America Last Quotes

“DeSantis’s assault on academic freedom was reminiscent of the playbook that William F. Buckley Jr. first outlined in God and Man at Yale, not to mention”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“In his Hillsdale address, Caldwell began by explaining that he wasn’t intent on telling anyone what to think about the Russian dictator (a term, incidentally, he never used to describe Putin) but how to think about him. He went out of his way to deride Western “globalist leaders” for pretending that sovereignty was passé. Putin didn’t. “Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Caldwell affirmed, “is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“In February 2017, a month after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, delivered a speech about Putin at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Trump’s summit meeting in Helsinki in July 2018, where the American president sided with Putin against his own FBI over allegations of Russian attempts to influence”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“the American election? A brief flap. The Mueller Report? With the aid of Attorney General William P. Barr, Trump turned it to his advantage, explaining to his followers that it was merely the latest installment in the ongoing saga of the Deep State’s nefarious attempt to abort his presidency. The Senate 2020 Intelligence Committee report on the 2016 election detailing Russian interference and contacts with the Trump campaign? More fodder for his “Russia hoax” claim.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“On May 10, 2017, one day after firing FBI Director James Comey over “this Russia thing,” now-President Trump met with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and ambassador Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office, where he divulged highly classified information to his Russian guests on the terrorist group Islamic State that had not even been shared with America’s closest allies.38 Trump’s supporters in Congress didn’t see anything wrong with the meeting. In July, Trump thanked Putin for evicting American diplomats from Moscow, claiming that “We’ll save a lot of money.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“At the same time, Trump began his own effort to condition the Republican party to accept and even adopt his fawning view of Russia and Putin. Trump converted his pro-authoritarian sentiments into a weapon with which to bully any dissenters in the GOP into submission. In schooling the Republican faithful, Trump took a large swath of the party back in time. Throughout the campaign, Trump returned repeatedly to the theme that Russia was misunderstood by the West. In December 2015, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance, Trump made his veneration of Putin, who had recently termed him “brilliant,” plain. Trump dismissed host Joe Scarborough’s warning that Putin murdered journalists and political opponents without compunction as so much piffle. “I’ve always felt fine about Putin,”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Trump said. “He’s a strong leader. He’s a powerful leader.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Only a few weeks earlier, Vladimir Putin had convened with his spy chiefs and senior ministers during a special meeting of Russia’s national security council to authorize a multiagency operation to assist the “mentally unstable” Trump.36 Putin established a new working group that included Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Federal Security Bureau head Alexander Bortnikov to execute it. The top-secret Kremlin plan—No. 32–04\vd—deemed Trump”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“the “most promising candidate” and called, among other things, for creating “media viruses” and cyber-hacking on behalf of Trump.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Since 9/11,” wrote Frum, “the paleoconservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business.”29 He concluded that the paleoconservatives began by hating neoconservatives, moved on to hating George W. Bush, and ended by “hating their country.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“that was directed at Buchanan: “In the 1930s, everyone thought Hitler was a fringe element who could never come to power. History showed otherwise. We must recognize bigotry and prejudice and defeat it whenever it appears.” Appearing on The Tonight Show, Trump was more distinctive: “He’s obviously been having a love affair with Adolf Hitler.”23”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“This Balkan war,” Buchanan said, “is not America’s war.” Once again, he wasn’t the only critic of that campaign, prompting Robert Kagan to observe that too many “Republicans have adopted a Neville Chamberlain attitude toward the population of Kosovo, yet another distant people whose fate need not concern us.”17 Kagan’s evocation of Chamberlain was a staple of neocon discourse, but in the case of Buchanan it was quite accurate. In fact, Buchanan had always supported appeasement.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“That Buchanan would receive a message from Russia with love was no accident. In the 1990s, he consistently voiced Moscow’s geopolitical line, warning that NATO expansion and intervention in the Balkans were colossal errors. Buchanan was not alone in his apprehensions—realist thinkers such as the diplomat George F. Kennan opposed NATO expansion as well—but Buchanan came at these questions from a distinctive place, not of foreign policy realism (which he claimed to espouse), but outright fervor for Christian nationalist Russia.