ROGER KIMBALL: Conspiracy Theory or Conspiracy In Fact?

Last week, Fox Nation aired “Patriot Purge,” Tucker Carlson’s three-part series on the January 6 protest in Washington, D.C. No sooner had the program been announced than the regime media went nuts. The former conservative Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic, said it was a “sinister” piece of anti-American propaganda. NPR described it as an “off the rails” “conspiracy theory.” CNN said that it promulgated a “false narrative” that was “politically, historically and logically confused.”

Translation: Carlson disputes the accepted narrative according to which the protest at the Capitol was an “insurrection” aimed at undermining “our democracy.” Ergo Carlson must be wrong. Cue the heated rhetoric and wheel out that all-purpose epithet “conspiracy theorist.”

As a side note, I have always wondered why people of a certain ilk believe that uttering the phrase “conspiracy theory” or charging someone with being a “conspiracy theorist” disposes of any argument. George Orwell noted that the term “fascist” had been rendered nearly meaningless by its promiscuous application to all manner of things or people one didn’t like. “Conspiracy theory” is on even shakier ground, because in addition to make-believe conspiracies, the world is full of plenty of real conspiracies about which one needn’t theorize but simply observe and describe.

When the Soothsayer came to warn Caesar about the Ides of March, he wasn’t warning about a conspiracy theory. He was warning about a conspiracy in fact, something that Caesar came to appreciate personally when the fateful day rolled around. Caesar to the Soothsayer: “The ides of March are come.” Soothsayer: “Ay, Caesar; but not gone.”

Carlson’s thesis in “Patriot Purge” is that the extraordinary law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus that had been assembled and deployed to battle terrorism in the wake of 9/11 had not been dismantled after Osama bin Laden was killed. On the contrary, it has been maintained intact and is now being deployed against American citizens who have the temerity to challenge the dominant narrative about the perfidy of Donald Trump and the nature of the January 6 protest. (That Merrick Garland, the attorney general of the United States, should issue a memo directing the FBI, together with state and local law enforcement agencies, to treat parents who challenge their local school boards over the teaching of critical race theory as “domestic terrorists” shows how elastic that enemies list can be.)

The two most important commentators on the events of January 6 are Julie Kelly, who has written scores of thoughtful articles on the subject here at American Greatness, and Darren Beattie, whose painstaking investigation of the FBI’s role in various plots and protests has shed a discreditable light on that preening and increasingly lawless organization.

Left wing actors attempting to infiltrate the right — I just can’t see it, myself:

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: British Columbia doctor clinically diagnoses patient as suffering from ‘climate change.’

TOP SELLER: The Easy 5-Ingredient Slow Cooker Cookbook: 100 Delicious No-Fuss Meals for Busy People. #CommissionEarned

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION (AND TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE): Biden Accused Of Mocking Americans’ Intellect: ‘You Think They’d Understand What We’re Talking About?’

“What — like, for example, if I had — if we were all going out and having lunch together and I said, ‘Let’s ask whoever the — whoever is at the next table, no matter how — what restaurant we’re in — have them explain the supply chain to us.’ You think they’d understand what we’re talking about?” Biden continued. “They’re smart people. But supply chain — ‘Well, why is everything backed up?’ Well, it’s backed up because the people who supply the materials that end up being on our kitchen table or in our — in our fam- — our life — guess what? They’re closing those plants because they have COVID.”

Grabien founder Tom Elliott responded to Biden’s remarks by writing that Biden “mocks Americans’ intelligence.”

Well yes — elderly people with failing memories often fall back on those sweet memories of the good old days:

#10 ON THE NYT BESTSELLER LIST, #4 ON AMAZON: John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. #CommissionEarned.

MERE BOURGEOIS TRUTH MUST YIELD TO “REVOLUTIONARY TRUTH:” Astronomer retracts paper on use of data to make hiring decisions because it could harm ‘women and minorities.’

#Science!

CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN IDEAL. Ivy League Analysis Destroys Biden’s Entire Argument for Multi-Trillion-Dollar ‘Build Back Better’ Spending Plans.

Analysts at the Wharton School of Business reviewed President Biden’s latest $1.85 trillion framework proposal and ran the numbers to project its likely economic impacts, under two distinct scenarios. One is the rather unrealistic scenario where it actually only costs $1.85 trillion. Yet because the proposal is structured with many budget gimmicks and short-term spending authorizations that would likely be reauthorized if implemented, its real cost could be as much as $4.25 trillion. Wharton also modeled the likely impact of this scenario.

In the first case, where the president’s plans cost only what he claims, the analysis still finds his promises falling short on nearly all counts. The tax increases included would not, in fact, pay for the entire proposal, and it would lead to a 2 percent increase in government debt over the long run. (That might sound small, but it’s hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars!) And, while Wharton projects that wages would increase slightly, it finds that the overall economy would shrink, not grow, while business investment and hours worked would decline.

