1,741 words
From the early 1960s onward Buckley was easily goaded to sue, generally on account of casual insults, libels and calumnies that would be tossed off in print or on television, and just as easily forgotten in a week if he didn’t draw attention to them. As a public figure who courted controversy, he should have gained a thicker skin as time went on. Instead, the opposite happened. Initially his anger and litigiousness were mostly piqued by attacks upon his family, uttered on TV chat shows. From the very beginning, Gore Vidal was the main provocateur, but Buckley was persuaded to keep his powder dry—no defamation suits today, please. They sparred via Jack Paar, David Susskind, the 1964 Convention coverage. Things finally came to a head in their fourth or fifth set of encounters, in 1968, during the Democrat Convention in Chicago. They had been engaged to give commentary, and maybe debate a little, for ABC News, with Howard K. Smith as moderator. Toward the end of the run, Vidal called Buckley a crypto-Nazi, and Buckley called Vidal a queer. It should have stopped there, but they followed up the next year in the pages of Esquire. At extraordinary length, maybe 9,500 words, Buckley excoriated Vidal for his continuing and gratuitous attacks on the Buckley family, and slammed him for his apparent delight in perversity and pornographic writing. He ended his essay with a perfunctory apology to Vidal for calling him a queer on live television.
In response, Vidal carted out some heavy, if dubious, ammunition. Among the acquaintances who’d told him tales of the Buckley family were the two daughters of the Rev. Francis Cotter, the Episcopal minister in Sharon, Connecticut. These two Cotter daughters both became actresses and television personalities, under the names Audrey and Jayne Meadows. Jayne Meadows married perennial TV host, comic, and songwriter Steve Allen. They had a wide circle of friends in the 1950s and 60s, including young Gore Vidal, then living nearby in the Hudson Valley; and the Buckleys as well. This social circle is the real background to the Vidal-Buckley feud. Vidal was a kind of interloper, repeating hearsay: a gossip-queen. The Cotter girls, though, had skin in the game. They’d known the Buckleys since forever, and when they talked about them they saw it as just neighborly teasing.
Jayne particularly liked to retell a colorful tale from 1944. One Saturday night in May, it seems, three of the Buckley girls and two of their friends committed a few minor vandalisms at their father’s Christ Episcopal Church (honey and oatmeal in the pews, Varga Girl pinups and salacious Peter Arno cartoons from The New Yorker in the hymnals and prayer books). Bill wasn’t there, he was in South Carolina. He learned about the mischief when he came back to Sharon and learned his sisters had been charged with vandalism and now were awaiting their trial date. The Buckley girls’ motivation was unclear. There wasn’t some vendetta; it was just a prank. But Vidal, in his Esquire piece, implied that Bill was party to the shenanigans, and he painted the vandalism as dark retaliation against Mrs. Cotter, a real estate agent who’d recently sold a house to a Jewish couple. (That bit may or may not be true, and regardless did not figure in the court case, which ended with a fine. But the story spread far and wide, and mutated wildly over the years. I remember a Jewish acquaintance in college in the 1970s, informing me that the Buckley family had once vandalized a synagogue.)
This speculative anecdote was the only one Vidal related in his article. (His investigative research consisted of the initial news report in the weekly Lakeville Journal, talking about church vandalism.) But there was another old Buckley tale he did not repeat, perhaps because it didn’t manage to find its way into the newspapers or courtroom. That was when, in the summer of 1937, the first two Buckley boys, along with the first two Buckley sisters and local friends, built a wooden cross and lit it on a hillside in front of a resort hotel frequented by Jews. Bill was not present at that event, either, being only 11, and too young to participate in such hijinks. (“I wept tears of frustration,” he wrote in 1992, over missing out on this “great lark.”)[1]
In publishing the Vidal riposte, Esquire broke an agreement it had made with both Vidal and Buckley: that each would be able to read and blue-pencil the other’s essay. Esquire failed to send a copy of Vidal’s draft to Buckley, thereby leaving the innuendoes about the Buckley family unchallenged and actionable.
