You may recall that Buckley was a full-throated segregationist and white supremacist:
He didn’t stop there. In 1957, Buckley wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that, “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”And this is from the WNYC broadcast descriptor:
During the question period [Buckley] endorses the concept of a "white backlash" if it means repudiating the views of such black leaders as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Bayard Rustin.Maybe these are the kind of sentiments that WNYC wanted to warn visitors about. Do these guys really think it's a bad thing if the website thinks some black kid might like a simple heads-up before opening a file from an advocate of "white backlash"? Probably -- I expect they think the Pure Food and Drug Act was a big statist nuisance too, depriving consumers of the freedom to discover poison in their food by eating it.
I'm not crazy about trigger warnings and other sissy evasions of rough and tumble public discourse, but if someone wants to warn Jews that Hitler's about to make his big pitch, or warn blacks that William F. Buckley is about to speak, I count that as elementary good manners.
UPDATE. In comments, Maclean's cultural critic Jaime Weinman reminds us of the trigger-warnings-avant-la-lettre that have appeared before old cartoons that feature pickaninnies and whatnot for many years now:
I'm pretty reflexively anti-PC (or anti-anti-anti-PC?) but I also think the most important thing above all is to keep stuff available and uncut, whether it's a cartoon or a radio interview. And I don't think people realize that the choice is between sending this stuff out in public with a warning and not sending it out at all.
"No longer politically or socially appropriate" is awkward phrasing, I admit, but then Warner Brothers' first try at a content warning for cartoons had Whoopi Goldberg walking out to warn us. They replaced this with a disclaimer card. It's a work in progress.I can understand how the degradation of black people might be something some viewers (including black people) would want to avoid; I can also understand why some viewers would want to see the cartoons as they were meant to be presented, not shot full of censor-holes. (I should mention that syndicates also cut non-racial things out of cartoons, like Porky and Daffy's iron lung gag.) The warning seems a reasonable accommodation, but I can also understand how that lets libertarians out.
