Dear Weekend Jolter,
One of the most shocking scenes in the Netflix drama The Crown depicts the real-life Aberfan disaster of 1966, in which a mass of coal waste slid down a mountain and smothered 144 people, most of them children.
In the aftermath, the series shows Prime Minister Harold Wilson remarking on how delicate the situation would become. An aide scoffs at the notion that the tragic accident would turn political. (It would.)
“Everything is political,” the PM replies.
So it was true then, so it remains true now with the coronavirus disaster of 2020 onward. But the politics of the pandemic have become as virulent as Covid-19 itself, to a degree that might even have startled Wilson’s dramatized character.
The suddenly shifting debate over masking in schools is one illustration. As Jim Geraghty observes, the chair of the Virginia Democratic Party, among others, blasted Governor Glenn Youngkin just a few weeks ago for his mask-optional order — calling the face-coverings “essential” for student safety and accusing the Republican of catering to the “far-right fringes.” This week, Democratic governors moved to roll back school mask requirements all over the map. Even Democrats in Virginia are now having a change of heart. Are they all “far right”? Even considering falling cases, did circumstances so radically change between the time of Youngkin’s order and today to justify the loosening now, but not previously?
Of course not. Everything is political, and the politics of Covid-19 are awful.
Kyle Smith explains here why the argument that the science has changed, or that cases have fallen to an acceptable level (that is, still above what they were a couple months ago when masks were still insisted on), is flimsy. The pivot is now being justified by some as a Solomonic compromise between extremes — the problem with this, as Charles C. W. Cooke says, is that this third way, which acknowledges that restrictions were once necessary but now can go, is not a sudden consensus but has been the position of a huge number of Americans for a long time. It is a position that was relentlessly vilified as anti-science until this week.
Everything is political.
This toxicity has consequences. Caroline Downey reports here on how the masking debate has affected Connecticut students all along, as described by an elementary-school teacher who had to remain anonymous in order to speak freely:
“Kids are being taught to call out their peers. I constantly see kids bullying their classmates, yelling things like ‘Johnny, put your mask above your nose!’,” she said.
While the teacher encourages her children to take “mask breaks” outside to get some air, she says she’s noticed that some are afraid to ask for one because they’re worried that they’ll be ridiculed. . . .
“I had a kid throw up in my room. The mask was covered in vomit, and then the student felt like they had to cover their mouth with their hands.”
None of this is to say the masks can’t offer any protection, or that parents must shun them. But the effort to put that decision in the hands of families, as with so much else during this pandemic, never should have become so politicized. The official guidance has changed often enough, and varies enough from country to country, to justify reasoned debate on the departure from it. Instead, we saw hysterical accusations of running a death cult for kids, of promoting the virus for a “warped idea of personal liberty,” and of being “anti public health.”
Lockdowns were the subject of a similar partisan battle royal — a new study has now emerged saying that they “had little or no effect on COVID-19 mortality” and concluding that “lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.” Mario Loyola writes:
One of the study’s more depressing findings is that lockdowns appear to have been heavily driven by intergovernmental peer pressure. “In short,” the authors note, “it is not the severity of the pandemic that drives the adoption of lockdowns, but rather the propensity to copy policies initiated by neighboring countries.”
Lockdowns were contagious; in some cases, they weren’t adopted out of necessity but conformity. Yet at the time, skeptics were lambasted as the “Fox News-Nazi-Confederate death-cult rump of the Republican Party.”
The hyperbolic, attention-grabbing accusations run in the other direction, too, as Michael Brendan Dougherty documented in his memorable account of a recent school-board meeting, where officials were castigated as criminals, with “plentiful references to Nazi Germany.”
If ever there were a cause to make apolitical — a time to detach ourselves from tribe for the common good — the task of extracting the nation from this crippling pandemic in a way that balances public health with everything else is it. As NR’s editorial points out, America has a lot to be proud of, having played a pivotal role in creating effective vaccines, and should take the “W.”
In other news, the Olympic Games in Beijing are shaping up to be a total flop. Good.
In other, other news, bravo, Mitch.
In other, other, other news, our webathon remains up and running on the home page. If you haven’t already, please consider tossing some coins in the column dispenser.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On your mark, get set . . . Pivot! The De-Masking of America
Spotify missed the chance to say “No” this past week: Spotify’s Craven Response to Joe Rogan
ARTICLES
Kyle Smith: Stacey Abrams’s Epic Face (Mask) Plant
Dan McLaughlin: Nikole Hannah-Jones Responds to Our 1619 and Slavery Issue
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Know the Name of Jimmy Lai
John Fund: Who Gets to Join the Black Caucus in Virginia?
Ryan Mills & Isaac Schorr: How Michigan’s Ballooning DEI Bureaucracy Stifled Speech and Divided the Campus
Ryan Mills: ‘Ridiculous’ Masking Rules for Student Athletes Must End, Coaches and Parents Say
Charles C. W. Cooke: Trevor Noah Is a Moral Disgrace
Brittany Bernstein: Chinese Artist Calls GWU President ‘So Ignorant’ for Censoring Anti-CCP Art: ‘Huge Scandal and a Shame’
Caroline Downey: Connecticut Moms Use Social Media to Ignite Nationwide Opposition to School Mask Mandates
David Harsanyi: The Afghanistan Debacle Looks Worse and Worse
Jim Talent: China’s Uyghur Persecution Is All Part of Its Grand Economic Scheme
Kevin Williamson: Uncle Sam Is a Predatory Lender
Nate Hochman: Elise Stefanik Drops Support for Fairness for All Act
Madeleine Kearns: Yellow Emojis Deny White Privilege, Apparently
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Workers’ Revolution Is Here, and the Left Hates It
CAPITAL MATTERS
Edwin Burton sees economic clouds gathering: The Perfect Storm Is Coming
David L. Bahnsen warns of another looming disaster, concerning a little-noticed proposed SEC rule change: ‘Nothing Systemic Here’
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White bemoans the Millennial archetype: The Worst Person in the World — The Worst Role Model in the Movies
Brian Allen spotlights an old medium treated with precision, creativity, and flair, reviewing a show of marvelous woodcuts on display in London: Helen Frankenthaler Captivates at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
Today in compartmentalizing . . . Kyle Smith examines a new musical’s treatment of Michael Jackson: The Whitewashing of Michael Jackson’s Sins
WE REALLY SHOULD PUT A TRIGGER WARNING ON THESE EXCERPTS — OH, WELL
Kneejerk censorship in response to flagrantly false accusations of racism is always the wrong move. George Washington University seems to have realized this after removing posters calling out CCP human-rights abuses. Brittany Bernstein interviewed the artist behind them:
Chinese political cartoonist and activist Badiucao called it a “huge scandal and a shame” that George Washington University’s president is “so ignorant” that he could be “personally offended” by the artist’s cartoons portraying Chinese Communist Party atrocities.
Badiucao’s comments came in an interview with National Review on Monday after GWU president Mark S. Wrighton vowed to remove posters of Badiucao’s cartoons that called out China’s human-rights abuses, including the Uyghur genocide and oppression in Tibet and Hong Kong. Before backtracking on Monday, Wrighton said he was “personally offended” by the posters and would work to determine who was responsible for hanging them.
“I think it’s a huge scandal and shame that a president of well-known University is so ignorant and not informed to understanding my art,” he said. “We’re not talking about someone who is not aware of the international situation or the human rights issues around the Olympic Games. This is really just public common sense.”
Staying on this topic, former senator Jim Talent explains the economic motivations behind China’s repression of the Uyghurs:
No one knows for sure, but it’s likely that 1 million to 1.5 million people have been interned in approximately 180 camps in Xinjiang. . . .
Do not think that this repression is simply an expression of savagery. Plenty of savage things happen in Xinjiang, but as far as the CCP is concerned, the repression there is a practical response to a practical problem.
In 2016, the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was beginning to gain steam. BRI is a program of Chinese investment in infrastructure projects in countries around the world. The investments are typically in the form of loans for projects the local government desperately wants but cannot afford. The terms of the loans are usually favorable to China, and the projects themselves are typically performed by Chinese companies with Chinese employees.
BRI is of immense importance to the CCP. It’s Xi Jinping’s flagship project for capturing foreign markets, extracting the resources and co-opting the elites of other countries, controlling key foreign ports and foreign technological infrastructure, and exerting economic leverage on the countries to whom China has extended credit.
One important objective of the BRI is to solidify China’s economic and political links to Central Asia, and through Central Asia, to Europe. And to get to Central Asia from Eastern China, the BRI must go through China’s westernmost territory, which, unfortunately for the Uyghurs, is Xinjiang Province.
Beijing was not going to take any risks with the infrastructure it was building through Xinjiang. The CCP has always mistrusted the loyalty of the Uyghurs because (a) they are not ethnic Chinese, (b) they are Muslim, and therefore (c) they have cultural and religious traditions not dictated or controlled by Beijing.
In short, the Uyghurs were in the way. And since they were of little value to the Chinese state to begin with, they are now being gotten out of the way, using the methods deemed most efficient by a regime that has contempt for human dignity and possesses an apparatus of high-tech oppression that empowers its agents, almost literally, to spy on and suppress everyone at once.
