Nat Rev bak

---

merri ok

---

an 10 25

National Review Senior writer Noah Rothman blasted Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ embrace of MAGA influencer Tucker Carlson, and the alternative media host’s “friendly interview with avowed racist Nick Fuentes.”

After Carlson posted his interview with Fuentes Monday, conservatives urged the foundation to distance itself from Carlson due to Fuentes’s being the founder of a group of internet trolls that praise Hitler and white Christian nationalism.

But that’s not what Roberts did, said Rothman.

“My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always,” Roberts said instead. “When it serves the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”

Rothman called this a “strawman — and a familiar one, at that.”

IFrame Content

“It gets a beating whenever rank Jew hatred encounters even the mildest dissent, allowing purveyors of the world’s oldest hate to retreat into a more defensible posture,” Rothman argued. “‘We were only critiquing the geopolitical entity of Israel, and your obsession with one of many nation-states marks YOU as the monomaniac here!’ The notion that those who object to anti-Jewish slurs insist upon ‘reflexive’ — read, thoughtless and tribalistic — support for the Israeli government’s every act is false.”

Additionally, said Rothman, Israel’s military policies did not inspire Roberts’s statement. It was “Carlson’s generous efforts to elevate the profile of an unapologetic racist and antisemite” that is the issue to which Roberts is responding.

Equally cowardly is Roberts’ attempt to “evade direct engagement with the subject he pretended to address” by swearing off “cancelling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians,” said Rothman.

“I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But cancelling him is not the answer either,” Roberts argued. “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas in debate.”

Only there was no disagreement with Fuentes by Carson.

“This, too, is preposterous,” Rothman said. “… Carlson conspicuously declined to challenge Fuentes’s ideas on any substantive level,” as Carson has happily done for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

“As we wrote, amid the rise of right-wing antisemitism, it is ‘a time for choosing.’ This video suggests Roberts is making his choice,” said Rothman.

Read the National Review article at this link.

---

NEW

---

defends alex epstein racism:

David Harsanyi (born circa 1970) is an American conservative journalist, columnist, author, and editor. He wrote for the Denver Post for eight years, then Blaze, and then he edited for The Federalist for more than six years. He became a senior writer at National Review, and has returned to The Federalist as a senior editor. He is the author of five books.^[1]

Personal life

Harsanyi was born in New York City in about 1970.^[2] His parents were Jews who emigrated from Hungary to Rome in 1969, then to New York.^[2] His father had trained as a chemist in Hungary, but without English skills he found work in New York as a diamond setter; his mother took business courses and became an accountant. Harsanyi is the eldest of three brothers.^[2]

Career

In his early career, Harsanyi worked as a sports-journalist, covering baseball for Sports Illustrated and the Associated Press.^[2] He has also written columns for "The Wall Street Journal, Reason, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Christian Science Monitor, The Jerusalem Post, The Globe and Mail, The Hill", and he "worked for more than a decade as an editor, reporter and producer at media outlets such as the Associated Press, (and) the New York Daily News".^[3] He was hired as a press secretary for the Republican Jewish Coalition^[2] prior to writing a column for eight years at The Denver Post. Harsanyi was hired by Blaze Media^[4] and then was a senior editor at the online publication, The Federalist, writing more than 800 columns. He became a senior writer at National Review in 2019. He left National Review in May 2022 to return to writing for The Federalist.^[5]

As of 2022, Harsanyi has appeared nine times on C-SPAN.^[6]

Critical response

When Harsanyi began writing columns for the Denver Post, he was the subject of angry threats from readers. One reader threatened to take Harsanyi's head off and mount it on his wall. According to Michael Roberts of Westword, "Taxidermic threats are new for Harsanyi, whose pre-Post columns generally ran in publications that tilted to the right. 'When I was writing for the National Review, I had solely conservatives reading me,' he says, 'so I didn't get any nasty letters.' At the Post, however, he's been positively bombarded with negative missives during his first few weeks on the job, with many correspondents making sweeping generalizations about him based on perceptions of his politics." Roberts said, "Then again, Denver-area readers have had little recent experience with local columnists on the conservative side of the continuum."^[2]

Of Harsanyi's first book, The Nanny State, the Federalist Society said, "Harsanyi argues that when the government intervenes in this overzealous manner, no matter how good the intentions may appear to be, it not only diminishes our ability to make our own choices, but it promotes a culture of dependence that goes against the freedoms we celebrate so earnestly."^[7]

Publishers Weekly's review said "the book would have benefited from more anecdotes and original reporting, instead of incessantly naming overzealous do-gooders. Moreover, Harsanyi barely considers business's role, as these dangerous do-gooders fight fast food and tobacco companies armed with hundreds of millions of marketing dollars. There's not much new, but fellow libertarians may enjoy getting carried away by the flood of Harsanyi's outrage."^[8]

Jeff Minnick wrote of The People Have Spoken,

David Harsanyi offers a controversial thesis: our republic is dying, populism is its murderer, and the democracy replacing the republic will prove itself a dangerous dictator... The People Have Spoken is not a long book... I argued — and will continue to argue — with some of its premises, and I disliked the way the book ended, with no real solution, but Harsanyi's critique did cause me to reconsider the idea of democracy, which we have so eagerly tried to export into places like Iraq and Afghanistan..."^[9]

Of First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, Duke University's Michael C. Munger wrote, "It is not a legalistic argument about the importance of the Second Amendment, but rather a description of the place of guns in American history and culture."^[10]

