Libertarian: No Need to Break Big Tech
Monday’s “massive outage” is the latest sign Facebook “is clearly in trouble and the government doesn’t need to step in,” argues Reason’s Robby Soave. A “month of disastrous news coverage” after a whistleblower leaked internal documents “fueled a new wave of criticism from tech skeptics,” but “the case for breaking it up is weaker than ever” as the social-media giant “crumbles.” The outage, which also affected its Instagram app, “was so bad that Facebook employees couldn’t even get inside the company’s headquarters: The security systems were part of the same network.” And the revelation that it’s “desperate to attract” young users shows “Facebook’s relevance is probably fading.” It’s “not in control of our lives, our economy or our democracy” — despite “mainstream media’s cynical attempts to convince the public otherwise.”
Conservative: The Left’s Threat to Democracy
America faces an “existential constitutional crisis,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker, and it “owes at least as much to sustained antidemocratic behavior on the left and across much of the ruling classes as it does to the actions of a bombastic former president.” Notably, “the people who want to stop Donald Trump . . . themselves have been traducing political norms at least since he first came down that escalator in 2015,” and not just with “the Russia fabrications.” If he’d “been able to flip three states” to win in 2020, “Does anyone think . . . this ‘resistance’ movement . . . would have accepted it?” Until those on the left “acknowledge their own role in the undermining of democratic legitimacy, the crisis will only deepen.”
Media watch: Politicizing the Pandemic
A New York Times piece titled “Red COVID,” fumes Jeremy Beckham at Glenn Greenwald’s Substack, “obscures the reality of the pandemic and manipulates data in favor of a self-congratulatory liberalism.” The article claimed counties that “voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump had more than a four-fold greater mortality rate than” counties that “decisively voted against Trump.” But the Gray Lady’s “crude” analysis “failed to adjust or account for age,” the “strongest predictor” of COVID mortality. Consider: “Republican voters tend to be older than Democratic voters. And rural counties, where Trump won by the largest margins, have older populations than suburban and urban counties.” The piece was “rife with sloppy data analysis” — so it’s laughable that it blames vax rates on a Republican Party “hostile to science and empirical evidence.”
From the right: The End of Team Biden
At Spectator World, Roger Kimball suggests Oct. 4, 2021, as the date “that signaled the beginning of the end” for Team Biden. That’s when supposedly “moderate” Attorney General Merrick Garland penned a memo that will go down in “infamy,” ordering “the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools, citing (completely unnamed) ‘threats.’ ” What’s really at issue is the criminalization of dissent: As Mary Chastain notes at Legal Insurrection, Garland & Co. “want to figure out how to deal with parents who have the nerve to be involved in their child’s education.” Apparently that, snorts Kimball, “must be met by nationalizing the police power of the state and stomping down on any resistance” as if it were “domestic terrorism.”
Mideast eye: Israeli Strike at Iran Back on Table
Israel “is making serious contingency plans to move unilaterally against Iran, should it become necessary,” notes Ilan Berman at National Review. The step “has never been Israel’s preference,” and the goal would be only “to cause temporary setbacks and complications to Tehran’s path toward the bomb.” But “Iran’s nuclear program isn’t standing still,” and Tehran seems to think “time is on its side.” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett just said it outright at the United Nations: “We will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.” If Israel does strike, predicts Berman, “it will be because the United States and its international partners did not take Iran’s nuclear program, or Israel’s concerns, seriously enough.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
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