Roger Kimball

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.

It wasn’t so long ago that an official at London’s Heathrow airport, warned by the scanner through which my luggage was passing, uttered an Archimedean Eureka! (or words to that effect), pounced on my suitcase and abstracted an incriminating bottle of shampoo, which he confiscated. “Over the limit, Sir,” he exclaimed, as a colleague asked me to step aside and extend my hands to be tested for evidence of contact with explosive materials. It’s not only in England, of course, that functionaries subject the populace to their petty tyranny. It’s the same drill in the US. “Oh, but it’s to keep you safe, you know, that’s why we spend billions on our intelligence services and elite crime fighting units, equipping like armies so they can protect us from the bad guys.

Despite the best efforts of the media, the Democrats, and Liz Cheney, the Capitol protests of January 6 refuse to lodge themselves in the public consciousness as a nightmarish enormity. According to The Narrative, it was an “insurrection” that was worse than 9/11, worse than Pearl Harbor, the worst attack on “our democracy” since the Civil War. Yet almost no one believes that. Why? Because at the end of the day, the rambunctious events of January 6 were nine tenths theater, one tenth tragedy. Tucker Carlson was right. It was a protest that “got out of hand.” That fact is slowly crystalizing as the official narrative begins to crumble. The other day, I wrote a column lamenting Ted Cruz’s comments at the Senate hearings on the January 6 protest at the Capitol.

At least since the 2016 election, one of my favorites politicians — one of the few I could stomach at all — was Ted Cruz. He is certainly one of the smartest and most articulate members of Congress — not, I know, a high bar, but Ted really is someone with deep rhetorical gifts, an illuminating grasp of constitutional principles and a steely eyed appreciation of political realities. After a very brief flirtation with Scott Walker, my favored candidate for president in 2016 was Ted Cruz. I endorsed him publicly and even labored on the outskirts of his campaign for a couple of months. But it was not to be. His announcement that, should he win the Republican nomination, he would pick the egregious Carly Fiorina as a running mate made me raise an eyebrow.

The idea that what happened at the Capitol of January 6 was an “insurrection” was always a ridiculous and malevolent exaggeration. The passage of time has exposed that politically motivated lie and sent the rats scurrying for alternative explanations. Right on cue, we find a hobbyhorse leftist taking to the pages of the Washington Post — Jeff Bezos’s onshore publicity organ for the Democratic Party — to warn us against calling the protest at the Capitol an “insurrection.” The memo to Scribes and Pharisees has gone out. It’s no longer an “insurrection.” It’s been rebaptized a “sinister” act of “vigilantism.

Some people say that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. Nonsense. There is also the certainty that in America circa 2021 anti-black racist events are hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing whites or, more often, by blacks themselves. Right now, the world is mesmerized by the case of Jussie Smollett. Until he faked the “racist” attack on himself back in 2019, no one you knew had heard of Smollett. Now he is famous, not for being an actor, but for being a race-baiting hate monger. The fake-news, enemy-of-the-people, Trump-hating media slobbered all over that story. So did the slimy Democratic politicians sup daily on fifty-seven varieties of “racism” because they think it buys votes.

John Eastman, a former member of Donald Trump’s legal team, has just declined, through his attorney, to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the events of January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. I think he was right to do so, for several reasons. In the first place, the congressional inquiry would be better named a congressional vendetta. Its composition is heavily weighted towards Democrats. The committee includes no “ranking members” of the opposition as the rules stipulate, hence the frequent invocation of the “Star Chamber” in descriptions of the inquiry. It is less an investigation than an inquisition.

Ultimately, I suspect, John Durham will break your heart. At least, he will if you think, as I once hoped, that he was going to get to the bottom of the soft coup that was the Russia Collusion Hoax. I admit that I have been bucked up, somewhat, by Durham’s three indictments. Why only somewhat? First, I remember the many long months of silence. He didn’t call, didn’t write. I began to think he didn’t care. Then, in August of 2020, the radio crackled briefly to life. Amazing! John Durham, who had initially been presented as a sort of super Canadian Mounty, a prosecutor who always got his man, had come in from the cold with that scary facial hair and flashing spectacles with a real, honest-to-goodness indictment. At first blush, anyway, it seemed like a choice one.

Eventually, November 2 will be seen as a key date in American history. I am not thinking of November 2, 2021, however, the day of Glenn Youngkin’s stunning, delicious, gratifying victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race. Important though Youngkin’s victory was and is, it was prepared for and defined by a preceding triumph. The date I am thinking of is November 2, 2020. That was the date on which Donald Trump signed the executive order establishing the 1776 Commission, the purpose of which was to “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding.” 1776, mind you, not 1619.

How’s the ice cream in Rome? Joe Biden is about to find out. Word is he is excited about the gelato, which is A-OK, since it may distract him from the fact that he has nothing to report when he gets there. The president — I mean, Joe Biden — was supposed to reestablish “normality” to an office so badly bruised by the mad tweeter — no, make that “ex-tweeter” — who came before. “Normality” was one big selling point. The other was Biden’s vaunted foreign policy experience. Reality check one: was Joe Biden’s performance at that town hall with Anderson Cooper last week an exhibition of “normality”? Or was it yet another disagreeable instance of elder abuse, parading a man suffering from senile dementia before the cameras?