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New York Post
23-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Dem Senator Elissa Slotkin complains party is too worried about ‘p—ing off' the Internet
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., says that Democrats are too worried about making people angry and that they 'constrain' themselves too much. During an interview last week on PBS's 'Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,' Hoover asked Slotkin about President Barack Obama's recent criticism of Democrats, where he said that his party should 'toughen up.' 'President Obama chided Democrats, saying they need to 'toughen up' against Donald Trump. You have said we need more 'alpha energy' in the Democratic Party,' Hoover told Slotkin. Slotkin agreed, and Hoover asked if she and Obama are 'saying the same thing.' 'I don't know if we're saying the exact same thing, but it sort of smells the same, right,' Slotkin said. 'And I think this idea that Democrats are so careful, and they're so caveated, and they're so worried about offending each other, offending other people, they're so worried about pissing off people on the Internet. They live often in a world where they constrain themselves.' Hoover then asked if Democrats are 'too sensitive.' 'I think some of them, sure, are too sensitive,' Slotkin said. 'And this is, to me, the central point, especially with Donald Trump in the White House, this is just not a moment to be careful and polite. We need a plan. We need to be on the same page. We need to play as a team. We need to call out when someone isn't helping the team. And we need to hug someone when they do something great.' 3 'They're so worried about pissing off people on the Internet,' Senator Slotkin said about Democrats. 'They live often in a world where they constrain themselves.' PBS 3 Slotkin agreed with Barack Obama's statement that the party should 'toughen up.' 'It sort of smells the same, right,' Slotkin said. Getty Images The PBS host asked Slotkin if she was saying that Republicans are afraid of Trump, and if Democrats 'fear each other's factions.' Slotkin responded by saying that some 'fear' backlash on X, still often referred to as its former name Twitter. Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! 'You know, I've been shocked — you know, I'm new to the Senate, six months in — how many of my peers said, 'Well, Elissa, I'd love to be with you on that issue, but, you know, Twitter will be mad. You know, the Internet people will be mad at me,'' Slotkin said. 'They literally say that,' Hoover asked. 3 'Especially with Donald Trump in the White House, this is just not a moment to be careful and polite,' the sentor said. 'We need a plan.' AP 'Yeah. There'll be a bad online response,' Slotkin admitted. Obama's 'toughen up' comments referenced by Hoover were made at a fundraiser in July where he said Democrats should complain less.
CBS News
29-06-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
William Buckley and his drive to propel America to the right
William Buckley and his drive to propel America to the right William Buckley and his drive to propel America to the right William Buckley and his drive to propel America to the right For decades, William F. Buckley Jr. was a one-of-a-kind character: an author and columnist, and a celebrity intellectual. He hosted a TV debate show, "Firing Line," and was often a guest on late night television. But beyond that stardom and upper-crust accent was something consequential: Bill Buckley was a conservative who sought to propel the nation to the right. "Buckley invented cultural politics," said former New York Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus. He says we are still living in the world created by Buckley, who died in 2008. (He would have turned 100 this year.) I asked, "Is there a line from Buckley to McCarthy, to Goldwater, to Nixon, to Reagan, to Gingrich, to Trump?" "You have just drawn the fever chart or outline of the modern Republican Party in America," Tanenhaus replied. "He's the founder of the movement we have today." Tanenhaus' sweeping new biography is "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America." Random House Buckley's beginnings can be traced back to Yale University, which now houses an extensive archive of his personal papers. Buckley burst onto the national scene in 1951 with his book, "God and Man at Yale," which took on his alma mater as a thicket of secular professors and liberal elites. Tanenhaus said, "He was 25 years old, handsome Ivy League graduate who has everything going for him, but he's also gonna reveal the secrets of the ivory tower." In 1955, he founded National Review, seeking to provide conservatives with coverage of their ideas and debates. (I once worked there as a Buckley fellow and reporter). Though he never held office himself, Buckley caused a stir when he ran for mayor of New York City in 1965, and mused that if he won, he would demand a