Odd story in The Boston Globe about traditional family values among the Buckleyites:

The recent death of 33-year-old Tristan Egolf, a novelist cursed with promise at an early age, has given rise to a literary detective story. Obituaries published last month failed to name Egolf's birth father, Brad Evans, a flamboyant writer, political activist, and right-wing adventurer who shared many of his son's gifts and demons -- and who, like his son, died by his own hand.

... Evans was a University of Louisville football star who worked on riverboats and at a small newspaper in Kentucky before drifting into the ambit of William F. Buckley's National Review magazine. Buckley's sister Patricia and her husband, L. Brent Bozell Jr., were Tristan's godparents.

Moving further to the right in a society that was tilting leftward, Evans became a speechwriter for right-wing politicians and a publicist/activist for extreme-right fringe groups such as Bozell's militantly prolife Sons of Thunder, which had declared ''a state of war" between the Catholic Church and the US government. At the end of his life, Evans claimed to have been engaging in paramilitary operations in Central America, according to his father, Warren Evans, and Amber Faith, the mother of Brad Evans's third child....

To what extent, if any, was Tristan Egolf's swashbuckling literary and political lifestyle influenced by his father? The two met only a few times before Evans's death...

Remember all the sneering about the Marin County parents of John Walker Lindh? The right likes to say that people on the left poison their kids with cockamamie moral and political notions, while failing at the grunt work of parenting because they can't resist the siren song of self-indulgence. But what do you know -- that even happens among among right-wingers who romanticize third-world fascism.

(And anti-abortion zealotry -- the Sons of Thunder seem to have been early proponents of the "rescue," to judge from what this Freeper says, and also commenter #20 here.)

(Oh, and by the way, the Brent Bozell mentioned above is the father of the one Brent the Third, who runs the Media Research Center.)

(Link via Publishers Lunch.)