The allure of Hamas for women and the Democratic Party’s disconnect with public-school families: a reflection on current commentary

Liberal: Dems Losing Public-School Families

“A new spirit of secession is fracturing our country,” warns Will Marshall at The Hill of Republicans’ embrace of school choice.

A “lingering public anger over lengthy pandemic school shutdowns” is driving an exodus from public schools.

Plus, many parents are “incensed by what they see as progressive attempts to indoctrinate their children in ‘woke’ orthodoxies around race and gender.”

“Under Clinton and Obama, the party led the fight to expand public school choice and raise academic standards,” but “the Biden administration has taken its cue on education policy from the teachers’ unions, which myopically defend the K-12 status quo.”

If Dems shift back to “reinventing America’s public schools,” they “can reaffirm their historic role in cultivating civic unity and forging democratic citizens.”

Libertarian: Labor Board vs. Free Speech

The National Labor Relations Board “sees virtually no limit to its powers to police executives’ speech,” thunders Reason’s Eric Boehm.

One of its in-house administrative judges just ruled that “Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had violated federal labor law by expressing anti-unionization views during several televised interviews.”

Huh? “The First Amendment protects Jassy’s right to talk about those things and federal labor law allows employers to discuss unionization as long as they are not harassing or intimidating employees by doing so.” Yet “none of that matters to the NLRB.”

And the “ruling in the Amazon case sits awkwardly alongside other recent rulings by the NLRB that gave wide leeway to employees’ speech about similar topics,” such as forcing “Amazon to rehire an employee who had been sacked after directing an expletive-laden tirade at a fellow worker.”

Convention beat: The DNC’s Anti-Protest Plot

“With campus protests over the war in Gaza raging and Biden being disrupted nearly everywhere he goes,” organizers of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago “are plotting on how to preempt opportunities for heckling and quickly tamp down demonstrators who do get into the arena,” reports Politico’s Jonathan Martin.

“Some in Biden’s orbit are aggressively pushing to make the 2024 conclave a hybrid production” of “in-person speeches” and “a mix of pre-recorded testimonials and videos.”

One big problem: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “unabashedly sympathizes with protesters.”

“It’s the prospect of disorder outside and inside the arena this summer that so alarms Democrats, because either display could hand Republicans fodder.”

Conservative: Beyond RFK Jr.’s ‘Brain Worm’

Seizing on the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once claimed a parasite had compromised his cognition, National Review’s Jim Geraghty finds “a serious point burrowed in, worm-like, the wisecracks: “None of the three major presidential candidates have released their medical records.”

Hmm: “Before you turn over the keys to the Oval Office . . . wouldn’t you like a little documentation that their noggin and everything else is working the way it should?”

Beware: History proves “that a candidate can get a doctor to write just about whatever he wants them to write.”

So: “A note from a doctor just isn’t something we can trust anymore. But medical records — those are hard to fake or spin. Either your vitals are within normal ranges, or they aren’t.”

Campus watch: Why the Ladies Love Hamas

“The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria,” notes City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald.

Why? Well, “women constitute majorities of both student bodies” and the “metastasizing student-services bureaucracies”; “humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female.

“Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity.”

Worse, “administrators’ prolonged paralysis in dealing with them” will “confirm their participants’ self-importance” — “graduates will take this self-importance with them into what used to be called the real world, now being remade in the image of intersectional theory, with the same teary, excitable females leading the way.”

— Compiled by the Post Editorial Board