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A website with Education Secretary Betsy DeVoss son on its board of directors published a viral article that claims the coronavirus would be exterminated if lockdowns were lifted.

On April 7, the College Fix, a news and opinion website that normally publishes stories about politics and college life, ran a story titled Epidemiologist: Coronavirus Could Be Exterminated If Lockdowns Were Lifted. The most popular story ever published by the College Fix, it received over 1.7 million Facebook likes, shares, and comments, according to social media tracking tool BuzzSumo.

The article cited an academic arguing for herd immunity, the idea that ending the lockdowns will result in people becoming immune to the virus after contracting it, which is heavily contested by epidemiologists.

The College Fix is a conservative publication featuring both student and nonstudent writers based in Hillsdale, Michigan, and overseen by the nonprofit Student Free Press Association. Rick DeVos, the son of Betsy DeVos, sits on the Fixs board.

The DeVos family has a long history of funding conservative causes with its vast fortune. According to Fortune magazine, Betsy DeVoss family, including her husband and children, is worth about $2 billion.

Written by assistant editor Daniel Payne, the College Fixs story featured quotes from a YouTube interview with Knut Wittkowski published by UK-based video company Journeyman Pictures. In the video, Wittkowski misstated basic facts about the pandemic, saying there are no more new cases in China and in South Korea, contradicting publicly available statistics.

The College Fix described Wittkowski as a veteran scholar of epidemiology and previously the head of the department of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design at Rockefeller University in New York. Although Wittkowski did hold that position at Rockefeller, the university has sought to distance itself from the scientist. On April 13, Rockefeller University released a public statement saying although he was previously employed by the university, Wittkowski had never held the title of professor and that his views on herd immunity did not represent the institution.

"Dr. Wittkowski was head of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design in the Center for Clinical and Translational Science at Rockefeller University," a university spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. "That group was not an academic department, however. Unusual among its peers, the university does not have academic departments, in fact. Dr. Wittkowski was employed at Rockefeller from 1998 to 2018."

Many other publications are using articles from the College Fix to argue against extending lockdowns despite the main sources contested science. The story first made the rounds in Facebook groups aimed at conservative audiences before breaking out of the closed online spaces and into more mainstream ones. Its biggest Facebook boost came from Mark Levin, a conservative radio host whose show gets syndicated by Fox News.

I am not 'discouraging social distancing' (breaking the law), Wittkowski told BuzzFeed News in an email. I'm asking people to discuss the policy decisions made with their representatives. These are two very different things.

In both the article and the video, Wittkowski said that schools should be reopened while the elderly and at-risk people should be isolated. However, coronavirus victims have included young people and children.

Daniel Payne, the author of the article, said the College Fix didnt identify Wittkowski as a professor and used the same credentials as what he stated in the video. Paynes story was a news article, and the associate editor told BuzzFeed News that the College Fix does not have a wider editorial stance on social distancing.

Our editors regularly write columns on the site expressing different viewpoints on varying higher ed topics, but those opinions do not constitute a unified editorial standpoint, he told BuzzFeed News.

Dr. Aaron Glatt, the chair of the department of medicine and hospital epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau, told BuzzFeed News that Wittkowski was essentially advocating for more people to die from COVID-19.

In multiple studies now, we've seen that when you restrict social proximity what we call maximizing social distancing you can impact the number of people who will get COVID and flatten the curve, decrease the number of new cases, decreasing significantly morbidity and mortality, Glatt said.

The danger is that many, many people will die if we just let nature take its course. That's the problem. We don't want people to die.

The story featuring Wittkowski is one of several stories the College Fix has published that argue for the pandemic lockdown to end. Rick DeVos himself, however, has tweeted angrily about college students not following lockdown procedures.

Launched in 2010 by John J. Miller, a correspondent with the National Review, to nurture conservative and libertarian college students, the College Fix has had its writers frequently go on to work for other conservative publications. The website is funded through the Student Free Press Association, a nonprofit that receives the vast majority of its funding from contributions from sources that it does not disclose. In 2018, it received $749,509 in contributions, according to its tax documents. BuzzFeed News has reached out to Miller for comment.

Although its not clear where much of the current funding comes from, Inside Higher Ed reported in 2017 that the Fixs income came from Donors Capital Fund, a large nonprofit that funds right-wing causes.

In 2014, Donors Capital Fund gave $265,000 to the Student Free Press Association, which amounted to half its yearly operating budget. In 2015, the Student Free Press Association received $100,000 from the fund, according to tax forms available online. Tax filings for 2016 and 2017 do not show any further donations from Donors Capital Fund.

Donors Capital Fund also has received funds from another organization, Donors Trust, to which the DeVos family has contributed. In the past, the nonprofit Donors Trust has given money to organizations rejecting scientific facts about climate change. Both organizations have also donated over $1.7 million to Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, according to the Washington Post.

Its not possible to say whether any of the funds contributed by the DeVos family flowed directly from Donors Trust through Donors Capital Fund to Student Free Press Association and the College Fix. Aside from giving money to Donors Capital Fund, Donors Trust has also given $100,000 to the Student Free Press Association in 2017 according to tax forms. Miller previously said the DeVos family hasnt given money to the College Fix, which would not rule out indirect funding.

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The College Fix Was Founded To Fight Culture Wars On Campus, But Its Biggest Hit Is About The Coronavirus - BuzzFeed News

Catastrophic events like the coronavirus pandemic force us to examine, and in some cases rethink, how we see the world. Sometimes they also shed light on important trends and patterns of behaviour that predated the pandemic. Consequently, it is now possible to see and understand the culture wars that have divided societies for more than three decades in a new light. So what have recent events taught us about the dynamic and drivers of the culture wars?

Numerous commentators have claimed that the culture wars are on their way out. Time and again I have heard people say that they simply cannot last much longer. Indeed, the impending demise of the culture wars has been predicted many times since the 1990s. In 2009, the Center for American Progress published a report titled The Coming End Of The Culture War. In 2018, an article in the Baffler declared that the culture wars are dead. More recently, just before the pandemic, one writer suggested that China might bring an end to the culture wars.

Meanwhile, on the anti-identitarian left, some have raised the hope that the politics of class will soon return and neutralise the more grotesque manifestations of identity politics. Others have seized on the devastation brought by the pandemic to conclude that, faced with a common foe, the constant squabbles over identities and related cultural matters will exhaust itself. Please, please let Covid-19 kill the culture wars, pleads a journalist in a recent edition of the Spectator USA.

But it has become clear that not even a deadly pandemic could lead to a truce in the culture wars. On the contrary, Covid-19 has raised the stakes and intensified pre-existing conflicts, to the point that just about any new detail that emerges about the pandemic is seized upon as vindication of ones previous point of view. Consequently, culture warriors are not interested in the number of deaths or the statistics regarding the health and economic consequences of the pandemic. Their main aim is to highlight the supposedly unfair consequences of the pandemic and its management for their chosen identity group or cause. If coronavirus doesnt discriminate, how come black people are bearing the brunt?, asks Afua Hirsch, a columnist in the Guardian. Similar questions have been posed about the impact of Covid on other minorities and on women.

The culture wars are so deeply entrenched that they make it very difficult to forge a sense of genuine unity in face of a common foe. This is why the instinctive response of both sides of the cultural divide in the United States was to use the pandemic as a pretext for settling old scores. As the pandemic spread across America, New Jerseys Democratic governor made a point of refusing to declare gun shops an essential service that could stay open. In their wisdom, Republicans in Texas and Mississippi decided that nothing was more urgent than to try to limit access to abortion provision.

In the past, when faced with a common enemy such as Nazi Germany during the Second World War ideological differences were put aside in a common effort to defend the nation. It is unclear whether such unity could be forged if society was confronted by a similar external foe today.

