I attended college in Storm Lake, Iowa, in the mid-90s. I was the only black person there and the student body president in the 1995–96 school year when Republican presidential hopefuls were crisscrossing through Iowa.
Storm Lake, IA, was ground zero for Republicans to barnstorm through since it boasted the most facilities for Republicans to meet voters as the Iowa Cacuces were in full swing. Names forgotten to the past, men like Lamar Alexandar, Pete Wilson, Dick Lugar, Steve Forbes, Bob Dole, and several also-rans tramped into town, hoping to ignite their meager campaigns and ascend to the Oval Office.
They all came to my college to court voters and would see me in the audience—the proverbial raisin in the mayonnaise-based potato salad. Each candidate and I knew they would not be earning my vote. It was unspoken between us, but due to my station in life, I was an authority figure on this campus. My presence was requested until they saw the small black frame that enclosed my indelible spirit; their advance team immediately regretted the request.
I am blessed with discernment and common sense. I have been able to marry book smarts with street smarts.
As I reflect on this experience almost 30 years later, I was baffled by how many of these white men could sit in the audience and be enthralled by the truly dystopian lies these charlatans were baying. They trodded out the classics: our country was being overrun by undocumented people from Mexico (and not in those words). They would talk about how our inner cities (which was the polite dog whistle for blacks back then, instead of ghettos, which some, like Pat Buchanan, were not above using) were plagued with crime and turned into bombed-out warzones by gangs. Today, this type of fearmongering seems relatively tame compared to the blatant and bold lies that Trump and his cronies saturate the airwaves and smother the internet with every other minute.
I don’t know if my presence at an all-white affair tempered their bombastic language. I don’t know if it was my position at the University, being elected by my peers to be their president, dulled their words on their deceitful observations about the condition of black America.
I do know that every time a candidate of import came to our campus, I was there smirking as they revved themselves up into a frenzy over the lies they had manufactured to describe how Bill Clinton was destroying America. I smirked because what they said then was weird and not aligned with the world I had seen.
I must confess to you, my loyal readers: I was an insufferable idiot in college. I thought I knew everything. I was woefully ignorant about the world around me. Yet, in college, in the forsaken northwest corner of Iowa, I was surrounded by a gaggle of mouth-breathers that were my peers. I had a reason to believe that I was the smartest person of my generation — a once-in-a-lifetime genius—somehow condemned to this stockade I called a college.
My audacity was my protection. My arrogance, my shield. My hubris, my comfort.
At that point in my life, emerging from the protection of my parents, I had backpacked through Europe, so in my estimation, I was cultured. I had seen some beautiful and horrible things; I had read Brother Malcolm’s and Sister Toni’s words; I had been lucky enough to love and be loved by some amazing people and some less-than-amazing people, and I had known what unrequited love felt like and introduced others to this cruel purgatory. I thought that the sum of my life’s work imbued me with a rare and unique knowledge — as I said above, I was an idiot.
Regardless, blissfully ignorant of my shortcomings and with only twenty-one years of life on this planet, I received Pat Buchanan's words and denounced his followers as ignorant.
I was so foolish back then. I took a broad brush and labeled everyone with whom my words came in contact as ignorant.
I had incorrectly stereotyped these people who supported a brand of conservatism that was opposite to the world I lived in and wanted to live in as ignorant.
My ill-fated remarks eventually made it onto TV and into the newspapers. I was the big deal I knew myself to be; now, the rest of Iowa and soon the world marvel at my brilliance.
At a college-wide invocation, the university President denounced my comments. He did not call me out by name, but those who knew knew.
I was crestfallen, devastated. My twenty-one-year-old ego could not handle such a public rebuke.
The President of my University said there was no place at an institution of higher learning for such labeling of people.
I hated him for this rebuke. For almost 30 years, I have carried a vendetta against this man. It has been what has driven me to reach for the stars. I wanted him and everyone else who incorrectly believed they had bested me with their public condemnation of my words to choke on my success.
I got a scholarship to the highest-ranked graduate school that anyone from my University ever attended. I won a consequential civil rights decision via special action in Arizona. I soared in politics in a battleground state. I held leadership positions, wrote op-eds, was a political television commentator, and was the first black man to serve on an Arizona governor’s transition team. This past week, I became the second black attorney in Arizona’s history to receive an AV Preeminent designation by Martindale Hubbel.
