Buckley’s big words masked a bigger racism

William F. Buckley Jr. was evil. He equated Dr. Martin Luther King with Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. He gay-baited author Gore Vidal on national television. “The literature of women’s liberation is so stupefyingly awful,” he wrote.

Yet the corporate media, “liberal”’ and “conservative,” have been gushing out praise for this racist, sexist bigot since he died this February.

Buckley supported the dirty war against Vietnam that killed millions. He called the Spanish fascist dictator Franco “a national hero.” Buckley was an enthusiastic press agent for Pinochet in Chile and the Argentine generals who tortured to death thousands.

This bigot supported segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. “Where Mandela belongs, in his current frame of mind, is precisely where he is: in jail,” Buckley wrote in 1985.

He founded the National Review as a magazine of white supremacy. Buckley called for denying voting rights to Black people in a 1957 editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail.”

Two years earlier 14-year-old Emmet Till was tortured to death by white fiends in Mississippi. Yet Buckley claimed there was “a median cultural superiority of White over Negro ... that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.”

When Buckley ran for mayor of New York in 1965, his platform included rounding up people on welfare and dropping them outside the city.

In 1986 Buckley called for tattooing gay men who were HIV positive, an idea straight out of Hitler’s Third Reich with its pink triangles. He repeated this obscene proposal in 2005.

The New York Times has printed at least eight articles about Buckley since he died. When the great African-American intellectual leader W.E.B. Du Bois died the Times printed only one. Du Bois helped found the NAACP and edited its magazine “The Crisis” for decades. He wrote a series of classic works, including “Black Reconstruction.”

In contrast, which of Buckley’s 50 or so books will he be remembered for? Most of them are collections of his newspaper columns or a series of tawdry spy novels. His best known book is “Joe McCarthy and his Enemies,” a defense of the vicious witch hunter, which Buckley co-authored.

Buckley was also considered a great debater. But when former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver appeared on “Firing Line,” he mopped the floor with Buckley.

Buckley was born into his daddy’s oil fortune, which was stolen from Mexico and Venezuela. He grew up at the family’s Connecticut estate. In 1937 four of Buckley’s brothers and sisters joined a gang that burned a cross in front of a nearby Jewish resort. “I wept tears of frustration at being forbidden by senior siblings to go out on that adventure, on the grounds that (at age 11) I was considered too young,” Buckley later wrote.

After graduating from Yale in 1950, Buckley joined the CIA and was a spy in Mexico. Later as a “former” CIA agent, he took every opportunity—including a movie review of “The Day of the Jackal”—to advocate torture.

Buckley founded the National Review in 1955 with $100,000 from his dad as well as other handouts from wealthy friends.

The National Review featured interviews with die-hard segregationists like Georgia’s Sen. Robert Russell, who railed against “miscegenation,” that is, relationships between Blacks and whites. Today the National Review fights lesbian and gay marriage.

A special target of Buckley was Harlem’s congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. The National Review sought to get Powell framed up on tax charges and was outraged when the Eisenhower administration dropped the matter.

According to someone who worked briefly at the magazine, the editors were eager for a nuclear war to begin during the Cuban missile crisis. “Better dead than red” was written on every toilet seat cover in the joint.

The youthful anti-Semite Buckley hated Palestinians so much he called for Israel to be made the 51st state.

Four little girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley—were murdered when Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed on Sept. 15, 1963. Everybody knew the Ku Klux Klan was responsible for this atrocity.

The National Review was so awful that it claimed the bombing could have been the work of “a communist ... or a crazed Negro”! No wonder the magazine was favored reading material of the White Citizens Councils.

Buckley’s 1965 campaign to be New York’s mayor on the Conservative Party ticket was a racist cop mobilization. During his campaign, Buckley stood before an audience of 5,000 cops and mocked Viola Liuzzo, who was shot to death by Klansmen in Alabama.

None of this prevented Buckley from being a favorite of New York’s high society.

Buckley’s life was filled with disappointments. The people destroyed McCarthyism and the anti-communist witch hunt. Black people overthrew apartheid in the United States and South Africa. The Cuban Revolution lives.