William F. Buckley Jr. is a name that every conservative should know, especially in the year 2025, when he would have turned 100.
While I cannot say where in my activist career I first heard the name, nothing appealed to my freedom-thirsty heart quite like a man who wrote an entire book defending Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., and his often-misrepresented crackdown on Communist infiltration of the U.S. government in mid-century America.
So, when my treasured supervisor at Newsmax, John Gizzi, told me about an event that reflected on the impact of the man who lit the Yale Daily News on fire before starting The National Review, I jumped at the opportunity to attend.
"Buckley at 100: The State of American Conservatism," hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, was a showcase of Buckley's intellectual fingerprint on the glass elephant that is the modern Republican party and wider conservative movement.
The impact of Buckley in modern youth movements is clear to me as someone who began conservative student activism chapters in college. As National Review CEO Chuck DeFeo described Buckley's strategy: "To bring about societal change, you need three essential elements: ideas, the ability to popularize those ideas, and a coalition of people who will bring those ideas to fruition."
The conservative movement, as designed by Buckley, is rooted in ideas and the dissemination of those ideas, which is why one cannot find a conservative group pushing for free speech on college campuses without a liberal bureaucracy trying to hinder that right.
Every interaction between young conservatives turns into a discussion, debate, and analysis of the moment's pressing issues.
Of course, most conservatives in power are not truly young. With few exceptions, they are generally millennials and older. They are taking stages from campus quads to TikTok to make one point clear: with an aging Republican cohort, we will be the movement's voice sooner than we think.
Recent political resignations — including Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — only prove this.
The event's speakers, who told of Buckley's dinner parties of cigarette dispensers and token liberals as guests, highlighted that the hunger for new things and new knowledge Buckley instilled into the conservative movement has only grown with America's hunger for meaningful interactions between disparate factions that the left has given us.
Buckley's ability to befriend, to listen, is seen in students starting activism clubs at their colleges to create communities that voice what would otherwise be stifled by directors of ambiguous university departments. The speakers that thousands of youth rush to see, from Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk to Students for Life of America's Kristan Hawkins, do nothing more than engage with others and ideas.
Furthermore, the Gen Z rush toward Christianity reflects Buckley's reminders that a culture without God is one without community and morality. Buckley knew secular culture would drive people to tables, ballot boxes, and churches. There, his conservatives would be waiting.
Bill Buckley created a desire within conservatives to not just save the culture, but to have fun while they do it. Because of this, the gray-suited, soft-spoken, sometimes elitist ways of early 2000s-era Republicans were destined to fade and be replaced with the unapologetically defiant, in-fighting, thoughtful movement we see today.
Are there disagreements among young conservatives? Absolutely. But, as Buckley did so often, they are resolved and conservatives go forth and, more often than not these days, conservatives win. In a sense, today's up-and-coming generation of conservatives is the legacy of Buckley, and to him we say, "Happy 100th Birthday!"
A graduate of the University of North Carolina (Asheville), Olivia D'Angelo's poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in various literary journals, including Carolina Muse and The Penwood Review, and she received an honorable mention in the 2024 A. R. Ammons Poetry Contest.
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