#A message for black parents and other commentary

Urban beat: A Crucial Message for Black Parents

“Someday soon,” predicts Lee Hayes at the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, “a young African-American male will be gunned down in Minneapolis by someone who looks much like him” — yet there won’t be “one word from Black Lives Matter,” unless a white cop is involved. And “no one will have the courage” to tell parents “what needs to be said”: that “you are responsible for the actions of your children,” for raising “law-abiding” kids, who aren’t “a burden or menace to society.” Racism “cannot be an excuse.” A 50-year-old African American, Hayes has “witnessed” racism “firsthand,” but “this never stopped our ancestors.” If black lives truly matter, black parents must teach their sons that they aren’t “thugs,” but “kings” who hold “the key” to the black community’s survival. 

From the right: 1619’s ‘Race Hustlers’

The publication of “Red, White and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers” is “a public service,” cheers the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley. Veteran community activist Robert Woodson was “incensed” by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, “which posits that America’s true Founding” was “the year African slaves arrived in Virginia” and that “the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery.” It was “junk history” that “would be disseminated through school curriculums in the name of helping blacks.” He responded with 1776 Unites, and the group’s “thoughtful” essay collection “debunks” 1619’s “dubious claims” and “barely disguised propaganda.” Woodson understands “1619’s falsehoods about the American Founding,” and its contention that slavery is the source of black America’s present ills, “will do little if anything to facilitate black upward mobility.”

Tech watch: GOP Must Update Antitrust Laws

Finding themselves “on the brink of an antitrust revival,” Republicans have “largely woken up to the threat of concentrated economic power acting at scale, because it has been so overtly wielded against them,” ­observes Rachel Bovard at the American Conservative. “When unprecedented economic dominance is paired with activist progressive dogma, one witnesses an ideologically driven economic cartel.” But “distorting the marketplace of ideas is only possible if these same companies first control the marketplace itself.” How did we get here? Over the last few decades, antitrust ­enforcement has gone from a “broad congressional mandate to police concentrated power” to the “esoteric ruminations of economists.” Which is why Congress must reframe these laws to “ensure the antitrust apparatus has the resources, tools and guidance to act with its full remit.” 

Conservative: Paul Ryan-ism Is Dead

“After whispering a prayer to Saint Ronald Reagan,” Pedro Gonzalez mockingly writes at Spectator USA, “Paul Ryan rose to his feet . . . and gave a speech . . . about the perils of personality cults.” The former House speaker’s anti-populist, anti-Trump message, ­reiterated in a speech in California recently, is hopelessly out of tune with the times: Former President Donald Trump’s rise, after all, “resulted, in part, from the party’s and the movement’s failure to conserve much of anything apart from the happiness of donors.” Nor is there much appetite among 2020’s Republican electorate for Ryan’s mix of tax cuts, foreign adventurism and preemptive culture-war surrender: “Most younger, white, Hispanic and lower-income Republicans lean populist in their economic preferences” but conservative culturally.

Christian Baker: Why I Didn’t ‘Bake That Cake’

At First Things, Jack Phillips, the evangelical baker whose refusal to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding was vindicated by the Supreme Court in 2018, explains his fateful decision: “My beliefs don’t have to be your beliefs. But my beliefs are what make me who I am. My commitment to God and to the truth of a book I believe to be his holy Word is the defining premise of my life, the focus of my faith and the guiding directive for my actions. If you ask me to separate all of that from my work, from my decisions, from my art . . . I simply can’t do that. Not just won’t — can’t.”

 Compiled by The Post Editorial Board