From the left: Dems vs. Civil Liberties
“Civil liberties have officially gone out of style” with Democrats, fumes Racket News’ Matt Taibbi after testifying at last week’s Weaponization of Government hearing. The top Dem called the two liberal journalist witnesses “a ‘direct threat,’ ” while “Stanford-educated former prosecutor” Rep. Dan Goldman “confused accusation with proof,” insisting that “only someone who signed his version of a loyalty oath — a question about whether or not we ‘agreed’ with Robert Mueller’s two indictments of Russian defendants — can ‘belong’ in the public conversation.” Since at least 2016, managerial elites have answered growing “anger in the population” by trying “to mechanically deamplify the discontent” via the government-driven censorship exposed in the Twitter Files. But: “Making a furious public less visible doesn’t make it go away.” And now Democrats are “betting everything on the blinders they refuse to take off, a plan everyone but them can see won’t end well.”
Culture critic: Sanitizing Books Is ‘Dystopian’
“Sanitizing books” via posthumous woke rewrites is “worse” than banning them, warns Elizabeth Grace Matthew at The Hill. People know a book’s been banned; it becomes “forbidden fruit” while “the sanitization process” leaves you thinking you’ve read a work, when you’ve only read “an imposter.” That “insidious lie” in effect “erases a given work from history,” which is “far more sinister than simply hiding that work from view. What is hidden will eventually be found. What is erased is lost forever.” “It takes a flimsy intellect hell-bent on the creation of a monistic utopia” to think “we can retain the essence of a written work while altering its language.” It’s not “just stupidly illiberal; it is creepily dystopian.”
Eye on NY: Hospitals Cry ‘Wolf’
“NYC-area hospitals and nursing homes” just sent “a contradictory message about the financial condition of the state’s health-care industry,” grouses the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. The fat wage hike in a “recently amended labor contract” came days after “hospitals and nursing homes told state lawmakers that they faced a “dire fiscal crisis” and pleaded for” more state money. The labor contract “wasn’t due to expire for another 18 months,” but they framed the pay hike as a “response to an industry-wide shortage of workers.” Huh? Federal data show NYC hospitals had more than “fully bounced back from pandemic-related losses by early 2022,” while nursing-home jobs are down just 5% in the city.
Libertarian: End the Mandate Madness
“New Yorkers can be forgiven for losing track of just when they should and should not wear” face masks, quips Reason’s Matt Welch: “The masking requirement in New York City health care facilities was lifted only last month. Public transportation mandates lasted until a half-year ago,” alongside many other rules. But now Mayor Adams wants no masks in stores (to fight retail crime). Yet “masking off so soon after masking on threatens to extend, not end, the dysfunction that helped elect Adams.” “Enforcement whiplash” can “degrade respect and contribute to uncertainty.” Until someone “takes a machete to the thicket of mandates” that make following “the law an exercise in randomness and knowing the right people, Gotham will likely continue its greasy skid.”
Neocon: Desperate Mask-Facts Denial
The gold-standard Cochrane “massive review of studies on the efficacy of masks in taming the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses” found zero evidence that mask mandates do any good. Now experts are explaining it away, snarks Commentary’s Abe Greenwald, by insisting the problem is “the way they’re used! In other words, perhaps it comes down to the degree of compliance and proper face-covering among mask wearers.” But “if you have a tool against infection that is so onerous to the user that improper use and lack of compliance make it ineffective,” then “it’s the wrong tool.” Fine: “Maybe, in theory, masks work. But there’s a long, dark history of people trying to impose theoretical fixes on real populations. And it’s killed more people than Covid.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board