If Books Could Kill - God And Man At Yale

00:00:00.000 Peter. Michael. What do you know about a book called God and Man at Yale?

00:00:04.760 The two things liberals hate the most, God and men.

00:00:08.020 so god and man at yale is a 1951 unexpected runaway bestseller by william f buckley

00:00:30.980 Peter, what do you know about William F. Buckley?

00:00:34.160 The distances that a weird little mid-Atlantic accent could take you in the 1950s, man.

00:00:42.700 Incredible.

00:00:43.220 The godfather of modern conservatism.

00:00:46.100 You know, he's the founder of National Review, the man who married the weird establishment Republicans with the segregationists.

00:00:57.100 I read a couple of biographies of him and they're like, he comes from a family of star

00:01:01.160 crossed lovers.

00:01:02.100 His father was old money and his mother was new money.

00:01:05.500 So what do you what do you know about this actual book?

00:01:08.040 Not much, actually.

00:01:09.200 Buckley goes to Yale and it's a little too communist for him or something.

00:01:15.420 And so he's like, I'm going to write a book about it.

00:01:17.800 And he does as like a 24 year old or whatever.

00:01:20.820 That was like remarkably accurate and succinct, Peter.

00:01:23.440 I've got my finger on the pulse.

00:01:24.940 He just like sits down immediately after graduating and just like writes this entire book, basically just like complaining and re-litigating every single fight that he had on campus.

00:01:36.240 He was the editor of the Yale Daily News.

00:01:38.680 And he's like, you know what? 0.99

00:01:39.880 Everything I wrote an op-ed about while I was there, I'm just going to write a fucking book about it. 0.98

00:01:44.240 That's the whole book. 0.98

00:01:45.400 That is the dream, right? 1.00

00:01:47.040 To go to school and have a nemesis and then write a book being like Janice failed sociology.

00:01:55.140 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.

00:02:04.760 Like, oh, you're just like you're just you went to a weekend conference that sucked.

00:02:08.900 And you want to tell me about that?

00:02:10.240 All right.

00:02:11.220 That's literally like that's the level like that.

00:02:13.420 That's the level of depth that this book gets to basically.

00:02:15.660 Right.

00:02:15.840 And the level of depth of this episode.

00:02:17.800 I'm excited.

00:02:18.520 So the obvious thing to say about God and Man at Yale and really the only aspect of this book that is remotely interesting is the extent to which it set the template for all of the campus panic bestsellers that we've had since then.

00:02:32.840 So this is – it's essentially like a genre of conservative writing at this point.

00:02:37.860 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 Prof Scam, which isn't even a word. It sounds like shit. This is just something that conservatives do. 0.99

00:02:52.940 Yeah. It's one of their central complaints that our precious, beautiful children are going off to college and then they meet old communists.

00:03:00.880 Yes.

00:03:01.200 And they get convinced that minorities deserve rights. 0.99

00:03:05.020 Yeah, you start teaching conservative kids about history and philosophy and pretty soon 1.00

00:03:08.400 they'll have a second joke.

00:03:10.520 Okay, so I'm sending you the first couple paragraphs of the book.

00:03:16.140 During the years 1946 to 1950, I was an undergraduate at Yale University.

00:03:22.140 I arrived in New Haven fresh from a two-year stint in the army, and I brought with me a

00:03:26.180 firm belief in Christianity and a profound respect for American institutions and traditions.

00:03:31.080 I had always been taught that an active faith in God and a rigid adherence to Christian principles

00:03:37.000 are the most powerful influences toward the good life. I also believed that free enterprise and

00:03:42.880 limited government had served this country well and would probably continue to do so in the future.

00:03:47.740 These two attitudes were basic to my general outlook. I therefore looked eagerly to Yale

00:03:53.000 University for allies against secularism and collectivism. The two worst things. I am one of

00:03:58.600 a small group of students who fought against those who seek to subvert religion and individualism.

00:04:04.340 So he went there bright eyed and bushy tailed thinking, well, of course, we all agree

00:04:10.320 that free market capitalism and Jesus are good. Hopefully college will reinforce my priors.

00:04:18.020 It is funny how the entire campus panic now is like these young kids don't want to be challenged.

00:04:23.680 And in this book, he's just very explicitly like I was challenged. Right.

00:04:27.920 The thing is, like, doing these, like, hypocrisy arguments about, like, 70 years ago, conservatives said something different than what they say now.

00:04:35.060 Like, we would do this every 30 seconds going through this book.

00:04:38.300 So, like, we can't do it every single time.

00:04:40.200 But it's like this is one of the more glaring examples of it.

00:04:43.480 This is when the conservative complaints about higher education started to emerge.

00:04:49.060 Yes.

00:04:49.540 And I don't really know why that's the case.

00:04:52.860 Maybe just something about, like, the post-World War II intellectual atmosphere.

00:04:57.180 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?

00:05:04.300 Only two, Hobbes?

00:05:08.860 Slipping, slipping.

00:05:10.900 All right.

00:05:11.080 So here is the end of that quote.

00:05:13.300 So these are the next two paragraphs.

00:05:15.000 And this establishes this book's weird pattern of making like administrative and logistical arguments.

00:05:24.540 So here's this.

00:05:26.140 Some of us advance the viewpoint that the faculty of Yale is morally and constitutionally responsible

00:05:31.920 to the trustees of Yale, who are in turn responsible to the alumni. They are thus

00:05:37.320 duty-bound to transmit to their students the wisdom, insight, and value judgments which in

00:05:42.900 the trustees' opinion will enable the American citizen to make the optimum adjustment to the

00:05:48.460 community and to the world. I content that the trustees of Yale, along with the vast majority

00:05:54.720 of the alumni, are committed to the desirability of fostering both the belief in God and a

00:06:00.320 recognition of the merits of our economic system.

00:06:03.120 As our educational overseers, it is the clear responsibility of the trustees to guide the

00:06:08.600 teaching at Yale toward those ends.

00:06:10.740 What do you think?

00:06:11.320 So he's doing, he's implying that there is a almost fiduciary duty.

00:06:16.600 Yes.

00:06:17.160 That Yale owes to America to be conservative.

00:06:21.060 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.

00:06:42.440 I'm going to speculate a bit here, but this does feel a little bit like him attempting to articulate a gut feeling that he has where he's like, I'm mad that they didn't teach this.

00:06:55.200 And then he sort of constructs a framework by which he has a claim to be indignant.

00:07:00.640 But when you actually start peeling back the claim, it doesn't make a ton of sense.

00:07:03.820 And Yale doesn't actually really owe him anything.

00:07:06.340 This gets to the way that he concludes the introduction to this book.

00:07:10.540 Right. So he says, I should also like to state that I'm not here concerned with writing an

00:07:17.280 apologia either for Christianity or for individualism. That is to say, this essay

00:07:22.840 will not attempt to prove either the divinity of Christ, nor shall I attempt to demonstrate

00:07:27.840 the contemporary applicability of the principal theses of Adam Smith. Rather, I will proceed

00:07:33.080 on the assumption that Christianity and freedom are good without ever worrying that by so doing,

00:07:38.820 I am presumptuous. I see. And then in a footnote, he says, in point of fact,

00:07:45.000 the argument I shall advance does not even require that free enterprise and Christianity be good,

00:07:50.000 but merely that the educational overseers of a private university should consider them to be

00:07:55.660 good. Now, it's coming together, right? He's like, look, I'm not going to defend my ideas

00:08:00.280 on the substance. I'm just going to say that Yale alum all agree with me and therefore Yale should

00:08:07.580 be pushing our agenda. I read a lot of reviews of this book from when it came out. And even then

00:08:12.340 people were pointing out that like, you know, at the heart of this book and really at the heart of

00:08:16.100 the conservative complaint about college campuses, you still see this now is this this idea of moral

00:08:21.360 relativism, right? If like the postmodern turn, you don't even teach kids like right and wrong

00:08:25.520 anymore. But this book is like profoundly relativistic. Like he never says they should

00:08:31.320 be teaching people truth, right? He doesn't even attempt to make an argument and he explicitly

00:08:35.460 rejects that he's like no no no the alumni think that this is good therefore it should be taught

00:08:40.760 to students this is about what institutions owe to the elite right right there would have been

00:08:46.400 times when the alumni of yale thought that slavery was good or that women shouldn't vote you said

00:08:50.900 there would have been times i'm pretty sure one of those times was 1950 yeah exactly aren't we still

00:08:57.120 like 20 years out from yale admitting women oh yeah the they they don't admit women until 1969

00:09:02.820 and they don't admit black people on any like large scale a couple people get in but they don't

00:09:08.080 admit black people like as a group until 1968 we also at this time have quotas for jewish people

00:09:12.960 at 10 interestingly he doesn't mention this in the book there's also quotas for catholics that

00:09:18.680 they don't want to be more than 13 catholic and he is catholic so it is weird that like of all

00:09:23.200 the grievances that he makes in this book it's weird that he doesn't make that grievance they

00:09:26.460 hadn't like developed their political vocabulary about affirmative action yet they're like well

00:09:32.320 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. 1.00

00:09:42.220 So we then get into the first chapter of the book. The book has five chapters. Chapter one is called Religion at Yale. This entire chapter is about religion, right? The attack on religion, the rise of atheism as an ideology throughout Yale, right?