Predictably, Esquire eventually settled with Buckley, paying at least his legal costs, while Vidal dropped his suit. Tanenhaus does not give the details, but I seem to recall that Esquire made additional payments in kind, by buying years of display ads in National Review, and simultaneously running subscription ads for NR in Esquire. There were also some big Esquire subscription ad buys around this time (1974) in the Yale Daily News Magazine, where Christopher Buckley was an editor. (A monthly periodical, not a weekend supplement, as Tanenhaus seems to think.)
As a rule, Tanenhaus does not give us details about personality conflicts and lawsuits, and this is bound to result in a lot of head scratching. I was not an NR reader in the 1980s and 90s, so heard about the simmering Joe Sobran problem long after the fact. From what I can learn from Tanenhaus and elsewhere, Sobran was a columnist and then senior editor on the magazine, regarded there as a disorganized, passionate, but often brilliant essayist. In 1993 he was summarily fired from NR after making some remarks critical of Israel and/or Jews in another periodical.
I still don’t really know what the fuss was about, but I’m pleased to say that Tanenhaus succinctly tells us why Sobran was fired. Buckley did it, or so he said, to make Norman Podhoretz happy.
Buckley claimed to be personally fond of Joe Sobran. And while you wouldn’t guess this from its title, his In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992), seems to have been intended as both defense and constructive critique of Sobran (as well as Pat Buchanan and other, lesser targets). It’s a kind of open letter addressed to NR readers but also to The New Republic‘s Marty Peretz, and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and Norman’s wife Midge Decter. Midge in particular had been a constant complainer about Sobran. But of course, there are some subjects you cannot write about, however honestly or obsequiously, without making some parties unhappy, and certain types of folks you can’t ever please anyway. In this case, everyone was unhappy, and Buckley’s book (which began as a long cover essay in NR) looked, and still looks (to me) like a desperate, preposterous venture.
There is an obsessiveness and repetitiveness in the Anti-Semitism book that characterizes much of Buckley’s later non-fiction writing. You see it in the pendulous, overwritten 1969 “On Experiencing Gore Vidal” in Esquire. And it’s noticeable in the drop-off in quality in “On The Right,” Buckley’s thrice-weekly syndicated column, a decline that seems to have commenced around the same time.
Once upon a time, perhaps because I’d idly mentioned that I’d found his father’s recent columns difficult to get through, Chris said to me, “Do you find that he’s become very parliamentarian?” I had no idea what he meant by that. Many years later I suspect that what Chris was really trying to say was something like orotund, talking (writing) like a bloviating orator. Around this time I had a theory about it all: the problem was that Bill was now regularly dosing himself with Ritalin, which he told Chris was prescribed for him “for low blood pressure.” Now, Ritalin has an effect similar to amphetamines. It may give some people a boost to write quickly and creatively when doing something like fiction, or dashing off column-filler. But when I tried some of those pills they gave me an obsessive need to rewrite every sentence about ten times (if it’s supposed to be polished, expository writing). My point here is, drugs like this might enhance your writing but they can just as easily mess with your critical judgment.
Tanenhaus informs us that Bill actually began taking Ritalin in 1958. This I find hard to believe, since not only does that make him a very early adopter (Ritalin only went on the market in 1957), but it destroys my whole theory about the decline in quality I detected in his his columns and essays a decade or so later: just before he became a manic writer of memoirs and page-turner spy novels, cranking out Blackford Oakes thrillers in three or four weeks while on vacation in Gstaad.
So my guess is that Bill kept taking a lot more as he got older. Christopher wrote of his father’s last days, when half-empty blister packs littered the night table, that Bill was gobbling sleeping pills and “Rits” together when he went to bed. In his last months Bill did not seem to “get it” that Ritalin was a stimulant. I have yet to read a single Buckley thriller, but if ever I open one and it’s pharmaceutically enhanced, I think I’ll spot the Ritalin right away.
