Roger Kimball

It is a truism that while it takes much time and patience to build up a civilization, those achievements can all be undone in a moment. The administration of Joe Biden seems bent on testing that proposition. On his first day in office, 'C’mon Man’ Biden issued a spate of executive orders — 17 in all, if you are counting — aimed at undoing the legacy of President Trump.  It was all 'hello Paris Climate Accords, goodbye policing the borders.’ Two executive orders in particular caught my attention, one shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, the other shutting down the 1776 Commission and removing its report, issued just two days before America’s first armed-camp inauguration, from the White House website.

Like most Greek stories, the tale of Pandora’s box is fraught with ambiguity. Most of us, when we first encounter the story, learn that it is a fable about the dangers of curiosity, not unlike the story ‘of man’s first disobedience, and the Fruit/ of that Forbidden Tree’. As Eve sneaked the apple, so Pandora took the lid off a box that she was forbidden to peek inside. Bang! Death, illness, famine and all the other miseries of the world escaped to blight man’s life, leaving behind only hope as a sort of consolation prize. But is hope a consolation? Or is it a subtler, more insinuating evil?

‘Disappointed but not surprised.’ I suppose that describes my initial feeling about the summary dismissal by the Supreme Court last night of the ‘audacious’ (the New York Times) lawsuit brought by the state of Texas against Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan on December 8. In essence, Texas argued that those four states had trespassed on the civil rights of citizens by favoring some voters over others in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The amusing and perspicacious commentator known as Ace of Spades added a bit of hot sauce in his response to the news of the Court’s ruling. ‘The ultimate Friday Night News Dump,’ he wrote.

Are the chickens coming home for Hunter Biden? It certainly seems so, though experts differ on the critical question of whether they are coming home to roost or roast. Wednesday’s news, splashed via an official communiqué from his father’s transition operation, that Hunter is being investigated by the US Attorney’s Office for possible tax fraud makes me want to bet for ‘roast’ not ‘roost’. Here’s Hunter’s statement from Wednesday, in full: ‘I learned yesterday for the first time that the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs.

Although the electors for the presidential election of 2020 do not cast their votes until December 14, and their votes are not certified — and hence the election is not officially ratified — until December 23, it is eminently possible that by the time you read this the world will know whether the election was won by Donald Trump or Joe Biden. That is emphatically not the case now, in mid-November. The media narrative would have you believe otherwise. According to the received script, Biden won on November 3, or at least in the wee hours of November 4, when mail-in ballots, tens of thousands of them, began appearing like manna from heaven.

Once again, President Trump has done the right thing. This afternoon, he announced that earlier today he had pardoned Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the man who was framed by the corrupt administration of Barack Obama and mercilessly hounded for four years by a rogue FBI and out-of-control deep state apparat. The case was so embarrassing that the Department of Justice eventually intervened and dropped the prosecution. That did nothing to quell the fury of the vindictive Judge Emmet Sullivan, who decided to soldier on as both prosecutor and judge in his effort to nail Gen. Flynn. All that comes to an end today. 'It is my Great Honor,' the Twitterer-in-Chief wrote this afternoon, 'to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon.

Anyone who wants to peek into the engine room of the mainstream media’s megalomania should pay close attention to the Twitter account of the New York Times. You have to act fast, though, because some of the most revelatory tweets soon disappear like dew on a feminist’s jackboot. No, silly, those messages are not suppressed by Twitter.  This is the New York Times, after all, warden of wokeness, prefect of political correctness. The commissars of conformity running Twitter exist to enforce the dispensation smiled upon by the New York Times and other unofficial outposts of Democratic machine, not silence them. But every now and then the Times, like other such tools of The Narrative, fail to observe the important advice offered by Gertrude Stein.

If Joe Biden loses the presidential election tomorrow, he will not have any shortage of people to blame. The first culprit will be himself. Why did he do it? Why did he run? There are some vigorous 78-year-olds. Joe Biden is not among them. Physically, he’s ready for a nice cup of Ovaltine, not the Oval Office. In the matter of stamina, it is unfair to measure most people against Donald Trump. The man is a machine. As Ann Althouse pointed out, the President visited five states yesterday, covering about 3,000 miles. Joe traveled to two quiet events in one state some 30 miles from his home. William Blake was on to something when he observed that 'Energy is eternal delight.’ Joe Biden is a faltering battery, a flaccid string. Donald Trump is a dynamo.

First, let me pay brief homage to Kristen Welker, moderator of Thursday night’s debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. A White House correspondent for NBC, she is pretty clearly not an enthusiast for President Trump. But unlike the wretched Chris Wallace, she did not make the debate a two-versus-one shouting match against the President. And unlike Steve Scully, who was scheduled to moderate the canceled second debate, she did not covertly consult with one of the President’s enemies and then lie about it when exposed.

Writing in mid-October, anno domini 2020, it is sobering to speculate that when the results of a certain upcoming political contest are finally decided, an item that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly four years might be about to evaporate without trace. I refer, of course, to that great long-running entertainment, the Trump-Russia Collusion Delusion. As I write, the latest morceaux are the revelations from John Ratcliffe, the newly installed Director of National Intelligence, to the effect that Russian intelligence believed that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services’ during the 2016 presidential campaign. Why? Typical campaign dirty tricks, in part.

Res ipse loquitur. What a card Joe Biden is. Here he is to Fox News a year ago: 'I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.' Ha, ha, ha. Peter Schweizer exploded that bald faced lie in his film Riding the Dragon and elsewhere. And just today the New York Post prints an email captured from Hunter Biden’s computer. It’s from a Ukrainian businessman named Vadym Pozharskyi, who in 2015 was an adviser to Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter sat. Hunter had no experience in the energy sector. But his dad was vice president of the United States and apparently that was worth the $50,000 per month that Hunter collected in fees.

I should clear up one thing straight away. I do not believe that Joe Biden is guilty of magical thinking. Magical thinking, though specious, is a form of thinking. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Joe Biden is not guilty of thinking of any kind, ergo, Joe Biden is not guilty of magical thinking. Quod erat demonstrandum. But Biden’s supporters? Well, that is another matter altogether. There you see a wild efflorescence of magical thinking. What is magical thinking? It is the irrational belief, rampant among primitive peoples and those exposed to too many woke college seminars, that our thoughts influence or ‘constitute’ reality.