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“After Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary in February 1996, he received a telegram of congratulations from abroad. The nationalist Russian presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky wrote to suggest that Jews—“this small but troublesome tribe”—in both Russia and America should be deported forthwith to reservations in the hinterlands.15”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“The first thing he talked about wasn’t immigration or abortion but his sympathy for the marauding Serbs, who had perpetrated genocide against Bosnian Muslims.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“In his columns, Buchanan, much like the generation of conservatives immediately after the Second World War had done, consistently referred to the Nuremberg war crimes trials as a form of victor’s justice. In essence, he depicted a moral equivalence between Churchill’s England and Hitler’s Germany. It all came full circle in 1990 when Buchanan defended Saddam Hussein by invoking Hitler’s example in the final days of the Third Reich. It was the height of folly, Buchanan wrote, to insist that Saddam Hussein exit Kuwait. His reputation in the Arab world would be toast. “Even Adolf Hitler,” Buchanan wrote, “preferred to die, a suicide in his bunker, than agree to such a disgrace”—as though Hitler was not already amply disgraced in April 1945.7”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“1982 television interview with Allan Ryan, the former head of the Office of Special Investigations, a Justice Department office that tracked down Nazi war criminals living in America, Buchanan said that it was a waste of money to investigate Nazi war crimes and that he saw no “singularity” about the Holocaust.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“In a 1977 syndicated column about Hitler, Buchanan expressed admiration for him: “Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Like Mencken and Nock, Buchanan evinced a predilection for eyebrow-raising statements about Jews and Germany that testified to an unhealthy obsession with rewriting history. And like Mencken and Nock, he took a jaundiced view of democracy. An admirer of the southern confederacy and a defender of South Africa, he insisted that America was a “republic,” not a “democracy.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Buchanan came under fire from his former mentor, William F. Buckley Jr., who wrote a 40,000-word essay detailing and criticizing the perennial problem of anti-Semitism on the Right. Buckley not only examined Buchanan’s record, but also that of his fellow National Review editor Joseph Sobran, who in March 1986 in an essay for the Hillsdale College publication Imprimis protested the “diabolization” of Hitler. A paleoconservative who was often likened to H. L. Mencken by his admirers, Sobran ended up being dismissed from The National Review in 1993 by Buckley.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, speaking under the auspices of the Council for Democracy, got it right. “Whenever a man stands before you and tells you to bow down before the mythical invincibility of the Nazi tyranny,” he said, “that man is a warmonger.” He added, “Whenever he tells you that democracy is done for, that we must not have the faith in the eternal strength of our democratic institutions, that man is a warmonger.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Nazi scuttlefish” who “pour ink on the truth to blacken out the light of freedom,” Ickes stated that Lindbergh had initially remained silent about the June 22 German invasion of the Soviet Union until he received his talking points from Berlin. “I have never heard Lindbergh say a word for democracy itself,” Ickes concluded. “Has any one of you?”46”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“When Hitler delivered a speech on January 30, 1939, to the Reichstag to celebrate the sixth anniversary of his ascension to power, he declared that a new war in Europe would lead to “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”—and attacked Ickes by name.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“You panderers of Communism, you cringing, cowardly advocates of press-muzzling, we will fight you in Franco’s way. Call this inflammatory if you will. It is inflammatory. Christianity is the peaceful way until there is left no other way than self-defense—the Franco way.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Michael Kazin speculated that had Wilson declined to intervene, the outcome would have been far superior for America and Europe—no Treaty of Versailles, no stab-in-the-back myth, and “no rise, much less triumph, of Hitler and his National Socialist Party.”6”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“America, they say, is a republic, not a democracy—ignoring that the Founding Fathers favored a republican government not to promote minority rule, but to avert what James Madison in Federalist No. 10 referred to as “the spectacles of turbulence and contention” of mob rule.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“In fact, a proclivity for authoritarianism is American to its core. While much of the story that follows focuses on the “revisionist” history that conservatives regularly espouse, the Right has been right all along, so to speak. Its members don’t despise America; they loath the America they cannot bludgeon into submission. To justify their power grab, they turn American political history on its head.”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“They denounce “cancel culture,” but are busily canceling anything that nettles them, from books to beer. They define freedom as the ability to suppress the views and beliefs, ranging from transgender rights to an independent media, that they revile. At”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

“Liberalism, conservatives say, stands for totalitarianism, democracy for injustice, and rights for decadence. Conservatives have a different formula. They wish to protect freedom in the name of limiting it. They aspire to create a revolution to preserve tradition, to capture the future by returning to a mythical past. Right-”
― Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators