National Review was the prototype for conservative commentary when it was founded by the great William F. Buckley back in 1955, and 60 years later it has managed to stay near the top of an ever-expanding digital pack of bloggers and pundits.

Obviously such a run could only happen if the first principles of such an institution were zealously guarded, and winsomely communicated by writers and thinkers uniquely unafraid to follow in Buckley's giant footsteps and tell it like it is.

Unfortunately, it appears those first principles aren't going to be as zealously guarded, let alone defended, as they once were. In a column written by managing editor Jason Lee Steorts, National Review apparently decided they didn't want social conservatives -- the third and largest leg of Reagan's famed three-legged stool -- to read their stuff anymore when they full-throated embraced the Rainbow Jihad.

And just like that a legacy marked by staring down Marxists both foreign and domestic is no more. National Review has been surrendered to America's Cultural Marxists. So much for the legacy founded by the man who gave us God and Man at Yale.

That takes some serious selling out.

This isn’t totally out of left field, though. Steorts began showing his true colors back in 2013 when he ran Mark Steyn – arguably one of the most courageous and entertaining conservatives of the last decade – out of National Review for daring to call the agenda of the Rainbow Jihad into question.

That agenda was still in its ‘How is my gay marriage going to affect your life?’ stage, but Steyn saw through the scam and said as much in his typically biting yet congenial way. Less than two years later we know Steyn to be a prophet, as businesses great and small are now forced to genuflect at the altar of homosexual hubris and pagan courts gone wild.

But that is of no matter to a wolf-in-sheep's clothing like Steorts. He even uses the Rainbow Jihad's propaganda by calling his treacherous screed "an equal chance at love." National Review was founded by a man who thought the tree of life should be guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. But now it's managing editor, Steorts, has decided to take an axe to the base of that tree instead.

There is no limit to the sweet nothings that will be conjured as justification once such a betrayal is made. Ruining the legacy of man who got his start by rejecting the soft-headed decadence of the American Left is small potatoes, when compared to what we learned this week about paganism’s propensity to seek and destroy.

A much celebrated 2014 study claiming voters’ minds can be changed about gay marriage by way of interaction with homosexual activists was determined to be entirely made up. As in a fake. A total sham. As real as unicorns and a pro-life Democrat.

The study’s co-author apologized and described the lengths his guilty colleague went to in order achieve his desired result.

“There was an incredible mountain of fabrications with the most baroque and ornate ornamentation,” said Donald Green of Michael LaCour. “There were stories, there were anecdotes, my drop box is filled with graphs and charts, you’d think no one would do this except to explore a very real data set.”

No one except a diehard member of the world’s premier flat-earth society: the Rainbow Jihad. Come hell or high water, you will be made to care.

Whether he wants to admit it or not, that’s the sort of vortex of licentiousness that a very smart guy like Steorts has gotten himself caught up in. How else does one convince himself that the spirit of William F. Buckley, whose traditionalism could be measured out by his undying support for the Catholic Church’s Latin Mass, would somehow come down on the side of perhaps the greatest cultural farce in this country’s history?

Buckley once said he would rather be governed by the first 400 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University, but Steorts begs to differ. He'd rather side with those running the First Amendment through a meat grinder than the common sense that made Buckley, well, Buckley.

I guess he thinks Buckley would have evolved like dear leader Obama. Well, whatever Steorts believes the chances of that happening are, I’ll take those odds.

I have every confidence that if Buckley were with us today he would remind Steorts that you didn't create marriage. You were blessed by it. No, defining marriage wasn’t overbroad for its purpose of bringing life into the world and nurturing that life into adulthood. Marriage is proportionately reflective of the heavens in its qualities.

Buckley might even point-blank ask Steorts "how did you get to be managing editor of my publication again?"

Now add to this hot mess the fact Steorts wrote his ode to decadence during National Review’s spring fundraising period. Good grief. You mean you want more of my money and you are going to lecture me about how Rachel Maddow is really on to something? I don’t know if I can get my check in the mail fast enough.

But it won’t be for National Review. It will be to buy flowers of condolence for the dying light of its founder, William F. Buckley.