The response to Covid-19 indicates that conflicting attitudes that have surfaced during the culture wars are now so deeply held that they spontaneously guide many peoples behaviour and reactions. Not everyone is a signed-up member of one side or another in this conflict. But of those who are, most are likely to respond in a fairly predictable way to the issues at stake in this pandemic.

According to reports, at least initially, social distancing in the United States was polarised along party lines. Supporters of Trump were sceptical and made a feature of not taking social distancing seriously. Meanwhile, their opponents were much more likely to live according to the advice offered by experts. Reports indicate that Democrats were likely to say that the pandemic was worse than it appeared, while Republicans would say its bad, but its getting better.

In most parts of the Western world, there are also conflicting attitudes towards reliance on expertise. One side of the cultural conflict is more comfortable with experts, rather than elected politicians, taking important decisions. The other side is far more suspicious of experts and looks to other forms of authority for guidance and leadership.

In a pandemic you cant do without experts. So pre-existing differences have also been refracted through many of us embracing experts whose outlook most corresponds with our personal views. In the UK, those who support a total lockdown prefer the doomsday scenario of the Imperial College modellers to the more modest prognosis put out by Oxford University.

Debates about the supposed trade-off between saving lives or salvaging the economy, between locking society down or adopting a more nuanced approach towards the management of the crisis, between giving up freedoms or demanding that people have a degree of freedom even during the pandemic, often intermesh with previous conflicts of values.

The differential responses to what is in fact a public-health crisis indicates that, for many people, the conflict of cultural values has become a lived experience, one that has become deeply internalised. Some of the activists in this conflict really see symptoms of discrimination, oppression or inequality everywhere, and the new circumstances brought on by Covid-19 simply confirm what they already suspected was the case.

The conflicts over Covid-19 are not just about racial, gender or sexual identities. The current debate over the trade-off between lives and the economy indicates that class plays an important role in this political drama.

In recent times, numerous commentators have raised questions about the modern worlds runaway economy its obsession with consumerism and growth. Some have pointed to the virtues of working at home and of slowing down. Since the lockdowns began, many commentators have suggested that domestic life, especially with the aid of online opportunities, has its good points. Online yoga classes, Zoom cocktail sessions, baking cakes, and living a more frugal but wholesome life supposedly allow these people to minimise their concern about the devastating economic and social consequences of societys response to the pandemic.

What all this misses is that, even during this crisis, there are millions of people working in the supply chain, delivering stuff to peoples homes, and running essential services. This pandemic is differentially experienced by those who work at home and those who do not. In most instances, this difference is principally one of class. For many working-class people, the threat posed by the pandemic is as much about economic survival as about physical health. But for some culture warriors, such attitudes smack of right-wing contrarianism. Dismissing concerns about the economy as a symptom of indifference to life, Polly Toynbee claims that divisions on the questions of your money or your life has sparked the latest culture war.

In many instances, those who are at home and those who continue to work also have different cultural values from one another. Those who have to work are not particularly worried about the culture of consumerism or the perils of economic growth. On the other side, there are those who do not want to return to the days of economic growth. Green zealots regard Covid as a useful exemplar of what they mean when they talk about a climate emergency. From their perspective, the loss of freedom brought on by emergency measures is precisely the kind of world they would like to see in the future.

Ultimately, Covid-19 highlights profound differences in attitudes towards the place of humanity in this world. For some time now there has been a powerful mood of uncertainty about the moral status of human beings and their role in the world. In recent decades there has been a one-sided emphasis on humanitys destructive powers and its indifference to the welfare of future generations and the planet. From this perspective, human ingenuity and creativity are portrayed as more of a problem than a solution to the challenges we face. Many greens believe that lockdown is a small price to pay in exchange for bringing closer a carbon-neutral world. Since they regard human freedom as principally meaning the freedom to destroy the planet, its loss is no big deal.

In the decades ahead, the faultline in the culture wars will be much more explicitly focused on the meaning and desirability of freedom itself. Until now, conflicts on the issue of freedom have mainly focused on issues to do with freedom of speech. But in recent months the focus has shifted to a far more fundamental question the value of freedom itself. The freedom of movement, the freedom to create and innovate, the freedom to take risks all are going to be increasingly challenged by those devoted to creating a culture of human restraint.

