320 Comments
User's avatar
DJ Teetop's avatar

The best part is that Buckley is irrelevant

Expand full comment
werecat's avatar

Trutles all the way down....

Expand full comment
-Comment-'s avatar

Then Gore Vidal’s epitaph to Buckley can be recycled for Charlie Kirk:

"I think hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins, forever, those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred".

Expand full comment
Zyxomma's avatar

Ta, Gary. Unlike Squishface, Buckley was educated, having graduated Yale with honors (I believe he wrote God and Man at Yale a year after graduation). I spit on both their memories, and George Will is welcome to go fuck himself with a Pringles can and no lube. I know that's mean; I don't fucking care.

Expand full comment
Asphalt-Type Person's avatar

Buckley was educated beyond his intelligence. Using a lot of two-dollar words doesn't make you right.

Expand full comment
Gern Blansten's avatar

I’m liking the no-holds-barred Zyxomma

Expand full comment
Ward From Cali's avatar

Buckley did only two decent political things in his life. He worked to purge the right of antisemitism (while still being an apologist for his antisemitic chums) and he broke with racist politicians after the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham (but without actually breaking with his own racism and defense of racist violence).

Both were purely political, done only to broaden conservatism's appeal when it was very much NOT an ascendant ideology. He would have sung a very different tune if he were living and working today. George Will is probably more correct than he knows.

Expand full comment
Peter MacMonagle's avatar

Kirk was a Nazi on the level of Stephen Miller. Are people really away of what Nazis in Germany did as Hitler came to power? If not, look here: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/kristallnacht-night-broken-glass

Expand full comment
KEITH TAYLOR's avatar

Kirk was a stone racist and a lying swine. His own words, that black women do not have the idea processing capacity to be taken seriously, should be quoted wherever his name is mentioned.

Hell, he said that while specifically denigrating Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and black female congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. He was saying it, also, long after Angela Davis had earned her way to Brandeis University and then to the Sorbonne in Paris.

Maybe Charlie Kirk wouldn't have counted a Marxist. Okay. I personally think Dr. Condoleezza Rice has the ethics of a scorpion, but since she graduated cum laude from the University of Denver, and then earned - earned! - a master's from the University of Notre Dame, I would never claim she'd ever been anything less than brilliant.

If Kirk wanted a real example of someone without the brain power to process ideas and "really be taken seriously", he could have mentioned Rep. James Comer or James "Snowball" Inhofe.

I cannot imagine why he didn't.

Expand full comment
RRJKR's avatar

Not being a fan of Buckley, I will still say that I can't see Kirk as an intellectual equal. Also, Buckley was born in 1925 making at least some of his bigotry a product of his time As for George Will, he has always been able to imitate a deep thinker by using lotsa "big words"

Expand full comment
Ward From Cali's avatar

Buckley was born in New York City and grew up in France and Britain. I won't say that those places were free of racism, but it was a very different kind of racism than the violent, segregationist, white supremacist racist he espoused, which was more akin to U.S. southern racism and explicitly approved of and defended Apartheid, including its violence.

Buckley did not absorb his variety of racism from his times and his upbringing. He chose it.

Expand full comment
RRJKR's avatar

Everybody “chose” it. It was just much more socially acceptable and widespread 80 years ago.

Expand full comment
Hank Napkin's avatar

Remind me, what was the "F" for?

Expand full comment
Daniel O'Riordan's avatar

Fuckwad.

That might not be the right spelling, but you know what I mean.

Expand full comment
Hank Napkin's avatar

Gore Vidal knows.

Expand full comment
Daniel O'Riordan's avatar

I wish I could upfist this more.

Expand full comment
Kay Ducky's avatar

Apparently, you can get CTE just from writing about baseball.

Expand full comment
Daniel O'Riordan's avatar

Having absolutely no interest in baseball whatsoever, I didn't even have that tiny fig leaf normal people used to justify his existence.

"I don't agree with his politics, but he knows his baseball."

Yeah. Right.

I was a bystander at the most profanity-laced analysis of the 1956 Cleveland Indians I have ever witnessed by Harlan Ellison. He was from Cleveland, and he knew his baseball.

Expand full comment
DJ Teetop's avatar

OMG

Expand full comment
Frank Talk, Action Pundit!'s avatar

"George Will is still alive?"

How would we tell?

Expand full comment
RRJKR's avatar

Will would likely describe being still alive using at least a dozen obscure polysylable words

Expand full comment
Aocm🇨🇦's avatar

Excellent, thanks

Expand full comment
Gloria Moss's avatar

Not at all! Buckley was brilliant I did not agree with his politics but he was very different from the MAGA morons!

Expand full comment
Vic's avatar

Brilliant at breaking every basic rule of logic in his fake "debates" foregrounded by (wait for it): P.B.S.

Expand full comment
Daniel O'Riordan's avatar

Still a racist.

Expand full comment
HerstoryRepeating's avatar

The charging news conference, in Utah, is so full of potential mistrials, I’m a bit in shock.

Prosecutor is giving ALL the evidence!

Expand full comment
Daniel O'Riordan's avatar

It's going to be hard for the young man to get a fair trial in a blood red state like Utah, considering the crime and all. Maybe his lawyers should make a motion for a change of venue to a blue state.

Expand full comment
Nicole Koretsky's avatar

Great piece. I can't tell you how many times I have used "You've Got to be Carefully Taught" in conversations about hatred and bigotry in my life. Thanks for using it, because the musical is older than I am, (and I'm getting up there) and most people haven't heard of it. It's a great teaching tool.

Expand full comment
OrdinaryJoe's avatar

Of course Will writes for the Völkischer Post.

Expand full comment