Mr. Speaker, a giant in the world of great ideas is lost. William F. Buckley, 82 years old, died today after a life consecrated to the defence of the ideals upon which our civilization is built and without which it would surely crumble.
The Yale educated Buckley founded the National Review magazine in 1955 and remained its editor for three decades.
George Herbert Walker Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
President Reagan told Buckley:
You didn't just part the Red Sea—you rolled it back, dried it up, and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism.
He exposed socialism as the oppressive ideology it is, and its ugly sibling, communism, as one of the most evil ideas to ever infect the earth.
A prominent Canadian author, Adam Daifallah, said that he popularized “smaller government, tax cuts and total victory over the Soviet Union”.
It is a great loss to us all.