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A little over two years ago, on March 6, 2020, I was in Manhattan on a cold and wet evening attending what would turn out to be my last public event for a very long time: a Times Center panel discussion on the New York Times Magazines 1619 Project. The magazines editor-in-chief opened by thanking everyone in attendance for coming to the event, braving the bad weather and the coronavirus. Everyone laughed. Little did we know.

By that time, I was certainly aware of COVID-19 as a potentially serious problem. My mother and I had canceled, on her doctors advice, a planned trip to Berlin (which, had we made it, would have left us scrambling to get home after the travel restrictions were imposed on March 11). Already at the beginning of February, my mother, a piano teacher who has many Chinese American students, was advised by one students parent to avoid contact with anyone who had recently traveled to China. It cant hurt to be careful, I told her. And yet on that evening in New York it never occurred to me that I was taking a risk by using the subway or by being in a crowded auditorium and mingling with people after the event.

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On the same day, March 6, reports on a leaked document from a February webinar hosted by the American Hospital Association on confronting the threat of what was then still widely called the novel coronavirus caused a flurry of panic on social media. Some experts were projecting as many as 96 million cases in the United States, 4.8 million hospitalizations, and 480,000 deaths. At the time, with fewer than 200 identified COVID-19 casesnot deathsin the entire country, those figures seemed preposterously high. For the record, I was among those telling people not to overreact, pointing out that other estimates were much rosier.

I spoke that week to a friend who works in biomedical research and who had initially been skeptical that the new coronavirus posed a grave threat. The reports from northern Italy had changed her mind. This is going to be very bad, she told me.

A few days later, we were in a state of emergency. My mom and I were still talking about using the credit for our canceled tickets to Berlin to go to London at the end of April; there were some London Symphony Orchestra concerts we wanted to attend, as well as an acclaimed new production of Uncle Vanya, and surely by then this coronavirus thing would have blown over.

By the end of April, we were debating whether it was safe to go to Trader Joes.

Almost from the very beginning, responses to COVID-19 in the United States were (like everything else these days) polarized along political lines. Being Team Blue meant that you saw COVID as a very serious threat and supported drastic measures to contain and mitigate its spread. Being Team Red meant that you thought COVID wasnt that big a deal and that its danger was being overhyped by safety freaks, people who wanted to give the government extraordinary powers, and Democrats who wanted to weaponize the pandemic to bring down Donald Trump. Obviously, not everyone fell neatly into those categories; but the tendency was undeniable. Here at The Bulwark in April 2020, Gabriel Schoenfeld documented the sorry record of people on the rightnot just Fox News carnival barkers like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, but such soi-disant intellectuals as Roger Kimball and Heather Mac Donaldminimizing the pandemic and mocking those who took it seriously. Kimball performed a particularly spectacular self-beclowning in a March 14, 2020 American Greatness column in which he mocked the idea of an emergency and sneered that a total of 60 people60!have died from the scourge of the Wuhan virus. . . . This really is a pandemic akin to the Black Death. He confidently predicted that, while widespread testing might uncover more cases, What wont go up much is the number of fatalities.

Chronicling Team Red covidiocy could easily fill a book: The estimate from Hoover Institution senior fellow Richard Epstein, a law professor, that just 500 Americans would die of COVIDfollowed by his comically desperate attempts to say he had really meant 5,000. The claims by talk-radio king Rush Limbaugh that COVID was just the common cold and was being overhyped by the media as part of an effort to bring down Trump. Trumps rant at a rally about the Democrats new hoax and about the flu being far worse. (Yes, if you pick apart his word salad, he technically didnt call the disease a hoax, only claims that he was mishandling it; but its ridiculous to deny that such talk boosted the COVID hoax narratives.) The #PlanDemic and #DemPanic hashtags (which still exist, but dont look if you want to avoid brain damage). The war cries to liberate locked-down states. The obsessions with alleged miracle drugs, especially hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. The Anthony Fauci Derangement Syndrome. The anti-vaccine propaganda and scare tactics peddled by the likes of Tucker Carlson.

This is not to say that Team Blue has been entirely faultless. Some accusations leveled at the Trump administration were baseless or exaggerated. For instance, its not true that (as Joe Biden charged, along with a number of media outlets) the Trump administration rejected COVID-19 test kits offered by the World Health Organization. Its also far from certain that, as many Trump critics suggested, the situation was made worse by the 2018 shutdown of the National Security Councils office for global health security, instituted two years earlier under Barack Obama; as Factcheck.org has pointed out, its functions (and members) were mostly shifted to other units. More broadly, the idea that the COVID death toll in the United States equals blood on Trumps hands seems overdramatic considering how many countries not led by Trump also fared badlyand how effectively the Trump administration facilitated the rapid development and production of vaccines. Did Trumps feckless rhetoric and lack of leadership encourage irresponsible behavior with regard to social distancing and vaccination and thus cost lives? Most likely; but counterfactuals are always iffy, and its difficult to say with any confidence how different the outcomes would have been under a different president.

It is also true that political polarization caused many people to circle the wagons around COVID mitigation strategies that needed to be questionedsuch as widespread school closures. (Ironically, the effects of these measures should have been of particular concern to progressives concerned with equity: Distance learning seems to have had particularly negative outcomes for low-income kids with few resources at home, disproportionately racial minorities, and school closures have also pushed many mothers out of the workforce.) And there is some truth to the charge that members of the cognitive elite who could easily do their jobs from home enthusiastically supported lockdown measures without giving much thought to their effects on the livelihood of many less privileged men and women.

