Woke watch: RBG Rewritten
The “American Civil Liberties Union honored the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the one-year anniversary of her death — by rewriting her famous defense of a woman’s right to abortion,” laments Jonathan Turley at The Hill. With “references to women and female pronouns” deemed “offensive,” “past pronoun offenses are being scrubbed away even for feminist icons like the ‘notorious’ Ginsburg, for referring to the right of ‘women’ to have abortions.” RBG herself “would have made short work of such ‘woke’ revisionism.” In reality, we can “allow for the adoption of alternative pronouns and the recognition of different gender identities without seeking to compel others to do so.”
COVID beat: The Lancet Gives Up
The Lancet, the elite medical journal, has “disbanded [its] entire commission investigating the origin of COVID-19,” quips National Review’s Jim Geraghty, because “apparently it is just too hard to find qualified scientific minds who don’t have some past tie” to Dr. Peter Daszak or his nonprofit EcoHealth, which funded “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak originally led the task force despite his clear conflicts of interest, and now it turns out that “other members of the task force had collaborated with Dr. Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on various projects.” The bigger picture is a “US virus-research bureaucracy that has deliberately withheld, covered up, lied, and obscured relevant information.”
Conservative: Dems’ Border Madness
Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents much of the southern-border area, says he’s never seen anything like last week’s “chaos” at Del Rio, where thousands of Haitians camped under a bridge, reports the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito. Del Rio residents saw “their lives turned upside down,” she notes: “If you’re a small-business owner and your business has somehow survived COVID-19, something like this could easily wipe you out.” Yet “Democrats, journalists, and the White House” ignored the crisis — until Twitter made viral a photo of a mounted Border Patrol agent herding migrants. Then they falsely accused the agent of abuse. Maybe if one of them “spent a few days living in a border town,” they’d “understand just how dire and dangerous life there has become.”
Eye on SCOTUS: Gorsuch’s Bid To Be Scalia’s Heir
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch plainly aims to inherit the late Antonin Scalia’s “intellectual leadership of the conservative legal movement,” argues Noah Feldman at Bloomberg Opinion; the “aspiration . . . fairly bursts from his votes and opinions”: “In every case, no matter how small or large, he takes pains to shape a consistent judicial philosophy that defines the conservative position.” Yet “he also authored the landmark opinion Bostock v. Clayton County, which conferred workplace anti-discrimination rights on gay and transgender people,” because of his insistence on “logical consistency.” That means his coveted role may wind up belonging to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is “a credible, competing heir to Scalia.” In short, “The coming debate between Gorsuch and Barrett about Scalia’s legacy will shape the future of conservative jurisprudence.”
Libertarian: Biden’s Loan-Forgiveness Rush
“Progressive Democrats” have yet to pass a “universal student loan forgiveness bill,” notes Reason’s Mike Riggs, yet the Department of Education has “nevertheless forgiven billions of dollars in federal student loan debt since Joe Biden became president.” And it’s on track “to forgive increasingly more” in the future, “thanks to the Biden administration’s expansive interpretation of the Education Department’s existing authorities, as well as a law signed by George W. Bush.” Under that law, “anyone with a Federal Direct Loan who makes 120 qualifying payments” while working for a nonpolitical nonprofit or a government agency can have the remainder of his or her loan forgiven. And “it’s likely only a matter of time until millions of private-sector workers begin to wonder why you have to be poor or work for the government or a nonprofit” to have your loans forgiven.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board