“Parents who send their kids to New York public schools have lots to worry about,” frets Max Eden at City Journal, from learning to safety — and now, “Is the school gender-transitioning my child behind my back?” A key takeaway from the New York State Education Department’s new “‘legal update and best practice’ document” is: “If your child decides that he or she wants to socially transition to the opposite gender, it is now a ‘best practice’ for the school to lie to you about it.” Polling shows that such “policies on gender are massively unpopular,” but SED plainly doesn’t care. In public education today, “the will of parents matters far less than the whim of activist-captured bureaucrats.” And: “If parents don’t push back, no one will.”
“The war on free speech” is taking the “form of a world war,” warns Michael Shellenberger at UnHerd. Despite the lack of evidence that “hatred and misinformation are increasing,” and despite “ample evidence of inappropriate censorship” of true information, “politicians across the West are calling for greater power to censor.” “Citizens of the world” must “insist” governments stop demanding that social media “censor disfavoured views.” We need to remind each other “of the enormous progress” we’ve made against “hatred and discrimination” and, “perhaps most of all, we should feel insulted, patronised and threatened” by elites who seek to “undermine that precious thing we have been fighting for since society was born: our right to express ourselves, however much it might offend them.”
“Experts are notoriously reluctant to debate cranks. But that policy may need a rethink,” argues Commentary’s Abe Greenwald. “The idea is that when a serious person debates a crank, he elevates and legitimizes him.” But “neither experts nor cranks are what they used to be.” RFK Jr., for example, “isn’t a voice in some remote fever swamp. He embodies one side of a critical fight in 21st -century American intellectual life.” “This fight won’t disappear if ignored.” Indeed, “many today who aren’t conspiracy theorists nevertheless find themselves giving conspiracy theories a second look.” And “if the public-health VIPs” hadn’t “been dishonest about masks, lockdowns, and the origins of the virus, they might have a better claim to their title as unquestionable authorities.”
President Biden’s “unexpected” cry of “God save the Queen” the other day reflects “the confused, uncertain and slightly out-of-touch approach to the rest of the world that characterizes the administration’s foreign policy,” quips The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker. “What else could explain the news last week that the Biden team is putting together a deal that isn’t a deal with the ayatollahs in Iran?” Or the “confusion and hesitancy about Ukraine,” where Biden provides “just enough arms to help the Ukrainians avoid defeat but not enough to help them win”? Plus: “The administration seems ready to look past China’s proliferating abuses” to “play at a new détente.” “Against all this a little confusion about who still reigns in Britain seems merely rather quaint. God save the queen!”
“An essential ingredient of leadership is an inspiring destination,” notes Niall Ferguson at Bloomberg, yet the United States now can’t say “where exactly is it” we would like our “allies to follow.” That gives them “the unpleasant feeling of being caught between two superpowers in a new cold war. They know China is partly to blame for this. But they see the US as equally culpable” and are “torn between the familiar security of the transatlantic alliance and economic self-interest that barely overlaps with that of the US.” Washington remains “the undisputed leader” of the alliance, yet it’s “somehow thinner than it was” and “shows the first worrisome signs of cracking.” To paraphrase Gandhi: US leadership “would be a very good idea.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board