“The next thing the American viewer saw was a flurry of night sticks and the pursuit of the screaming demonstrators back across the bridge into the streets of Selma. What the viewer did not see was a period of time, twenty long minutes…when the two camps stood facing each other, between the moment the Sheriff told the demonstrators to return, which order the demonstrators refused by standing there in defiance of it, until the moment when the human cordite was touched…The policemen moved excitedly, humanly, forward; excessively, yes, and their excesses on that day have been rightly criticized, but were ever the excesses criticized of those who provoked them beyond the endurance which we tend to think of as human?”

Thus, the naked violence visited upon King and his fellow marchers was less repulsive than the media daring to cover it. Never mind that Buckley couldn’t specify what provocation triggered such a gross reaction from Wallace’s enforcers, because it didn’t exist; facts detracted from his narrative of police victimhood. Won’t you, the reader, please consider the plight of a policeman who hated blacks so much he traded his baton for a rubber club wrapped in razor wire? Here, in the admittedly erudite words of a self-proclaimed genius, is the same glib bleating about “fake news” which emanates from today’s social media and ideological hate swamps.

He similarly disparaged the death of Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit woman murdered by Klansmen several days after the march on Montgomery. While Buckley decried her death, he also dismissed its importance, asking whether the killing “merely confirm[ed] what everyone has been saying about certain elements of the South?” And why, he mused, didn’t the press complain about the “unprovoked killing of a policeman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi” that same night? (Not that Buckley was alone in such blindness: one woman wrote to The Ladies Home Journal to say that Liuzzo “should have stayed home and minded her own business.”)

In other words, “All Lives Matter.” Buckley’s message landed with New York City police officers, who resented John Lindsay’s calls for police reform and openly sported “Buckley for Mayor” buttons throughout the campaign. (It didn’t endear him to New Yorkers generally, as Buckley managed only 13.4 percent of the vote.) Buckley received censure from the press, and entered into a long-running war of words with Jackie Robinson, athlete-turned-activist, but remained unrepentant. If anything, he doubled down in editorials defending disenfranchisement of blacks: “if the entire Negro population in the South were suddenly given the vote…chaos would ensue.”

Buckley’s only response to the torrent of criticism, in his memoir The Unmaking of a Mayor, was to blame the “liberal media” for misreporting trivial details. He complained, for instance, that despite reports of policemen cheering his insensitive comments, the hall remained silent throughout these parts of his speech. Whether or not this was so (eyewitnesses predictably differed, though Buckley claimed to possess a tape recording verifying his version) seems hardly relevant to the point. Perhaps the NYPD didn’t actually cheer Buckley’s remarks; the remarks themselves remain monstrous.

Admittedly, Buckley expressed these morally obtuse views with more sophistication than your average bar stool bigot, and more erudition than segregationists like Governor Wallace or Congressman William Dickinson, who denounced the marches as a breeding ground of miscegenation. “Negro and white freedom marchers,” he declared on the House floor, “invaded a Negro church in Montgomery and engaged in an all-night session of debauchery within the church itself.” Such responses from Dixiecrat fossils, however, should surprise no one. Buckley’s moral stagnation in the face of naked Evil is better only by degree.

Buckley never relented in his criticisms of King. Five days after King’s murder, he wrote a testy editorial wherein he concludes, after some deliberation, that MLK probably didn’t deserve assassination. Nonetheless, he slams the slain leader for “describ[ing] his intention of violating the law in Memphis” and blames King for rioting in that city. Certainly he blames MLK for his own demise: “The cretin who leveled his rifle at the head of Martin Luther King may have absorbed the talk…about the supremacy of the individual conscience…such talk as Martin Luther King…had so widely, and so indiscriminately, indulged in.”

In this, Buckley had many counterparts. Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, said that the riots triggered by King’s death were a “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.” Or Lionel Lokos, a conservative writer who proclaimed that MLK “left his country a legacy of lawlessness.” And lest we forget, King remained controversial enough decades later that dozens of congressmen voted against commemorating his birthday (and that many states, not all in the south, still refuse to observe it).

