#Big Tech widens censorship and other commentary

Libertarian: Big Tech Widens Censorship

Tech giants have started “partnering with watchdog groups and law enforcement to share information about so-called extremists using their platforms,” warns Reason’s Robby Soave. PayPal will work with the left-wing Anti-Defamation League to identify and block “extremists,” while the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube “will be expanding their use of a centralized database that compiles extremist content for the purposes of coordinated de-platforming.” Beware: With these new capacities, “information may eventually be shared with law enforcement.” Private corporations may not be bound to follow the Constitution, but it’s federal authorities that are encouraging these changes — and “we have the right to speak out against government encroachment.”

West Coast watch: Cali’s Blue Staying Power

Based on the results of last November’s ballot initiatives in California, you might think the Golden State “is poised to make a turn to the right” — but not necessarily, Nick Burns points out at City Journal. Rather, the “ballot initiative has actually become an advantage” for Democrats there. Nor are recall efforts, such as the one seeking to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), a surefire panacea for the right: Even if Newsom is replaced, for example, “with only a year left until fresh elections in 2022,” his successor would have little time to prove his competence and might be “vulnerable” to the Dem’s return. Like the ballot initiative, “the recall process does not seem to be the shortcut to overcoming the structural dominance of California Democrats that it may at first seem.”

Foreign desk: Dems’ Losing Bet on Cuba

“There is no foreign-policy issue in the United States that is less ‘foreign’ than the Cuba policy,” argues Carlos Gustavo Poggio Teixeira at The Hill. The “case of Cuba is unique,” because it’s “directly connected to the presidential elections. The reason: Florida’s 29 electoral votes.” More than two-thirds of the country’s 2.5 million Cuban Americans live in the swing state, making them “a particularly prized electoral asset.” Former President Barack Obama made a “bet that history was going the Democrats’ way,” with polling suggesting Republicans were losing ground with the group, but history “has taken a turn”: “Cuban Americans have become more conservative” since 2016. President Biden’s response to protests roiling the island was “mostly meaningless statements of solidarity” and “even more meaningless ‘individual sanctions’ whose practical effects are exactly zero.” Dems “do not know how to respond” to their lost bet.

Conservative: CRT Infiltrates DOE

“Americans have a right to expect that the leader of public education’s top civil-rights-enforcement body would unequivocally oppose racial discrimination,” writes the American Enterprise Institute’s Max Eden. Too bad Catherine Lhamon, President Biden’s pick to head the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, doesn’t share that expectation. Lhamon “defined racism as the belief that race determines character traits,” but then refused to definitively say whether it is racist for schools to grade differently, segregate students or shame them based on race. “Lhamon’s refusal to admit that any of these obviously racist, illegal practices violates federal civil-rights law comes quite close to an admission that she will, at best, not enforce equal protection equally” and, at worst, actively enforce critical race theory. But without any senators willing to question her in a public hearing, “Lhamon seems poised to take office, with reason to think she’ll be subject to minimal oversight and, at most, muted criticism.”

Liberal: Gender Insanity at Med School

At Bari Weiss’ Substack, Katie Herzog reports on an endocrinology professor in the University of California system begging his students to summon” the “generosity to forgive me.” His crime? “I said, ‘When a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant.” Welcome to gender ideology’s bizarro world: “Some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board