#Minnesotans tilting toward Trump and other commentary

In 2016, Democratic voters in rural Minnesota’s Iron Range mining community shifted allegiances to Donald Trump, because he spoke out about free trade’s role in “the region’s fading prosperity,” reports The Guardian’s Chris McGreal. This time around, six mayors from the region signed a joint letter endorsing the president, because they “no longer regarded the [Democratic Party] as advocating for workers.” Trump’s tariffs on China’s steel and tax cuts, meanwhile, have “injected new life into the industry.” Now, miners “feel even more alienated from their former party,” amid the rise of “a new breed of Democratic politicians who talk of ‘socialism’ and scrapping immigration enforcement.” As the president of the local United Steelworkers union branch pointed out, while Joe Biden may not be opposed to mining, “there is a strong perception in the region that the Democrats as a whole are, and that has a big impact.”

Prosecutor: The Real Disinformation Hoax

“If the stakes were not high, it would be a laugh-riot to listen to people who relied on the Steele dossier in an Intelligence Community assessment” calling The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop “a ‘Russian disinformation’ hoax,” snarks Andrew C. McCarthy at The Hill. “Most alarming” about how it’s been “sloughed off by Biden supporters and their media (including social-media) allies has been the resistance — no pun intended — to analyzing the substance of the e-mails and photos themselves.” The “knee-jerk allegations” of Russian disinformation and hacking aren’t “dispositive on the matter of authenticity,” says the former federal prosecutor. And it’s especially telling that “neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign has claimed the materials are fabricated.”

Libertarian: This Is No Time To Rename Schools

Reason’s Robby Soave blasts San Francisco school officials, who “are hard at work — not coming up with a plan to quickly reopen the schools, but to rename as many as 44 of them.” They’ve asked folks to brainstorm new names to replace those of “problematic” historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and even Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) — prompting Democratic Mayor London Breed to issue “a strongly worded rebuke”: “In the midst of this once in a century [pandemic] challenge, to hear that the district is focusing energy and resources on renaming schools — schools that they haven’t even opened— is offensive.” Soave is relieved, but only slightly: “At least one person in a position of authority in San Francisco has not completely lost her mind.”

Tech beat: Twitter Censors Science

After a week of “apparently politically motivated censorship,” Twitter blocked tweets about “the efficacy of masks” from Scott Atlas, a top White House scientist, sighs The Federalist’s David Marcus. The tweet in question cited World Health Organization reports and other credible evidence, but “some 20-something with his pronouns in his Twitter bio just pushed a button and erased scientifically accurate information.” Masks are “a contentious political argument in the midst of the 2020 presidential election,” and Twitter is once again proving that “not only does it have an editorial agenda, it has a political one.” Twitter is protected as a neutral platform, but its agenda is now “as obvious as a punch in the mouth, which is exactly what Congress needs to give it,” says Marcus. “Free speech is as central to the American experiment as any concept is, and as foreign to Twitter as could be.”

Iconoclasts: ‘Anti-Fascists’ Silent on Beheading

“Anti-fascists are incredibly quiet about the fascist in France who cut off a man’s head because he displayed some cartoons in a classroom,” seethes Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill. That would be the Islamist extremist who murdered “schoolteacher Samuel Paty for the supposed crime of showing caricatures of Muhammad to his pupils during a classroom discussion about freedom of speech. And yet the self-styled anti-fascists of the European and American left have said barely a word. . . . Their craven, cowardly silence is as revealing as it is depressing.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board