According to David French, First Freedom "simultaneously serves as a technical, legal, and cultural history — an ambitious effort that could easily bog down in any given American period. But Harsanyi smartly balances detail and overview."^[11]

Introducing an interview with Harsanyi about First Freedom, Bob Zadek wrote, "Today there are more guns than people in the U.S. — by a lot — thanks in large part to progressives' efforts to restrict our Second Amendment rights... David Harsanyi relays these counter-intuitively findings in his new book".^[12]

The New York Times wrote that Harsanyi's opinions are among "differing perspectives worth your time".^[13]

Selected publications

Books

Harsanyi, David (September 18, 2007). Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children. Crown. ISBN 978-0-7679-2845-8.
Harsanyi, David (March 4, 2013). Obama's Four Horsemen: The Disasters Unleashed by Obama's Reelection.Regnery Publishing. ISBN 978-1-62157-067-7.
Harsanyi, David (March 10, 2014). The People Have Spoken (and They Are Wrong): The Case Against Democracy. Regnery Publishing. ISBN 978-1-62157-202-2.
Harsanyi, David (October 2, 2018). First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-5011-7402-5.
Harsanyi, David (October 26, 2021). Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0063066014.

Articles

Harsanyi, David (April 15, 2021). "Fake News Is Real". National Review. Retrieved May 9, 2021.

Harsanyi, David (April 12, 2021). "This Just In: The Republican Party Is Dying — Again". National Review. Retrieved May 9, 2021.

Harsanyi, David (January 13, 2021). "All America Had to Do Was Not Be Crazy". National Review. Retrieved May 9, 2021.

Reference

---

an ah 9 22

Although some progressives believe that President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel some student loan debt doesn’t go far enough, a long list of Republicans — from U.S. senators to right-wing think tanks to state attorneys general — have accused the president of overreaching and are looking for ways to undermine Biden’s plan. The National Review’sCharles C.W. Cooke is even calling for Congress to “impeach and convict President Biden.”

Student loan debt has become a major problem in the United States, where it isn’t uncommon for students to graduate from college with six-figure debts that they will spend decades paying off with interest. This debt affects a variety of decisions that college graduates make as young adults, from deciding whether or not to have kids to being able to buy a house. Some older Baby Boomers, according to common complaints from Millennials and members of Generation Z, fail to comprehend the severity of the problem — as they graduated from college at a time when tuition was much more affordable than it is now.

Journalists Tony Romm, Jeff Stein and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel take a look at GOP reactions to Biden’s student loan debt plan in an article published by the Washington Post on September 1, stressing that some of those Republicans are considering lawsuits.

“Republican state attorneys generaland other leading conservatives are quietly exploring a slew of potential lawsuits targeting President Biden’s plan to cancel some student debt — challenges that could limit or invalidate the policy before it takes full effect,” the Post reporters explain. “In recent days, a number of GOP attorneys general from states including Arizona, Missouri and Texas have met privately to discuss a strategy that could see multiple cases filed in different courts around the country, according to a person familiar with their thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential talks.”

Romm, Stein and Douglas-Gabriel continue, “Other influential conservatives — including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and allies of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — are mulling their own options as they ratchet up criticism of Biden’s debt-relief plan, two additional people familiar with the matter said. And a conservative advocacy group founded by a major Trump donor said it would file a lawsuit against the policy.”

The Post interviewed John Malcolm, who serves as director of theHeritage Foundation’s Meese Center.The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, has been around 49 years — and its Meese Center was named after Edwin Meese, who served as U.S. attorney general during President Ronald Reagan’s second term and is now 90.

Malcolm told the Post, “The conservative public interest law firms in our network are exploring filing lawsuits against this. They are doing background legal research, trying to find out who might be the most suitable clients for them. They have to find a client with the standing and the gumption to take on a lawsuit. There are several groups in our network who are exploring that right now.”

Biden’s plan would forgive up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt, or as much as $20,000 if the former student also received Pell Grants. Some liberals and progressives were hoping to see larger amounts of student loan debt forgiven, but the centrist Biden believes that $10,000 or $20,000 is a step in the right direction.

The Post interviewed some former college students who have a lot of student loan debt, and they were appalled that Republicans oppose even the modest amounts that Biden favors.

One of those interviewees was 31-year-old Ohio resident Michael Loomus, who dropped out of the University of Toledo and has been struggling to pay down the $11,400 that he owes. Loomus told the Post, “It just seems they are continuously trying to keep borrowers in debt. I don’t make a lot of money.… and before this, it just felt like I’d never pay off my loans.”

---

https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/10/climate-change-no-its-not-97-percent-consensus-ian-tuttle/

no lnx many

POLITICS & POLICY

The 97 Percent Solution

By IAN TUTTLE

October 8, 2015

Unable to address Texas senator Ted Cruz’s questions about “the Pause” — the apparent global-warming standstill, now almost 19 years long — at Tuesday’s meeting of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Sierra Club president Aaron Mair, after an uncomfortable pause of his own, appealed to authority: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists concur and agree that there is global warming and anthropogenic impact,” he stated multiple times.

The relevant exchange begins at 1:39 (though the whole segment is worth watching):

The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive. Last May, the White House tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” A few days later, Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.”

“Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists” say no such thing.

There are multiple relevant questions: (1) Has the earth generally warmed since 1800? (An overwhelming majority of scientists assent to this.) (2) Has that warming been caused primarily by human activity? And, if (1) and (2), is anthropogenic global warming a problem so significant that we ought to take action?

