The ordeal of 2018 was terrifying, to be sure. But there was also a carnival absurdity to it. The members of the American Stasi who came for us were diabolical, but also a joke. We were kids who had been raised on Mad magazine and The Bad News Bears. After the extortion threats, the media mob, and the opposition researchers, there would be room for comedy, which at its best punctures the pretentious of totalitarianism.

In his book Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War, Duncan White notes that America once fought communism by sending forbidden book into the Eastern Europe via balloons. Oppressed people in Poland and East Germany would look up to find floating towards them balloons carrying books by Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A whimsical, funny way to fight the oppressive state.

One of the most noted performances of 2018 — aside from Christine Blasey Ford’s acting debut — was Matt Damon playing Brett on Saturday Night Live. The sketch was, yes, intended to make the judge (now justice) seem angry and unhinged. But there was also a revealing part where Brett is asked by a committee member whether he drank beer in high school. “You mean was I cool?” Kavanaugh/Damon fires back. “Yeah.”

The woke liberal audience laughs, almost despite themselves. It’s like they know in their hearts that a witch hunt against kids who drank beer in the 1980s made the witch hunters rather than the kids look like fools.