Cultural critic: Doctor James Bond Moment

Recommendations by about 1,200 medical professionals who urged people to join the Black Lives Matter protest amid a pandemic sounded like “a James Bond film in which a Bond super villain recruited ‘top scientists’ to spread a deadly virus,” joked John O ‘Sullivan at The Pipeline – “very similar,” in fact, to the plot “On Secret Majesty’s Secret Service.” Spreading COVID-19 is not the goal of medical staff, but their efforts to expand their public health role into a political role into a “familiar” pattern. Indeed, Lancet editor Richard Horton openly believes that doctors have a duty to be political. Unfortunately, doctors “are no more skilled at fighting racism than Humans at Clapham Omnibus.” And protests, “with the riots they were accompanying, at least tended to exacerbate racist feelings” as “fixing them.”

Foreign table: Bold Badness Beijing

“While America is tearing itself apart with endless internal squabbling and media psychodrama,” Victor Davis Hanson’s notes in The Daily Caller“China is now moving – without apology.” Beijing decided “if it would be blamed for spreading the virus because of its deception, it might also not let such a pandemic go to waste.” With offers to “strangle what remains of Hong Kong’s weak democracy” and “increase its eternal border confrontation with India”: “What better way to show the world that challenging China is more dangerous than agitating the biggest democracy in the world?” The COVID-19 crisis has forced the Middle Kingdom “to turn over its fine mask”: His response to anger over the closure of the virus has changed from “So what?” for “What exactly are you going to do?”

Campaign watch: Perils of ‘Defund’

The call to shave police has “grown louder” – but, Chris Cillizza from CNN watched, the urge “carries a huge political risk for Democrats.” National Democrats have “spent the past few days avoiding whether they support fundraising efforts” – not surprisingly, because police denudation is a “clear political loser.” Democrats must alienate their “activist” base. . . demanding radical changes “or” the majority of countries, “which do not support the move. Unless they can” turn talks into reforms “rather than abolish the police,” the call for ‘Defund the Police’ will continue to be music to Trump’s ears. “

Gotham Journal: Self-Praise by Pathetic Pols

“With the economy in disarray, storefronts of shops going up or being damaged and residents on the streets demanding justice, Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo spoke with one voice as they said to the citizens of New York:” You’re welcome, “” snarks Spectator USA Matt McDonald. The couple happily celebrated the reopening of the state Monday, after “weeks of being locked up in the country, thousands of deaths in preventable nursing homes and days of protests and looting of anger.” That the restart had just begun “must be news for thousands” who took to the streets earlier, including the mayor’s daughter, Chiara, “who was arrested for blocking traffic.” Cuomo, meanwhile, “spent the viral season joking with his brother on CNN and ignoring the mistakes of the New York nursing home disaster.” It seems “no matter what the crisis is, Cuomo and de Blasio have carried out routine reactions: Stay unconscious, make a few wrong steps, blame each other, declare victory without regard. If it’s not broken – like half of Manhattan – why fix it? “

From right: Cultural Civil War

This week, “America woke up to a moment of clarity,” sighed The Federalist’s Ben Domenech: It’s “in the midst of a great cultural civil war.” While Americans “largely united” in “anger and frustration” after the tragic murder of George Floyd, “we have been separated since then.” From protests, which “have now caused more than a dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and theft of property,” to “images of awakened white protesters” kneeling and “apologizing to the masses for sins that were not they did, “This nation is facing a clash of law and order versus” revolutionary racial radicalism. “Sadly, elite corporations and institutions have shown this” left-wing campus antagonism, now “strong and real.” For these new radicals, “You will kneel, or you will pay.”

– Compiled by the Post Editorial Board