From a $300 contributor to our current, ongoing fundraising drive (the one that is on account of a little lawsuit):
You’ve had my back thousands of times.
Long before there were conservative bloggers on an internet, Fox News on TV, Rush on the radio, and before Ronald Reagan had the bully pulpit of being President Reagan, you were a bi-weekly intellectual lifeline, and balm for the spirit in the mailbox.
I don’t think younger conservatives realize HOW LONELY it could be in those days, especially for traditionally-minded kids who were the first generation of their family to step into the maelstrom of the university then. 1968? Talk about the belly of the beast!
Looking back, I remember how buoyant and excited I felt every time NR made its entrance at my front door. So suffused was it by the spirit of those who crafted it ,the physical magazine itself was elevated, and became more than its mere paper and ink. A post-modern mass media age with the habitual ironic smirk and sneer it increasingly wears like a death rictus could never understand those feelings. My Mom and Dad loved NR too; to them it was a real revelation!
I can never express enough gratitude to the primary intellectual guides and friends whom I encountered way back then : Bill Buckley and all his wide NR family, right up there with Etienne Gilson, and Jacques Maritain. Not bad company, all in all !
This, all by way of saying, DADGUM (as Walter Johnson used to say) STRAIGHT, I’VE GOT YOUR BACK, NR !