Roger Kimball

Some moderately clever people, reflecting on the confusing morass of current events, knowingly quote George Santayana’s most famous observation: that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Since the past is largely an almanac of unfortunate (not to say horrific) events, the idea that we are “condemned to repeat it” concentrates the mind in approximately the way Dr. Johnson said the prospect of hanging in a fortnight tends to do. But of course the past never really repeats itself. When it comes to history, Heraclitus rules: you cannot step into the same river twice, mon brave. Moreover, as that sage of Ionia said, “the true nature of things loves to conceal itself.

As the song in “Li’l Abner” said, “The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands.”   I wonder if Joe Biden knows the tune?   The treasury says the national debtIs climbing to the skyAnd government expendituresHave never been so highIt makes a fellow get aGleam of pride within his eye,To see how our economy expandsThe country’s in the very best of hands Please note that Joe’s got plenty of help. There are lots of hands building up that debt, opening up our southern border, proselytizing for the girls who think they are boys and vice versa.

Well, no indictment, but there were developments! Vocabulary word of the week: “exculpatory.” “Something that shows that someone is not guilty of wrongdoing.” Now, use it in a sentence: “Soros-funded Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg neglected to reveal hundreds of pages of exculpatory evidence to the Grand Jury pondering whether to indict Donald Trump.” What does it mean? It means that the orange suit that Bragg was hoping to order up for Trump may have to be retailored in a larger size, one big enough to fit him. Some context: when a prosecutor conceals exculpatory evidence from a Grand Jury or defense attorneys he is guilty of prosecutorial abuse.

Is this news? Mike Pence “seized the spotlight” in DC this weekend when he “slammed former president Donald Trump in what amounts to his strongest criticism to date of his former running mate.”  Of course Pence did. He is, for the time being, running for president. Naturally he is going to set his sights on the the biggest beast in the room. And that beast, in case you haven’t noticed, is Donald Trump. (And, really, can’t Politico do better than “former running mate”?) Pence, having himself been subpoenaed by the January 6 Entertainment Committee (he doesn’t plan to testify) is nervous about his role in that jamboree.

“A hurt dog barks.” That’s what Tucker Carlson said as he aired various bits of the 41,000 hours of surveillance video captured at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. If you want to know what the hurt dog sounds like, just listen to Senator Chuck Schumer on March 7: “Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight [and] from letting him go on again and again and again [because] our democracy depends on it.” Really, Chuck? Does “our democracy” depend on preventing the American people from seeing what really happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021?

Remember when Donald Trump crowded illegal immigrants into cages? What a brute! But what could you expect from a man who was, when you came down to it, indistinguishable from that diminutive Austrian house painter with the funny mustache and a fondness for leather? The problem was, it was the anointed one, Barack Obama Himself, who built the cages and crammed them full of illegal immigrants. (Really they were large areas secured with chain-link fences, but “cages” sounds scarier.) And those dismal photographs depicting the huddled masses? The media splashed them everywhere as yet more evidence of Trump’s perfidy. But, wouldn’t you know it, the photographs too were from the Obama era. Even the Snopes Fact Manipulator, no friend to Trump, had to acknowledge that.

Looking back on the classified docudrama that brought down the Biden administration, it is still not easy to identify the exact moment when the official narrative began to unravel and the political establishment understood that Biden had to go. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can see that the New York Post breaking the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was an important alarm bell. That happened only weeks before the 2020 election, so it was a serious breach. At first, it seemed as if the threat had been contained. Elite squadrons of the regime’s damage-control department swung into action. They instantly de-platformed the Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, shutting down its social media accounts for weeks.

Psychologists and self-help gurus agree: it’s the little things that bring a smile to one’s lips and impart savor to life. A case in point was just vouchsafed this weary world by Paul Ryan, former important person. An interviewer for ABC recently sat down with Mr. Clean and asked him whether he would be going to the 2024 Republican National Convention, which is to be held in Milwaukee in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin. “Where will you be?” the host asked. “It depends on who the nominee is,” Ryan replied. “I’ll be here if it’s not named somebody Trump.” Ooo, that stung, Paul! “It’s,” “somebody Trump.” Slash and burn, what? I have some bad news. That “somebody” might very well be Donald Trump.

As usual, Elon Musk cut to the chase with a tweet that's both funny and accurate: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1619770090530181120 Pretty good, isn’t it? And do note the little rainbow in the background for the the sexually exotic. Musk’s tweet was in response to the revelation last week (hat tip to the great Matt Taibbi for ferreting through the garbage to retrieve it) that a shadowy group called “Hamilton 68” had been doing exactly what the title of Musk’s imaginary Golden Book says: accusing anyone and anything they don't like of being, or being influenced by, a Russian bot.

Given the fire-hose disgorgement of revelations about the behavior of the FBI, the CIA and their infiltration of the mainstream media, there is ample justification for believing that we are living in some dystopian, distinctly unfunny version of The Truman Show. In the movie, the gormless Truman Burbank grows up thinking he is living a normal, happy life in a normal, happy town. Only gradually does he realize that something is amiss. Slowly, piece by piece, the awful truth dawns on him: his entire social world is a fabrication, a gigantic product-placement concession with him as the unwitting MacGuffin. The deception is played for laughs, mostly.

So where are the FBI SWAT teams? Will they be raiding Joe Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement as they raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home? Of course not. Sure, it turns out that there were classified documents in Biden’s office dating from his time as vice president. But only Trump and Trump-friendly people get the full klieg treatment from the Deep State’s Geheime Staatspolizei.   We do not yet know exactly what is in Biden’s documents, though news reports acknowledge that some of the material was marked “sensitive compartmented information,” also known as SCI, a designation used for “highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources.

I was recently asked to say a few words about “Globalism and Freedom” at a conference sponsored by Hillsdale College in Boise. Globalism, I said, is the enemy of freedom. Why? Because globalism systematically attacks and undermines the moral and political filiations that make genuine freedom possible. In order to understand why this should be so, we must begin by pondering the word “globalism” and its adjectival personification “globalist.” Neither occurs in my thirteen-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates from the early 1960s. What does that tell us? For one thing, it tells us that the term “globalism” and its cognates are neologisms. Neologisms come into being for a couple of different reasons.