Politics

The White House is in a mask muddle What is the White House’s plan on mask mandates? At the start of the day yesterday it wasn’t clear whether the Biden administration would contest Monday’s ruling that scrapped the rules with immediate effect or, as I suggested in the Diary, whether they might see this as an opportunity to quietly drop the rule with minimal fuss. Things got no clearer as the day went on. Jen Psaki delivered stern denunciations of the ruling and reminded people of the advisability of masking up. Joe Biden, meanwhile, went for more of a you-do-you approach. It’s up to individuals whether they wear a mask, he said when asked about the ruling by a reporter.

My wife and seven-year-old son were halfway to Boston to catch a connecting flight to Ireland on Monday when the news came down. Or, as it were, went up, as Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle voided the Biden administration’s widely reviled but recently extended mask mandate on public transportation. After receiving instructions from the ground, the pilot on their plane emerged from the cockpit and announced that masks were no longer required. He then invited the passengers to “go ahead and throw them in the trash.” There was a swell of cheers as the passengers and crew were overcome by a euphoria of deliverance from the tyranny of overzealous Washington.

The latest filing by Special Counsel John Durham, investigating Russiagate and the Hillary Clinton campaign, suggests the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper than we thought. One hates to sound like Rachel Maddow, but it is now much more likely that the walls are closing in. Durham filed a new 34-page motion on April 15 in answer to defendant Michael Sussman's request to dismiss the case against him. Durham accused Sussman of lying to the FBI about his working for the Clinton campaign while he was trying to sell the Bureau on an investigation into Trump's ties to Russia, focusing on alleged internet pings between a Trump server and the Russian Alfa Bank. Sussman's claims also included a number of pings against Trump Tower WiFi and later White House WiFi by a Russian-made Yota cellphone.

The city of Philadelphia appears to be following China, if only in small steps, toward the delusional goal of Zero Covid. A new indoor-mask order, announced last week by Cheryl Bettigole, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, takes effect today, April 18. It’s the first resumption of such a mandate by any large city in the United States. President Xi Jinping, the well-meaning Dr. Bettigole most definitely is not. Yet is Philly, like China, again being seduced by the notion that the virus can be made to go puff? In Shanghai, a brutal push for Zero Covid is imprisoning millions in their homes and tearing infected children from their parents for quarantine.

Since the 1980s, conservatives have warned about the academic left’s “deconstruction” of Western culture. The fetishization of race and sex was shrinking our inheritance to a cartoonish morality play, they alleged. Academic identity politics would not stay put; its foundational conceits would migrate into the world at large. Such warnings had no effect. Corporations, law firms, banks, tech companies, publishers, museums, orchestras and theater troupes now routinely denounce the alleged racial oppression that is said to be endemic to the United States in particular, and to the West more broadly. Conservatives have responded in generalized terms: “The left is dividing us! It is betraying the ideal of judging people by the content of their character!

Cockburn knows we've all been there before. You're off on an innocent slosh through the Rio Grande River on the US-Mexican border when suddenly a posse of yodeling Border Patrol agents on horseback gallops up and starts attacking you with bullwhips. Such was the outrage of the day 24,000 outrages ago when images appeared to show mounted government agents riding after Haitian immigrants illegally trying to enter the country. The agents were holding their reins, which the left promptly portrayed as whips, all but accusing the men of being Indiana Jones wannabes. The episode was blamed on racism, xenophobia, Donald Trump, who was no longer president. Joe Biden said the agents "will pay." Kamala Harris invoked scenes of slaves being flogged.

Crime is on the rise in cities across America and the left is asleep at the wheel. Democrats are set to be routed in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead of getting onboard with tough-on-crime policies, they've focused their efforts on measures that are wildly out of touch with even their own voters. To start, Democrats have their pandemic lockdowns to thank for at least some of the crime crisis. Carjackings are up in cities, which experts attribute to teenagers who are not in school or extracurricular programs. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that the pandemic has given people too much free time, which can lead to an uptick in crime.

The G-word Menlo, Iowa, may seem a surprising spot from which to issue major foreign policy declarations. But such is the nature of the American presidency. One minute you are cheering Midwestern farmers with the news of a suspension of ethanol fuel regulations, the next you are describing war crimes committed thousands of miles away. The two are connected, of course: Biden was in Iowa yesterday to tackle the domestic fall out of the war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the thing that Biden’s trip to Menlo will be remembered for was his characterization of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “genocide.” Asked about his choice of words by reporters after the speech, Biden said: “Yes, I called it genocide.

Last week, a district court acquitted two men and deadlocked on two others who were accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. No word yet on which of her Covid restrictions Whitmer will now violate in order to cheer herself up. But the decision was a credit to the jury, which did the right thing in the face of immense pressure. The case against Whitmer's would-be abductors was a crock from the start, a classic instance of the FBI egging on poor saps so it could land an arrest and grab a headline. The spooky right-wing terrorists were nothing of the sort. Their supposed ringleader, a man named Barry Croft, was a heavy pot smoker nicknamed "Bonehead" who caused one FBI investigator to ask "Do these guys even know what's up?