Erm… how’s that revitalizing America? And those dismal results are under Biden’s rosy assumptions. Under the more realistic scenario where spending provisions are accurately accounted for and the real cost is north of $4 trillion, the investment’s return is even more spectacularly awful.

Last week, Joe Manchin told CNN, “We don’t have the numbers that FDR had or that Lyndon Baines Johnson had in order to get some major, major legislation done.”

But Manchin is wrong about Biden not being LBJ in one sense: As Amity Shlaes wrote in her 2019 book, Great Society, “What the 1960s experiment and its 1970s results suggest is that social democratic compromise comes close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy…In the pain of the 1970s and early 1980s, many Americans came to recognize that the ultimate executive-led expert-driven social project of the 1960s, the White House application of Keynesian economic doctrine, was also the ultimate domestic failure. In retrospect, citizens finally saw Keynesianism for what it was, mere window dressing for political expedience. The popular expression of these new insights was the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.”

This administration has of course, forgotten those lessons: Milton Friedman’s Revenge.

TYRANTS HATE TRUTH-TELLERS: And so they arrest them, throw them in jail, convict them in kangaroo courts, and punish them for the crime of telling the truth. Pray for Epoch Times Nigerian reporter Luka Binniyat.

THAT’S BECAUSE SPANISH ISN’T GENDER NEUTRAL: Despite the push from woke professors, Hispanics don’t use ‘Latinx.’

Trying to change a core characteristic of the Spanish language is cultural imperialism, straight up. #Resist!

SAN FRANCISCO MORPHED INTO DETROIT SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED:

Shot:

Walking through San Francisco, I kept thinking of the words “global capital flows.” And “flow” seems just right: There is a sense that all that big new money just washed over this rickety old city, a rising tide that lifted a hell of a lot of boats but inundated a few others, before the waters of big new global money did what all such waters do and began to recede. There are a lot of Teslas on the streets here, but a lot of U-Hauls, too, and while the Google/Facebook/Andreessen Horowitz party is still going strong in much of the rest of the Bay Area, the city of San Francisco is grim, ravaged by COVID-19 and wretched misgovernance. It is easy to forget that there is a thoroughly ordinary city here underneath all the madness and quaintness and money and glamour and grime. Tesla employs fewer people in the Bay Area than does Sutter Health, and Kaiser Permanente employs three times as many locals as Facebook. Sure, there’s a pretentious vegan café in the airport, but this is a city that needs CVS, Walgreens, and Target.

And those stores are under siege, falling one by one, closing up shop.

The ORCs are here.

First it was the razor blades and the cologne. Those were the first things in the all-night pharmacies and convenience stores to go behind locked cabinet doors. But at this CVS in San Francisco’s financial district, it’s damned near everything: booze, of course, though not all the booze, pistachios, mixed nuts, dental floss, toothpaste, lotion, deodorant, hair-care products, pain medicine, multivitamins — mostly not things that the vagrant and semi-vagrant members of the sandwich-philanthropy-receiving population are looking to scoop up for their own use, though a few hours before I got there one free spirit did apparently walk out with a bottle of white wine, the weather being fine and life being one long picnic.

If you want to buy some toothpaste or a Slim Jim, you have to press a little call button, like you are summoning the attendant on an airplane — and, of course, you’ll have about as much luck. A clerk earning minimum wage can wait out almost any shopper. It depends on whether you want that Benadryl bad enough.

Some of the stats say property crime is actually down in San Francisco, but that is probably a reporting issue, because some store managers have stopped bothering to waste their time filing police complaints. There’s a uniformed security guard here at CVS, but these guards are not allowed to touch thieves, so all they can do is try to reason with them — which, you know, best of luck with that. If they do call the police, the police will take half an hour or more to show up, if they show up at all, which they often don’t. One store clerk says that thieves will sometimes boost a few beers, walk out the door, and stand right there and drink them in front of the store, fearlessly enjoying their afternoon cocktails alfresco. Locals trade videos of thieves filling up their backpacks as security guards speak sternly to them:

“I’m calling the police!”

“Okay, whatever.”

—“The ORC Invasion,” Kevin D. Williamson, NRO, October 28th.

Chaser:

In their years at the Tailwind, the Aboud brothers have never been held up—a record that Aboud attributes to the family’s honest business practices and its militance. “When we caught shoplifters we never used to call the cops,” said Aboud, preferring the past tense. “We took care of things in our own way. If somebody killed my brother, I’d get even, that’s the type of family we are. People who think we’re crazy are right—we are crazy. But we don’t look for trouble. We’ve got a friendly store. Come over any night and you’ll see.”

