, his friends say,
suspected that powerful people at MSNBC were looking for a reason to
fire him from the day he started there in 2002, reuniting with liberal
commentator and former “Crossfire” co-host Bill Press for a similarly
formatted program, “Buchanan & Press.” Ultimately Buchanan lasted a
full decade at the left-wing cable news outlet before he published the
book that would, finally, end his national broadcast career. In early
2012, months after Buchanan published Suicide of a Superpower,
MSNBC fired him over provocative passages in the book relating to
demographic change in America. Officials at 30 Rock were exceptionally
disgusted with one chapter, “The End of White America,” in which
Buchanan warned of the dire consequences brought on by what he had often
called the “mass invasion” of immigrants from poor countries.
“Can Western civilization survive the passing of the
European peoples whose ancestors created it and their replacement by
Third World immigrants?” Buchanan wrote in his column
the day of the book’s release, pre-emptively defending what he knew
would be a polarizing thesis. “Probably not, for the new arrivals seem
uninterested in preserving the old culture they have found.”
Of course, Buchanan’s views were well known by that point;
he had presented identical arguments in several previous books, which
explains why some of his highest-profile colleagues were furious with
MSNBC’s decision. “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika
Brzezinski issued a statement saying that they “strongly disagree” with
Buchanan’s firing, and that his statements “should have been debated in
public.” Chris Matthews dedicated a segment of “Hardball” to Buchanan in
the wake of his dismissal, saying, “I miss him already,” and adding:
“To Pat, the world can never be better than the one he grew up in as a
young boy. … No country will ever be better than the United States of
America of the early 1950s.”
Buchanan will go to his grave believing exactly that. He
swears he has no personal animus toward people who don’t look like him;
in fact, he says, the immigrant groups he interacts with in northern
Virginia are “always smiling” and seem like wonderful members of the
community. “Obviously they love America,” Buchanan tells me. “The
question is, what is it that holds us together? The neocons say we’re an
ideological people bound together by what Lincoln said at Gettysburg
and what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, and that’s
what makes us one nation. But my tradition of conservatism says it’s
not; it’s the idea of culture and faith and belief and history and
heroes and holidays.”
He takes a long pause. “Can you have a nation that consists of all the people in the world—and be one people?”
Buchanan has spent decades researching and thinking and
writing about the threat he believes recent immigrants pose to America’s
identity, and he comes to the subject armed with reams of statistics
and arguments grounded in his reading of history. There are three main
problems with the latest immigration trends, he says. First, whereas the
Europeans were “never going back” and therefore put down permanent
roots, millions of recent immigrants in the United States hail from
Mexico and Central America and have easy access to their original home.
Second, the vast numbers of new arrivals are stifling opportunity and
mobility for the waves of immigrants who came before. And third, that
stifling of opportunity and mobility causes prolonged concentration in
closed-off communities, which robs those immigrants, Buchanan argues, of
the chance to work their way out of ghettos and assimilate into
American culture.
“This is why we argued in 1990 for a moratorium on
immigration—those folks coming in poor could have been like the ethnic
Irish and Italians and German,” Buchanan says. Instead, “they keep
coming, and now you’ve got 60 million Hispanics living here, many of
them in enclaves that can sustain themselves culturally and economically
and socially. And it’s like they’re at home. A little piece of Mexico
has been moved over here. … You look at the 24 counties from San Diego
to Brownsville, Texas: Are they part of the United States or part of
Mexico?”
A minute later, Buchanan adds, “You think you can go to
Tucson, to what they call ‘Little Mexico,’ and ask them what the
Constitution says? You think they know what the Constitution says?”
Can you have a nation that consists of all the people in the world,” Buchanan asks, “and be one people?”
It’s this type of talk that has earned Buchanan the
ugliest of labels—racist, bigot, xenophobe. He says it used to bother
him but doesn’t anymore. “Everybody’s a racist. The curse words of the
left [are] losing their toxicity from overuse,” Buchanan says. “Those
accusations used to be cause for a fight. Now they’re just tossed out.”
