From the Left: PayPal’s Indy-Media Wipeout
“The online payment platform PayPal without explanation suspended the accounts of a series of individual journalists and media outlets” for a half-year “review,” claiming vague violations of its user agreement, fumes TK News’ Matt Taibbi. One victim who actually spoke to a PayPal human learned the company plans to keep any payments it has now frozen if it decides there was a violation. The outlets are indeed edgy, but this “ups the ante again on the content moderation movement,” since “going after cash is a big jump from simply deleting speech, with a much bigger chilling effect.” That’s “especially true” for “the alternative media world, where money has long been notoriously tight.” If the issue is PayPal’s ban on providing “false, inaccurate or misleading information,” it’s an ominous echo of Team Biden’s “dystopian ‘Disinformation Governance Board.’ ”
Conservative: No Valid Defense for Roe
“It’s near-consensus among legal scholars, even those who believe abortion should be legal, that Roe was a shoddy decision, not grounded in the Constitution,” blasts The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney. “The Constitution quite obviously does not protect abortion as a fundamental right. Roe relied on a ‘right of privacy’ ‘emanating’ from a ‘penumbra’ cast by actually enumerated rights. It was clearly motivated reasoning.” If “Roe falls,” then “abortion defenders need to convince politicians to vote in order to strip unborn babies of any legal protections.” This is why abortion advocates are “relying on threats to protect Roe,” including threats of violence and declaring the Supreme Court illegitimate: When you have neither facts nor the Constitution on your side, you “threaten the judges.”
From the right: The Left’s ‘Insurrectionist’
“The left’s freakout” over the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade underscores its “unbalanced” state, snark Issues’ & Insights’ editors. Notable is a tweet from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass) claiming a “stolen, illegitimate, and far-right Supreme Court majority appears set to destroy the right to abortion.” Since the conservative majority was “the result of three appointments by duly elected President Donald Trump” and approved by the Senate, Markey can only mean Trump’s presidency was “stolen and illegitimate.” Dems would call that “insurrectionist talk” and perhaps impeach him — if Markey were a conservative. That won’t happen, of course, because he’s a liberal, “and liberals can say anything they want.”
SCOTUS watch: Why the Leak Will Do Damage
The leak of that draft Supreme Court ruling is “a shattering event” on “three levels,” writes Common Sense’s Bari Weiss: “substantively, politically and institutionally.” That last one is crucial: “How did we go from [an] ethos” where such a leak was unthinkable “to a world in which . . . one or more clerks are undermining the institution itself?” This captures “the most important story of our moment: the story of how American institutions became a casualty in the culture war.” “Uncontrollable or unslakable partisan fury” may “have overtaken everything” including “basic human things” such as “trust, devotion, privacy, integrity.” So the leak is “nothing more than the most recent salvo in our race to the bottom.”
Libertarian: How To End the School Wars
“Families should be able to put energy into educating kids rather than fighting over what is taught,” declares Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. John Stuart Mill argued the same in the 19th-century fight about what and how the state should teach. “Over a century and a half after” the British philosopher “advised us to keep government out of it and let parents choose their own schools, it’s time we listened.” Curriculum wars “are inevitable so long as we force people of different values and opinions to send their children to the same institutions.” Selecting “where and how” kids are taught “is the best way to choose what is taught without battling others who want something different.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board