There’s the calm before the storm. This feels more like the storm before the deluge. As wild a ride as these last years have been, we’re now in a hotly contested midterm campaign, where our best hope is enough congressional seats to stand athwart the woke Left yelling “Stop!” And we’re about to leap from there to the Mother of All Presidential Contests. The question is which side will steer the ship of state through domestic, financial, and geopolitical tumult.

All outcomes are uncertain. More than ever, we need direction. And that’s what we try to give you, every day, at National Review. And that’s why I’m asking you to subscribe to NRPlus (now 60 percent off), so we can keep doing it.

We don’t pretend to know all the answers, or even to agree among ourselves about the answers we think we may know. But we’re quite confident that the best way to move forward, for our culture and our country, is grounded in constitutional conservative principles, with our compass trained on liberty and our feet firmly on the ground.

That last bit is what I’ve tried to focus on most these last years. We’re in an unreal time — often, frankly, a really dumb time — when “narrative” (I know, a tired word) holds sway over real-world facts, even for people who ought to know better.

That’s not the world I come from. Like every one of us, I am animated by strong views about the way things ought to be, the way I want things to come out. But I’m also convinced that we can’t be effective in trying to move our society in healthy directions unless we know what we’re dealing with. We need to know things as they are, the facts, good or bad. Not a “take” on things. We need to put those facts in context — use the lessons of history, and connect to our rich past to navigate to a better future. That’s the only way to dig ourselves out.

It’s a reality of life, and not necessarily a benign one, that much of what we need to know is playing out in courtrooms, hearing chambers, and similar legal arenas — in Washington, throughout the nation, and in international tribunals. I’ve concentrated my work on that, because it’s what I know best. The great thing about it, especially the courtroom, is that it’s still the place where the rules can filter out the noise. Out of that room, we discover the truth. We don’t have to content ourselves with talking points spouted on the courthouse steps. Inside, it’s put up or shut up.

My job, as I see it, is to make sure you know who put up, and who should shut up.

It’s not always what you want to hear. Hell, it’s very often not what I want to hear. There have been monumental showdowns in the last few years — in the legal arena, in congressional hearings, and in the political-legal hybrid of impeachment — where I’ve had a decided interest going in. But when the proceedings start, we try to check that at the door. My goal is that when you come to National Review, you learn what really happened, what really was proved versus what bold proclamations withered when put to the test.

That is not just a matter of scrutinizing testimony. The fact-finding process itself has evolved in an unhealthy way. The media swooned this summer over the effectiveness of the House January 6 committee hearings. Far from celebrating, we should worry about that: They weren’t hearings; they were highly choreographed presentations of a political point of view, in which no cross-examination or alternative perspectives were permitted, regarding an enormity that cries out for searching and adversarial inquiry, the only kind that yields conclusions we can rely on.

Similarly, we continue to be plagued by politicized exploitation of the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus. We should never defend lawlessness and abuse of power. And you won’t find that here. But we have to demand our constitutional bedrock of equal protection under the law. We can’t abide a two-tiered system where the quality of justice depends on which side of the partisan divide you’re on. We can’t tolerate politically motivated violence just because the media-Democrat complex happens to be sympathetic to the “ism” that catalyzed it — even as it defames America’s parents as “domestic terrorists” because they reject the devolution of schools into laboratories of cultural Marxism.

It’s not just a matter of figuring out what happened and giving it to you straight. It involves asking why the law pursued this firebrand but not that one. And when the law did pursue, was it a fair proceeding or a show trial? Slouching toward show trials, no matter how worthy Washington judges the cause, is an alarming development in a free, rule-of-law republic.

When you subscribe to National Review, you’ll get access to all our paywalled articles and, with them, our best effort to give it to you straight. Our best effort to figure out where we really are and render it to you in a dependable way, so we can move our culture and our country in the direction we need to go — toward liberty and a sense of duty to preserve it.

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