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From the left: Bad Weather for Free Speech
“A sequel misinformation panic” to the COVID-era one is “upon us,” snarks Racket’s Matt Taibbi. Legacy media fumed at “falsehoods” about FEMA running out of disaster-relief cash as “‘another popular refrain that has gained traction on the right,’” yet: “It came from Biden’s own White House,” namely Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas. “We learned with Covid” that “officials issuing confusing or incorrect or shifting dictates” caused “enormous distrust,” prompting efforts to clamp down on the information landscape. Now “they’re trying to use hurricanes to shut down critics of the White House again.” “Officials will keep drumming up panics, and keep asking for the same review power” over speech and thought. Eventually, “they’ll get it.”
Iconoclast: Canada Quashes Trans-Lesson Critics
“There is no criticism of [gender] ideology that is viewed as acceptable” in Canada, fumes Meghan Murphy at Spiked. In 2017, former school trustee Barry Neufeld called for “a new gender-identity curriculum for kids,” SOGI 123, “to be reviewed by engaging parents and teachers in conversation” before “full implementation.” Indeed, notes Murphy: “Canadians were in the dark about this new ideology that had been adopted across the board” — yet “those who did speak up were silenced.” Neufeld faced “backlash,” including complaints filed to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and calls for his resignation. People should be free to criticize “an ideology that demands we all participate in a fantasy that puts women and kids in danger. Yet in Canada, the actual danger is protected at all costs and those who point to it are persecuted.”
Education beat: School Choice a Big Winner
Critics argue that school-choice programs “destroy public-school funding and worsen educational outcomes,” but their “claims don’t hold up,” concludes Martin F. Lueken at The Wall Street Journal. “Decades of data show that these programs generate substantial fiscal benefits for taxpayers” — as much as $7,800 per student in 26 states through 2022. “School-choice programs also create modest but positive learning, attendance and behavioral outcomes,” and even traditional public schools “benefit from reduced class sizes.” And that’s just the “beginning” of these programs’ benefits: “When we expand education options, we can expect crime rates to decrease and youth mental-health outcomes to improve.” We need to “embrace efforts to expand” these options, as both “fiscally responsible and educationally sound policy for the future.”
Conservative: The Migrant ‘Vetting’ Farce
“While Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other officials insist that these immigrants are being vetted, they rarely specify what it means and how it works,” frets Rodney Scott at the Washington Examiner. When illegal border-crossers are unable to provide ID, “authorities are left with accepting their attested identity at face value.” There’s no global database enabling officials “to meaningfully vet their criminal histories or affiliations.” And even “most flagged people are eventually released if officials cannot fully establish that the person poses an immediate and identifiable threat.” Even, countries willing to assist “are not able to help us vet immigrants in volume.” Fact is, “we don’t know who many of the millions of recent illegal immigrants are, where they are, or even why they are here.”
Foreign Desk: UN’s History of Abetting Terror
Since 2006, The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) “has allowed Hezbollah to construct tunnels and weapons depots under its nose,” notes Commentary’s Seth Mandel, but UNIFIL’s wrong-doing “begins back in 2000,” after “Israeli forces pulled out of South Lebanon” and “Hezbollah ambushed three soldiers on the Israeli side of the border and took them captive,” and the UN did nothing with a videotape “filled with evidence of the” kidnapping. ” Israel “pleaded with the UN to turn over the recording,” yet “the UN lied repeatedly by claiming there was no tape” though “scenes from the tape leaked” — but “by then, the soldiers were dead.” And this sorry tale is “also the story of UNRWA, the Gaza-based UN agency that has become an adjunct of Hamas.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board