#Critical race theory gaslighters and other commentary

Culture critic: Critical Race Theory Gaslighters

A “counterrevolution” against critical race theory has “exploded,” and its defenders are trying to protect it by pushing a “kind of political quietism — since you don’t know what CRT is, how can you struggle against it?” observes Hugo Gurdon at the Washington Examiner. The idea is to “make CRT opponents question their understanding and doubt the evidence of their own ears and eyes.” Yet critics do know what CRT is: “It’s the unfalsifiable assertion of racial essentialism, stigmatizing white people as irredeemably racist and privileged, and black people as systematically repressed. It is used to poison the minds of children down to the elementary school level.” Those who “pretend CRT is an obscure academic discipline don’t know or don’t care about the truth.”

From the right: Texas Cry-Babies

“The fugitive Texas Democrats are vain, self-promoting cry-babies,” declares William Murchison at The Spectator World. The legislators fled the Lone Star State to block a Republican election-reform bill that “doesn’t even make voting hard.” It “sets certain standards that were unduly relaxed during the pandemic when Harris County (Houston) improvised measures like drive-through voting and 24-hour voting.” The Dems’ “jump to Washington, DC, is profoundly un-American”: They “journeyed, showily, to the center of everything; the imperial capital. The media in Washington give you attention that you wouldn’t get otherwise.” It’s “a telling commentary on the state of American politics” when “only one side — the progressive side —” is “worthy of attention.”

From the left: Media Hysterics Boost Tucker

Matt Taibbi at TK News notes all the media’s scoffs when Fox News’ Tucker Carlson announced “The National Security Agency is monitoring our electronic communications” and “planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air” were replaced by “more tortured rhetoric” that still attacked him even after Axios ran a story apparently based on just such a leak. “An extraordinarily rich recent history of illegal, politically directed leaks has gone mostly uncovered, in another glaring recent press failure that itself is part of this story” — with the feds only punishing low-level leakers even as the high officials who dump dirt (often fake) to The Washington Post and The New York Times go unpunished. Bigger picture: “The prestige media’s ham-handed, hysterical, anti-intellectual approach” pushed voters to Donald Trump, and now it’s boosting Carlson.

Libertarian: Unmask Our Kids, Fauci!

In an MSNBC interview, virus guru Dr. Anthony Fauci insisted that even small kids should continue to wear masks, since they can contract COVID and spread it to vulnerable adults — but, counters Reason’s Robby Soave, “this is rapidly becoming an unpersuasive reason to require masks, given that all American adults who want to get a vaccine are basically able to do so, and 90 percent of the most vulnerable population — seniors — are already vaccinated.” So it’s increasingly unlikely “a sick child would spread COVID-19 to someone who would be in serious danger of dying from it, unless this hypothetical person obstinately refused to take the vaccine. And in that case, it doesn’t seem fair to continue to require children — who are not themselves particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 — to continue masking up.”

Business desk: Doomed Corporate Woke Moves

For some large corporations, woke politics is a way “to divert attention” from their “mistreatment” of customers, “serious business problems” and “significant evidence they’ve exploited foreign labor,” laments Will Hild at The Washington Times. American Airlines denounced Texas legislation requiring voters to show some form of identification, which is “beyond bizarre given that ID is required to fly with American Airlines.” Coca-Cola spoke out against similar legislation in Georgia while being “caught red-handed sourcing sugar from companies that benefit from Uyghur forced labor in China.” Executives who weigh in on “political matters in which they have no expertise to distract from their own failures and mistreatment of customers are pursuing a doomed strategy.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board