Roger Kimball

Although the public has other things to worry about — like runaway inflation and a collapsing stock market — there has been a lot of static about the January 6 show trials that opened last Thursday on location in Washington, DC. I’ve contributed to the cacophony myself, though not without misgivings. As rumors swirl about important changes in the cast next year — Liz Cheney, for example, is said to be returning to her real constituency in Georgetown — a friend writes to remind me that the entire show may be eclipsed by a new kid on the block: the June 8 House Select Committee to investigate the plot to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his home in a partially disclosed, insecure location.

By disposition, conservatives distrust government. They are for “limited government” and worry about the coercive power of the state intruding upon individual liberty. But these days, some conservatives tell us that, when they finally get their hands on the levers of power, they will be energetic in exercising them to achieve their (presumably conservative) ends. Is that a contradiction or indication of hypocrisy? Maybe. Or maybe it is just a sign of how deeply anti-conservative sentiment has burrowed into the tissues of our society. No doubt I would prefer the policies promulgated by a conservative administration to the policies we are saddled with now. But my low opinion of human nature inclines me to distrust government power no matter who is in charge.

I see that my National Review friends are writing their letters to Santa a bit early. Some, like Rich Lowry's recent paean to Ron DeSantis, are asking for that shiny new firetruck all the cool kids want. Others, like Charles Cooke’s febrile King Lear-like anti-Trump expostulation (“never, never, never, never, never”) hearken back to NR’s infamous "Against Trump" issue and are mostly negative: “No coal, please, Santa, and especially No More Trump!” I remember when I first heard the expression that Donald Trump “lived rent-free in the heads of his opponents.” “Vivid,” I thought, “and quite right.” Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol, Max Boot — the list of people obsessed with the forty-fifth president of the United States is long.

It’s nice to be prescient. On Thursday, in a column titled “Kamala Invades Poland,” I introduced the world to “cackle diplomacy.” “Silly partisan hyperbole!” I nearly heard as the social media-ites had their say. But then the vice president of the United States did me proud. Just a few hours after my column posted, there she was, holding a press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda. Some say the people who run our government sent Kamala Harris to Eastern Europe in order to give her a chance to shine in the sphere of international relations. Watch her performance and tell me what you think. “I am here, standing here. On the northern flank...on the eastern flank...talking about what we what we have in terms of the eastern flank and our NATO allies.

Justin Trudeau, still the prime minister of Canada, is the first person in history to invoke the Emergencies Act, a law enacted in the 1980s to allow the government to take special, temporary action to deal with an “urgent and critical situation” that “seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians.” Little Justin is embarrassed by the thousands of truckers in Canada who are protesting, first of all, the country’s vaccine mandate but, more to the point, the government’s intrusion into the lives and livelihoods of the people. Justin is embarrassed. That’s the real national emergency. In response, Trudeau is transforming Canada into a police state. People with tow trucks, he said, will be “coerced” into moving the rigs of recalcitrant truckers.

Quick: what do you think when someone tries to convince you of something by prefacing their remarks with the phase “Experts say”? I think of that rude, two-word imperative of Germanic origin that ends in “You.” As Laplace said in another context, it is par expériences nombreuses et funestes that I have this almost Pavlovian reaction. The “experts,” alas, are not expert, i.e, “possessing a high degree of skill in or knowledge of” a certain subject. For proof of my contention I offer the name of Anthony Fauci or the organization that glories in the acronym CDC, that is, the Centers for Disease Control. They are both a bit like Michael Avenatti, once championed everywhere as a genius and presidential material, but now universally exposed and discredited.

Is a modicum of sanity about to reassert itself regarding the Wuhan Flu? Are the people finally exhausted by their panic over the Fauci-altered coronavirus? Remember those little bulletins that Mike Pence carried around, enjoining us all to to take “fifteen days to stop the spread”? I think we’re at about day 750 now. New York restaurants and many cultural emporia demand that you produce your papiers (it sounds better in German) — identification plus an image attesting to your “vaccination status” — in order to enter. Some are even requiring proof that you’ve had a “booster” jab. Pfizer likes that.

I believe that Maximinus Thrax, whose brief reign ran from 235 to 238 AD, was the first Roman emperor never to have set foot in Rome. The Thracian brute started a trend. As the years went by, more and more Roman emperors gave the city a miss. Diocletian (284-305), who brought the crisis of the third century to an end, hated the city. Some later emperors settled on Ravenna as the seat of power for the Western empire. Constantinople emerged as HQ for the East. Rome retained a certain ceremonial significance but was increasingly irrelevant to the business of empire. The turn away from Rome happened for many reasons.