#Politicized pharmaceuticals and other commentary

Iconoclast: Politicized Pharmaceuticals

“Can a drug be ‘right-wing’? ” asks Matt Taibbi at his TK News. Ivermectin, which has shown promise treating severe COVID cases, “has suffered the same fate as” many “topics since Donald Trump” announced his presidential run, inhabiting “separate factual universes for left and right audiences,” with news “clearly in the public interest” censored. “Should people on their deathbeds be allowed to try anything to save themselves?” That’s a “no-brainer,” but hospitals have gone “to extraordinary lengths to refuse treatment even with dying patients who’d exhausted all other options.” It’s “become a test case” for “how much input patients should have in their own treatment” and “hostage to a larger global fight between populists and anti-populists.” The former think “officials are prone to lying and can’t be trusted,” while the latter associate “unapproved cures with political theories of stolen elections.” A polarized populace can no longer agree on anything, “even if their lives depend on it.”

Conservative: Stop Obsession With Skin Color

At The Washington Times, Everett Piper begs Americans to “please stop talking about ‘white’ people and ‘black’ people.” Millions of Americans “just don’t care what color you are,” and the “racist nonsense” is tearing the country apart. Even in churches, “the transparent enablement of us-against-them is rampant,” inspired by the sermons of pastors whose agenda it is to “balkanize us into competing groups with irreconcilable demands.” The pulpits “preaching this nonsense are pumping spiritual carcinogens into a cultural cancer that grows more malignant with each passing day, inevitably resulting in more exclusion rather than inclusion, more segregation rather than integration.” We are and must remain “one nation under God, indivisible.”

Historian: The Cruelty of Progressivism

“The new progressivism,” Victor Davis Hanson thunders at American Greatness, “is a cruel creed” that “envisions humanity as a marbleized abstraction, not incarnate humans. . . . And the carnage it wreaks on the masses is always acceptable damage.” So de facto open borders telegraph the left’s “morally superior commitment,” no matter “the ensuing collateral damage,” such as “cartel predation on the vulnerable, the overtaxing of social-welfare services at the expense of American poor, greater rates of crime and gang violence,” etc. Similarly, “if it is a choice between reducing the some 700 shooting deaths of blacks in Chicago by increasing the police presence to protect inner-city residents, and thereby losing the progressive narrative of an epidemic of out-of-control racist rogue cops, then inner-city violence is a tolerable price.”

Urban beat: Backlash by the Bay

“Citizens’ cries” for officials to clean up Dodge Place — a residential San Francisco street that has become a drug-ravaged dystopia — “have gone virtually unanswered,” laments Erica Sandberg at City Journal. The area is now “a particularly intense concentration” of misery. Yet there’s “only so much law enforcement can do”; DA Chesa Boudin “resists prosecuting” dealers arrested by cops. Other officials “justify their inaction by citing rhetoric that the war on drugs does little more than incarcerate marginalized people.” But a “backlash” from voters is “strengthening”: Boudin faces a recall election. A recent poll found 76 percent of citizens want more cops in high-crime areas. “Officials who want to keep their seats or run for higher office will face the wrath of voters who are no longer complacent.”

Culture critic: Victoria’s Secret’s Feminist Ruse

Victoria’s Secret is rebranding itself — but, warns Kristina Murkett at Spectator USA, “don’t be fooled: This has little to do with female empowerment.” The lingerie firm recently announced it would replace its sexy catwalkers with “accomplished women who share a common passion to drive positive change,” as a statement put it, including “US soccer player Megan Rapinoe, Chinese-American freestyle skier Eileen Gu, plus-size model Paloma Elsesser,” as well as a trans woman. Get real, Murkett says: “This is a marketing tactic by a flagging brand to regain some semblance of cultural relevance (and revenue). . . . Its products are overpriced and its sizes are limited, misleading and inconsistent.” Hence, this sad-sack marketing Hail Mary.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board