Foreign desk: China’s Kerry Snub
“Chinese diplomats relegated Biden climate czar John Kerry to a Zoom conference the same day China joined Taliban leaders in a photo-op to pledge ‘friendly relations’ with the terror group,” reports The Washington Free Beacon’s Jack Beyrer. Beijing “dispatched a junior-level climate official to” Tianjin to meet Kerry, denying him “face-to-face interactions with senior Chinese officials,” except via Zoom. They “reportedly bristled at Kerry’s suggestions to decouple climate change from other issues fraught with tensions,” such as “human rights and military aggression.” Kerry’s “bungled visit coincided with Beijing’s open-arms embrace of Taliban leadership at an in-person visit in Qatar” in pursuit of Beijing’s bid to “fill the vacuum in Afghanistan left by America’s withdrawal.”
Socialist: White Men Denouncing . . . White Men
“Boy, do woke white men love to complain about white men,” Freddie deBoer smirks at his Substack, citing all the white, male Twitterati who claim “the opinions of white men are inherently suspect” — yet exempt themselves. “This gives the whole game away . . . Once you admit exceptions to the ‘white man’ designator, you’re really just saying, . . . ‘I am the good white man,’ which puts you in the company of literally millions of other aging white guys who have gotten very worried about their place in the world and see a market opportunity in making themselves out to be unlike other white men. . . . Hustle on, player.”
From the left: The New ‘Moral Mania’
Local reports in Oklahoma about hospitals overwhelmed by people who OD’d on ivermectin spread to blue-check media like a game of “Twitter telephone,” snarks Matt Taibbi at TK News. The hospitals disputed the story — but not before Rachel Maddow retweeted the fake news, and Rolling Stone amplified it. MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid imagined that “the hated overdosers not only swallowed ‘horse paste,’ but had done so ‘instead of taking the vaccine,’ ” and should be denied treatment. Occupy Democrats blared, “Trumpers are overdosing,” and MSNBC’s “Dr. Jason Johnson even speculated Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe was somehow profiteering from the misery.” “The reason the error spread,” says Taibbi, “happens to be the same reason underlying innumerable other media shipwrecks in the last five years. . . . News has become a corporatized version of the ‘Two Minutes Hate,’ in which the goal of every broadcast is an anxiety-ridden audience provoked to the point of fury by the unpoliced infamy of whatever wreckers are said to be threatening civilization this week” — with liberals taking “the role once occupied by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority”: “pious sadists.”
From the right: Pandemic’s Over for the Vaxxed
“College football is back — and with nary a mask in sight,” cheers the Washington Examiner’s editorial board. Labor Day weekend saw “celebration of American perseverance and community,” but the likes of Anthony Fauci found it “too much to bear.” Yet most stadiums required proof of vaccination, making attendees’ risk of catching COVID-19 low. “COVID-19 is now only a threat to the unvaccinated,” and “that is no reason the rest of us, who are vaccinated, can’t live our lives like we did before the pandemic.” Get jabbed, live your life and “go to as many football games, concerts, marches and church services as you want to.”
Pandemic watch: COVID Rules Make Little Sense
At National Review, Jim Geraghty blasts “the government’s contradictory and sometimes nonsensical” COVID rules, even as President Biden promises a “new strategy.” He is expected to urge employers to require vaccines for workers (i.e., “the same old strategy as before, just louder”). Oregon still orders the vaxxed to mask outdoors, inadvertently signaling that “getting vaccinated doesn’t actually change anything.” Hawaii’s bars and restaurants must close by 10 p.m. next week, as if officials think the virus, “like a vampire,” is most active at night. Don’t fume over those who refuse jabs; they will fight off the virus or die — but their decision isn’t “something you can control.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board