ALAS! National Review stands athwart history and yells . . . and nobody listens

“People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), “are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.” Williamson is one of the bright young writers of NR and NRO, presided over by Rich Lowry (or is it Richard now?) who have made National Review increasingly irrelevant to modern American conservatism. Williamson’s estimation of Fox News viewers resembles Hillary Clinton’s description of populist conservatives as “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s snide remark about those voters who cling to their religion and guns. Bill Buckley (who famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 persons in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard) is probably turning over in his grave.

It is hard to pinpoint when things went awry with what was once a great magazine that regularly published James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Russell Kirk, William Rusher, Will Herberg, Michael Novak, Joseph Sobran, D. Keith Mano, John O’Sullivan, and so many other great writers. Perhaps, like Bill Kristol and his crowd of “#NeverTrumpers,” NR’s editors succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome. And perhaps it is generational -- the Rich Lowry generation of writers and editors have been shaped to some extent by the same decaying Western culture that has afflicted our society at large.

Williamson’s article is another “hit piece” on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, whose television program, as Williamson admits, reaches a greater audience in one evening than National Review reaches in twenty years. Williamson decries what he calls the “cable news bubble,” and the “fractured media landscape,” and then criticizes “modern right-wing Internet journalism.”

NR goes the way of all ungrounded flesh - the the Left.

“Conservatism” (tyranny of the status quo) was ever the answer - only pointed to the answer.

The answer for America is

1) faith in God not in man or his government, and

2) restoration of our Free Constitutional Republic (blow up the status quo)

Let’s try this again...

NR goes the way of all ungrounded flesh - to the Left.

“Conservatism” (tyranny of the status quo) was never the answer - only pointed to the answer.

The answer for America is

1) faith in God not in man or his government, and

2) restoration of our Free Constitutional Republic (blow up the status quo)

"Williamson decries what he calls the “cable news bubble,” and the “fractured media landscape,” and then criticizes “modern right-wing Internet journalism.”

This is incoherent. He criticizes the cable news "bubble" - suggesting it isolates people in their own separate worlds - and then criticizes the "fractured media landscape," implying that too many different voices are being heard.

In reality, people who visit a site like this are exposed to far more points of view than people who rely on one newspaper or one television outlet. We are exposed to the MSM, foreign news sources, scientific and medical journals, religious media, blogs left and right, and - yes - some fringe sites. Moreover, pretty much every story triggers a debate, and we are not shielded from contrary views.

I think National Review might be on the road to extinction.

————

Thing is, even Rush was a legacy donor and this was after they stood against Trump in 2016. These publications have old money behind them, so they continue on in their absolute irrelevance. I hadn’t thought of that publication in a few years

Actually, I think it is more accurate to say that,

“People who spend a lot of time in front of the TV watching anything, be it any news channel, sitcom, reality show, TV series, etc. are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.”

I rarely watch any TV. Maybe an hour per week at most and find I am much more content, happy and positive outlook on life and the world around me. I also don’t miss being bombarded by commercials trying to condition or convince me that white people are evil and black are not simply better than the rest of us but also that their ghetto culture is cool.

"the fractured media landscape"

This sounds like an argument for censorship, for the imposition of a mandatory consensus on all issues. It sounds like globalism, and that Williamson no longer believes there is a distinctly conservative way of looking at things, but that his type of conservativism is now indistinguishable from the mainstream consensus. In arguing against "right-wing" media, Williamson is arguing against the need for a magazine like National Review.

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