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Peter. Michael. What do you know about a book called God and Man at Yale? The two things liberals hate the most, God and men.
So God and Man at Yale is a 1951 unexpected runaway bestseller by William F. Buckley. Peter, what do you know about William F. Buckley? The distances that a weird little Mid-Atlantic accent could take you in the 1950s, man. Incredible. The godfather of modern conservatism. You know, he's the founder of National Review, the man who...
married the weird establishment Republicans with the segregationists. I read a couple biographies of him and they're like, he comes from a family of star-crossed lovers. His father was old money and his mother was new money. So what do you know about this actual book? Not much, actually. Buckley goes to Yale and
And it's a little too communist for him or something. And so he's like, I'm going to write a book about it. And he does as like a 24 year old or whatever. That was like remarkably accurate and succinct, Peter. I've got my finger on the pulse. He just like sits down immediately after graduating and just like writes this entire book, basically just like complaining and relitigating every single fight that he had on campus. He was the editor of the Yale Daily News magazine.
And he's like, you know what? Everything I wrote an op-ed about while I was there, I'm just going to write a fucking book about it. That's the whole book. That is the dream, right? To go to school and have a nemesis and then write a book being like, Janice failed sociology. There's a part where he talks about like an interfaith conference. And he's like, the conference was organized by... And then he gives the person's actual name. And then he just moans about how like the panels were boring. Like, oh, you're just like... You're just...
You went to a weekend conference that sucked and you want to tell me about that? All right. That's literally like, that's the level, like that, that's the level of depth that this book gets to basically. And the level of depth of this episode. I'm excited. So the, the obvious thing to say about God and man at Yale and the, really the only aspect of this book that is remotely interesting is the extent to which it's set the template for all of the campus panic bestsellers that we've had since then. So this is,
It's essentially like a genre of conservative writing at this point. Right. We've had Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals. Charlie Sykes has a book called A Prof Scam, which isn't even a word. It sounds like shit.
This is just something that conservatives do. Yeah. It's one of their central complaints that our precious, beautiful children are going off to college and then they meet old communists. Yes. And they get convinced that minorities deserve rights. Yeah. You start teaching conservative kids about history and philosophy and pretty soon they'll have a second joke. Yeah.
Okay, so I'm sending you the first couple paragraphs of the book. During the years 1946 to 1950, I was an undergraduate at Yale University. I arrived in New Haven fresh from a two-year stint in the Army, and I brought with me a firm belief in Christianity and a profound respect for American institutions and traditions.
I had always been taught that an active faith in God and a rigid adherence to Christian principles are the most powerful influences toward the good life. I also believed that free enterprise and limited government had served this country well and would probably continue to do so in the future. These two attitudes were basic to my general outlook.
I therefore looked eagerly to Yale University for allies against secularism and collectivism. The two worst things. I am one of a small group of students who fought against those who seek to subvert religion and individualism. So he went there bright eyed and bushy tailed thinking, well, of course, we all agree that free market capitalism and Jesus are good. Hopefully college will reinforce my priors.
It is funny how the entire campus panic now is like, these young kids don't want to be challenged. And in this book, he's just very explicitly like, I was challenged. Right. The thing is, doing these like hypocrisy arguments about like 70 years ago, conservatives said something different than what they say now. Like we're,
We would do this every 30 seconds going through this book. So like we can't do it every single time. But it's like this is one of the more glaring examples of it. This is when the conservative complaints about higher education started to emerge. Yes. And I don't really know why that's the case. Maybe just something about like the post-World War II intellectual atmosphere. Peter, do you need me to say that I read two additional books about this and we're going to talk about it for like an hour? Or do you just want to say that and get out of the way?
Only two, Hobbes? Slipping. Slipping. All right. So here is the end of that quote. These are the next two paragraphs. And this establishes this book's weird pattern of making like administrative and logistical arguments. So here's this.
Some of us advance the viewpoint that the faculty of Yale is morally and constitutionally responsible to the trustees of Yale, who are in turn responsible to the alumni. They are thus duty-bound to transmit to their students the wisdom, insight, and value judgments which, in the trustees' opinion, will enable the American citizen to make the optimum adjustment to the community and to the world. I contend that the faculty of Yale
What do you think? So he's doing, he's implying that there is a almost fiduciary duty. Yes. That Yale owes to America. Yes.
To be conservative? No, Peter, you are steel manning him into something that makes sense. This book is predicated on the specific argument that Yale should be accountable to its alumni, right? Like the alumni should be in charge of like what they teach at Yale. I don't think anybody would like would say that like in a vacuum. I'm going to speculate a bit here, but this does feel a little bit like Yale.
him attempting to articulate a gut feeling that he has where he's like, I'm mad that they didn't teach this. And then he sort of constructs a framework by which he has a claim to be indignant. But when you actually start peeling back the claim, it doesn't make a ton of sense. And Yale doesn't actually really owe him anything. This gets to the way that he concludes the introduction to this book, right? So he says,
Hmm.
I see. And then in a footnote, he says, Now, it's coming together, right? He's like, look, I'm not going to defend my ideas on the substance. I'm just going to say...
That Yale alum all agree with me and therefore Yale should be pushing our agenda. I read a lot of reviews of this book from when it came out. And even then, people were pointing out that like, you know, at the heart of this book and really at the heart of the conservative complaint about racism.
college campuses, you still see this now, is this idea of moral relativism, right? Of like the postmodern turn. You don't even teach kids like right and wrong anymore. But this book is like profoundly relativistic. Like he never says they should be teaching people truth. Right. He doesn't even attempt to make an argument and he explicitly rejects that.
He's like, no, no, no, no. The alumni think that this is good. Therefore, it should be taught to students. This is about what institutions owe to the elite. Right. Right. There would have been times when the alumni of Yale thought that slavery was good or that women shouldn't vote. You said there would have been times. I'm pretty sure one of those times was 1950. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Aren't we still like 20 years out from Yale admitting women? Oh, yeah. They don't admit women until 1969 and they don't admit black people on any like large scale. A couple people get in, but they don't admit black people like as a group until 1968. Mm hmm.
We also at this time have quotas for Jewish people at 10%. Interestingly, he doesn't mention this in the book. There's also quotas for Catholics that they don't want to be more than 13% Catholic. And he is Catholic. So it is weird that like of all the grievances that he makes in this book, it's weird that he doesn't make that grievance. They hadn't like developed their political vocabulary about affirmative action yet. They're like, well...
