This Buckley video is movingly nostalgic. Bill Buckley is so young and elegant. Of course, watching him perform, one cannot avoid noticing the very characteristic way he systematically relies upon style in deliberate preference to substance. It is also fascinating to look back and realize just how “insensitive” Buckley could get away with being way back in 1965. No conservative intellectual today could display such public disregard for the sacred cows of civil rights and sodomy, or so condescend to a prominent queer Black author. The topic was: “Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?” Buckley here, of course, represents one small voice trying to stand in the face of an onrushing avalanche of compensatory racial privilege yelling, “Stop!” In 1965, it was still vaguely possible to argue that a massive new era of coercive National Reconstruction and indoctrination was not really morally or practically necessary. Today, four more decades worth of Americans have been taught from infancy that coercive racial egalitarianism represents the most vital moral necessity as well as the supreme triumph of human civilization and political philosophy.