The GOP Establishment needs to stop clinging to their white, pompous elitism. And there’s no better example of it than National Review devoting its entire issue to bashing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The establishment’s visceral hostility and disdain for Trump has become enormously predictable this election. National Review’s chummy club isn’t concerned about the future of the country, only the loss of their political power, influence and gravy train.
What the magazine is really telling conservative voters is that they are stupid and a few of them know how to pick the best candidate for the country. This is the same arrogant political class that gave the Republican Party presidential losers of Mitt Romney in 2012 and Senator John McCain in 2008. But who’s counting? This time around conservatives aren’t letting the chosen few in this predominately white, elite male club pick its nominee.
No less than 22 editors, endorsed National Review’s “Against Trump’ cover and referred to Trump as a menace, racist, power-driven billionaire. Only one of those so-called Republicans was black, Thomas Sowell.
It’s no surprise National Review has a dearth of minorities among its ranks — the magazine seems to have remained true to the roots of its founder William F. Buckley, Jr., who was no fan of blacks or integration. Revered by many conservatives as one of the godfathers of the modern day GOP, Buckely published National Review’s first issue in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, ending segregation in public schools.
During the civil rights movement, Buckley used the magazine as a racist engine to embrace, according to Kevin Schulz, “nearly all of the most offensive and discredited arguments against the movement, including the idea that black people were inherently inferior to white people.”
In the magazine’s infamous 1957 editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail,” Buckley defended Southern Democrats’ fight for segregation, arguing that whites were “the advanced race” and were obligated to protect their “cultural superiority.”
Buckley observed that “the South … perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes, and intends to assert is own.”
National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct.”
In his racist rant against the first Civil Rights Act, Buckley denounced as “demagogy” the idea that “Everyone in America is entitled to the vote, period.”
Buckley argued that “great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could.” Thus he concluded that giving blacks the right to vote “is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom.”
One of Buckley’s most bigoted moments was in 1965 when he debated celebrated black novelist James Baldwin at Cambridge University. Buckley was arguing against Civil Rights for blacks and Baldwin for it.
“It is quite impossible in my judgment to deal with the indictments of Mr. Baldwin unless one is prepared to deal with him as a white man, unless one is prepared to say to him that the fact that your skin is black is utterly irrelevant to the arguments you raise.”
Buckley suggested because Baldwin was educated and was the “toast of the town” that he was immune to racism.
“I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton. I carried it to the market. I built the railroads under someone else’s whip, for nothing, for nothing,” Baldwin responded and won the debate.
Neither Buckley nor his magazine were standard bearers of the party of Lincoln that fought to give blacks equality from the Civil War through passage of the Civil Rights Movement. Act. Today, National Review still hews to Buckley’s bigoted worldview, largely employing white men and nurturing editorial content consumed with eugenics. A cursory search on the Internet of National Review and racism serves up a slew of references to the magazine’s racist history. Borrowing from its own editorial excoriating Trump, National Review is “a menace to conservatism” not the other way around.
Crystal Wright is author of “Con Job: How Democrats Gave Us Crime, Sanctuary Cities, Abortion Profiteering, and Racial Division.” She also is a principal at the Baker Wright Group, a communications and public relations firm. You can follow her @GOPBlackChick. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.