Trumps Big Tech lawsuit has legs and other commentary – New York Post

Big Tech watch: Dons Censorship Suit Has Legs

Not so fast, counters Vivek Ramaswamy in The Wall Street Journal to the prestige press predictable dismissals offormer President Donald Trumps lawsuit against Big Tech censors: Theres a strong case to be made that social-media censorship violates the Constitution. Yes, the First Amendment doesnt ordinarily bind private companies such asFacebook and Twitter. But their censorship constitutes state action, because the government granted them immunity from legal liability via Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and in addition threatened to punish them if they allow disfavored speechand colluded with them in choosing targets for censorship. In other words, Trump has a colorable claim that he has beenthe victim of effective government, rather than private, censorship.

City Journals Charles Fain Lehman & Rafael A. Mangual squarely refute progressives claims, in the voice of Eric Levitz in New York magazine, that their criminal-justice reforms will curb the homicide spike. Indeed, progressives argue, the30 percent year-over-year increase is actually cause to back their agenda which reduces the footprints of incarceration and policing. Levitz claims such left-leaning policies have a track record of controlling violent crime, while the social costs of law-and-order approaches may be too high. Yet he overstates the effectiveness of progressive alternatives and understates the evidence behind traditional crime control, Lehman and Mangual argue. To his claim that safety and compassion have been deemed competing goods, they counter that safety and compassion for victims are perfectly compatible. Its misplaced compassion for perpetrators that undermines safety for everyone else.

Thanks to the slowly rising courage of a few members of the almost totalitarian solidarity of the anti-Trump hallelujah chorus, the nations Trump-haters are tentatively dropping out of lockstep with the Biden administration, celebrates Conrad Black at The Hill. Comedian Jon Stewarts recognition of objective facts that the coronavirus likely escaped from the Wuhan lab effectively destroyed the charge of Trumps xenophobia, hostility to proven science and scapegoating. And liberal wise-cracker Bill Mahers warning about the dangers of continuing with the piercingly monotonous fictions that have propelled progressives thus far is now ricocheting in the ears of the Trump-hate coalition. With the ex-prez still retaining the support of more than 40 percent of Americans, Trump-haters are realizing that they may have squeezed all the juice there is out of that lemon.

Critical race theory undermines military effectiveness, declares Mackubin Owens at the Washington Examiner. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, whom Owens taught at the Naval War College, is a fine officer but simply wrong about CRT. It isnt a benign academic theory in support of the advancement of civil rights for African-Americans but a species of Marxism that divides Americans by race into oppressors and victims. CRT encourages distrust among racial groups, which is fatal for the unit cohesion upon which military effectiveness depends. Decades ago, a sociologist observed the Army was the only institution in America in which black men routinely gave orders to white men. But the perception of favoritism kills trust and morale, and CRT would increase racial conflict by keeping the military from holding all to equal standards.

Catholic churches have been torched in Canada these past two weeks afterthe discovery of the remains of hundreds of indigenous youths, buried near the residential schools run, sometimes badly, by the church, Douglas Farrow reports at First Things. Yet activists arewrong to characterize the remains as mass graves, the result of a 19th-century Christian genocide: For there was here no genocide, though there was no shortage of negligence, cruelty, disaster and untimely death. Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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Trumps Big Tech lawsuit has legs and other commentary - New York Post