Notes
[1] Buckley wrote this near the beginning of In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992) a collection of essay-memoirs about how he juggled relations with neocon Jews such as Norman Podhoretz and Marty Peretz on the one hand, and prickly rightists such as National Review staffer Joe Sobran on the other. The story about cross-burning had been published at least once before, in John B. Judis’s William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988). I first heard the tale myself about 50 years ago, from one of the participants. This person had been a friend and neighbor of the Buckleys, and was the father of some friends of mine. He described vividly that foggy night 40 years before, the wet grass and slippery hillside near the hotel, along with his own weepy regret that he’d come along on this crazy trip. “Oh no, Johnny and Jimmy, don’t do this, let’s go back,” he cried. Or at least he claimed to have cried, recounting it for me long afterward. I gathered this adventure took place in the Berkshires, perhaps over the Massachusetts line. In his 1988 book, John Judis said it happened in Salisbury, in northwest Connecticut. Tanenhaus says it happened in Amenia, New York, two-and-a-half miles west of Sharon, practically in the Buckleys’ backyard. Of course it might have happened in both places, and maybe others. Or it might just be one tall tale that they’d been a-tellin’ since ’bout 1937. Regardless, young Billy said he was sad to have missed it.
22 comments
So petty , so trivial – so typical up tight American Conservative – making a big deal about some Conservative s daughters pulling a minor prank in an Episcopal church , lots of gossip about someone in Conservative media being “ Gay “ or not being anti National Socialist 24/7 .
in my case , I foolishly admitted I had yes ( horrors of horrors) once smoked MJ in college ( I should have pulled an Al Gore and said I never inhaled ) and was rejected my the Marine Corp officer program .
thus at a time where Negro Communists and criminals were/are mass rioting , murdering our young women and destroying all our once safe , beautiful cities – European civilization being openly invaded and conquered by hundreds of thousands , millions of you Muslim men/soldiers .
i lived in New York City 1985-91 . One year NYC had over 2,000 murders ! I lived 2 blocks from a Dominican crack cocaine house “ the Rock “ where there were beheadings ! The Central Oark White jogger gang raked and left for dead , Al Sharpton – Tawana Bradley – I left shortly B4 the first Islamic Jihadists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 . And Buckley NR , Conservative Inc did nothing , Another bad WASP Yalie Then President George HW Bush sr did no thing , wouldn’t t even say anything against the Bkack and brown wilding , raping mob and Bush Sr took the Bloods . Cripps Rodney King LÁ rioter side and retried the found innocent LA police officers on Federal Civil Rights charged the Bush Sr with Buckley Cuckservative Inc invaded Iraq to get SADDAM Hussein because Saddam was supposedly Hitler !
so who gives a sh&$ about William F Buckley then or now his legacy . Please dox thus dead WFB so we can go pee on his grave .
jR
Al Gore? You mean Bill Clinton.
Are you channeling someone, with your sloppy writing? What is this? It’s like you would write a one-word, one-syllable sentence that somehow contained three misspellings, two grammatical errors, and a misplaced pronunciation mark. If this is a joke, and I’m a mark, I’m well tookin’
“Tawana Bradley”? It’s a comedy sketch, I hope inadvertently.
FO
you re proving my point .
william F Buckley NR anal retentive WASP Yalie types obsessing about trivial stupid stuff like some typos .
i m texting on a smart phone on airplane flights .
there will be some typos – big f$ing deal!
Our best warrior leaders such as Charles Martel or Mormon gun slinger Porter Rockwell couldn’t t read !
sigh
typical
Great article! Joe Sobran sounds like a good candidate for an article. 🙃
I’ve been planning one. He told his side of the story, and it’s quite eye-opening.
Peter Quint: September 19, 2025 Great article! Joe Sobran sounds like a good candidate for an article.
