#Calling out ‘cancel culture’ is everyone’s duty and other commentary

The Harper’s magazine “Open Letter” many journalists, academics and others signed in opposition to cancel culture wasn’t mere whining, as critics charge — but rather, signer John McWhorter explains at Quillette, it was ­resistance to a “poisonous” judgmentalism that has “demoted, shunned and personally vilified” anyone who opposes liberal opinion. In this atmosphere, even many “smart, progressive people” believe in a “narrow, punitive form of moral judgment,” much like that during the Salem Witch Trials and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, resulting in such “persecution” attempts as The Washington Post’s targeting of a private citizen for a bad Halloween costume. Such “new norms and modus operandi,” which promote an “intellectually unhealthy” climate of “falsification and self-censorship,” are what alarmed the Harper’s letter-signers — “not any perceived threat to our own careers.”

Pandemic journal: No More Lockdowns, Please

“Americans can’t be expected to stay in their homes for months on end,” Bloomberg’s Faye Flam argues. Rather, we have to learn to judge “pandemic safety against other ­vital needs,” such as the economy and the education and mental health of children. Instead of championing “extreme” measures, public-health ­experts should promote practical ways “to reduce our odds of getting the disease in a way that can be sustained economically and socially, while keeping the curves flattened and hospital beds available.” This is an imperative of justice, because while it’s easy for people with white-collar jobs or fat savings to stay home, it’s impossible for the working and middle classes. Bottom line: “It’s time to make the best of a bad situation” and strive for “some degree of balance.”

Conservative: Teachers’ Dangerous Admission

Teachers across the country denounce reopening schools, with those in Washington, DC, even staging a “die-in” protest complete with body bags and “signs saying ‘RIP Favorite Teacher,’  ” eyerolls The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen. But “maybe they should have brought signs that read ‘I’m not essential’ — because that is what they are telling us.” When the pandemic was at its worst, after all, “millions of grocery clerks, factory workers, food processors, truck drivers, railroad workers, mass-transit workers, sanitation workers, utility workers, police officers and fire fighters continued showing up for work — because it was essential that they do so. Are teachers less essential than these professions? Apparently, they think so.” But that’s wrong: A mounting body of research evidence has tallied the high costs to children of not learning and socializing — costs that go double for poor and minority kids. Worst of all, “we now know that children are least vulnerable to COVID-19.” It’s time for teachers to get off the couch.

Israeli: Get Off Our Backs, American Jews

Prompted by movie director Seth Rogen’s recent anti-Israel rant, Shany Mor at The Forward asks “American Jewish boys” to “please, please, take your Oedipal rage and find another outlet for it. It’s not Israel’s fault you hate your parents. Leave us out of this.” In summer camp in your tweens, “someone gave you a heroic version of Israel’s history, and now that you’re suddenly surrounded at university by theologians of the grand church of ­intersectionality, you feel the need to renounce” the Jewish state. Go for it, Mor says, but bear in mind: “Here in Israel, at least, we’ve taken a critical approach to our history pretty much from day one. The first major literary treatment of the Palestinian displacement in Hebrew came out in 1949, just one year after independence.” Meanwhile, though, Israelis living with complex Mideast realties can’t ­afford to serve as props in the liberal diaspora’s psychodramas. “Yours sincerely, Israeli Jews.”

Culture critic: Yankees’ Anti-American Betrayal

“Every New York Yankee kneeled when the National Anthem was played during the opening game of the condensed baseball season last week,” fumes David Krayden at Human Events. “These athletes apparently lack the will or the courage to challenge the meaning behind the act — a meaning that, after it has been appropriated by Black Lives Matter” has come to represent “a larger Marxist agenda” and “distaste for democracy.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board