- “Will the end of zero Covid be the real legacy of the World Cup?” – “The spectacle of humans being human, free of restrictions, with no more serious purpose than having a great time, could be far more consequential than anything that happens on the pitch,” says Philip Patrick in the Spectator
- “Chris Whitty warned pre-lockdown 820k people could die from Covid” – Two months before lockdown, Chris Whitty told Matt Hancock that there was a 50-50 chance that the virus would escape China and cause mass deaths in Britain, the Daily Mail reports, highlighting its serialisation of Hancock’s pandemic diaries
- “Even now, nobody wants to confront the awful truth about Britain’s pandemic lockdowns” – As the Chinese people protest against zero Covid, Douglas Murray calls for a reckoning with Britain’s own lockdown experiences in the Telegraph
- “When will Covid fraud catch up with Rishi Sunak?” – “For all his supposed competence as a technocratic administrator, in reality, Sunak presided over fraud on an unprecedented scale” says Matthew Lynn in the Spectator. “It may be just a matter of time before this massive scandal catches up with him”
- “Covid hero-worship has left Britain at the mercy of trade union barons” – “What rankles most are the cynical attempts to justify unreasonable double-digit pay rises for their members on the basis that many of them worked through the pandemic,” says the Telegraph’s Ben Marlow
- “The brass neck of the Western lockdown zealots” – “Justin Trudeau’s condemnations of the CCP’s Covid authoritarianism are a sick joke,” writes Spiked’s Fraser Myers
- “Trudeau Liberals discussed sending in army to quash Freedom Convoy” – It never got past the planning stage, but many question why the idea of sending the Canadian military to quash the Freedom Convoy was discussed at all, the Post Millennial reports
- “Victoria and China: a tragic tale of two tyrannies” – “The contrast could not be greater,” writes Bill Muehlenberg in Spectator Australia. “Freedom is willingly being thrown away in Victoria and the West while being passionately fought for in Communist China”
- “China signals ease in Covid policy after mass protests” – China has signalled a shift in its Covid stance, the BBC reports, as districts in Shanghai and Guangzhou where daily case numbers have been rising, are released from lockdown measures
- “The real reason behind China’s ‘zero Covid’ policy” – China’s brutal ‘zero-Covid’ approach allows Western governments to claim the ‘moderate’ label simply by virtue of not being so cartoonishly ‘evil’ as China, writes Kit Knightly in Off-Guardian
- “Survival of SARS-CoV-2 on food surfaces” – A Food Standards Agency study investigating how long SARS-CoV-2 survives on food and packaging
- “How to save your skin, according to Bankman-Fried and Fauci” – An entertaining parody of Anthony Fauci and Sam Bankman-Fried and their responses under questioning for bad actions that no one denies except them, penned by Jeffrey A. Tucker of the Brownstone Institute
- The Government is killing its own academic freedom bill” – Julius Grower, Professor of Law at the University of Oxford, warns readers of the Telegraph that the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is in danger of being watered down
- “Oxford students are going back to the dark ages” – In UnHerd, Louise Perry tells of the latest student to be burnt at the stake for wrong think
- “U.K. regulator appoints former Google exec as ‘Online Safety’ head after online censorship bill is reintroduced” – Gill Whitehead, formally a member of Google’s U.K. management group, has been appointed Group Director of Online Safety at Ofcom, Reclaim the Net reports
- “Regulator announces statutory inquiry into Mermaids” – The Charity Commission announces a statutory inquiry into transgender charity Mermaids, after identifying concerns about its governance and management
- “Diversity actually” – Writing for Spiked, Laurie Wastell mourns the passing of an era in which a Christmas romcom “could be judged on whether it was heart-warming and funny – not for the diversity of its cast”
- “The palace has treated Lady Hussey cruelly” – “We all know Charles and William want to modernise the Firm,” writes Brendan O’Neil of the Palace race row in the Spectator, “but if they do so by embracing such modern cruelties as cancel culture, they’ll regret it”
- “In defence of Lady Susan Hussey” – Lady Susan Hussey “has never knowingly offended anyone in her life,” writes her friend, Petronella Wyatt, in the Spectator. “She possesses the milk of human kindness by the quart”
- “The sacking of Lady Susan Hussey is ritual humiliation masquerading as social justice” – By casting Ngozi Fulani as a victim, “many in the media and on the Left are revealing their own ingrained prejudices”, says Sebastian Milbank in the Telegraph
- “Lady Susan Hussey doesn’t deserve this vitriol” – “Two worlds collided at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday night: a Lady in Waiting encountered a Lady in Wokeing,” writes Allison Pearson in the Telegraph
- “America’s woke establishment has been triggered by Musk’s Twitter campaign for free speech” – Steve Hilton says the reason the blue tick liberals are freaking out over Musk‘s plans for Twitter is because they want to control America’s public conversation
- “It’s not the place of the university to restrict speech more than the law already does” – Professor Arif Ahmed joins Patrick Christys on GB News to discuss the calls from peers and university leaders to water down the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill
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