She just canceled her own speech at Furman University on her book “Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics”, Mary Eberstadt explains at The Wall Street Journal, after learning “what happened to the speaker who preceded me,” Scott Yenor. “An inhospitality committee sprang into action, ‘triggered’ not by his speech topic but by opinions that he had expressed elsewhere. . . . Scores of faculty and student protesters ‘silently’ objected inside and outside as he spoke. Three armed policemen were assigned to his protection. Within the auditorium, protesters lined the walls the professor had to pass, holding posters with ad hominem slogans and quotations of his taken out of context, staring balefully at him throughout.” The students who invited her will get copies of her book, which “makes the case that social upheavals since the 1960s have led to compounded fractures on generations” and “that the rise in mental and emotional problems . . . on campuses and on the streets is a result. The students revulsed by free speech these days aren’t victims of that analysis but poster children for it.”

“Private universities,” observes Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness, “rely on billions of dollars in federal and state research subsidies and grants” and “hundreds of billions of dollars in federally backed student loans that allow them to charge exorbitant tuition at above the annual inflation rate,” as well as “billions of dollars in tax-exempt annual income from their endowments.” “Given those huge public investments” the public might “insist that all colleges, public and private, simply abide by the laws of the land” on free-speech and due-process rights and discriminatory hiring rules. That “insistence would prompt revolutionary changes on campus.”

The “Finger Lakes meal-kit company” Real Eats “closed its doors suddenly this month after New York state government had sunk upwards of $14 million into the operation” — which “says more about the people who wagered on it than about the business itself,” grouses the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin. The “army of state and local economic development luminaries” responsible for the subsidy “seem to have universally misread” the “crowded” sector the company sought to enter. And while efforts to “overcome the state’s difficult business climate” with largesse are “politically easier than tackling the state’s high tax burden or its regulatory or tort” situation, this is ultimately a “cosmetic approach to weak economic growth.”

“John Blake at CNN wants you to get really upset about the use of ‘digital blackface,’ which he describes as white people sharing images or gifs of members of minority groups on social media,” muses National Review’s Jim Geraghty. Meanwhile, “real life-and-death situations keep developing, starting, and resolving themselves.” Such as: “Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is now saying he intends to move some of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.” Maybe it’s “just more of [his] nuclear saber-rattling,” but “the West is in this mess in large part because a wide variety of Western leaders underestimated the danger of Putin, year after year, decade after decade.” Now “it’s your choice whether or not” to bother with silly media controversies.

“Volkswagen has no plans to bring” its electric car — “roughly the same price as a Toyota Camry” — to the US, notes Reason’s Joe Lancaster, due to “protectionist policies.” Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, if Volkswagen “wanted to sell” the new model “in the U.S. and let buyers take advantage of the tax credit” the IRA set up for electric vehicles, it would “have to produce the car here as well” — “a clear case of economic protectionism.” “In a free market, consumers would get to choose the products to buy based on cost and dependability.” “But when the government, over misplaced protectionist sentiments, uses the tax code to artificially advantage one product over another, it disadvantages not only competitors but consumers.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board