Christopher Rufo looks at Nixon
Interesting. Of course, America – and the world – has changed a lot since then:
Richard Nixon fought the chaos of the New Left and won a 49-state landslide. He dismantled the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. And he saw the threat of the permanent bureaucracy.
As I explain in a new film, Richard Nixon, despite his flaws, has much to teach us: pic.twitter.com/YefQyAfQYg
— Christopher F. Rufo ?? (@realchrisrufo) October 5, 2023
The Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign should have reduced Nixon’s actions to a mere footnote. Nixon’s flaws are a speck when compared to the plank in Obama’s eye.
I’ll happily watch the documentary.
An interesting take on Nixon. The left will denounce this as rewriting history.
Given that the MSM and administrative sate are so deeply left, the revolution will be extremely difficult. However, I’m sensing a coming economic problem so bad, that even Democrats will demand change. We’ll see.
Nixon was not as terrible as people said at the time. He tried to do on his own what the FBI did for FDR and LBJ and he got caught. SDS and Weatherman did tend to dry up on their own as the draft and the war ended, the economy soured, and the radicals entered their thirties. Still, Nixon did see America through a very troubled time.
It may be of interest that while the Reagan Library has been hostile to Trump, the Nixon Library has been more favorable. Nixon’s been attacked for not following the conservative recipe as well as it’s claimed Reagan did, but what suited Reagan’s time may not have been the best for Nixon’s era or our own.
When it came out, I watched Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995) with some surprise. I’d expected a hate letter to Nixon but instead it seemed Stone had discovered an odd well of sympathy for Nixon. Which is to say, it was clear Stone did not turn Nixon into the Hitler many believed him to be.
Writing these words, I can’t quite believe it. I’ll have to watch the film again sometime. If for no other reason than Anthony Hopkins plays Nixon.
Looking back and with some knowledge of Nixon’s life, I find he emerges as a complex, flawed man, but not at all a cartoon villain.
Say often the Eff Bee Eye has taken out 2 US Republican Presidents.
Rufo’s video essay is excellent. Well worth the time.
I was a kid in High School working a grocery store night shift when Nixon resigned. It was outside of Boston, MA, the only state that didn’t vote for him, so one can imagine the scene. Quite a few co-workers were celebrating his departure, some with particularly choice words involving Nixon as a criminal.
But at this point, I was already turning conservative, having seen the fruits of busing in person, at school, every day, while witnessing the preening self-indulgence of the nitwits that organized it – but couldn’t be bothered to evaluate the results of their efforts. At the grocery, I would receive a daily learning experience on the eating habits of food stamp recipients, to compare to my own in a house where father was unemployed and struggling hard to find work, with mother working as a teacher. Rough times, but not catastrophic. The welfare queens were eating a lot better than we were, though.
But for the life of me, I couldn’t see that Nixon was a bad President, nor that he had done much more than to defend his people, unadvisedly. He made a serious mistake and was hung out and dressed by the media, with top coaching from the FBI, as we now know. Nice to see that history can be even-handed sometimes. I’ll watch it.
Geoff Shepard has written several books about the Nixon ouster. He was a Lawyer in the administration.
https://shepardonwatergate.com/
Nixon was taken out by the Swamp. He was the best President since Eisenhower as his incredible second election landslide showed. I was in my forties during his terms and was a total political junky. He was great.
The recent book by Roger Stone: The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ has a lot about the various people in the FBI and CIA who decided Nixon had to go and created a convoluted situation that he ultimately got drawn into and destroyed by.
I hope I live long enough to see the whole thing blow up. I think it will. Lots of participants are aging out. Kennedy running will help.
The level of disgust with the Uniparty is something I never believed would happen, but it is. The skeptical group that follows Scott Adams, Tucker Carlson, Russell Brand, et al. is growing exponentially, and the guardians of the Uniparty are finally aging out.
