Imagine that …

… a free exchange of views: Firing Line: PBS & Margaret Hoover Revive a Needed Institution | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… rather than try to silence those whose views he himself found abhorrent, Buckley put them on television’s most prestigious public-affairs program. He was a devout Christian who helped bring the evangelical atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair to wider attention, a conservative and a patriot who brought Noam Chomsky, Saul Alinsky, and Huey P. Newton into the living rooms of intelligent Americans — not as a freak show, but in the pursuit of genuine democratic discourse. (Allen Ginsberg playing the harmonium and reverently chanting “Hare Krishna” was a little bit of a freak show.) Christopher Hitchens advised his fellow radicals that they’d never get a more open or fairer hearing than on Firing Line, and he was right about that.