From the right: Opinion Laundering in Gun Debate
Are the grieving students of Parkland, Fla., “being exploited for the purpose of advancing a media crusade?” asks National Review’s Kyle Smith. Or are they “inheritors of a grand tradition of Americans who use their personal experience to push for social change”? Either way, they have “achieved remarkable levels of fame almost instantaneously.” Yet “they aren’t being given so much airtime by the media because they’re policy experts,” but because they’re “telegenic, sympathetic vehicles for a message media personalities wish they could get away with openly espousing themselves.” And it isn’t so much public policy they’re pushing as “public shaming” and “insult theater.” Fact is, “progressives don’t have a plan for stopping mass shootings,” so instead they’re “venting at gun owners,” and “using the children of Parkland to do it.”
Foreign desk: Why Polish Jews Are Growing Uneasy
It’s been a month since Poland passed a statute making it illegal to apportion any blame for Nazi crimes to Poland — a measure that Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky says “smacks of authoritarian attempts to weaponize history.” And with the nationalist Law and Justice party in power, Poland may be “powerless . . . to do anything about the demons it’s woken.” Last week, Poland’s Jewish organizations issued a statement declaring that “Jews do not feel safe in Poland.” No, there hasn’t been anti-Jewish violence — but anti-Semitic statements have been heard on state TV. And “it’s hard to go back on something that increases one’s popularity,” as the new law has done. Fact is, “Poland’s current leadership is a hostage to the resentments it has stirred as it tried to raise Poles’ sense of self-worth.”
Culture critic: Monica Lewinsky’s Lesson for #MeToo
Two decades after her relationship with President Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky has become “a voice of reason and nuance,” suggests Daniella Greenbaum at Commentary. In a new article in Vanity Fair, she acknowledges that while her affair with the president “was not sexual assault,” it was “a gross abuse of power.” She calls his actions reprehensible and inappropriate, but still accepts “responsibility for her actions.” In this, says Greenbaum, Lewinsky has “thread the needle of nuance in a way that has eluded many” in the wake of #MeToo: “She enters into a difficult, morally gray conversation about what consent means in the environment in which she found herself, without taking that moral grayness and warping it into a tale of assault.”
Criminologist: Exposing School-Shooting Myths
Some policies may help decrease gun violence in general, but it’s unlikely that any of them can actually prevent mass school shootings. That’s the finding of a study by Northeastern Criminology Professor James Alan Fox and doctoral student Emma Fridel, as reported by Allie Nicodemo and Lia Petronia at the university’s Web site. In fact, they found that “schools are safer than they were in the ’90s, and school shootings are not more common than they used to be.” Contrary to figures being bandied about, there have been 16 multiple-victim shootings since 1996, only half of which involve four or more victims. In fact, they found, “mass school shootings are incredibly rare events,” adding: “There is not an epidemic” of such events.
Political scribe: Sorry, Conservatism Isn’t Dying
Liberal pundits have been bemoaning “the inexplicable extremism” killing the Republican Party ever since modern conservatism existed — but “don’t call the priest just yet,” contends David Harsanyi at The Federalist. For one thing, “the driving issues of American political conservatism” — tax cuts, deregulation, religious freedom, economic growth — “haven’t changed much since 1964, and they are unlikely to drastically change any time soon.” Democrats certainly can’t say the same; in fact, “if anyone has seen a radical ideological transformation over the past two decades, it hasn’t been among Republicans.” And note: “Every time someone tells us that conservatism is in its death throes,” it tends to make “a miraculous comeback.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann