The Republicans' shift towards white supremacy, led largely by Buckley, is one that Buccola also believes is essential to understanding current politics.

"If we want to try to understand where we are now, with the rise of Donald Trump and this sort of resurgent white nationalist authoritarianism, we have to understand stories like this one," the author tells Scheer. "Because this is a story about, intellectually and politically, how the right came to make this deal with the devil of white supremacy. And that's very much where we are today.

"Trump's got a different style from Buckley, and Buckley didn't like Trump personally," Buccola continues. "But it's hard to really differentiate that sort of populist politics that Buckley was promoting on questions of race, from what Donald Trump has done so successfully today."

https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/There-is-no-Donald-Trump-without-William-Buckley

transporter_ii: NRO < There was a point in time at which Trump's unusual verbal affect and singular nose for underutilized wedge issues gave him a competitive edge.

Racism was an underutilized wedge issue. Got it.

I mean, if anyone would know about using racism as a wedge issue...

A September 21, 1965, article by Ernest van den Haag called "More Immigration?" took on the impending reform [signed into law on October 3, 1965, by Lyndon Johnson] that would open up America to the Third World. Mr. van den Haag...argued that our then-sound immigration laws should be made even stricter, not looser. Rejecting the charge that the laws were "racist," he wrote: "one need not believe that one's own ethnic group, or any ethnic group, is superior to others . . . in order to wish one's country to continue to be made up of the same ethnic strains in the same proportions as before. And, conversely, the wish not to see one's country overrun by groups one regards as alien need not be based on feelings of superiority or 'racism'." He goes on to say, "the wish to preserve one's identity and the identity of one's nation requires no justification . . . any more than the wish to have one's own children, and to continue one's family through them need be justified or rationalized by a belief that they are superior to the children of others."

A September 26, 1975, review of Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints makes much the same point. Prof. Jeffrey Hart...called the book a "sensation" that rocked liberal sensibilities. He wrote:

Most people . . . are able to perceive that the 'other group' looks rather different and lives rather differently from their own. Such 'racist' or 'ethnocentric' feelings are undoubtedly healthy, and involve merely a preference for one's own kind. Indeed - and Raspail hammers away at this point throughout his novel - no group can long survive unless it does 'prefer itself.' . . . The liberal rote anathema on 'racism' is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.

/They probably even have the original print versions lying around the office.
//Or maybe just soft copies...

President Trump was lying when he claimed in 2011 that he had paid private investigators to go to Hawaii to dig up information on former President Barack Obama's birth certificate, Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer and fixer, told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Tuesday.

In his new book, Disloyal: A Memoir, Cohen writes about Trump pushing the false claim that Obama was not actually born in Hawaii. Cohen told Maddow that when Trump began talking endlessly about the conspiracy theory, he "saw that his poll numbers and his popularity and the number of times that he's gracing the cover of the newspaper is increasing." Trump didn't actually believe any of it, Cohen said, but "he doesn't care what he says, he doesn't care who gets hurt, so long as he wins."

After Trump claimed to have sent private investigators to Hawaii, he declared that they couldn't "believe what they're finding." Later, Trump refused to share what the PIs allegedly uncovered, telling CNN's Anderson Cooper it wasn't "appropriate" to reveal their discoveries and letting ABC News' George Stephanopoulos know "it's none of your business right now."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/theweek.com/speedreads/936488/michael-cohen-says-trump-lied-about-sending-investigators-hawaii-look-into-obamas-birth-certificate%3famp

If he was looking for proof that Obama was born in Kenya, why would he send investigators to Hawaii? Pretty sure everyone knew that he was full of shiat the moment he said it.

From a contributor to the "Never Trump" issue of National Review:

Painful as it may be to realize that we are reduced to considering the impeachability of a presidential candidate, that is reality.

How impeachable is Hillary Clinton? Since she would be "the first woman president," any criticism of her, much less any impeachment, would bring loud howls from the media across the country. Hillary in the White House would have a blank check, and she would not hesitate to use it.

Donald Trump has no such exemption. Neither the media nor congressional Republicans would automatically spring to his defense, if he overstepped the line. His impeachability may be his most important asset in a year of painful choices.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.