Let me preface this by noting that once upon a time, I chauffeured Pat Buchanan. I have no natural animosity towards Pat. It’s my objectivity that compels me to call Pat out for his economic nationalism. While Pat has been promoting economic quackery, Alan Keyes has been blazing a trail for liberty.
Here’s a snippet from a recent commentary written by Alan Keyes:
“Like Mr. Trump’s instinctive opposition to North Carolina’s so-called “bathroom bill”; his desire to alter the GOP’s principled platform position on respect for the unalienable right to life; his disregard for the plain meaning of the Fifth Amendment’s reference to persons, without regard to citizenship; and his eager disregard for the implications of the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against compulsory self-incrimination and the Eighth Amendment’s intolerance for cruel and unusual punishment (which, taken together, more than eliminate torture from the list of actions the government can constitutionally perpetrate against persons not even accused of a crime), Trump’s willingness to consider William Pryor for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court contradicts the principled, conservative course he now promises to take with respect to judicial appointments.” -Alan Keyes, see: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/keyes/160523 (bold text added for emphasis)
It was very refreshing to read Alan Keyes echoing exactly what I have been saying about torture (e.g. waterboarding, which Republicans claim isn’t) ever since I first learned of its use in 2004. This isn’t about Trump bashing or a personality contest. This is about the Constitution and standing in protest to its demolition. If the government can torture a confession out of a person, damning the Fifth Amendment, then the entire Bill of Rights be damned. Alan Keyes also makes a great point about not only does Trump advocate torturing people, but people not even accused of a crime. Until somebody is legally and officially charged with a crime to be granted habeas corpus, then that person hasn’t yet been officially accused. Thank you, Alan Keyes, for supporting and defending the Constitution. Alan hits a homerun. One thing I really appreciate about Alan Keyes is he really understands how abortion and the devaluation of human life begets things like torture.
Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan has been writing commentaries like this one: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/05/patrick-j-buchanan/great-white-hope/ Several months ago, I wrote a mock endorsement of Trump. See: http://libertyeconomics.com/why-i-support-donald-trump/ Little did I realize just how my satire would foreshadow a commentary by Pat Buchanan – only Pat is serious. For those who may laugh at me or believe I’m somehow inaccurate in what I write, it looks like I may get the last laugh.
Nobody distilled Pat Buchanan’s nonsense more skillfully than did my friend William Norman Grigg. Below is WNG’s response to Pat’s commentary:
“As I learned from reading the fascinating (and, of course, self-serving) autobiography of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, the expression “Great White Hope” was paired with the description of Johnson as “The Black Peril” — not because of his morally dissolute lifestyle, which he shared with many white athletes, but because of his incontestable dominance of a sport that was seen as the defining test of manhood.
“If a black man — especially one who was literate and flamboyantly individualistic — could best a white man in a mediated boxing match, the myth of innate white superiority would be impossible to sustain. Johnson’s merciless beating of Jim Jeffries in 1910 set off race riots in cities across the country in which dozens or scores of people were killed, most of them blacks who were beaten, shot, or had their throats slit as punishment for being uppity in the face of resentful whites.
“In Uvalda, Georgia, a vengeful white mob laid siege to a black suburb, lynching three people and driving many more to flee for their lives into a nearby forest. In Mounds, Illinois, interestingly, a black police officer was killed trying to defend persons and property against four local black residents who wanted to celebrate in much the same fashion as the white mobbers in Georgia.
“When Jess Willard, the titular “Great White Hope” of Buchanan’s scabrous essay, beat Johnson in Havana five years later, white tribalists treated this as the validation of the social order, rather than the victory of one remarkable athlete over another. Willard was seen as symbolically beating back the dusky-skinned hordes whose mere presence in society was a threat to white dominance, which — it was feared — couldn’t survive in a society in which whites and non-whites were allowed to compete freely against each other.
“That is the core complaint being made in Buchanan’s unabashed endorsement of what *he* sees as the white nationalist essence of the Trump campaign.
“Yes, state-imposed schemes like affirmative action have done considerable damage to the economy and to civil society, and must be destroyed root and branch. But that consideration is ancillary to Buchanan’s central complaint — namely, the presence of “Scores of millions of third-world immigrants, here **legally** and illegally, who depress U.S. wages,” and the fact, as he sees it, that “The world has been turned upside-down for white children” because the education system and popular culture no longer validate the idea of white dominance.
“Buchanan is an economic ignoramus, but even he must understand the role played by the Federal Reserve in destroying the middle class. People of any origin or description who perform honest work at agreed-upon wages are not the culprit here, and since the collapse of the Fed’s last speculative bubble nearly ten years ago immigration from Mexico has declined precipitously. But then again, Buchanan objects to *legal* non-white immigration, because he seems to think the United States should be a state-enforced safe space for white nationalists.” -William N. Grigg
You got that? Pat is cheering on Trump for wanting to create a state-enforced safe space for white nationalists – literally. And people believe libertarians are extremists? Pat Buchanan swings and misses with his brand of race based mercantilism. Objectively, protectionism is state intervention to manipulate capital flows (i.e. capital controls). It’s marketed as a means to remedy capital outflow, yet capital outflow is a symptom of a disease called statism. Capital flows don’t determine economic conditions. Economic conditions determine capital flows. What Trump seeks to impose on the United States would be referred to as sanctions if imposed by any other government on the United States. Trump’s economic policies will actually precipitate an exodus of capital. While Alan Keyes has been echoing me on defending the Constitution, Pat Buchanan has been echoing my satire that demolished his calculus.