recount. "He was really turning the party inside out," Tanenhaus said. "He was going to make the Republican Party the voice of the excluded middle class." But as he built his new coalition, he also drew scrutiny and denunciations, especially on race. In the Fifties and Sixties, Buckley opposed key civil rights legislation, and supported segregation. And he had his critics. Buckley's views were rebuked at high-profile debates, be it with James Baldwin or Gore Vidal. Tanenhaus says, by the late sixties, Buckley was seen as a central force, boosting Richard Nixon and, in 1980, Ronald Reagan, who won the presidency "Bill Buckley reached his peak under Richard Nixon, because Nixon needed Buckley," Tanenhaus said. Reagan, however, did not: "Reagan was a great pragmatist, and he knew that Buckley was still a movement guy." Then came a new generation of louder, brasher conservatives, starting with Rush Limbaugh. And in Washington, there was Newt Gingrich, who won the Speaker's gavel in 1994. Asked what he believed Buckley thought of the rising stars of the right in the 1990s, Gingrich said, "I think we amused him. He was proof that conservatism could be smart, and that you could win the argument. Buckley was a model of thinking about things and to say things that are true but not acceptable." Gingrich, now a close ally of President Donald Trump, says the flame of Buckley still flickers inside the GOP. "Much of the critique that Buckley made at Yale of the intellectuals is the underlying fuel for Trump's assault on the Ivy League," he said. I asked, "You see echoes of Buckley in what President Trump's doing with the universities today?" "Yes." "What's the difference in your view between Buckley's conservatism and President Trump's conservatism?" "Trump is the most effective anti-liberal in my lifetime," Gingrich said. "I think Trump focuses on doing and achieving more than on knowing. I think Buckley thought his role was to be a genuine intellectual. And that meant, obviously, he wouldn't be a particularly good politician." Tanenhaus says William F. Buckley Jr's legacy is complicated. His civility certainly stands out: "He wants to defeat you, but he's gonna defeat you with his vocabulary. And that is an aspect of democracy that's been lost." Yet, for the biographer, there is also an inescapable conclusion: Buckley paved the way for Trump: "If Trump is able, if he succeeds in some of the big things he means to do, then he may emerge as the single most powerful figure to come out of the movement William F. Buckley Jr. created all those years ago." READ AN EXCERPT: "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" For more info: Story produced by Michelle Kessel. Editor: Jennifer Falk.
CBS News
27-06-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Book excerpt: "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America"
Random House We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. William F. Buckley (1925-2008), founder of the National Review and host of the TV debate show "Firing Line," was a leading political commentator who catalyzed America's conservative movement with his support of such figures as Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. In his new biography, "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" (published by Random House), historian Sam Tanenhaus (author of books on Whittaker Chambers and Louis Armstrong) writes about the life and influence of Buckley, whose drive to push America to the right would alter the Republican Party and lead to the rise of Donald Trump. Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Roert Costa's interview with Sam Tanenhaus on "CBS Sunday Morning" June 29! "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now. Connecticut Yanquis William F. Buckley, Jr., the intellectual leader of the modern conservative movement, rightly saw himself less as founder than heir. Everything he learned, and all he became, began at home. It started with his father, William F. Buckley, Sr., a lawyer, real estate investor, and oil speculator who grew up in the brush country, the scrubland frontier, of Duval County in South Texas. He was thirty-five and had made his first fortune when, on a visit to New Orleans, he met twenty-two-year-old Aloise Steiner, the eldest of three sisters of Swiss and German background—"the very essence of old New Orleans charm," said one of the many men smitten by her. She had a year or two of college, played Mozart on the piano, and told captivating if not always quite credible stories—for instance, of the fourteen marriage proposals she claimed to have turned down before W.F. Buckley began courting her in the spring of 1917. The physical attraction was immediate, almost electric. Many years later the couple's children remembered the "frisson" that connected their parents. The couple also shared a deep and abiding Catholic faith. After the wedding ceremony at the Steiner family's parish church, Mater Dolorosa on South Carrollton