This crew deserves your support.
National Review was founded to expound upon the “eternal verities” — the big truths about individuals, institutions, society, and even God. Along the way that has also implied the duty to speak up for unpopular truths. Sometimes speaking up for these maligned ideas is one of the only ways of preserving liberty. We need your help to do it.
It was almost exactly three years ago that I saw a YouTube video posted by Matthew Tye — an American travel blogger who had spent years motorcycling around China. Tye is fluent in Mandarin and had recently left China because it was impossible to live there safely while still criticizing the Chinese Communist Party. The video showed a ton of circumstantial evidence that the Wuhan virology lab was studying novel bat coronaviruses, that it was urgently searching for more expertise in this field, and that some kind of incident happened.
I passed the video on to Jim Geraghty because I know he’s a sleuth. Hours later, Jim started messaging me with what we both suspected: It checks out. Jim has done the lion’s share of NR’s pioneering work on the lab-leak theory ever since. Jim’s special gift is in reading the mainstream press, and then also reading past it. A reporter of the old school, he has a sense for what is sturdy and flimsy in any report. He knows what’s the product of expertise, and what expertise is the product of mere groupthink or guild craft. And then he has a nose for trolling through the endless sea of the internet, and finding the little clues the media left behind.
Jim’s first big piece on the lab leak came out on April 3 of 2020. It identified several of the mysteries we still haven’t uncovered. For instance: Where is Huang Yanling, a lab employee widely rumored to be patient zero? It also just reported, straight out, the shady behavior of Chinese authorities in the weeks and months after the first reports of a novel virus in Wuhan emerged.
Contrary to left-wing revisionism, there was nothing in Jim’s story that pointed to bioweapons conspiracies. Most of us were still operating on the basic theory that the virus could have escaped from a research lab. But as the months went on, we reported responsibly about the hazards of gain-of-function research and the possibility that such research led to Covid-19. Jim gave you his level of confidence in the information right at the top: We have no proof it leaked from the lab, but we have good reason to doubt the story put out by Chinese officials and their apologists.
I’m really proud to work with Jim Geraghty. And not just him. Dan McLaughlin is unafraid to tell the truth about the law, our history, and our elections. Charlie Cooke is unafraid to take on the lies about America’s Second Amendment. When Maddy Kearns confronts the controversies about trans athletes and the policies concerning them, her reporting not only informs us of the events of the day but highlights the eternal truth that “male and female, He created them.” The irreplaceable Armond White, our film critic, is willing and ready to defy any and every critical consensus that is shallow, or untruthful. And we keep adding more of these stubborn truth-tellers. Noah Rothman is an unsparing critic of what passes for social justice, woolly thinking, and the habits of shoddy moralistic cliques, everywhere. Our news team, from Jack Crowe to Caroline Downey and beyond, is possessed with the same qualities shared by our opinion writers and leading editors: a rebellious adherence to solid truths.
And boy, it’s fun when we disagree, too.
This crew deserves your support. The rest of the media is full of obsequious, soft-hearted, slick nobodies who would cover for the CCP or stab their mother for a regular gig on CNN. National Review is full of true characters: hard, daring, dogged, valiant men and women, confronting the world not just with our reason, but hearts burning with passion for beauty, truth, and goodness. This merry ship sails on the swells of support, and the winds that you send us.
