Reader Blind

This deceased writer/publisher of a well known magazine that still runs was also known for having a television show.

His manner and speaking style were mocked on sketch comedy shows many times.

He preferred s e x u a l  relations with men rather than with women but like a lot of men of his generation he could not acknowledge this and so married and had children.

In addition, the audience he cultivated would not have accepted this. He spent a lot of time with h o m o s e x u a l p r o s t i  t u t e s from a specific procurer.

He would often tell his favorites that he would refer to them on his TV show by assigning them an obscure word, Latin or old English, and then use the word on his show that week.

William F. Buckley Jr.

Well known magazine: National Review

Television show: Firing Line

William F. Buckley Lived Off Evil As Mold Lives Off Garbage

If it is true that the evil men do lives after them, William Francis Buckley can be assured a certain kind of immortality. Or perhaps it is going too far to say that he did evil. That is probably too active a word. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he lived off evil, as mold lives off garbage.

The garbage he is particularly associated with is that which began accumulating in the right-wing alley about forty years ago: McCarthyism, which Buckley took part in by writing speeches for Senator Joe and by praising with majesterial clichés (“McCarthyism is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks”); and the long-forgotten manifestoes of the Young Americans for Freedom, a frenzied campus movement which he helped found in 1960; and his pious defense of the kooks of the John Birch Society as “some of the most morally energetic self-sacrificing and dedicated anti-Communists in America.” In those days Buckley lent his name–as adviser or supporter or officer–to virtually every major crackpot right-wing movement in America, and his ideological soulmates were a group that long ago were banished to history’s padded cell: people like Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, the Rev. Carl McIntire, Dan Smoot, Dr. Fred Schwarz, Revilo P. Oliver, the Rev. Billy James Hargis, James L. Wick and similar names, which, if you are a genteel person under the age of 45, have probably never passed your lips.

Today Buckley does not live off right-wing garbage or anything else because he is quite dead, and has been for at least fifteen years. At least that’s my theory. But because the right wing is so sentimentally attached to its old shills, Buckley has been put away in hypothermal storage in the hopes that medical science someday will be able to defrost him and reactivate his brain. Meanwhile, the pretense that Buckley lives is carried on from time to time through stories about him, or ghosted under his byline, in such mortuary trade journals as New York and The New York Times Magazine.

As for the two-bit actor who plays Buckley on Firing Line, Lord knows he is a poor imitation, thinking he fills the part merely by uttering unintelligible gibberish through pursed lips while fiddling with pencil and clipboard. Many members of the general public, less gullible than the literati, are beginning to suspect that Buckley is a hoax. For instance, in New York a subscriber writes, “More than anything else, Buckley seems a media creation. Buckley is like the man in the aspirin ad who says, ‘I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.’” – Source

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