Dear Weekend Jolter,
You may recall coverage a few weeks back about the work of “disinformation”-tracking groups, and how they coordinate with ad companies to essentially defund conservative media. The way they operate is they concoct systems for sorting which news outlets traffic in disinformation and which don’t; lo and behold, the “riskiest” outlets are those on the right. The methodologies are suspect, to say the least — one prominent tracking group defines disinformation, in part, as narratives that are merely “adversarial.”
Look no further than the latest news surrounding Covid-19 to understand how the “disinformation” alarmists — especially those in the media who, like these tracking groups, treat non-consensus views as dangerous — have been getting it all wrong.
In the past few weeks, we’ve learned: The Energy Department suspects the pandemic started with a lab leak, as does the FBI; masks may have done very little to curb transmission; natural immunity provided a level of protection similar to that from two doses of the vaccine; and more. All points were considered disinformation by the truth arbiters not so long ago, but we at National Review weren’t afraid to make them, over and over, and early.
So: This is the part where I ask for a little support (or, if you’re inclined, a lot of support; we’d be foolish to put a ceiling on donations) toward NR’s mission — the mission of fighting this kind of delusory groupthink. Our own Jim Geraghty, among others, was at the forefront of questioning the consensus Covid narratives early on. As he wrote this week, “correcting and debunking lies isn’t the only thing we do at National Review, but it’s a big part.” It’s fair to say NR wouldn’t be able to keep exposing uncomfortable truths if we didn’t have the support of our readers. So, please, consider a donation to the webathon we’re running this week. Aside from picking up an NRPLUS subscription for yourself and/or friends and family, it’s the most direct way to support the work that we do.
We’re happy to report, also, that a generous donor has agreed to match donations dollar for dollar up to $100,000, as part of this webathon. So if you chip in now (and many of you have already taken advantage of this), your donation will make double the difference.
Questioning the conventional wisdom isn’t only about Covid. It’s about taking a hard look at the 1619 Project, the politics of transgenderism, the Biden administration’s student-loan decree, and much more.
This, of course, should be SOP for any media organization. Yet . . . it wasn’t. In tracking how the press got so much so wrong on Covid, Rich Lowry took note of a peculiar shift in the profession that heralded this era of acquiescence:
Rather than embracing an ethic of questioning everything — and especially authority — the legacy press in recent years has taken on the role of enforcer of various orthodoxies, whether based in fact or not.
The point of this business — reporting and commentary alike — is to get at the truth, sometimes bit by bit, but always pursuing it with an open mind. Those who would proscribe entire avenues of inquiry because they are not immediately endorsed by government officials are doing something, but it’s not journalism. The recent Covid developments are in fact a giant billboard for adversarial reporting, by those not afraid of testing The Narrative for weaknesses.
You’ve come to the right place.
We profoundly appreciate anything you can chip in toward the cause. Thank you.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Those who decried the lab-leak theory as racist and implausible look worse all the time: The Covid-Origin Scandal
Speaking of “disinformation”: Nonsensical Narratives in East Palestine
Joe Biden is not a monarch: A Legal Reckoning on Student-Loan Forgiveness
Maybe China isn’t a partner after all: The Emerging Russia-China Alliance
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: The Lab-Leak Theory Was a Victim of Left-Wing Culture Wars
Noah Rothman: Does Marjorie Taylor Greene Like America?
Ryan Mills: ‘Diversity Without Division’: Meet the Woman Trying to Save the DEI Industry from Itself
Charles C. W. Cooke: Why Not Censor Shakespeare Next?
Ari Blaff: How ‘Progressive Discipline’ Turned Ontario Schools into a Battleground
Rich Lowry: Anatomy of a Taboo
Brittany Bernstein: Waiting for the Media Mea Culpa on the Lab-Leak Theory
Jeffrey Blehar: Stop Insulting Our Intelligence about Covid Origins, Please
Jim Geraghty: What Is the Point of The View?
Dan McLaughlin: Supreme Court Majority Skeptical of Biden Student-Loan Forgiveness
John McCormack: Jessa Duggar Seewald Had a Miscarriage, Not an Abortion
John McCormack: Josh Hawley’s U-Turn on Military Aid to Ukraine
Michael Brendan Dougherty: When Being Right Isn’t Enough
Henry Oliver: Why Should Roald Dahl’s Grandchildren Tell Us What We’re Allowed to Read?
