Breitbart Business Digest: Biden Is the Chaos Candidate

Never Murder a Man Committing Suicide

Republicans looking out across the chaos that has engulfed American campuses should take Richard Nixon’s advice: “Never murder a man who’s committing suicide.”

The promise of Biden’s 2020 candidacy was a return to normalcy. After the strife of the Trump years and the pandemic, Joe Biden’s most persuasive pitch was that his presidency would bring about a return to a more ordered Republic.

That has not worked out. Instead of economic prosperity, we got massive inflation. Instead of peaceful relations with the world, we have wars in Ukraine and Gaza. A crime wave grips our cities. And our colleges and universities are besieged by antisemitic protests and battling occupations by masked students and “outside agitators” (as the mayor of New York City describes them) falsely accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians.

The establishment media weirdly used to insist on describing the Trump presidency as “dark” or “troubled times.” That’s far more fitting to America in 2024.

This has been a wake-up call for many on Wall Street. Although America’s financiers once leaned Republican, they had moved to the left in recent decades, not least because President Barack Obama presided over a revival of Wall Street’s fortunes in the aftermath of the financial crisis. What momentarily looked like an existential crisis for the financial sector proved to be merely a period of consolidation, in no small part because of Obama’s policies.

Protest—recall Occupy Wall Street—was just a bubble in the molten mass, to paraphrase Robinson Jeffer’s prophetic poem “Shine Perishing Republic.“ It popped and sighed out, and the mass hardened. By 2016, nearly all the Wall Street money was flowing into the campaign coffers of Hillary Clinton.

The ugly turn of American progressives against Israel and the uncovering of deeply held antisemitic convictions in our institutions of higher education has been jolting. The Biden administration’s timid responses and complacent acceptance of this—highlighted by Biden’s recent “both sides” comments—is triggering a realignment.

The Ackman Moment

Nowhere can this shift be seen more clearly than in the person of billionaire fund manager Bill Ackman, long considered a progressive Democrat. (He probably considers himself a centrist, but that’s just the way liberal Democrats with money tend to describe themselves.) His social media posts on Elon Musk’s X now read like he’s a loyal reader of Breitbart.

He reposted this from a pseudonymous account:

And wrote this:

He reposted this from Mike Pompeo:

Ackman has always been particularly outspoken. He’s an activist investor, and now he is applying his approach to underperforming companies to American public life. What’s perhaps less visible is that many on Wall Street quietly agree. What’s more, Ackman’s example is giving permission for financial sector folks to do the once unthinkable: openly proclaim their opposition to Biden and support for the once-and-probably-future President Donald Trump.

The Lesson of Chicago 1968

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does earn compound interest.

The Democratic Party is once again having its national political convention in Chicago. There are very good odds that the world will witness a reprisal of the events of 1968, when leftwing protesters battled police in the parks and streets of the Democrat-controlled city while Hubert Humphrey attempted to make his case that the American people should elect another Democrat into the White House.

Humphrey found the attempt to stand against the anti-American protests without alienating his own party a Gordian knot impossible to untie. He even had his own “both sides” moment when he proclaimed that “Neither mob violence nor police brutality have any place in America.”

The odds are looking very good that Biden will find himself standing in Humphrey’s shoes come the DNC convention. Will he be able to make a pitch that he represents order and peace while his erstwhile political allies accuse Israel of genocide and “occupy” the public square with their hateful sloganeering and venomous encampments?

And what should Republicans and conservatives do as leftwing chaos surges?

Nearly thirty years ago, one of the authors of this newsletter was a young staffer on the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination of Pat Buchanan. It was a brilliant campaign waged against the Republican establishment on behalf of America First economic and foreign policies and conservative approaches to domestic politics that—sadly—America was not yet ready to hear. Twenty years later, Trump would win the White House on a very similar platform in large part because the very catastrophes Buchanan was warning against had actually come to pass.

One day toward the end of the campaign, Buchanan told us the story of his experience at the 1968 Democratic convention.

Buchanan had asked Nixon to send him to Chicago to be part of a GOP rapid response and observation team. The idea was to put a team on the ground to hear what the Democrats were saying and to be where all the national press would be to deliver Republican rebuttals to the claims of Democrats at their convention.

Nixon agreed to the idea and sent Buchanan, then not even 30 years old, as well as William Safire and a young GOP Congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld. They set up shop in the Conrad Hilton Hotel, across the street from Grant Park, where the worst rioting took place.

On the first night that protesters clashed with Mayor Daley’s police, Buchanan and Safire went down to Grant Park. “We probably should not have gone in coats and ties,” Buchanan told us. “That was provocative to the long-haired and bearded kids.”

Buchanan said they wound up being tear-gassed down on the street when the cops moved in and nearly got their own heads bashed in by the cops, even in their square-peg suit and ties. They retreated back to the hotel and watched the action through the window of their hotel room. It was not a bad place to be. Apparently, the boxer Jose Torres and writer Norman Mailer also decamped to the Nixon-operative suite to watch from the windows.

The team of Buchanan, Safire, and Rumsfeld debated how the Nixon campaign should respond to what later became known as a “police riot.” Coming down too much on the side of “law and order” risked seeming unsympathetic to what many Americans saw as “kids” being battered by police. On the other hand, the worst of the protesters epitomized exactly the sort of anti-American attitudes that Nixon was campaigning against.

Buchanan realized that the right approach was to do nothing. He phoned Nixon, who was down in Florida, and advised him that the best thing they could do was sit back and allow the media to focus on the unruly protesters and their battles with police. No visible GOP presence was necessary at all. Indeed, it would be counter-productive. Better to issue no statements at all and just serve drinks to members of the press watching the action from the 19th floor hotel room where the Nixon operatives were staying.

Nixon agreed. Safire, Buchanan, and Rumsfeld stood down. It was then that Nixon recalled the maxim that Buchanan said originated with Woodrow Wilson: “Never murder a man who’s attempting to commit suicide.”

The progressive coalition that elected Biden in 2020 is committing suicide. Republicans should probably take the Buchanan-Nixon response to heart. It may pay off with interest this time.