“Buckley wasn’t who a lot of us thought he was towards the end.
He erred when he fired Sobran and Francis, in my opinion.”
Exactly. And that was far worse than error. It was capitulation to some influential neocons who had always despised actual conservatives. They still do.
But Buckley is to blame for the ruin of National Review. It was WFB who turned over his magazine to the useless sissy Rich Lowry. It only has gotten worse over time.
I remember hearing that Buckley had a sister who played a much bigger role in running NR than he did, back when it featured great writers. For me that was late ‘70s to maybe 1989. I suspect that NR went to hell after she retired or died.
Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Chilton Williamson and some other NR refugees migrated over to Chronicles magazine and it became the redoubt for paleo and populist conservatives. The roots of MAGA were there 30 years ago.
I went to some NR fundraiser in Newport Beach in the early 1990s when we in California were battling illegal immigration with Prop 187. That NR crowd was utterly indifferent to what we were trying to do, just like the Bush GOP toadies that they had become.
Yep, I subscribed from 80-89, it was a good read then. But then again, so was the WSJ editorial page.