“Twitter faces the ‘nightmare’ of being forced into free speech,” snarks Jonathan Turley at The Hill. Its board of directors “unanimously voted to swallow a ‘poison pill’ to tank the value of the social media giant’s shares rather than allow billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company.” It wasn’t just fending off a hostile takeover: “Twitter and many liberals are apoplectic over Musk’s call for free speech protections on the site.” Censorship “is not value maximizing for Twitter, but it is status enhancing” for its executives. The public wants “access to an open, free forum for discussions,” so it stands to reason its profit-seeking shareholders do too. But “the company has become captive to its executives’ agendas.”

“Whatever the final outcome,” argues Joel Kotkin at UnHerd, France’s elections show “the essential political conflict of our time”: “corporate oligarchy” and “regulatory clerisy” vs. “small-business owners” and the “service class,” driven by the global “erosion of opportunity” that’s left us “sleeping on a volcano” (to quote Tocqueville). Inflation at a 40-year high has revealed that “the progressive classes live in a kind of fantasy world” (witness “the Biden administration’s response”) but “conservative parties” suffer “addiction to market fundamentalism . . . and a worship of capital’s prerogatives,” while “neoliberalism . . . now means for most people an inevitable diminishment of living standards.” “We do not know when or if the volcano will erupt, but the prospect of it erupting will be with us for the foreseeable future.”

“Europe has been much more welcoming” to 2022’s 5 million Ukrainian refugees than it was to the 2015 wave, when “only 1.3 million people, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq,” prompted “political convulsions on the Continent,” reports The Wall Street Journal’s Jillian Kay Melchior. Part of the contrast: “In 2015 Europeans legitimately feared that terrorists and Islamist radicals would come to Europe. . . . There’s no similar risk with Ukrainians.” More: “Men were some 73% of the asylum seekers in 2015,” whereas the Ukrainians “are almost all women, children and men over 60. Europeans admire the Ukrainians’ fighting spirit and understand they can help by sheltering soldiers’ wives, children and elderly kin.” Though “a wave of effectively single mothers and their children poses its own difficulties,” notably “dependency.”

“Lots of people in the left-of-center mainstream media fume about shallow, uninformed celebrity candidates and how these fame addicts aren’t truly committed to doing the work of being a legislator, and then give all their attention and airtime to shallow, uninformed celebrity candidates,” grumbles National Review’s Jim Geraghty. Case in point: Gail Collins’ New York Times summary of the Ohio and Pennsylvania GOP Senate primaries whinged that voters will “choose between the President Trump-endorsed J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz ‘or a half-dozen alternatives without reality-TV careers’ ” without bothering to mention “any of their names.” On Ohio, “Collins couldn’t even be bothered to mention the polling frontrunner,” Marine vet and former state treasurer Josh Mandel.

“Inflation’s return marks a tipping point,” declares the Hoover Institution’s John H. Cochrane at Zawya: “A lot of wishful thinking will have to be abandoned, starting with the idea that governments can borrow or print as much money as they need.” Now that spending must come from current or credible future tax revenues; more stimulus will only bring more inflation, since “our economies are now producing all that they can.” Getting real long-term growth requires “unleashing supply” — meaning a recognition that regulations “have direct costs that cannot be offset by printing more money.” “The era of wishful thinking is over. Those who come to grips with that fact now will look a lot less foolish in the future.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board