#Free speech is under threat and other commentary

Conservative: Will the Backlash Kill Joe’s Bid?

When the hard-left theorist Noam Chomsky thinks bedrock American principles like free speech are under threat, Matthew Continetti observes in The Washington Free Beacon, “it is a sign that . . . things have gotten out of control” — “Joe Biden better be paying attention.” The wokesters are going too far: “Social media has become a system of surveillance, policing and stigma, news media the vehicle for an attack on the American Founding.” This could all spell doom for Biden’s presidential bid. “There is only so much self-abasement a nation can take. And when the winds of woke start to blow, millions of Americans find that there is one way left for them to oppose political correctness: pulling the lever for the man in the White House.”

Urban Beat: The Black Lives They Ignore

“As street violence spikes in big cities across America,” writes The Chicago Tribune’s John Koss, it’s becoming clear that Black Lives Matter is a mere “political and fundraising arm” of the Democratic Party, not the civil-rights movement it claims to be, and its largely “young, white and woke” supporters can’t work up much concern about “black children being slaughtered” in big-city gang wars. Indeed, even while protesters are “shouting loudly and passionately about defunding or abolishing the police,” they aren’t saying a word to pressure “big-city Democratic” mayors to do anything about “the spiking urban violence” — probably because they live “several degrees removed” from the killings and “see no political advantage for the November elections” in drawing attention to them. “That’s not cynicism,” sadly. “That’s reality.”

Culture critic: Socialists With Daddy Issues

Much of modern social protest is “psychological and spiritual need dressed up as revolution,” Mark Judge argues at The Stream. Because many young people don’t have a grounding principle like religious faith in their lives, they’re “easy prey for toxic ideologies,” such as Marxism. That’s nothing new: For many believers, “Communism became like a ­father,” providing both “love and acceptance” and “a ‘totalizing’ solution” to all the world’s (and each person’s) problems. And like their 1960s predecessors, many antifa rioters are really “out there looking for their ­fathers” after coming from broken homes. All of these “broken souls” share the “same distant, soulless nihilism” — and rather than taking up the “difficult task” of “making themselves more whole,” they latch on to radical movements.

Iconoclast: Cheers for Kanye Traditionalism

Kanye West’s recent pledge to remove extraneous chemicals from deodorant “makes me like America’s last rock star even more than I did before he announced last Saturday that he was going ahead with his presidential campaign,” half-jokes The Week’s Matthew Walther. “Would anyone really expect, much less want,” Kanye to “run on lower taxes and block-granting Medicare to the states?” Kudos, too, for his unabashed pro-life stance: “At a time when social conservatism is mostly an unedifying series of non-debates about the flag and kneeling,” the rapper “sounds like Pat Buchanan in 1992, arguing for prayer in public schools and insisting that ‘We have to stop doing things that make God mad.’ ” And he sounds more genuine than more conventional conservatives. What’s not to like?

Health desk: Killer COVID Lockdowns

With COVID resurging, warns Dr. Joel Zinberg at City Journal, “we must acknowledge” data showing that lockdowns themselves “contributed to the death toll.” If we don’t learn from this, doctors will need “a new cause of death on death certificates — ‘public policy.’ ” Economic recession led to “increased drug and alcohol abuse and increases in domestic abuse and suicides.” Meanwhile, inpatient admissions in Veterans Administration hospitals “were down 42 percent for six emergency conditions,” including stroke, heart failure and appendicitis, during one six-week period during the pandemic, a change not seen last year. These and deaths from chronic conditions increased because people had to “shelter in place, were too scared to go to the doctor or were unable to obtain care.” Bottom line: Public-health experts can’t go on pretending lockdowns don’t kill.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board