Society

COVID-19 is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma and hidden within a Chinese wet market, or possibly a CCP laboratory. World leaders are baffled by how to respond. The science keeps contradicting itself. The world’s greatest mathematicians can’t keep up with the ever-changing data sets. Who can the poor and frightened public turn to for help? Never fear, Greta’s here. That’s right. Little Miss Thunberg, a 17-year-old Swedish girl who dropped out of high school to sound the climate change alarm, is turning her mega-brain towards COVID-19, just when we need her most. On Thursday evening, CNN will host a live town hall called ‘Coronavirus: Facts and Fears’, featuring former acting CDC director Richard Besser, former HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Miss Thunberg.

The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) was planning to run a panel tomorrow called ‘The Rise of Misinformation’ sponsored by Huawei — a Chinese consumer electronics firm with suspiciously close ties to the Chinese Communist party. Sadly, just over 24 hours before the start time, the NABJ suddenly canceled the event. What happened?A statement released by the NABJ said that the panel had ‘become a distraction from other priorities’, as it ‘had come under attack because controversial technology giant Huawei was planning to sponsor the webinar though it had no editorial control’.

Kayleigh McEnany, President Trump's new White House press secretary, has breathed new life into the briefing room and already proven herself to be a formidable opponent for the media. Unlike her predecessor, Stephanie Grisham, McEnany has been preparing for her moment at the podium for years. She rose to prominence in 2016 as a CNN contributor by duking it out on panels where she was routinely outnumbered as the lone pro-Trump voice. McEnany later joined the 2020 Trump re-election campaign  as its national press secretary. Her time in front of the camera debating Trump haters clearly paid off — she has been prepared twice already for 'gotchas' from members of the White House press corps, throwing their questions right back in their faces.

Everybody knows that the Communist party of China is sensitive to criticism. Internal critics have a tendency to disappear; external ones often find themselves silenced. Beijing pursues a policy of ‘elite capture’ — using powerful non-Chinese actors to pursue influence perceptions of China and advance its interests.Enter Steve Bannon, the former White House senior adviser, who likes the CCP even less than the elites. Bannon has been waging economic war on Beijing for years and is now using his new smash-hit radio show, War Room: Pandemic, to launch endless broadsides against the tyranny and malfeasance of China’s leadership. Bannon has been sharper than almost anyone in seizing the opportunities the pandemic has created to trash China’s global prestige.

With his usual haunts closed thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown, Cockburn has been clamoring for a new source of entertainment. Luckily, his nieces, who are always on the forefront of technology, have introduced him to a new app called 'TikTok.' The app, which allows users to create and upload short videos, has been gaining steam over the past year thanks to huge popularity among the Zoomer generation. As with most things that young people like, desperate politicians quickly pretended to understand or be interested in TikTok. In 2020, various Democratic candidates started to appear in videos themselves, mostly through the Washington Post's TikTok account. Things got very awkward, very quickly.

Disheartening news from the world of punditry this week, as it emerged that dynamic MAGA duo Diamond and Silk have been cut loose by Fox News. The pair rose to prominence in the lead-up to the 2016 election, with their snappy and boisterous Facebook videos in support of Candidate Trump. That spirit seems to have been their undoing: As CNN put it: 'Over the last few weeks, the duo has advanced all sorts of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus. They've questioned the death toll. They've questioned whether the virus is being "deliberately spread." They've suggested the "Deep State" is working "behind the scenes" and that it is "engineered." On and on and on it goes. 'On Wednesday, "Diamond & Silk" posted a tweet.

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo has perfected COVID-19 performance art. While other attention seekers declare proudly that they’re ‘pretty sure’ they ‘had the ’rona back in January’, Cuomo has outplayed them all by actually securing a positive test before becoming an insufferable twerp about it. Cuomo announced on March 31 that he tested positive for coronavirus and that he would be self-quarantining in his basement away from his wife and children. On April 7, Cuomo told viewers of his primetime show that he was shivering so much that he chipped a tooth. Sympathy poured in from across the internet, but just five days later, Cuomo threw away any goodwill he ought to receive for his illness.

The Spectator in London has this week done something no other magazine has done. We’ve just published our 10,000th edition. We’ve been producing a weekly magazine since 1828 — I’m proud to have been involved in the magazine for 10 of those 192 years. The key to our longevity is that The Spectator is unique; it dares to be different. We have pretty much stuck to the same simple editorial formula — news and comment first, book reviews after — because it works. We allow jokes and dissent. We encourage arguments. As Douglas Murray puts it in his column this week, The Spectator’s enemies are ‘Boredom. Predictability. Obviousness. Humorlessness. Dullness. Staleness.

