Ex-Times reporter: Cool to Kenosha Victims’ Pain
Until recently, liberals argued that “burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy,” allowing for “the expression of righteous rage,” and anyway, “the businesses all had insurance” — yet, in “a note on Kenosha in light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial,” Nellie Bowles writes at Common Sense that such thinking was never true. As a New York Times reporter last year, “I went to Kenosha” and found the part that was “burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots.” Yet the Times declined to run the story, at least until after the 2020 election. “Covering the suffering” was not a priority. “The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore.”
Russian activist: Fight To Save Democracy!
The terms “cancel culture” and “woke” have become “overused and abused, part of a struggle to define one’s political opponents in the harshest possible way, to dismiss ideas as not only wrong or harmful, but intolerable,” laments Garry Kasparov for The Wall Street Journal. “I am content to avoid rhetorical fashion and use older phrases. Call it the mob mentality, groupthink, or punitive neo-Puritan orthodoxy. It is the abuse of power” that silences debate and paralyzes “the spread of any ideas that challenge the prevailing ideological dogma,” whether by the left or the right. Yet such intolerance erodes the very “pillars of American democracy,” which is why “we must fight to preserve the free flow of ideas, of debate and an open society, however uncomfortable it makes us.”
Bank expert: Beware Biden’s Comptroller Pick
Team Biden’s nomination of Saule Omarova to head the Comptroller’s Office has former banking-firm CEO John A. Allison at Cato positively “fearful.” “I am not a Republican” and not concerned with “politics or personalities,” but “what worries me is a major shift away from a free society.” Omarova “favors a central government that allocates financial resources,” with “no room for private banks, large or small.” Her beef? “Bankers have largely failed to channel sufficient credit” to communities. Yet Omarova misses the fact “that simply ‘supplying more credit’ will not solve most economic problems.” Besides, if “Congress wants to transfer more money to people for any reason, it should do so transparently” — it shouldn’t “use the banking system to hide the failure of its social programs.”
Conservative: The Culture Clash Is Real
“There’s nothing ‘phony’ about the culture war,” declares Peter Wood at Spectator World, despite what former President Barack Obama and “a surprising fraction of conservatives” say. Gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe because voters “created a referendum on critical race theory, the 1619 Project, transgenderism and the whole apparatus by which progressive political ideology is being implemented in Virginia schools.” Their “rebellion” reflected “their genuine and deeply felt concerns” with the left’s “constant message” that “America is a rotten place, founded on hollow principles.” Ultimately, “our dissatisfactions are all a matter of profound mistrust with a governing class that dislikes us and does all it can to foment division. And that’s why the culture wars are real.”
Campus watch: Fire ‘War Criminal’ Prof, Oberlin
“Freedom and democracy campaigner Natan Sharansky” is joining the fight to get Oberlin College to fire religion prof Mohammad Mahallati because of his alleged role in Iranian “crimes against humanity” as Tehran’s UN envoy in 1988, reports The Jerusalem Post’s Benjamin Weinthal. Per Amnesty International, Mahallati knew the regime was massacring thousands of political prisoners but hid the facts. Today, “thousands of Iranians live in anguish, mourning the loss of their family members, who were mercilessly buried in mass graves, unable to grieve at their gravesites,” he wrote. Many asked the college’s president to investigate Mahallati, who denies involvement in the massacre — but she hasn’t responded. And though the school claims an internal probe exonerated him, it won’t release details.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board