This is why, at the moment, those who are concerned about the threat this crisis poses to democratic freedoms are so casually dismissed. And this highlights a very real problem that we ignore at our peril.

Frank Furedi is a sociologist and commentator. His book Whats Happened To The University?: A Sociological Exploration of its Infantilisation, is published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Picture by: Getty.

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What Covid-19 has revealed about the culture wars - Spiked

When President Donald Trump declared a national emergency last month, as the coronavirus outbreak worsened, he deployed language familiar and perhaps oddly comforting to many Americans. Designating himself a wartime president, Trump likened the countrys COVID-19 response to the U.S.s mobilization during World War II. Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation, Trump insisted.

This rhetorical maneuver reflected the long American history of declaring war on any conceivable enemy whether physical, abstract, domestic or foreign. But as familiar and ubiquitous as war might be for many Americans, at least figuratively, that same history also shows that it is a poor framework through which to understand complex social problems such as poverty and public-health emergencies like the novel coronavirus or drug addiction.

War has been a permanent condition and the governing metaphor for American life since at least the Second World War. Instead of reining in its military and defense infrastructure at the end of the war and the beginning of what is ironically known as the postwar period the U.S. opted to go in the opposite direction, bolstering the national security state in the hopes of thwarting the perceived Soviet and Communist threat. A massive expansion of federal power, the National Security Act of 1947 formed the skeleton of our modern national defense apparatus. The Act established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council (NSC), a cabinet-level body that would help formulate military and foreign policy on the presidents behalf.

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Drafted and circulated in 1950, the councils NSC-68 report cast the young Cold War in stark, severe terms. It declared that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake and argued that Americans must be willing to give up some of the benefits which they have come to associate with their freedoms. In other words, though World War II had ended in victory, Americans would continue seeing the world through a wartime lens and indefinitely so.

In many ways, the assumptions underlying NSC-68 would guide U.S. foreign policy through the end of the Cold War and beyond. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the end of the Cold War, the U.S. [f]reed from major challengers remained committed to military action, although it often couched these interventions in terms of human rights.

It is therefore no surprise that Americans have long understood challenges far from the battlefield (such as COVID-19) through the lens of war. Beyond the actual experience of war as combat, as historian Michael Sherry has shown, the United States obsession with war has meant imagining many things in terms of it from President Lyndon B. Johnson depicting incidents of urban unrest as a war within our own boundaries to President Richard Nixon declaring a war on cancer in 1971 (as the Vietnam War raged), from LBJs War on Poverty to Pat Buchanans war for the soul of America (i.e., the culture wars) to the interlocking wars on crime and drugs. The band Wilco lamented this war fetish in their 2001 song War on War, in which frontman Jeff Tweedy sings that, in such a conflict, Youre gonna lose.

Americans know war, theologian Stanley Hauerwas notes, and when we are frightened ironically war makes us feel safe. Michael Sherry concurs building on the work of the late historian Marilyn B. Young when he calls the United States a nation deeply wedded to and defined by war, though maddeningly reluctant to admit it.

Still, real war remains distant and abstract for the overwhelming majority of Americans. As scholar Andrew Bacevich indicated in 2011, approximately half of 1 percent of our citizens bear the burden of service and sacrifice meaning 99.5% of Americans are not personally attached to the military or the national security state. The physical and emotional distance separating most Americans from the battlefield allows them to glorify war while knowing nothing of its unspeakable horrors or the sacrifice it entails.

War is destructive, violent and annihilative. But the nations commitment to war (both as reality and metaphor) has a tendency to take other policy approaches off the table. What has been called the troopification of everything generates financial and political support for any activity conducted under the umbrella of war. And so Americas over-reliance on the blunt, imprecise instrument of war hinders its ability to respond to myriad other problems, from public-health emergencies to chronic issues such as hunger. The infrastructure needed to address such concerns doesnt mesh well with war. Its use as a rhetorical and framing device within our present crisis therefore represents a dismal failure of imagination.