Yeah, sure. It keeps Catholics out and I don't like that, but it keeps blacks out and Jews out and I do like that. And, you know, it was all a jumble in their minds. So we then get into the first chapter of the book. The book has five chapters. Chapter one is called Religion at Yale. Mm-hmm.
This entire chapter is about religion, right? The attack on religion, the rise of atheism as an ideology throughout Yale, right? But then over and over again, the actual evidence that he cites is like how powerful Christianity is as a force on campus.
He says,
Later in the book, he just mentions that like this board of trustees thing, which I think is 18 people at the time. He's like, oh, yeah, all 18 of them are Christians and they open every meeting with a prayer. He's like, but that doesn't mean anything. This is the first time in American history that there was even a hint of secularism anywhere. And people were like, absolutely.
Absolutely not. You fucking commies. I also looked this up in 1950. The population was 95 percent Christian. Right. So his actual argument here, to the extent that he has one, is that, yes, yes, everybody's a Christian right there. There's all these kind of trappings and symbols of Christianity all throughout the college. But that doesn't necessarily mean that students are getting religious messages in class, which I guess on some level is true.
Yeah. So this is the only piece of data that he has in this chapter. I'm going to send it to you. Oh, God. I love that he just drops names. I know. Professor Clarence P. Shedd of Yale, speaking on the radio program. Sorry. I like that he says of Yale. Just caught me off guard. FYI, I'm talking about Yale, my alma mater. Perfect.
Professor Clarence Pichette of Yale, speaking on the radio program Yale Interprets the News on August 15th, 1948, insisted upon the dramatic upswing in post-war religious interests, but added, quote, I talked with a chaplain in a large state university only last week who asserted that all the religious influences in his university were not significantly influencing more than 10% of the undergraduates.
My own figure for the large university situation nationally has been 15%. I listened to the radio and a guy talked about another guy that he talked to. How is this? I don't even understand this as a piece of data. All the religious influences in his university were not significantly influencing more than 10% of the undergraduates. What does that even mean? This is just someone saying numbers and words. So he starts this chapter by talking about the Department of Religions.
which is quite large and quite popular. And here is where he starts talking about specific teachers. I'm going to send this to you. Okay. At Yale, the religion course which consistently attracts the greatest number of students is entitled The Historical and Literary Aspects of the Old Testament.
Mr. Lovett, the widely admired university chaplain, teaches this course. But he does not proselytize the Christian faith or, indeed, teach religion at all. Even the title of the course does not call for an understanding of or even sympathy with Christianity. So there's a huge religious studies department. There's what appears to be a required course that people have to take that is taught by the chaplain. I love that. And yet, the chaplain doesn't, like, go out of his way to be like, by the way, you guys, Christianity's real. Pfft.
Jesus lived and died for our sins. Like every, what, on five minute intervals? The course title is not Christianity, which is correct, by the way. The one true religion. The modern conservative discourse is all about academic freedom and...
truth and shit like that right but it is fundamentally the same substantively as buckley's right which is like we should be teaching conservative stuff like that's the actual material yes request but buckley is doing it without the veil yeah right buckley is just being like
hey, we should be teaching that Christianity is correct, obviously. And they're not doing that in every single course at Yale. And that pisses me off. And it sucks. There are tons of conservatives right now who have that same fundamental belief, but they have to like shroud it in all of this gibberish. Right. So it's kind of refreshing to read Buckley just be like,
They're not saying Jesus is real. This was my arc with the book is because at first you're like, at least they're fucking saying it. Right. But then after like 200 pages, you're like, no, this is really bad. This is still it's still he basically is demanding propaganda and demanding propaganda for something students already believe. Right. Which is just weird. Constant reinforcement. Why? Why?
The way he approaches it almost proves just how wrong he has it, because in his mind, this complaint is sort of like self-evidently correct. Right. Don't we all agree that they should be teaching that Christianity is correct? Right. He doesn't even feel a need to explain himself. But if he actually lived in a society where.
Where that principle was being questioned in some significant way, he would have to explain himself. Right. He doesn't, right? He's just sounding the alarm. Oh, no, they're not advertising Christianity. So basically the rest of the section is just him like naming professors and talking about how they're like not Christian enough, even though all of them are Christians. Uh-huh. So...
He says, Mr. Green is unflinching in his respect for Christian ethics, but it is, after all, assumed that most people are. There's a widespread opinion that what he teaches is ethics, not religion.
So this is an ethics course, which teaches ethics. He also he's talking about another teacher. He says, while respecting Christianity and what it represents, Mr. Schroeder does not seek to persuade his students to believe in Christ, largely because he has not, as I understand it, been completely able to persuade himself, which is a good burn. This is I'm sorry, but this is so fucking funny. Just rattling off every professor and being like, I'm not getting the most Christian vibes from this guy. This fucking guy.
I see parallels with modern conservative discourse in the incoherence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, just these sort of like all over the place complaints about how things aren't quite as he believes they should be. So after he does the religion department, he then goes to the social studies department. My God. If the religion department was inadequately religious for him, I can't imagine. I know. And then...
And then but then he can't even stick to his fucking argument. So he starts out by saying in the Yale history department, many students are affected by the religious inclinations of Professor Baumer, who teaches the intellectual history of Europe. Mention ought to be made of Professor Mack, a straightforward Christian whose attitudes become apparent in his lectures on Shakespeare. So he starts off with being like, oh, yeah, these dudes are like super Christian, like constantly talk about how like Christ is good.
He then says the most popular class is taught by this guy, Mr. Turner, who is emphatically and vigorously atheistic. He's a cool young professor. And then he gets to this, which is like so fucking telling. He says many Yale students laugh off the influence of Mr. Turner and ultimately classify him as a gifted and colorful fanatic. Others more impressionable and hence those over whom there is cause to be concerned.
are deeply disturbed by Mr. Turner's bigoted atheism and finish the year they spend with him full of suspicion and doubts about religion they may retain for a lifetime.
We must protect our weakest minds. I realize that we sort of live in a different time now in terms of access to information and things like that. But it is very funny to me to picture like some prep school kid showing up to Yale in 1948 and a professor is like, I don't believe in God. And they're like, oh, yeah.