Avenue, on December 29, 1917, the Buckleys began their married life in Mexico. W.F. Buckley had been living there since 1908. He had apartments and law offices in Mexico City as well as in Tampico—the oil boomtown on the Gulf where, after building a prosperous law practice writing oil leases, he had gone into real estate and then into oil, borrowing substantial sums to sink five wells on the banks of the Panuco River. Oil speculation was always a high-risk venture, but especially in Mexico. It was in the throes of the twentieth century's first great revolution, its ten-year-long "bloody fiesta," which ended in 1920 with the rout of the right-wing faction Buckley had supported and the election of a new president he despised. It was a stinging defeat, and he would never get over it. Yet he also could say, and often did—to his children most emphatically—that although he had lost, he had done so on his terms, without giving an inch to the opposition. Other oilmen, including some far wealthier and more powerful than he, had submitted to the new order and made lucrative deals with each fresh regime. W.F. Buckley refused to do it. He left Mexico—in fact was expelled by order of its government—with debts totaling one million dollars. In later years he showed his children a treasured souvenir from those times, an architect's sketch of the grand palacio, with private chapel, which W.F. Buckley had planned to build on substantial property he had purchased in Coyoacan. Bankrupt at age forty, Buckley would have to start all over. He had a family to support, his wife and three small children, now living with his mother and two sisters in Austin, Texas. But there was a new opportunity. In fact, having to put Mexico behind him might be for the best. The oil fields in its Golden Lane were nearly tapped out. The great new oil patch was in Venezuela. Once again there were large profits to be made but also many hazards—in this case "hostile Indian tribes," as well as malaria and fatal "liver and intestinal disorders." Visitors were advised to stay no longer than a few weeks. For W.F. Buckley admonitions were a goad. He went to Venezuela, stayed a full six months, and came back in 1924 with leasing rights to three million acres surrounding Lake Maracaibo, spreading east and west, a complexly organized checker-board whose squares "in practically every instance adjoin properties that are being actively developed by major American oil companies," it was reported at the time. The concession was "rated among the most valuable in Venezuela." Buckley, now based in New York, formed a new company, Pantepec (named for a river in Mexico), and with the sponsorship of the Wall Street broker Edward A. Pierce floated stock shares and secured investments from two California majors: Union Oil and California Petroleum. Matching wits against some of the finest legal minds in the United States, W.F. Buckley worked out the terms for an innovative "farm-out." In return for gaining temporary control of a third of the holdings, the two behemoths would cover the costs of exploration and drilling and reap most of the profits once oil was struck. W.F. Buckley would be allotted a tiny fraction of those profits, and he now had funds to send teams of engineers and geologists to explore the remaining two million acres. Remade as a Wall Street speculator, W.F. Buckley bought a suite of offices on lower Park Avenue and furnished them sumptuously, the better to impress investors. He also bought an apartment building nearby where he stayed alone during the week. Jazz Age Manhattan, with its speakeasies and fleshpots and lurking criminal element, was no place for his wife and growing family. They lived on his third shrewd purchase, a large estate in the rural northwest corner of Connecticut. On Fridays, the work week finished, W.F. Buckley walked a few blocks uptown from his office to Grand Central and rode the train home to his family, three full hours through exurban New York—Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties—all the way to Amenia, where a Buick sat idling with the Black "houseboy," James Cole of New Orleans, behind the wheel in a chauffeur's cap. Together they drove three miles along a country road and, if daylight remained, enjoyed the vista—the wooded Litchfield Hills and the dipping valley, the bright quilt of dairy farms—and then crossed the Connecticut state line at Sharon, a picturesque village of fifteen hundred, incorporated in 1739 and named for the fertile Biblical plain. A favorite weekend and summer getaway for wealthy New Yorkers, Sharon was famous for its narrow elongated green, originally grazing land, which gracefully stretched for more than a mile from its north end—with storefronts and wooden walkways where in summer elms arched overhead, the branches on either side touching to form a canopy—to South Main Street. There, near the town hall and the Hotchkiss Library, stood what is still today Sharon's chief landmark: a granite-and-brownstone