Culture critic: Self-Help Social Justice
The similarities between self-help guides and “anti-racism handbooks” are “eerie, but also unsurprising,” observes Kat Rosenfield at Tablet. Both generally target “the guilt, anxiety and insecurities of financially secure white women”: Self-help “has always been a woman’s game,” and the attendees of Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” seminars are “overwhelmingly white, female and highly educated.” Both sappy self-help and the woke guides insist you need “constant and unmitigated navel-gazing” to remedy your supposed flaws, whether cellulite or racism. Instead of helping “marginalized communities who suffer most from oppression,” then, “self-help social justice” just “fuels the pleasant, ego-driven delusion” that nothing is more important than a person’s own “thoughts, attitudes and feelings.” The “highly educated, financially secure, socially liberal and politically engaged women” falling for it are just “journaling through their guilt while the world burns outside.”
Pandemic journal: Good News on Herd Immunity
Two new studies suggest immunity to the coronavirus may be far more widespread than past research implied, reports Reason’s Ronald Bailey. Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute found that even “asymptomatic family members” of individuals with COVID-19 may have “immunity” to the virus. Meanwhile, German researchers discovered that “earlier common-cold coronavirus infections” could offer protection against COVID-19. While both studies have only “small sample sizes” and haven’t yet “been vetted by peer review,” they suggest that many countries, including the United States, are “much closer to herd immunity” than we thought — or media alarmists are prepared to admit. If future work validates the new findings, that’s “very good news” indeed.
2020 watch: Bobblehead Biden
While “Democrats across the country plot to defund the police and tear down statues of great Americans,” Joe Biden is choosing not to “denounce the Jacobin mobs destroying our cities,” charges The Federalist’s David Marcus. Once, Blue Dog Democrats such as Biden defended “police and law and order.” Now “Uncle Joe from Scranton” is just a vapid “bobblehead” for “Marxist ideologies that keep our streets unsafe, poorly educate our children [and] destroy jobs.” Sure, Biden may still “love America,” but “his party demonstrably does not” — and if he becomes president, he will serve as “a mere rubber stamp for the cackling mobs.”
Iconoclast: Profiteering Off ‘Never Trumpers’
The establishment media keep calling the anti-Trump Lincoln Project a “conservative PAC” — yet, fumes the Atlantic’s Andrew Ferguson, it’s flying “under false colors.” The group presents itself as “fresh, principled and trans-partisan” but is “funneling money to its advisory members” while “spending relatively little airing political ads to influence voters.” Those advisory members are mostly “unhappy former Republicans,” like the consultant Rick Wilson, and the few ads the group is airing are “personally abusive, overwrought” and “pointlessly salacious.” The least the group could have done is “leave Lincoln out of it”: Sure, Honest Abe originally insulted his political adversaries, but “his soul deepened” as he matured. “Such growth is unlikely to overtake the Lincoln Project,” however, which in its quest to take down Trump has become more like him than Lincoln.
Conservative: The Auxiliary-Democratic League
The Anti-Defamation League will apparently cross “any red line” to prioritize “partisan politics” over its core mission of combating anti-Semitism, fumes JNS.org’s Jonathan S. Tobin. ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt has now allied his organization with Al Sharpton, “a race-baiting inciter of anti-Semitic violence,” in a campaign to push Facebook to censor conservative ads. Disgracefully, Greenblatt treats Sharpton’s support as “a gift for which he is truly grateful,” not once calling on him to “confess his role” as an instigator of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, “a modern-day pogrom.” Bottom line: Greenblatt has “trashed ADL’s reputation in his pursuit of a liberal political agenda.” — Compiled by Karl Salzmann