Most damningly, perhaps, Americas recent wars whether directed at targets physical, abstract, domestic or foreign have mostly failed. The United States excels at war, Sherry observes, though no longer at winning it. In just the past 50 years or so, the U.S. has failed to win the War in Vietnam, the war on cancer (despite many notable achievements in research and treatment), the War on Poverty (although LBJs campaign slashed poverty rates), the war on crime (which did much to terrorize and imprison poor and working-class black and brown people but little to actually curtail crime), the war on drugs (given the persistent reality of drug addiction) and the seemingly endless global war on terror.

This track record does not bode well for the nations war against COVID-19. We need an efficient, coherent public-health response coordinated by a competent federal government. What we dont need is another war.

Paul M. Renfro is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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War Has Been the Governing Metaphor for Decades of American Life. This Pandemic Exposes Its Weaknesses - TIME

Meghan vs. Kate. Taylor Swift vs. Katy Perry. Jennifer Lopez vs. Mariah Carey. Famous female feuds are easy to list off, being, as they are, the bread and butter of tabloid media and bad television. As Sheryl Sandberg, for all her many flaws, has correctly observed, everyone loves a fight and they really love a catfight.

It'd have been tempting, then, for a miniseries like FX's Mrs. America, which premieres Wednesday, to have milked the tension between the conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly and feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug in its retelling of the fight over the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) during the culture wars of the 1970s. It'd have even admittedly made for compelling television; catfights aren't a pervasive TV trope because they're dull. But to its credit, Mrs. America circumvents the seductively easy narrative about powerful women at each other's throats for a more nuanced one that pits their ideas and organizing strategies against each other, with illuminating results.

There's no ignoring the natural binary at the center of the series: that you were either for ratifying the ERA, or against it. In the latter camp, played by two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett in her first U.S. television role, was Schlafly, "the sweetheart of the silent majority" who led a successful grassroots campaign to thwart the ratification of the ERA on the grounds that it threatened the traditional family. On the other side were the feminist activists during what was arguably the height of the movement's political influence, a diverse group headed by the National Women's Political Caucus co-founders Steinem (Rose Byrne), Abzug (Margo Martindale), Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), and Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman).

To be clear, the ideas represented by the opposing sides of the ERA fight are mutually exclusive. There is no coexistence between the world desired by Phyllis Schlafly whose platform involved describing husbands as the "ultimate decision makers" in a marriage, whose "history of racism" is downplayed by the show, and whose final work was the posthumously-published Conservative Case for Trump and the world pursued by the feminists, who, while not a monolith, generally advocated for women's reproductive freedom, LGBT rights, and anti-discrimination protections. Mrs. America, however, wisely allows these ideologies to exist outside of symbolic character figureheads; Schlafly and Steinem, say, are not embodiments of their arguments, but people whose ideas are fiercely in conflict.

In other words, Feud: Phyllis and Gloria this is not. Schlafly and Steinem are the show's two most prominent characters, but despite their ideas being in conflict they never actually confront each other or even meet, much less share a frame (in real life, they occasionally exchanged barbs in the press). There are no narrowed eyes or spat insults, no tears, screaming matches, or petty remarks over the phone all usual staples of the catfight trope. Instead, the two women leaders are shown in many ways as almost being alike; both have followed an easy path to national celebrity because they are white, attractive women, and both face the same struggle to be taken seriously by the powers-that-be the men by virtue of their sex, too. Even their flaws can be parallels: Steinem is blind to her own tokenism at Ms. magazine, and Schlafly is only able to pursue her political ambitions because of the black cooks and nannies running her home in her absence.