The following Friday I took him up on his offer. After all the horror stories I had heard, I was surprised by the relaxed atmosphere in the Tailwind. Customers, mostly black, bantered with Aboud and his brother Mike, exchanging neighborhood gossip. John Aboud flirted amiably with several of the young women and they flirted back. Over the cash register there were snapshots of kids from the block.

After each customer left, Aboud provided me with a thumbnail biography. Some were solid working people, but many were drug addicts or dealers, teenage mothers and ex-cons. Each story was told in a flat, nonjudgmental way. Aboud is a merchant, not a missionary, and he accepts the foibles and weaknesses of human nature philosophically.

Aboud’s tolerance has not impaired his vigilance, however, and the Tailwind’s security system could be fairly characterized as forbidding. The front door has a permanent squeak, to let the brothers know when someone comes in. They work behind a thick shield of bullet-resistant glass (Aboud told me that when they come out from behind it, they wear bulletproof vests) and on the shelf behind the counter there was a small arsenal: a .44 Magnum, a 9-millimeter pistol, and a couple of AR 15 semiautomatic assault rifles—tools of the shopkeeper’s trade in Detroit.

—Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit, Zev Chafets, 1990.

Hangover: San Francisco Chronicle: Should residents tolerate burglaries and focus on barricading their homes?

—Twitchy, yesterday.

GOOD: GOP to force vaccine mandate vote and put squeeze on centrist Democrats.

DAVID SOLWAY: Billionaire Barbarian at the Gates, Part One.

It is clear why many people consider Gates a dangerous man. He is indescribably wealthy, influential and powerful, and also persuasively glib in furthering his various agendas. Obviously, no one can determine absolutely what his underlying motives might be. Is he philanthropist or exploiter, hero or villain, savior or eugenicist? But there is ample warrant to remain skeptical of his bona fides.

To be sure, his Ted Talk was framed in the context of global warming and the obligation to reduce CO2 emissions, a challenge that could be met by reducing the planetary census. According to his formula, CO2 = P x S x E x C, where P = People, S = Services per person, E = Energy per service, and C = CO2 per energy unit, fewer people in a congested world means less atmospheric carbon and the consequent decline in the rate of (ostensibly) rising global temperature.

The problem here is that a reduced population does not necessarily entail a reduction in manufacturing and industry. Major polluting countries like China and India give no indication of scaling down carbon-emitting coal plants. Moreover, Green technology—the wind farm/solar array nexus—is notoriously expensive, unreliable, landscape defiling, and fossil-fuel dependent with its inevitable and frequent outages. Similar drawbacks are true of the half-ton, non-disposable, toxic EV lithium batteries now all the rage in the plans of quantitative futurists. The Green solution is a neon green figment, largely unworkable in the long run. Energy extraction remains essential. Fracking and nuclear are the most feasible alternatives, but are ruled out by ecological enthusiasts.

But when it comes to portraying himself as an “ecological enthusiast,” it’s clear that Gates is merely cosplaying: Bill Gates shops for ‘hundreds of acres of farmland’ to create ‘sustainable farm in Turkey’ from aboard his $2 million-a-week rental yacht after celebrating lavish 66th birthday party with Jeff Bezos.

I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.

TOP SELLER: Glencairn Whisky Glass, Set of 4 in 4 Pack Gift Carton. #CommissionEarned

SHOCKER: DEEP-BLUE SCHOOL SYSTEM IS CESSPIT OF SEX ABUSE. Sex Crime Allegations Rock Loudoun County Schools: New allegations come to light after explosive bathroom rape case. “Loudoun County police on Thursday charged high school counselor Ann Barrett, who allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with an underage student from 2013 to 2015. Loudoun County Public Schools placed Barrett on leave in May after the case surfaced. The counselor turned herself in and was later released on bond.”

THE NOT READY FOR PRIME-TIME PLAYERS: Fake laughter not the best medicine.

Does anyone recall the good old days of 2020, before the price of gasoline rose some 50 percent? We were maximizing the production of energy in the United States as a matter of national policy. Something happened in January 2021.

Biden Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm addressed the rising cost of gasoline yesterday in a Bloomberg interview (video below). Is there anything to be done? “That is hilarious,” she said and showed just how funny she found it. She seems to have taken a lesson or two from Kamala Harris in the department of fake laughter.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm laughs when asked about Biden's plans to bring gas prices down.

"Ha ha ha. That is hilarious!" pic.twitter.com/0V0XCsVqDc

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 5, 2021

Meanwhile, Granholm’s alleged boss has acting issues as well: Joe Biden Starts Wildly Screaming at a Reporter After He Gets Caught Lying.

Some days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported on settlements being reached with illegal immigrants that could pay as much as $450,000 a person. That is being ostensibly done as restitution for families that were separated under the Donald Trump presidency.

