Why should you donate to National Review Online? I don’t suppose that “Donate so that Kevin D. Williamson can have the best job in journalism” is necessarily all that persuasive to anybody who is not one of my immediate family members, but I like to think that there is something in it for you, too. And that is because one of the great, remarkable, and underappreciated things about National Review is the freedom our writers have.

Like everybody who writes for National Review, I get the occasional one-sentence story idea from Rich Lowry, which generally reads like he typed it with his nose on an iPhone while hang-gliding: “U shd go 2 Iowa & wrt smthng abt Brnie Sndrs.” Some of my best and most enjoyable stories have started off that way: It was, for example, Rich’s idea for me to go to Appalachia to write about poverty, whereas going to Vegas to write about pornography was pretty much all me. But what I never hear is this: “You need to write something critical about Donald Trump. You’re too critical of Ted Cruz. You’re too easy on Rand Paul. You should be more positive in your assessment of Colorado’s marijuana-legalization experiment.”

The wonderful truth is: There is no National Review party line. If I thought that Donald Trump were the second coming of Abraham Lincoln instead of the second coming of my breakfast, I am confident that I’d have a forum here to make my case. I understand that my friend Andrew C. McCarthy recently took to these virtual pages to endorse Senator Ted Cruz. Senator Cruz is a fine and worthy man, and though I myself am not in the habit of making endorsements (I can’t imagine that anybody would vote based on my endorsement) I am confident that if I wanted to put my name behind another candidate, or simply tell Andy all the reasons why he might be wrong about Cruz, nobody here would expect me to toe the line.

Here’s a little behind-the-curtains NRO-logy. You want to know what the most common sort of editorial feedback I get here is? (Other than: “Do we really need 21 adjectives in that 108-word opening sentence?”) It’s this: “I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to the other side’s case. I think that they would characterize their views differently than you have. Your argument would be stronger if you addressed the strongest points of the other side’s argument, rather than the weakest ones.” Sometimes that’s from Rich Lowry, sometimes it’s from one of the other editors here. We here at National Review are constantly conscious of having inherited something remarkable, something that was built by serious, literate, thoughtful men and women we respect.

In print or online, this is Bill Buckley’s journal, the magazine that published Whittaker Chambers, George Will, Joan Didion, John Dos Passos — and Andy, Jonah, Ramesh, Charlie, Jay, Rick, Kathryn, and a great many other people I am privileged to know and to work with. We aren’t selling hysteria, gratifying spasms of inchoate rage, or easy emotional validation. Much less are we peddling cheap partisanship or illiterate celebrity enthusiasms. There are plenty of places to get that.

There’s one place to get what National Review does, and this is it. Under the gimlet-eyed management of Jack Fowler, we run a pretty tight ship, but those nickels and dimes add up. We may fly coach, but we do first-class journalism, and it costs money to make that happen. We’ve been going out of business for 60 years — with your help, we’ll keep up the fight, and laugh while we’re fighting, for the next 60 years.

— Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.