Today is National Review’s 53rd birthday. We’ve come a long way over the course of half a century — many of those years spent crying in the wilderness. But what the late, great William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in the magazine’s inaugural Publisher Statement remains our lodestar today:

We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn’t enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D’s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.

Needless to say, Planet Gore hasn’t been around for the full 53 years. After all, Al Gore invented the Internet some years after the quintessential National Review president — Ronald Reagan — left office. Still, we here have reason to celebrate.

Hopefully, you’ll do so, too — and by celebrating right reason. Your donation to National Review Online will help keep the lights on here at Planet Gore, and our home fires burning bright through the long, cold winter ahead. So give all you can. It’s a far sounder investment than carbon offsets.