In 2004, University of California-San Diego professor Naomi Oreskes reported that, of 928 scientific abstracts from papers published by refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, “75% . . . either explicitly or implicitly accept[ed] the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.” Also remarkably, the papers chosen excluded several written by prominent scientists skeptical of that consensus. Furthermore, the claims made in abstracts — short summaries of academic papers — often differ from those made in the papers themselves. And Oreskes’s analysis did not take up whether scientists who subscribe to anthropogenic global warming think the phenomenon merits changes in public policy.

RELATED: On Climate, Science and Politics Are Diverging

The “97 percent” statistic first appeared prominently in a 2009 study by University of Illinois master’s student Kendall Zimmerman and her adviser, Peter Doran. Based on a two-question online survey, Zimmerman and Doran concluded that “the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific bases of long-term climate processes” — even though only 5 percent of respondents, or about 160 scientists, were climate scientists. In fact, the “97 percent” statistic was drawn from an even smaller subset: the 79 respondents who were both self-reported climate scientists and had “published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change.” These 77 scientists agreed that global temperatures had generally risen since 1800, and that human activity is a “significant contributing factor.”

A year later, William R. Love Anderegg, a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to determine that “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC [anthropogenic climate change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” The sample size did not much improve on Zimmerman and Doran’s: Anderegg surveyed about 200 scientists.

#share#Surely the most suspicious “97 percent” study was conducted in 2013 by Australian scientist John Cook— author of the 2011 book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand and creator of the blog Skeptical Science (subtitle: “Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.”). In an analysis of 12,000 abstracts, he found “a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.” “Among papers taking a position” is a significant qualifier:

Only 34 percent of the papers Cook examined expressed any opinion about anthropogenic climate change at all. Since 33 percent appeared to endorse anthropogenic climate change, he divided 33 by 34 and — voilà — 97 percent!

When David Legates,a University of Delaware professor who formerly headed the university’s Center for Climatic Research, recreated Cook’s study, he found that “only 41 papers — 0.3 percentof all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent,” endorsed what Cook claimed.Several scientists whose papers were included in Cook’s initial sample also protested that they had been misinterpreted. “Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain,” Legates concluded.

RELATED: Scientists Don’t Actually Know What’s Causing ‘Extreme Weather’]

Studies showing a wider range of opinion often go unremarked. A 2008 survey by two German scientists, Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, found that a significant number of scientists were skeptical of the ability of existing global climate models to accurately predict global temperatures, precipitation, sea-level changes, or extreme weather events even over a decade; they were far more skeptical as the time horizon increased. Most did express concerns about global warming and a desire for “immediate action to mitigate climate change” — but not 97 percent.

#related#

A 2012 poll of American Meteorological Society members also reported a diversity of opinion. Of the 1,862 members who responded (a quarter of the organization), 59 percent stated that human activity was the primary cause of global warming, and 11 percent attributed the phenomenon to human activity and natural causes in about equal measure, while just under a quarter (23 percent) said enough is not yet known to make any determination. Seventy-six percent said that warming over the next century would be “very” or “somewhat” harmful, but of those, only 22 percent thought that “all” or a “large” amount of the harm could be prevented “through mitigation and adaptation measures.”

And according to a study of 1,868 scientists working in climate-related fields, conducted just this year by the PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, three in ten respondents said that less than half of global warming since 1951 could be attributed to human activity, or that they did not know.

Given the politics of modern academia and the scientific community, it’s not unlikely that most scientists involved in climate-related studies believe in anthropogenic global warming, and likely believe, too, that it presents a problem. However, there is no consensus approaching 97 percent. A vigorous, vocal minority exists. The science is far from settled.

IAN TUTTLE is the former Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at the National Review Institute. @iptuttle

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/conservative-thought-on-college-campuses/

Eric Kaufmann published last month a perplexing account of ideological diversity on college campuses for National Review. He opens the piece by noting that, in a recent survey of female college students, only 6 percent said they would date a Trump supporter, which, as Kaufmann see it, "reveals the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism." Kaufman then segues into an account of discrimination against conservatives and the problem of liberal over-representation. This, he maintains, like race-based discrimination, merits federal intervention. Solution? Mandating "viewpoint neutrality" in higher education.

Kaufmann's piece was roundly and rightly criticized for its troubling implications regarding free speech as well its bizarre inferences about dating and authoritarianism. I won't rehearse those arguments. But there is something else worth noticing.

Many commentators, including some on the left, have uncritically accepted two of the premises underlying Kaufmann's argument. One, that social justice is increasingly illiberal. Two, that ideological imbalance on college campuses is a societal problem.

For example, in his critique of Kaufmann, New York's Jonathan Chait writes, "Despite veering off immediately into absurdity, Kaufmann does identify a real problem. Many elite American institutions, most dramatically but not exclusively in academia, are becoming ideological monocultures in which commitment to progressive goals is becoming a formal or informal criteria for membership within the community."

This description of a "monoculture" echoes concerns previously voiced by writers from across the political spectrum. In 2019, Nicholas Kristof wrote, "Yet while I admire campus activism for its commitment to social justice, I also worry that it sometimes becomes infused with a prickly intolerance, embracing every kind of diversity except one: ideological diversity." Similarly, the signatories of the 2020*Harper*'s letter, ranging from leftists to conservatives, also critiqued the social left's "restriction of debate." In this same vein, George Packer's most recent piece in The Atlantic characterized current social justice in America as bordering on tyranny.

When writers—from the left, center or right—reference "ideological conformity" or "monoculture," they often offer little in the way of details. References to homogeneity of thought surely sound troubling. But it all remains very abstract. What's missing is concrete description. So let's unpack these claims a bit to see the box is empty.