I don’t see anything under C-C’s tag for joe sobran except this article, but how about this one, mentioning him and “conservative poseur” Buckley: “Conservatism 101: Less than Worthless” at nationalvanguard.org by outstanding, courageous author and essayist John Massaro
WHETHER IN GOVERNMENT OR media, conservatives just react to the leading news stories each day, sounding off within their prescribed boundaries. Step over the line and you’re sent packing, as Joe Sobran, who wrote a column for National Review under the withering eye of conservative poseur William F. Buckley, found out. Whether out of ignorance or expedience, they are accomplices to the routine censorship employed by the media…
… Those I have named in this chapter [including Jews] are but a few of the well-known conservatives of our day who have led so many Americans into the swamp of no return. There are many, many more in government, entertainment, political activism, on the radio, on television, and on the Web. No matter who wins the next election, expect nothing progressive on the childhood vaccination front or anywhere else from anyone identifying with this moribund word “conservative.” Conservatism is for losers. Conservatism is finished.
Source: Author; an excerpt from his excellent book Will Vaccines Be the End of Us?
I’m not bad at decoding the enemy’s bullshittish such as ‘progressive’ which really means regressive-I was 17 on 9/11 and since then it seems we’ve devolved culturally by one thousand years. Do you or any of the NA men agree with my opinion that the word ‘conservative’ is really a lame old geezer term that stands for weak, raceless pushovers glad to be a doormat for jewry? Who in the world can possibly be attracted to anyone proudly wearing that fogey-identifier? It has no fangs nor fight at all. Even as a teen, whenever I hear ‘conservative’ or cuckservayids as I call them, I think of newt gingrich, bill o’reilly, and grover norquist dim bulbs whose squawking is limited to ‘safe’ non-issues like tax policy or militaria grandstanding. Do older Whites find this display as pathetically ineffective as I do cause ‘conservatives’ never seem to get the hint that they’re not attracting anyone by proudly boasting of principles and the founding fathers that’s never reciprocated by an audience. It’s just a lame word that’s long outlived its chronic not-usefulness and lumbers on as uninspiring boredom void of all creative dynamism, and crotchety old-fartism that refuses to be put out to pasture. I believe it should’ve been scrapped long ago to shed ourselves of its uncoolness taint.
Duplicate comment removed
Uncle Semantic asks me: September 20, 2025… Do you or any of the NA men agree with my opinion that the word ‘conservative’ is really a lame old geezer term that stands for weak, raceless pushovers glad to be a doormat for jewry?…
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Did you read my comment above yours to which you are responding here?
If not, read Mr. Massaro’s “Conservatism 101: Less than Worthless” at nationalvanguard.org. The title of that piece says it all. Put ‘conservatives’ in the search block at NV and dozens of scholarly articles will appear. I and most NA men and women — and you, Unc — will agree with what is said in most of those essays.
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I believe it should’ve been scrapped long ago to shed ourselves of its uncoolness taint.
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Conservatism is not “cool” at all to a serious White separatist/preservationists.
William Pierce scrapped it 54 years ago with “Why Conservatives Can’t Win.” Greg Johnson agreed with him a few years later with “Why Conservatives STILL Can’t Win” at nationalvanguard.org Greg’s piece can also be found here on C-C and I expect he has not changed his mind:
… Pierce was right. Conservatism can’t win. It doesn’t really conserve anything. It is so politically inept and hapless that it seems almost designed to lose. If doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, it is also a good definition of conservatism.
So why are so many Whites at C-C so fascinated with Christian conservative Zionist Charlie Kirk’s death? Do they think he was “cool?” That idea is funny to me. White conservatives need some serious radicalization, and quick.
IMO
George Lincoln Rockwell s “ 50 years of Failure “
in WP is one of THE best observations of the dead end of American Conservative Inc.
Amren also did a good observation of the decline and final irrelevance of Buckley s National Review:
https://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/the-decline-of-national-review/
Yes, in the 1960s, George Lincoln Rockwell coined the term “Kosher Conservative” with William F. Buckley (or anyone like him) specifically in mind.
And as has already been pointed out, Rockwell said that Conservatism will never get anywhere because Conservativism is fighting to “conserve what is already gone.”