Yay. What? Like, surely you've heard of this. So we're not going to spend too much time on it. But then after the social sciences, he then goes to the Department of Psychology. Peter, imagine a psychology department in 1950. I don't even know what it was as a profession. It was like, we're learning that there is a brain. Yeah.
Within the brain, there are activities of various types and we're looking into it. His only like evidence of this is he talks about one of the psychology textbooks. He says, psychology and life makes mention of religion in only one passage, which is unabashedly derisive. And then, quote, it is interesting to note that when the part of his brain thought by phrenologists to be the center of religion is stimulated, a man twitches his leg. Okay.
It's like, uh, the phrenologists are being mean to religion, but like that feels like a critique of phrenology, which I ultimately agree with. So I'm like, all right, Bill, I'll give you this one. There's something funny to me about being anti-phrenology because it's insufficiently religious. Yeah.
But then, you know, the whole kind of complaint with this section is that, like, they're teaching psychology, but they're not teaching religion. The human brain, which was created by our God, Jesus Christ. Which is God. Yeah, there's something very tedious about this where he's just going to rattle off next math, which they never say stems directly from God's mouth. Yes. I'm sorry, but is this just going to keep happening? Is this like the rest?
No, this is, don't worry. I can tell you're starting, your interest is starting to flag. So he's taken us to the Department of Religion, the Social Sciences, and the Department of Psychology. Do you want to guess, Peter, where he takes us next? Is it like English? The next section of this chapter is extracurricular activities. How?
Hell yeah. So he abandons academia entirely and then just starts moaning about like how there's clubs on campus. Right. Like there's obviously like Christian clubs and Catholic clubs and whatever. And then there's a building called Dwight Hall, which is like an entire building dedicated to the religious clubs on campus. Okay. These elite institutions are so fucking baffling to me in the first place. But in 1950s, they're like baffling, baffling. He then complains that the magazine...
for this building does not require its editors to be Christians. Hell yes. I think it's like a newsletter coming out of like events, like next Wednesday there's going to be this. Right. But like they don't have like essentially a loyalty oath. I have to read newsletters written by Jews now at Yale?
He also – I could not believe this was like an actual – he spends pages on this. There's a whole thing where the ushers for like the on-campus church services, which of course are being held because everybody hates Christianity. The ushers were at one point elected by popular vote and people ended up electing some people who like weren't Christians. Okay. Did they guide people to their seats? No.
Like not in a God fearing way. Like what are we? I love him. I'm sorry. This is the, this rules that this whole thing is just like, like getting bad vibes from that guy. I saw, uh, you know, I rounded the corner the other day and saw a Jewish kid did not like that. It does read like a long Yelp review. Yeah.
I also want to send you this part. One of the things as like a literary device that he does is he uses a lot of sassy italics. Uh-huh. All right. I'm going to send this to you. He is talking about...
The inaugural ceremony for the new president, a new president of Yale, was sworn in in 1950, I believe, the last year that William F. Buckley was there. Got it. And so this is a expressly Christian ceremony. There's like deacons and shit there.
But he's complaining about the president's speech that he gave at his inauguration. It was more than a mere omission for the president summoned to the attention of his audience three vital forces at Yale, which are supported by powerful traditions. Christianity was not among those he cited.
All italics. Sassy. Sassy. Spicy italics. God, this is incredible. The whining. The fact that this is like one of the not really intellectual cornerstones of conservatism, but sort of in the way that modern conservatism developed sort of stems directly from this book in many regards, right? Yes. And the fact that it is just him whining about like every instance
of secularism and not even like secularism per se, but just the absence of express Christianity. It's so good. So on point. One thing I did notice in the research is that if you look at lists of like 10 most influential conservative books, this is usually on them. But then if you look at lists of like 10 best conservative books, it's on none of them.
It's like this was influential at the time. Like this really set the template. But also like people do not read this anymore because it's like it's pretty embarrassing. Not only because Buckley is saying exactly the opposite of what conservatives are saying now, but also it's like punishing to read this shit now. I guess in the early 1950s, though, if you're some fucking Yale alum, him being like there were Jewish ushers like these people are reading this being like, good heavens.
Cut off the donations immediately. Okay, so that is the religion chapter. Before we get to the communism chapter, I want to give a little bit of context about like what is going on in the country at this time. So one of the things that a lot of the histories that kind of incorporate the influence of this book talk about is that like this comes out in 1951, which is very early in the Cold War.
And this is a time when there's just a huge amount of anxiety. It's not obvious at this time that like America is going to win the Cold War. And it's not even obvious that like America is like a better system. Like there's a huge rise in living standards in the Soviet Union at this time, part of which is just propaganda and part of which is just like catch up growth because the war was so devastating. Right. A lot of poor countries especially are seeing like market growth.
Economic gains under communism. Yes. There's also the political forces that Republicans have basically been out in the wilderness. They haven't won an election since 1932. Right. They've been kind of flogging this like anti New Deal stuff, but like it just is not hitting. And we're we're pre McCarthy. McCarthyism basically launches like the year that this book comes out.
But we're getting the sort of early intonations of McCarthyism. So in the late 1940s, basically as soon as the war is over, Republicans are saying that Democrats are soft on communism. Yeah. Right. They were in power. Now, communism, like they're having all these gains all over the place. And Democrats aren't like they're not willing to do what it takes to fight communism. This is like a really useful message for them. Right. Right. And so.
Of course, Democrats in like, this is one of the earlier examples of this, but like true Democrat fashion, they basically just like cave to these attacks. Like we're not soft on communism. We're really hard on communism.
So in 1947, we basically launch the Red Scare with an executive order that makes a loyalty oath for federal employees. Right. They were also they were also over the course of the 1940s, sort of like tightening the grip on immigrants in this country in terms of their ideological preferences, questioning their loyalties, etc. Exactly. So for this, I read a book called Nostalgia.
No Ivory Tower, McCarthyism and the Universities by Ellen Schrecker, which is a history of the way that McCarthyism basically came down to universities and in some ways really started at universities. These days, I feel like people kind of focus on McCarthyism as like the center of the Red Scare. But McCarthyism was really the culmination of a trend that had mostly been happening in states earlier. So
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, 32 states passed laws requiring loyalty oaths for state employees, any government employees. And a lot of these, because universities were oftentimes controlled by the government, they also imposed these loyalty oaths on professors. By the end of the Red Scare, of all of the people purged from employment, one in five were academics. And so this started extremely early and was already going on when Buckley was writing his
book. Right. We now think about McCarthy as this great authoritarian moment in our history. But at the time, it was relatively popular and people just thought that communism was a plague. Yeah. And also, I mean, one of the things she mentions in this book is that a gift to the anti anti communists was that McCarthy was such a fucking worm.