The Cancellations are backfiring. The vaccines are the new asbestos. The Twitter Files happened. DeSantis changed Florida registrations from Democrat to hugely Republican, showing what can happen when Conservative ideas are actually implemented.
The best example in our history of how Swampians may look in ten years is the revulsion toward the Planter Class after the Civil War.
I was not happy at the time Ford pardoned Nixon (and my only Dem vote for President went to Jimmy Carter) – but now I realize it was the FBI who got rid of Nixon. Tho the FBI is a fiction, it doesn’t exist.
The deep throat person, who did exist, was Mark Felt, then #2 under Hoover who finally died, and was passed over by Nixon as head. [William Mark Felt Sr. ]
We need 3 FBIs: one Republican controlled against Dems, one Democrat controlled against Reps, and one (small? large?) that is non-political.
Similarly, it wasn’t the FBI lying to the FISA courts, it was certain people. Who remain essentially unpunished, as so many Dem deep state criminals do.
We also need a firing offense allowing “preponderance of evidence” against US gov’t officials, so far more are fired for illegal actions that they wouldn’t be convicted for.
nixon made some bad policy mistakes notably in economics, wage and price controls, going off the gold standard, then again the tools were scarce then,
but the left still burned for revealing Alger Hiss, and also the embrace with China,
in the early part of the terrors,
Sorry, not buying. The FBI didn’t manipulate Nixon into hiring John Mitchell, John Ehrlichman, and HR Haldeman and it didn’t manipulate these three into hiring rogues like Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt, John Dean, and the young Charles Colson. Liddy, Dean, and his crew committed real crimes. The problem we have faced in the last dozen years is that no one in the FBI or among the Obama and Biden crew has faced any accountability for worse crimes. Neither was J. Edgar Hoover held accountable for the FBI’s abuses prior to his death in 1972.
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Shortly before Mark Felt was ‘exposed’ as ‘Deep Throat’, there was published a analysis of Woodward and Bernstein’s account of their dealings with ‘Deep Throat’ demonstrating the mechanics of it (e.g. the pen and ink notations on newspapers delivered to the vestibules of their respective buildings) simply did not work. It was a fabricated account. Felt was one of a number of their sources and ‘Deep Throat’ was a composite.
wage and price controls, going off the gold standard
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All wage and price controls are a mistake except those pertaining to natural monopolies. However, we did not and do not need a currency peg. We needed and we need prudent monetary policy, which Arthur Burns and his crew were not giving us.
they were sloppy its what the dems had done for generations, that was their crime,
yes a bond lawyer isn’t the best choice for atty general, but neither is a mouthpiece for oxycontin (Holder) a corrupt Dade county prosecutor, (Reno) et al
All Nixon’s sins and more were routine for the Democrats. Their operatives were regarded as heroes.
After I read Roger Stone’s book I realized how much more was in play with the FBI and CIA lifers. It is worth reading. Nixon was manipulated in ways I had not understood.
Only Nixon could go to China, and Nixon did go to China. I was constantly appreciative during his terms at his desire to actually address big problems with big solutions.
Art D: “his crew committed real crimes.” Yes. As so many gov’ts do, often to a bigger extent.
Including Felt at the FBI illegally leaking secret stuff to get Nixon. As you say, “the problem … is that no one in the FBI or among the Obama and Biden crew has faced any accountability for worse crimes.”
Nor under Bush43 , nor Clinton, nor Bush41, nor Reagan (not much).
In thinking about how to make the gov’t better, my current best idea is to have an FBI group primarily going after Dems, and another one primarily going after Reps, with both going after all gov’t employees (especially FBI & CIA etc). We need the laws to apply to both Reps & Dems, pretty equally.
Funny sad at how honest, yet inept and naive, was Jimmy Carter. The recent Israel – Hamas flare up is partly because the dirty Shah was replaced by a far worse Ayatollah Khomeini. Selective moral outrage is lousy (outrageous!), all too often.