Crossword-Solution: BUCKLEY 7 letters, 4 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 18

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.

The real Machiavellian genius of the First Amendment is that free speech turns out to be mostly harmless — a lot of P.C. nit-picking, dingbat conspiracy theories, tedious libertarian screeds and name calling. The only “free speech” that has any effect in a stable, well-run plutocracy is the kind protected by Buckley vs. Valeo in the form of campaign contributions.

He considered himself a sort of esoteric martyr, who'd sacrificed everything for principle. Apparently that little book had set him on a course towards political extremism, culminating in the loss of his job at the community college, as well as the breakup of his previously stable marriage. By the time he met Old Hoss, a few years later, Hiram Buckley was one of those unfortunates the normal and untroubled point at in scorn and laugh at derisively; a veritable dog that's kick…