Right. Like he just aesthetically was so gross and he lied constantly and he was wrong. Like this is kind of what they could go after him for. But also underneath that, a lot of people didn't actually disagree with like the crusade against communists. Yeah. A necessary evil.
Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so there was a deliberate attempt to make the fight against communism into a moral crusade. It wasn't enough to say, well, we have a better economic system than they do. And so this framing of kind of godless communists didn't really exist.
Right.
What's really interesting about this book, what Buckley is doing in this book, is that he is attempting to make this link very explicit. So in the intro, as he's kind of laying out the thesis of the book, he says, I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.
So fundamentally, individualism is Christian. Individualism is good. And any collectivism, anything that smacks of communism whatsoever is fundamentally atheistic and immoral. His use of collectivist is...
It's sort of odd here because he is embracing a collectivist thought, right? He is sort of embracing top down institutional order. Yes. Unfortunately, Christianity cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas with mid-century communism. Yeah.
So speaking of which, the next chapter of this book is called Individualism at Yale. Let's go. Here's where we're going to talk about collectivism versus individualism and how the teachers are instilling collectivistic values in youth. And using an institutional top-down approach, we can reinstill individualism. Yeah. No. This makes sense. We are...
going to start with his little thesis statement at the beginning of this chapter. I'm pasting this so you're not going to need all the sassy italics, but you can sassily italicize whatever you need. No one should be so naive as to expect that I could conjure up a list of professors and textbooks who advocate the overthrow, violently or otherwise, of all vestiges of capitalism in favor of an ironclad, comprehensive socialist state. There is very little of this at Yale.
But this approach is not needed to accomplish, ultimately, the same transformation. Marx himself, in the course of his lifetime, envisaged two broad lines of action that could be adopted to destroy the bourgeoisie. One was violent revolution. The other, a slow increase of state power through extended social services, taxation, and regulation to a point where smooth transition could be effected from an individualist to a collectivist society.
It is a revolution of the second type, one that advocates a slow but relentless transfer of power from the individual to the state that has roots in the Department of Economics at Yale and unquestionably in similar departments in many colleges throughout the country. Unquestionably. Talk about the part of higher education that experienced the least liberal capture over the last 70 years, Departments of Economics. I know that.
I was going to say, in the same way we really didn't want to belabor how like the KKK is racist last episode. I'm like, economists are pretty into free market capitalism. I don't know how to like say this. In a way, this is just me repeating that over and over again. He's making a slur.
slippery slope argument, right? It's basically like, look, no one at Yale is a communist or is advocating for anything like socialism. But when you think about it, what's the difference between advocating for the socialist overthrow of the government and advocating for small welfare programs? He's doing
the Jonah Goldberg thing again, where he's like one form of totalitarianism is banning elections and like murdering minority groups. Another is to ban trans fats. So last chapter, he went professor by professor through these departments. This chapter, he's going textbook by textbook. I can't wait till we get to student by student. Yeah.
Jeff, Bill, Steve. So in the economics department, the teachers are using four textbooks. They are Economic Analysis and Public Policy by Bowman and Bach, The Elements of Economics by Laurie Tarshis, Economics and Introductory Analysis by Paul Samuelson, and Income and Employment by Theodore Morgan. These are very boring, but I just have to get them on the record.
Okay. The rest of this chapter is Bill Buckley giving us evidence of the creeping collectivism that is taking over the campus. And he does this with a series of quotes from these textbooks. And he talks about how they're super bad. So, Peter, I am going to have you read the collectivist propaganda. And then I am going to read Bill Buckley's sputtering responses. Hell yeah. Okay. This is an excerpt from the Samuelson textbook.
Get your Marx voice on. Get your Marx voice. A cynic might say of free competition what Bernard Shaw once said of Christianity. The only trouble with it is that it has never been tried. There never was a golden age of free competition, and competition is not now perfect in the economist's sense.
Probably it is becoming less so every day in large part because of the fundamental nature of large scale production and technology, consumers' tastes and business organization. Rough stuff. So this is the very, very mundane observation that like free markets don't actually really exist. It's just a theoretical concept. Here is another excerpt from one of the textbooks.
the allegedly collectivist textbooks that Buckley cites. Cradle to grave security has great popularity. If the private economy cannot supply it naturally, people will insist upon getting it artificially from governments. Versus propaganda? People want security? That's a quote from Joseph Stalin. And then I'm going to send you a link to this one because it has sassy italics.
He prefaces this by saying, Professor Tarshish comes right out and says it. We must be prepared to accept new ways of doing things as well as old, for the problems we face are new and alarming. As the nature of our economy has changed, and as the problems that it has been compelled to face have altered and grown in gravity, we have been compelled to call upon the government. Italics added on that last part. Sassy. We have been compelled to.
There's something interesting about this because in many ways, Buckley and his cohort won. And in many ways they lost. Right. And, and,
One of the ways they lost is that the mere mention that the government can like help the poor is not a controversial statement in modern discourse. But he's like, look, they're saying it. They're saying that we should help the poor. He admit it. He admit it. I also, Peter, I don't know if you noticed. Let's let's take a look at the brackets in the midst of it. There are there are page numbers in the brackets right where he's citing to the government.
To the book. And one of them says, page 54, italics added. What does the other one say? Page 686. So this is a two-sentence excerpt in which the two sentences are separated by more than 600 pages. This is like the first clue. Just removing 630 pages of content and then adding italics for emphasis. So...
Then he responds. So he lists all of these things out. We've just gotten all of this communist propaganda. And then he responds by saying about these books, it is nowhere recorded that the 19th century was one of unparalleled production of goods and services. We are not told of the mammoth increases in the capital structure of the country and how it was built out of wilderness. Nothing is said of the growth of a world of little capitalists, the grocer, the dressmaker, the newspaper owner, the farmer, all of which are not known.
Where's the lengthy fellation of capitalism? I do find it hard to believe that across the four textbooks, no one mentioned capitalism.