I have seen a lot of things “go” in my lifetime, so I can see the importance of not losing more when the degeneracy only accelerates every year.
I am skeptical of “Unite the Right” schemes but we should also not let ourselves become like “fish in a barrel,” as the American Nazi Party Commander put it, where each fish scurries in their own direction hoping to avoid the spear.
Our opponents learned the lessons of Solidarity a long time ago.
AntiFa and Leftists have been able to ride roughshod on college campuses for a long time. Now the Left (not MAGA) has assassinated a Christian and Conservative, Charlie Kirk. This cannot stand. We have to rally for White people.
A few years ago when Charlie Kirk tried to hold a rally on the ASU campus ─ the largest University by enrollment in the nation ─ the academic professionals were derisively calling him a White Nationalist. That was laughable, as if anything Charlie Kirk was a “love your enemy” Christian, but the important point is the threat that our enemies saw. And it seems that Charlie was moving in our direction.
This gives us some great avenues for propaganda, which is why our (respectfully) claiming his martyrdom is not wrong. Free Speech is our friend and it always will be. We need to begin by reclaiming campus spaces.
🙂
In a quick search, I’m turning up dozens of “sobran” results, going back to 2010. I know I’ve mentioned him myself once or twice, with regard to his endorsement of Instauration.
As for his banishment from National Review, Joe Sobran was kept aboard for years after the whining began. Contrast that with the treatment of John Derbyshire two decades later. The Derb did one penetrating column (still a good read) in another outlet (Takimag) during the “Trayvon” hysteria in April 2012…and within a couple days he was gonzo. Rich Lowry just couldn’t take the heat.
Margot Metroland: September 20, 2025 In a quick search, I’m turning up dozens of “sobran” results, going back to 2010. I know I’ve mentioned him myself once or twice, with regard to his endorsement of Instauration.
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Joe was well-known in our circles. Since I saw a C-C tag for his name, I was expecting to see more to come up when I hit it than just this one article. Your search was much more successful than mine.
I did find that one article by Mr. Massaro that mentioned Joe. As an excellent wordsmith yourself, you would probably appreciate world-traveler Massaro’s fascinating essays, here: John Massaro | National Vanguard. I sure do as a friend of his.
Yes, thanks. I saw the Massaro piece. It just made what to me is a routine and rather mainstream indictment of what passes now for “conservatism” in the political sphere. But its opening swipe at Buckley and National Review is misleading, perhaps because badly informed:
WHETHER IN GOVERNMENT OR media, conservatives just react to the leading news stories each day, sounding off within their prescribed boundaries. Step over the line and you’re sent packing, as Joe Sobran, who wrote a column for National Review under the withering eye of conservative poseur William F. Buckley, found out.
Now, I had to do a little bit of research to get the dates right, but Joe’s mention of Instauration happened in May 1986, and his firing didn’t happen for another seven years. The plug for Instauration happened not in an NR piece but in the Joe Sobran syndicated newspaper column. It caused a ripple, of course, and made many of us Instauration readers (me, anyway) suddenly aware of Sobran’s existence. A year before this, Sobran had got some noses out of joint by supporting President Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, wherein were buried some Waffen SS soldiers. I recall that Reagan, and/or the visit’s main promoter, Pat Buchanan, made a point of explaining that Waffen SS were not Totenkopf SS or cartoon Nazi bully-boys; they were more akin to Special Forces or the Marines. That was one satisfying, lip-smacking line of argument, I must say! Of course it poured even more fuel on the flames. Around the same time, Joe mocked the New York Times‘s “Holocaust” obsession, writing that the paper “really ought to change its name to Holocaust Update.” (Mark Weber did a nice treatment of provocateur Joe in the JHR that year.) But Sobran’s position at NR was still safe.