clock tower, forty feet high with a pyramid roof, built in the 1880s by the same firm that designed Theodore Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island. On either side of South Main, set back from the street, were large and imposing manor houses. The Buckleys lived in one of them, Number 32, called the Ansel Sterling House after its first owner, a lawyer and judge twice elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1820s. Sterling had purchased the property in 1808 and then torn down the original brick, replacing it with a Georgian frame structure. Over time the ten-acre property had tripled to thirty acres, beautiful and lush, with thick stands of oaks and sugar maples, outbuildings including barn, stables, and icehouse, and horse trails that wound through the rolling pastures and up into the gentle hills beyond. Today Ansel Sterling's house still stands, though much enlarged by W.F. Buckley. Its handsome entrance with pediment and pillars stares across Main Street at Sharon's two historic churches: little Christ Church Episcopal, with its witch-hat spire, and the Congregational church, the town's oldest. In 1923, when W.F. Buckley first toured the property and rented it for the summer, its most striking feature was the elm that towered up from its front lawn. It had been planted in colonial times by Sharon's most illustrious forefather, the Congregational minister Reverend Cotton Mather Smith, a descendant of Cotton Mather. It was now the largest elm in the entire state, its immense trunk measuring eighteen feet around. In 1924, the same year Main Street was paved for motor traffic, Buckley bought the estate outright and renamed it Great Elm. This was the new life Buckley had conjured in a few short years, seemingly pulled out of thinnest air, for his wife and growing family. So promising did the future look that when a sixth child was born on November 24, 1925, husband and wife agreed that this son, their third, should be his father's namesake: William F. Buckley, Jr. It was always an event when "Father" came home. The children who were not away at school or upstairs in the nursery crowded in front of the house to greet him. "We'd wait there for his car to come," one of his six daughters remembered, "and make bets on which car would be Father's." He was delighted to see them, but even happier to see his wife. "He'd kiss us all and he'd say, 'Where's your mother?' Mother would come and say, 'Darling,' and the two of them would walk out together." No one felt these currents more keenly than Billy Buckley, who had the middle child's fear of being overlooked, lost in the crowd. And the Buckley siblings really were a crowd: ten in all, many of them very close in age, five born ahead of Billy and four after. With servants added, as well as tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, and later a riding instructor and his family, the household numbered more than twenty and was alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife. Excerpted from "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" by Sam Tanenhaus. Copyright © 2025 by Sam Tanenhaus. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Get the book here: "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" Buy locally from For more info:
Economist
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Economist
William F. Buckley, the man who put the charm into conservatism
Culture | Standing athwart history, yelling stop Photograph: Eyevine/New York Times/Redux/Sam Falk R EADY to feel lazy and unaccomplished? William F. Buckley wrote his first bestseller when he was 25. Over the next 57 years, he would write more than 50 books, including 20 novels. When he was 29, he founded the National Review, a magazine. When he was 40, he created 'Firing Line', a public-affairs tv show; he would go on to host 1,505 episodes. Buckley wrote and edited thousands of articles, made thousands of public speeches, and once, quixotically, ran for mayor of New York. (He won 13% of the vote.) This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline 'Right on' Will it rev up new fans for the motorsport? Fenix, in Rotterdam, lets visitors make up their own minds American and Irish writers dominate the list Rachel Zegler's streetside 'Evita' reveals a lot about fame and London In this week's list, the water is not so fine In a post-apocalyptic horror sequel, monsters and mockery co-exist
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What the Godfather of American Conservatism Would Think About Donald Trump
