As the country undergoes yet another political shift, we at COMMENTARY remain determined to keep our feet planted firmly on the solid ground of principle and tradition to which we’ve sought to hold fast during the 16 years of my editorship—as America shifted from Bush to Obama in 2009, from Obama to Trump in 2017, from Trump to Biden in 2021, and from Biden back to Trump in 2025. The country lurches and swings, as do the parties, and as it has done so, we have remained what we have been.

We are an unambiguously patriotic voice for the glories of the American experiment. We are a full-throated advocate for the glories of Western civilization and the gifts it has bestowed upon the world. We are a stentorian voice for the necessity of Zionism as both the fulfillment of God’s promise to and the salvation of the Jewish people. And we bear constant witness to the evil of Jew-hatred.

We have been warning, throughout my tenure, about the advancing threat anti-Semitism poses worldwide daily even as appallingly self-satisfied Jewish organizations were shifting their focus to matters that had nothing to do with saving the Jewish people and everything to do with advancing the cause of contemporary left-liberalism—only to find themselves on the back foot and having to regroup when the threat went active and global on and after October 7.

We have not changed. We supported free markets and free trade and free expression when liberals turned on them, and we support them now even amid signs that conservatives are turning on them. We opposed affirmative action and intersectional thinking then, and we are gratified that the arguments we have been making have forced those bad and wrong ideas into retreat due to the courage of conservative thinkers, legislators, and judges in advancing those arguments despite heavy social sanction. And we thought that men were men and women were women, because that is what Genesis says: Male and female created he them, in the words of the King James Bible.

What has changed is our ability to convey our ideas and our messages in ways that extend far beyond the physical pages of the magazine we are proud to continue to publish on paper between covers every month but one every year. Hundreds of thousands of people read our articles and our blog posts on our website at commentary.org every month. Tens of thousands of people listen to our podcast every day. And beginning in November 2024, we began releasing our podcast on video on YouTube every afternoon, providing us with yet another forum and another kind of audience to spread the word and advance our mission.

The response to our efforts in all these realms has been overwhelming, and your support has been more gratifying than you can possibly know. One of the most common things we hear is that readers and listeners and viewers are strengthened and confirmed in their own convictions by reading and hearing and watching us articulate our views on the most pressing matters of the day. And that is very much true in reverse. We are boosted and ballasted and energized by the fact that our audience has grown so profoundly and that we are saying things people want and need to hear.

These are perilous and critical times for our country, for the West, and for the Jewish people. It is an honor to have this platform on which we can keep the candle burning.

Photo: Nick Brundle Photography/Getty Images

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