Posted on 08/30/2021 12:09:43 PM PDT by BurgessKoch
There were rumors in the summer of 2018 that an audiotape was circulating that would send shockwaves through the think tanks of Washington and the conservative intellectual movement in particular. A top Google executive had been recorded telling his fellow employees that Google generously donated to conservative think tanks and magazines to dampen criticism of their anti-conservative bias. In essence, Google was buying off Conservatism Inc. and the GOP establishment to stay silent while Google monitored, harassed, and excluded Trump supporters. If true, the tape sounded like a smoking gun: incontrovertible evidence of the corruption and double-dealing of Conservatism Inc. that would permanently discredit it with Republican voters.
I was told that the tape had been offered as an exclusive to the Wall Street Journal. Months went by, and nothing happened. (There were rumors during that time that Big Tech lobbyists were trying very hard to get the Wall Street Journal to kill the story.) Then I began to get a series of messages from various anonymous sources that the organizations that were guilty of taking Google money to stay silent included: the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Cato Institute, CPAC, the Weekly Standard and the National Review. (A weak article appeared on September 27th by John McKinnon in the Wall Street Journal but it hardly mentioned the tape or its implications.) This was, needless to say, a huge story: was it possible that the entire conservative intellectual movement was being bought off by Big Tech companies?
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(Excerpt) Read more at emeralddb3.substack.com ...
David French was himself removed from the magazine a few months later! Where did he go? Well, he went to work for Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes and their little newsletter of course. The three of them were now free to plummet into new depths of unpopularity together. The most intellectually bankrupt and vitriolic of the Never Trumpers had finally been thrown into the dustbin of history.Did the editors of the National Review learn anything from this debacle? Of course not. The feckless Rich Lowry recently handed the magazine over to the world’s only living Evan McMullin voter Ramesh Ponnuru — who was absolutely nobody’s choice to steer the magazine back to popularity. (If anything, Ramesh Ponnuru represents an even greater slide into snide effeminacy than Lowry, and few thought that was possible.) Defeat seems to be the brand for these boys. In any culture war, Rich Lowry and the gang have always been the first to stand athwart history, crying: "We surrender first!” They’ve been so weak and defeatist during the Trump years that a year's subscription to the magazine could be marketed as an estrogen supplement.
I wondered where National Review got its financing. It certainly wasn’t from subscribers. I figured Soros was involved.
NR sold out shortly after WFB passed on.
Maybe, although I think most except the hardened Libertarians like Friedman were pro-life, which before Trump was NEVER reined in.
They killed this magazine. Buckley always said he want the best conservative “THAT CAN GET ELECTED” and was pragmatic. Buckley would not have declared war on Trump like these spoiled kids did.
I subscribed to National Review from 1977 to maybe 1992. It was getting past its pull date by then. Instead of criticizing Bush’s abandonment of Reagan’s policies it was already becoming a neoconservative rag.
“WFB should have done a better job in selecting his successors.”
Buckley owns the blame. He’s the one who selected Rich Lowry as his successor in 1997.
“When Buckley fired Sobran and Francis.”
That’s when we knew NR was dead. Chronicles filled some of the void.
“For the record, I was not a fan of Krauthammer. He was a blowhard and when he came on, I changed the channel.”
Your instincts are sound. Krauthammer was a liberal who wrote speeches for Walter Mondale.
Funny how his promoters in the alleged conservative media never asked him about his “conversion”, assuming that the dimwits even knew what his past was. But then there really wasn’t any conversion. Neoconservatives were simply liberal opportunists who relabeled themselves in order to gain power and influence in the Republican Party. Worked for Bush junior.
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