Politics

Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd in a Minneapolis courthouse on Tuesday. Jurors deliberated for 10 hours before returning a guilty verdict on all counts: second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Floyd's death on May 25 last year was witnessed by several bystanders outside of the Cup Foods deli in northern Minneapolis. A video showing the final minutes of Floyd's life, shot by teenager Darnella Frazier, went viral and prompted a wave of summer protests and riots in American cities and worldwide. In the clip, Officer Chauvin restrained Floyd with his knee, pinning his head to the tarmac alongside a car. Floyd had initially been apprehended for use of a counterfeit banknote in the deli.

Being a somewhat old-fashioned person, Cockburn is skeptical of latter-day feminism and the utter sanctity of a woman’s right to choose. So it’s quite odd that he also feels compelled to defend progressive womanhood from Planned Parenthood, which quite unexpectedly has come out in favor of misogyny. ‘I’m the Head of Planned Parenthood. We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder,’ says the headline from current Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson. The context is Planned Parenthood’s ongoing cancellation of Margaret Sanger over her support for ideas that are today unpopular, such as sterilization, eugenics, and freedom of speech.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2021 World edition.  As I walk toward Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s office, I notice a large flag and sign opposing one another across the hall. Greene’s neighbor, Democratic Rep. Marie Newman, has recently planted a transgender pride flag to protest Greene’s opinion that biological men should not be playing women’s sports. Greene responded by posting a sign that says, ‘There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. “Trust The Science.”’ I’m expecting a rather tense atmosphere inside Greene’s office, given how often the congresswoman from Georgia finds herself at odds with her colleagues.

Age matters in Japan, so when Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga (73) sat down for talks with President Biden (78), deference to his ‘senpai’ (senior) colleague would have been his default setting. But from the looks of the joint statement following their summit, he seems to have held his own. The main issue, it seems, was China. Japan wanted assurances from the US that their claim to the Senkaku Islands would be respected. The islands’ status is covered by the US/Japan security treaty, but as China routinely sends its own fishing boats to menace Japanese vessels, Suga was looking for a reaffirmation of American support.

President Joe Biden announced this week that he was pulling all remaining American troops out of Afghanistan by September 11 — and the media rushed to frame the decision positively. They are technically correct — it makes zero sense to continue to put American lives at risk and spend taxpayer dollars on a decades-long 'war' with no foreseeable end nor desire to 'win'. But as you can guess, when former president Donald Trump announced he would withdraw troops from Afghanistan just last year, the media hysterically warned that he was emboldening the Taliban and making America less safe. 'Trump administration to cut troop levels in Afghanistan despite Pentagon warnings,' the Washington Post reported.

We live in the wackiest of times, when woke corporate leaders should propagandize for promoting 'racial equity'. They tried it in Georgia, to no avail. The state passed a law to improve a haphazard, disorderly voting process shaped (or unshaped) by pandemic requirements. The heads of two Georgia-based corporations, Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, scowled. Their finger-wagging lectures to non-woke state leaders were absurd but much publicized. Major League Baseball wasn’t going to put up with being ignored on a matter unrelated to game length and such like. In a door-slamming, cat-kicking snit, MLB announced it was moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta, capital of the offending state, to Denver. Take that, all you Trump fans!

For years, activists have demanded stricter gun control in America, on the cogent (though perhaps unconstitutional) grounds that fewer guns will save the lives of young people in American cities. Cockburn has an alternative proposal: instead of gun control, America needs celebrity control. Lacking any skin in the game and let loose on Twitter, famous people are saying extremely insane things that are going to get people killed. The chief honor this time goes to alleged ‘comedian’ Chelsea Handler, after the shooting death of Minneapolis’s Daunte Wright. Wright tragically learned the hard way that resisting arrest puts you at risk of being shot by a birdbrained police officer who confuses her taser with a pistol.

The coronavirus pandemic was a black-swan event the likes of which this planet hadn’t seen in almost a hundred years. It caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and crashed the global economy, resulting in the largest socioeconomic change since 2008. It was, in short, not good. Yet there are pockets of public health experts and corporate media pundits who seem content to play out an endless cycle of pandemic porn. This runs contrary to what the majority of the population wants to watch and how most Americans are choosing to live their lives.

As the pandemic accelerated, an epidemic seemed to recede from headlines. But it did not stop. More than 40 states reported an increase in opioid-related deaths, with more than 81,000 between May 2019 and May 2020, the highest one-year death toll ever reported. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one cause stood out: fentanyl overdoses spiked by nearly 40 percent. As a Schedule II controlled-substance, fentanyl is already highly regulated. The drug is several times more powerful than morphine; when used appropriately the pharmaceutical can treat severe pain post-surgery. Unauthorized use — possession, manufacturing, or distribution — is illegal. Synthesized analogue versions of the drug are just as deadly, but can skirt regulation because of chemical differences.

For all that has gone wrong in America in the last year, the main thing that has gone right is our system of 50 independent states has endured and prospered. The COVID-19 pandemic was a challenge to our federalist system. The impulse in March 2020 was to have all states respond in the same way to the virus. Of course, in a country with large cities and small cities, sprawling suburbs, small towns, extremely rural areas and everything in between, that made little sense. We quickly corrected it and governors took control of COVID-19 policies for their states. The results of that have been astonishing. States that had tight lockdowns, such as New York, New Jersey and Michigan, did not see better outcomes than states which loosened their lockdowns early on.

Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson came under fire early this week for vetoing a bill that would prohibit doctors from providing children suffering from gender dysphoria with hormones, puberty blockers, surgeries, or other treatments that would 'affirm' their 'identity'. The governor's response to this criticism was to pour gasoline all over himself and light a match. There are few good long-term studies on the use of hormone and puberty-blocking treatments for transgender youth, primarily because such drugs have only been used in the past on a short-term basis to treat conditions like precocious puberty. They were not intended to suppress puberty indefinitely. Research suggests, however, these treatments can lead to an increase in suicidal thoughts or depression.