WF Buckley wrote for Playboy. You can’t tell me he was serious about his religion when he wrote for a wank magazine. Playboy’s core use was for wanking. Everything else was commentary. <\/p>\n
Buckley was as serious about his Catholicism as Nick Fuentes. ChatGPT: <\/p>\n
That\u2019s a fair analogy if you mean \u201cmore as a cultural identity and personal brand than as a consistently applied moral framework.\u201d Both Buckley and Fuentes use religion as a flag of legitimacy and moral authority, but they\u2019re also selective in how it\u2019s lived out\u2014willing to bend or sidestep doctrine when it serves their political or media goals. For Buckley, that meant debating in elite secular spaces, writing for Playboy, and cozying up to power brokers who weren\u2019t exactly Catholic paragons. For Fuentes, it\u2019s playing provocateur online while claiming Catholic orthodoxy, despite routinely violating the spirit (and sometimes the letter) of church teaching. It\u2019s the old pattern: religion as an identity marker, not a leash. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You’re not serious about your religion unless it stops you doing things you want to do. Unless you sacrifice, you are not religious. <\/p>\n
Buckley loved religion as long as it did not impede his ease, pleasure and ambition. He was as Christian as Peter Thiel.<\/p>\n
The more I learn about WF Buckley from reading this Sam Tanenhaus biography<\/a>, the more he reminds me of influencers like Kim Kardashian, Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes.<\/p>\n
Buckley had the polish of an Oxbridge debater and the moral vocabulary of a conservative Catholic, but under it all he was a master brand-builder. Like Kardashian, Spencer, or Fuentes, he understood that the real currency is attention\u2014and that you can trade on controversy as long as you package it well.<\/p>\n
The ideological consistency was often secondary to the performance. He\u2019d pick fights, coin quotable lines, and make himself indispensable to media outlets, whether that was PBS, the New York Times op-ed page, or yes, Playboy. The difference is mostly in style: Buckley\u2019s self-promotion wore a bow tie and spoke in ten-dollar words, but it was still self-promotion first, convictions second.<\/p>\n
If you keep going in Tanenhaus\u2019s book, you\u2019ll probably see just how much of his \u201cconservative leadership\u201d was really about being the face of a movement rather than its conscience.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Buckley hated the Birches for the same reason Richard Spencer hated TRS — they were down market competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WF Buckley wrote for Playboy. You can’t tell me he was serious about his religion when he wrote for a wank magazine. Playboy’s core use was for wanking. Everything else was commentary. Buckley was as serious about his Catholicism as … Continue reading