Pandemic desk: Cuomo by Gaslight(ing)
Gov. Cuomo’s order forcing New York nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients was “one of the deadliest mistakes of the coronavirus crisis” — yet, grimaces National Review’s David Harsanyi, he has “among the highest approval ratings of any governor.” How? Cuomo-loving establishment-media types fawned over his “allegedly successful pandemic response,” despite numbers that are the “worst in the country” and “some of the worst in the world.” Now they are praising Cuomo, because Gotham had zero coronavirus deaths on Sunday — “tantamount to declaring New York victorious on 9/12 because no one died in the city that day.” No amount of “gaslighting” from the governor’s sycophants, however, will “change the fact that Cuomo-led New York was an utter failure.”
Park Bird-watcher: Why I Won’t Aid Prosecution
White pedestrian Amy Cooper called the police on black bird-watcher Christian Cooper in May after he offered her dog a treat when she refused his request to leash the pet, sparking outrage and leading to the Manhattan DA charging her with filing a false report. Christian Cooper, however, has “chosen not to aid the investigation,” he writes at The Washington Post. Focusing on “this one individual” instead of widespread “racial bias” is “a mistake.” He can’t “see what is to be gained by a criminal charge” when he “suffered no harm, physical or mental,” and she “has already lost her job and her reputation.” Erring “on the side of compassion” is the “only course I can pursue in good conscience.”
Iconoclast: ‘White Fragility’ Is a Racist Tract
Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” which insists whites confront their inherited racism, became a bestseller after the George Floyd protests, but John McWhorter at The Atlantic calls the book itself a “racist tract” that “diminishes” blacks. It’s “replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality” and written “for what can only be described as a cult.” If “you are white, make no mistake: You will never succeed in the ‘work’ she demands of you”; “you will die a racist just as you will die a sinner.” McWhorter says DiAngelo’s “depiction of black people as endlessly delicate poster children” is “deeply condescending.” Few books about race “have more openly infantilized black people than” DiAngelo’s.
2020 watch: Why Jeff Sessions Lost
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions battled more than President Trump’s ire in his failed “bid to win back his old Senate seat”: He also faced a “remade” GOP, notes Spectator USA’s Daniel McCarthy. Sessions, “for a long time the only Republican of national standing to support Trump in 2016, has no place in” a party that’s “half-Trump, half-GOP machine of old.” “Corporate America will not support an economic nationalist and an immigration restrictionist,” while Trump’s base is “confused by the claims” every Republican makes of being a “pro-Trump populist” and as “Trump himself pillories his former ally.” Therein lies “a warning for the president”: Pro-Trump voters hate “GOP, Inc.” and vice versa. He can only square that circle if he “runs as the man beyond party that he was four years ago.”
Culture critic: Bourgeois Belonging
Drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon or similar beers “on tap in hipster bars in Brooklyn and DC . . . doesn’t put you in solidarity with the working class,” Jonathan Malesic explains at Commonweal. “That’s an easy mistake to make in places where bourgeois culture dominates, where you don’t encounter working-class people or feel estranged from them every day.” Those “academic and professional cultures get people like me to locate our identity within them, in part by separating us from people and place.” You “can gain wealth and status within” the system “if you’re willing to pull up your own roots again and again.” In this ideal, you forgo the human desire to belong; “you belong to the world, equally at ease in Berlin or Bangkok,” which “also means being equally ill-at-ease anywhere, including among citizens of your home country.” Living “the cosmopolitan ideal,” moving for work, “means you know someone everywhere but have close ties nowhere.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board