Belatedly, I want to draw attention to Matthew Richer's post on The Unz Review: Up from Buckleyism| Will Trump’s Victory Spell National Review’s Demise? (March 3, 2016, Comments accepted). He writes:

The central question of our time is not who is or what is conservative. The real question is the National Question. And Donald Trump has risen to that challenge better than any candidate since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The truth is that Donald Trump has filled an enormous political vacuum—one that National Review has refused to acknowledge even though they helped to create it in the first place.

Many people have complimented me on correctly predicting last April that Donald Trump would run for President—and run on patriotic immigration reform. So let me make another prediction: If Donald Trump is elected President in 2016 it will mark the permanent end of National Review’s influence over the conservative movement in America.

(Links in original, For my views on "conservative," see here).

Of course, it's also true that Ted Cruz has now emerged as an immigration patriot—the cause that, as Richer documents, Bill Buckley effectively abandoned when he purged the magazine in 1997-8.

Richer correctly observes that a harbinger of this change was Rich Lowry's hiring of the notorious John J. Miller, whom we'd already exposed (not, as Richer says, in an article by me, but in an unsigned editorial) as a rare case of an immigration enthusiast who directly lied about data, instead of just Enthusiastically misinterpreting it.

A Conservatism Inc. functionary recently wrote me (privately of course):

Had the US limited immigration in the mid-90s, in the wake of the Jordan Commission, we'd be in a far better position today. Instead, things will likely get worse before they get better.

Yeah. Well, we tried.