George Will Compares Kirk To Buckley, Means It As Compliment

Also, George Will is still alive? Good for him.

Last week the United States Postal Service unveiled a commemorative stamp that it created, for God only knows what reason, to honor William F. Buckley Jr., the founder back in the 1950s of the racism brochure National Review. Which, to our mind, is really scraping the bottom of the barrel to find an American to put on a stamp. Did George Wallace’s descendants say no?

Now, we understand that the USPS is going to sometimes make stamps celebrating bigots because otherwise it would be eliminating an enormous pool of historical Americans to honor. The nation’s history is littered with milkshake ducks, and we have made peace with this state of affairs. We probably wouldn’t have even noticed the event, or if we had we wouldn’t have cared because there is only but so much outrage to go around, and it has been a week.

Then some nut shot Charlie Kirk, which motivated George Will to write an entire column for The Washington Post favorably comparing the two smug weirdos. To which the only possible response is, when is that asshole George Will going to retire? We thought he was an old dinosaur when we were reading his Newsweek columns 30 years ago, back when Newsweek was a respectable publication. Somehow, he’s still getting people to pay him for his stentorian pronouncements like the world’s dullest carnival barker.

But Will also worked at one point for National Review, which we suppose qualifies him to write some tripe about the parallels between Buckley and Kirk. Doing so requires him to sidestep both Buckley’s and Kirk’s strongly held views, such as Buckley’s belief that white people had the right to rule over Black people or Kirk claiming that DEI programs were the reason he got nervous if he was on a plane with a Black pilot. But then, so does everyone engaged in slobbering hagiography of Buckley and Kirk.

Kirk was called “divisive.” So was Socrates, who also paid with his life for the offense of being too argumentative, corrupting young Athenians by encouraging independent thinking.

Who can forget Socrates’s famous teachings about how giving the Moors an education made him nervous? And is he really trying to make a comparison between the Socratic method and Charlie Kirk’s never-ending gotcha questions to college students that he hoped would yield viral moments he could tweet out to keep his audience of mouth-breathers paying attention to him?

Because we’re heathens, we also find the idea that reading Scripture encourages independent thinking hilarious. It’s the exact opposite, at least with evangelicals like Kirk. If God, through Scripture, tells you to stone gay men to death, you’re not supposed to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow your roll, Poindexter. That seems mean!

Kirk was killed at the beginning of what was to have been a Buckley-like tour of political evangelism among the unconverted: college students. He also was probably killed because, unlike Buckley when he was 31 in 1956, Kirk was advocating a powerful and ascendant politics.

Fascism. You can say fascism. It was fascism back when Buckley worked for Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s, too. But back then the Republican Party had a sense of shame. Now it’s McCarthys all the way down.

Will then writes a few paragraphs bemoaning the lack of civility in today’s politics, as opposed to 1997, when he was agreeing with Buckley that the next National Review editor could only be a Christian while Ken Starr and the rest of the GOP chased Bill Clinton’s penis all over Washington. Those, apparently, were some good old days.

If one wants a more honest conversation about Buckley and his sneering patrician snobbery, try here.

There is a great irony that the Post published this on Monday. That was the same day that Karen Attiah, an opinion writer and editor and the only person of color left on the paper’s Opinions page, announced she had been fired. Her sin? Not mourning Charlie Kirk with sufficient grace, or some shit, according to the termination letter sent to her by HR.

There was some other blah blah about her violating the paper’s social media policy. And then this:

“Your postings on Bluesky (which clearly identifies you as a Post Columnist) about white men in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk do not comply with our policy. For example, you posted: ‘Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is.... not the same as violence’ and ‘Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.’”

In other words, Attiah didn’t want to weep for a bigot, even while she also condemned the murder itself. For that, she was sent packing, leaving the Opinions page the sole province of a bunch of white men.

White men like George Will, who finished Monday’s column by calling Charlie Kirk “like Buckley, a teacher unconfined to a classroom.” And they both did it well. Bigotry is learned behavior; it has to be carefully taught.

[WaPo / Karen Attiah’s Substack]

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