But this really isnt a both sides issue. Yes, the COVID hawks made their share of errors and missteps. No, none of it was comparable to the indecency of encouraging people to disregard the risk of COVID infection, flout safety measures, and avoid vaccination, or the insanity of conspiracy theories about the pandemic as a plan by a globalist cabal to shut down the economy, seize power, and tamper with peoples DNA through vaccination.

Proponents of limited government and individual liberty have had valid reasons to worry about the vast expansion of government power and the drastic curbs imposed on peoples personal freedoms for the sake of combating the pandemic. The belief that politicians and bureaucrats dont like to relinquish powers that are meant to be temporary has been often vindicated in the past. Critical voices questioning the usefulness or the ethics of various mandates and prohibitions are never more essential than in the kinds of crises that create a strong temptation to trade freedom for safety.

This is especially true given that some progressives did, by their own admission, want to use the pandemic as an opportunity for a permanent shift away from what they saw as excessive individualism. As Canada went into lockdown in March 2020, Toronto Star columnist Shree Paradkar pointed to drastic measures taken in the public and private sectors as examples of how radical change can happen quickly with proper motivation. Paradkar exultantly announced that Canada had discovered collectivism and that feminists, anti-racism activists, and equity leaders were getting an unexpected glimpse into what an actual enforcement of their demands would look like. You dont need to be particularly right-wing to find such rhetoric disturbing.

More recently, in a New York magazine essay discussing New York Times writer David Leonhardt, a strong proponent of the view that vaccination should enable a transition from mitigation strategies to normalization, left-wing journalist Sam Adler-Bell acknowledged that many progressives dislike Leonhardts argument because they had hoped for a COVID-driven shift toward a different social and political order better grounded on communal values. Instead, writes Adler-Bell, normalization means a return to the individualized logic of the American moral imagination in which people are responsible for the consequences of their own choices.

This is where center-right commentatorslibertarian, conservative, or moderatecan make the counterargument that it would be perverse to build our social order around a once-in-a-century pandemic and to apply the logic of emergencies to everyday life. While individualized morality certainly allows for obligations to others, government action that broadly and drastically curbs citizens personal freedom for the benefit of those who either forgo vaccination or are at unusually high risk for deadly infections (pandemic-related or not) is a troubling form of supposedly benevolent authoritarianism. It also means, as Leonhardt points out, inflicting pain on some to spare others.

But making such a case requires an honest assessment of facts and tradeoffs, rather than crying fascism! over social distancing and masking mandates at the height at the pandemicwhen COVID mortality rates were alarmingly high, no vaccine was on the horizon, effective treatments were nonexistent, and the nature and consequences of the disease were only beginning to be understood. By now the COVID-hawkish states have dropped virtually all COVID restrictions. And some of the more dramatic claims of a COVID-paved road to serfdom were always based on hysteria and misinformation. In April 2020, for example, the rumor went around that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had banned all sales of seeds and gardening supplies. Some on right-wing Twitter saw an insidious tyrannical plot: Whitmer has taken actions to prohibit people from being self sufficient on their own land, wrote one self-identified post-conservative anti-Communist. In fact, the new regulations required cordoning off nonessential sections of large stores (over 50,000 square feet), including garden centers and plant nurseries, in order to limit indoor contacts. There was no ban on buying seeds, bulbs, or gardening supplies online or in smaller stores. One could debate whether the policy made sense, but a dastardly attack on the self-sufficiency of Michiganders it was not.

How well lockdowns, mask mandates, and other pre-vaccination COVID-19 mitigation strategies worked in reducing the spread of the virus and the resulting deaths is a massively complicated question. In January, a research review and analysis published under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise concluded that lockdowns had a minimal effect on saving lives; the paper sparked intense polemics, and the authors were accused of political bias, especially since their conclusions often differed from those of the researchers whose work they reviewed. But leaving aside questions of bias and complicated disagreements about methodology and data-crunching, the paper is far more nuanced than one would know from the gleeful lockdowns are useless! reports and reactions on the right. For one thing, the authors found that, while stay-at-home orders and school closures did not reduce COVID-19 mortality, nonessential business closures apparently didand so did masking mandates, though this last result was based on a very limited sample of studies.

The paper stressed that one reason to be skeptical of the benefits of lockdowns is that the effects of government orders can be difficult to disentangle from those of voluntary behavior modifications, such as avoiding social gatherings and close contact with others. This is hardly the same as proposals to just get on with normal life and defy the virus while shielding the elderly and those with high-risk medical conditionshardly a tenable strategy considering how many people in those groups live in the same households as the young and the healthy.

The COVID culture wars have not abated in the spring of 2022, despite being pushed into the background by Russias war in Ukraineand made far less urgent by the fact that COVID-19 has become (at least for now) far less scary, due to the milder Omicron strain and to the availability of vaccines and treatments.

Yes, some people, generally more on the progressive side, are still in masks forever mode, either out of an ingrained habit of caution or because they still feel the need to display proof of taking COVID seriously as a badge of progressive identity.

But if theyre still stuck in the spring of 2020, what is there to say of those on the right who are still hellbent on proving that the pandemic was always a lot of hype? We get, for instance, brilliant takes like this:

Never forget that it wasn't masking or vaccines that ended COVID.

It was upcoming elections ? https://t.co/T54vki0f3k

— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) March 4, 2022

Of course, other Team Red members had confidently predicted that COVID would disappear after the 2021 presidential election, but never mind. Also, never mind that American elections and the Democrats bad polling fail to explain why most European countries have also been dropping pandemic-related restrictions.