CAPITAL MATTERS
Joel Zinberg follows the money in the Covid-origins story: Eyes Wide Shut: The Covid-Origins Story
Joel Kotkin writes on trouble in the countryside, emanating from decisions in the cities: Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, with the contrarian zombie take of the week: The Last of Us Brings On Armageddon Time
Well, it was a nice museum for the five minutes it was open, says Brian Allen: Yale’s British Art Center: A Shut, Open, and Shut Case
FROM THE NEW, MARCH 20, 2023, ISSUE OF NR
Philip K. Howard: The Public-Union Spoils System
Madeleine Kearns: The Trans Fight at the New York Times
Christine Rosen: Nikki Haley’s Platitude Problem
Noah Rothman: Moral Urgency Is Not a Ukraine Strategy
THE ENERGY DEPARTMENT ENDORSES THESE EXCERPTS
The newest issue of NR is out, and you can find Mark Antonio Wright’s highlight reel here. The cover is all about the unions, and their decline. In the wake of the invasion anniversary, Ukraine is another big topic this issue. And then there’s 2024 — and Christine Rosen’s examination of Nikki Haley:
If Haley is trying to revive establishment conservatism, which by the evidence thus far seems to be her intention, she will not be able to follow the playbook of many Republican women who came before her, such as Elizabeth Dole, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Carly Fiorina, and Haley’s fellow Trump-administration official Elaine Chao. . . .
Today’s prominent Republican women are more like ground-and-pound brawlers in the octagon. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, for example, revel in taunting political opponents on social media and appear to mistake regular cable-news appearances for the job of governing. Like a parody of a hysterical woman who feels herself wronged by a man, Greene recently appeared on Hannity to demand a “national divorce” from the Left.
Even Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), once seen as a rising-star moderate in the party, has now morphed into a Republican who calls herself “ultra-MAGA and proud of it” and was once described by Trump as “one of my killers.”
Haley, by contrast, even while appearing Trump-adjacent because of her brief service in the administration, has retained her establishment mien. When talking about hot-button culture-war issues such as “wokeness,” she sounds more like a well-intentioned, ideologically neutral HR manager than a firebrand, which is not necessarily a bad thing in our polarized political culture.
However, this posture poses a challenge for Haley’s messaging. Like many politicians she has a platitude problem, but it is compounded by the need to demonstrate that she is conversant in the language and tactics of contemporary culture-war sparring. This creates contradictions. In her campaign-announcement video, for example, Haley says, “This is not about identity politics. I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe in glass ceilings either.”
Fair enough. But at a recent New Hampshire town hall, she said of her own family’s experience of race: “We weren’t white enough to be white, weren’t black enough to be black,” and in other remarks she has used her experience as a woman of color as evidence of her ability to reach a broader and more moderate group of voters. She relishes repeating a line from her campaign video: “I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”
In a GOP primary dominated by a candidate who has repeatedly made noxious racist remarks, most recently about Chao, his own former transportation secretary, and who openly mocked candidate Fiorina’s appearance in the 2016 primaries, Haley’s subtle nods to her race and sex are in tension with her vows not to play identity politics. She ought to be bolder and say what she’s thinking: She looks like America and its future, and her life story represents the ideals of freedom and opportunity that most Americans cherish. Donald Trump looks like someone’s old racist uncle who still thinks it’s funny to mock people who don’t look or sound like him.
This week’s big Supreme Court cases aren’t just about student-loan debt; they’re about whether a U.S. president has unfettered power, or not. From NR’s editorial:
If the Court cannot stop the president from raiding the Treasury to buy votes and reward friends on the most implausible of legal pretexts, what is it for? A majority of the Court appears to recognize that the HEROES Act does not grant the power in question — a reality that even Nancy Pelosi acknowledged until it became clear that Biden intended to act when he could not get such a plan through Congress.