Democracy relies on debate between citizens. This does not presume every debate is worthwhile, though. Nor does it imply ideological conformity is always bad. We should not, for example, be concerned about conformity concerning the tooth fairy or the shape of Earth. It's good to agree that the human body is made of cells, that Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and that 2 + 2 = 4. Conformity is often the result of the truth.

Some might protest. The problem of ideological conformity doesn't revolve around objective facts, some say; rather, it's about the lack of representation of conservative thought. OK, but be specific. What conservative thought has been silenced?

Critics of "monoculture" aren't concerned that the work of Milton Friedman or Frederick Hayek is excluded from economics courses—such a concern would be false. In 2021 alone, Google Scholar yields around 8,000 results for articles mentioning these authors. Nor should we worry that anti-capitalist sentiment is taking over college campuses, given the sheer number of works churned out extolling the merits of markets. Universities from Georgetown to Cornell to Texas Tech have whole institutes devoted to this subject. Libertarians, conservatives and liberals all participate.

So one has to ask, again, what conservative thought is being ignored exactly? More likely, the complaint is that college classrooms lack positive representations of the current political beliefs of the Republican Party. And herein lies a small problem: the political beliefs of the GOP are, in fact, diametric to the entire project of education.

Just to make a quick list: according to current Republican belief, climate change is, at best, a natural phenomenon unaffected by human behavior and hardly worth worrying about. More often, it doesn't exist. The party also continues to deny the results of a fair and secure democratic election. Republicans have also argued that masks are an ineffective public health measure, covid is just like the flu and George Soros, a Jewish billionaire, pays protesters who disagree with Republican Party policy. Within the party, doubts still remain about whether Barack Obama was born in the United States.

The list goes on. Just the past few weeks have seen Fox News run endless anti-vaccination commentary, including the assertion that guidelines are akin to apartheid. Breitbart featured headlines on the Marxist threat to Taylor Swift. The Federalist published deep dives into Obama's potential connections to critical race theory. The American Conservative published a piece arguing the mass graves of Native children in Canada were "good, actually" as they were a product of a "sincere concern for the salvation of their souls." In the Meantime, Claire Lehmann, the editor of Quillette, spent her week tweeting about Black women's nails as a signal of possible drug abuse.

Given all this, why exactly should we be worried about Republican thought being less well-represented on college campuses? Are we concerned that students won't learn enough falsehoods? That they won't be exposed to enough racism? That covid denialism isn't being taught in biology class? That psychologists aren't seriously considering debates over whether or not Black people are intellectually inferior?

Or maybe conformity really boils down to colleges and universities recognizing and promoting the scientific consensus that gender is fluid, which aligns with guidance from the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association? Is this the terrifying monoculture?

Look, colleges should be maximally permissive in order to protect academic freedom. They should do everything they can to be ideologically blind while hiring. No one should try to ascertain an applicant's ideology. Trump supporters should be hired just as readily as Biden supporters. No professor should be sanctioned for teaching conservative economic theories. Nor should any professor get in trouble for being skeptical of critical race theory or Marxism or any other intellectual framework. However, professors should be sanctioned when they fail to do the basic requirement of their job: education. Modern conservative thought is antithetical to this project.

So do I fear this liberal monoculture in academia? No. One, academia is actually quite ideologically diverse. Two, in cases where "ideological conformity" does exist—such as "the earth is round" and "racism is bad"—perhaps we shouldn't be that fearful of it.

Overall, if analysts are concerned by the lack of representation of conservative ideology, they should be more explicit about which ideas within the Republican potpourri of falsehoods and bigotry should be adopted in college curricula.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

History

Early years

In 1953, Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, which sought to trace an intellectual bloodline from Edmund Burke^[4] to the Old Right in the early 1950s. This challenged the popular notion that no coherent conservative tradition existed in the United States.^[5] A young William F. Buckley, Jr. was greatly influenced by it.

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_F._Buckley,_Jr._1985.jpg "Enlarge")

William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review

Two years before, Buckley published God and Man at Yale, criticizing his alma mater for its abandonment of its founding principles. Buckley, a Skull and Bones secret society member, champion debater and former editor of The Yale Daily News, soon rose to national prominence. After a short stint in the CIA, he toured the country debating for The Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), contributed to The American Mercury, and soon decided to start his own magazine.

Buckley first tried to purchase Human Events, but was turned down. He then met Willi Schlamm, the ex-communist editor of The Freeman; they would spend the next two years raising the $300,000 necessary to start their own weekly magazine, originally to be called National Weekly. (A magazine holding the trademark to the name prompted the change to National Review.) The statement of intentions read:

Middle-of-the-Road, qua Middle of the Road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant. We shall recommend policies for the simple reason that we consider them right (rather than “non-controversial”); and we consider them right because they are based on principles we deem right (rather than on popularity polls)...The New Deal revolution, for instance, could hardly have happened save for the cumulative impact of The Nation and The New Republic, and a few other publications, on several American college generations during the twenties and thirties.

