Frank Buckley is a professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law, a senior editor at The American Spectator, a columnist for the New York Post, and the author of books including The Once and Future King and Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life. He appeared as a guest on The Bob Zadek Show in episodes on social media censorship and on curiosity and American capitalism.
Social media censorship and the Hawley proposal
In a 2019 episode, Bob Zadek and Buckley discussed growing calls for government regulation of social media censorship following high-profile “de-platforming” incidents. They critiqued Senator Josh Hawley’s proposed legislation as a “regulatory shakedown” and explored Buckley’s alternative proposal for a disclosure-based commission to provide transparency without granting the government enforcement power Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019).
Curiosity and its twelve rules
In a 2021 episode, Zadek interviewed Buckley about his book Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life. Zadek introduced the book as not a how-to or self-help work but a book about curiosity, which he glossed as risk-taking and welcoming the unknown. He described Buckley as a frequent guest and recalled Buckley’s 2015 appearance on the show to discuss The Once and Future King, which Zadek said taught him about the merits of a parliamentary system Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Buckley framed the book around two questions: why curiosity is important, and why it is particularly an issue at that moment. He said that behind any of the people one admires, or any great advance in science, business or literature, there was somebody curious. He argued that curiosity is natural, so a book about it would be unnecessary unless something were suppressing it, and that there had never been in America such an effort to silence dissenters, at least since the witch trials in Salem in the 1600s. He described a culture that tells people there are received thoughts they are to adopt, and that departing from them makes one a racist who deserves to be canceled Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Zadek put to Buckley that cancel culture—preventing individuals and institutions from sharing what they believe to be information—is anti-curiosity, because it refuses to make information available ab initio so that the public can judge it. Buckley agreed, invoking Aristotle’s statement that philosophy begins in wonder, and said that curiosity is something one wants to avoid in 1984, and that America was far closer to Orwell’s dystopia than at any time since the country’s creation 250 years earlier. He added that if one is not curious, liberty does not matter, because one can be told what to do without complaint Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
The epidemic of loneliness
Zadek asked Buckley about his phrase the “epidemic of loneliness.” Buckley said it is not in the DSM but that he thinks it belongs there, and traced it to people turning themselves incurious by focusing on a very narrow set of issues. He recounted appearing on a call-in program to present his book, where callers wanted to talk not about the book but about the January 6th “insurrection,” and said that some people treat a very narrow set of political issues as the only thing that matters. He said this produces real loneliness for people excluded from the conversation, including those who voted for Trump, and also for those he called the kingdom of the blessed, the people with the correct thoughts, since if only one issue may be discussed there is nothing to talk about Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Buckley then discussed friendship, which he called a basic human good, and said it depends on revealed confidences—confessing something about oneself that might be turned against you. He said it is dangerous to do that now, and extremely dangerous to tell a joke, so the kinds of friendships one might have made in the past are no longer made, producing a friendless society in which suicides are up and a majority of Americans describe themselves as unhappy Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Zadek characterized the censorship, wokeism and cancel culture of the moment as a quarantine of ideas, imposed by those who fear that exposure to another point of view will cause people to leave the reservation. He described this as the unifying factor he found in Buckley’s book, calling the book a Trojan horse: a political book whose premise is a state of mind Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Ideology as a mental shortcut
Buckley said the state of mind he opposes is a form of sociopathy, since a sociopath is someone who does not need other people. He noted that in a lot of colleges students are encouraged or told how to report on their professors, so that an idle comment or a joke can trigger a student and lead to charges, and that part of the idea of cancel culture is a shifting set of misstatements and bad thoughts—what was innocuous ten years, ten months or ten days ago can quickly become toxic. He said it is getting to the point where one would want a tape recorder running whenever talking to somebody else, and that anyone who thinks that is a good idea has described a purely sociopathic society. The idea of the book, he said, is to tell people to get out there, do their thing and not let the censors get them down Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Zadek observed that the book is replete with stories about great men and women over history, and said that reading it in paper he yearned for links, since each story made him curious about its subject and he would have followed link after link; he called the book its own little Wikipedia Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Deliberation in the Senate
Zadek raised the United States Senate, sometimes called the world’s greatest deliberative body, and said he could not find an example of a senator changing his or her mind as a direct result of deliberation—on borders, the minimum wage or abortion—and that this meant there had never been deliberation. Buckley offered examples of senators changing their minds: civil rights, and Senator Vandenberg, a Republican isolationist, deciding after Pearl Harbor to forget isolationism because the country was at war. Buckley noted that Vandenberg changed his mind because of circumstances rather than persuasion, and agreed that the Senate is not a deliberative body in the sense that Parliament in England can be. He cited May 1940, when the Chamberlain government fell and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, and said that what got that going was a series of speeches in Parliament in which Chamberlain was ripped apart, with the result that about 70 members of the majority Tory party decided not to support the government, having been persuaded by devastating speeches. Real deliberation can happen, Buckley said, but any deliberation in Washington happens offstage Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Zadek asked whether opinions, once formed, can always be changed or become baked in. Buckley said it is happening all the time, for a couple of reasons: partisanship, since when you are taught that the other side is poisonous you have no responsibility to listen to it and listening is dangerous; and the growth of ideologies, such as ideologies surrounding the 1619 Project of the New York Times, which would have it that we are irredeemably a racist society. An ideology, Buckley said, is like a mental shortcut, a key supposed to unlock all doors, and buying into one avoids the need to look at conflicting evidence; it is like a mental trash folder that sends contradictory facts where you do not have to pay attention to them Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Buckley connected this to morality: a big part of curiosity is curiosity about other people and how they are affected, so a pure ideologue who does not care how others are affected by a policy is incurious. He said he wanted to argue that curiosity is the foundation of a good part of our morality, because morality concerns how other people fare and what the consequences of our actions are upon them, and thinking about that requires curiosity. He concluded that the deeply incurious person is also a deeply immoral person, and that incuriosity is the root of all evil in many ways Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Across episodes
The two episodes touch on censorship and the suppression of dissent: the 2019 episode treats government regulation of social media platforms and Buckley’s disclosure-based alternative to Senator Hawley’s proposal, while the 2021 episode treats cancel culture, ideology and the decline of curiosity as a broader cultural phenomenon. The excerpts show no development between the earlier and later treatment beyond the shift in subject matter, and Buckley advances the argument in both.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Buckley’s date or place of birth, his full academic history, or the titles of his other books beyond those named. They do not describe the contents of the disclosure-based commission beyond the summary given, nor the text or fate of Senator Hawley’s proposed legislation. They do not report the outcome of any case or the amendment on which any case turned, and the 2019 excerpt provides no quotations from Buckley himself.
Episodes
5 appearances, 2018–2021.
- The One Book You Must Read to Understand American Politics in 2018 (2018) — Trump and the Republican Workers Party. Professor of Law at Scalia School of Law
- Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019) — Government regulation of social media censorship. American Spectator and New York Post
- Secession: A How-to Guide (2020) — Secession and the potential for a national breakup. Professor at George Mason University
- Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020) — American Secession and the Return to Federalism. Senior editor at the American Spectator
- Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021) — The decline of curiosity in modern America. Professor at George Mason University