The growth of GDP in America or anything? I find that hard to believe. Did you read all four, Mike? Are you going to? Yes. I was waiting to see if you'd get there or if I should hop in. Yes. I downloaded all four fucking books.
And double checked all of the quotes that he used. First of all, again, these are economics textbooks, mainstream textbooks from the late 1940s. They talk about how capitalism is good. Every single one of these textbooks has like an entire chapter about the rise in living standards between 1850 and 1950. They all have things about like small businesses. The idea that they don't mention the growth in GDP in a fucking economics textbook is
They talk about very little else. They're also, most of them, the Samuelson one is actually like semi-left wing, I guess, by like 1950 standards. All of them are like hella anti-union. Like they all go on like long...
long tirades against unions and how like it's gone too far and shit the fact that what he's actually doing is just sounding the alarm to old yale alums right it makes this all sort of make sense because he doesn't he knows to some degree that he doesn't actually need to make a substantive argument here because the old money perverts who are reading this and have influence over yale already agree with him of course of course they do one
of the things that comes up in the reviews of this book that are published at the time is that in this entire chapter, in this entire book, he never actually defines what collectivism is. The old Jonah Goldberg. And like, as he goes through the rest of this chapter, this is like a 40-page chapter. This is really like the meat of the book. He has these title headings. And the title headings are...
completely anodyne. So the first one is unfair distribution of income, where he cites all of these like really benign excerpts from these books saying like, yeah, it's unfair. People are upset about how unfair the distribution of income is. We'll see what my father, William F. Buckley Sr. has to say about that. This isn't actually all that radical. And then one of the things he does in this section that he does throughout is he's like, this textbook says that like the tax rate should be this.
But then you go to the actual textbook and the textbook is citing like the National Council of Economic Advisors where it's like, oh, this is what like experts believe is like the optimal tax rate. Right. He then has a section on the inheritance tax. Hell yeah. That's collectivistic and bad. The daddy's favorite boy tax as they called it back then. Yeah.
He has all these gotcha quotes where the textbooks admit that like this doesn't actually raise that much revenue, but it's something that you kind of do is like a deliberate thing to like break up like these Carnegie style dynasties. Actually, I'm going to send this to you because this has sassy italics and scare quotes. There is little or no economic value attached to such confiscation.
It simply advances the social welfare as these economists define social welfare. That social welfare for them, as for all collectivists, is egalitarianism. Got you in 4K. We should have a more equal society. He's like, oh, they're doing fairness, folks. There is. He always puts social welfare in quotes, which is very funny to me. His main, his like primary angle here is like,
God gave me a mansion. And these fucking communists are trying to intervene. They're trying to attack God directly. Then he has a weird thing about like government spending and like a monopoly thing. But then the one we're going to dive a little bit more into is one of his little headings is private property rights. Hell yeah. So this is where he basically says...
That all of these economists, they want like a centrally planned economy. They basically don't believe in the principle of private property. They want to confiscate everything from everyone and like dole it out according to government wins, right? This is like the extreme form of communism that we have taking place around the world at this time. So I am again going to send you a quote of communist propaganda. This is a quote from the Morgan book.
Probably majority opinion agrees with our own national policy that the right of a man to engage in business for himself is not a basic freedom, like freedom from fear, want, freedom of speech, and of worship.
It is a right which only one in five of our working force finds himself able or finds it worthwhile to accept. So when you think of kind of basic civil rights, you know, you think of like food and freedom and stuff like that. You don't necessarily think of the right to start a business. Only about one in five people do this.
Most people don't really have that in their kind of list of basic rights. Sure. That's what he's saying here. Sure. And so Buckley has a very long, very hysterical response to this excerpt where he really zeroes in on this idea that like, ooh, only one in five people start a business. Therefore, starting a business isn't a right. Right.
And you can tell he really, he really like thinks he's got a gotcha. And he's like, well, only like one in 10,000 people publish a book. So I guess free speech isn't a right either. He really like, you can tell he really thinks he's cooking. This is the only quote that he uses to support the idea that these textbooks want to confiscate private property from people. Yeah.
So I'm going to send you the rest of the quote from the Morgan book. If free enterprise is not a basic freedom, then it must be justified primarily on the grounds of whether it has delivered the goods. Has it proved an efficient mechanism for producing the goods and services we want? The evidence is strong that private enterprise has delivered the goods. Over the course of the last two centuries, it has lifted the general standard of life of the Western world to an extent never before achieved.
Reasoning in this field often suffers from the illusion that the redistribution of income from the rich to the poor would appreciably raise the living standards of the poor. This is not true. There are too few of the rich and too many people of moderate and low incomes for the device to work.
So basically this dude is like, well, most people don't think starting a business is a right, but...
But we know that it works to bring people out of poverty. And we know that redistribution isn't going to do it. We need untrammeled capitalism. He's basically saying he rejects the moral argument. Yes. That like free market capitalism is like this unfettered right that you have.
to engage in business. But he accepts the logistical, practical argument that it is the best way to lift everyone out of poverty, to increase living standards to the highest degree possible. Yes. So this is essentially pro-capitalist propaganda. It's an argument for capitalism. But that's not enough for Buckley. Buckley wants him to be like, Jesus Christ handed you free enterprise. Right.
Jesus Christ, who was real. And FDR took it away from you. He got between you and Christ. The reason why I'm harping on this, this might be too many examples, but like there's kind of this idea of like the polite conservative. And I feel like there's oftentimes this
nostalgia for like an earlier generation of conservatives back when people were like more civil to each other and more erudite and Buckley is really this like symbol of like the kind of conservatism that we lost and it's now these like Trump wackos right
But the core of this book, it's not something I disagree with ideologically, although I do. But like, this is bad work. Yeah. He's very clearly taking things out of context and twisting them to make an argument that fucking economics textbooks in the 1940s are collectivist propaganda. And that's what's like so important about Buckley as a character. Because, yes, when you hold him up against
some fucking lunatic on TikTok rave like raving about how Biden is sucking the blood of children, then sure. William Buckley on firing line on PBS seems like a pretty reasonable guy. Yeah. But we're talking about a man of almost no intellectual talent. Yes. Not a guy who said anything, you know, very interesting. He was just a guy who
With a mid-Atlantic accent. And I swear to God, watch Firing Line and you can just see people like nodding along to his little drool. He does that thing when he's talking to someone where he leans back in his chair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's got his like pen in the air. You can put that picture next to pontification in the dictionary. Which is now Eric Andre, but used to be...
