Elex desk: Big Philanthropy’s Money Move
“America’s richest foundations are pouring money” again into “a progressive organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, to provide grant funding to run local elections,” notes Steve Miller at RealClearInvestigations. Yet the outfit “became a focus of controversy” in 2020 for “helping direct hundreds of millions” in “Zuck Bucks” to elections on “a partisan basis that favored Democrats” — “allowing elections offices to work directly with progressive activist groups.” Now, “the center has refused to provide basic information about its operations.” And its current “grant-making, political foes contend, is a politically biased process that favors Democrats,” making it hard “for voters to have faith that the grants are being awarded with nonpartisan intentions.”
From the right: Dems’ Flip-Flop on Ga. ‘Racism’
“For much of 2021, every major Democrat, including President Biden, denounced the state of Georgia as a racist disgrace when its Republican-controlled state government enacted an election-reform law that they insisted was a voter-suppression effort and ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ ” recalls National Review’s Jim Geraghty. Major League Baseball even pulled the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta. Yet “the state’s African Americans reported great satisfaction and trust in their voting experience” in 2022, and “just about every major southern Democrat” now wants Atlanta to host the 2024 Democratic National Convention. So: Georgia is “too racist” to host the All-Star Game but “not too racist” to host the Dem convention? This “reeks of shameless political opportunism.”
Scholar: A Turning Point for US Academia?
“A large majority of the faculty — seventy-one of ninety-two members — have called on university president Fayneese Miller to resign” over Hamline University’s firing (after a single student’s complaint) of a prof who had, with advance warning, “shown two images of the Prophet Mohammed in her online art history class,” observes Peter W. Wood at Spectator World. “Are even liberal faculty exhausted with efforts to suppress intellectual freedom and procedural fairness?” This follows a Jan. 16 faculty letter explaining to students “that classrooms are sometimes ‘challenging’ and ‘uncomfortable.’ ” Wow: “I hope the backlash that has started at Hamline will catch on.”
Conservative: A Failed Political Prosecution
Was Mark Houck “targeted by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department to score political points?” asks The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. He’s just been found not guilty in what “never should have become a federal case.” Houck “for years has prayed and protested outside . . . a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia”; the feds charged him under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act for allegedly shoving a volunteer escort in 2021 — after “local police filed no charges.” Nor did Philly’s progressive DA Larry Krasner, as “Houck said he pushed” the volunteer “because he was harassing his 12-year-old son.” And: “The FBI didn’t arrest this public enemy until Sept. 23, 2022—almost a full year after the altercation,” sending armed agents to Houck’s home “as though he were a violent gangster.” The raid, less than two months before the midterms, seemed “calculated to send a political message.”
Gadfly: Lame SCOTUS Leak Hunt
The leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs case overturning Roe v. Wade “threatened the internal deliberative process on which the Court relies for its day-to-day functioning and spurred illegal protests outside the homes of justices,” huffs Ben Weingarten at Newsweek. But after a fruitless probe, no one will pay “any price whatsoever for doing incalculable damage to the Court and igniting a firestorm that almost resulted in the assassination of a Supreme Court justice.” Chief Justice John Roberts should’ve used “every available means to find the leaker, bring him/her to swift and overwhelming justice, and do so publicly as a deterrent to any such future malfeasance.” But the investigation didn’t press the justices themselves: “The system protects its own.” Roberts has “further undermined the institution with this failed probe.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
