by Roger Kimball
On Saturday, June 12, former President Donald Trump released a statement that, in tone, will have his opponents rolling their eyes.
“I told you so,” they will say, because Donald Trump told them so and managed to get in a bit of signature Trump braggadocio along the way.
Under the legend “Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America,” this is what he wrote:
“Have you noticed that they are now admitting I was right about everything they lied about before the election?”
“They” of course are the eye-rollers, not only those the former President delighted in calling dispensers of “fake news” but also their clients, toadies, and enablers.
Not for the first time, I wonder whether they all are readers of “Pride and Prejudice.”
I am thinking of that passage towards the end of the novel where Lizzy confesses her love for Mr. Darcy to her sister Jane.
Jane is horrified. “Oh, Lizzy! It cannot be. I know how much you dislike him.”
“That is all to be forgot,” Lizzy replies. “In such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is that last time I shall ever remember it myself.”
So it is with the reporters at CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Politico, the entire Democratic side of Congress, not to mention woke members of our intelligence services, the DOJ, military men with a rank of colonel or higher, members of any teacher’s union and of course anyone who has been graduated from or teaches at any Ivy or near-Ivy institution of so-called higher education, not to mention the NeverTrump sorority and time-servers in HR departments across the country.
To save time, let’s call this wretched multitude The Committee.
The Committee said one thing then, when Donald Trump was president.
They say something contradictory now, claiming—or in the case of Joe Biden, really—to have forgotten what they said when their bête orange was in office.
Hydrochloroquine
Here is his list (an incomplete list, by the way) of things that they admit now but lied about then:
— Hydroxychloroquine works
Remember the pain and anguish that accompanied President Trump’s announcement that he was taking the drug?
It was about the same time that the press went to town claiming that the president had recommended people inject or drink bleach.
My favorite episode in that little melodrama involved an Arizona couple.
A man in his sixties died after he and his wife ingested chloroquine phosphate, fish tank cleaner.
The media were all over that, claiming the president was responsible for the death.
Forget about the fact that hydroxychloroquine is not the same as chloroquine phosphate.
The really nice detail is that the wife was eventually brought up on homicide charges in the case.
But that’s just a bonus.
The real news here—as has been everywhere in the press these last week—is that hydroxychloroquine—pooh-poohed, derided, solemnly warned against by the lying fake-news deep-state establishment—actually does work. It is a potent treatment for the CCP virus.
Department of small blessings: it has been gratifying to see all of those smarmy reporters, and the organizations they work for, do the right thing and acknowledge their error and actually apologize to Donald Trump.
Just kidding.
They skidded right over it, taking a page from the end of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”: “Wovon mann nicht sprechen kann darüber muss muß schweigen” “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
It was the same story with the other items on the president’s list.
Origin of the Virus
— The Virus came from a Chinese lab
Trump raised that possibility very early on in the Wuhan scourge.
The Committee lambasted him for that.
Senior Committee spokesman CNN weighed in repeatedly to throw cold water on the contention.
“Nearly 30% in the U.S. believe a coronavirus theory that’s almost certainly not true,” CNN screamed.
And again: “Trump contradicts U.S. intel community by claiming he’s seen evidence coronavirus originated in Chinese lab.”
Oh, the “US intel community,” eh?
I am sure you are suitably impressed by that lawless fount of partisan misinformation.
My favorite gambit on the CCP-virus-could-not-have-come-from-a-Chinese-lab contingent was our fish wrap of record, perhaps America’s single most scurrilous source of woke nonsense, The New York Times.
Initially, Times oozed contempt for the idea that the virus might have come from the Wuhan virology lab.
It was, they said, a “fringe conspiracy theory.”
Connoisseurs of shameless cant will appreciate that the Times, shortly after the likelihood of the lab release became public, awarded itself a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the pandemic.
It’s good to be part of the nomenklatura.
“Oh, but the Times doesn’t decide who gets a Pulitzer. The Pulitzer Committee does.”
Want to bet?
More Lies
And so it goes with the other items on Donald Trump’s list.
— “Hunter Biden’s laptop was real.” Yes it was.
— “Lafayette Square was not cleared for a photo op.” Nope, it wasn’t but The Committee, from Jim Acosta to Joe Biden, insisted otherwise.
— Remember the “Russian bounties”: Russia was supposed to have put bounties of the heads of U.S. soldiers and Trump did nothing about it.
Trouble is, it was totally untrue.
Joe Biden is taking credit now for the COVID vaccines. But he literally had nothing to do with the creation or manufacture of the vaccines or with the logistical achievement of setting up a distribution network for their delivery.
And so on, from the uselessness—worse, the disaster—of lockdowns as a response to the virus to the bane of “critical race theory” and the dismantling of Trump’s successful border security initiatives.
The Committee has lied, lied, lied about Trump.
They lied then when he said what he said and did what he did, and they lie now, by omission if not commission, that the truth about these and other of Trump’s achievements have come to light.
Ambition Exposed
You might think this is just politics as usual.
It is not.
It is the infernal work of a self-engorging clique that more and more controls the levers of power and the spigots of information.
Their object is partly to push the “woke” agenda of identity politics but, deep down, their unalterable goal is the acquisition, deployment, and retention of power.
They are not well-meaning people who happen to disagree with us.
They are mandarin apparatchiks who seek to compass our destruction.
Donald Trump brought them out of the woodwork and exposed their ambition to public scrutiny.
That is the real reason they hate him.
We forget this at our peril.
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Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent book is “Who Rules? Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in the 21st Century.”
