#Doctors’ James Bond moment and other commentary

Medical professionals join a George Floyd protest rally at Union Square in Manhattan last Friday.
AP

Recommendations by some 1,200 medical professionals urging folks to join the Black Lives Matter protests amid the pandemic sound like “a James Bond movie in which a Bond super-villain recruits ‘top scientists’ to spread a deadly virus,” quips John O’Sullivan at The Pipeline — ­“eerily similar,” in fact, to the plot of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Spreading COVID-19 isn’t the medics’ goal, but their attempts to expand their public-health role into a political one is becoming a “familiar” pattern. Indeed, Lancet editor Richard Horton openly argues that doctors have a duty to become political. Alas, doctors “are no more expert at combating racism than the Man on the Clapham Omnibus.” And the protests, “with their accompanying riots, are at least as likely to be exacerbating racist feelings” as “ameliorating them.”

Foreign desk: Beijing’s Bold Badness

“While America tears itself apart with endless internal quarreling and media psychodramas,” Victor Davis Hanson notes at The Daily Caller, “China is now on the move — without apologies.” Beijing decided “if it’s going to be blamed for the spreading virus due to its deceit anyway, it might as well not let such a pandemic go to waste.” With bids to “strangle what was left of Hong Kong’s enfeebled democracy” and “ramp up its perennial border confrontations with India”: “What better way to show the world that a defiant China is dangerous than agitate the world’s largest democracy?” The COVID-19 crisis has forced the Middle Kingdom “to give up its nice-guy façade”: Its response to outrage over its virus coverup has gone from “So what?” to “What exactly are you going to do about it?”

Campaign watch: The Perils of ‘Defund’

Calls to defund police have “grown increasingly loud” — but, CNN’s Chris Cillizza observes, that push “carries massive political risk for Democrats.” National Democrats have “spent the last few days dodging about whether they support defunding efforts” — unsurprisingly, as ­defunding the police is “a clear political loser.” Democrats must alienate either their base of “activists . . . demanding radical change” or “a ­majority of the country,” which doesn’t support the move. Unless they can “change the conversation to be about reforming” rather than abolishing police, “the call to ‘Defund the Police’ will continue to be music to Trump’s ears.”

Gotham journal: Pathetic Pols’ Self-Praise

“With the economy in tatters, storefronts boarded up or broken and citizens in the street demanding justice, Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo speak with one voice as they say to New Yorkers: ‘You’re welcome,’ ” snarks Spectator USA’s Matt McDonald. The pair smugly celebrated the state’s reopening Monday, after “weeks of state-mandated lockdown, thousands of preventable nursing-home deaths and days of angry protests and looting.” That the restart just began “must be news to the thousands” who took to the streets earlier, including the mayor’s daughter, Chiara, “who was arrested for blocking traffic.” Cuomo, meanwhile, “spent the virus season bantering with his brother on CNN and shirking the blame for New York’s nursing-home catastrophe.” It seems “no matter the crisis, Cuomo and de Blasio have settled into a routine reaction: Remain oblivious, make several missteps, blame each other, declare victory regardless. If it ain’t broke — like half of Manhattan — why fix it?”

From the right: A Cultural Civil War

This week, “America woke up to a moment of clarity,” sighs The Federalist’s Ben Domenech: It’s “in the midst of a great cultural civil war.” While Americans were “largely unified” in “anger and frustration” after George Floyd’s tragic killing, “we’ve been coming apart ever since.” From the protests, which have “now led to more than a dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and theft,” to “images of woke white protesters” kneeling and “apologizing to the mob for sins they did not commit,” the nation faces a clash of law and order versus “revolutionary racial radicalism.” Sadly, elite corporations and institutions have kowtowed to this “leftist campus antagonism,” now “powerful and tangible.” For these new radicals, “you will kneel, or you will pay.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board