00:09:56.700 But then over and over again, the actual evidence that he cites is like how powerful Christianity is as a force on campus.

00:10:05.740 He says the handiest arguments of those who vaunt the pro-religious atmosphere at Yale is that the university has a large religion department, a great number of strong and influential men whose beliefs are strongly pro-Christian on its faculty, and a powerful and pervasive religious tradition.

00:10:20.160 To a greater or lesser extent, these statements are true.

00:10:23.400 And yet it remains that Yale, corporately speaking, is neither pro-Christian nor even, I believe, neutral toward religion.

00:10:31.520 Later in the book, he just mentions that like this board of trustees thing, which I think is 18 people at the time.

00:10:36.400 He's like, oh, yeah, all 18 of them are Christians and they open every meeting with a prayer.

00:10:41.520 He's like, but that doesn't mean anything.

00:10:43.280 This is the first time in American history that there was even a hint of secularism anywhere. 0.91

00:10:49.040 and people were like absolutely not you fucking commies i also looked this up in 1950 the

00:10:55.960 population was 95 christian right so his actual argument here to the extent that he has one is 0.98

00:11:01.540 that yes yes everybody's a christian right there there's all these kind of trappings and symbols

00:11:05.600 of christianity all throughout the college but that doesn't necessarily mean that students are

00:11:11.000 getting religious messages in class which i guess on some level is true sure yeah so yeah this is

00:11:17.880 the only piece of data that he has in this chapter i'm gonna send it to you okay i love that he just

00:11:24.920 drops names i know professor clarence p shed of yale speaking on the radio program yeah sorry i

00:11:32.180 like that he says of yale just caught me off guard fyi i'm talking about yale my alma mater

00:11:38.620 professor clarence p shed of yale speaking on the radio program yale interprets the news on august

00:11:45.600 15th, 1948, insisted upon the dramatic upswing in post-war religious interests, but added,

00:11:52.420 quote, I talked with a chaplain in a large state university only last week who asserted that all

00:11:57.600 the religious influences in his university were not significantly influencing more than 10%

00:12:02.680 of the undergraduates. My own figure for the large university situation nationally has been 15%.

00:12:09.460 I listened to the radio and a guy talked about another guy that he talked to.

00:12:13.300 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? What does this mean? This is just someone saying numbers and words.

00:12:29.340 So he starts this chapter by talking about the Department of Religion, 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.

00:12:40.240 Okay. At Yale, the religion course, which consistently attracts the greatest number of

00:12:45.840 students, is entitled The Historical and Literary Aspects of the Old Testament. Mr. Lovett,

00:12:51.960 the widely admired university chaplain, teaches this course. But he does not proselytize the

00:12:57.640 Christian faith or, indeed, teach religion at all. Even the title of the course does not call

00:13:02.820 for an understanding of or even sympathy with Christianity. So there's a huge religious

00:13:07.600 studies department there's what appears to be a required course that people have to take that is

00:13:12.120 taught by the chaplain i love that and yet the chaplain doesn't like go out of his way to be

00:13:17.440 like by the way you guys christianity is real jesus lived and died for our sins like every

00:13:22.420 what on five minute intervals the course title is not christianity which is correct by the way

00:13:28.280 the one true religion the modern conservative discourse is is all about academic freedom

00:13:35.620 and truth and shit like that right but it is fundamentally the same substantively as buckley's

00:13:44.820 right which is like we should be teaching conservative stuff like that's the actual

00:13:49.560 material yes request but buckley is doing it without the veil yeah right buckley is just

00:13:58.040 being like hey we should be teaching that christianity is correct obviously and they're

00:14:02.800 not doing that in every single course at Yale. And that pisses me off. And that sucks. There

00:14:07.220 are tons of conservatives right now who have that same fundamental belief, but they have to like

00:14:12.260 shroud it in all of this gibberish. Right. So it's kind of refreshing to read Buckley, just be like,

00:14:18.580 they're not saying Jesus is real. This was my arc with the book is because at first you're like,

00:14:23.660 at least they're fucking saying it. Right. But then after like 200 pages, you're like, no, 0.98

00:14:27.400 this is really bad this is still it's still he basically is demanding propaganda and demanding

00:14:33.960 propaganda for something students already believe right which is just weird constant reinforcement

00:14:38.480 why the the way he approaches it almost proves just how wrong he has it because in his mind

00:14:46.260 this complaint is sort of like self-evidently correct right don't we all agree that they

00:14:52.240 should be teaching that christianity is correct right he doesn't even feel a need to explain

00:14:56.360 himself. But if he actually lived in a society where that principle was being questioned in some

00:15:04.240 significant way, he would have to explain himself. Right. He doesn't. Right. He's just he's just

00:15:08.920 sounding the alarm. Oh, no, they're not advertising Christianity. So basically, the rest of the

00:15:14.060 section is just him like naming professors and talking about how they're like not Christian

00:15:18.860 enough, even though all of them are Christians. So he says, Mr. Green is unflinching in his

00:15:25.880 respect for Christian ethics, but it is, after all, assumed that most people are. There's a

00:15:30.900 widespread opinion that what he teaches is ethics, not religion. So this is an ethics course,

00:15:36.620 which teaches ethics. He also, he's talking about another teacher. He says, while respecting

00:15:41.760 Christianity and what it represents, Mr. Schroeder does not seek to persuade his students to believe

00:15:46.960 in Christ, largely because he has not, as I understand it, been completely able to persuade 0.66

00:15:51.600 himself which is a good burn dude this is i'm sorry but this is so fucking funny just rattling

00:15:57.500 off every professor and being like i'm not getting the most christian vibes from this guy this 0.95

00:16:02.900 fucking guy i i see parallels with modern conservative discourse in the incoherence 0.96

00:16:09.980 yeah you know just these sort of like all over the place complaints about how things aren't quite 0.99

00:16:16.460 as he believes they should be.

00:16:18.040 So after he does the religion department, he then goes to the social studies department.

00:16:24.460 My God.

00:16:25.200 If the religion department was inadequately religious for him, I can't imagine. 1.00

00:16:30.960 And then but then he can't even stick to his fucking argument. 0.98

00:16:33.880 So he starts out by saying in the Yale history department, many students are affected by 0.99

00:16:38.660 the religious inclinations of Professor Baumer, who teaches the intellectual history of Europe.

00:16:43.140 mention ought to be made of professor mack a straightforward christian whose attitudes become

00:16:47.540 apparent in his lectures on shakespeare so he starts off with being like oh yeah these dudes

00:16:51.720 are like super christian like constantly talk about how like christ is good he then says the

00:16:55.720 most popular class is taught by this guy mr turner who is emphatically and vigorously atheistic 0.96

00:17:02.140 he's a cool young professor and then he gets to this which is like so fucking telling he says

00:17:06.740 many yale students laugh off the influence of mr turner and ultimately classify him as a gifted 0.91

00:17:12.380 and colorful fanatic. Others, more impressionable, and hence those over whom there is cause to be

00:17:17.640 concerned, are deeply disturbed by Mr. Turner's bigoted atheism and finish the year they spend

00:17:22.960 with him full of suspicion and doubts about religion they may retain for a lifetime.

