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Trump and the Meaning of Anti-Establishment

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Since When Do I Have to Support Trump Just Because He’s the Front-Runner?

Dear Reader (including those of you in D.C. who may try to burn this “news”letter in a desperate attempt to stay alive during the snowstorm), Well, here we go.

National Review’s “Against Trump” editorial and symposium came out Thursday night and the fecal matter hit the rotor blades. That’s a bad turn of phrase, since we’re neither sh** nor fan. We’re more like a lighthouse amidst the crap-storm, or at least we try to be. This seems lost on a lot of people these days. I keep hearing from folks who seem to think that if Donald Trump is popular or the front-runner, then National Review — and yours truly — must bow to the popular will. Get with the program, they say. See the writing on the wall. Get out in front of this.

Instead, we went a different way, and the brickbats are flying in. We’ve disgraced ourselves, they insist. We’ve gone and read ourselves out of the conservative movement. Betrayed William F. Buckley.

And that’s the calm and reasonable stuff. If say, you, offered some of the tantrums I’ve received in person instead of via e-mail and Twitter, the only reasonable response would be to call for the orderlies and ask how you slipped out of your restraints.

So before we get into it, let me just say up front that rather than this being a low point or an epic fail or a betrayal, this is in fact one of National Review’s finest moments. If it costs us subscribers, or readers, or advertisers (all of which I doubt), so be it. What is it the Marines say? “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Well, such losses to National Review would be like dross being skimmed off freshly forged steel.

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Source: Jonah Goldberg, www.nationalreview.com