To many on Team Red, its not enough that everything has been reopened; the enemy must be browbeaten into admitting that the lockdowns were useless or downright criminal, that mainstream narratives about COVID were a scam, and the skeptics are fully vindicated.

Conservative pundit and Kentucky State University political scientist Wil Reilly, who retweeted this graphic, told me in a Twitter exchange that most major MSM/PMC [mainstream media/professional-managerial class] claims about COVID were b/s from the start. As it happens, the very next day I stumbled on a thread by Reilly from March 20, 2020, arguing that it was extremely unlikely the coronavirus would kill more Americans in 2020 than the flu already had by that point (22,000 to 24,000). There are currently 14,366 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 in-country, there have been 220 deaths, and spread may almost stop during summer, Reilly wrote. The actual COVID-19 death toll in the United States for 2020 ended up being 385,000. So it seems that, at least on the numbers, the MSM/PMC were far closer to the truth.

The Team Red narrative also minimizes the death toll by claiming that it was overwhelmingly among the very old; in fact, a quarter of the dead (242,000) were under 65 and nearly half (458,000) were under 75. And then, of course, theres the dead with COVID, not from COVID dodgeeven though the Centers for Disease Control separates cases in which COVID is a contributing but not principal factor from those in which it is the underlying cause of death.

But no part of Team Red COVID discourse has been more insidious than anti-vaccine propaganda, often abetted by the anti-anti-vax crowd. Some of this discourse comes from people who are not, strictly speaking, Team Red but are part of the anti-woke side in the culture wars (a side with which I broadly sympathize). Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, husband-and-wife biologists who attracted a lot of support a few years ago when they were run out of Evergreen College for opposing an anti-racist exercise in which white people were asked to stay away from campus for a day, have emerged as two leading voices of COVID vaccine skepticismrejecting scientific evidence for quackery.

Former New York Times editor and anti-cancel culture dissenter Bari Weiss initially urged her newsletter readers last May to get vaccinated and start living a normal life (and advised the vaccine-hesitant to consider the data and get with the program); but later, she shifted toward platforming vaccine skeptics as a legitimate side in the debate and giving sympathetic coverage to vaccine resisters including the protesting Canadian truckers, with no balancing pro-vaccination message or criticism of anti-vax agitprop and conspiracy theories.

Its hard to say whether this is contrarianism or audience capture. Either wayand I say this as someone who generally admires Bari Weissits, well, deplorable.

Of course one can oppose government vaccination mandates on the grounds of personal autonomy without being anti-vaccine. But surely the only way to take that position responsibly is to also stress that people should get vaccinated for their own and others sakes: breakthrough cases in the vaccinated are not only vastly less likely to result in serious illness and death but less likely to lead to transmission.

So yes, you can have sympathy for the Canadian truckers. But give some thought, too, to people like Robert LaMay, a Seattle police officer who quit his job last October to protest Gov. Jay Inslees vaccination mandate for state employees (even though he himself had received a religious exemption). LaMay was hailed as a hero by Fox News and right-wing radio after he filmed himself in his patrol car on his last day on the job telling Gov. Inslee to kiss my ass. Less than four months later, he was dead of COVID at the age of 51, after four weeks in the hospital.

Whatever one may think of LaMays choice to forgo vaccination for (apparently) religious and philosophical reasons, what happened to him is a terrible tragedy. But it is also a fact that he received praise and attention for persisting in a literally self-destructive course of action. His Fox News fans, including Laura Ingraham, had nothing to say about his death. Seattle right-wing talk show host Jason Rantz blasted the ghoulish vaccine zealots who had made snarky remarks on Twitter, but did not express any regret about his role in lionizing LaMay.

When Weiss appeared on HBOs Real Time with Bill Maher last January and declared that she was done with COVID, she asserted that COVID excessive restrictions would be remembered as a catastrophic moral crimebut had no such harsh words for anti-vax agitprop and its peddlers. Surely, what happened to Robert LaMay qualifies as a moral crime as well.

Today, the latest covidiot trope is that its no coincidence that COVID-19 became a non-story just as the war in Ukraine broke out. Obviously, our globalist showrunners had decided that it was time to wrap up the pandemic storyline and roll out the World War III one. At least I think thats what Julie Kelly implies in her latest American Greatness column.

In reality, of course, COVID-19 may not be done with us. China has a new COVID surge, and infections are rising again in Europe thanks to a stealth Omicron subvariant. We dont know yet if our new freedom from COVID will turn out to be just a break. And, while the new subvariant seems mild, we dont know that another mutation cant bring back a more severe version of the disease. This is not a cause to panicscientists are working on a universal COVID vaccine, and treatments are constantly improvingbut we may not be out of the woods yet. And a major COVID outbreak in Ukraine, already battered by war and a refugee crisis, could be a truly horrific tragedy.

Meanwhile, right-wing Twitter is getting upset about a screenshot from a Forbes blog post discussing whether it would be a good idea to administer psychoactive drugs to the population to make people more likely to comply with masking and social distancing guidelines for COVID-19. You will take morality pills and be happy. This is what the elites want for you, tweeted anti-woke guru James Lindsay, to the tune of 1,700 retweets. Actually, the article, by physician and free-market advocate Paul Hsieh, argued against the morality pill idea (a fact the headline had been tweaked to reflect), and its only known exponent was an adjunct assistant professor in philosophy at Western Michigan University . . . back in August 2020.

Its good to see that some people have their eye on whats important.

