We won’t say that ‘we told you so.’ We’ll just tell you so.
On the final day of the Soviet Union’s 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956, over 1,500 socialist dignitaries from 56 countries were treated to something disconcertingly unfamiliar from a General Secretary of the Central Committee: candor.
With the succession squabble behind him, Nikita Khrushchev detailed the litany of crimes and betrayals committed by Stalin and his capos. The evidence on offer was overwhelming. And yet, “the question arises,” Khrushchev pondered: “Why is it that we see the truth of this affair only now, and why did we not do something earlier?” The answer, of course, is that terrible consequences were meted out to those who succumbed to pangs of conscience. Only after the threat had diminished did anyone in a position of authority summon the gumption to tell the truth.
Though they are far less grave today, there are still plenty of powerful inducements that convince those in command of the facts to keep that knowledge to themselves. Those pressures have no power over National Review. We won’t say that “we told you so.” We’ll just tell you so. But we need your support to continue that mission, and we hope you’ll consider contributing to our ongoing webathon.
As Jim Geraghty, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Rich Lowry, and other NR writers have so often noted, the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins was never the fantastical conspiracy theory its critics made it out to be. With the news that yet another American governmental institution has come around to the plausibility of that scenario, those who had summarily dismissed it now graciously confess that they had subordinated their honesty to a political imperative — that is, not conceding anything to their political opponents. Now the truth can be told, they admit. Well, they’re late.
Another example: President Joe Biden announced last week that he would not veto congressional legislation that overrules a District of Columbia crime bill, which would have reduced criminal penalties for violent and nonviolent offenders despite an ongoing crime wave in the nation’s capital. Biden’s concession represents an acknowledgment of what voters in places such as New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco have been saying for some time: Crime is out of control.
That stands in stark contrast with the left-of-center commentary around crime in the run-up to 2022’s midterm elections. Crime, data analyst Jeff Asher told NPR, was a nebulous concept that lacks a “common definition.” When it wasn’t an amorphous concept, crime was a problem of Republican governance. “Research has repeatedly shown that crime is rising faster in Republican, Trump-supporting states,” insisted Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich. “Violent crime is not soaring,” insisted Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. “In fact, it might be declining.”
Even those who convinced themselves to gainsay the testimony of their lying eyes couldn’t dispute the evidence presented by National Review’s news writers, editors, and columnists, whose work on the crime surge and its impact on the American political landscape was and remains vital.
Likewise, the Biden administration’s push to ban the future sale of natural-gas-powered stoves and ranges ignited an exhaustingly familiar cycle in progressive media circles. This empirically observable event, one that only elevated to the national level an ongoing trend in blue states and municipalities, just wasn’t happening, they insisted. When the gas-stove ban wasn’t dismissed as a fabrication of fevered right-wing imaginations, it was lauded as a noble and long-overdue enterprise.
National Review readers can skip right past this threadbare exercise. You already read here that the gas-stove ban was real, and that it was predicated on junk science. You knew it had been an object of technocratic desires for years. And we’re still keeping an eye on it for you, even as the rest of the country has moved on to shinier objects.
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