In the early 1980s, there were several failed efforts to create a magazine with a conservative viewpoint at Princeton University, including the Madison Report, which had a circulation of 2,500 but folded due to financial difficulties.

[1] In October 1984, a group of students including Yoram Hazony and Amy Bix, began publishing the Princeton Tory, planning for six issues in the initial year.

In contrast, the Tory was founded to highlight cogent argumentation with early issues addressing topics such as religion in politics, the composition of the Supreme Court, and the university's endorsement of a nuclear freeze.

He stated, "The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laserlike at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung.

[9][10][11][12] Fortgang made use of his own family's history, with a grandfather exiled to Siberia, a grandmother sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and a great-grandmother and five great-aunts and uncles who were shot in an open grave outside their hometown.

Corey Robin, a fellow member of the Princeton class of 1989, wrote critically of her association with a paper committed, in his view, to the selfishness of capitalism, and some of whose founders, Hazony and Polisar, he describes as "hardcore Zionists" with "storied if peculiar careers on the Israeli right.