#YouTube cancels the Senate and other commentary

Conservative: YouTube Cancels the Senate

In removing two videos from a US Senate committee hearing that note the promise of the drug ivermectin for early treatment of COVID-19, “Google’s YouTube has ratcheted up censorship to a new level,” worries Sen. Ron Johnson at The Wall Street Journal. Though the National Institutes of Health hasn’t yet recommended the “cheap and widely available drug,” some doctors are developing “protocols” that use “cheap, available and safe FDA-approved drugs to treat patients early.” Yet “censors at YouTube have decided” the public shouldn’t “hear what senators heard” and that the only medical viewpoint allowed “is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies.” Such action “represents a dark chapter in the history of medicine and journalism” that “should frighten us all.”

Labor beat: How Biden Crushed Workers’ Dreams

In a Washington Examiner series on President Biden’s decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline project, Barnini Chakraborty relays the pain and frustration of workers crushed by the action. “Democrats are supposed to support the union,” argues one worker, Richard Zwall. “One minute [Biden] would tell us, ‘I’m not going to [cancel the pipeline],’ and then he did.” Union business manager Peter Bardeson says his members “fought tooth and nail” for President Barack Obama to OK the project. One purchased his first home, only to find out a few days later he was out of a job. “It was the greatest thing watching people get the American dream, but now,” sighs Bardeson, “it’s devastating.”

Free-speech watch: The Push To Silence Foes

Issues & Insights’ editors are appalled by a New York Times reporter’s call for a “reality czar” who would lead “a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism.” “Please tell us, comrade, when the show trials begin.” Others, too, are urging the “ruling class” to “re-educate, curb and cancel the unruly masses to the right of center” and the White House “to establish various versions of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, which was itself a ministry of propaganda.” The left is “itching to shut down speech” it doesn’t agree with “under the cover of preserving and honoring ‘truth.’ ” And “these are the same people” who claimed Russians elected Donald Trump.

Libertarian: Pandemic Lessons From Disney

While California’s lockdowns have left Disneyland closed for 10 months, “every other Disney property in the world has reopened,” and there’s no evidence closures have “substantially stopped the spread of COVID-19,” observes Reason’s Zach Weissmueller. “The media savaged” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when Disney World in Orlando opened “as Florida’s case rate was rising,” but the vastly different approaches of the two states resulted in “remarkably similar” outcomes regarding COVID. Meanwhile, shutdowns have “taken a devastating toll on working-class California residents”; “the city of Anaheim, where the Mouse provides 78,000 jobs,” looks like “a ghost town.” Florida’s economy has fared better, but neither California’s restrictions nor Florida’s “more laissez-faire approach have proven effective at suppressing the virus.” Bottom line: Lockdowns are just not “effective” at halting this pandemic.

Culture critic: San Fran’s ‘Brain-Dead’ Crusade

The San Francisco school board recently announced 44 public schools named after historical figures must be renamed as part of a “holier-than-thou crusade” under the banner of “brain-dead political correctness,” laments Gary Kamiya at The Atlantic. Not only is “judging past figures by the standards of the present” both “untenable and ethically suspect,” but “renaming the schools is likely to cost the already deeply indebted district millions” without helping disadvantaged students or advancing “the cause of racial justice.” But the left has “embraced a kind of maximum-semiotic approach to cultural artifacts, in which historical context and intent are irrelevant.” Campaigns like this “must not be immune from criticism simply because they purport to fight racial injustice — that noble cause is debased by empty gestures that achieve nothing.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Adam Brodsky