fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Continuing The TAC Conversation

We couldn't do what we do here without your support. Will you help?
IMG_9274-e1525434902196

In these waning hours of 2020 — O Year of Infamy! — I’d like to appeal to you readers who are not struggling financially to consider a tax-deductible gift to The American Conservative.

I don’t know how many of you read around on the site, but I do know that all of you read this blog. This morning I’ve been thinking back over the past decade for a roundup post I’m doing, and it occurred to me that I started working at TAC in the summer of 2011. I have worked at TAC for longer than I worked anywhere else. I cannot even begin to count the number of words I’ve written here, but I can tell you that this blog was the birthplace of four books: The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (2013), How Dante Can Save Your Life (2015), The Benedict Option (2017), and Live Not By Lies (2020).

Four books that wouldn’t exist if not for this blog. Four books that wouldn’t exist if not for you faithful readers, especially you donors. That photo above, from TAC’s 2018 fundraising gala, is an example of how this works. See the guy on the right, Viliam Ostatnik? He’s a Slovak grad student who was in Washington as part of his studies. He’s a young conservative, and came to our event. I met him there, and we became friends. The next year, when I was in Bratislava researching Live Not By Lies, Viliam served as my interpreter, opening the door to a new world. I absolutely could not have written Live Not By Lies without him. We met at a TAC event. Here is Viliam, Self, and historian Jan Simulcik in 2019, in a secret chamber underneath a Bratislava house; in that room, for ten years, the underground church printed samizdat prayer books, catechisms, and other material, right under the nose of the Communist secret police. Jan was part of that movement, and is now a historian of it. Viliam translated Jan’s words for me. I write about that room, and Jan’s role in the underground church, in Live Not By Lies.

 

There you have only one fruit of your investment in cultivating ideas, writers, and community around The American Conservative. There are more!

I hear these days from readers who write to tell me that they used to think of me as an alarmist, but this year, 2020, has convinced them that I was right all along. That pleases me, not in an “I told you so” way, but because I have written my last two books as an alarm to wake up the church and to inspire us to prepare ourselves, individually and collectively, for hard times to come. If not for the fact that TAC has given me a place to write, and to work out my ideas in public before writing about them in books, I am certain that these books would not exist. If you recognize any value in the things I have written in those books, please consider a gift to TAC.

What a privilege it is to be a writer who works for a magazine that will not cancel me for saying what I think! Do you know how rare that is? Nobody at TAC has ever told me what I can and can’t write. That is golden. If TAC went away, it would be impossible for me to get a job in mainstream media, simply because of my stated opinions on identity politics — opinions that haven’t essentially changed since I first became a conservative three decades ago, but which are now forbidden in our mainstream media. TAC has been a home to me for almost a decade, and the home of many other writers whose views now make them persona non grata among the Respectable Establishment Media.

Look, I know you don’t agree with everything I write, or that TAC publishes. I know I make everybody here mad about something from time to time. I write a lot, almost every day. Sometimes I’m wrong (in which case, I appreciate your telling me). I always try to be interesting and challenging. If it’s important to you to keep publications where that kind of thing is possible, then won’t you consider a year-end donation to TAC?

I’ve been to the DC Mothership of TAC three, maybe four times in the past decade. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that it is a shoestring operation. I don’t mean by that “rinky-dink,”not at all, but I mean that your donations really do go primarily into content. When you give to TAC, you’re not supporting DC journalism swamp creatures. You are helping to support writers who really care about ideas, and who could make a lot more money doing something else, but they choose to write for a living because they see it as an important vocation.

I hope you do too, and I hope those of you who have extra to spare this year will consider supporting our vocation here at The American Conservative. I thank you for the votes of faith you have given us with your faithful readership this year and every year, and I especially thank you who have favored us with (tax-deductible!) financial assistance. It means the world. Click here to donate, and to continue the conversation into the new year. 

 

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now