Where I’m going with this shaggy-dog story is this simple point: Joe Sobran was raising hackles in 1985 and 1986. Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz were telling Bill Buckley to dump him, and this clamor just increased as Joe criticized the neocons and Israel Lobby and their connivance in bringing about the adventure in Iraq and Kuwait in 1990-91. But Joe had been with NR since 1972, and was very popular with the readership, maybe the only real “conservative” firebrand Buckley had aboard at that point. So Buckley would not give Sobran the heave-ho until 1993. And when that happened it was because of something that looked like a personal attack on Buckley himself, published not in NR (of course), but in the trad-right Catholic journal, The Wanderer. Sobran wrote that Buckley had told him to “stop antagonizing the Zionist crowd.”
And that’s what finally tore it, after 21 years. Bill Buckley had been defending Joe, year after year, to Midge and Poddy, but now it was a matter of personal rancor.
Did Buckley talk like Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island? 🙃
Thurston Howell III talked like Jim Backus doing a bit of “Locust Valley Lockjaw.” Jim Backus would do radio commercials for La-Z-Boy Reclining Chair back in the 70s —”The perfect gift for Father’s Day!”—and a bit of the old Thurston Howell honk would come back when he did those. (Well, yeah—they surely didn’t hire him for his Mr. Magoo voice. Mr. Magoo sold GE lightbulbs, not La-Z-Boys.)
Bill Buckley’s speech was far different, as well as being almost unique in the Buckley family. Younger brother Reid looked like Bill and spoke a bit like him, but without the tics. But if I had to, I’d reckon the WFB Jr. vocal style was distilled from a number of influences:
Factor 1: The family was Southern on both sides, and they lived on their South Carolina estate much of the time. So that would be one influence. WFB Sr. was an oilman-lawyer from south Texas, son of a sheriff born to Irish-Canadians in far-off Ontario. Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner Buckley’s family, of Swiss and German and Missouri-Irish extraction, had been in New Orleans for generations. The Buckley kids also helped found the Citizens’ Council in Camden, SC in the 1950s, an impressive endeavor they chose to keep on the QT when up North.
Factor 2: The Buckleys lived in Europe for extended periods when Billy was small, so that he acquired several languages along with that unaccented and stilted “diplomatic brat” kind of locution that can sound Mid-Atlantic to our ears.
Factor 3: Age 13, Billy spent a term or two at an English public school called Beaumont College, near Windsor. Following this, he did prep school at the Millbrook Academy in the Hudson Valley, where his roommate was an English evacuee named Alistair Horne (later to be a popular historian and lifelong friend).
Finally, he had those distinct tics (diagnosed as Tourette’s, or so I was told) and a usually controllable stammer. Near as I can make out, these various elements, rather than some youthful affectation, accounted for the way he talked.
William L. Pierce described the American political establishment thusly, years ago (I paraphrase), “The Democratic Party tightens up the political apparatus two turns when they come to power, and when the Republican Party comes back in power they only back the political apparatus off one turn.” It is the old con, “two steps forward, and one step back,” they have always, knowingly, worked this way together. The conservatives have never conserved anything, they aided normalizing miscegenation, they aided normalizing homosexuality, they aided normalizing “open borders,” and they always wreck the economy, and increase government debt. Reagon might have been an exception, but he was also a neoconservative. 🙃
Peter Quint: September 21, 2025 William L. Pierce described the American political establishment thusly, years ago (I paraphrase), “The Democratic Party tightens up the political apparatus two turns when they come to power, and when the Republican Party comes back in power they only back the political apparatus off one turn.” It is the old con, “two steps forward, and one step back,” they have always, knowingly, worked this way together. The conservatives have never conserved anything, they aided normalizing miscegenation, they aided normalizing homosexuality, they aided normalizing “open borders,” and they always wreck the economy, and increase government debt. Reagon might have been an exception, but he was also a neoconservative..
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That sounds like something Pierce would say, without providing a source for the quote. He is very quotable for us today for a reason: he was right.
