Transcript
Ryan Holiday (0:00)
Welcome to the daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.
Stephen (0:14)
You would not think that a thousand page biography of William F. Buckley would be fucking with me. Yeah, fucking with it.
Patrick (0:21)
A thousand page.
Stephen (0:22)
It's incredible. Really incredible. Yeah. Yes. Like, first off, just because it's like this arc of history that's fascinating. And he. All these different, like, James Baldwin's in there. He. I mean, he was the first person to publish Joan Didion.
Patrick (0:38)
Is that right?
Stephen (0:38)
Yes, he wrote for the National Review, but yeah. So it's this arc of American history that I think is fascinating. So basically he fondly recounts he was not invited, but his brothers, at the direction of their father, go burn a cross on somebody's lawn. Like, his father's, like, profoundly anti Semitic, profoundly racist, just a reactionary bigot. And then, so when you understand that, then when you understand. When you understand William Buckley, you're like, oh, he's actually doing this thing that's kind of endemic to the conservative movement, which is like, people have these opinions or these instincts. How do we intellectualize that? It's a way of creating, like, an intellectual cover for these sort of like, primal, emotional, prejudiced ideas. So there's the arc of that in his life. And then he starts by writing a book about liberal overreach on college campuses that his dad pays for.
Patrick (1:43)
Is that right?
Stephen (1:44)
Yeah, his dad was, like, an oil speculator. Okay. Then he is a speechwriter and advisor to McCarthy. And the next, he's this sort of Machiavellian genius behind, like, all these pivotal moments. It's fascinating, really.
Ryan Holiday (2:04)
You will realize, like, oh, if you
Stephen (2:06)
just change a couple of these names, it's the same things happening again. Yeah, but. But like, I. I think the Free Press, which I like for some stuff. Is it similar role where. It's like, part of what it does, though, is create kind of intellectual cover for things that people want to believe. Realizing that we tend to think of propaganda and misinformation as inserting false ideas. And actually its job is to give you reasons to believe what you already believe.