When Joe Biden was asked about the report, though, he called it “garbage,” claiming that it was not going to happen. A day later, his own White House contradicted him, saying that settlements are being negotiated that could reach that amount.

You’d think, at that point, that the president would understand he got caught with his pants down, having no idea what his own administration is doing. Instead, when asked again about it today, Biden doubled down on lying and began to — bizarrely — start screaming at the reporter.

A fair warning, this is really uncomfortable to watch.

WATCH: Biden bizarrely yells at a reporter when confronted about offering cash payments to illegal immigrants for breaking the law. pic.twitter.com/k0CBCgvnmQ

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 6, 2021

And then of course, there’s the woman with “the most obvious [poker] tell in the history of politics:”

SHH, DON’T TELL THE DEMOCRATS: Don Surber: Time to Dump Clueless Obama.

Throughout 2021, the narrative from DC reporters and pundits has been that Republicans must distance themselves from President Trump. Republicans largely ignored this advice for 75 million reasons. That’s how many people voted for him in 2020. No Republican ever came close to that figure, which was a gain of 13 million from the 62 million votes he received in 2016.

After Tuesday’s election, we now know that the Republican strategy of staying on The Donald’s good side worked. He was 4-0 in races he endorsed. He campaigned little but he raised money and occasionally a little heck on the Internet.

Meanwhile, Democrats trotted out Obama in Virginia. His job was to gin up the black vote. It helped cost Democrats the race.

Obama is out of touch. Never one to bother with details, he failed to do his homework. He dismissed parental concerns about schools, telling supporters, “We don’t have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage, the right-wing media peddles to juice their ratings.”

Wow.

How clueless.

For a fellow with jug ears, he sure is tone deaf.

Parents are not domestic terrorists. Parents have legitimate concerns about critical race theory, about schools providing students with books with porn passages, and with a boy in a skirt raping girls in the girls bathroom. These are real events.

And the parents Obama wrote off were not deep in Trump country. The parents Obama ticked off were in deep blue Northern Virginia — Loudoun County no less.

He kicked to the curb suburban DC voters.

In the wake of a 12-point flip in Virginia, Yascha Mounk wrote in The Atlantic, “You Can’t Win Elections by Telling Voters Their Concerns Are Imaginary.”

Mounk dared to say that yes, critical race theory, is being used in government schools.

It’s not like Barack would know. His kids are too old, and went to fancy private schools when they were younger anyway.

Plus: “As I say, he is clueless. He now is stuck in a celebrity bubble that occasionally overlaps with the political bubble he once ran. The media is largely inside that bubble as well. In it post-election piece, the New York Times put parental rights in air quotes. Transgenders can have rights. Illegal aliens can have rights. But parents cannot.”

TWO NEW YORK TIMES IN ONE! “Democrats Deny Political Reality at Their Own Peril,” a New York Times op-ed noted on Thursday:

HERE AT UT THEY OFTEN CALL IT “CARRICK COUGH” AFTER THE BIG DORM: What is ‘frat flu?’ Unknown illness spreading through campus not COVID, mono or flu.

HARDEN THE SYSTEMS: A Drone Tried to Disrupt the Power Grid. It Won’t Be the Last. Not sure that regulating drones more is the answer, though, since terrorists won’t follow the regulations, and since drones are relatively easy to build from scratch.

OPEN THREAD: If you’re not in it for love I’m outta here.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA picks landing site at the moon’s south pole for ice-drilling robot. “NASA plans to use the ‘lessons learned’ from PRIME-1 to prepare for a more ambitious lunar rover mission, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), which will also land at the south pole in 2023. In September, the agency announced VIPER’s landing site would be just west of Nobile, a crater near the moon’s south pole.”

SEEN IN GLEN ROSE, TX LAST NIGHT:

Related: 3inch Joe Biden Funny Sticker, That’s All Me I Did That Decal. #Commission Earned.

BIDENFLATION: Terry McAuliffe’s doom: Joe Biden and the price of eggs. “Twelve dollars for a dozen eggs. At the farmers market on Sunday, I did my own survey. Three stands were $11. The rest were $12. Ten minutes ago, they cost $6. One hundred dollars. That’s how much it cost my handyman to fuel up his truck. They’re warning that the price of canned cranberries is going to be 50% higher this year because of the scarcity of aluminum for the cans. . . . Tuesday was a small disaster. Bigger ones are on the horizon. Everyone gets that. The question is whether the early warning is early enough and whether Biden can recapture the attention of the country when we have the price of eggs, not to mention eggnog, to worry about.”

Biden can’t even remember what he had for breakfast.

AGREED, WE SHOULD KEEP DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME YEAR-ROUND: ‘Fall back’ time change potentially bad for health, experts say.

#JOURNALISM: