Coronavirus

President Donald J. Trump, burned in 2020 at the height of Covid by some states’ shenanigans ranging from rule changes regarding absentee voting to registration requirements, is now on a quest to reform mail-in voting and traditional ballot tabulation machines. On August 18, the President posted the following missive on Truth Social: “I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.” Some of the voting practices the President has critiqued are unusual, to say the least.

At long last, the Ontario government’s drawn-out legal proceedings against the organizers of the Freedom Convoy is winding to a conclusion. In a move seen as surprisingly vindictive, the Crown is seeking minimum sentencing of seven and eight years of jail time respectively for leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber.As Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre posted on X, “Let's get this straight: while rampant violent offenders are released hours after their most recent charges and antisemitic rioters vandalize businesses, terrorize daycares and block traffic without consequences, the Crown wants seven years prison time for the charge of mischief for Lich and Barber. How is this justice?

Last Friday the White House launched, without warning (which is how they like to do things), what is essentially a truth and reconciliation inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. While this somewhat vanished into the fog of President Trump’s ongoing battles against the post-Cold War liberal order, it’s still a significant political event.  Dial your browser to covid.gov, and it takes you to a White House splash page, with the words LAB LEAK in all caps, and “The True Origins of COVID-19” below to the right. The letters “Covid-19” are in cursive, as though a baseball player had signed it as an autograph.

In June 2021, Jon Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and ridiculed people that dismissed the possibility of a lab leak origin for Covid. He quipped: “Oh my God! There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? ‘Oh, I don't know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.’ Or it’s the fucking chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it.” At the time, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called Stewart’s rhetoric “dangerous and short-sighted.” Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman fumed that “celebrities” shouldn’t be considered reliable sources of information and Forbes rounded up viewers uncomfortable with Stewart’s words.

As a new Covid variant, JN1, has cropped up across America, the public health officials who were at the forefront of the Covid-19 pandemic were hauled into Congress and pressed on lockdowns, the origins of the coronavirus, school closures and more behind closed doors. The most prominent target, Anthony Fauci, was particularly grilled by the House’s bipartisan Covid Select Committee for fourteen hours over two days. Unreported until now is the lack of interest by the committee’s top Democrat, the confirmed conflicts of interests that an American scientist investigating Covid’s origins had and the carelessness with which Fauci ran his grant-making.

For decades the American left has attempted to build a winning political coalition by convincing as many factions as possible that they have somehow been victimized by a white power structure — more particularly, by an American and European white male power structure. The goal has been to provide the Democratic Party with a large base of aggrieved voters while simultaneously giving its traditional allies in the media, academia and government a persuasive social justice (or more recently “anti-colonial”) narrative. But ever since Joe Biden’s inauguration as America’s forty-sixth president, when his promise to be the country’s conciliator quickly disappeared behind a sharp left turn, progressivism’s self-defeating internal contradictions have become increasingly apparent.

As Joe Biden met with Xi Jinping on the West Coast, one of China’s favorite scientists had a rough day on the East Coast — where he revealed to Congress that his ties to controversial coronavirus research were deeper than suspected.  Peter Daszak, head of the controversial EcoHealth Alliance, was summoned to a closed-door, transcribed interview by the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee of the Coronavirus Pandemic, where he was pressed solely by Republican lawmakers and the committee’s bipartisan staff on everything from gain-of-function research to his 2021 trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.