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Two Years of Covidiocy - The Bulwark

Joseph Robertson, Strategic Director of Orthodox Conservatives. Screengrab: GB News

The Conservative Party is being lobbied by an anti-BLM, anti-Islam, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, anti-green youth group which claims to be grassroots but which has links to opaquely funded right-wing think-tanks and far-right figures, an investigation by media non-profit the Citizens for VICE World News can reveal.

Members of the group make regular appearances in the national press and as guests on broadcasters TalkRadio and GB News.

Orthodox Conservatives claims to be a grassroots think-tank, but the investigation found that it is connected to both established conservative groups such as the Bruges Group - which have influence inside Westminster - and to far-right organisations.

It would be easy to dismiss the OCG as privileged students playing at politics, but the group is part of an influential network which includes MPs and members of the far-right. When VICE World News spoke to Luke Doherty, chairman of Orthodox Conservatives, he excitedly told us, even the Prime Minister has heard of us!

Orthodox Conservatives strategic director Joseph Robertson is regularly featured on GB News as a political commentator and has been quoted in the Daily Express on several occasions. Former OCG President Dominique Samuels was invited on to TalkRadio to disparage BLM as a front for communism during the height of the protests against racism in June 2020.

But who are Orthodox Conservatives?

Orthodox Conservatives was formed in 2020 from the ashes of the far-right student group Turning Point UK. In America, Turning Point USA made waves at university campuses by creating a Professor Watchlist of academics that it claimed taught leftist propaganda and discriminated against conservative students. A UK counterpart was launched in February 2019 but failed to make much of an impact in UK universities. It became a laughing stock on social media almost as soon as it launched after numerous spoof Twitter accounts were set up representing fictitious Turning Point UK branches. In January 2020, key members of Turning Point UK launched Orthodox Conservatives.

Orthodox Conservatives claims to be a grassroots group, but a look at the organisation shows that it is nothing of the sort.

The groups advisory board includes Sir John Hayes, a Conservative MP who was a minister under David Cameron. Hayes is founder of the Common Sense Group, a group of 59 Conservative MPs and seven peers who announced their formation in November 2020 with a letter to the Daily Telegraph railing against cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the woke agenda. Cultural Marxism is a far-right conspiracy theory with anti-Semitic origins that was used by Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik. The Common Sense Group recently published a war on woke manifesto, aiming to influence the culture wars in the same way as the European Research Group of backbench MPs pushed the government for a hard Brexit.

Orthodox Conservatives Head of Operations, Ethan Thoburn, is another link to the Common Sense Group. He is Communications and Campaigns Officer for Andrew Rosindell MP. Rosindell was a signatory to the Common Sense Groups Telegraph letter and has been described in the Times as a flag fanatic and super-patriot.

The group also provides a bridge between these culture-war Conservative MPs, and others whose views put them outside the Tory tent.

Ben Harris-Quinney, chairman of the Tory Bow Group think-tank and ex-Conservative councillor, is Orthodox Conservatives chief advisor. He was expelled from the Tory party in 2015, and claims he was asked by a party candidate to leave for being a racist and a homophobe. In a blog post, he scoffed that if he was guilty of this, he should have been expelled long ago, but added his party membership had already lapsed.

Earlier that year, he had been recorded at an anti-LGBT conference describing David Cameron as being forced to endure the indignity of legalising gay marriage with only the support of opposing parties. More recently, he has tweeted against the LGBT lobby and the spectre of Cultural Marxism.

The Bow Group labels itself the worlds oldest Conservative think-tank. Founded in 1951, it has a controversial history. In 2020 it sponsored the National Conservative Conference in Rome, a meeting of hard-right figures from across Europe including Ryszard Legutko, a Polish Law and Justice party MEP who said that homophobia was a totally fictitious problem and Hermann Tertsch, an MEP from Spains Vox party who said that General Franco was not a fascist.

Orthodox Conservatives and the Bow Group have had several meetings with far-right figureheads. Benjamin Loughnane, a Bow Group researcher and contributor to the Orthodox Manifesto - a document spelling out Orthodox Conservatives beliefs - has spent evenings with British YouTuber and conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson at the Reform Club - a private members club in Pall Mall, for which membership costs 1,344 per year. The Reform Club is an exclusive establishment frequented by MPs and party donors - Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees Mogg has been seen eating there.

In July 2021, Alice Grant, Orthodox Conservatives head of education attended the annual summer party of free-speech group the New Culture Forum. Held at an undisclosed location, the bash was hosted by UKIP MP Peter Whittle. Other guests included Loughnane of The Bow Group and US conservative provocateur Andy Ngo - best known for having a milkshake thrown at him by anti-fascist activists after embedding with far-right groups.

The groups finances also belie its claims of being grassroots.

Members of Orthodox Conservatives have claimed that the majority of the groups work is funded by its members. There is no publicly available list of donors.

The Bow Group is based at 71-75 Shelton Street. VICE World News has uncovered eight separate companies currently or formerly run from this address whose directors are members of Orthodox Conservatives, the Bow Group or Turning Point UK. Despite most having existed for at least two years, few appear to be making any money and many list activities of political organisations as their business.

Surge Britain Ltd is one of these. Started in 2021 and listed as a political organisation, it is run by Orthodox Conservatives strategic advisor Robertson (under his real name of Josephmarie Dulston) and Loughnane. As with the other companies we discovered, what they actually do is as opaque as their finances.

71-75 Shelton Street also sheds light on Orthodox Conservatives proximity to the far-right. The address is also the base of far-right Christian YouTube channel Hearts of Oak. The Hearts of Oak website lists among its contributors a number of controversial figures.