00:17:29.340 We must protect our weakest minds. I realize that we sort of live in a different time now

00:17:34.900 in terms of access to information and things like that. But it is very funny to me to picture

00:17:40.140 like some prep school kid showing up to yale in 1948 and a professor is like i don't believe in

00:17:46.560 god and they're like oh yeah like surely you've heard of this so we're not gonna spend too much

00:17:54.360 time on it but then after the social sciences he then goes to the department of psychology

00:17:58.800 peter imagine a psychology department in 1950 well i don't even know what it was as a profession it

00:18:06.460 was like we're learning that there is a brain yeah within the brain there are activities of

00:18:11.420 various texts and we're looking into it his only like evidence of this is he talks about one of

00:18:15.640 the psychology textbooks he says psychology and life makes mention of religion in only one passage

00:18:21.720 which is unabashedly derisive and then quote it is interesting to note that when the part of his

00:18:27.200 brain thought by phrenologists to be the center of religion is stimulated a man twitches his leg

00:18:32.120 it's like uh the phrenologists are being mean to religion but like that

00:18:36.060 that feels like a critique of phrenology which i ultimately agree with so i'm like all right bill

00:18:40.220 i'll give you this one i there's something funny to me about being anti-phrenology because it's

00:18:45.440 insufficiently religious but then you know the whole kind of complaint with this section is that

00:18:52.420 like they're teaching psychology but they're not teaching religion the human brain which was

00:18:57.440 created by our god jesus christ which is god yeah there's something very tedious about this where

00:19:01.840 He's just going to rattle off next math, which they never say stems directly from God's mouth.

00:19:08.000 Yes.

00:19:08.320 I'm sorry, but is this just going to keep happening?

00:19:09.760 Is this like the rest of it?

00:19:11.100 No, this is don't worry.

00:19:12.120 I can tell you're starting your interest is starting to flag.

00:19:14.340 So he's taken us to the Department of Religion, the Social Sciences and the Department of

00:19:20.460 Psychology.

00:19:20.940 Do you want to guess, Peter, where he takes us next?

00:19:22.880 Is it like English?

00:19:24.000 The next section of this chapter is extracurricular activities.

00:19:29.520 Hell yeah.

00:19:30.080 So he abandons academia entirely and then just starts moaning about, like, how there's clubs on campus.

00:19:37.360 Right.

00:19:37.660 Like, there's obviously, like, Christian clubs and Catholic clubs and whatever.

00:19:41.280 And then there's a building called Dwight Hall, which is, like, an entire building dedicated to the religious clubs on campus.

00:19:48.620 Okay. 0.98

00:19:49.020 These elite institutions are so fucking baffling to me in the first place. 0.99

00:19:52.180 But in 1950s, they're, like, baffling, baffling. 0.98

00:19:54.800 he then complains that the magazine for this building does not require its editors to be

00:20:02.980 christians hell yes i think it's like a newsletter that they're sending out of like events like next

00:20:08.460 wednesday there's going to be this right but like they don't have like essentially a loyalty oath

00:20:12.300 i'm what i'm i have to read newsletters written by by jews now at yale he also i i i could not

00:20:22.160 believe this was like an actual he spends pages on this there's a whole thing where the ushers

00:20:26.640 for like the the on-campus church services which of course are being held because everybody hates

00:20:31.880 christianity the ushers were at one point elected by popular vote and people ended up electing some

00:20:39.620 people who like weren't christians okay did they guide people to their seats like not in a god

00:20:45.320 fearing way like what are we i love him i i'm sorry this is the this rules that this whole thing

00:20:51.220 is just like like getting bad vibes from that guy i saw uh you know i rounded the corner the other

00:20:58.100 day and saw a jewish kid did not like that it does read like a long yelp review i also want

00:21:04.540 to send you this part one of the things as like a literary device that he does is he uses a lot

00:21:10.020 of sassy italics uh-huh all right i'm gonna send this to you he is talking about the inaugural

00:21:19.240 ceremony for the new president. A new president of Yale was sworn in in 1950, I believe, the last

00:21:25.380 year that William F. Buckley was there. And so this is a expressly Christian ceremony. There's

00:21:31.280 like deacons and shit there. But he's complaining about the president's speech that he gave at his 0.99

00:21:36.980 inauguration. It was more than a miro mission for the president summoned to the attention of his

00:21:41.420 audience three vital forces at Yale, which are supported by powerful traditions. Christianity

00:21:48.420 was not among those he cited all italics sassy spicy italics god this is this is incredible

00:21:57.180 the whining the fact that this is like one of the not really intellectual cornerstones of

00:22:03.640 conservatism but sort of in the the way that modern conservatism developed sort of stems

00:22:10.200 directly from this book in many regards right yes and the fact that it is just him whining about

00:22:15.840 like every instance of secularism and not even like secularism per se, but just the absence of

00:22:23.820 express Christianity. It's so good. So on point. One thing I did notice in the research is that

00:22:30.200 if you look at lists of like 10 most influential conservative books, this is usually on them. But

00:22:35.440 then if you look at lists of like 10 best conservative books, it's on none of them.

00:22:39.240 It's like this was influential at the time. Like this really set the template. But also

00:22:43.480 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. 0.95

00:22:54.660 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. 0.94

00:23:07.500 OK, 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. 0.94

00:23:37.140 Yeah. And it's not even obvious that like America is like a better system. Like there's 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.

00:23:48.560 Right. A lot of a lot of poor countries especially are seeing like market economic gains under communism.

00:23:55.580 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 pre-McCarthy. McCarthyism basically launches like the year that this book comes out. But we're getting the sort of early intonations of McCarthyism.

00:24:19.060 So in the late 1940s, basically as soon as the war is over, Republicans are saying that

00:24:23.740 Democrats are soft on communism, right?

00:24:25.540 They were in power.

00:24:26.280 Now communism, like they're having all these gains all over the place and Democrats aren't

00:24:30.740 like they're not willing to do what it takes to fight communism.

00:24:33.160 This is like a really useful message for them, right?

00:24:36.080 Right.

00:24:36.400 And so, of course, Democrats in like this is one of the earlier examples of this, but

00:24:42.100 like true Democrat fashion, they basically just like cave to these attacks like we're

00:24:45.860 not soft on communism.

00:24:46.760 We're really hard on communism.

00:24:48.220 So in 1947, we basically launch the Red Scare with an executive order that makes a loyalty oath for federal employees.

00:24:58.100 Right. 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.

00:25:10.920 Exactly. So for this, I read a book called No Ivory Tower, McCarthyism and the Universities by

00:25:17.460 Ellen Schrecker, which is a history of the way that McCarthyism basically came down to universities

00:25:22.580 and in some ways really started at universities. These days, I feel like people kind of focus on

00:25:27.360 McCarthyism as like the center of the Red Scare. But McCarthyism was really the culmination of a

00:25:32.220 trend that had mostly been happening in states earlier. So during the late 1940s and early 1950s,

00:25:38.980 32 states passed laws requiring loyalty oaths for state employees, any government employees.

00:25:45.760 And a lot of these, because universities were oftentimes controlled by the government,

00:25:49.600 they also imposed these loyalty oaths on professors. By the end of the Red Scare of

00:25:54.320 all of the people purged from employment, one in five were academics. And so this started

00:25:59.580 extremely early and was already going on when Buckley was writing his book.

00:26:04.700 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.

00:26:19.120 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. 0.99

00:26:28.360 Right. 0.99

00:26:28.660 Like he just aesthetically was so gross and he lied constantly and he was wrong.

00:26:32.760 Like this is kind of what they could go after him for.

00:26:35.020 But also underneath that, a lot of people didn't actually disagree with like the crusade against communists.

00:26:41.640 Yeah. A necessary evil.

00:26:43.340 Yes.

00:26:43.580 In a lot of their minds.

00:26:44.220 Yeah. And so there was a deliberate attempt to make the fight against communism into a moral crusade. It like wasn't enough to say like, well, we have a better economic system than they do. Right. And so this framing of kind of godless communists didn't really exist before these years at the beginning of the Cold War. Like people had always said like communism is like subversive and like they want to overthrow the government or whatever. But it wasn't seen as kind of inherently evil. Right. In the way that it was then eventually framed during the Cold War.

00:27:12.200 And 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.

00:27:21.320 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.

00:27:30.900 I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level. 0.63

00:27:37.220 So fundamentally, individualism is Christian. Individualism is good. And any collectivism, anything that smacks of communism whatsoever is fundamentally atheistic and immoral.

00:27:49.740 His use of collectivist is sort of odd here because he is embracing a collectivist thought, right?

00:27:57.980 He is sort of embracing top-down institutional order.

00:28:01.780 Yes.

00:28:02.060 Unfortunately, Christianity cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas with mid-century communism. 0.68

00:28:11.060 So speaking of which, the next chapter of this book is called Individualism at Yale. 0.79

00:28:18.540 Let's go.

00:28:19.000 Here's where we're going to talk about collectivism versus individualism and how the teachers are instilling collectivistic values in youth.