That's right. That's right. That's who Eric Andre is doing in that meme. Yeah. It's the aesthetics of an intellectual and the work of a hack. And it's the work of a hack that is deliberately laundering facts.
Hmm.
And what he points out is that at the time that Buckley was writing this, there was already a like pretty deranged far right movement that had been whipping up a panic about Soviet subversion in the schools for ages. And they were publishing these like weird pamphlets and something called the Educational Reviewer, which was sort of like a kind of quasi journal thing, but was just like completely fucking bananas.
So I am going to send you a description of the contents of The Educational Reviewer. Published between 1949 and 1953, the journal examined textbooks for collectivist bias. Any scholar who supported government intervention in the economy was pilloried as un-American. Contemporary liberalism, The Educational Reviewer warned, was rooted historically in tyranny and slavery. Got that Goldberg. Early, early Goldberg.
Reviewers made it clear that professors should not be allowed to disparage the Constitution, call attention to class or racial inequality, show evidence for the viability of Keynesian economics, or make positive reference to the United Nations. Love it. Which has been around for like a month and a half. Yeah. Yeah.
Scary stuff. Crime...
Being entirely determined by biology was not a belief that I would have thought existed. But then I hear it and I'm like, yeah, they would have thought that. So what's fascinating about this is like, you know, this is kind of the part where
where you expect to be like, well, this stuff was bouncing around the right. And like Buckley was drawing upon this in this kind of like inchoate way. But no, the author of this article went to Yale and got Buckley's papers in the sort of archive they have, like his like library of stuff that he was reading when he was putting together God and Man at Yale.
He had copies of these pamphlets and he had underlined passages in them. So we know that Buckley was drawing specifically from this like deranged far right agitprop. There's a 1949 pamphlet from this organization called Reducators at
Yale University. Reducators. Jesus Christ. Buckley had gone through this and basically had underlined all of like the non-deranged parts. So this crazy far right movement, their whole thing was that it was like explicitly Soviet spies. The Soviets have taken over our universities and they're like talking with Russia. There's stuff that there's just no evidence for whatsoever. Right. And so Buckley ignored all that shit because it's bananas. But
he started underlining all of this stuff by like, well, the collectivism in the textbooks. And then he just ports all that shit into his bestselling super normie ass book. This is interesting because I had perceived of this up until now as a work of petty grievance. And now I realize was even more classic Buckley in that it was a derivative hacked
job. Yeah. Right. It's not even his shoddy work. It's other people's shoddy work. That almost explains why some of his examples are so weak. Yeah. Like that's why you get like the Jew usher because he wants to make the points that the propaganda is making. Yeah.
But he doesn't necessarily have the ingredients, right? Yeah. So he's just sort of pulling out whatever threads he can. For this, I read a really interesting book called The Fire Is Upon Us, James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr. and the Debate Over Race in America by Nicholas Bukola.
And he talks about this as like a metaphor for what he was doing his entire career, that basically he was like taking these far right arguments and like repackaging them. I mean, that was the insight of Buckley, right? His contribution to conservatism was looking at establishment business oriented Republicans, looking at segregationists in the South and saying there is common ground here. Yeah, there's common ground.
There's also I did not read this, but I read a review of it. There's also a book called Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. Oh, boy. We don't have time for the John Birch Society here, but I'll let you go. I'll let you go. One of the things that William F. Buckley is often credited with.
Right. You know, the entire intellectual project of his whole fucking life was a fraud. Right. He was wrong about literally everything. But oftentimes you get this sort of, well, you got to give him credit for kicking the John Birch Society out of American conservatism. Right. For like creating a distance between legitimate conservatism and like the deranged right wingers. Right. But in this book, the author argues that he was actually very careful to distance himself from the leaders.
of the far right racist movements while still appealing to the rank and file. Right. That was something Buckley was intentionally doing was just just toning that down enough. Yeah. That people on the right in the South especially could see what he was doing, that he was on their team. Yeah. While still giving a green light thumbs up to the establishment types who didn't quite want to be associated with those projects. So.
So the next chapter of this abysmal book is fucking bizarre. It's like it's called Yale and Her Alumni. Oh, so Yale's a girl. Pronouns. He lists the pronouns for Yale. And then we're sort of I mean, we're kind of going to skip it because a lot of it is like this bizarre logistical stuff. He's like the trustees is...
appointed by this vote and all this like he's trying to build this case that it's like the alumni are truly in control of the institution but it's just like fuck boring he quotes from like the charter of Yale and all this weird historical stuff like I just know I could barely get through it absolutely not this was this remember
on Twitter when I got yelled at because I was like, there's no way you twinks who are posting like Cate Blanchett memes like watched all of Tar, like a three hour long movie about like office politics at like a composer. Michael, I cannot keep track of the various times that you got yelled at on Twitter for being mean to twinks or to Glenn Greenwald or whoever. Yeah.
All I'm saying is there's no way Ben Shapiro read this section of the book. We then get to chapter four, the superstitions of academic freedom. This is kind of like the culmination of the book. He's laid out all the evidence, right? We know the professors are all atheists. We know the textbooks are all collectivist propaganda. So what should we do about this?
He lays out his argument in seven parts. Okay. Point one, the responsibility to govern Yale falls ultimately on the shoulders of her alumni. We've talked about this. I don't find this remotely convincing, but like, okay. Right. Like whatever. So then number two, he says Yale already subscribes to a value orthodoxy. So this is basically the argument that like,
Institutions have values. He says, I should be interested to know how long a person who revealed himself as a racist, who lectured about the anthropological superiority of the Aryan, would last at Yale. My prediction is that the next full moon would see him looking elsewhere for a job.
Yale looks upon anti-Semitic, anti-Negroid prejudices as false values, though of course they are value judgments just the same, and have been upheld by various scholars not only in the past but in the present day as well. But they are value judgments which are not going to be defended in any Yale classroom. Pitch perfect Buckley because he's maintaining just a hair's distance between him and those beliefs. Like, look, some people believe in this stuff. Even now. Even now. Some people have those values. So...
Basically, he's making like a really obvious point here. He's like, there's certain people and ideas that like you're obviously not going to entertain. He is at bottom correct here. Yes.
