#Open our schools and other commentary

Despite evidence showing children rarely contract or transmit COVID-19, Mayor de Blasio decided that public schools would not fully reopen this fall.
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Unlike a few months ago, we now know that “elementary-school-age children rarely contract” COVID-19, “rarely succumb to it” and “rarely transmit it” — so, asks Reason’s Matt Welch, why did “relentlessly hapless” Mayor de Blasio decide that “public schools would not fully reopen this fall”? Maybe the mayor simply feels compelled to oppose President Trump, who wants the schools open. Yet “stupid politics” aside, research shows children, especially younger ones, are “less likely to catch the ­infection and less likely to spread the infection.” Another “school season of cabin fever, Zoom-wrangling and behavioral backpedaling,” meanwhile, will only hurt kids. Officials should “move heaven and earth to ­allow willing parents to send their children to class this fall.”

Campus beat: Profs Cave to Political Winds

Michigan State University professor Joseph Cesario and University of Maryland’s David Johnson’s 2019 study, which found no “endemic police racism,” made it through “three levels of editorial and peer review” — yet, Heather Mac Donald observes at The Wall Street Journal, it “set off a firestorm” when she quoted it in a Journal op-ed, and Cesario and Johnson have now “retracted their paper” exclusively because they claim she “misused” their findings. In truth, says Mac Donald, the “only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is ­unacceptable in our current political climate.” Alas, the retraction “bodes ill for the development of knowledge” — and will only further anti-cop hostility that is igniting “a shocking rise in shootings in American cities.”

Law prof: Why the Right’s Jurists Defect

“The end of a Supreme Court term almost always sees one or more conservative justices” defect from the right, Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule notes at The Washington Post. “So it went this year”: Chief Justice John Roberts struck down abortion restrictions in Louisiana, as well as President Trump’s executive order ending protections for Dreamers. And he and Justice Neil Gorsuch interpreted gender identity and orientation into the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Why do liberal justices always remain firm while the right’s go wobbly? Because the justices, contends Vermeule, are bowing to “our real, unwritten constitution”: “a particular set of commitments held passionately by urban professionals and . . . ‘gentry liberals.’ ” These ­include “a high rate of immigration” and “protecting sexual expression.” While not “spelled out explicitly in law,” these ideas “exert a gravitational force that powerfully influences the justices’ interpretations” — including supposedly conservative justices, who themselves are from the gentry-liberal class, after all.

Cancel watch: Mobs Prove Their Power

“I’m not ashamed to find myself in the company of the canceled,” ­declares Margaret Wente at Quillette, as it includes “some of the finest minds in the world.” Wente was forced to quit the Quadrangle Society, a literary group at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, over her writing for the Globe and Mail newspaper, where her specialty “was deflating Canada’s numerous liberal pieties.” Critics painted her “as a racist, anti-feminist heretic, whose mere presence inside Massey’s halls would have presented a threat to students.” As one student put it: “How are my friends and colleagues supposed to feel safe sitting across from her at dinner?” The college head “hoped this unpleasantness could be resolved by respectful dialogue,” notes Wente, but “mobs aren’t interested in dialogue. The whole purpose of a mob is to punish heretics and prove to everyone where the power lies.” It’s all “reminiscent of China’s Cultural Revolution,” when “students denounced their elders . . . before they were packed off to the pig farms for re-education.”

From the right: Cancel Obama

Boeing recently forced out executive Niel Golightly because he argued against putting women in combat roles back in 1987. “If this sort of thing is our new standard for corporate behavior,” muses National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, “how can Netflix, which presents itself as a leader on LGBT issues, maintain its relationship with Barack Obama, the remorseless bigot who ran twice for president opposing gay marriage?”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board