00:28:27.480 And using an institutional top-down approach, we can re-instill individualism.

00:28:34.300 Yeah.

00:28:35.320 This makes sense.

00:28:36.720 We are going to start with his little thesis statement at the beginning of this chapter.

00:28:45.180 Okay.

00:28:45.400 I'm pasting this. You're not going to need all the sassy italics, but you can sassily italicize

00:28:49.600 whatever you need. No one should be so naive as to expect that I could conjure up a list of

00:28:53.880 professors and textbooks who advocate the overthrow, violently or otherwise, of all

00:28:58.740 vestiges of capitalism in favor of an ironclad, comprehensive socialist state. There is very

00:29:04.060 little of this at Yale. But this approach is not needed to accomplish, ultimately, the same

00:29:09.760 transformation. Marx himself, in the course of his lifetime, envisaged two broad lines of action

00:29:15.560 that could be adopted to destroy the bourgeoisie. One was violent revolution. The other, a slow

00:29:21.700 increase of state power through extended social services, taxation, and regulation,

00:29:26.840 to a point where smooth transition could be effected from an individualist to a collectivist

00:29:32.000 society. It is a revolution of the second type, one that advocates a slow but relentless transfer

00:29:37.620 of power from the individual to the state that has roots in the Department of Economics at Yale

00:29:43.340 and unquestionably in similar departments in many colleges throughout the country.

00:29:48.600 Unquestionably.

00:29:49.300 Talk about the part of higher education that experienced the least liberal capture

00:29:55.920 over the last 70 years, the Departments of Economics. 0.69

00:29:59.180 I was going to say, in the same way, we really didn't want to belabor how like the KKK is

00:30:06.660 racist last episode. I'm like, economists are pretty into free market capitalism. I don't know

00:30:13.860 how to like say this in a way that isn't just me repeating that over and over again.

00:30:18.740 He's making a slippery slope argument, right? It's basically like, look,

00:30:23.240 no one at Yale is a communist or is advocating for anything like socialism. But when you think

00:30:29.800 about it, what's the difference between advocating for the socialist overthrow of the government

00:30:35.620 and advocating for small welfare programs.

00:30:40.340 He's doing the Jonah Goldberg thing again, where he's like one form of totalitarianism

00:30:45.620 is banning elections and like murdering minority groups.

00:30:49.300 Another is to ban trans fats.

00:30:52.520 So last chapter, he went professor by professor through these departments.

00:30:57.400 This chapter, he's going textbook by textbook.

00:31:01.080 I can't wait till we get to student by student.

00:31:02.740 jeff bill steve uh so in the economics department the teachers are using four

00:31:13.300 textbooks they are economic analysis and public policy by bowman and bach the elements of

00:31:20.500 economics by laurie tarshis economics and introductory analysis by paul samuelson and

00:31:26.220 income and employment by theodore morgan these are very boring but i just have to get them on

00:31:30.300 the record okay the rest of this chapter is bill buckley giving us evidence of the creeping

00:31:36.300 collectivism that is taking over the campus and he does this with a series of quotes from these

00:31:42.020 textbooks and he talks about how they're super bad so peter i am going to have you read the

00:31:47.980 collectivist propaganda and then i am going to read bill buckley's sputtering responses hell

00:31:53.820 Oh, yeah. Okay. This is an excerpt from the Samuelson textbook. Here, get your get your

00:32:01.800 Marx voice on. A cynic might say of free competition what Bernard Shaw once said of

00:32:07.720 Christianity. The only trouble with it is that it has never been tried. There never was a golden age

00:32:12.820 of free competition and competition is not now perfect in the economist sense. Probably it is

00:32:17.980 becoming less so every day in large part because of the fundamental nature of large scale production

00:32:22.760 and Technology, Consumers' Taste, and Business Organization.

00:32:26.920 Rough stuff.

00:32:27.440 So this is the very, very mundane observation that, like, free markets don't actually really

00:32:33.040 exist.

00:32:33.500 It's just a theoretical concept, yeah.

00:32:35.080 Here is another excerpt from one of the textbooks, the allegedly collectivist textbooks that Buckley

00:32:42.260 cites.

00:32:43.080 Cradle to grave security has great popularity.

00:32:46.340 If the private economy cannot supply it naturally, people will insist upon getting it artificially

00:32:51.400 from governments.

00:32:52.760 is propaganda? People want security? That's a quote from Joseph Stalin. And then I'm going to

00:32:58.240 send you a link to this one because it has sassy italics. He prefaces this by saying,

00:33:04.840 Professor Tarshish comes right out and says it. We must be prepared to accept new ways of doing

00:33:09.940 things as well as old, for the problems we face are new and alarming. As the nature of our economy

00:33:15.620 has changed and as the problems that it has been compelled to face have altered and grown in

00:33:20.360 gravity we have been compelled to call upon the government italics added on that last part

00:33:25.820 we have been compelled there's something interesting about this because um in many

00:33:32.280 ways buckley and his cohort won and in many ways they lost right and one of the ways they lost is

00:33:39.480 that the mere mention that the government can like help the poor is not a controversial statement

00:33:46.060 in modern uh discourse but he's like look they're saying it they're saying that we should help the

00:33:51.600 poor he admitted he admitted i also peter i know if you noticed let's let's take a look at the

00:33:58.180 brackets uh in the midst of it there are there are page numbers in the brackets right where he's

00:34:03.920 uh citing to the uh to the book and uh one of them says page 54 italics added what does the

00:34:11.740 other one say? Page 686. So this is a two sentence excerpt in which the two sentences are separated

00:34:17.800 by more than 600 pages. This is like the first clue. Just removing 630 pages of content and

00:34:27.800 then adding italics for emphasis. So then he responds. So he lists all of these things that

00:34:36.620 we've just gotten all of this communist propaganda. And then he responds by saying

00:34:42.980 about these books, it is nowhere recorded that the 19th century was one of unparalleled production

00:34:49.180 of goods and services. We are not told of the mammoth increases in the capital structure of

00:34:54.000 the country and how it was built out of wilderness. Nothing is said of the growth of a world of little

00:34:59.000 capitalists, the grocer, the dressmaker, the newspaper owner, the farmer, all the millions

00:35:03.240 who attained ratings in Dunn and Bradstreet,

00:35:05.460 nothing of the log cabin that blossomed out

00:35:07.380 into a seven-room house

00:35:08.540 with hot and cold running water and garage.

00:35:11.020 No tribute is paid to the support of the week

00:35:13.180 that is an automatic result of the free enterprise system

00:35:16.200 because no one can bring prosperity to himself

00:35:19.220 without bringing it to others.

00:35:21.240 Where's the lengthy fellation of capitalism?

00:35:25.680 I do find it hard to believe

00:35:27.840 that across the four textbooks,

00:35:30.560 No one mentioned the growth of GDP in America or anything.

00:35:36.000 I find that hard to believe.

00:35:38.280 Did you read all four, Mike?

00:35:39.280 Are you going to?

00:35:39.500 Peter, yes.

00:35:41.160 I was waiting to see if you'd get there or if I should hop in. 0.92

00:35:44.500 Yes, I downloaded all four fucking books and double checked all of the quotes that he used. 0.79

00:35:52.240 First of all, again, these are economics textbooks, mainstream textbooks from the late 1940s. 0.97

00:35:58.820 they talk about how capitalism is good. Every single one of these textbooks has like an entire

00:36:04.040 chapter about the rise in living standards between 1850 and 1950. They all have things

00:36:09.380 about like small businesses. The idea that they don't mention the growth in GDP in a fucking 0.99

00:36:14.480 economics textbook. They talk about very little else. They're also most of them. The Samuelson 0.99

00:36:20.700 one is actually like semi left wing, I guess, by like 1950 standards. All of them are like

00:36:26.320 hella anti-union like they all go on like long tirades against unions and how like it's gone 0.99

00:36:32.400 too far and shit the fact that what he's actually doing is just sounding the alarm to old yale 0.92

00:36:39.260 alums right it makes this all sort of make sense because he doesn't he knows to some degree that 0.99

00:36:44.980 he doesn't actually need to make a substantive argument here because the old money perverts who

00:36:50.260 are reading this and have influence over yale already agree with him of course of course they

00:36:56.040 do one of the things that comes up in the reviews of this book that are published at the time is

00:37:01.220 that in this entire chapter in this entire book he never actually defines what collectivism is

00:37:06.500 the old jonah goldberg and like as he goes through the rest of this chapter this is like a 40 page

