Dominic Green

An op-ed in the Washington Post about the Canadian truckers’ protest tells us that the idea of freedom is “White” with a capital W and that the truckers’ belief in freedom is “a key component of White supremacy.” This is about as sensible as saying that the idea of gravity is “English” or that the Post reports the news. True, Newton’s apple fell in England and the Post looks like a newspaper, but gravity is universal. The same goes for stupidity, though that takes many forms, and for the impulse to be free, though that too takes many forms, some of them stupid. Taylor Dysart, the author of this insult to reason, is a white PhD student at private Ivy League university. Color me shocked.

We volunteered to serve in the biggest medical experiment in human history. We accepted the biggest peacetime suspension of civil liberties in American history. And we agreed not to ask difficult questions about the origins of the virus. Now it’s time we recovered our freedom — and exercised the responsibility that sustains it. The Omicron variant isn’t the end of the world. It looks more like the beginning of the end. The case numbers are rising even faster than the rate of inflation, but the ICUs aren’t overflowing and the death rate remains low. Covid-19 seems to be becoming endemic, like all the other bugs we might catch in a normal winter. If you’re elderly or obese, or if you have another co-morbidity, then you have a way to go yet.

We’ve all learnt to wash our hands more carefully over the last couple of years, but no one has soaped his dirty digits as fastidiously as Joe Biden. His announcement that “there is no federal solution” to Covid-19 puts him up there with history’s greatest handwashers. Like Pontius Pilate, Biden is leaving it to the mob: “this gets solved at the state level.” Unlike the procrastinating procurator who surrendered his responsibilities to the jeering Judeans, Biden’s got it right. But it won’t save him from the jeers — and nor should it. Biden won the presidency on a promise of the federal solution that he now says doesn’t exist. It didn’t exist in 2020, either.

Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong in law, but this does not mean he did the right thing in going armed to Kenosha. Much of the right is celebrating him as a patriot for taking arms against a sea of troubles, and as a poster child for the Second Amendment. He is neither. He is a liability for both of those causes. The right to bear arms is just that: a legal right. Choosing to bear them publicly is another matter: an ethical choice. Rittenhouse’s defense was that he was legally innocent because he was ethically innocent. Despite growing up with guns, he seems to have been unaware of the adult commonplace about bearing them: if you produce a weapon, you should be prepared to use it.

Did Joe Biden fall asleep during the opening speeches of the COP26 climate jamboree in Glasgow? It’s hard to blame him if he did. A conference dedicated to saving the planet is generating nothing but hot air, some of it carboniferously heavy with the exhaust of the armada of private jets that brought the guests. But it’s Biden’s job to stay awake, look lively and remember his lines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsaEoozPLNo The footage shows a frail man who’s jetlagged, pushing eighty and trying his best to absorb the torrent of heated eco-bilge that’s being pumped into his ears. But he’s only human.

Is it more worrying that President Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge? Nobody has the power to force a president to undergo the indignities that Biden went through on Thursday night’s CNN town hall. As with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, either someone convinced him to do it or he insisted on doing it. Either way, you could not watch him, clenching his fists as though holding a Zimmer frame while Anderson Cooper spoon-fed him a prompt, without feeling that we are heading nowhere good. On the same day that Donald Trump evoked the ghosts of Soviet propaganda by launching a social-media app called Truth — the Russian translation is Pravda — Joe Biden attempted a Brezhnev-era theatrical of his own.

It’s time for Pete Buttigieg to truck off down the road from the Department of Transportation — if, that is, he turns up for work again and can find a driver. It’s shameful even by the standards of the federal government for the head of a department to disappear during an emergency. It’s ludicrous for a technocratic Democrat in a technocratic administration. The smart set are explaining away the supply-chain fiasco as middle-class false consciousness. ‘Most of the economic problems we're facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems,’ says Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff. That’s right, Ron: if the peasants can’t find vegetables on the shelves, let them eat the rich.

The forming of the Australia-UK-US (Aukus) military alliance in the Pacific shows how everything Trump can say, Biden can do. The problem is, Biden isn’t doing it very well. Biden’s administration, like Trump’s, is committed to building its Pacific alliances while sustaining Nato. Yet on Australia as in Afghanistan, the Biden team are doing exactly what they accused Trump of: unpicking the frayed bonds of Nato without a clear idea of what might replace it. The government has three tasks: to keep American workers at work, win contracts for American exports, and secure America’s interests overseas. Two cheers for Biden for getting the Trump memo on the first two points.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez looked radiant on the red carpet at the Met Gala. She looked elegant too, at least until she turned around. But this is show business. And that, after the last 18 months, is reassuring: this is still America. Also still American is the message that she delivered at the Met through the medium of a decorated wedding dress. It’s an important one, about class and the future of this country. And no one in politics since Donald Trump is better placed to deliver it. Ocasio-Cortez is proof that the prosperity gospel lives. Like an old-time starlet equipped only with moxie and a major in Theater Studies, she has risen to the top. It is only right that she shares her success with her public, just as the stars of the Depression years shared theirs.