On November 19, 1955, Buckley’s magazine would take shape. Buckley assembled an eclectic group of writers: traditionalists, Catholic intellectuals, libertarians and ex-Communists. They included: Russell Kirk (the traditionalist admirer of Burke and author of The Conservative Mind), ex-Marxists James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and Willmoore Kendall, and Catholics L. Brent Bozell, and Gary Wills. Whittaker Chambers,the Communist-party defector and former Time editor who had given the key congressional testimony against Alger Hiss in the latter's espionage hearing, was also invited to join. Chambers initially declined, but eventually became a senior editor. In the magazine’s founding statement Buckley wrote:^[6]

Let’s Face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that of course; if National Review is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

National Review aimed to make conservative ideas respectable, in an age when the dominant view of conservative thought was expressed by Lionel Trilling in 1950:^[7]

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation... the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not... express themselves in ideas but only... in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Buckley attacked Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, as part of his efforts to build a respectable conservative movement:

Mr. Buckley's first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks. He marginalized the anti-Semites, the John Birchers, the nativists and their sort.^[8]

Buckley and Frank Meyer also promoted the idea of fusionism, whereby different schools of conservatives, including libertarians, would work together to combat what were seen as their common opponents.

National Review promoted Barry Goldwater heavily during the early 1960s. Buckley and others involved with the magazine took a major role in the "Draft Goldwater" movement in 1960 and the 1964 presidential campaign. Buckley also helped found Young Americans for Freedom;^[9] it and National Review spread his vision of conservatism throughout the country.^[10]

The early National Review faced high-profile defections from both left and right. Garry Wills broke with NR and became a popular liberal—yet still religious—commentator. Buckley’s brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., who ghostwrote The Conscience of a Conservative for Barry Goldwater, left and started the short-lived traditionalist Catholic magazine, Triumph in 1966.

After Goldwater

After Goldwater's defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Buckley and National Review continued to champion the idea of a conservative movement, which was increasingly embodied in Ronald Reagan. Reagan, a longtime subscriber to National Review, first became politically prominent during Goldwater's campaign. National Reviewsupported his challenge to President Gerald Ford in 1976 and his successful 1980 campaign.

During the 1980s NR called for tax cuts, supply-side economics, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and support for President Reagan's foreign policy against the Soviet Union. The magazine criticized the Welfare state and would support the Welfare reform proposals of the 1990s. The magazine also regularly criticized President Bill Clinton. It first embraced, then rejected, Pat Buchanan in his political campaigns. A lengthy 1996 National Review editorial called for a "movement toward" drug legalization.^[11]

[edit] Current editor and contributors

The magazine's current editor is Rich Lowry. Many of the magazine's commentators are affiliated with think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute. Prominent guest authors have included Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Sarah Palin in the online and paper edition.

---

https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/11/17/the-road-from-serfdom/

Milton Friedman had no idea that his six-day trip to Chile in March 1975 would generate so much controversy. He was invited to Santiago by a group of Chilean economists who over the previous decades had been educated at the University of Chicago, in a program set up by Friedman’s colleague, Arnold Harberger.Two years after the overthrow of Allende, with the dictatorship unable to get inflation under control, the “Chicago Boys” began to gain real influence in General Augusto Pinochet’s military government. They recommended the application of what Friedman had already taken to call “shock treatment” or a “shock program” immediately halting the printing of money to finance the budget deficit, cutting state spending twenty to twenty-five percent, laying off tens of thousands of government workers, ending wage and price controls, privatizing state industries, and deregulating capital markets. “Complete free trade,” Friedman advised.

Friedman and Harberger were flown down to “help to sell” the plan to the military junta, which despite its zealous defense of the abstraction of free enterprise was partial to corporatismand the maintenance of a large state sector. Friedman gave a series of lectures and met with Pinochet for 45 minutes, where the general “indicated very little indeed about his own or the government’s feeling.” Although he noted that the dictator, responsible for the torture of tens of thousands of Chileans, seemed “sympathetically attracted to the idea of a shock treatment.”

Friedman returned home to a firestorm of protest, aggravated by his celebrity as a Newsweek columnist and ongoing revelations about Washington’s and corporate America’s involvement in the overthrow of Allende. Not only hadNixon, the CIA, and ITT, along with other companies, plotted to destabilize Allende’s “democratic road to socialism,” but now a renowned University of Chicago economist, whose promotion of the wonders of the free market was heavily subsidized by corporations such as Bechtel,Pepsico, Getty, Pfizer, General Motors, W.R. Grace, and Firestone,was advising the dictator who overthrew him on how to complete the counterrevolution at the cost of skyrocketing unemployment among Chile’s poor.

The New York Times identified Friedman as the “guiding light of the junta’s economic policy,” while columnist Anthony Lewis asked: if “pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?” At his university, the Spartacus Youth League pledged to “drive Friedman off campus through protest and exposure,” while the student government, replicating their own version of the Church Commission hearings that was just then investigating US crimes in Chile, convened a “Commission of Inquiry on the Friedman/Harberger Issue.” Everywhere in the press the name Friedman was paired with the adjectives “draconian” and “shock,” with small but persistent protests dogging the professor at many of his public appearances.

In letters to various editors and detractors, Friedman downplayed the extent of his involvement in Chile, fingering Harberger as more directly involved in the mentoring of Chilean economists. While defensive, he nevertheless reveled in the controversy and the frisson of being ushered into speaking engagements via kitchens and back doors to avoid demonstrators. He enjoyed exposing the double standard of “liberal McCarthyism,” pointing out that he was never criticized for giving similar advice to Red China, the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. In recounting an episode when a man was dragged out of the Nobel award ceremony after shouting “down with capitalism, freedom for Chile,” Friedman delighted in noting that the protest backfired, resulting in his receiving “twice as long an ovation” than any other laureate.

