The Secret Is Out

A few months ago, Senator Ted Cruz said, “If it ends up that Biden wins in November… I guarantee you, the week after the election, suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors, will say, ‘Everything’s magically better. Go back to work, go back to school.’ Suddenly, the problems are solved; you won’t even have to wait for Biden to be sworn in.” Cruz — who knows a thing or two about conspiracy theories, having been a victim of one in 2016 — was actually just parroting a theory advanced by his erstwhile victimizer.

But it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. We’re six weeks past the election and the pandemic is still very much with us and being treated as such. But that’s the great thing about conspiracy theories: They can just be trotted out to suit one’s political purposes, and when, with the passage of time, they turn out to be baseless, no one even remembers them, and it’s on to the next wild imagined conspiracy.

Remember this one? “Joe Biden is a mere puppet of the radical left to be used as a tool to burn down the suburbs and impose atheism on America.” During the campaign, his opponent referred to him regularly as a “Trojan Horse for socialism.” When asked by talk show host Laura Ingraham who Biden’s being controlled by, he helpfully clarified that it’s “people who you’ve never heard of, people who are in the dark shadows,” and “people who are in the streets, people who are controlling the streets.”

I didn’t vote for Mr. Biden, nor have I ever written anything in support of his policies. Indeed, I look forward to the end of January, when I can pick up where I left off in 2016 and once again begin critiquing, often harshly, the policies of a Democratic president (to be cheered on no doubt by some who were aghast these last four years at the thought of criticizing a sitting US president).