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Over the weekend, I received the usual emails from panting readers on the news-cycle hamster wheel demanding to know why I wasn't writing about Texas. Because I wrote that column two decades in advance and then retired to the Bahamas. "We've failed," as David Starkey told me on Friday night. Sean Hannity, whose 2017-2020 dining companion had his entire presidency subverted by the feds, still does his "Oh, there's just a few bad apples. I know these G-men. They're salt-of-the-earth decent honorable blah-blah-blah" shtick on the FBI.

So the Texas codswallop mainly reminds us that, long before the WuFlu, the citizenry had internally accepted that officialdom and the media could tell obvious laughable lies and not be called on it. The mistake, presumably, was in thinking that this would be confined to Islamic terrorism and not metastasize to China and public health and whatever's next.