00:37:10.600 chapter this is really like the meat of the book he has these title headings and the title headings

00:37:15.900 are completely anodyne so the first one is unfair distribution of income where he cites all of these

00:37:23.180 really benign excerpts from these books saying like, yeah, it's unfair. People are upset about

00:37:28.620 how unfair the distribution of income is. We'll see what my father, William F. Buckley Sr. has

00:37:33.200 to say about that. This isn't actually all that radical. And then one of the things he does in

00:37:39.280 this section that he does throughout is he's like, this textbook says that like the tax rate should

00:37:43.760 be this. But then you go to the actual textbook and the textbook is citing like the National

00:37:49.600 council of economic advisors where it's like oh this is what like experts believe is like the

00:37:53.700 optimal tax rate right he then has a section on the inheritance tax hell yeah that's collectivist

00:37:59.020 the daddy's favorite boy tax as they called it back then he has all these gotcha quotes where

00:38:07.120 the textbooks admit that like this doesn't actually raise that much revenue but it's

00:38:11.560 something that you kind of do is like a deliberate thing to like break up like the these carnegie

00:38:16.180 style dynasties actually i'm gonna send this to you because this has sassy italics and scare quotes

00:38:23.200 there is little or no economic value attached to such confiscation it simply advances the social

00:38:30.100 welfare as these economists define social welfare that social welfare for them as for all collectivists

00:38:37.980 is egalitarianism got you in 4k we should have a more equal society he's like oh they're they're

00:38:44.720 doing fairness folks there is he always puts social welfare in quotes which is very funny to 0.99

00:38:51.020 me his main his like primary angle here is like god gave me a mansion and these fucking god these 0.99

00:39:01.300 fucking communists are trying to intervene they're trying to attack god directly then he has a weird 0.99

00:39:08.120 thing about like government spending and like a monopoly thing but then the one we're going to 0.99

00:39:12.320 dive a little bit more into is one of his little headings is private property rights hell yeah so

00:39:17.860 this is where he basically says that all of these economists they want like a centrally planned

00:39:23.040 economy they basically don't believe in the principle of private property they want to

00:39:27.040 confiscate everything from everyone and like dole it out according to government wins right this is

00:39:32.020 like an extreme form of communism that we have taking place around the world at this time so

00:39:37.300 So I am again going to send you a quote of communist propaganda.

00:39:44.560 This is a quote from the Morgan book.

00:39:48.360 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.

00:40:00.760 It is a right which only one in five of our working force finds himself able or finds it worthwhile to accept.

00:40:09.460 So when you think of kind of basic civil rights, you know, you think of like food and freedom and stuff like that.

00:40:15.040 You don't necessarily think of the right to start a business.

00:40:18.420 Only about one in five people do this.

00:40:20.660 Most people don't really have that in their kind of list of basic rights.

00:40:23.240 That's what he's saying here.

00:40:24.340 Sure.

00:40:24.560 And so Buckley has a very long, very hysterical response to this excerpt where he really zeros in on this idea that like, ooh, only one in five people start a business.

00:40:39.200 Therefore, starting a business isn't a right.

00:40:41.620 And you can tell he really he really like thinks he's got a gotcha.

00:40:44.240 And he's like, well, only like one in 10,000 people publish a book.

00:40:48.620 So I guess free speech isn't a right either.

00:40:51.800 He really like you can tell he really thinks he's cooking.

00:40:55.940 This is the only quote that he uses to support the idea that these textbooks want to confiscate private property from people.

00:41:04.220 So I'm going to send you the rest of the quote from the Morgan book.

00:41:09.840 If free enterprise is not a basic freedom, then it must be justified primarily on the grounds of whether it has delivered the goods.

00:41:17.320 Has it proved an efficient mechanism for producing the goods and services we want?

00:41:21.260 The evidence is strong that private enterprise has delivered the goods.

00:41:25.720 Over the course of the last two centuries, it has lifted the general standard of life

00:41:29.420 of the Western world to an extent never before achieved.

00:41:33.160 Reasoning in this field often suffers from the illusion that the redistribution of income

00:41:37.120 from the rich to the poor would appreciably raise the living standards of the poor.

00:41:42.480 This is not true.

00:41:44.320 There are too few of the rich and too many people of moderate and low incomes for the

00:41:49.300 device to work.

00:41:50.200 it is increased production alone that can significantly raise the living standards of

00:41:55.760 the poor and middle income groups as well. So basically this dude is like, well,

00:42:00.740 most people don't think starting a business is a right, but we know that it works to bring people

00:42:07.580 out of poverty. And we know that redistribution isn't going to do it. We need untrammeled

00:42:12.340 capitalism. He's basically saying he rejects the moral argument that like free market capitalism

00:42:17.840 is like this unfettered right that you have to engage in business. But he accepts the logistical

00:42:24.800 practical argument that it is the best way to lift everyone out of poverty, to increase living

00:42:30.220 standards to the highest degree possible. Yes. So this is essentially pro-capitalist

00:42:34.760 like propaganda. It's an argument for capitalism. But that's not enough for Buckley. Buckley wants

00:42:39.700 him to be like, Jesus Christ handed you free enterprise. Jesus Christ, who was real.

00:42:45.880 And FDR took it away from you. He got between you and Christ.

00:42:50.700 The reason why I'm harping on this, this might be too many examples, but like,

00:42:54.860 there's kind of this idea of like the polite conservative. And I feel like there's oftentimes

00:42:59.980 this nostalgia for like an earlier generation of conservatives back when people were like

00:43:04.900 more civil to each other and more erudite. And Buckley is really this like symbol of like the

00:43:09.720 kind of conservatism that we lost. And it's now these like Trump wackos, right? But the core

00:43:15.040 of this book it's not something i disagree with ideologically although i do but like this is bad

00:43:22.160 work yeah he's very clearly taking things out of context and twisting them to make an argument 0.80

00:43:27.500 that fucking economics textbooks in the 1940s are collectivist propaganda and that's what's like 0.97

00:43:34.760 so important about buckley as a character because yes when you hold him up against some fucking 0.99

00:43:42.140 lunatic on TikTok, like raving about how Biden is sucking the blood of children, then sure, 0.98

00:43:50.040 William Buckley on Firing Line on PBS seems like a pretty reasonable guy. 0.94

00:43:55.340 Yeah.

00:43:55.660 But we're talking about a man of almost no intellectual talent.

00:44:02.720 Yes.

00:44:03.000 Not a guy who said anything, you know, very interesting. He was just a guy with a mid-Atlantic

00:44:10.460 accent and i swear to god watch firing line and you can just see people like nodding along to his

00:44:18.120 little drool like no yeah he does that thing when he's talking to someone where he leans back in his

00:44:24.940 chair yeah yeah and he's got he's got his like pen in the air you can put that picture next to

00:44:31.100 pontification in the in the dictionary which is now eric andre but used to be that's right that's

00:44:38.440 who Eric Andre is doing in that meme. It's the aesthetics of an intellectual and the work of a

00:44:45.780 hack. And it's the work of a hack that is deliberately laundering far right arguments

00:44:53.100 into polite language. So for this episode, I read a super interesting article called

00:44:58.440 The Passion of William F. Buckley, Academic Freedom, Conspiratorial Conservatism and the

00:45:03.580 Rise of the Post-War Right by Julian Nemeth. And what he points out is that at the time that

00:45:10.580 Buckley was writing this, there was already a pretty deranged far-right movement that had

00:45:16.580 been whipping up a panic about Soviet subversion in the schools for ages. And they were publishing

00:45:23.260 these weird pamphlets and something called the Educational Reviewer, which was sort of like a 0.97

00:45:31.340 kind of quasi journal thing, but was just like completely fucking bananas. So I am going to send 0.88

00:45:37.000 you a description of the contents of The Educational Reviewer. Published between 1949 and 1953,

00:45:44.540 the journal examined textbooks for collectivist bias. Any scholar who supported government

00:45:49.480 intervention in the economy was pilloried as un-American. Contemporary liberalism,

00:45:54.100 the educational reviewer warned, was rooted historically in tyranny and slavery.

00:45:59.920 Got that Goldberg.

00:46:01.120 Early, early Goldberg.

00:46:03.360 Reviewers made it clear that professors should not be allowed to disparage the Constitution,

00:46:07.720 call attention to class or racial inequality, show evidence for the viability of Keynesian

00:46:12.720 economics, or make positive reference to the United Nations, which has been around for

00:46:17.980 like a month and a half.

