From the right: GOP Isn’t Doomed by Demographics

Republicans are constantly being warned of looming “demographic disaster” — that their struggles with minority voters will render the party unelectable. But at Bloomberg, Ramesh Ponnuru reads through some new studies and says doom is far from a sure thing. For one, intermarriage and integration may mean many Hispanic voters won’t identify as such in the future. Second, analyst Sean Trende suggests, according to Ponnuru, “that black voting patterns are returning to their pre-Obama norm, and Democrats will be hard-pressed to regenerate the excitement that greeted the first black president.” And third, time might also close the growing gap among now-young voters: “Will age, and the marriages and mortgages that accompany them, pull these voters toward the Republicans?”

Media watch: NYT’s Fake News in Story on Fake News

New York Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles over the weekend described Facebook’s Watch project as “a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like ‘Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families.’ ” Far-right conspiracy? At Tablet, Liel Liebovitz sets her straight: “Read the real news, and you’ll learn that, in 2017, the PA doled out more than $347 million to families of terrorists who had murdered Jews, increasing the amount to $403 million this year.” It’s one thing for idiots online to share obviously false nonsense, Liebovitz writes. “But we need journalistic institutions like the Times precisely because we trust them to be more discerning, to sift through the stream of falsehoods for the few glittering nuggets of hard truth.”

Conservative take: ADL’s Hypocrisy on Pompeo

Dems have rallied around opposition to Mike Pompeo’s nomination as secretary of state. But some of the attacks on the current CIA director are unfair and hypocritical, notes Sohrab Ahmari at Commentary. In particular, he points out that the Anti-Defamation League, which is now led by a former Obama staffer who doesn’t hide his anti-conservative bias, is hitting Pompeo for saying the same things the ADL itself has said. “The ADL fulminates against Pompeo for suggesting that some American Muslim organizations don’t go far enough in condemning terrorism and the ideologies that inspire it,” Ahmari writes, yet the ADL has done so “in terms that have been as harsh if not harsher than Pompeo’s.” Same is true for the ADL’s critique of his focus on homegrown Islamic terrorism. “If Pompeo’s remarks are beyond the pale, so are the ADL’s positions.”

Tech file: Social-Media Empires Starting To Crumble

“When a dreamer alienated by the big social networks would start a new one, the internet would make fun of them for a while and then let the thing die in peace,” Ben Smith recalls at BuzzFeed. But now something’s changed: “Having grown unprecedentedly large,” networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter “became toxic and subject to manipulation. The attempts to rein in the ultimately ungovernable has meant that the platforms may become more like launching pads, spinning off niche networks of the disaffected.” We were riveted by Facebook’s congressional hearings, Smith says, but “it is possible that scale and centralization are just yesterday’s and today’s problems in this landscape of media and politics. Tomorrow’s may involve the birth of a fragmented new ecosystem with no Silicon Valley headquarters and no executives to grill.”

From the left: Comey Memos Won’t Hurt Russia Inquiry

Democrats’ warnings that the release of James Comey’s memos on his discussions with the president will hurt Bob Mueller’s investigation are reasonable but wrong, explains The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. That’s because “so much of their content was publicly known from Comey’s public testimony last year, his recently released book, and his public appearances.” If anything, “they bolster his credibility, because contemporaneous accounts are considered more accurate than recollections.” But that won’t necessarily be true for other leaks, which is why the GOP shouldn’t make this a habit: “If the Department of Justice accedes to future requests, it might give potential targets of the investigation a heads up on information they shouldn’t have access to yet.”

— Compiled by Seth Mandel