What’s interesting is that his many friends on the left have grown
similarly numb to the hullabaloo. At this point, they are resigned to
rejecting Buchanan’s views while remaining convinced of his inherent
respectability as a person.
“I’ve learned to live with the fact that Pat has some very
abhorrent views, which I strongly, strongly object to, while at the same
time I know him to be a very good, very solid, decent man, who is loyal
to his friends and loves his country,” Press, his former MSNBC co-host,
tells me. “I know that may be an impossible distinction, but I really
don’t think Pat has a racist bone in his body. I think he just gets
carried away with his view about threats to Western civilization.”
Kinsley recalls his old colleague renting a vacation home on
Maryland’s Eastern Shore that had an extra bedroom, where Buchanan
could store boxes of books he would read while there. “Pat might be a
nut, but he’s not a con man. Trump is both a nut and a con man,” Kinsley
tells me. “You have to give Pat a certain amount of credit for
intellect. He really thought through policy problems, and that’s where
he’s not like Trump at all.”
Trump or no Trump, Buchanan has only become more alarmed
about America’s political trajectory. The Republican Party is “running
out of white folks,” he says, and historically immigrant groups have
voted overwhelmingly Democratic. “If you bring in 100 million people and
they vote 60 percent Democratic and 40 percent Republican, you’re
buried,” Buchanan tells me. “What I’m saying is the America we knew and
grew up with, it’s gone. And it’s not coming back. Demographically,
culturally, socially, in every way, it’s a different country. And I
think it’s come to resemble more of an empire than a nation and a
people.”
Buchanan’s friends say that deep down he wants to be wrong
about these predictions. And he admits that sometimes his pessimism gets
the better of him: He never believed Trump would win in November. On
Election Day, in fact, he bumped into Virginia Congresswoman Barbara
Comstock’s mother at the polling station and suggested that her daughter
would soon be running for higher office—to replace Hillary Clinton’s
vice presidential nominee, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. Instead, he found
himself up at 3 in the morning celebrating, basking in congratulatory
emails, and convincing himself that maybe, just maybe, America isn’t
doomed yet.
“But this,” Buchanan tells me, “is the last chance for these ideas.”
Daddy and Mama taught us to plant trees and watch
them grow. Two of my earliest recollections are about tree planting. The
first planting was of a Willow Oak which Mama had tied a piece of cloth
to in the later part of summer around about 1946 I'm guessing as that
would have been when I was three years old.
The second
memory is of Grandma replanting a water oak in her backyard. I know it
was in my early years because it was during the time that I was not yet
trusted to walk from our house to Grandma's house alone. One day while I
was with Grandma she dug up a water oak from behind her backyard and
replanted it near the back porch. As she put the tree with its small bit
of dirtball in the hole I had watched her dig with the grubbing hoe she
told me to hold onto the tree to keep it upright. I felt like I was
doing something special. About the time she finished and was pouring
some water around the tree Mama came to take me home. Mama arrived just
as Grandma was finishing. Grandma said to Mama: Irene we will have to
call this the Jimmy tree because he helped me plant it. As I write these
words I look out my window and see the Jimmy tree. It appears to be
healthy and happy.
Sadly the Homer tree (the willow Oak by
Mamas dining room window) has come to it's end. Day before yesterday I
contracted with a tree service to take it down completely. I feel like I
have signed a death warrant for a life long friend and it breaks my
heart to see it go. Unfortunately the Homer tree was struck by lightning
just over twenty years ago and I'm confident of the time frame because
it was before Mama's death. The lightning strike killed one huge limb
and the tree has been weakened as a result. Last October hurricane
Matthew (on Jamey's birthday) the Homer tree lost several huge limbs and
severely damaged the roof on Mama's house. I hate to see it go but in
order to have a chance to save some of Mama's house I must do this in
order to safely undertake the task of dismantling some or all of the
Homer and Irene Smith family home. Hopefully I will salvage some
material and display it in my barn or at Grandma's house.
I
am a fierce "tree hugger" but I am a realist and I know that all living
things have different seasons and there is a time when life must end.
I
love this place called the Homer Smith place. I walk among the trees
and take great joy in admiring lifelong friends as I watch them grow old
with me.