His public rebuke made me into the man I am, but it was all for naught. Ultimately, I was wrong, and I am embarrassed that it took me almost 30 years to admit that I should have been publicly rebuked.
They were not ignorant — they were bigots.
They were intentional and ahead of the curve in embracing the bigotry that Pat Buchanan espoused. The same bigotry that fueled Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the White House.
I formerly apologize to everyone I erroneously extended grace and charity to by referring to your support of such a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic worldview as ignorance. It was not my right to erase your agency in embracing hate.
You were not ignorant but deplorable bigots.
When I was twenty-one, I did not know what I did not know. I did not have the depth of knowledge from reading, listening, observing, and analyzing how the world worked. White supremacy was a term that was only used in quiet hushes and exclusively reserved for the Klu Klux Klan, which had been vanquished — reduced to a fearful apparition of the past. The KKK was a story that we told our children to remind us how far we had come in this country.
At this point, I had read Incident’s In the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Race Matters by Cornell West, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, and Beloved by Toni Morrison. These were the books that gave my life its base for parsing information about racism and how the government allowed black people to be subjugated, coerced, and even destroyed. I had been to Dachau and felt a dampness of evil that I regret has stained my soul.
This was the sum of my collective wisdom, plus being the son of parents who were forced into the indignity of attending segregated schools. The grandson of grandparents who sent their oldest boys off to fight in Korea but could not come home and vote. The great-grandson of sharecroppers who were cheated out of land and earnings, and the great-great-grandson of formerly enslaved people.
Even with this dearth of knowledge, I knew, with every fiber of my being, that Pat Buchanan was a bigot. I realized that those who followed him, who subscribed to his worldview, were bigots. I either lacked the boldness or the ability to articulate the malice and hatred I had observed in his presence.
So, I defaulted to calling his supporters ignorant and denying their appetite to embrace the devil and reject the angel that sits on our shoulders. A philosophy of cruelty that has sowed so much pain on American soil.
Pat Buchanan was, is, and forever will be a bigot. The ghoulish troll, Stephen Miller, oozes charism and sex appeal compared to Pat. That is why his robust white grievance populism failed to gain traction: the messenger was a frumpy, disheveled vagabond of a salesman. No one trusted anything he was selling except the visionaries who could separate the message of racial superiority from the charmless spokesman.
The same brain trust that ran Pat Buchanan ran Donald Trump in 2016: chiefly Paul Manifort and Roger Stone. In Trump, these two pardoned criminals found a man with charisma. Many of us were glued to our televisions, watching this man who was brash and funny, bellow his catchphrase: you’re fired. We saw a man with an oversized ego that encouraged him to desecrate skylines with his name.
We fell for the myth of Trump, not interrogating who he was or how he came to his fortune. The evidence was clear he was the product of tall tales; we ignored it and decided to be amused.
Trump was cool (I just threw up a little in my mouth writing this), but Pat was weird. Pat was diminutive despite being over six feet tall. He was Nixionian in looks—think troll with bad posture. He scowled instead of smile.
Pat was weird, so his nascent version of America-First politics did not catch fire because the emissary was flawed. He was a loser. You could see it in him; you could sense it. Defeat causes a person to embrace hopelessness. His brand of white grievance populism was privately embraced by white America but publicly rejected.
I think the biggest lie we currently tell ourselves in politics is that Fox News has rotted white folks' minds. We tell this lie and make Rupert Murdock and Roger Alles into villains, and they are villains, but they did not create a brain worm that makes RFK Jr. envious, no they gave white America the content they desired: rage, fear, and lies.
The more they fed their white audience rage, the more money Fox made. The more fear they spread, the better their benefactors performed in elections (the Republicans), and the more lies they told, the more resentment built toward non-white Christian heterosexual men.
Then, when the rage was not sufficient, the fear did not induce a state of panic, and the lies were too tepid, the audience rebelled. They got their fix from more potent sources of mis- and disinformation.
This white audience wanted to be afraid, angry, and aggrieved.
Yet, we allow the lie to live that Fox did this to your white parents and grandparents, but instead, it was created to soothe them and provide them with the content they were yearning for.
Almost 30 years later, I have embraced the fact that I lied when I called Pat’s followers ignorant when I knew they were bigots.
I hope all those I have affronted with my misnomer can forgive me.
Sincerely,
Garrick Arvin McFadden, Esq.
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