There is ex-EDL leader Tommy Robinson, right-wing blogger David Vance and far-right vlogger Carl Sargon of Akkad Benjamin. Also among them are Dr Niall McRae, co-author of an Islamophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy booklet that VICE revealed was distributed at Conservative Party conference in 2018 and Catherine Blaiklock, former leader of the Brexit Party (now the Reform Party) who had to resign over a series of anti-Islam tweets. Blaiklock is also on the board of the Reform Party, whose Counter Conference was organised by Robertson last year.

Robertson, 24, is taking a masters degree in International Relations at Portsmouth University. He told VICE World News that Boris Johnson is operating to the left of Blair we certainly don't see him as a true Conservative leader; that broad lie that brought him to power is being revealed more and more through tax hikes.

As for his groups role, We are a sort of safe space for conservatism, he said.

What this means is spelled out in the OCGs manifesto which was created in collaboration with the homophobic Christian legal advisory group ADF Legal. It describes BLM as a divisive, gendered, and artificial ideology that fetishises skin-deep diversity and seeks to make the case for having an abortion less necessary by adopting the controversial Hungarian system of financial incentives for two-parent families. This echoes the opinion of Hungarian Families Minister Kaitlin Novak, who met with Jacob Rees-Mogg in 2021.

The manifesto claims educational standards have slipped because [20 years ago] teachers began to dress informally" and calls for a return to corporal punishment in schools. It also warns of the harmful, divisive, menacing influence which Gender Ideology inflicts on children. It calls for the government to conduct thorough independent research into [OFSTED] and hold it accountable for its actions in promoting Gender Ideology and Critical Race Theory - an academic discipline which has been adopted by right-wing culture warriors as a catch-all term used to dismiss any discussion of racism.

When VICE World News presented this manifesto to far-right extremism expert and researcher for ISD Global, Julia Ebner, she described OCG as more radical than they look at first sight.

They are trying to move the Overton Window further to the right, she said, referring to the window or range of policies that are generally seen as acceptable in mainstream politics.

Regarding their similarities to the far-right, Ebner says both have a clear focus on aesthetics, cultural purity and traditional family values noting that they hijack words like conservative and Christian but their manifesto is full of alt-right vocabulary.

They use fancy words and sophisticated rhetoric to camouflage radical ideologies [and to] be perceived as legitimate and harmless, Ebner added.They also have a much higher potential to provoke radical change in politics, business and culture, as they are more likely to get into influential professional positions.

Sir John Haynes was approached for comment but did not reply.

When asked about Orthodox Conservatives relationship with the Bow Group, Loughnane told us there is no formal association. Robertson said Orthodox Conservatives has a good working relationship with the Bow Group and their collaboration is a mutual thing.

This story was published in collaboration with media non-profit the Citizens.

The rest is here:
Revealed: Youth Group Trying to Push Conservative Party Further to the Right - VICE UK

Its hard to pick up a foreign policy journal or even turn on the TV without encountering someone predicting, recommending or lamenting a new Cold War with Russia, China or both.

This is entirely understandable and even justifiable, if you mean a new period of strategic competition, pressure and geopolitical tension that falls short of all-out war. Such a lower-case cold war is already on display.

The U.S. and our allies are doing nearly everything short of declaring a hot war on Russia for its immoral aggression against Ukraine. Things are not so tense with China, but theres a broad consensus, particularly among Republicans, that containing China to use a Cold War term should become central to American foreign policy. And even many who believe we are entering a new Cold War with China whether we want one or not. After all, sometimes wars, cold or hot, are not wars of choice.

I agree that new cold wars with Russia and China are simultaneously necessary and not necessarily desirable. But I worry that the semantic confusion of the historic Cold War and this new cold war could get us into trouble. George Orwell observed in Politics and the English Language that if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.

The Cold War was wholly a creature of its time. Indeed, as Orwell himself observed in his 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, our conflict with the Soviet Union was a product of the nuclear age, and he predicted that nuclear weapons would make the kind of war that had just concluded a few months earlier unlikely.

The fear of nuclear war still constrains our actions and I hope our adversaries but the differences between the Cold War era and today are profound.

To start, the Cold War was not a time of sustained peace. The Korean and Vietnam wars were part of the Cold War, as were the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

It was very easy to cut off economic relations with the Soviet Union, because we had so few to begin with. The same holds to a large extent with contemporary Russia, which may be a nuclear superpower but is an economic piker. Its GDP is less than half of Californias (Russias per capita GDP is an eighth of Californias).

Meanwhile, China is the worlds second-largest economy and a global manufacturing powerhouse. Any expectation that the U.S. and the international community would sever ties with China over a Taiwan invasion the way they have over Russias invasion of Ukraine seems overly optimistic. China crushed democracy in Hong Kong and is putting Uyghurs in concentration camps, and the international business community has for the most part shrugged.

The Soviets vowed to liberate the world from capitalism, bourgeois democracy and religion. That kind of ideology made it comparatively easy to garner political support for containment yet even then, there was ample domestic and international opposition to Americas anti-communist policies.

Indeed, under God was officially inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance to differentiate America from the godless Communists. When Sen. Homer Ferguson (R-Mich.) introduced the legislation, he said, I believe this modification of the pledge is important because it highlights one of the real fundamental differences between the free world and the Communist world, namely belief in God.

No one in the House or Senate spoke in opposition to the change.

For good or ill, it seems implausible anything like that would be possible today. Religion no longer binds the nation the same way, and our domestic culture wars whether over COVID-19 pandemic response or school curricula or Vladimir Putin as anti-woke hero do not seem very compatible with a new cold war. And freedom itself is no longer the rallying cry it once was on either the left or the right.

