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50 Years Ago: The Day Nixon Routed the Establishment
November 1, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
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    Ten days after the “silent majority” speech, Vice President Spiro Agnew, in Des Moines, launched an assault on the unholy matrimony of media power and liberal bias. Agnew questioned whether the networks near-monopoly over the primary source of information for the American people should be permanently ceded to so tiny and unrepresentative an elite.

[Note: Agnew speech video included below]

What are the roots of our present disorder, of the hostilities and hatreds that so divide us? When did we become this us vs. them nation?

Who started the fire?

Many trace the roots of our uncivil social conflict to the 1960s and the Johnson years when LBJ, victorious in a 61% landslide in 1964, could not, by 1968, visit a college campus without triggering a violent protest.

The morning after his narrow presidential victory in 1968, Richard Nixon said his goal would be to “bring us together.” And in early 1969, he seemed to be succeeding.

His inaugural address extended a hand of friendship to old enemies. He withdrew 60,000 troops from Vietnam. He left the Great Society largely untouched and proposed a Family Assistance Plan for the poor and working class. He created a Western White House in San Clemente, California.

In July, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

America approved. Yet the elites seethed. For no political figure of his time was so reviled and hated by the establishment as was Richard Nixon.

By the fall of 1969, that establishment, which had led us into Vietnam and left 500,000 U.S. troops there as of January 1969, had turned against their own war, declared it “an unwinnable war” and “Nixon’s war,” and begun to cheer the huge anti-war protests scheduled for October and November.

David Broder of The Washington Post was one who saw clearly what was happening: “It is becoming more obvious with every passing day that the men and movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s presidency in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon in 1969. The likelihood is great that they will succeed again.”

In a cover story titled “Nixon in Trouble,” Newsweek echoed Broder:

“From almost every quarter last week the nine-month-old Administration of Richard M. Nixon was under sustained attack and angry fire, and increasingly the target of the attacks was Mr. Nixon himself and his conduct of the Presidency.”

On Oct. 15, some 250,000 descended on the capital for the largest demonstration in history. A stunned Time declared that, instead of resisting its demands, Nixon should prepare “the country for the trauma of distasteful reversal.”

Time wanted Nixon to declare Vietnam a lost cause.

But by now, Nixon, realizing his presidency was in danger of being broken like LBJ’s — but believing he was reading the nation better than the establishment — had decided to wheel and fight.

On Nov. 3, 1969, Nixon delivered an Oval Office address that was carried live on every network. After reciting the case Ike, JFK and LBJ had all made for resisting a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, Nixon laid out his own policy, the rationale for it, and urged the “great silent majority” to stand by him for peace with honor.

The network commentators almost universally disparaged Nixon’s address as repetitive and unresponsive to the crisis of his presidency.

Washington’s elites, however, had misread the nation.


An instant poll found that 70% of the country supported Nixon’s declared policy. A coalition of 300 House members endorsed Nixon’s stand. Liberal Democrats in the Senate rejected Nixon’s policy, but Southern and conservative Democratic senators backed him.

Ten days after the “silent majority” speech, Vice President Spiro Agnew, in Des Moines, launched an assault on the unholy matrimony of media power and liberal bias. Agnew questioned whether the networks near-monopoly over the primary source of information for the American people should be permanently ceded to so tiny and unrepresentative an elite.

VIDEO: Spiro Agnew: Television News Coverage Speech – Des Moines, Iowa – Nov 13, 1969
Note: Audio version and full text of speech can be viewed here…]

All three networks carried Agnew’s speech live, but were rocked on their heels by the reaction. Scores of thousand of telegrams and letters poured into network offices and the White House, with the vast majority agreeing with the vice president.

The liberal establishment had sustained a historic defeat.

By December, Nixon was the most admired man in America. His approval rating in the Gallup Poll was 68%. Only 19% disapproved of how he was conducting his presidency. Dr. Billy Graham was the second-most admired man, and Agnew third.

Nor was this but a blip in the Nixon presidency. When, three years later, Democrats nominated the most impassioned and articulate of their anti-war senators, George McGovern, Nixon would crush him in a 49-state landslide.

In Watergate, the establishment would get its pound of flesh for its rout by Nixon in November 1969 and its humiliation in November 1972. But that establishment would never recover what it lost — the respect and regard of the American people in the ’60s and early ’70s.

