H/T Pic Amazon

I obviously do not visit The Right Stuff website enough. A friend has drawn my attention to Delenda est National Review by Silas Reynolds May 21, 2016. This is a highly competent survey of the later stages of degeneration of National Review, starting

Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Elder, was a Roman senator and consul. He…is probably best remembered for routinely ending his speeches with “Delenda est Carthago”—Carthage must be destroyed.

And indeed it was destroyed and in savage fashion. After the Third Battle of Carthage in 146 BC, the city was sacked and systematically burned for 17 days…To ensure that Carthage never again posed as a threat, legend has it that the remains of the city were sown with salt...The Romans knew how to end a conflict.

This must be the fate of the late William F. Buckley’s crowning achievement, the National Review (NR). It must be destroyed without impunity for its habitual transgressions, perpetual failures and the fiends that have infected it. It’s time has come

After this cheerful opening, Reynolds goes on to catalog NR’s faults

Their sins are many, especially, when one considers how many victims they purged and/or ruined.

This includes an appreciative reference to Peter Brimelow

…there’s also the expulsion of the esteemed Peter Brimelow, whose mission has been to warn us the simple and accurate truth that voters are tied to ethnic loyalties, which is why our post-1965 immigration policy is a death sentence. On the degradation of National Review, Brimelow wrote, “This was a just minor part of the process by which NR's Washington bureau converted the magazine into a neocon-dominated, Beltway Republican bulletin board—then subservient, of course, to the senile Bill Buckley's insatiable vanity.”

Reynolds has the public spiritedness to draw his readers’ attention to Paul Gottfried’s exhaustive (5,400 word!) essay The Logic of the Conservative Purges Radix Journal September 9, 2015 which details the full squalid history.

We at VDARE.com have an extensive anti-NR archive. I think Peter Brimelow’s obituary William F. Buckley, Jr., RIP—Sort Of is the definitive word on this profoundly flawed personality. My own latest contribution was in January - On NATIONAL REVIEW Obeying Its Paymasters.

My only quibble with this survey is the absence of the Joe Sobran story. Peter Brimelow said in Thinking About Joe Sobran

I do believe that, as Neal Freeman has noted, the corruption of National Review was a first step to the astonishing diversion of the conservative movement to the Invite The World-Invade The World heresy that occurred under the catastrophic regime of President George W, Bush. The fate of Joe Sobran, who died September 30, after a terrible struggle with diabetes, was a harbinger.

For those who lived through these events, it is difficult to grasp that many of our most-valued colleagues did not. HISTORY MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO REPEAT ITSELF.

Reynolds' and Gottfried’s articles are valuable antidotes.