Buckflips: Buck’s Brain on…

Ken Buck focuses on a conspiracy theory about Sanctuary Cities and the economics of addiction. What is he thinking?

Blossoms and unripe pods of Papaver somnifera, the opium poppy. Ken Buck appears to be obsessed with it.

Ken Buck has been doing more talking than legislating this year, and not all that much of either one. But he did record an interview on “Conservative Review” recently, about the opioid crisis. Here’s Buck talking:

I believe the drug crisis is an epidemic because of the politics in Washington, DC. If we took a realistic view towards border security, if we took a realistic view toward sanctuary cities, we wouldn’t have have nearly the problems we have in this country right now. I believe the sanctuary city policies are leading directly to an increase in heroin in Denver, and Denver is a hub for probably a five or six state region, as a distribution point. So if you allow, if you give heroin dealers sanctuary in Denver, you’re giving ’em sanctuary for five or six states.

Buck and his interlocutor go on to conclude (in a giant leap of inference) that the “illegals” get “special treatment” in sanctuary cities, so that Denver is an active enabler of the opioid epidemic.

Buck contradicts himself coming and going.

The obvious lie here is Buck’s assertion that undocumented people (or undocumented drug dealers?) are getting special treatment. But in fact what he’s objecting to is that Denver police (and those in most of Colorado) don’t give the undocumented special treatment. They don’t detain them without due process. Don’t stop them merely to ask for papers. (Do you make a habit of carrying your passport to the grocery store?) Sanctuary cities don’t profile people based on “racial” characteristics that aren’t actually a good indicator of citizenship status at all. In other words, Sanctuary Cities follow the law, and refuse to stop doing so because ICE requests it.

But it’s the other two lies, the hidden lies, that are really insidious. The first is the lie of supply-side economics, that increasing supply will increase demand. Caravans of Mexican drug dealers will not cause one more person to seek a source of heroin, but one lazy doctor with his prescription pad can send dozens or hundreds to the streets looking for a cheap alternative to oxycontin.

What undocumented immigrants are actually doing for a living. Do they look as if they have a lucrative sideline in heroin going?

The last, biggest lie, whispered between the lines, is that Buck’s (and Trump’s) nativism is not racism. It is. It’s white pride and the defense of white privilege that Buck is selling. Nobody could doubt it, who heard him at a town hall this time last year, curling his lips as he called some BLM activists “black supremacists.” It takes a racist to watch the police fear-slaughter one nonviolent black or brown youth after another and conclude we need a movement called “Blue Lives Matter.” But that’s what Buck thought, and that’s what he did.

The truth? Criminals are always with us. They aren’t part of other populations, they are part of the general population. There is drug traffic across our borders. Since the “war on drugs” was declared in the 1970’s no efforts by the US have succeeded in stopping it. Perhaps, as in macro-economics, addressing the supply-side is ineffective. Let’s give demand-side policies a chance now. At least there’s evidence that they might work.

Ken Buck desires power and fears the powerful. So he cravenly sidles up to the Trump administration and echoes its policies, trying to bask in the shadow of power, even though those policies are not in the economic interest of his constituents. Here in Eastern Colorado our livelihood in large part depends on the labor, and yes, the safety and well-being of the migrants he’s accusing. Buck, with his Princeton education and wealthy family, may not really understand the populism that drives this kind of messaging. But he’s doing his best to go along, and obediently spread the nativist lies that the Trump administration promotes.

Certain forms of authoritarian government could never gain the “Consent of the Governed” if the governed (that’s us) knew the truth. So those in authority get very good at selling lies. (That’s a form of supply-side economics, too, isn’t it?) Well, Mr. Buck. Here’s a drug deal for you: Sell all the lies you want. We are not buying any. We demand the truth, and we have better candidates than you, Mr. Buck, who will tell it to us free.

All we have to do is vote them in.