#Instagram’s empty religions and other commentary

Culture critic: Instagram’s Empty Religions

The “nones” — the 22 percent of millennials without a specific religion — have “found a different kind of clergy,” Leigh Stein reports at The New York Times: Instagram “personal-growth influencers.” Millennials’ “new belief system is a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology and Dolly Parton.” Take memoirist Glennon Doyle, who offers an “accessible combination of self-care, activism and tongue-in-cheek Christianity.” Women like Doyle ­offer nones “permission, validation and community on demand,” while “it’s nearly impossible to share communion in person. We don’t even have to put down our phones.” Instead of tackling life’s fundamental questions, “the whole economy of Instagram is based on” women “thinking about our selves, posting about our selves, working on our selves.”

Leftist: The Crumbling ‘Insurrection’ Narrative

At his Substack blog, Glenn Greenwald flags the awkward fact that the nation has had two sets of warnings in six weeks “about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol” on Jan. 6. And “both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless.” Despite hysteria on CNN and NPR about “potential violence in all 50 state capitals” on Inauguration Day, nothing happened, except minor lefty violence in Portland and Seattle. March 4, ballyhooed as a big deal for QAnon crazies, also proved a non-event. The extremist threat is “being deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited, both for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more powers in the hands of the state.”

From the right: Woke Public-Health Hypocrites

When public-health groups declared racism a barrier to “health equity,” major US cities last summer “raced to align themselves,” observes Commentary’s Noah Rothman — yet their actions led to worse outcomes. After George Floyd’s killing, health officials declared COVID-mitigation strategies an obstacle to racial rapprochement. A “public-relations campaign” was deployed not “to augment existing public-health guidelines, but to circumvent them.” Blue-state elected officials reversed “their inviolable commitment to preventing dangerous gatherings” — and “2020’s long, hot summer began”: At least six people were killed in the violence; looting and vandalism sparked as much as $2 billion in insurance payouts.

Royal watch: Throne of Victimhood

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s two-hour television sit-down was “a grotesque spectacle — emotionally manipulative, self-obsessed and a clear attempt by Harry and Meghan to position themselves as the king and queen of victim politics,” declares Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill. “In a country where” millions lost their jobs to lockdowns, “this pair, who get paid millions for making naff podcasts, moaned to billionaire” Oprah Winfrey “about how difficult their lives have been” from “the unimaginably luxurious surrounds of a Californian mansion.” And what hypocrisy: “Nobody invades Meghan Markle’s privacy as much as Meghan Markle does” by “constantly revealing all.” The couple’s “punishment of the disobedient media” and insistence on telling us “how to live, how to travel, how many kids to have” show they are “far more old-world monarchical” than the queen, with her “ideals of duty, self-sacrifice, stoicism.”

Conservative: New Meaning to Loony Left

Last week, we saw “six children’s books by Dr. Seuss shoved into the memory hole because, according to the frightened bureaucrats at Dr. Seuss Enterprises, ‘they portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,’ ” scoffs Roger Kimball at The Epoch Times. We also witnessed “Charles Blow, a columnist for The New York Times, inveighing strenuously against the ‘Looney Tunes’ character Pepé Le Pew because, in the febrile imagination of Mr. Blow, the cartoon skunk ‘normalized rape culture.’ ” Add these episodes to the left’s push to all but proscribe state-level voting-integrity laws and to bar white men from COVID-relief benefits, and the result is political “ ‘Loony Tunes,’ indeed.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board