So then point three, he says, at any given time, a responsible individual must embrace those values he considers to be truth. This is basically like everyone within the organization is expected to adhere to the values, right? So he gives an example. This was actually a relatively big deal, like cancel culture anecdote in 1937, where a Yale professor was denied tenure basically because he was like a communist. Point four, the abolition of the Jewish usher is paramount. Yeah.
He then, this is where he starts wandering off.
Point four, truth will not of itself dispel error. Therefore, truth must be championed at every opportunity. This is a section that I like completely agree with. He basically says that like you can debate ideas as much as you want, but like that doesn't mean the truth is going to win. He says like the Nazi regime came to power and like you can't like debate your way out of Nazism. I love how thoroughly he is just...
embracing the complete opposite of what the modern right says about this shit. He sounds like my fucking Twitter feed. But to the same ends. It's like, it's very interesting. This is also kind of a weird point because it's not really central to his argument, right? He's talking about truth here, but the whole explicit...
argument that he makes elsewhere is that it doesn't matter whether it's true. It matters what the alumni want. Right. Well, because that was just a way of dodging having to address this shit throughout the book. But he actually is in his own mind concerned with truth. Number five, a value orthodoxy in an educational institution need not lead to inflexibility in the face of new experience.
Okay. This is basically a slippery slope argument. Okay. He's talking about the president of Yale. He says, President Seymour has been unequivocal about communism, which he considers evil and foolish.
If he considered atheism evil and foolish, he would have needed only to utilize the same logic and the same powers he invoked against communism to banish it from the classroom. If he deemed socialism as evil or foolish as communism, he could have done that. But I would remind President Seymour and his successor that the moral code to which they subscribe exhorts men to abhor all that is bad.
Murder is a more grievous wrong than theft, but we discourage both. And we invoke divine, social, and legal sanctions against the two. God, he is a bore. It's weird to bring in murder and theft when like we treat murder and theft differently. Yeah, we do. Like we don't treat them the same. It's a fucking terrible example. We must all agree on the bad things. Yes. And treat them the same. So his next point, you might have to help me with this one, Peter. I genuinely don't know what he means here.
He says, a value orthodoxy in an educational institution need not induce credulity in the student, nor deny the value of skepticism as a first step to conviction. So this is something of like, it's okay to have debate on stuff. It's okay to bring in other ideas as long as we all acknowledge what the truth is. This is sort of what his complaint is, because like all of his complaints were like,
yeah, this guy is a Christian and he teaches Christianity, but the name of the course is not Christianity rules, Christianity number one, USA forever. It's not entirely coherent, but it does feel like you can draw a line through some of his arguments that's like,
At the end of every statement by the university, there should be a line that's like, by the way, we are capitalists and Christians. Yeah, it's sort of like a peace be unto him. Jesus is real. Capitalism is fine. Yeah, yeah. The final point, this is he's really hammering it home. Number seven, free
Right. Right.
Yeah, we never really got past chapter one, which is...
Alumni should control Yale. Alumni want Yale to be Christian and conservative, and therefore it should be. And that's it, right? That's the whole argument, whole book. Everything else is extraneous. Within this chapter, this isn't even at the end of the chapter, but this is the conclusion of the chapter. He says, I maintain that Yale does subscribe to an orthodoxy.
Okay.
That's what your book should have been. Right. Yes, we all kind of agree that there are fucking limits. You can't be a grand wizard of the KKK and work at fucking Yale. Fine. God, it's so exhausting. It's so fucking funny how this is a complete mirror image of modern conservative arguments. And I don't want to give me like two shots here because I have my brain is fried. But like Buckley is making this argument that like, of course, institutions have values and
But he's making it in 1950 in an era when Yale and other institutions of higher education are pretty much still, you know, boarding school plus. And now the modern conservative argument is the complete opposite. They have now ceded that institutions of higher education are part of the Marxist apparatus that controls our youth.
Right. What about open debate? What about...
asking the question. It's all this procedural bullshit. The complete opposite argument. It is incredible. He also, so there's one chapter of the book left. It's extremely short. This is basically where he lays out like the cancel culture conclusion of the book. So chapter five is called The Problem of the Alumnus. And he very explicitly makes the case that alumni of Yale should be
revoke all donations until Yale purges the faculty of all of these seditious forces. And then, Peter, I almost fucking died. The last two paragraphs of the book, right? Listen to this shit. I shall not say which specific professors should be discharged, but I will say that some ought to be discharged. I shall not indicate what I consider to be the dividing line that separates collectivist from individualist, but I will say
Okay. I'm not gonna draw a line between collectivist and individualist. What the fuck is your book?
What have we done for 200 pages then? The entire book is like completely offloading the intellectual responsibility onto other people. And also, I love, I also love the chicken shit thing where he's like, I'm not going to specify which professor should be fired. Right. After he spent the entire book naming them.
You gave us a list of fucking professors. We even skipped over the part in the religious studies department where he literally went after a specific professor and like he wrote a whole op-ed trying to get this one professor fired because he referred to Catholicism as voodoo in a speech, allegedly. The context, I don't know what the context was, but whatever. I love that he gets mad about the anti-Catholic sentiment at an institution that still has like
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or is it, is it, is it actually, is their quota a strict minimum or a maximum? Uh, it's a maximum, but it's also kind of flexible because this stuff, this stuff was never written down because Harvard tried to have an explicit quota and there was a huge fucking outcry. And then Yale was like, let's just have like a casual quota. And they just did it without writing it down.
So it's not clear. Like with Jewish people, I believe it is exactly 10%. But with Catholicism, I wasn't able to find exactly how it worked. And also, I don't know how you like can tell. I don't know. Oh, you can tell. I'm...
I'm from the West Coast and we like don't have ethnic whites. So like, I don't know how people do this thing of like figuring out like who is from like the white people countries or like the white people religions. I'm from the Northeast. We've got Jews and Catholics. When you see a Protestant, there's an air about them. It's very identifiable.
They'll say things like, oh, my goodness. You know, when someone says, oh, my goodness, I'm like, that's a that's a Protestant right there. So that is the book. One of the things that that didn't really.
click with me until I started reading all of like the extra books about the influence of this book is just the extent to which this was a Red Scare book and not not in a like Jonah Goldberg. Like this is an echo of McCarthyism or whatever. Right. But in a literal get communists out of the school, a literal like I would like mass firing of people for their views, please.
I continue to find this refreshing. I have to say, I really do. You're team Buckley. Seeing as we live in an era of obfuscation about what conservatives actually want and are actually doing with all of their policies.