I've often wondered what William F. Buckley Jr., the most influential conservative of the 20th century, would make of Donald Trump as president. A potential answer, I thought, might lie in Sam Tanenhaus' epic new biography of Buckley. It took nearly 30 years and a thousand pages for Tanenhaus to craft the book, but it was worth the wait. The prodigious research includes years of interviews and unfettered access to the family's history. And it's resulted in a fascinating portrait of a man who was an arresting figure, beginning in his days as a Yale undergraduate to his life as a columnist, editor, television star, author, debater, political candidate, and ultimately a key figure in the ascent of conservatism from fringe movement to the highest reaches of power. Yet it leaves unsettled the question of whether Buckley set the stage for the rise of Trump. For me, this is more than an academic issue. I first met Buckley in 1966 when he read my student coverage of his appearance at Yale with amusement and invited me to participate in public discussions with other young voices about politics. These, in turn, led me to appear on the TV show Firing Line as an 'examiner' — someone who could offer different perspectives on his conversations toward the end of the show. It also led to a friendship: He brought me to London for Firing Line episodes, we dined at each other's homes, and I became one of a long line of people — Murray Kempton, John Kenneth Galbraith, Al Lowenstein to name a few — whose companionship he enjoyed even as he staunchly challenged our more liberal opinions. As Tanenhaus' biography makes clear, his gift for friendship was a lifelong quality. There are also far less admirable aspects of Buckley's life. His first appearance in the public spotlight came with his 1951 book God and Man at Yale where he urged alumni and trustees to use their financial power to pressure the university into combating the faculty's more left-leaning doctrines. His second book was a ringing defense of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his demagogic attack on subversives in government. (Tanenhaus does note that McCarthy's foes were less than vigilant about the fact that there were indeed some spies within the halls of government.) Perhaps most shameful, Buckley was a defender of segregation throughout the 1950's and 60's, infamously writing in 1957 that the white minority had to prevail in the South because it was for the moment 'the advanced race.' He was a financial supporter of a newspaper in Camden, South Carolina, that embraced the white supremacist views of the powerful Citizens' Council. (Later in life, Buckley acknowledged that his views on race were wrong.) The books leaves no doubt about just how crucial Buckley was to the shaping of the conservative movement's ascent. 'Without Buckley, there is no Reagan,' more than one voice asserts. But by necessity, it leaves a huge amount of doubt about how Buckley would have viewed the rise of Donald Trump and the lurch away from some of the right's once-sacred beliefs, including free trade and a muscular internationalism. Buckley died in 2008 when Trump was still a political dilettante rather than the formidable politician he now is. In 2000, when Trump was flirting with presidential run, Buckley scorned him as a 'narcissist.' A whole suitcase full of Trump's qualities — historical ignorance, near-illiteracy, vulgarity — would suggest that Buckley would have joined his old colleagues at the magazine he founded, National Review, and devoted an entire issue in 2016 exclusively to making the case against Trump. And yet — Buckley often embraced figures whose behavior was markedly different from his own, because they were serving a greater purpose in promoting his beliefs. Joe McCarthy was one example; Rush Limbaugh was another. Buckley was usually a loyal Republican and fiercely committed to the right; if both groups chose Trump, he might have also embraced the ex-reality TV star. In fact, Buckley and Trump may have shared more political similarities than Buckley might have liked to admit. The seeds of Trump's appeal could be found in Buckley's 1965 campaign for mayor of New York, where his strongest support came from the cops, firefighters, shop keepers and other elements of the white working class. Furthermore, as Tanenhaus noted in the New York Times, Buckley's first two books offered themes that resonate strongly with Trump's world: his scorn of the academic elitists who abandoned traditional values and his sharp critique of the bureaucrats who formed a kind of permanent government — essentially the 'deep state' belief central to the Trumpier version of conservatism. I still find it hard to believe that this highly educated, multilingual polymath whose disposition was so antithetical to the dark, resentment-fueled figure of Donald Trump, would have thrown his political weight behind the candidate of retribution. But if politics makes strange bedfellows, then the possibility of this coupling can't be dismissed. The potential through-line from Buckley to Trump is also important because of what it says about the right. For years, many Republicans and conservatives claimed Trump was an aberration and not representative of the movement or the party. Today, with many of Trump's key arguments found in the writings of the right's most historically prominent voice, that's harder to accept today.
