The real tell here is that in the actual video -- which is less embarrassing that the photo -- Pete still only takes a *tiny* sip of what looks to be Lagavulin 16. A dude who genuinely likes drinking would have taken a real pull.

Here's the thing: politicians should avoid drinking in public *unless* they genuinely like drinking. Otherwise they look like losers.

Again, like with the fascism debate this is all ultimately about liberalism and the belief of a cadre of leftist thinkers that *any* critical scholarship on the American right is functionally an apologia for American liberalism, which is simply categorically untrue.

. Buchanan and Trump despite them having functionally the same politics and having even *RUN AGAINST EACH OTHER* for the Reform Party nomination in 2000.

And it's more than a little intellectually dishonest for the same folks who insisted that we can't use the terms "populism" or "fascism" to describe MAGAism because of their historical specificity to 1890 or 1930 claim that we also cannot talk about the connection between. .

And it's particularly bizarre because while the fascism debate could be had in something approximating good faith -- which it unfortunately usually wasn't -- the "Buchanan presaged Trumpism and tapped into the same energies in a moment of political flux" is straightforwardly true.

Stepping back from it, it is *really* bizarre that "Pat Buchanan has nothing to do with MAGA" is the Trump 2.0 version of the fascism debate.

Speaking as a historian of American conservatism who actually published an academic book on the subject. *none* of the people who are making this claim are actually historians of American conservatism.

He built his post-2008 political career on birtherism, after all—but of course the big wrench in this is that Buchanan was a birther too!.

In over a day of discourse on the subject no one has yet talked about the strongest piece of evidence against the Buchanan—>Trump thesis, which is that Trump independently embraced and capitalized on nativist racism because of his personal antipathy towards Obama.

I've been lucky over the past week or so to hear from a number of people I respect and admire that they liked my book. That means a lot!.

Anyway, in political history it's pretty uncontroversial to claim that someone who runs against another person in an election and then later adopts a significant part of that person's platform was influenced by them.

Yes, it's called "political history".

Huh, I missed the "white flight was actually the ethnic cleansing of American cities" discourse on the right over the past couple of days.

Well to be fair for a good half-century there the Democratic Party was itself the party of treason.

RT @thezachloeffler: Memories are clearly short. Today I learned of the 1981 Baker Report at UChicago, addressing the question of whether s….

RT @MikeKoncewicz: The Vice President of the United States, the most powerful millennial politician, has proudly cited Pat Buchanan as an i….

@UVA (It may seem like I'm trolling by posting this, and I kind of am, but also my syllabus is FOIA-able and if someone is gonna after me for it I'd rather just have it already out there!).

Anyway, here's hoping I don't get fired by our new administration at @UVA for teaching anti-MAGA or woke DEI agitprop!.

I want to thank the folks who responded to this thread for giving me some really great ideas about contemporary texts to assign, which make up the bulk of the final class sessions.