00:46:21.140 The educational reviewer provided many such examples of collectivist conspiracy, including

00:46:26.660 works that downplayed the positive contributions by businessmen in American history that argued

00:46:32.760 crime was not entirely determined by biology and that neglected to mention that child labor

00:46:39.320 was often caused by lazy parents rather than greedy factory owners.

00:46:44.940 Scary stuff.

00:46:45.520 Crime being entirely determined by biology was not a belief that I would have thought

00:46:52.740 existed? But then I hear it and I'm like, yeah, they would have thought that.

00:46:58.280 So what's fascinating about this is like, you know, this is kind of the part where you expect

00:47:02.760 to be like, well, this stuff was bouncing around the right. And like Buckley was drawing upon this

00:47:06.540 in this kind of like inchoate way. But no, the author of this article went to Yale and got

00:47:12.960 Buckley's papers in the sort of archive they have, like his like library of stuff that he was reading

00:47:18.180 when he was putting together God and Man at Yale, he had copies of these pamphlets and

00:47:24.120 he had underlined passages in them.

00:47:26.500 So we know that Buckley was drawing specifically from this like deranged far-right agitprop.

00:47:33.740 There's a 1949 pamphlet from this organization called Reducators at Yale University.

00:47:43.020 Reducators.

00:47:43.760 Jesus Christ.

00:47:44.440 Buckley had gone through this and basically had underlined all of, like, the non-deranged parts.

00:47:50.560 So this crazy far-right movement, their whole thing was that it was, like, explicitly Soviet spies.

00:47:56.600 The Soviets have taken over our universities and they're, like, talking with Russia.

00:48:00.660 There's stuff that there's just no evidence for whatsoever. 0.54

00:48:03.040 Right. 0.99

00:48:03.300 And so Buckley ignored all that shit because it's bananas. 0.99

00:48:05.640 But he started underlining all of this stuff about, like, well, the collectivism in the textbooks. 0.99

00:48:09.980 and then he just ports all that shit into his best-selling super normie ass book this is 0.97

00:48:15.960 interesting because i had perceived of this up until now as a work of petty grievance and now 0.98

00:48:23.200 i realize was even more classic buckley in that it was a derivative hack job yeah right it's not

00:48:31.160 even his shoddy work it's other people's shoddy work that almost explains why some of his examples

00:48:36.200 are so weak yeah like that's why you get like the jew usher because he wants to make the points that 0.79

00:48:42.360 the propaganda is making but he doesn't necessarily have the uh ingredients right yeah so he's just 0.85

00:48:49.740 sort of pulling out whatever threads he can for this i read a really interesting book called the

00:48:53.960 fire is upon us james baldwin william f buckley jr and the debate over race in america by nicholas

00:48:59.340 bucola and he talks about this as like a metaphor for what he was doing his entire career that

00:49:06.080 basically he was like taking these far right arguments and like repackaging them.

00:49:11.720 I mean, that was the insight of Buckley, right?

00:49:14.220 His contribution to conservatism was looking at establishment, business oriented Republicans

00:49:22.420 looking at segregationists in the South and saying there is common ground here.

00:49:28.060 Yeah, there's also I did not read this, but I read a review of it.

00:49:31.420 There's also a book called Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American

00:49:36.140 Right.

00:49:36.620 Oh, boy.

00:49:37.020 We don't have time for the John Birch Society here, but I'll let you go.

00:49:40.160 I'll let you go.

00:49:40.580 One of the things that William Buckley is often credited with, right, you know, the 0.98

00:49:45.680 entire intellectual project of his whole fucking life was a fraud, right? 0.95

00:49:48.360 He was wrong about literally everything. 0.98

00:49:49.880 But oftentimes you get this sort of, well, you got to give him credit for kicking the

00:49:53.960 John Birch Society out of American conservatism, right?

00:49:56.400 For like creating a distance between legitimate conservatism and like the deranged right wingers.

00:50:01.800 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.

00:50:13.260 Right. That was something Buckley was intentionally doing was just just toning that down enough that people on the right in the South, especially could see what he was doing, that he was on their team.

00:50:25.820 while still giving a green light thumbs up to the establishment types who didn't quite want to be

00:50:31.680 associated with those projects. So the next chapter of this abysmal book is fucking bizarre. 0.98

00:50:38.080 It's like it's called Yale and her alumni. Oh, so Yale's a girl. Pronouns. He lists the pronouns 0.98

00:50:43.460 for Yale. And then we're sort of I mean, we're kind of going to skip it because a lot of it is

00:50:47.840 like this bizarre logistical stuff. He's like the trustees is appointed by this vote and all this

00:50:53.320 like he's trying to build this case that it's like the alumni are truly in control of the 0.99

00:50:58.100 institution but it's just like fuck boring he quotes from like the charter of yale and all 0.86

00:51:03.120 this weird historical stuff like i just no i could barely get through it absolutely not this 0.98

00:51:07.800 was this remember on twitter when i got yelled at because i was like there's no way you twinks

00:51:11.960 who are posting like cate blanchett memes like watched all of tar like a three-hour long movie

00:51:16.900 about like office politics at like a composer michael i cannot keep track of the various times

00:51:22.560 that you got yelled at on Twitter for being mean to Twinks or to Glenn Greenwald or whoever.

00:51:31.400 All I'm saying is there's no way Ben Shapiro read this section of the book.

00:51:35.920 We then get to chapter four, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.

00:51:42.260 This is kind of like the culmination of the book.

00:51:45.400 He's laid out all the evidence, right?

00:51:46.860 We know the professors are all atheists.

00:51:48.800 We know the textbooks are all collectivist propaganda.

00:51:52.560 So what should we do about this?

00:51:55.280 He lays out his argument in seven parts.

00:51:59.940 Okay.

00:52:00.840 Point one, the responsibility to govern Yale falls ultimately on the shoulders of her alumni.

00:52:07.700 We've talked about this.

00:52:09.100 I don't find this remotely convincing, but like, okay.

00:52:12.120 Right.

00:52:12.460 Like, whatever.

00:52:13.060 So then number two, he says, Yale already subscribes to a value orthodoxy.

00:52:18.740 So this is basically the argument that, like, institutions have values.

00:52:23.520 He says,

00:52:24.020 I should be interested to know how long a person who revealed himself as a racist,

00:52:28.720 who lectured about the anthropological superiority of the Aryan, would last at Yale.

00:52:33.640 My prediction is that the next full moon would see him looking elsewhere for a job.

00:52:37.660 Yale looks upon anti-Semitic, anti-Negroid prejudices as false values,

00:52:42.740 though, of course, they are value judgments just the same

00:52:45.480 and have been upheld by various scholars, not only in the past, but in the present day as well.

00:52:50.120 But they are value judgments, which are not going to be defended in any Yale classroom.

00:52:54.180 Pitch perfect Buckley because he's maintaining just a hair's distance between him and those

00:52:59.740 beliefs. Like, look, some people believe in this stuff. Even now, even now, some people have those

00:53:04.680 values. So basically, he's making like a really obvious point here. It's like there's certain

00:53:09.300 people and ideas that like you're obviously not going to entertain. He is at bottom correct here.

00:53:14.220 Yes. So then point three, he says, at any given time, a responsible individual must embrace those values he considers to be truth.

00:53:22.940 This is basically like everyone within the organization is expected to adhere to the values, right?

00:53:27.740 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.

00:53:38.940 Point four, the abolition of the Jewish usher is paramount.

00:53:43.040 he then this is where he starts wandering off point four truth will not of itself dispel error

00:53:52.380 therefore truth must be championed at every opportunity this is a section that i like

00:53:57.780 completely agree with he basically says that like you can debate ideas as much as you want

00:54:04.200 but like that doesn't mean the truth is gonna win he says like the nazi regime came to power

00:54:08.860 and like you can't like debate your way out of nazism i love how thoroughly he is just embracing 0.99

00:54:16.720 the complete opposite of what the modern right says about this shit he sounds like my fucking 0.95

00:54:21.460 twitter feed but to the same ends it's like it's yeah it's very interesting this is also kind of 0.97

00:54:26.220 a weird point because it's not really central to his argument right he's talking about truth here

00:54:31.080 but the whole explicit argument that he makes elsewhere is that it doesn't matter whether it's

00:54:35.720 true. It matters what the alumni want. Right. Well, because that was just a way of dodging

00:54:39.580 having to address this shit throughout the book. But he actually is in his own mind concerned with 0.99

00:54:45.220 truth. Number five, a value orthodoxy in an educational institution need not lead to

00:54:51.000 inflexibility in the face of new experience. OK. This is basically a slippery slope argument.

