#New York’s lockdown self-harm and other commentary

Economy desk: NY’s Lockdown Self-Harm

The “Great Lockdown” of 2020, laments The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, involved massive, “self-inflicted” harm — but some states fared better than others. “States that allowed businesses to reopen sooner, and maintained fewer restrictions for the rest of the year, recovered by year-end,” according to new data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. New York was especially hard-hit by Gov. Cuomo’s refusal to reopen the economy during the summer “despite ample hospital capacity and fewer COVID cases. He let retail and restaurants in New York City partially reopen in the fall, but then reimposed a near-total lockdown in December. New York’s economy never awoke from its spring coma.” Compare that to Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis “let nearly all businesses stay open after May” and the economy contracted only 1.1 percent by year’s end. The lesson: “Politicians like Gov. Cuomo made the pain from the Great Lockdown much worse than it had to be.”

Libertarian: Keeping Questioning on Campus

When a “medical student questioned microaggressions,” the University of Virginia “branded him a threat and banished him from campus,” ­reports Reason’s Robby Soave. Kieran Bhattacharya asked a presenter at a panel discussion if you must be “a member of a marginalized group” to “be a victim of microaggression.” She replied it wasn’t necessary. He noted one of her slides “defined microaggressions as negative interactions with members of marginalized groups,” and they had “a polite disagreement.” A professor complained, and UVA eventually told the student “he must be evaluated by psychological services before returning to classes,” even as officials wouldn’t “clarify what exactly he was accused of.” A court just ruled his lawsuit against UVA can proceed. “Students must have the right to question administrators about poorly formed concepts from social psychology” without being branded “threats to public order. That’s the difference between a public university and an asylum.”

Neocon: No Schools Should Be Closed

Districts still refusing to open schools showcase “a species of bureaucratic inertia that has hardened into an intolerable intransigence over the course of this pandemic year” — and it’s “actively harming this country’s children,” warns Commentary’s Christine Rosen. The “parents who want to know why their kids can’t go back to school this spring” are “repeatedly told that there isn’t enough demand for in-person learning,” instead of the truth about protesting teachers unions. The lies and obstruction have “seriously undermined the trust many parents had” in teachers, ­administrators and elected officials. Enough.

Media watch: Press’ War on DeSantis

“Say what you want about the media in 2021,” snarks Grace Curley at Spectator USA, “they never let a dream die. For over a year now, the ­activists who play journalists on TV have been hell-bent on ­destroying Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The press is trying, with all its might, to turn him into the second most evil man in America,” after former President Donald Trump; CBS’ botched recent hit piece was only the latest ­attempt. Why the vendetta? The answer is obvious: Almost all the established media are ­behind President Biden, and those “cheerleaders are scared of DeSantis, because he is becoming a clear front-runner for 2024.” But the blue checks should beware: “The last time the media hated a guy with this much deranged passion, they helped him get elected president.”

Conservative: MLB’s Boycott Hypocrisy

 Major League Baseball boycotted Georgia over a perfectly sane voting ­reform, yet it had no qualms forming ties with “two of the most repressive totalitarian dictatorships on the face of the earth,” fumes The Washington Post’s Marc A. Thiessen. The MLB held a 2016 exhibition game in Cuba — “the Castro family’s tropical gulag.” And in “the same week that MLB ­decided to leave Georgia, the league also announced a deal with Tencent, the Communist Party-linked Chinese telecommunications firm,” implicating itself in Beijing’s “genocide.” 

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board