JFK’s “best and brightest,” whose hour of power was “Camelot,” were broken on the wheel of Vietnam. After taking us into Southeast Asia, they had washed their hands of their own war and declared it immoral.

So great was the loss of esteem for the establishment among the silent majority, America’s elite would soon cease to call themselves liberals and change their names to “progressives.”

https://buchanan.org/blog/50-years-ago-the-day-nixon-routed-the-establishment-137693

Bernie Leads His Party to Open Borders
November 12, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
Votes: 5.00 Stars!
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With cartel battles escalating into a war that Mexico City has no stomach for fighting, and a record number of migrants from Central America crossing Mexico to flood into the USA, what is the Democratic Party’s policy for halting the rising tide?

Some 100 members of an American Mormon community in northern Mexico, nine of whom — women, children, toddlers — were massacred a week ago on a lonely stretch of highway, just crossed over into Arizona.
Other family members who have lived there for decades will follow.
The atrocity was the work of one of the cartels battling for control of the drug traffic into the United States.
In Mexico’s Sinaloa state in October, an arrest of Ovidio Guzman Lopez, son of “El Chapo,” who sits in a New York prison, brought a military-style cartel attack on the state capital, Culiacan, followed by a surrender to the cartel gunmen by national guard and army troops, and a release of the captive.
“Is Mexico a failed state?” asks The Washington Times. Its editorial describes “Another Blood-Soaked Year in Mexico” where 17,000 people were murdered by July and the 2019 death toll is expected to reach 32,000.
USA Today reports: “Through August of the current fiscal year, the Border Patrol apprehended 457,871 migrants arriving as ‘family units’ … a 406% increase compared to the 90,554 family unit apprehensions during the same period the previous year. Migrant families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador made up almost 92% of the total.”
With cartel battles escalating into a war that Mexico City has no stomach for fighting, and a record number of migrants from Central America crossing Mexico to flood into the USA, what is the Democratic Party’s policy for halting the rising tide?
Democrats are moving toward an “open door” policy on the U.S. border, an open borders embrace of any and all who wish to come.
America, apparently, does not belong to those who live here and love the country. America belongs to anyone who chooses to come. America belongs to the world.
Consider Bernie Sanders’ immigration proposal, outlined the week of the massacre of Mormon women and children.

On Day One, President Sanders would declare a moratorium on deportations and offer a “swift pathway to citizenship” for all illegal migrants who have been here for five years.
Bernie would break up ICE. Border-jumping would cease to be a crime and become a civil offense like jaywalking. The “Muslim ban” would be abolished.
President Sanders would back sanctuary cities that refuse to work with U.S. law enforcement. Asylum seekers would not have to wait in Mexico as their claims were processed but would be welcomed into the USA.
Family separations would end. Trump’s wall, which Bernie calls “racist,” would be history. The administration’s treatment of illegal immigration “as a criminal and national security matter is inhuman, impractical and must end.”
Migrants who enter illegally would qualify for federal health care and the same social welfare benefits as U.S. citizens. Immigrant officials say Sanders’ proposals would create an irresistible magnet for millions of migrants from all over the world to stampede into the USA.
The Nation magazine calls Sanders’ plan “one of the boldest immigration plans any major politician has put forward in years, and comes amid a campaign season that has seen a major shift to the left among Democratic candidates on immigration.
“With calls for a total moratorium on deportations, abolishing ICE and providing a path to citizenship for undocuмented migration, the plan serves as a road map for what a fair and just immigration can be.”
From another standpoint, Sanders’ proposal is a surrender to the reality that a leftist regime lacks the conviction or will to stop an endless stream of people from migrating here.
Americans troubled over what is happening on the Syrian-Turkish border, or Ukrainian-Crimean border, might take a closer look at what will happen at our own border, and to our own country, if Democrats win the presidency and throw open the doors to unrestricted immigration.
The federal budget, already running trillion-dollar deficits, and state budgets, too, will see huge increases in the cost of social programs, without the commensurate income tax revenues to pay for them.
Even at present levels, illegal immigration is bringing in millions of people without the work, education or language skills to compete and assimilate rapidly in a first world, Western economy.
These migrants pay virtually no income taxes, yet, would qualify for the same benefits as U.S. citizens. The inevitable result: another run-up in an annual deficit already running $1 trillion in the red.
Politically, so massive a migration of peoples who, once they become citizens, vote 70%-90% Democratic means an end of the GOP as a truly national party.
If we open the borders, how do we stop the drugs from coming in? How do we stop the cartels from following MS-13, which is already here?
Socially, this country is as splintered as it has been since the 1960s.
Will a barrage of migrants add to its diversity, or deepen the ethnic, racial and cultural divides that are turning us into two, three, many Americas?