The statute says that the secretary of education can “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs” when “necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.” Chief Justice John Roberts set the tone for the argument by noting that Justice Antonin Scalia once observed that “modified in our view connotes moderate change. He said it might be good English to say that the French Revolution modified the status of the French nobility, but only because there’s a figure of speech called understatement and a literary device known as sarcasm.” Moreover, the chief justice observed that, even if terms such as “waive or modify” could be construed to encompass the outright cancellation of student debt, the Court’s “major question doctrine” requires more — namely, a citation to “clear congressional authorization” of the specific action taken by the administration. No one can plausibly claim that the HEROES Act even anticipated, much less green-lighted, half a trillion dollars in relief to a favored class of debtors without additional congressional input.
Ari Blaff on the news team kicked off a reporting series this week on the Ontario public-school system, where a U.S.-style approach to discipline has led to a breakdown in school safety. From the opening:
A 200-pound Ontario middle schooler was getting ready to pummel his classmate when a group of teachers escorted him to an office where they hoped to calm him down — instead, he proceeded to ram into the two adults, a man and a woman, for the better part of an hour, leaving them shaken and bruised. He never faced any consequences.
“You should have seen their bruises. The guy’s back is totally messed up. The girl still has arm issues,” Margaret, a teacher with over a decade of experience in Ontario’s public schools, told National Review.
Worried about the potential repercussions, the teachers who were assaulted were not able to physically restrain the student, nor did senior school administrators expel him.
“All he got was an in-school suspension. His mom came to pick him up, asked if he wanted dumplings, and they left. There were no consequences,” Margaret said.
The veteran teacher explained that the administration’s indifference to staff members being physically assaulted stemmed from the student’s historical behavior: “That’s his baseline.” Under the school district’s present approach to discipline, if aggressive and dangerous behavior is typical for a student, then only behavior that exceeds the norm is dealt with.
Noah Rothman has a deeper dive on what can explain the media’s refusal to entertain the lab-leak theory from the get-go:
The Wall Street Journal revealed on Sunday that the U.S. Department of Energy has joined the FBI in concluding that the virus that exploded out of China in early 2020, inaugurating the worst global public-health crisis in a century and taking millions of lives with it, “most likely” originated in a Chinese virology lab. Other investigatory bodies looking into the virus’s origins don’t yet all agree, and the Energy Department added the caveat that it had “low confidence” in its own assessment. But “low confidence” is more than no confidence. Even this modest dispensation represents an indictment of the expert classes, who wielded all the social pressure at their disposal to cajole the nation into dismissing the lab-leak theory early and with prejudice.
Those who lent credence to the theory and were subjected to the dominant culture’s bottomless capacity for condescension as a result will be tempted to take a victory lap. And, you know what? They should! The story of the theory’s rise, fall, and rise again is a story of how too many abused their positions of authority to wage a conflict over cultural values under the guise of dispassionate empiricism. Anathematizing the lab-leak hypothesis was just the latest avenue through which they could impeach political actors they didn’t like.
Senator Tom Cotton was among the earliest prominent figures to wonder aloud whether a unique coronavirus conspicuously adapted to infect humans had escaped containment in a country where laboratory leaks that sicken and kill are not unheard of and where “laboratory biosafety” was, until recently, an obscure concept. Cotton’s curiosity was handled by the arbiters of American discourse as a menace more dangerous than the virus itself. . . .
Advocates of the lab-leak theory’s suppression constructed an elaborate narrative in which the propagators of this thesis were actively radicalizing their impressionable audiences. They convinced themselves that even discussing the possibility that the theory might be true had the power to destabilize the global geopolitical environment and produce an army of potentially violent racists. You don’t often see genuine scholars indulge the hyperventilating apoplexy to which those who tried to throttle the nascent lab-leak theory in its crib so often appealed. But you do frequently see those who prosecute the culture wars indulge it — and the prosecution of the culture wars is all this enterprise ever was.
Shout-Outs
Jacob Savage, at Tablet: The Vanishing: The erasure of Jews from American life
Adam Hoffman, at the New York Times: My Liberal Campus Is Pushing Freethinkers to the Right
Collin Anderson, at the Washington Free Beacon: Turns Out They Are Coming for Your Gas Stoves
Carine Hajjar, at the Wall Street Journal: Jiddoo’s Guide to a Long and Happy Life
CODA
It’s webathon week here at NR (which, unless you skip right to Coda, you already know); that means what’s fitting is to end with a song of appreciation. The Beatles have us covered.
Thanks for reading, for donating, or maybe even for doing both. Have a fine weekend.