Iconoclast: The EU-ization of America
America’s globalist elite views the European Union as the perfect governance model. That is, undemocratic and technocratic — and “now that ‘progressives’ have returned to the White House, aping the EU has become a national policy,” laments Joel Kotkin at UnHerd. Following the EU-besotted left, “President Joe Biden has already sought to federalize many functions — from zoning to labor laws to education — that historically have been under local control.” Yet beware: The EU has a “remarkable record of turning Europe into the developed world’s economic and technological laggard. Overall, nearly a third of Europeans consider Brussels an utter failure.” More than that, “copying Brussels … risks sacrificing the fundamental principles of our country: that wherever it is feasible, control of daily life should be left to local communities, and even individuals.”
Prehistorian: Did Climate Change Spark Farming?
“What if the need for fabric, not food, in the face of a changing climate is what first tipped humanity towards agriculture?” asks Ian Gilligan at Aeon. Yes, it’s “a radical departure from conventional thinking.” But “natural global warming” after the last ice age “prompted people” to “change their clothes from animal hides to textiles” and spawned agriculture. “Fitted garments offer superior protection from wind chill” and allowed our ancestors to “penetrate into the frigid Arctic Circle, further north than cold-adapted Neanderthals had managed to venture,” from Siberia to Alaska, where archaeologists “unearthed the fragile technology that made the journey possible: a 13,000-year-old eyed needle.”
Media watch: The Times’ COVID-Paranoia Push
The New York Times is pushing “absurdly cautious” behavior for the vaccinated “in light of the evidence showing how remarkably effective the vaccines are,” fumes Jacob Sullum at Reason. “Some epidemiologists continue to recommend following the golden rules of coronavirus safety,” the paper reports — advice that Sullum notes “is based on something other than rational, context-dependent concerns about virus transmission.” Masks and distancing “have been transformed into rituals that signify membership in a COVID-19 cult of caution.” Science clearly confirms “that COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective,” yet the Gray Lady presents that miracle “by saying vaccinated people face ‘less risk’ than unvaccinated people. To call that an understatement would be an understatement.”
From the right: Follow DeSantis
After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that fully vaccinated people don’t need masks and distancing, liberals’ outrage proved that they “don’t seem to care so much about exterminating COVID-19 as they do about keeping a vise grip on what people can and can’t do,” scoffs the Washington Examiner’s Eddie Scarry. Progressives are finally starting to see the GOP’s point that a group of scientists shouldn’t be “tasked with steering a country through a pandemic” because “that’s what elected leaders are for.” But “these people have never really been interested in ‘following the science’ anyway.” It’s become a “cliché” that we might do better to replace with “follow DeSantis,” after the Florida governor, who rightly “made the determination early on that the pandemic was too big to micromanage.” Now, “liberals can feel their control over our lives slipping away” with each passing day, and they may not like it, “but that’s where ‘the science’ is taking us.”
Feminist: Welcome the Sexual Counterrevolution
A growing cohort of young elites views sex liberationism “as toxic not just to individual well-being, but even to the long-term health of American society,” cheers Mary Harrington at Spectator USA. These young Americans are far from fundamentalists or dour feminists, yet the female ones express a preference for child-rearing over career-chasing, while the men are keen to settle down for the long term. Their movement comes in reaction to the 1960s sexual revolution, which promised to “unmoor” sexual desire from reproduction and family, but in practice, resulted in alienation, commercial exploitation and the degradation, especially, of women. “Welcome to the sexual counterrevolution.” — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