00:54:57.120 OK. He's talking about the president of Yale. He says President Seymour has been unequivocal

00:55:02.480 about communism, which he considers evil and foolish. If he considered atheism evil and 0.87

00:55:08.260 foolish, he would have needed only to utilize the same logic and the same powers he invoked 0.92

00:55:13.160 against communism to banish it from the classroom. If he deemed socialism as evil or foolish as 1.00

00:55:18.580 communism, he could have done that. But I would remind President Seymour and his successor that

00:55:23.300 the moral code to which they subscribe exhorts men to abhor all that is bad. Murder is a more

00:55:29.860 grievous wrong than theft but we discourage both and we invoke divine social and legal sanctions

00:55:36.320 against the two god he is a bore it's weird to bring in murder and theft when like we treat 0.99

00:55:41.460 murder and theft differently yeah we do like we don't treat them the same it's a fucking terrible 0.94

00:55:45.960 example we must all agree on the on the bad things yes and treat them the same so his next point you

00:55:53.680 might have to help me with this one peter i genuinely don't know what he means here he says

00:55:57.260 a value orthodoxy in an educational institution need not induce credulity in the student nor

00:56:03.760 deny the value of skepticism as a first step to conviction so this is something of like it's okay

00:56:10.740 to have debate on stuff it's okay to bring in other ideas as long as we all acknowledge what

00:56:16.060 the truth is this is sort of what his complaint is because like all of his complaints were like

00:56:22.580 yeah this guy is a christian and he teaches uh christianity but the name of the course

00:56:29.860 is not christianity rules christianity number one usa forever it's not entirely coherent but

00:56:37.520 it does feel like you can draw a line through some of his arguments that's like at the end of

00:56:43.180 every statement by the university there should be a line that's like by the way we are capitalists

00:56:48.480 Christians. Yeah. It's sort of like a peace be unto him. Jesus is real. Capitalism is fine.

00:56:53.460 Yeah. Yeah. The final point, this is he's really hammering at home. Number seven,

00:56:58.240 freedom is in no way violated by an educational overseer's insistence that the teacher he employs

00:57:04.460 hold a given set of values. Basically, it's not a violation of academic freedom to fire people

00:57:10.820 if they don't uphold the values of the institution. Right. I don't know if you've

00:57:14.720 noticed, but his entire argument, like all seven of these points are almost all identical. They're

00:57:20.340 all basically just like the starting point. It's like institutions have values. Individuals in

00:57:25.100 institutions need to uphold the values. It's okay to fire people who don't uphold the values. It's

00:57:29.120 like, right, you're just basically saying flavors of the same thing. Yeah, we never really got past

00:57:34.620 chapter one, which is alumni should control Yale. Alumni want Yale to be Christian and conservative,

00:57:43.260 and therefore it should be. 0.93

00:57:45.120 And that's it, right?

00:57:46.060 That's the whole argument, whole book.

00:57:47.660 Everything else is extraneous.

00:57:49.400 Within this chapter,

00:57:50.180 this isn't even at the end of the chapter,

00:57:51.300 but this is the conclusion of the chapter.

00:57:53.560 He says,

00:57:54.420 I maintain that Yale does subscribe to an orthodoxy.

00:57:58.620 There are limits within which its faculty members

00:58:00.620 must keep their opinions if they want to be tolerated.

00:58:03.500 Now, these limits are very wide indeed

00:58:05.480 and they are limits prescribed by expediency,

00:58:08.100 not by principle.

00:58:09.800 My task becomes then not so much to argue

00:58:12.220 that limits should be imposed but that existing limits should be narrowed that's what your book 0.97

00:58:17.420 should have been right yes we all kind of agree that there are fucking limits you can't be a 0.98

00:58:21.340 grand wizard of the kkk and work at fucking yale fine god it's so exhausting it's so fucking funny 0.95

00:58:27.540 how this is a complete mirror image of modern conservative arguments and i don't want to 0.97

00:58:32.060 give me like two shots here because i have my brain is fried but like buckley is making this

00:58:38.580 argument that like, of course, institutions have values, but he's making it in 1950 in an era when

00:58:45.700 Yale and other institutions of higher education are pretty much still, you know, boarding school

00:58:54.040 plus. And now the modern conservative argument is the complete opposite. They have now ceded that

00:59:01.640 institutions of higher education are, uh, part of the Marxist apparatus that controls our youth.

00:59:09.320 And therefore what is important is that those institutions do not have a predetermined set

00:59:13.920 of values, but are instead subject to, uh, these sort of like notions of academic freedom that

00:59:20.480 allow conservatives to sort of weasel their way in and, uh, and teach kids whatever conservatives

00:59:26.340 want. Right. What about open debate? What about asking the question? This is, it's all this

00:59:29.460 procedural bullshit. The complete opposite argument. It is incredible. He also, so there's 0.99

00:59:34.740 one chapter of the book left. It's extremely short. This is basically where he lays out like

00:59:39.040 the cancel culture conclusion of the book. So chapter five is called the problem of the alumnus.

00:59:45.340 And he very explicitly makes the case that alumni of Yale should revoke all donations

00:59:52.140 until Yale purges the faculty of all of these seditious forces. And then, Peter, I almost

00:59:59.540 fucking died. The last two paragraphs of the book, right? Listen to this shit. 0.98

01:00:04.260 I shall not say which specific professors should be discharged, but I will say that some ought to 0.99

01:00:10.260 be discharged. I shall not indicate what I consider to be the dividing line that separates

01:00:15.600 collectivist from individualist. But I will say that such a dividing line ought thoughtfully and

01:00:21.260 flexibly to be drawn. I will not suggest manner in which alumni ought to be consulted or pulled

01:00:26.380 on this issue, but I will say they ought to be, and soon. Far wiser and more experienced men can

01:00:32.020 train their minds to such problems. I should be satisfied if they feel impelled to do so,

01:00:36.920 and I should be confident that their job would be well done. Okay. I'm not going to draw a line

01:00:41.700 between collectivist and individualist. What the fuck is your book? What have we done for 200 pages 0.99

01:00:46.980 then the entire book is like completely offloading the intellectual responsibility onto other people 0.95

01:00:53.320 and also i love i also love the chicken shit thing where he's like i'm not going to specify 0.96

01:00:57.120 which professor should be fired right after he spent the entire book naming them you gave us a 0.99

01:01:02.440 list of fucking professors i we even skipped over the part in the religious studies department where 0.98

01:01:07.540 he literally went after a specific professor and like he wrote a whole op-ed trying to get this 0.99

01:01:12.420 one professor fired because he referred to catholicism as voodoo in a speech allegedly

01:01:17.820 the context i don't know what the context was but whatever i love that he gets mad about the

01:01:23.280 anti-catholic sentiment at a an institution that still has like caps on catholics where is it is

01:01:29.760 it actually is there quote a strict minimum or a maximum uh it's a maximum but it's also kind

01:01:34.720 of flexible because this stuff this stuff was never written down because harvard tried to have

01:01:39.260 an explicit quota and there was a huge fucking outcry and then yale was like let's just have 0.71

01:01:43.880 like a casual quota and they just did it without writing it down so it's not clear like with jewish 0.90

01:01:49.620 people i believe it is exactly 10 but with catholicism i wasn't able to find exactly how

01:01:54.580 it worked and also i don't know how you like can tell i don't know oh you can tell i'm

01:01:59.580 i'm from the west coast and we like don't have ethnic whites so like i don't know how people do

01:02:07.360 this thing of like figuring out like who is from like the white people countries or like the white

01:02:12.380 people religions i'm from the northeast we've got jews and catholics when you see a protestant

01:02:17.100 there's an air about them it's very identifiable they'll they'll say things like oh my goodness

01:02:22.560 you know when someone says oh my goodness i'm like that's a that's a protestant right there so

01:02:26.880 that is the book one of the things that that didn't really click with me until i started

01:02:33.220 reading all of like the extra books about the influence of this book is just the extent to

01:02:37.880 which this was a red scare book and not not in a like jonah goldberg like this is an echo of

01:02:44.980 mccarthyism or whatever right but in a literal get communist out of the school a literal like

01:02:50.640 i would like mass firing right of people for their views please uh i continue to find this refreshing

01:02:56.680 I have to say, I really do.

01:02:59.080 You're Team Buckley.

01:03:00.000 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.

01:03:15.820 You know what I mean?

01:03:16.300 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.

01:03:27.920 And Buckley could say it outright because conservatism was the predominant mode of thought.

