Free Republic

The 80-year-old book that explains Elon Musk and tech’s new right-wing tiltThe long shadow of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. Since the launch of the so-called “Twitter Files” — Elon Musk’s self-styled exposé of the alleged excesses of the “woke” managers of Twitter before he bought it — there’s been a lively debate over what exactly Musk is trying to accomplish. His statements clearly indicate that he sees himself as being engaged in some kind of culture war — “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” as he tweeted on Monday morning. But what does the...

“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...

Years before becoming senior editor of National Review, James Burnham wrote a book titled The Machiavellians (1943). Consistent with Machiavelli, the work studies not how things should be, but how they really are: Burnham reduced all political relationships to power. Governments — without exception — exert power against those whom they rule. Seeming humanitarian words disguise the real intent of the rulers. Only by resisting can the people exert power against the government. This must be done in order to protect freedom.

The Buckley Rule has been much invoked in recent weeks, in this space and elsewhere, and on almost every occasion it has been both misquoted and misapplied. As one who was present at the formulation, I feel obliged to record the “originalist” intention. It was the winter of 1964 and the unresolved question at NR editorial meetings, week to week, was this: Whom should the magazine support for the Republican presidential nomination? To outsiders, the question would have seemed all but settled. Issue by issue, NR gave every appearance of being all in for Barry Goldwater. Heck, there were those...