Something happened to me this week, which suggests that certain enemies hang around to bite you until you or your enemies depart this world. A few months ago Walter Block and I began assembling a list of "Scholars for Trump," which some readers of this website agreed to sign. Later Walter and I were told that another academic, Francis Buckley, a professor of law at George Mason and contributor to National Review, was putting together an independent list of pro-Trump authors. Thereupon we established contact with Professor Buckley, exchanged lists (for full disclosure, his list was considerably longer than ours) and agreed that sometimes in October we would try to integrate our two lists. This week the AmGreatness website published its own long list of "Scholars and Writers for Trump" together with declarations of support prepared by what we were supposed to believe were prominent scholars. A few dozen friends asked me over the internet why my name had not turned up on this list. As the author of thirteen books with publishers that include Princeton, Cambridge, and MacMillan and as the writer of numerous scholarly articles in German and French as well as in English, I would certainly qualify as a scholar, at least as much as any of the signatories featured on AmGreatness.

As best as I can piece together the circumstances, it seems that Professor Buckley made an entirely unauthorized use of our list. We never agreed that he was allowed to recycle our list, after he removed those names, including those of the two organizers, which did not resonate with his pals at the AmGreatness-website.  Those on our list whom the editors of that website found compatible were contacted behind our backs and induced to sign on to the Amgreatness list. The other signatories, including me, were thrown onto the trash heap. These steps came after what the website editor, Christopher Buskirk, suggested had been an exceedingly fastidious process.  Apparently neither Walter nor I, although widely published septuagenarian scholars, was good enough to be on the same list of notables with geriatric neoconservative journalists. Having read an assessment of this list in the nutcase leftist the New Republic, I found myself actually agreeing with its judgment that many of the signatories barely if at all qualify as scholars. At least some of them, as the commentary stated, were "of little scholarly repute."