Mrs. America further protects itself from sexist clich by emphasizing coalition building and the diversity of opinion within those coalitions. Schlafly and Steinem might both be leaders and expert organizers, but they're orbited by allies with whom they don't always see eye-to-eye. Schlafly makes concessions to southern chapter leaders who want to center pro-life arguments as part of the STOP ERA fight; Bella Abzug, meanwhile, invites Betty Friedan, who is outspokenly anti-lesbian, to be a "delegate-at-large" at the national women's convention despite disagreeing with her stance. "That's politics," both sides say at various points, a resignation to their own hypocrisies.

The show also never lets Schlafly and the housewives nor Steinem and the activists "win" or "lose," at least in those terms. Avoiding a battle between the women means neither leader can be seen as coming out on top. This is, admittedly, confusing. "Do We Need a Biopic Celebrating America's Preeminent Anti-Feminist?" wrote Vogue, while a Washington Examiner article written by Schlafly's niece blasts Mrs. America's "caricature of Phyllis Schlafly" as "pure propaganda." For both of these to be takeaways from the same show is a testament to its hazily-drawn battle lines. Who really wins? Who really loses?

After all, the great knife-twist of Mrs. America is that all women however enlightened or liberated or contentedly at home they may be are oppressed by the system they believe to have beaten in their own way. It is no mistake that many of the "strong female leads" in the show are depleted and homebound in Mrs. America's final shots. It's telling, too, that Mrs. America has not one but two major references to the 1975 feminist film Jeanne Dielman, which today remains a seminal depiction of stifling domesticity. The movie is played in the background in one scene and is subject of a direct homage in another, where the camera unwaveringly watches as Schlafly peels apples in her kitchen. To reference such a classic portrait of suffocating womanhood, one that still resonates today, is to cement the fact that these battles rage on even now.

Mrs. America doesn't need to pit women against each other for cheap narrative tension. Because even on opposite sides of the war, some uphill battles are always the same.

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Mrs. America resists the urge to pit women against each other - The Week

Some right-wing media personalities are encouraging Americans to protest stay-at-home orders, arguing it is time to start to re-open the economy.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday tweeted approvingly of people in Michigan demonstrating against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's order. "Time to get your freedom back," Ingraham declared. "Soon Marylanders, Virginians, etc will stand for their right to work, travel, assemble, socialize and worship? Massive long lasting damage is piling up day after day as many 'experts' continue to get the virus analysis wrong," Ingraham wrote in another tweet.

Ingraham wasn't the only Fox personality to express such a sentiment. Jeanine Pirro told Sean Hannity Wednesday night that the health officials "overblew what was going to happen in terms of the number of people who were going to die" and now are telling people to stay home. "No," she said. Pirro later added, "The American spirit is too strong and Americans are not going to take it. And what happened in Lansing, [Michigan], today, God bless them, it's going to happen all over the country."

Fox also spent the day spotlighting the protests. It was the top story on FoxNews.com for a fair amount of time, with the headline, "NO TO THE 'NANNY STATE.'" And it received airtime on shows where hosts appeared to somewhat agree with the protesters.

Outside Fox, others in right-wing media have also started speaking out. A prominent Infowars host is organizing a Texas rally for later this week. "Are we in martial law right now?" the host asked Wednesday. "Because we're acting like it."

The far-right blog The Gateway Pundit framed the protests as people protesting a "tyrannical governor" who had implemented "police state policies." And Candace Owens tweeted this week she was going to the grocery store every day, expressing outrage at the fact that she was asked to wear a mask. "WTF is going on?" Owens wondered.

"We can't be careless"

I thought I'd ask Jason Miller, the former Trump comms adviser, what he thinks of right-wing media stars saying such things. Along with Steve Bannon and Raheem Kassam, Miller has co-hosts "War Room Pandemic" -- a daily radio show that has covered the coronavirus for weeks.

Miller said that he believes right-wing media personalities encouraging Americans to protest stay-at-home orders are "on the outskirts of sensible voices on this topic." Miller added, "We all want the U.S. to reopen as soon as possible, and there's plenty of room for debate for how best to do that, but we can't be careless in how we go about doing it."

The social distancing culture wars

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Some in right-wing media egg on protests against stay-at-home orders - CNN