Is Macron Right? Is NATO, 70, Brain Dead?
November 26, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
Votes: 4.95 Stars!
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Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the Cold War.

A week from now, the 29 member states of “the most successful alliance in history” will meet to celebrate its 70th anniversary. Yet all is not well within NATO.
Instead of a “summit,” the gathering, on the outskirts of London, has been cut to two days. Why the shortened agenda?
Among the reasons, apprehension that President Donald Trump might use the occasion to disrupt alliance comity by again berating the Europeans for freeloading on the U.S. defense budget.
French President Emanuel Macron, on the 100th anniversary of the World War I Armistice, described NATO as having suffered “brain death.” Macron now openly questions the U.S. commitment to fight for Europe and is talking about a “true European Army” with France’s nuclear deterrent able to “defend Europe alone.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose nation spends 1.4% of GDP on defense and has relied on the U.S. and NATO to keep Russia at bay since the Cold War began, is said to be enraged at the “disruptive politics” of the French president.
Also, early in December, Britain holds national elections. While the Labour Party remains committed to NATO, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is no Clement Attlee, who took Britain into NATO at its birth in 1949.
Corbyn has questioned NATO’s continued relevance in the post-Cold War era. A potential backer of a new Labour government, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party, is demanding the closing of Britain’s Trident submarine base in Scotland as a precondition of her party’s support for Labour in Parliament.
Also present in London will be NATO ally Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan.

Following the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has purged scores of thousands from his army and regime, jailed more journalists than any other authoritarian, purchased Vladimir Putin’s S-400 missile system as Turkey’s air defense, and ordered the U.S. forces out of his way as he invaded northern Syria, killing Kurdish fighters who did the bleeding and dying in the U.S.-led campaign to crush the ISIS caliphate.
During the Cold War, NATO enjoyed the widespread support of Americans and Europeans, and understandably so. The USSR had 20 divisions in Germany, surrounded West Berlin, and occupied the east bank of the Elbe, within striking distance of the Rhine.
But that Cold War is long over. Berlin is the united free capital of Germany. The Warsaw Pact has been dissolved. Its member states have all joined NATO. The Soviet Union split apart into 15 nations. Communist Yugoslavia splintered into seven nations.
As a fighting faith, communism is dead in Europe. Why then are we Americans still over there?
Since the Cold War, we have doubled the size of NATO. We have brought in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but not Finland or Sweden. We have committed ourselves to fight for Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and Montenegro but not Serbia, Bosnia or North Macedonia.
Romania and Bulgaria are NATO allies but not Moldova or Belarus.
George W. Bush kept us out of the 2008 Russia-Georgia clash over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And Barack Obama refused to send lethal aid to help Ukraine retrieve Crimea, Luhansk or Donetsk, though Sen. John McCain wanted the United States to jump into both fights.
In the House Intel Committee’s impeachment hearings, foreign service officers spoke of “Russian aggression” against our Ukrainian “ally” and our “national security” being in peril in this fight.
But when did Ukraine become an ally of the United States whose territorial wars we must sustain with military aid if not military intervention?
When did Kyiv’s control of Crimea and the Donbass become critical to the national security of the United States, when Russia has controlled Ukraine almost without interruption from Catherine the Great in the 18th century to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 20th century?
Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the Cold War.
And these unanswered questions are deadly serious ones.
Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons?
Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?
In 1914 and 1939, in solidarity with the mother country, Britain, Canada declared war on Germany. Would Justin Trudeau’s Canada invoke NATO and declare war on Putin’s Russia — for Estonia or Latvia?
Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations even closer to Russia.
One day, one of these war guarantees is going to be called upon, and we may find that the American people were unaware of that commitment, and are unwilling to honor it, especially if the consequence is a major war with a nuclear power.

https://buchanan.org/blog/is-macron-right-is-nato-70-brain-dead-137808