Nate Hochman delivers some serious scoopage on the Fairness for All Act:
House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik has dropped her support for the Fairness for All Act (FFAA), National Review has learned. As the third-ranking House Republican, the New York lawmaker was likely the most prominent cosponsor for FFAA, an all-Republican bill that would write sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) into U.S. civil-rights law. Her withdrawal of support, which occurred during last night’s procedural vote, deals another heavy blow to the proposed legislation’s already-beleaguered cause.
FFAA was initially pitched by its backers as a “compromise” between LGBT rights and religious liberty, pairing government protections for gay and transgender citizens with modest “right to discriminate” carve-outs for certain religious institutions. Until recently, that proposed arrangement seemed to be gaining momentum. When it was first introduced by Representative Chris Stewart of Utah at the end of 2019, FFAA had eight cosponsors. By November 2021, it had 22.
Today, however, that momentum seems to have reversed. As of this writing, Stefanik is the third and highest-ranking cosponsor to have withdrawn support for FFAA. She joins Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who quietly withdrew his support on November 30, and Claudia Tenney of New York, who dropped off the bill on February 2.
Ryan Mills & Isaac Schorr shine a light on the swelling DEI bureaucracy at the University of Michigan, and how it has stifled campus life:
Students and faculty who spoke to National Review described a campus culture where people fear that committing even a minor slipup deemed insensitive by someone, somewhere, could put them in the crosshairs of DEI bureaucrats, whom activists are more than happy to weaponize.
Few institutions have seen their DEI infrastructure grow faster or larger than U-M’s. The Heritage Foundation’s Diversity University report released last summer found that U-M had by far the largest number of staff members whose jobs are based on propagating and promoting DEI of any of the 65 universities in the five “power” athletic conferences the researchers reviewed.
To better understand how U-M’s DEI bureaucracy has grown over the years, National Review obtained annual university staff lists going back to 2002 and used them to identify staff members with DEI-related job titles, or employees of the various diversity centers, units, and programs listed on the school’s website under the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion umbrella. The analysis focused on U-M’s main Ann Arbor campus and tried to include only university staff whose primary role is propagating DEI, not faculty who are ostensibly dedicated to teaching and research.
The analysis found that U-M had at least 167 staff members dedicated to DEI and other multicultural initiatives in 2021, more than four times the approximately 40 DEI staffers working on campus in 2002. . . .
Rather than make U-M a more tolerant place, there’s evidence that its DEI push has instead created a more culturally rigid campus, the kind of place where woke students and staff are forever on the lookout for offenses against the politically correct orthodoxy.
In 2016, for example, a campus housing official reported a phallic-shaped snow sculpture as a “bias incident.” In 2020, the university’s Information and Technology Services department released a draft list of problematic words and phrases, including “picnic,” “sweetheart,” “brown bag,” and “hi guys!”
And don’t miss Dan McLaughlin’s response to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s response to NR’s 1619 Project response. Got all that?
Those familiar with how she typically responds to engagement with her work — engagement that typically appears only on Twitter, and not in any edited publication — will be unsurprised to see that she reacted with a lot of sneering and ad hominem argumentation and nothing of substance.
Naturally, her opening bid was to complain that we “couldn’t find any women, apparently, and only one Black person, apparently, to write about a slavery project created by a Black woman.” This sort of racial essentialism — in which the race and gender of the writer is more important than the writer’s facts or evidence — has been endemic to efforts by Hannah-Jones to dismiss critiques by the nation’s leading historians in areas of their own, but not her, expertise. . . .
My own contribution to the issue, on how American slavery fits within the global history of slavery, runs nearly 6,000 words and covers seven pages of the print magazine. Hannah-Jones could find nothing to say except to screenshot a single paragraph and grouse that it was “straight out of 1910.”
Nowhere does she attempt to argue that a single thing in that paragraph is wrong, and she — like you, dear reader — is free to peruse my list of sources.
Shout-Outs
David French, at the Dispatch: Our Nation Cannot Censor Its Way Back to Cultural Health
Dorian Lynskey, at UnHerd: Why comedians stopped being funny
Doug Badger, at the Daily Signal: Unmasking CDC’s Latest Mask Study: How Government Gets It Wrong Again
Yascha Mounk, at the Atlantic: Open Everything
CODA
Sometimes, the best songs are the interludes, the packets of music without any real beginning, middle, or end. “The Wild Healer,” by French metal band Gojira, is one of those. (And yes, plugging an aimless interlude from a “French metal band” sounds like something Stefon would do, guilty.) The soothing, circular music creates an instant atmosphere, developed in layers, and it’s one you don’t want to dissipate. Thankfully, this extended version exists. The Internet just keeps giving.
Got a tune? Want to share? Send a link to jberger@nationalreview.com. Thanks for reading.