Orwell argued that some phrases come to us like parts of a prefabricated hen-house and end up doing our thinking for us. We may indeed face a new cold war, but we need fresh thinking that doesnt necessarily flow from old phrases like Cold War.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

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Let's not confuse the Cold War of the 1950s with what's happening today - Frederick News Post

Photograph: Glenn Hunt/AAP

Scott Morrisons government has cranked up Australia Day funding tenfold in two years to promote a celebration of which we can be proud, sorry, suspicious. Callum Foote investigates the mysterious National Australia Day Council, and busts them for dodgy accounting.

The National Australia Day Council (NADC), the body in charge of promoting Australia Day and choosing the Australian of the Year, has seen a tenfold increase in its funding since inception in 2014. Its funding has shot up from $4m a year when Tony Abbott was PM to $34m last year, the vast majority coming in the last 2 years under Scott Morrison.

An investigation of the Councils financial disclosures shows, ironically, that the people in charge of promoting Australia Day have been in breach of Australian Accounting Standards. Its accounts have been qualified by the Auditor-General; in other words they have been busted for fudging their income.

With roughly $30 million in government grants to spend in 2021, the NADC launched a multimedia campaign The Story of Australia, spanning television, radio, digital, social media and outdoor ads. There was also a series of multimedia partnerships, including a thank you postcard for first responders delivered to more than 300,000 households.

Who got it, where was it targeted, how did the costs break down, who were the service providers who got some of this $30m, are they Liberal Party donors and associates? We know none of this because, typical of this government and its secrecy, nobody at the National Australia Day Council bothered to return emails or pick up the phone; for days.

It is unclear how much of its large budget was spent on this multimedia advertising campaign, although, if its 2021 financial report is any guide, the amount may be up to $1.6 million as covered in the NADCs other expenses from ordinary activities segment.

Moreover, $7.2 million was spent to host covid safe events on Australia Day, of which the flagship was the Australia Day Live Concert, delivered by the NSW Government in partnership with the NADC. Australia Day Live featured Australian acts performing on Sydney Harbour. It incorporated the Reflect. Respect. Celebrate. theme and branding for the first time.

An additional $6.8 million was spent on local government councils and non-for-profits to host Australia Day events.

The NADC then also spent $352,000 for Australia Day-branded Reflect. Respect. Celebrate. collateral and grants for production of branded materials.

The remaining $15m or so was given out in grants to non-for-profits and related organisations. The recipients are not public.

This year, the NADC is offering $7.5 million worth of grants to help Councils and not-for profit organisations host Australia Day events and activities that bring their community together to reflect respect and celebrate, wrote NADC chief executive Karlie Brand.

The 2021-22 Federal Budget allocated $33 million in funding for the NADC this year.

The National Australia Day Councils claim that their core mission is to actively promote our national day to all Australians to inspire national pride and increase participation and engagement across all sectors of the community.

The organisation was launched back in the 2010s with cricket star Adam Gilchrist as its chair. Now that post is filled by Danielle Roche, former Olympic Hockey star and finance executive.

There are 11 full time equivalent employees employed by NADC, at a cost of $1.6 million, plus an additional half a million to employ the councils CEO Karlie Bran and COO Karen Wilson.

Bran and Wilson gave themselves a $40,000 pay bump between them from 2020 and 2021.

The explosion in public funding which the Council has enjoyed over the past three years has been explained by the need to fund Covid-safe events on Australia day. Though, it is not obvious why these events, if they were held pre-pandemic, now cost ten times the amount that they were previously.

The earliest available financial documents provided by NADC are from 2013, where the organisation was awarded $3.3 million in government grants. Government grants steadily increased by a few hundred thousand, if that, each year until 2020 where they skyrocketed.

Meanwhile the Culture Wars rage on, the corporate media today, on Australia Day, largely muted on the matters of Australia Day dissent and the offense taken by many in First Nations communities.

Perhaps, the rising popularity of anti-Australia Day marches dubbed Invasion Day or Mourning Day marches by their organisers. Last year, up to 4,000 people attended marches in Sydney and Melbourne despite restrictions on gatherings due to covid regulations.

Clearly, these marches are antithetical to the mission statement of the NADC, as they actively promote the idea of changing the date and discourage participation in Australia Day festivities.

The government has encouraged nationalism meanwhile.

Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge campaigned against a new draft education curriculum in September last year, insisting that students should not leave school with a hatred of Australia. Tudge told Triple J that if students did not learn about Australias great successes they were not going to protect it as a million Australians have through their military service.

Instead of Anzac Day being presented as the most sacred of all days in Australia, where we stop, we reflect, we commemorate the hundred thousand people who have died for our freedoms its presented as a contested idea, Tudge said.

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Culture Wars: Morrison hides big spend on Australia Day ...

A group of Aquinas Institute parents and alumni, concerned with what they see as a leftward drift in the Catholic schools academics and culture,want theschools board of trustees to restore Aquinas to a God-centered classic curriculum and learning environment. The groups petition has garnered more than 350 signatures on Change.org since being posted on Jan. 14.

Parents who support the petition say many of their grievances are longstanding, but what spurred them to organize and petition the board now was an incident that occurred in November when alumnus Robert Agostinelli visited the school and gave an invited talk to studentsonly to have his remarks disavowed within hours by the schools top administrator. Agostinelli is managing director of Rhone Group, a global private equity firm he co-founded in 1996.

This is bigger than (Agostinellis) condemnation, Aquinas parent and alumnus Michael Kennedy wrote in an email. His experience was thelast strawan event that sparked many parents to come together and fight for what we know is right.

