From the left: Pity the Poor Censors
A House GOP report on Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, notes Matt Taibbi at Racket, has various disinformation “experts” scared and whining about the politics around the issue. These people weren’t always so “bashful”: Reporters have recently swooned “like teen girls seeing the Elvis wiggle for the first time” about “anyone with intelligence credentials who utters dire prophecies about Trump and ‘fake news.’ ” Yet “these people lie” in a way “that would impress even a politician.” EIP members, for instance, “declare unequivocally that CISA did not ‘found, fund, or control’ their program” but it then comes out that “the superficially private structure of the EIP was necessary because ‘DHS cannot openly endorse the portal.’ ”
China desk: ‘Industrializing’ Procreation
After a surprise population survey, “China’s leaders look like they are now panicking over population decline,” observes Gordon G. Chang at The Hill. “Will they force couples to procreate? Or will they industrialize the process of procreation?” “The Chinese people, for various social and other reasons, are not enthusiastic about reproducing.” Not least because “draconian population policies, put in place in the 1970s and bolstered by relentless indoctrination, have instilled anti-natalist values in the country.” Now “officials have been thinking out loud about forced procreation.” A posting on X in August even depicted “an image of a human fetus growing inside a machine.” China has “taken steps” to support “the industrialization of procreation. Only time will tell where the next steps will take them.”
From the right: The Freight ‘Monopolists’ Myth
“Remember when we were all supposed to believe that ocean carriers were villains?” snarks Dominic Pino at National Review. Shippers were supposedly monopolists who raised shipping prices and fueled inflation during the pandemic. They needed to be broken up and taxed, we were told. The truth? Prices rose due to a “surge in demand,” and now that “the boom is over,” carriers “are going back to being what they used to be: unprofitable.” Trucking and cargo airlines have also been “hit hard.” Fact is, “the freight industry is very competitive and subject to frequent boom-bust cycles, contrary to what politicians would have you believe.” “The calls for windfall taxes on supposedly price-gouging ocean carriers” have now been “exposed for the demagoguery that they always were.”
Mideast beat: Tlaib’s Perverse ‘Aspirations’
The House censured Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for “repeatedly calling for the destruction of the Jewish state using an explicitly and famously genocidal slogan,” thunders Commentary’s Seth Mandel. Her last straw: promoting “a video using the phrase ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and then defending it.” Despite her claims, the phrase is not “open to interpretation.” The Palestinian National Charter was amended in 1998 to comply with the Oslo peace process, but openly described how “Palestinians would go about freeing the land between the river and the sea, and it does not mince words.” The pre-1998 charter, Mandel argues, makes clear what “Tlaib and her supporters’ ‘aspiration’ for the land between the waters” entails. Those wanting peace “should hope Tlaib’s aspirations go unfulfilled.”
Campus watch: Hold College Bigs Accountable
The “weasel words emanating from college presidents in response to odious pro-Hamas statements by militant faculty members” have prompted “widespread outrage,” cheers Niall Ferguson at Newsweek. University leadership has “collectively forgotten that it is not the job of academic administrators to opine on every political issue.” Yet this problem is now addressed “in the new constitution of the University of Austin,” which explicitly prohibits the school “from taking political positions, but guarantees free speech to faculty and students alike in a ‘bill of rights’ ” enforced by an independent panel. And if a president, provost, dean or professor violates any article of the constitution, “there is a mechanism to hold them to account.” That’s “what has been sorely lacking” at other schools “for far too long.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board