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What Happened: June 23, 2021

Tablet’s afternoon news digest: WHO says don’t vaccinate kids; the hero cheerleader; Patriot Act 2.0

by
The Scroll
June 23, 2021

The Big Story

While the United States continues lowering the age for vaccinations, the World Health Organization released guidance Tuesday recommending that children should not yet receive COVID-19 vaccines. The WHO provides three reasons for its policy: Children and adolescents “tend to have milder disease compared to adults” and are at considerably less risk from COVID-19; the limited number of doses should be allocated to needier groups first; and there’s a lack of information from vaccine trials on minors that only began a few months ago. The most telling line in the document from an organization that has generally championed aggressive vaccination programs is this: “More evidence is needed on the use of the different COVID-19 vaccines in children to be able to make general recommendations on vaccinating children against COVID-19.” Policy among developed countries with ample supply of COVID-19 vaccines has been divided on the wisdom of administering doses to minors. The U.S. Center for Disease Control recommended in late May that “everyone 12 years and older should get a COVID-19 vaccination,” while earlier this month Israel’s Ministry of Health also began vaccinating children over 12. Health officials in Israel acknowledged that some children given the vaccine developed myocarditis, a condition in which the heart becomes inflamed, but said such cases occurred only in one in 6,000 vaccine recipients in the 16-19 age group and that the illness was “mostly mild and brief.” In Britain, officials have not yet authorized the vaccine for minors and are expected to wait until July, when more data has been gathered, before issuing any recommendations.
Read about it here:
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/covid-19-vaccines/advice 

In today’s Back Pages: The War on Terror Comes Home

The Rest

New York City’s next mayor may well end up being Eric Adams, the Black, vegan, ex-Republican, ex-cop running as an anti-woke law-and-order liberal who’s currently enjoying a healthy lead as ballots from yesterday’s primary vote are counted. The city’s new ranked-choice voting system means the earliest we’ll know anything for sure is next week, but New York could well end up with Adams, the ex-cop, running against “a pretend cop in Republican Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the red-beret-wearing Guardian Angels,” as Harry Siegel (my brother) writes in The Daily Beast about the possible showdown between Adams and the former vigilante group leader turned talk radio host and perennial gadfly. 
Read it here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/eric-adams-is-ahead-after-nyc-election-but-nothings-done-yet

Voting on the far-reaching elections bill that forms a central plank of the Democrat’s legislative agenda deadlocked at 50-50 yesterday before Senate Republicans managed to filibuster and block debate on the For the People Act. In a clear sign of the bill’s importance for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris spent yesterday afternoon on Capitol Hill trying to rally votes for the bill.

Cheerleader and free speech hero Brandi Levy has won a great moral and legal victory for adolescents everywhere by getting the Supreme Court to rule that the U.S. constitution protects a high school student’s right to privately curse their school. As a 14-year-old freshman, Levy was suspended from cheerleading for complaining about not making the varsity squad in an expletive-laced social media post written off school grounds, a move that the high court now says violated her First Amendment rights. 

The pro-democracy Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily is closing this week following a long campaign against the tabloid by Chinese authorities that culminated last week in the freezing of the paper’s assets and the arrest of five of its executives.

Welcome to a new semi-regular interactive game called Guess that obviously non-antisemitic, totally innocent thing someone just happens to have in common with David Duke! Can you guess what perfectly innocent and inoffensive word both the Twitter user here and David Duke like to use, but which should not be cause for any deeper reflection, obviously? 
Send your guesses to: [email protected]
(The answer plus best reader guesses in tomorrow’s edition of The Scroll).


Cheerleader and free speech hero Brandi Levy has won a great moral and legal victory for adolescents everywhere by getting the Supreme Court to rule that the U.S. constitution protects a high school student’s right to privately curse their school. As a 14-year-old freshman, Levy was suspended from cheerleading for complaining about not making the varsity squad in an expletive-laced social media post written off school grounds, a move that the high court now says violated her First Amendment rights. 

The pro-democracy Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily is closing this week following a long campaign against the tabloid by Chinese authorities that culminated last week in the freezing of the paper’s assets and the arrest of five of its executives.

The Biden-Putin Geneva summit last week looked so appealing, France and Germany now want in on the action. An article in Financial Times describes a private summit Wednesday where German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron called for “closer engagement with Russia.”
Read it here: https://www.ft.com/content/03528026-8fa1-4910-ab26-41cd26404439

Despite substantial, wide-reaching increases in consumer prices, U.S. officials, along with many pundits and economists, argue that inflation is not the cause. In testimony to Congress Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell insisted that it is “very, very unlikely,” that the United States is entering a period of crippling 1970s-level inflation and that the Fed would continue to keep interest rates low.

Countering an overall decline in Reform Judaism, a new Pew poll shows modest growth in the Reform movement spurred by Jews raised in other denominations joining the Reform ranks later in life. The Conservative movement, by contrast, has been losing members, with three people now leaving the denomination for every one who joins, according to the survey.
Read it here: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/22/denominational-switching-among-u-s-jews-reform-judaism-has-gained-conservative-judaism-has-lost/

Starting next year, the tech company Kickstarter, an early leader in crowdfunding for creative projects, plans to experiment with a four-day work week. The company’s CEO Aziz Hasan tells Axios that the move was motivated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Back Pages

Many thanks to the great Armin Rosen for stewarding The Scroll while I was out on paternity leave.
—Jacob Siegel

While the U.S. military is getting ready to leave Afghanistan in a few months, the War on Terror that started with the invasion there two decades ago, far from ending, is being reassembled at home.

The White House’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism,” released this month, is essentially a domestic version of the Patriot Act. The document calls for expanding both intelligence collection and sharing by government agencies, increasing social media monitoring, expanding the legal framework for prosecuting domestic extremism, and instituting new screening policies for government and law enforcement employees. There hasn’t been much fanfare, but it’s now the official policy of the president and the national security establishment to repurpose the counterterrorism machinery built to combat groups such as al-Qaeda as a weapon against racism and other dangerous ideologies supposedly threatening the political order in the United States. The strategy makes a cursory attempt to be apolitical, nodding at anarchists and anti-capitalist extremists as well as racist extremists and right-wing anti-government militias, but its focus clearly is directed at the right even if it provides a pretext for targeting left-wing groups should they prove to trouble those in power. Here’s the core of the plan:

Tackling the threat posed by domestic terrorism over the long term demands substantial efforts to confront the racism that feeds into aspects of that threat. We are, therefore, prioritizing efforts to ensure that every component of the government has a role to play in rooting out racism and advancing equity for underserved communities that have far too often been the targets of discrimination and violence. This approach must apply to our efforts to counter domestic terrorism by addressing underlying racism and bigotry.


So, it’s not enough to use the considerable powers of the half dozen already-existing domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute those racists who actually want to commit violent acts—no, it’s now the stated policy of the federal government to attack the root causes of such acts.

There’s a striking parallel here with George W. Bush’s post-9/11 promise to “drain the swamps” of radicalism in the Middle East. The idea back then was that rather than allowing radicalism to fester in corrupt and repressive regimes that would inevitably foster the kid of terrorist groups that would attack the United States, this country could just invade and forge a new political culture in the Arab world that would allow democracy to flourish and prevent extremism from taking root in the first place. Look at how that turned out. Military and spy agencies are not very good at social engineering. And yet it never stops them from trying again and again because where there’s a federal budget, there’s always a way.

Read it here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/National-Strategy-for-Countering-Domestic-Terrorism.pdf

Tablet’s afternoon newsletter edited by Jacob Siegel and Park MacDougald.