Last stand in the mask wars
Across blue America, the masks are coming off.
New Jersey governor Phil Murphy announced Monday that the state’s mask mandate in schools will end on March 7. Connecticut governor Ned Lamont changed state level guidance to recommend that mask mandates in schools are lifted by the end of February. Delaware’s statewide mask mandate will end later this week. Oregon has announced that school mask mandates will be gone by the end of March. Even California governor Gavin Newsom, who has enforced some of the strictest pandemic regulations (on others if not himself), has announced he will lift mask the state’s indoor mask rule next week. (Here in DC, there is no end in sight to the indoor mask mandate.)
Those Democrats stuck in tough re-election battles later this year seem desperate to avoid any association with the Biden approach to Covid. Watch, by way of example, the first re-election ad from Raphael Warnock. The Georgia senator might not mention Covid restrictions in his mask-free hit, but what will voters think of when they hear him say: “People are tired. People have seen what they worked their entire lives to build turn upside down at a moment’s notice. They’re wondering when things will get back to normal and at the same time not knowing what normal even means anymore.”
While Democratic leaders across the country acknowledge that, as Murphy put it yesterday, “we can responsibly live with this thing,” the White House hardly looks like it is ready to beat a retreat in the mask wars. Asked about the rule changes in Democratic states, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said that universal masking in schools “remains our recommendation.” Avoiding any direct comment on the policy shift, she added: “It’s always been up to school districts. That’s always been our point of view and always been our policy from here.”
“America is back to work,” said Joe Biden on Friday, welcoming the news that the economy had created half a million jobs during the pandemic. He said that the numbers demonstrated that “America’s job machine is going stronger than ever.”
If the robust figures say something about the economy, they also say something about the pandemic: that America has moved on. In the days leading up to the jobs report, administration sources had tempered expectations, pointing to the latest spike in Covid cases. “Forecasters see a large Omicron effect on employment in January but expect that to reverse in future months as we see the wave beginning to come down,” David Kamin, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told Axios. That the numbers beat low expectations suggests that American attitudes to the pandemic aren’t quite what the White House thinks they are. Outside a small group of Covid hardliners, the country is moving on. They are going to do so with or without the Biden administration.
This is a fact that the White House appears not to realize, let alone publicly acknowledge. Last week, Politico reported that administration officials had nothing more than a “subtle shift” planned for its approach to the next phase of the pandemic. The administration has reportedly ruled out a “hard pivot back to normalcy” and is “unlikely to drop its indoor masking recommendations.”
Part of the reluctance is presumably down to the fact that to declare the emergency phase of the pandemic over tomorrow would be to acknowledge that Covid ended not with a Biden curve-crushing policy bang but with an endemic whimper. If the White House is holding out for a stroke of administrative genius with which it can stick up a V-for-victory sign and break out the Champagne, it could be waiting for a while longer.
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GW’s Wrighton backs down
Yesterday, I reported on an alarming apparent act of censorship from George Washington University president Mark S. Wrighton. Having condemned artwork critical of the Chinese regime in an email to a Chinese student association and promised to “undertake an effort to determine who is responsible,” Wrighton has been forced into an embarrassing reversal.
“I responded hastily to the student,” he said in a statement yesterday. “University staff also responded to ensure the posters were removed. These responses were mistakes. Every member of the GW community should feel welcome and supported, but I should have taken more time to understand the entire situation before commenting… Upon full understanding, I do not view these posters as racist; they are political statements. There is no university investigation underway, and the university will not take any action against the students who displayed the posters.”
That Wrighton is backing down is good news, of course. But the images were very obviously political speech and, if Wrighton is to be believed, he claimed he was personally offended and “saddened by this terrible event” and promised to take action, all in hasty response to a student. With leaders like this, is it any wonder that American academia is so vulnerable to Chinese pressure?
Gawker’s sinister Sinema ‘reporting’
Gawker has published a piece with the threatening title “We have Kyrsten Sinema’s social security number.”
The piece does not, in fact, include Sinema’s SSN. But it does tell readers how they obtained it (and how someone else might do the same thing). “You can do a lot with a social security number,” writes Gawker staffer Tarpley Hitt. “Unfortunately, if the number in question isn’t yours, most of what you can do with it is a felony.”
For opposing Joe Biden’s spending bill, Sinema has faced a grim pressure campaign. Activists have harassed her in airports and even followed her into the bathroom (all things Biden has called “part of the process”). If those activists wanted to take their harassment campaign digital, Gawker has — without offering any real journalistic justification for their creepy piece — shown them where to start.
What you should be reading today
Michael Warren Davis: Time for the baby boomers to grow up already
Roger Kimball: End of the road for malicious lockdowns
Daniel DePetris: Kudos to Macron for going to Moscow
Michael Shellenberger, Common Sense: Slow-motion suicide in San Francisco
Matthew Dean, Tablet: Reading Leo Strauss in China
Greg Ip, Wall Street Journal: An American labor market mystery
Poll watch
President Biden Job Approval
Approve: 40.9 percent
Disapprove: 53.8 percent
Net approval: -12.9 (RCP Average)
Do US voters support Biden’s decision to send around 3,000 troops to Eastern Europe to support NATO allies amid conflict between Ukraine and Russia?
Strongly support: 18 percent
Somewhat support: 30 percent
Somewhat oppose: 18 percent
Strongly oppose: 15 percent
Don’t know/no opinion: 19 percent (USA Today/Suffolk)