Friedman defended his relationship with Pinochet by saying that if Allende had been allowed to remain in office Chileans would have suffered “the elimination of thousands and perhaps mass starvation . . . torture and unjust imprisonment.” But the elimination of thousands, mass hunger, torture and unjust imprisonment were what was taking place in Chile exactly at the moment the Chicago economist was defending his protégé.

Allende’s downfall came because he refused to betray Chile’s long democratic tradition and invoke martial law, yet Friedman nevertheless insisted that the military junta offered “more room for individual initiative and for a private sphere of life” and thus a greater “chance of a return to a democratic society.” It was pure boilerplate, but it did give Friedman a chance to rehearse his understanding of the relationship between capitalism and freedom.

Critics of both Pinochet and Friedman took Chile as proof positive that the kind of free-market absolutism advocated by the Chicago School was only possible through repression.So Friedman countered by redefining the meaning of freedom. Contrary to the prevailing post-WWII belief that political liberty was dependent on some form of mild social leveling, he insisted that “economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom.”

More than his monetarist theorems, this equation of “capitalism and freedom” was his greatest contribution to the rehabilitation of conservatism in the 1970s. Where pre-New Deal conservatives positioned themselves in defense of social hierarchy, privilege, and order, post-WWII conservatives instead celebrated the free market as a venue of creativity and liberty. Such a formulation today stands at the heart of the conservative movement, having been accepted as commonsense by mainline politicians and opinion makers. It is likewise enshrined in Bush’s National Security Strategy, which mentions “economic freedom” more than twice as many times as it does “political freedom.”

While he was in Chile Friedman gave a speech titled “The Fragility of Freedom” where he described the “role in the destruction of a free society that was played by the emergence of the welfare state.” Chile’s present difficulties, he argued, “were due almost entirely to the forty-year trend toward collectivism, socialism and the welfare state . . . a course that would lead to coercion rather than freedom.” The Pinochet regime, he argued, represented a turning point in a protracted campaign, a tearing off of democracy’s false husks to reach true freedom’s inner core. “The problem is not of recent origin,” Friedman wrote in a follow-up letter to Pinochet, but “arises from trends toward socialism that started forty years ago, and reached their logical and terrible climax in the Allende regime.” He praised the general for putting Chile back on the “right track” with the “many measures you have already taken to reverse this trend.”

Friedman understood the struggle to be a long one, and indeed some of the first recruits for the battle of Chile were conscripted decades earlier. With financial funding from the US government’s Point Four foreign aid program and the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics set up scholarship programs in the mid-1950s with Chile’s Catholic and public universities. About one hundred select students between 1957 and 1970 received close, hands-on training, first in an apprenticeship program in Chile and then in post-graduate work in Chicago. In principle, Friedman and his colleagues opposed the kind of developmental largesse that funded the exchange program as a market distortion, yet they took the cash to finance their department’s graduate program. But they also had a more idealistic purpose.

Starting in the 1950s, Latin America, particularly the southern cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, had become a laboratory for developmentalist economics. Social scientists, such as the Argentine Raúl Prebisch from his position as head of the UN’s Economic Commission on Latin America, expanded Keynesianism after John Maynard Keynes, who elaborated the dominant post-WWII economic framework that envisioned an active role for the state in the workings of the market — beyond its focus on managing countervailing cycles of inflation and unemployment to question the terms of international trade. Chronic inflation, according to Prebisch and other Latin American economists, was understood not to be a reflex of any given country’s irresponsible monetary system but a symptom of deep structural inequalities that divided the global economy between the developed and the undeveloped world. Volatile commodity prices and capital investment reinforced first world advantage and third world disadvantage.

Economists and politicians from across the political spectrum accepted the need for state planning, regulation, and intervention. Such ideas not only drove the economic policies of developing nations, but echoed throughout the corridors and conference rooms of the UN and the World Bank, as well as in the non-aligned movement’s 1973 call for a New International Economic Order.

It was the Chicago School’s vision of hell, the New Deal writ large across the world stage. These ideas “fell like a bomb” on those who had long stood against Keynesianism at home only now to see its authority spread globally. The Chilean scholarship program was intended to counter such a vision. “University of Chile economists have been followers of Keynes and Prebisch more than of Marx,” wrote former University of Chicago president and State Department director of overseas education programs William Benton, and “the Chicago influence” will “introduce a third basic viewpoint, that of contemporary ‘market economics.'”

Students returned to Chile not just with a well-rounded education in classical economics but with a burning dedication to carry the faith to benighted lands. They purged the economics departments of their universities of developmentalists and began to set up free-market institutes and think tanks the Center for Social and Economic Studies, for example, and the Foundation for Liberty and Development funded, as their counterparts in the US were, by corporate money.They understood their mission in continental terms, committed, as Chicago alum Ernesto Fontaine put it, “to expand throughout Latin America, confronting the ideological positions which prevented freedom and perpetuated poverty and backwardness.”

The program, which brought up students from universities in Argentina as well, is an example of the erratic nature of both public and private US diplomacy, conforming as it does to competing power interests within American society. At the same time that Kennedy was promoting Alliance for Progress reform capitalism, he was training and funding the men and institutions that would constitute the continent’s dense network of death squads.

At the same time that Chase Manhattan, Chemical, Manufacturers Hanover, and Morgan Guaranty were promoting, through the establishment of the Trilateral Commission, a more conciliatory economic policy in the third world, they were cutting off credit to Chile, making, in accordance with Nixon’s directive, its economy “scream.” And at the same time that every American president from Truman to Nixon was embracing Keynesianism, the University of Chicago’s Economics Department, with financial support from the US government, had turned itself into free-market madrassa that indoctrinated a generation of Latin American economists to spearhead an international capitalist insurgency.

