“You’re an apologist for a racist society and have claimed other cultures as being unworthy of freedom based on your stereotypical impression of them”

Buckley recognized the intrinsic distinctions between cultures, and he did not slip into your mindset to condemn those who see the failings of ideological and cultural viewpoints. Instead, he recognized the distinctions, the difficulties, and separated the individual moral worth of each human being from the value assigned to a particular culture. You see this as racist, but it is nothing of the sort, it is realist. It is logical to recognize that suffrage should be based on capacity, not on universal personhood, for the distinct reason that the voter does not exercise power alone over himself, but for everyone. Fundamentally, the people of America, of our communities, have a right to demand some safeguards concerning the acts upon which their welfare and existence depend.

Of course I maintain that prior to the 13th Amendment, slavery was constitutionally protected. That is not bigoted, it is the truth. Lincoln and every historian in the country will agree…

Only individuals can possess liberty, and some individuals are not capable of exercising it. Societies based on respect for the individual are indeed more entitled to have their people live in liberty, for they have, in the words of Franklin, “kept it.” Those who preserve the respect for the individual, those who never forget the price of individual liberty, and those societies which promote that remembrance, will deserve, and achieve, liberty.

If you ever had known or met the man, perhaps you would have understood.

If he’d ever heard your thoughts on the Confederacy he’d have condemned you and removed you from his presence…the same as he helped remove the John Birchers and the anti-Semites from the conservative movement. Buckley was many things, but judging by his public writings a racist wasn’t one of them, and if you did meet the man yourself it only confirms to me your quite appalling lack of intellectual capacity because you obviously learned nothing of moral value from him.

Conspiracy theorists and bigots rightly feared his pen and cutting mind, but those grounded in the same principled foundation had nothing to fret over.

You’re an apologist for a racist society and have claimed other cultures as being unworthy of freedom based on your stereotypical impression of them…had Buckley realized what you were he’d likely have told you that himself. And if Buckley was aware of your beliefs and accepted them, then the man was a fraud.

To him, as you are to me, you are nothing but a mouth, a mouth from which pours not reasoned argument and principled analysis, but rather, the dogma of a blind and elastic mind capable of rationalizing any level of tyranny…

Funny, since I’m not the one who supported the Constitutionality of state-sponsored slavery…that was you. Nor am I the one who seems to think that some cultures are more entitled to liberty than others (you again). If that makes me a third-rate intellectual I’ll take that over being a pompous hypocrite who sides with the bigots.

Third-rate “intellectuals” such as yourself were of little use to him. To him, as you are to me, you are nothing but a mouth, a mouth from which pours not reasoned argument and principled analysis, but rather, the dogma of a blind and elastic mind capable of rationalizing any level of tyranny…

I for one will indeed miss him.

Why? He enthusiastically drummed your ilk out of the conservative movement because you were all a bunch of dead-enders who turn every political group they affiliate with into pariahs.

Though tragically misled about the potential to spread democratic liberty through force of arms, Buckley died vindicated. Errors seen, admitted, and corrected. I for one will indeed miss him.