01:03:33.980 But it's sort of just nice to be like, Jesus, like, at least we can have the conversation on its own terms.

01:03:38.960 You know what I mean?

01:03:39.460 Also, I don't know if you know this, but Buckley's next book was an explicit defense of McCarthyism.

01:03:44.940 What was the book called?

01:03:45.860 uh mccarthy and his enemies yeah i i read the sequel written by ann coulter treason in 2003

01:03:53.400 buckley was also a fbi informant during this period there's a book called compromise campus

01:04:00.540 that has a whole chapter on buckley but it's weird in that like he was in touch with the fbi but he

01:04:05.920 didn't like he didn't ever inform them of anything mostly because like there weren't any communists

01:04:10.520 on campus he just wanted the aesthetics of being a snitch it's also kind of funny because like it's

01:04:15.440 hard to kind of get any traction with this critique because he was such an open boot

01:04:21.080 licker for this entire time.

01:04:22.960 Like he wrote an editorial in the Yale Daily News called Hats Off to the FBI. 0.99

01:04:26.940 Oh, God, that's so fucking good. 0.98

01:04:28.180 It's not like you're catching him in a lie. 0.99

01:04:30.180 It's like, no, I think the FBI is dope.

01:04:32.720 Imagine the interrogation or whatever when the FBI is like, all right, what do you know?

01:04:37.100 And he's like, there are four textbooks taught at Yale.

01:04:41.280 page 683 but so i want to return to the idea that we started with the ways in which this book set

01:04:51.980 the template for future campus panic bestsellers so there's the obvious way that this book did that

01:04:58.660 where it's basically just 200 pages of whining about college professors yeah and there's also

01:05:03.980 like the medium obvious way that it set the template in that this is basically just a series

01:05:08.900 of like unbelievably low stakes anecdotes on a college campus. And, you know, all of the evidence

01:05:15.920 is just a bunch of out of context quotes, like none of which hold up to scrutiny. Like this is

01:05:20.140 the same pattern that we saw in Coddling of the American Mind. Like this is what all of these

01:05:23.900 books are based on. Right. But then I think at the sort of deepest level, what Buckley was really

01:05:29.300 doing was establishing the rhetoric of conservative victimhood. Yeah. So this is from the article about

01:05:38.360 all the far right bullshit that he was reading. It says, a New York Times bestseller that launched 0.99

01:05:43.320 Buckley's career as the nation's leading conservative pundit, God and Man at Yale

01:05:47.580 was only the most visible example of a much broader right-wing attack on post-war higher

01:05:52.200 education, one sustained by a perceived sense of victimhood. Historians have examined how colleges

01:05:57.520 and universities dismissed dozens of scholars for their supposed ties to the Communist Party

01:06:02.260 during the post-war Red Scare. What has received less attention is that activists on the right

01:06:06.560 believed that the only casualties of a politically targeted campaign on campuses

01:06:10.640 were people like themselves.

01:06:12.760 So we also see the total inversion of reality.

01:06:17.000 Right.

01:06:17.180 We're getting mass firings of professors,

01:06:19.480 and it's literally illegal to have a set of ideological beliefs at this time. 0.97

01:06:24.580 And still, in the midst of a fucking actual purge, 0.93

01:06:28.480 he writes an article being like, 0.97

01:06:29.760 my, you can't even be conservative on campuses anymore.

01:06:32.480 Well, they go hand in hand, right?

01:06:34.320 The purge is justified by the victimization and and that, you know, that continues to this day.

01:06:42.780 Some people talk about conservative self-victimization like it's a strategy.

01:06:48.860 I really don't think it is.

01:06:50.400 I really think it is like a psychological phenomenon that exists within conservative brains in disproportionate degrees.

01:06:58.800 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:06:59.160 I realize that I don't have the expertise to make a claim anywhere like that, but I don't care.

01:07:04.940 I'm saying it to our hundreds of thousands of listeners.

01:07:08.780 We've learned from the best.

01:07:09.980 We've learned from Buckley. 1.00

01:07:10.760 You can just say shit. 1.00

01:07:11.700 Absolutely. 1.00

01:07:12.320 Just say stuff.

01:07:12.840 If I do a qualifier that's like, while no one would say that all conservatives have narcissistic personality disorder.

01:07:19.240 Do you want to know the good news?

01:07:20.560 The epilogue of this book?

01:07:21.820 Is it just that he's dead?

01:07:22.620 I know that.

01:07:23.180 Well, there's also that.

01:07:24.060 Yes. 0.98

01:07:24.720 The first good news is that like the Yale alumni did not give a fuck about this book. 0.90

01:07:28.180 okay buckley was probably right about them being christian and capitalist yeah even they were like 0.93

01:07:32.940 dude no that's because it's it if you're if you're some old money freak and some like 24 0.90

01:07:39.320 year old is like yeah attention please uh yale is insufficiently conservative it's like shut up

01:07:45.580 kid i mean the funny thing is this book was mostly distributed by like the far right like it was it

01:07:51.060 was these weirdo like education has soviet subversion people who like right spread the

01:07:57.180 book through word of mouth it's a book that is directly appealing to elites and yet becomes

01:08:03.380 folded into a more populist rhetoric and also it's a book that liberals like right because he's always

01:08:10.320 kind of been the liberal whisperer right he's somebody who has the aesthetics of somebody that

01:08:13.940 liberals think that they should be listening to right and so one of the things that that spread

01:08:19.140 the message of this book is that it gets reviewed fucking everywhere it gets reviewed in like new 0.72

01:08:22.180 York Times, New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, like very mainstream sources were 0.99

01:08:26.880 actually addressing this in a way that they didn't with the far right shit. 0.98

01:08:29.660 So like, well, this is so bananas and out there that we don't really have to like confront 0.98

01:08:32.720 it.

01:08:33.280 But it was confronting this book that spread the message.

01:08:36.480 Right.

01:08:36.700 I'm going to send you our final quote of the episode.

01:08:39.880 This is how we're going to close.

01:08:41.080 This is a excerpt from The Atlantic Review.

01:08:44.440 The persuasiveness of its language and the sinuousness of its syllogisms offer no clues

01:08:49.420 to the falsity of its premise or the violence that has been done to its supporting facts facts

01:08:54.100 and quotations truly this book is a sorry effort and one which would warrant no serious consideration

01:09:00.020 were it not for the support it has received from other individualists of more stature and influence

01:09:05.060 than little willie it calls his little willie throughout uh brutal it seems more likely that

01:09:10.340 in view of the support which he has gotten more will be heard from this little neanderthaler in

01:09:14.760 white shoes and still too tight pants. And while his next attack will probably be no more honest 0.79

01:09:20.980 than the last, he may with practice become more clever at concealing his dishonesty.

01:09:25.500 You know what? Kind of homophobic, but I'll allow it.

01:09:27.660 Me too. I will also allow it, Mike.

01:09:29.480 Thank you.

01:09:31.860 I host a podcast with a gay guy. I have this authority now.

01:09:35.220 Look, what's gayer? Having sex with men or hosting two podcasts? 0.99

01:09:39.720 so i mean not that it fucking mattered but i do like that this review was just like dude 1.00

01:09:47.620 fuck this guy that rules and with someone as small and petty as buckley you know that he was 0.98

01:09:55.940 fuming oh dude i haven't even told you about the the edition of got a man at yale i have is like 1.00

01:10:01.040 the 25th anniversary edition and there's like a new introduction by william buckley and all he 0.93

01:10:07.060 fucking does is complain about the reviews oh hell yeah reviews one by one hell yeah just like 0.84

01:10:12.820 moans about them just doing the same thing he did with the professors but with the reviews 0.98

01:10:17.240 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

01:10:22.880 we did this whole episode and you didn't um talk about the time he called gorvidal a queer i know 0.99

01:10:29.460 you call me a crypto nazi one more time i'll suck you in the damn face the thing is i also hate 0.99

01:10:34.660 Gore Vidal though so it was real that was a real let them fight situation for me I mean look 1.00

01:10:39.760 absolutely um however there is nothing I would have liked more than someone accepting Buckley's

01:10:46.280 invitation to fisticuffs on national television if Gore Vidal was just like absolutely let's fight

01:10:53.120 you know that would have that would have been sick and Dick Cavett just pulls out a stack of ones

01:10:57.360 he's like please somebody knock the mid-Atlantic accent out of this guy

01:11:01.260 I'll see you soon. 0.88

If Books Could Kill - September 07, 2023

God And Man At Yale

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