The Western COVID-19 crisis started with another skirmish in the Nerd-Hack war and the conflict has continued. Back in February, Vox published a rather snide piece about how Silicon Valley weirdos were not shaking hands for fear of picking up and passing on coronavirus. Balaji Srinivasan, a noted angel investor and entrepreneur, hit back with a detailed critique of the piece. The reader can decide for themselves who was more prescient, though I will pose one question — when did you last shake someone's hand?Nerd-Hack conflict has boiled up again this week. Marc Andreessen, the co-author of Mosaic, the granddaddy of web browsers, published a rousing call to build. ‘Our nation and our civilization,’ Andreessen writes:‘...were built on production, on building.

Does President Trump have a new favorite magazine? At yesterday's Coronavirus Task Force briefing, Trump took a bit of time to educate the press corps on what they should be reading: National Review articles: https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1252354480298811392 'A story that just came out...“How the Media Completely Blew the Trump Ventilator Story”, I'm sure you love to see that. That's by Rich Lowry, respected journalist and person. “How the Media Completely Blew the Trump Ventilator Story”, which, unfortunately, you did. And here's another one that just came out. Kyle Smith, “The Ventilator Shortage That Wasn't”. “The Ventilator Shortage That Wasn't”...because we got it fixed...

Just as we were getting used to the headlines about hospitalization and mortality rates, the really bad news arrives. Meghan and Harry are back. After scuttling to California before they were isolated in the hell of a luxury rental in Vancouver, the unemployed ex-royals are loose on the streets of Los Angeles. Disguised as two Postmates workers, they’re delivering bags of food to already vulnerable members of the public and making sure to be filmed doing it. Think Candid Camera, without the candor.Like everything this spontaneously warm and down-to-earth couple does, this stunt combines a cold whiff of careful planning with their signature aroma, a complex blend of farce, vanity and self-destruction.

Donald Trump announced this week he intends to halt funding for the World Health Organization over the group's suspicious relationship with China. Doubtless you'll be shocked to hear that the establishment media quickly fell in line to defend one of its favorite globalist institutions, regardless of its actual effectiveness. The New York Times, fresh off picking apart the woman who has accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, scraped together an article defending the WHO's response to the coronavirus outbreak in a stunning display of  revisionist history. 'The World Health Organization, always cautious, acted more forcefully and faster than many national governments', declared the Times's standfirst, which prompted Cockburn to spit out his double-roast espresso.

News outlets across the globe are grappling with how to expand or adapt their operations to adequately provide readers with the latest news about the novel coronavirus. In the US, for example, various digital publications have reduced their paywalled content so that more people have access to their reporting. Cockburn’s masters at The Spectator are even giving away three months’ free digital access. Away from home though, Cockburn has particularly enjoyed Politico’s nightly newsletter dedicated COVID-19 news, aptly named, ‘POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition.’ However, while settling into his fourth scotch one evening, Cockburn noticed something in his Politico email that greatly disturbed him: the newsletter is sponsored by PhRMA.

For Christians, Easter commemorates the most important event in history. The importance of the event is not always obvious, for Easter — like Christmas — has been festooned with a garland of secular preoccupations. At Christmas, it’s the gifts and the gaudy, the saccharine and the sentimentality. The kernel of the event, part pagan, part Christian, is often little more that a quiet seed in the cacophony of a holiday from which the 'holy' has been carefully extracted. Still, if you stop moving, you can descry the adumbrations of a ceremony acknowledging the engulfing darkness of the winter solstice and promise of light to come. Easter has been decorated with ribbons and chocolates and strawberries.

Cockburn doesn't pay all much attention to football, but he was surprised to read on Wednesday that former New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady said he was 'tired' of people criticizing Donald Trump. 'The guy is doing his best to help the country. I'd like to see his critics try to do better in his position,' Brady supposedly said, according to reports in the New York Post and Washington Examiner. Cockburn saw several MAGA people sharing the quote victoriously on Twitter, but is at pains to inform them that it is a spoof. Brady, who is headed to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the upcoming NFL season (whenever that is), did give a candid interview about Trump to Howard Stern this morning.

Tone-deaf media elites and celebrities demand we all just stay home just as they do, self-isolating in their multi-million-dollar LA mansions or NYC brownstones. Journalists who don’t care to educate themselves about rural America — even after wildly misunderstanding the rise of Trump in 2016 — now lecture us country bumpkins, because we’re too stupid to understand how to quarantine ourselves. The architect of this condescending union of the fatuous and the famous was the New York Times.

‘During that time it seemed no easy thing to see any man on the streets of Byzantium, but all who had the good fortune to be in health were sitting in their houses, either attending the sick or mourning the dead… and work of every description ceased, and all the trades were abandoned by the artisans, and all other work as well, such as each had in hand.’ That’s a passage from Procopius’s History of the Wars, describing the way the bubonic plague ravaged Byzantium in 541 AD. If you want to feel historical time collapse, and the distance of centuries evaporate, it is worth reading the whole account.