Coronavirus

We are less than a month away from entering 2022 — so why does it feel like March 2020 all over again? Cable news networks are obsessively covering the new Omicron variant of Covid-19. They are hellbent on scaring the daylights out of any unsuspecting viewer who accidentally flips onto their programs. To be fair, the media is taking cues from the president. According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is reportedly weighing up a seven-day self-quarantine for all travelers arriving on our shores, regardless of vaccination status, including US citizens and permanent residents. Travel bans, which fell out of fashion in the Trump years because they were "xenophobic", are suddenly back in vogue. It all begs the question: didn’t Joe Biden promise to shut down the virus?

Another holiday season, another Covid strain to quintuple-mask against. This one, discovered in South Africa last week, is called omicron, and how fitting that it sounds like the codename for some evil plan that was hatched in a volcanic lair. The omicron variant feels like nothing so much as a twelfth-in-ten-years action movie sequel, derivative and exhausting, asked for by no one, with even Vin Diesel and The Rock unable to tell each other apart anymore. Omicron is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, meaning Covid has already produced a couple dozen other variants. (The WHO, which names the strains, skipped nu, the thirteenth letter, so it wouldn't be confused with "new," as well as xi, the fourteenth letter, presumably to avoid offending a certain Chinese public health hero.

Did you think we were having supply chain issues? Just wait until the vaccine mandates — cross-border and federal — kick in. We haven’t seen anything yet. “The supply chain that stole Christmas” has been dominating headlines all over the place for over a month now, even in The Spectator. Senator Mike Lee’s office is having fun with it too. The senator has just introduced the Surpassing Temporary Obstructions at Ports and Guaranteeing Resources to Increase the Nation’s Commercial Health Act — or STOP the GRINCH Act. More on that in a moment — but first, why are we hearing so much about the supply chain lately? Because of shortages, obviously! But wait. There’s nothing terribly new here.

Imagine if former governor Andrew Cuomo had been as concerned with the safety of nursing home patients during the pandemic as he was with cranking out his crappy memoir. Perhaps more people would be seeing their grandparents this Thanksgiving. Alas, the Luv Guv had his eyes on a $5.1 million prize and therefore he had to quit, or at least check out of, his day job. Cuomo was not the only governor who mishandled the response to the pandemic — but his fall from grace was definitely the most captivating. After all, the media fawned over Cuomo. The talking heads drooled over his leather bomber jacket, his tough talk, his no nonsense press conferences and his possible nipple ring. Marie Claire dubbed him "America’s boyfriend" while Chelsea Handler wrote him a love letter.

I was dress shopping for a wedding at Tyson's Corner in Virginia last Thursday when I saw two security guards and a man wearing a "Let's Go Brandon" sweatshirt having a heated discussion. Usually I would assume shoplifting was involved and move on, but considering the left's freakout over the "Let's Go Brandon" chants sweeping the country and their insistence on punishing those who use the phrase, I stopped to listen to the exchange. I soon gathered that the man, who later identified himself to me as Alex Caballero, was kicked out of the nearby Apple Store for allegedly violating their mask mandate. Caballero told the security guards that he entered the store because he had a service appointment.

Sometimes a thing can be two things at once, one good and one bad. That requires a choice. And in a free society, that choice is usually best made by the individual directly affected. If not, then by an open, democratic process. Yet that is not what's happening with Joe Biden's vaccine mandate and it's why the cure is worse than the disease. I am, by my choice, thrice vaccinated. I understand the COVID vaccine prevents me from getting sick, and it is only a day-by-day smaller population of unvaccinated people who are actually still at risk of dying. We each make a choice. Now the government wants to make that choice for us. Vax mandates are an unhealthy thing for our democracy and represent a willful effort by government to exert additional control over an already cowed population.

There were plenty of lessons for Democrats to learn from the shock victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin in Tuesday night's gubernatorial election in Virginia. Perhaps the most important is that Terry McAuliffe should have focused more on local issues instead of nationalizing the race. Youngkin was able to tap into the ire of local parents protesting their school boards on a litany issues, including critical race theory and transgender bathroom policies. An often overlooked point in debates about critical race theory (and whether or not it is being taught in Virginia schools) is that the parent movement started in response to pandemic-related school closures and the shifting standards of teacher's unions and school boards for reopening.

Ex-governor of New York Andrew Cuomo has been named on a criminal complaint for “forcible touching the sexual or intimate parts for the purpose of degrading or abusing another person.” How the mighty fall. This time last year Cuomo was riding high on popularity nationwide as the go-to pandemic politician. There were whispers of him replacing Joe Biden on the ticket for president. All the major news networks fawned over him and helped him win an Emmy award for his “effective use of television during the pandemic.”  Cuomo and his giant ego later remarked that the Emmy board members forgot to mention his “sense of humor, charisma, good looks or charm.

I feel for Emily Dreyfuss. Really I do. Like millions of us, she is navigating parenthood in the midst of a pandemic. I feel even more for her son Huxley, the central figure of a piece she recently wrote for the Atlantic. Huxley is having difficulty negotiating the kindergarten social scene from behind the face mask mandated by his school. Dreyfuss writes that her son “couldn’t tell his new classmates apart; he had trouble hearing them; he wasn’t sure whether they could hear him; and he became especially disoriented around lunchtime, he said, because that was when all the kids took their masks off. Suddenly they looked like entirely new people.” The normally affable boy developed anxiety from all of that confusion.

Two weeks to flatten the curve became 18 months of mandates with no end in sight. Government seized new powers from the people to regulate their lives. Rules that make no sense dominate us, experiments in compliance not science. How do COVID restrictions end? They likely never will. I learned all that at the Department of Motor Vehicles . My reeducation started when I was told to prove as an American citizen in an American state that I am 'resident' here, not simply being an American in America. I'm a good sport and wanted to comply, just like I try to keep up with the latest rules and Purell my terrestrial hands 600 times a day against an airborne virus. Threats aren't inherently political, right? And you just can't be too careful.

October is upon us, which means it’s horror movie season. And a new release promises ‘a dark dystopian story’ that depicts ‘terrifyingly evil’ behavior. But Cockburn raised an eyebrow at the trailer for Florever Purge, which contains very little to fear and a lot to love. Among the supposedly blood-curdling lines uttered by the movie’s main villain: ‘We trust people to make their own decisions’ and ‘We’re not going to be bludgeoning people with restrictions, mandates, lockdowns or any of that stuff.’ Cockburn is no horror connoisseur, but ‘I’m going to leave you alone’ doesn’t give him goosebumps. For most of the trailer, Cockburn found himself not hiding behind his sofa, but nodding his head in agreement.