A boom market for wallet inspectors

Jeremy Peters — the reporter who found Elon Musk’s politics an unfathomable mystery — discovers that Republican complaints about CANCEL CULTURE may not have been made entirely in good faith:

As conservatives fought against cancel culture on college campuses, they developed a particular fondness for the First Amendment. It was un-American, they argued, to punish someone for exercising their right to speak freely.

Today, however, many of those same conservatives, now in power in state and federal government, are behind a growing crackdown on political expression at universities, in ways that try to sidestep the Constitution’s free-speech guarantees.

President Trump and Republican lawmakers say that new laws and policies are necessary to protect students from harmful and objectionable content, to prevent harassment and to discourage conformity.

To that end, Mr. Trump has threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of federal dollars from universities because they moved too slowly to quell protests that left many Jewish students feeling threatened. And Republicans in state legislatures have drafted sweeping prohibitions against classroom “indoctrination” and the display of certain L.G.B.T.Q. symbols. They have also demanded the removal of art they consider inappropriate.

Well, baby steps — better to figure this out belatedly rather than just ignoring it and continuing to tout Donald Trump as President Free Speech a la Matt Taibbi, I suppose.

And now, the punchline, and it’s such a perfect cameo I wonder if Peters is actually in on the joke this time:

Some conservatives said this kind of action is overdue and unsurprising.

“When you take federal funds, you agree to abide by all kinds of rules,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Universities agree, for instance, to abide by certain accounting standards and anti-discrimination policies.

Those rules are not always enforced consistently, Mr. Shapiro said. Nor is the Trump administration “exactly being legally precise” in a lot of what it has done, he added.

“But part of this vibe shift that elected Trump is wanting law and order in a lot of ways,” Mr. Shapiro said. “And that includes on college campuses.”

Not exactly being precise indeed. Whatever the vibes, “there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect” is always the reactionary ethos.

In closely related news, Bari Weiss University is saturated with people with connections to the world’s preeminent forum of free discourse, Victor Orbán’s Hungary. There must be a sophomore poised to destroy the First Amendment by suggesting to a student reporter that calling baloney and Miracle Whip between two Hostess Ding Dongs a “banh mi” is kind of insulting somewhere.