National Review, reformed

Crying "bleep!"

Dear National Review reader:

As you have no doubt noticed, our magazine has gotten cheekier of late, as when Senior Editor Charles C.W. Cooke recently referred to the President with an epithet that — our editor-at-large Kathryn Jean Lopez informed us in no uncertain terms — had never been permitted in our pages before.

A bold choice — but the times require boldness. The federal government has been captured by the Deep State and, quite possibly (the jury is still out), the Lizard People. The Democrats of the Democrat Party have all become pedophiles and the vaccines we once thought innocent and — can you imagine? — healthful are microchip poisons with which Big Tech hopes to make us communist slaves.

Were you surprised to read that? We have to confess that lately we often surprise ourselves! This is not your father’s National Review!  

It has been a long time coming. For years we were so shocked by the rise of President Donald Trump (who, we must make clear, we do not endorse for the 2024 Republican nomination, because he is so pro-gay) that we became timid and — I guess we can confess it now — wimpy about defending real conservative values.

Why? We are ashamed to admit it: Because those values were no longer represented by the same stuffy old conservatives we’d grown up with, but were instead championed by vital “New Jacks” like President Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Charlie Kirk, Joe Rogan, the Proud Boys, popular rapper Happy Hitler, and other new voices we have come to admire and respect.

Chalk it up to the Washington cocktail parties that were, along with the National Review cruises, our only contact with other human beings, which warped our understanding of true conservatism. (Kudos to Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has broadened our horizons by introducing us to some real modern-day conservatives in his Sedevacantist Catholic men’s group. Now when we hear the expression “more Catholic than the Pope,” it has a whole new meaning!)

As “old-school” conservatives we were taught to fear change. But over the past few years, when so many of you were cancelling your subscriptions, failing to sign up for our cruises, and filling our comments boxes with abuse, we have learned how wrong we were.

Change, we have learned, can be good when it’s conservative — in, for example, the recent Supreme Court decisions, and in the energetic, and certainly not awkward, actions of Florida dreamboat very-conservative Governor Ron DeSantis, which have certainly “changed” what a lot of Americans, including ourselves, thought of as civil rights — especially when it comes to the you-know-whats.*

In fact, that’s what the big story in our next issue is all about.

For years the world has thought of our Founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., as some kind of a sissy who favored big words and fancy manners over the he-man behavior that is the hallmark of true conservatism. We confess that we, too, have long been prey to the same misunderstanding.

But in “The Bill ‘Butch’ Buckley I Knew,” Simon Ypres-Bugger, a legendary copy-editor and lifelong friend of the great man, sets the record straight. Here’s an excerpt:

Bill was not the stuffed shirt people make him out to be. He loved watching sports on the television, and drinking beers working men drank, such as Piels Real Draft. And oh, how he did carouse! Many’s the night Pat had to come downstairs and tell us to pipe down. He was verbally abusive of her, of course, and oftimes would brag to us that the marks Pat explained away as plastic surgery sequelae were actually bruises he visited upon her during sex. When recounting such stories in ribald terms he would savagely pound his chest and yodel.

Neither was Bill afraid to speak his mind when the censorious David Susskinds and John Chancellors of the world were out of earshot. He once told me, as we refreshed ourselves at his exquisitely furnished home bar, that his favored term for Martin Luther King “rhymes with this,” and then held aloft a jigger. No doubt the woke young will fail to see the humor, but men who have lived, really lived, in editorial offices where one pounded one’s manual typewriter like a man and sexual harassment was not merely permitted but encouraged, will roar with laughter…

You’ll certainly want to hear Ypres-Bugger’s account of how “standing athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!”” was originally “Bleeping athwart bleep, yelling bleep!” This, and everything else in this story, is completely unexpurgated in the subscribers’ edition — which will remain available to you if you click the link below within the next six hours!

Remember: If you think we’re hustling you, think of how you used to feel that way when you got emails exactly like this from Donald Trump. You certainly changed your mind about that — and we’re confident you’ll change your mind about this.

Yours in Christ,
Rich Lowry
Editor, National Review

[*Heads up: In a future issue the “you-know-whats” will be explicitly named – another, even more shocking change in editorial policy! And you can be part of it! Subscribers can click here to enter a raffle for a chance to read the very-politically-incorrect words in the audio version of our “Calling a Bleep a Bleep” issue, and also get lunch and an autographed selfie with Roseanne Barr!]