Many of Buckley's fellow CIA recruits shared his affiliation with Skull and Bones, where who you know and how, provides yet another layer of artificial elitism. Members of that fellowship guaranteed a lifetime of easy times paid for by those whose long term associations have made them rich at the expense of ordinary Americans. Few are inclined to bite the hand that holds the caviar.
Those who employed Bush, Buckley and their cronies are the descendants of the mercantilists either by genes or by practice.
No matter where they come from they share that they are the inheritors of the devious practices of those who see government as an extension of their power. Today we know them as Corporatists, Oil Barons, the 28,000 Elite. Their moral ancestors were the ship owners who ignored the disgust of other New Englanders, making their services available to slavers and dealing in slaves themselves.
Earlier generations knew them as the people who moved in on the profits to be made from the Civil War, a war fought to establish a more powerful Federal State and not to end slavery. A generation later John D. Rockefeller would establish his own line of avarice using the same techniques.
William F. Buckley was never a Conservative any more than Monica Lewinsky was an innocent virgin when she met Bill Clinton. And examination of his actions over a life time reveals no nuance of action that affirmed the principles of Conservatism. His stock in trade was deceptive rhetoric. Debunking the ideas of Conservatism by his failure to defend them over and over again, he continued to claim the mantle. He could never have accomplished that if he had not gone after the real leaders of that movement.
Buckley's 1957 attack on Ayn Rand came in the form of a bizarre review of “Atlas Shrugged,” her most prominent novel, put out under the imprimatur of National Review. National Review would follow the strategy of later publications that are used in serial to excoriate individuals and reframe issues while continuing to carry enough unexceptional material so as to keep philosophical adherents oblivious to the real agenda, puzzled but not moved to attack.
Also essential was to control the youth. In 1960 Buckley used his estate in Sharon, Connecticut for the founding meeting of the Young Americans for Freedom. This did not work out as planned. The group immediately broke into two factions, reflecting two viewpoints that continue to drive politics today. The Rockefeller wing was a simple political extension of corporatism. The Conservative wing eventually dominating, representing the principles of small government, individual rights, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. These had been the principles of Robert Taft, who Buckley sought to displace in the minds of young Americans by promoting the candidacy of Barry Goldwater.
Credited with supporting the candidacy of Goldwater through National Review in 1964, Buckley gave public support to that candidacy because Goldwater's platform, rather than taking the clean non-interventionist viewpoint of Alliances with None, instead promised only to end the draft as soon as possible, according to Rockwell in his essay, “Before the Storm.”
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