Roger Kimball

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?

Have you seen the new variation on the children’s book series Where’s Waldo? It’s called Where’s Joe? and it is taking DC by storm. So where is Joe, leader of the free world, black-belt in political glossolalia, a potentate without power, our version of Nietzsche’s 'Last Man’ who not only blinks but gibbers. When I was a child, some scalpel-happy doctor determined that I should have my tonsils removed. In order to reconcile me to the procedure, I was promised all the ice-cream I could eat. That turned out to be a lie, of course, and I somehow suspect that poor Joe Biden feels the same now. Here he is, after decades of feeding at the public trough, and he is trough master supreme. It was supposed to be all ice-cream and young girls’ heads of hair.