From the left: Move Over, ACLU
“After years of planning, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, announced a major expansion Monday, moving ‘beyond college campuses to protect free speech — for all Americans,’” cheers TK News’ Matt Taibbi. “The group has already raised over $28 million toward a $75 million ‘litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.’” As such, “FIRE will be doing a lot of stepping into a role semi-vacated by the American Civil Liberties Union.” As FIRE spokesman Nico Perrino tells Taibbi, “For the ACLU, free speech is one of 12 or 15 different values,” but “freedom of expression should be core to every political belief. Our ability to express our political beliefs, whole stop, is the thing that makes debate and discussion about all these other issues possible.”
Culture critic: Wokeness Is ‘Managerial’ Power
If “The Managerial Revolution” author James Burnham “were alive today,” Malcolm Kyeyune argues at City Journal, “he might see wokeness as . . . a systematized, managerial ideology” that “asserts a wide variety of rights that supersede ownership and insists upon the creation of a permanent caste of managers to monitor the implementation of these rights.” “Why has America become more woke than its European counterparts?” Blame “the material insecurity of the American managerial classes” which have “grown too large to be absorbed by society in ways commensurate with their lofty economic expectations.” Hence their embrace of “a comprehensive, flexible, and ruthless ideology that can justify almost any act of institutional subversion and overreach.” “One needn’t be a revolutionary to ask” of this: “How long can it really last?”
Comedian: Progressives’ War on Humor
No one should be suspended from their jobs for retweeting “a banal throwaway joke,” fumes comedian Cam Harless at The Spectator. But just that happened to “Washington Post blue-check” Dave Weigel for sharing Harless’ crack: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” Harless notes, “it’s bizarre to see someone else apologize for a tweet that you wrote,” yet Weigel got bashed by fellow WaPo reporter Felicia Sonmez. “This sort of blow-up only happens because culture is dying.” The woke are “deadly serious about all things. So much so that a man can face professional repercussions and even potentially lose his job from laughing at another man’s joke.”
Conservative: DeSantis Muddied Corporate Debate
“Corporate welfare, not woke tweets, is the problem with taxpayer-funded stadiums,” declares Tom Joyce at the Washington Examiner. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “vetoed a proposal” to “give the Tampa Bay Rays $35 million in funding from the state” to help build a new spring-training camp. Yay! “Economists generally agree that taxpayer-funded stadiums aren’t effective in generating economic growth for communities.” But DeSantis’ “framing could have been better; he didn’t need to bring the Rays’ virtue-signaling tweets about gun control into the debate.” The “real issue is that this organization wants to take millions of dollars from the working people of Florida — not tweets.”
From the right: Biden’s Shameful Belly-Aching
“Quit whining, Mr. President!” chides National Review’s Jim Geraghty after reports of President Biden’s growing frustration with his political predicament. “You asked for this job,” Joe. “You assured us” you could handle it. It’s one “you’ve been trying to get since 1987.” So “stop whining about how difficult” it is. Biden bristles at aides stifling his plain-speaking persona and keeping him out of the loop on the baby-formula crisis. “Mr. President, if you think you’re being undermined,” fire those staff. The prez tells reporters he’s not supposed to answer questions. “Is he a small child who’s not supposed to talk to strangers?” Why do Republicans say Biden’s not in charge of his own administration? Because “Biden keeps saying that.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