It's sort of nice to see someone being like, we should fire all the leftists. You know what I mean? Now, I understand in my brain that it's actually worse, that the reason the right obfuscates now is because they have a little less leverage and power in the public discourse. And Buckley could say it outright because conservatism was the predominant mode of thought.
but it's sort of just nice to be like, Jesus, like at least we can have the conversation on its own terms. You know what I mean? Also, I don't know if you know this, but Buckley's next book was an explicit defense of McCarthyism. What was the book called? McCarthy and His Enemies. Yeah, I read the sequel written by Ann Coulter, Treason. Yeah.
In 2003. Buckley was also a FBI informant during this period. There's a book called Compromise Campus that has a whole chapter on Buckley. But it's weird in that like he was in touch with the FBI, but he didn't like he didn't ever inform them of anything, mostly because like there weren't any communists on campus.
He just wanted the aesthetics of being a snitch. It's also kind of funny because like it's hard to kind of get any traction with this critique because he was such an open bootlicker for this entire time. Like he wrote an editorial in the Yale Daily News called Hats Off to the FBI. Oh, God, that's so fucking good. It's not like you're catching him in a lie. It's like, no, I think the FBI is dope. Imagine the interrogation or whatever when the FBI is like, all right, what do you know? And he's like,
There are four textbooks taught at Yale. Page 683. But so I want to return to the idea that we started with, the ways in which this book set the template for future Campus Panic bestsellers. So there's the obvious way that this book did that, where it's basically just 200 pages of whining about college professors. Yeah. And...
There's also like the medium obvious way that it's at the template in that this is basically just a series of like unbelievably low stakes anecdotes on a college campus. And, you know, all of the evidence is just a bunch of out of context quotes, like none of which hold up to scrutiny. Like this is the same pattern that we saw in Coddling of the American Mind. Like this is what all of these books are based on. Right. But then I think at the sort of deepest level, what Buckley was really doing was
was establishing the rhetoric of conservative victimhood. So this is from the article about all the far right bullshit that he was reading. It says, a New York Times bestseller that launched Buckley's career as the nation's leading conservative pundit, God and Man at Yale was only the most visible example of a much broader right-wing attack on post-war higher education, one sustained by a perceived sense of victimhood. His
Historians have examined how colleges and universities dismissed dozens of scholars for their supposed ties to the Communist Party during the post-war Red Scare. What has received less attention is that activists on the right believed that the only casualties of a politically targeted campaign on campuses were people like themselves. So we also see the total inversion of reality. Right. We're getting mass firings of professors, and it's literally illegals.
to have a set of ideological beliefs at this time. And still in the midst of a fucking actual purge, he writes an article being like, my, you can't even be conservative on campuses anymore. Well, they go hand in hand, right? The purge is justified by the victimization. And and that, you know, that continues to this day. Yeah. Some people talk about conservative,
self-victimization like it's a strategy. I really don't think it is. I really think it is like a psychological phenomenon that exists within conservative brains in disproportionate degrees. Yeah. I realize that I don't have the expertise to make a claim anywhere like that, but I don't care. I'm saying it to our hundreds of thousands of listeners.
We've learned from the best. We've learned from Buckley. You can just say shit. Absolutely. Just say stuff. If I do a qualifier that's like, while no one would say that all conservatives have narcissistic personality disorder. Do you want to know the good news? The epilogue of this book? Is it just that he's dead? I know that. Well, there's also that. Yes. The first good news is that like the Yale alumni did not give a fuck about this book. Okay. Buckley was probably right about them being Christian and capitalist. Yeah. But even they were like, dude, no. That's because if you're some old money freak-
And some like 24 year old is like, yeah, attention, please. Yale is insufficiently conservative. It's like, shut up, kid. I mean, the funny thing is this book.
was mostly distributed by like the far right. Like it was, it was these weirdo, like education has Soviet subversion people who like spread the book through word of mouth. It's a book that is directly appealing to elites and yet becomes folded into a more populist rhetoric. And also it's a book that liberals like, right? Because he's always kind of been the liberal whisperer, right? He's somebody who has the aesthetics of somebody that liberals think that they should be listening to. Right. And so,
One of the things that spread the message of this book is that it gets reviewed fucking everywhere. It gets reviewed in like New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, like very mainstream sources were actually addressing this in a way that they didn't with the far right shit. So like, well, this is so bananas and out there that we don't really have to like confront it. But it was confronting this book that spread the message. Right. I'm going to send you our final quote of the episode. This is how we're going to close. This is a excerpt from The Atlantic Review.
Facts and quotations. Truly, this book is a sorry effort.
and one which would warrant no serious consideration were it not for the support it has received from other individualists of more stature and influence than Little Willie. It calls him Little Willie throughout. Oh, brutal. It seems more likely that in view of the support which he has gotten, more will be heard from this little Neanderthaler in white shoes and still too tight pants. And...
While his next attack will probably be no more honest than the last, he may with practice become more clever at concealing his dishonesty. You know what? Kind of homophobic, but I'll allow it. Me too. I will also allow it, Mike. Thank you.
I host a podcast with a gay guy. I have this authority now. Look, what's gayer? Having sex with men or hosting two podcasts? So, I mean, not that it fucking mattered, but I do like that this review was just like, dude, fuck this guy. That rules. And with someone as...
as small and petty as Buckley, you know that he was fuming. Oh, dude, I haven't even told you about the edition of God of Man at Yale I have. It's like the 25th anniversary edition. And there's like a new introduction by William Buckley. And all he fucking does is complain about the reviews. Oh, hell yeah. He lists the reviews one by one. Hell yeah. And then just
like moans about them just doing the same thing he did with the professors but with the reviews oh it's that's so good it's like 30 pages long i could barely get through it god i i can't believe we did this whole episode and you didn't um talk about the time he called gorvodala queer i know you call me a crypto nazi one more time i'll suck you in the damn face the thing is i also hate gorvodal though so it was real that was a real let them fight situation for me i mean look
Absolutely. However, there is nothing I would have liked more than someone accepting Buckley's invitation to fisticuffs on national television. If Gore Vidal was just like, absolutely, let's fight. You know, that would have been sick. And Dick Cabot just pulls out a stack of ones. He's like, please, somebody knock the Mid-Atlantic accent out of this guy.