In marked contrast, today’s conservative Republicans regularly invoke King, from Glenn Beck conjuring MLK for his own March on Washington in 2010 to pro-lifers invoking him as a standard bearer to a Trump spokesman comparing his candidate to King, to the absurd but persistent claim that King was even a Republican himself. Perhaps the low point of this noxious revisionism came last January, when Rob Schneider, whose civil rights bona fides consist of portraying ethnic stereotypes in Adam Sandler movies, told John Lewis, King’s ally and friend who survived Bloody Sunday, that he knew more about King than Lewis.

In one sense, it’s gratifying that MLK, so controversial in his lifetime that 63 percent of Americans held a negative opinion of him, is now so universally beloved that even conservative politicians, reactionary radio personalities and the star of The Hot Chick now embrace him as a hero. Too bad their claim that he was, deep down, a secret conservative isn’t backed up by history, as the words of Buckley, and King’s own record, attest.

King had a complicated relationship with both parties. He regularly allied with the moderate Republicans – particularly the hated Nelson Rockefeller – the GOP leadership has spent the past half-century purging from its ranks. He also criticized Dwight Eisenhower for not doing more for desegregation, denounced Barry Goldwater as “morally indefensible and socially suicidal” and Richard Nixon, whom he initially respected for his pro-Civil Rights rhetoric as Vice President only to revile his later pandering to the hard right, as “the most dangerous man in America.” During the lead-in to the 1968 election, he gave public, albeit tepid encouragements of Rockefeller and George Romney’s candidacies, while privately urging Eugene McCarthy to enter the Democratic primaries against LBJ.

Nor was King, in fairness, a liberal Democrat. He branded John F. Kennedy an opportunist who needed to do more “in the area of moral persuasion by occasionally speaking out against segregation.” His relationship with Lyndon Johnson alternated between mutual respect and pragmatic, wary alliance, before openly breaking with Johnson over the Vietnam War. For their part, Kennedy called King “so hot these days that it looks like Marx coming to the White House,” while Johnson dismissed King as a “nigger preacher,” ramped up J. Edgar Hoover’s efforts to discredit or demoralize him and wondered “what more does he want” than the Civil Rights Act.

Naturally, King’s objections to Kennedy and Johnson weren’t that they were too progressive for his take. As early as 1952 he told future wife Coretta Scott that “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” While he remained circumspect about publicly expressing these views, he had no reservations about working with socialists like Stanley Levison, Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph. For that matter, his disagreements with Black Power advocates like Stokely Carmichael, typically invoked as antitheses to King, were generally more rhetorical than substantive. Such views certainly informed his later critiques of American imperialism and capitalist greed which culminated in his outspoken antiwar activism shortly before his death. These positions were less an evolution in his views than increased willingness to express them.

Conservatives who invoke King must ask themselves whether, with their hatred of protests and fetish for “law and order,” they sympathize with his view that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Or whether they feel comfortable embracing someone who complained that “the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is…the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.” Or whether a leader who urged that “America must move towards a democratic socialism” would truly embrace Paul Ryan or Donald Trump’s vision for America.

Which doesn’t stop Buckley’s descendants from aping, and occasionally besting, their progenitor’s cluelessness. Some, confronted with Black Lives Matter, Antifa and activism against Donald Trump’s cryptofascist regime, merely recycle Buckley’s arguments. Consider, for instance, National Review editor Rich Lowry’s vituperation against “the Left’s lawless shock troops” protesting the murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014: “The Left has long posited various means of achieving social justice…to these methods must now be added traffic congestion. All of these ordinary people,” he complains, “are being inconvenienced for the sin of having somewhere to go.”

Funny how Buckley made similar complaints 49 years earlier, wondering “how long…should sit-ins be allowed to squat down in major traffic zones?” He continued pondering “at what point do the local authorities begin to transfer their concern from the rights of dissenters to dissent…to the right of the community to practice the profession of living?” For both men, civil liberties and the First Amendment extend only so far as they don’t inconvenience the white middle class.

When feeling particularly mendacious, these noted clowns ventriloquize King for their own arguments. In another column, Lowry proclaims that “the difference between demonstrators in Selma and Ferguson is the difference between dignity under enormous pressure in a righteous cause and heedless self-indulgence in the service of a smear.” Strong words indeed, if a little late. It only took National Review a half-century to recognize King’s courage – and only then, “in the service of a smear” against those protesting modern-day inequities.