Mark Steyn: For almost two years we have lived in Covid-stan

What a week.

The French President declares the Irish Backstop the only thing preventing the powder keg going up in Europe, and belittles the British Prime Minister as a vulgarian too lowbrow to discuss these things with. I’m reminded of Liza Minnelli’s late husband David Gest, who claimed in the divorce that she’d beaten him up. Liza is a 5’4” woman a decade his senior with two hip replacements: Why couldn’t he just run for his life? Or, in fact, stroll for his life? Now, the big blonde bruiser of Number Ten with his expensively roughed up hair is being beaten up by some exquisite petite globalist metrosexual who roughed him up so badly the expensively roughed up hair got flattened into something as smooth and coiffured as a middle-aged telly presenter’s hairpiece.

Eric Zemmour tosses his hat into the French presidential race, and is assailed as a far-right racist for pointing out things that are obvious to anyone who spends twenty minutes walking about certain rapidly transforming parts of France. The outgoing German Chancellor has divided her citizenry into two classes: if you belong to Class A, feel free to enjoy the festive season at full throttle; if you belong to Class B – the unvaccinated – you cannot go to leisure or entertainment events or to Christmas markets; you cannot shop at non-essential shops, but only in supermarkets and chemists; and you can only socialise with those living in your household plus two additional persons. So your Boxing Day sherry party is going to be super-exclusive this year. Yes, yes, I know, it’s Germany, so it’s probably a St Stephen’s Day schnapps party. But, if you’re unjabbed, no parties for you – not even a party of the unjabbed. You’d have more fun at the local leper colony.

For almost two years we have lived in Covidstan – a world in which quote-unquote “public health” trumps the most fundamental liberties: freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of worship... They’re not reported on most media outlets, but there are protests against this new regime in France and Australia, the Netherlands and Austria.

On the other hand, there are tens of millions of people who are apparently happy to live under the Covid commissars forever. The strange and psychologically unhealthy fetishization of NHS worship – all that clap-for-carers stuff, so unbecoming to a supposedly free people – and even as the NHS was abandoning their duty of care, as we’ve heard this week, to thousands of sufferers from cancer and other diseases.

Is there something bigger going on, both in our relationship with the state and our subordination to the state in matters of life and death