Prof: ‘Erase and Replace’ vs. Anti-Woke Blacks
“When woke Critical Social Justice proponents encounter a certain kind of black person who does not align with their preferred victim narrative,” Eric Smith notes at Medium, they opt for “erase and replace.” Notably, “Angel Eduardo discussed his ostracism from his black and Dominican peers as a teen and argued that mandating people of color to all have the same values, tastes and beliefs dismisses their individuality and self-regard,” so he now rejects all racial labels. In response, The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted, “When you yourself say you are not Black, why are you upset that Black people respect your choice and don’t consider you Black either?” This, notes Smith, “erased the fact that Eduardo’s rejection for being too ‘white’ caused his rejection of racial labels” as she “replaced him with a contrived character too absurd to take seriously.” That this strategy “actually works is downright scary.”
Conservative: Hidden Details in $3T Spending
Democrats are “hiding” the details of their $3.5 trillion spending package “to avoid public scrutiny,” warns Trump economic adviser Lawrence Kudlow at The New York Sun. “Some say that it’s going to be a 10,000 page bill” and “no one is going to know what’s in it.” The package will feature “a tax assault on business and investment that will cripple the economy, generate higher inflation, and be paid for mainly by the blue-collar middle-class workforce.” But it’ll also include “hidden” measures like “illegal immigration amnesty, unionization via the so-called Pro Act” and “Lord knows what else” — assuming “the Good Lord can find time to read a 10,000 page bill.” If and when the details get out, “the vast majority of Americans are going to hate this.”
Leftist: ACLU vs. ‘Individual Choice’
The American Civil Liberties Union “surprised even many of its harshest critics this week when it strongly defended” state mandates to fight COVID, Glenn Greenwald writes at Substack. Besides the “shock” of it siding against “individual choice” is that the group has warned of such dangers before: In a 2008 report, it aimed “to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary” just such actions by the state. The ACLU claims that “far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further” them. Yikes. “Hearing the ACLU invoke the standard rationale of authoritarians — we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions, but these rights are not absolute — is nothing short of jarring.”
Climate-change beat: Growth’s Key ‘Health Threat’
White House adviser Gina McCarthy justified President Biden’s new Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, claiming climate is “a health threat,” Tim Black reports at Spiked. No surprise: Concern for public health is now “the catch-all justification for policymakers.” Yet there’s something “especially grotesque about framing climate change as a health emergency” considering that “almost all the advances in medicine, diet and general welfare that we enjoy today rest on economic, material development.” And it is precisely this growth that “climate alarmists in the White House” and elsewhere seek to curtail. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits that “a far greater threat to health is a lack of economic development.” In short, stymied growth means “people’s health suffers.”
Libertarian: Teachers Union’s Mask Meddling
When the CDC relaxed its mask guidance last May, “the leaders of the nation’s top teacher’s union were furious,” recalls Reason’s Robby Soave. The National Education Association “swiftly intervened to ensure that the CDC would still advise masking in schools, regardless of vaccination status.” Its meddling is unsurprising: Teachers unions “mounted a similar effort to persuade the Biden White House to slow down on school reopening.” Yes, the FDA “should move much faster to approve vaccines for young kids,” but there’s no reason we should be making school harder for them in the meantime. “Why are teachers unions behaving otherwise?”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board