WSJ:
Canada Bridge Protesters Agree to Open One Lane From U.S.
Business leaders demand end to blockade, with ruling expected Friday on whether police can remove demonstrators at Ambassador Bridge
A group of protesters, who have choked off most access to the Ambassador Bridge, decided that opening up a lane might weaken the argument of lawyers for the Canadian border city of Windsor, Ontario, and the automotive industry, who seek to persuade a court that protesters need to be forcibly removed.
Vox:
The Canadian trucker convoy is an unpopular uprising
The “freedom convoy” that has besieged Ottawa isn’t a people’s revolt. It’s a fringe movement protesting its defeat.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson has declared a state of emergency, and Trudeau’s government has deployed hundreds of Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the protests. As the situation in Ottawa continues, the freedom convoy movement has expanded across the country. Demonstrators have shut down at least two border crossings between Canada and the United States.
But while the protests are generating a lot of noise and attention, the eruption actually points up a counterintuitive fact: The Canadian far right is weak and ineffectual, especially when it comes to pandemic restrictions.
Yair Rosenberg/Atlantic:
Why It’s So Hard to ‘Follow the Science’
A conversation with Harvard historian Steven Shapin about why people believe Joe Rogan, why our public discourse about science is splintered, and what to do about it
Shapin: Look, whatever we know about the natural world—which includes the virus and the orbits of the planets, and so on—comes from human sources. These subjects are practically solved for all of us when we’re young by our parents. They’re practically solved later on as we grow up by our teachers at all levels. That’s true for Dr. Fauci and that’s true for Professor Shapin, and it is true for anybody else. We’re no different in that respect. We don’t know things directly. We know things through trusted sources.
So part of the science that’s relevant in this situation is the science of credibility: how credibility is established, how people come to know things. One of the things I think that people mean by following the science is, “Look, there’s this guy, Fauci; he knows what he’s talking about, believe him. Look, there’s this guy, Trump; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; don’t believe him.” The problem we have today is a radical splintering in sources that speak about the world. In a sense, we’ve always had this, but now we’ve got such a diversity of voices that we’re asking laypeople to decide between Joe Rogan and Trump and Fauci, and determine who is speaking the truth about the virus. It’s a hard thing to do!
David Leonhardt/NY Times:
If only it were so easy.
When Donald Trump was president and making false statements to downplay Covid, “follow the science” began to gain popularity. Now, it also serves as a response to the many incorrect statements that vaccine opponents make. President Biden likes to promise that he will follow the science, to signal his difference from Trump and deference to the C.D.C.
The phrase does have its uses. It’s a rejection of myth and a recognition that some aspects of the pandemic are unambiguous: Covid is more deadly for the unvaccinated than almost any virus in decades, and the vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing serious illness.
Many other Covid questions, however, are complicated. What does the science say about them? It says many things. Above all, science makes clear that public health, like the rest of life, usually involves trade-offs.
Jonathan Chait/NY Magazine:
Republicans Can’t Decide Whether to Celebrate Trump’s Coup Plot or Ignore It
What the “legitimate political discourse” fight reveals.
The Republican Party is embroiled in a minor internal tiff over three words: “legitimate political discourse.” The awkward coinage appeared in a Republican National Committee resolution censuring Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to negate the election results. RNC chair Ronna McDaniel is furious with the news media for highlighting those words out of what she regards as proper context. Many Republican officials are furious at McDaniel for passing the resolution in the first place.
The dispute offers a revealing window into the state of the party’s internal deliberations over Trump’s coup plot.
Theodore R Johnson/Bulwark:
The Role of Racial Resentment in Our Politics
The parties seem further apart on questions of race today than they have been for some time—but the truth is more complicated.
If you think race is a minor part of, or even a distraction from, the broader debate about the future of our democracy, let me introduce you to the last couple of weeks in American politics.
When President Joe Biden announced his intention to follow through on a campaign pledge to nominate a black woman to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, a chorus of voices on the right grabbed every mic in sight to decry the president for eschewing meritocracy in favor of identity politics. And a few days later, when Donald Trump suggested during a campaign rally that he would pardon the convicted Jan. 6th insurrectionists (many of whom openly displayed their racism), folks on the left we-told-you-so’d over how in-step the former president’s move was with the right-wing politics of white grievance.
There is a real sense that the parties are further apart on questions of race today than they have been for some time—each side being pulled to the poles. But the truth is more complicated. The yawning gap between the parties is not, as is often suggested, because Republicans have become more racist and Democrats have become more woke; it is because the left has become more progressive on racial inequality while the right has fortified its pre-existing position.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
The Supreme Court’s ‘Dead Hand’
The 6–3 majority-conservative Supreme Court is dangerously out of step with a demographically and culturally changing America.
On all of these fronts, and others, the Republican justices are siding with what America has been—a mostly white, Christian, and heavily rural nation—over the urbanized, racially and religiously diverse country America is becoming.
“The Court seems to be pulling the United States back into a prior era without regard for changing notions and understandings of equity, equality, and fairness,” Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, told me. “It is about almost trying to maintain a 1940s, 1950s view of what the United States is and what its obligations are to its citizens.”