Throughout the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, though, the revolution seemed to be forever deferred. In the late 1960s, the Chicago Boys had drawn up the platform of Allende’s nationalist opponent in the 1970 election, which included many of the proposals that eventually would be implemented under Pinochet. But Allende won, so Chile had to wait. In the meantime, the military junta in Brazil, which took power in 1964, had invited Friedman in 1973 down for advice, which it took for awhile.

A severe recession and skyrocketing unemployment followed. Friedman pronounced this first application of “shock therapy” an “economic miracle.” But the generals, wisely it seems, demurred, returning to its state-directed program of industrialization that, while failing to curb inflation, did lower unemployment and lay the foundations for Brazil’s current economic dominance of Latin America.

Richard Nixon too, early in his first term, showed promise, but then he raised tariffs, introduced wage and price controls and, with an eye to the 1972 election, declared himself a Keynesian and opened up the money spout. Nixon was an “enormous disappointment,” reflected Friedman.

That left Pinochet, not the most reputable of characters but willing to go the distance.Chile became, according to Business Week, a “laboratory experiment” for taming inflation through monetary control, carrying out, said Barrons, the “most important modifications implemented in the developing world in recent times.” American economists may have been writing “treatises” on the “way the world should work, but it is another country that is putting it into effect.”

A month after Friedman’s visit, the Chilean junta announced that inflation would be stopped “at any cost.” The regime cut government spending twenty-seven percent, practically shuttered the national mint, and set fire to bundles of escudos. The state divested from the banking system and deregulated finance, including interest rates. It slashed import tariffs, freed prices on over 2000 products, and removed restrictions against foreign investments.

Pinochet pulled Chile out of a number of alliances with neighboring countries intended to promote regional industrialization, turning his country into a gateway for the introduction of cheap goods into Latin America. Tens of thousands of public workers lost their jobs as the government auctioned off, in what amounted to a spectacular transfer of wealth to the private sector, over four hundred state industries.Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate one hundred percent of their profits, but were given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so. In order to build investor confidence, the escudo was fixed to the dollar. Within four years, nearly thirty percent of all property expropriated not just under Allende but under a previous Alliance for Progress land reform was returned to previous owners. New laws treated labor like any other “free” commodity, sweeping away four decades of progressive union legislation. Health care was privatized, as was the public pension fund.

GNP plummeted thirteen percent, industrial production fell 28 percent, and purchasing power collapsed to forty percent of its 1970 level. One national business after another went bankrupt. Unemployment soared.

Yet by 1978 the economy rebounded, expanding thirty-two percent between 1978 and 1981. Though salary levels remained close to twenty percent below what they were a decade previously, per capita income began to climb again. Perhaps even a better indicator of progress, torture and extrajudicial executions began to taper off. With hindsight, however, it is now clear that the Chicago economists, despite the credit they received for three years of economic growth, had set Chile on the road to near collapse.

The rebound of the economy was a function of the liberalization of the financial system and massive foreign investment. That investment, it turns out, led to a speculative binge, monopolization of the banking system, and heavy borrowing. The deluge of foreign capital did allow the fixed exchange rate to be maintained for a short period. But sharp increases in private debt rising from $2 billion in 1978 to over $14 billion in 1982 — put unsustainable pressure on Chile’s currency. Pegged as it was to the appreciating US dollar, the value of the escudo was kept artificially high, leading to a flood of cheap imports. While consumers took advantage of liberalized credit to purchase TVs, cars, and other high-ticket items, savings shrank, debt increased, exports fell, and the trade deficit ballooned.

In 1982 things fell apart. Copper prices plummeted, accelerating Chile’s balance of trade deficit. GDP plunged fifteen percent, while industrial production rapidly contracted. Bankruptcies tripled and unemployment hit 30 percent. Despite his pledge to hold firm, Pinochet devalued the escudo, devastating poor Chileans who had either availed themselves to liberalized credit to borrow in dollars or who held their savings in escudos. The Central Bank lost forty-five percent of its reserves, while the private banking system collapsed. The crisis forced the state, dusting off laws still on the books from the Allende period, to take over nearly seventy percent of the banking system and reimpose controls on finance, industry, prices and wages.Turning to the IMF for a bailout, Pinochet extended a public guarantee to repay foreign creditors and banks.

But before the crisis of 1982, there were the golden years between 1978 and 1981. Just as the international left flocked to Chile during the Allende period, under Pinochet the country became a mecca for the free-market right. Economists, political scientists, and journalists came to witness the “miracle” first hand, holding up Chile as a model to be implemented throughout the world. Representatives from European and American banks poured into Santiago, paying tribute to Pinochet by restoring credit that was denied the heretic Allende. The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank extolled Chile as a paragon of responsibility, advancing it 46 loans between 1976 and 1986 for over $3.1 billion.

In addition to money men, right-wing activists traveled to Chile in a show of solidarity with the Pinochet regime.Publisher of the National Review William Rusher, along with other cadres who eventually coalesced around Reagan’s 1976 and 1980 bids for the Republican nomination, organized the American-Chilean Council, a solidarity committee to counter critical press coverage in the US of Pinochet. “I was unable to find a single opponent of the regime in Chile,” Rusher wrote after a 1978 pilgrimage, “who believes the Chilean government engages” in torture. As to the “interim human discomfort” caused by radical free-market policies, Rusher believed that “a certain amount of deprivation today, in the interest of a far healthier society tomorrow, is neither unendurable nor necessarily reprehensible.”

Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago professor whose 1944 Road to Serfdom dared to suggest that state planning would produce not “freedom and prosperity” but “bondage and misery,” visited Pinochet’s Chile a number of times. He was so impressed that he held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin there. He even recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete her free-market revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of Chile’s 1982 financial collapse, agreed that Chile represented a “remarkable success” but believed that Britain’s “democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent” make “some of the measures” taken by Pinochet “quite unacceptable.”

Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a “transitional period,” only as long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. “My personal preference,” he told a Chilean interviewer, “leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.” In a letter to the London Times he defended the junta, reporting that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.” Of course, the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet’s regime weren’t talking.

Hayek’s University of Chicago colleague Milton Friedman got the grief, but it was Hayek who served as the true inspiration for Chile’s capitalist crusaders. It was Hayek who depicted Allende’s regime as a way station between Chile’s postwar welfare state and a hypothetical totalitarian future. Accordingly, the Junta justified its terror as needed not only to prevent Chile from turning into a Stalinist gulag but to sweep away fifty years of tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, labor legislation, and social welfare provisions — a “half century of errors,” according to finance minister Sergio De Castro, that was leading Chile down its own road to serfdom.

“To us, it was a revolution,” said government economist Miguel Kast, an Opus Dei member and follower of both Hayek and American Enterprise Institute theologian Michael Novak. The Chicago economists had set out to affect, radically and immediately, a “foundational” conversion of Chilean society, to obliterate its “pseudo-democracy” (prior to 1973, Chile enjoyed one of the most durable constitutional democracies in the Americas).

Where Friedman made allusions to the superiority of economic freedom over political freedom in his defense of Pinochet, the Chicago group institutionalized such a hierarchy in a 1980 constitution named after Hayek’s 1960 treatise The Constitution of Liberty. The new charter enshrined economic liberty and political authoritarianism as complementary qualities. They justified the need of a strong executive such as Pinochet not only to bring about a profound transformation of society but to maintain it until there was a “change in Chilean mentality.” Chileans had long been “educated in weakness,” said the president of the Central Bank, and a strong hand was needed in order to “educate them in strength.” The market itself would provide tutoring: When asked about the social consequences of the high bankruptcy rate that resulted from the shock therapy, Admiral José Toribio Merino replied that “such is the jungle of . . . economic life. A jungle of savage beasts, where he who can kill the one next to him, kills him. That is reality.”

But before such a savage nirvana of pure competition and risk could be attained, a dictatorship was needed to force Chileans to accept the values of consumerism, individualism, and passive rather than participatory democracy. “Democracy is not an end in itself,” said Pinochet in a 1979 speech written by two of Friedman’s disciples, but a conduit to a truly “free society” that protected absolute economic freedom. Friedman hedged on the relationship between capitalism and dictatorship, but his former students were consistent: “A person’s actual freedom,” said Finance Minister de Castro, “can only be ensured through an authoritarian regime that exercises power by implementing equal rules for everyone.” “Public opinion,” he admitted, “was very much against [us], so we needed a strong personality to maintain the policy.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick was among those who traveled to Chile to pay respect to the pioneer, lauding Pinochet for his economic initiatives.“The Chilean economy is a great success,” the ambassador said, “everyone knows it, or they should know it.” She was dispatched byReagan shortly after his 1981 inauguration to “normalize completely [Washington’s] relations with Chile in order to work together in a pleasant way,” including the removal of economic and arms sanctions and the revocation of Carter’s “discriminatory” human rights policy.Such pleasantries, though, didn’t include meeting with the relatives of the disappeared, commenting on the recent deportation of leading opposition figures, or holding Pinochet responsible for the 1976 carbomb execution of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to the US, in Washington’s Dupont Circle— all issues Kirkpatrick insisted would be resolved with “quiet diplomacy.”

Setting aside the struggles surrounding religion, race, and sexuality that give American politics its unique edge, it was in Chile where the New Right first executed its agenda of defining democracy in terms of economic freedom and restoring the power of the executive branch. Under Pinochet’s firm hand, the country, according to prominent Chicago graduate Cristián Larroulet, became a “pioneer in the world trend toward forms of government based on a free social order.” Its privatized pension system, for example, is today held up as a model for the transformation of Social Security, with Bush having received advice from Chilean economist José Piñera, also a Chicago student, on how to do so in 1997. Pinochet “felt he was making history,” said Piñera, “he wanted to be ahead of both Reagan and Thatcher.”

Friedman too saw himself in the vanguard. “In every generation,” he is quoted in his flattering New York Times obituary, which spares just a sentence on his role in Chile, “there’s got to be somebody who goes the whole way, and that’s why I believe as I do.”

And trailblazer both men were, harbinger of a brave and merciless new world. But if Pinochet’s revolution was to spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere, it first had to take hold in the United States. And even as the dictator was “torturing people so prices could be free,”as Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once mordantly observed, the insurgency that would come to unite behind Ronald Reagan was gathering steam.

Today, Pinochet is under house arrest for his brand of “shock therapy,” and Friedman is dead. But the world they helped usher in survives, in increasingly grotesque form. What was considered extreme in Chile in 1975 has now become the norm in the US today: a society where the market defines the totality of human fulfillment, and a government that tortures in the name of freedom.

GREG GRANDIN teaches Latin American history at NYU and is the author of the Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and The Rise of the New Imperialism, from which this essay has been excerpted. He can be reached at: gjg4@nyu.edu

---