Eye on Disney: A Tradition of Sexualizing Kids

“Disney’s recent commitment to ‘add queerness’ wherever possible can’t be explained as just trying to teach tolerance and inclusivity,” notes pseudonymous former Disney TV writer Stella Paul at the American Thinker. The company has long warned writers that “whatever kids see, they imitate,” so its execs “know that by showing ‘queerness,’ they are . . . encouraging kids to imitate that behavior.” And “Disney has had issues with sexualizing children for a long time,” with young female stars turned from “adorable ingenues into hypersexual vixens” as well as “a history of exposing its young actors to convicted child molesters.” Since “kids now live in a world of immersive media, spending up to nine hours a day watching or using screens . . . taking down Disney would be a major victory in the battle to restore the sanctity of childhood.”

Libertarian: 6.5 Billion Hours Lost to Tax Filing

“This year, Americans will spend an estimated 6.5 billion hours” and more than $200 billion to file their taxes, roars Reason’s Eric Boehm, citing the American Action Forum. “That’s an insane amount of added expense” for “no productive ends whatsoever.” The process’ complexity is “no accident,” since the tax code tries to balance many conflicting goals (“fairness, enforceability, efficiency”) and “companies that profit off the complexity,” like TurboTax-brand owner Intuit, “lobby hard” against efforts to simplify it. Yet the tax “should be simply a tool for funding the federal government,” not a mechanism for “social engineering.” Americans should “spend fewer hours trying to figure out what you owe the IRS — or what the IRS owes you.”

Conservative: America’s Trickle-Down Racism

“Present-day multiracial America is a great experiment in the unknown,” observes Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness. “Can its various tribes and races unite around the Constitution? Or will they inevitably revert to form and give their first loyalties to those of shared superficial racial or ethnic affinities?” Beware: “Tribalism is like nuclear proliferation. Once groups begin separating and self-identifying by shared superficial appearances, then all will fragment.” This “reactionary and neo-Confederate return to racial stigmatization and hatred is not going to end well.”

Senate watch: A Hypocrite in Nevada

“To save her seat, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is starting to sound like Donald Trump on immigration,” Victor Joeks snarks at the Las Vegas Journal-Review. “President Joe Biden is about to make the southern border crisis worse” by lifting Title 42, which allows deportations over COVID concerns — though he also says the pandemic is still bad enough to justify mandating masks on planes and a moratorium on student-loan payments. Cortez Masto condemns the move, “but her record shows how disingenuous this is” since she called on then-President Donald Trump to lift the Title 42 order in June 2020 and helped vote down Sen. Ted Cruz’s August 2021 proposal to extend it. “Until a tough election was around the corner, she showed little concern about surges in illegal immigration.”

Foreign desk: Fight Ortega Authoritarianism

Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and wife-VP Rosario Murillo stand accused by Organization of American States investigators of crimes against humanity and seem out to “cement a North Korean-style, dynastic dictatorship smack in the middle of the Americas,” notes Ryan C. Berg at The Hill. Yet Team Biden flinches from tougher sanctions, arguing that “more pressure on the Ortega-Murillo regime will engender greater migration to the US southern border.” Yet “migration concerns feel more like a convenient excuse.” It’s time to sanction “the Nicaraguan Army, which is already implicated in human rights abuses” as well as the army’s “lucrative pension and investment fund” and “myriad government ministries involved in quotidian repression,” and to get “multilateral lending institutions to turn off the taps to Managua.” “Make confronting the Ortega-Murillo regime a more central pillar” of US policy.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board