Entitled Restore Academic Freedom and Christian Values at Aquinas, the Concerned Aquinas Parents and Alumni petition alleges that Aquinas in recent years hasdrifted from its Christian Core Beliefs and Mission, to accommodate political correctness. It continues: The school hides behind a faade of paper mch Catholicism and is more closely aligned to a secular world view with a non-biblical explanation of life and justice. There is clear evidence of a woke ideology embraced by members of the schools board, administration and faculty.

The petition drive sparked by Agostinellis visit to Aquinasin some sense mirrors the culture wars that have ripped at a number of public and private schools across the country. However, the local petition effort has the backing not only of impassioned Aquinas parents and alumni but also of a billionaire alumnus with influence far beyond Rochester.

Whether many Aquinas parents and alumni share the groups views is uncertain. A few days ago, a counterpetition to the Aquinas trustees appeared on Change.org. Started by a group identified as Proud Alumni, it calls on the Aquinas community to join us in showing your support for Aquinas board, administration and faculty for their dedication to quality education and their denunciation of racism, bigotry and hate.

Nor is it clear how the board will respond to the petition. On Tuesday, Kennedy sent the petition to Nick Dobbertin, chair of the Aquinas board of trustees. The next day, Dobbertin replied by email to Kennedy, confirming receipt of the petition and writing that you can expect a response from our Executive Committee (representing the full Board) no later than January 31.

My requests to speak directly to top Aquinas administrators were turned down. Dobbertin also declined my request for an interview. Most of the information I have gathered comes from parents and alumni upset about the schools response to Agostinellis visit and dissatisfied with what they see as the cultural drift of the school, and from Agostinelli himself.

A storied institution

Aquinas Institute, a Catholic co-ed school for grades 6-12 located on Dewey Avenue, on Rochesters west side, has been an important part of the Rochester community for 120 years. Among its distinguished alumni are former mayor and New York lieutenant governor Bob Duffy, who now leads the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce, and the late Robert Wegman, who donated $10 million to the school some two decades ago. Aquinas had long sought a major gift from Agostinelli, who graduated from the school in 1972 and is one of the schools wealthiest alumni.

Agostinelli grew up on Rochesters west side, both in the city and in Greece, in what he describes as a classic Rochester immigrant middle-class family. While at Aquinas, he worked at his fathers service station, at grocery stores including IGA on Lyell Avenue and Loblaws, and had a Democrat and Chronicle paper route.After graduating from Aquinas in 1972, he attended St. John Fisher College, where he earned a B.A. and studied English and accounting.After graduation, he worked at the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand in Boston, then Goldman Sachs, and later Lazard Freres, before co-founding his own firm.Today, hes an active member or director of many organizations and philanthropies, including the Council on Foreign Relations; the Friends of Israel Initiative, of which hes a founding member; and the American Italian Cancer Foundation. He describes himself as a major contributor to the presidential campaign of John McCain and as a leader of anti-Trump Republicans.

Several months ago, Agostinelli accepted Aquinas invitation to visit the school. He was prepared to consider, he told me recently, a seven-figure gifta million dollars. On Nov. 5, he and his wife, Francesca Agostinelli, were welcomed at the school by President Anthony Cook and Principal Theodore Mancini. After a tour, they went to the auditorium, where a select group of juniors and seniors had been assembled to hear them speak and to ask questions.

Agostinelli says he spoke for about 30 minutes. No recording of his talk has surfaced, but by his own account and the recollections of a few students who were there, the bulk of his talkwas about the dangers of what former Bishop of RochesterFulton J. Sheenhad termed ego narcissism. (While at Aquinas, Agostinelli served as an altar boy for Sheen and came to regard him as a mentor.) About 25 minutes into his talk, he exhorted students to pursue happiness and the American dream and not fall prey to the tyranny of false deities, as examples of which he mentionedcritical race theory, the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization, feminism and gender confusion.

At that moment three or four students stood and walked out of the auditorium, according to students who attended the talk.

They were sitting together, and they just got up and marched out,Agostinelli told me. In my day, if you walked out on a prominent alumnus speaking, youd have gotten detention. You just wouldnt do that; it was an insult.

After Agostinelli completed his talk, his wife, a TV personality, spoke of her own career. When the couple finished their talks and answering questions, there was applause.They spent about another 20 minutes in the auditorium with students who came up to speak to them. Then, they toured more of the school before leaving.

A few hours later, Cook sent this email to the Aquinas community:

Dear Aquinas Families,

Today we had on campus an alumnus and his wife who wanted to share with our students the secrets of their success in their business careers. They spoke to members of our junior and senior classes. Unexpectedly, both speakers shared some of their personal beliefs. We have heard from several students and parents that they were offended. Please know that this was not the intended purpose of todays presentation. These personal opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by our guests do not reflect of the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the faculty, staff, and administration of The Aquinas Institute.

We will address this with our students on Monday morning. We will also use this as an opportunity for open dialogue and our belief that we will treat all others as children of God, deserving of respect and dignity.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel to contact me at (585) 254-2020 ext. 1097 or by email at[emailprotected]

Sincerely,

Dr. Anthony Cook 99

President

According to Agostinelli, Cook also wrote him directly about a football game scheduled that evening. Earlier, the football coach had invited Agostinelliwho had played football for Aquinasto appear on the field that night as their special guest. In the email, says Agostinelli, Cook wrote they would not be allowing visitors on the field that night.