A service the National Alliance’s young Membership Coordinator, Dillon Rau, provides is scouring Pierce’s considerable body of work, pulling quotes and posting them to NA’s forum, whitebiocentrism.com as “Dr. William L. Pierce Quotes.” What I like about Dillon’s topic is that he provides sources for each Pierce quote, like here:
We can make a difference, because courage is contagious. It spreads from person to person. And it’s powerful. One courageous truth teller can back down a thousand cowards and liars and hypocrites. He can send a whole regiment of Jewish media bosses scurrying for cover, like vampires fleeing the light of the rising sun.
There has never been a time in the long history of our race when we were more in need of a few honest men and women, a few people of courage and integrity. There has never been another time when a few good men and women had the opportunity to make such a big difference as they can make now. Let’s do it! Source “Brainwashing in America” at nationalvanguard.org.
Anyone going to that Pierce essay on NV will see other Pierce teachings, like this one, on conservatives, a topic that dominates the news today with the evangelical Christian conservative Charlie Kirk’s death being a maniacal lovefest:
The government is locked into its present course of social and racial destruction. It does not have the will to change its fundamentally destructive policies. Nothing but a total revolution can bring about the changes necessary to minimize alienation, restore the faith of White citizens in the government, and eliminate terrorism. That’s why I’m a revolutionary instead of a conservative or a reformer.” Source: “How Liberals Think” at nationalvanguard.org
Peter, you mention Ronald Reagan and typical party politicians. A quick search on NV for RR’s name turned up this 1984 piece, not by Dr. Pierce, but by another quotable genius on our side, Dr. Revilo P. Oliver. I relate to it because I fooled around with [Carto’s] Populist Party briefly soon after our NC-based White Patriot Party was banned by JOG (with help from SPLC’s Morris Dees) — meeting Carto and seeing Bob Richards (before he bailed on the PP) — before discovering and working with more serious racial mentors like Klassen and Pierce:
… The Populists’ candidate for that exalted role is one Robert “Bob” Richards… I have before me a newsletter which purports to quote from a press conference given by Richards… I naturally have no means of being certain that Richards actually made the statements attributed to him in the newsletter, but I do know, from long observation, how politicians, even small ones, behave. According to the newsletter, Richards made the three following statements, which are quoted verbatim: (1) “I believe all people and all races are equal.” (2) “Bring three and one-half million Jews from Israel and put them into Texas and they would turn Texas into a paradise.” (3) “I don’t believe in [Carto’s] Liberty Lobby’s anti-Holocaust. position. I know the furnaces were a fact, I was there. I know.” Source: “Reagan — Eyewitness to the Holocaust?” at nationalvanguard.org
Thank you for these articles. Fascinating and enjoyable. I wish there would be Parts 4, 5, and so on.
Some of the “Firing Line” episodes were worthwhile. They helped bring me out of a liberal phase. But of course they weren’t enough.
Thank you, Tommy. Actually it was one long review that got serialized into three parts (and arguably got more eyeballs that way). There’s plenty more to delve into on the subject, e.g., the John P. Judis 1988 bio of WFB that I mentioned, which came out right in the middle of the neocon squawks about Sobran. I’m hoping Beau Albrecht gives us his penetrating, in-depth piece on Joe Sobran first, and soon.
The real subject at hand isn’t Buckley or Sobran, of course, but the permutations of “conservatism” and general right-wingism over the past 75 years. The summa thesis on that has yet to be written.
Margot Metroland: September 21, 2025 Yes, thanks. I saw the Massaro piece. It just made what to me is a routine and rather mainstream indictment of what passes now for “conservatism” in the political sphere. But its opening swipe at Buckley and National Review is misleading, perhaps because badly informed…
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His indictment of conservatism is a little beyond anything in the so-callled “mainstream (that is controlled by the Tribe he criticized),” but John’s brief mention of Sobran was absolutely nothing compared to your detailed memories and research about him. Thank you for all of that.
C-C’s tag for ‘Joe Sobran‘ under this article is still lacking for me. Your excellent research here should go to the top of that tag’s hits, or even stand alone on the front page somehow.
John’s expertise is vaccines, with 40-plus years of research into the history of them. See: “Will Vaccines Be The End Of Us by John Massaro” at cosmotheistchurch.org
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