One of William F. Buckley Jr.’s most famous statements, that National Review “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it,” is often misunderstood as a kind of stand-pat-ism, a mere recalcitrance. Not so. NR was not prepared to accept a status quo of “coexistence” with the “satanic communism” that in 1955 reigned over two of the world’s largest nations, as well as many others. Nor was it willing to sit idly by while “the conformity of the intellectual cliques, . . . in education as well as the arts,” sought “to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies.”
Soviet communism, we have since dispensed with. It is in the latter regard, of “modish fads and fallacies” at home, that Buckley successor Rich Lowry aptly invokes his predecessor’s words in today’s webathon appeal. Buckley might have recognized the fads and fallacies of today against which we range ourselves as a kind of mainstreaming and institutionalizing of Myra Breckinridge–ism. It’s most evident in the month of June, now claimed entirely by the forces of what we are urged to call “Pride.” But as National Review‘s reporting has made clear, the forces of pride have nothing to be proud of lately: schools poisoned by child-directed gender theory; minors’ lives ruined by premature, body-altering surgeries; a wholesale assault on tradition (especially Christian tradition) that is not content to drench this country with its ugly flags but also imposes on her embassies in other lands the same aesthetic and moral ugliness, reducing a noble nation to a wanton exporter of woke ideology.
It is all nonsense, and we won’t have any of it. Like many of NR’s past antagonists, the vile votaries of pride fancy themselves inevitable. Well, more and more Americans fancy them not, if this year’s backlash is any indication. We intend to prove it, and to give this counter-reaction teeth. But to do that, we need your continuing help. So please consider donating to National Review, so that we can continue standing athwart — not just standing pat.