By Monday, according to students I spoke to, the school had arranged counseling for students who had been offended by Agostinellis speech, including those who had not attended but had heard about it. According to these students, those who walked out on Agostinelli faced no discipline. (I had messages sent to two of the students who walked out inviting them to share their perspectives, but have not heard back.)

Some teachers made a point of telling their students about Agostinellis talk. One senior told me one of his teachers told students Agostinelli was racist and should be anti-racist, and that if students are upset by something they hear its OK to walk out to express how they feel. A sixth grader (with parents permission) told mea teachersaid a man had come to school to talk, and he said lots of racist things and very hateful speech.

Agostinelli was shocked and disturbed, he told me, by the reaction of administrators and teachers to his talk.

Regarding students walking out on his talk, he said, I would have thought if they didnt agree with mewhich is finetheyd have asked questions. Thats what happens at other schools where Ive spoken. He mentioned high schools in England, including Harrow, and colleges in the U.S. including Harvard, Yale, and the Naval War College. Ive often gotten reactions, but weve always debated it.

He described the behavior of school administrators in allowing students to walk out and not be disciplined for it as disgraceful.

I asked Agostinelli if the gift he had contemplated making to Aquinas was now off the table.

One hundred percent, he said.

He also said hed received more than 200 supportive letters from parents and alumni, and partly in response he decided to go public with his concerns about the school.

National spotlight

On Dec. 8, in theNational Review, a prominent conservative magazine of which he sits on the board, Agostinelli responded in an article headlined, An Alumnus Story: Going Home and Finding Woke.

Calling the administration at his alma mater moral eunuchs, he wrote that their actionsunmasked a cauldron of woke political correctness within the schools teaching ranks, the administration, and the board of trustees. At Aquinas, where young men and women of sound mind know intimately the tyranny of practicing leftists, he continued, the schools institutional cave-ins have repulsed and rousedeven emboldenedmany students, parents, and alumni who are prepared to take back this heralded school from those determined to subvert its legacy and mission.

In declining my request to speak directly with Cook and Mancini, Aquinas public relations firm supplied a statement on behalf of the Aquinas administration in lieu of an interview:

Aquinas Institute remains committed to honoring our schools values of goodness, discipline, and knowledge with respect and dignity for all of Gods children. We provide our students with a college preparatory educational environment that encourages ongoing and balanced dialogue. We foster critical thinking skills, in a nurturing learning environment, that will serve our students well in college and throughout their lives.

We value the feedback we have received from members of the Aquinascommunity following an alumnus visit in November 2021. As we do with allfeedback we receive, our administration and Board has given this feedbackthoughtful consideration. As an educational institution, Aquinas iscommitted to an open dialogue with our constituents and respects differentpoints of view. We will continuously evolve to address contemporary issuesin ways that are consistent with the mission of the school.

Demand for action

Word of how the school reacted to Agostinellis visitspurredlike-minded parents and alumni to launch the petition drive.

The petition, explains alumnus Dan Dwyer, is a request by parents and alumni to assure that the board hears concerns they have had for quite some time that have come to a head since Agostinellis visit in November when he got treatedinappropriatelyby our alma mater.

Adds Kennedy, an alumnus with two children currently attending Aquinas: Agostinellis talk has spearheaded this movement. The students who walked out were not disciplined but coddled. Wokism is turned up to 11 at my kids Catholic school. But the school should be religious and not be political. Were trying now to create a platform for parents to be heard.

In an open letter to parents and alumni urging them to sign the petition, Kennedy wroteAquinas has been under sustained assault by those who are brazenly dismantling its traditional Catholic teaching for political correctness, woke ideology and amoral secular bias. Sadly, this is rampant through the faculty and the administration.

The petition calls for specific changes at the school:

Replacement of the NY Common Core curriculum with a God-centered classic curriculum, aligned with the philosophies of St. Thomas Aquinas and Christian values that teach children how to think, not what to think.

Immediate action to ensure that no administrator or teacher seeks to indoctrinate students with a particular dogma or self-serving version of current events that reflect personal philosophies or viewpoints. There is no place in our school for such heinous conduct.

A return to the schools true foundation based on the principles of St. Thomas Aquinas and Congregation of St. Basil; restoring an air of academic freedom, consciously and actively supporting good citizenship, firm and just discipline, and unbridled patriotic fervor to flag and country.

The counterpetition, which by this morning had drawn more than330 signatures, expresses a starkly different perspective. It says Agostinelli and parents who share his views have spewed outrage that AQ has lost its Catholicity and caters to liberalism. It continues:

Indeed, Aquinas does exhibit a willingness to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from ones own, an openness to new ideas and a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise (which is the actual Oxford Languages definition of liberalism.). It also embraces gospel values and reflects Catholic values and teachings. Plus, it offers a top-notch education, a rigorous curriculum and an opportunity for students to think critically and to become the citizens that this world so desperately needs.

Given the enormous schism made apparent by the dueling petitions, it seems unlikely the boards forthcoming response to the Concerned Aquinas Parents and Alumni petition will significantly narrow the divide.

I asked Agostinelli what, if any, role he is taking regarding the petition to the board.

I stand with these parents shoulder to shoulder, he said. Im not in the lead, but what Im doing is being a voice, and theres going to be some changes made at the school. I will do everything in my power to help these parents and alumni bring their school back to respect the traditional teachings of the Catholic faith.

Peter Lovenheim isWashington correspondent for the Rochester Beacon and author of In the NeighborhoodandThe Attachment Effect. He can be reached at[emailprotected]. Rochester Beacon Executive Editor Paul Ericson contributed to this article.

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