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What did Fauci fund in Wuhan and other commentary
By Post Editorial Board May 11, 2021 | 6:15pm | Updated

Pandemic journal: What Did Fauci Fund in Wuhan?

“We still don’t know the origins of COVID-19,” notes Stephen L. Miller at Spectator USA, but “connections emerging” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology “involve the United States government, the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Anthony Fauci — and he should have to explain them before Congress.” The evidence of “recklessly outsourcing research” on novel coronaviruses is so far circumstantial because the Chinese Communists block “any meaningful investigation,” but Americans “have a right to know what role, if any, our own government played in this pandemic.” Journalists should ask tough questions instead of worrying about ruining “the mainstream storyline that Fauci is a great hero.”

Libertarian: Biden’s Federalizing Failure

Census numbers show the “model of states such as California, New York and Illinois led to demographic and economic decline — yet the Biden White House seems determined to federalize their failures,” sighs Kristin Tate at The Hill. Red states will gain congressional seats at the expense of blue after millions moved in response to “the highest tax rates in the nation and stringent business regulation, combined with significant increases in crime.” Americans “won’t pack a U-Haul for other nations” if President Biden’s “out-of-control spending plans, new taxes and importation of destructive criminal-justice policies” pass — we’ll simply “suffer the consequences.”

From the right: Liberals Can’t Quit Trump

“Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson has an answer for all those hoping to heal and move on from the Trump years: Nothing doing,” quips The Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn. Jackson ordered the Justice Department to release an internal 2019 memo to then-Attorney General Bill Barr about whether to prosecute President Donald Trump. Her “tirade” reflects “the great liberal frustration” that “there was no ‘there’ there” in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report: If she can’t get Trump, the judge hopes “she can at least tarnish” his AG. Yet Barr wasn’t hiding anything; he released nearly all of Mueller’s report. Allowing the judge access to internal communications would “jeopardize” any AG’s ability “to get candid advice from his staff.”
(The McGurn piece is here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/robert-muellers-revenge-11620684758 )

Gadfly: ‘Systemic Racism’ Is a Useless Concept

“If the mantra is” that solving black America’s problems requires us to “‘get rid of systemic racism,’ we’re in trouble,” John McWhorter warns at his It Bears Mentioning site, since the idea “is based on a third-grader’s understanding of how a society works.” Plus, it “does not help black people and often hurts us.” Take the claim that systemic racism explains why “black kids tend to underperform scholastically compared to white kids”: In fact, the disparity seems caused by “something richly documented nationwide — a sense among black teens that school is ‘white’ and that real black kids don’t hit the books.” While “racism pure and simple did create this sense of remove, in the 1960s,” the hard fact is that racism was “eons ago.” And “of all of our strategies, ‘get rid of the racism’ is the goofiest, most unreasoning and ultimately most harmful.”

Culture critic: Make Buildings Great Again

“Something is terribly wrong with architecture,” laments Current Affairs’ Nathan J. Robinson. “Nearly everything being built is boring, joyless and/or ugly,” and “an arbitrary and ugly assortment of random stark rectangles” wins the field’s highest honor each year. Contemporary buildings “do not amaze, enchant, or make the jaw drop. They lack the kind of intricacy that means you can stare at them endlessly and keep finding new things. They feel dead.” Tourists carry “themselves across the world” to see “Hindu temples, Japanese gardens, the French Quarter, Venice and Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona,” not “cold and off-putting” modern sites, which are “badly designed, unless the purpose is to repel people,” in which case they’re “strangely sociopathic.” But the “minimalist consensus” reigns because people fear being “called backward if they admit they like mosaics and gargoyles and friezes and stained glass and other cool stuff.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

https://nypost.com/2021/05/11/what-did-fauci-fund-in-wuhan-and-other-ocmmentary/