“For decades, Western athletes, celebrities and corporations have diligently kept silent in the face of Chinese human-rights violations,” thunders Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter at The Wall Street Journal. Now that Beijing has “disappeared” tennis champ Peng Shuai and scrubbed her post that accused a former top Communist of sexually assaulting her, “The sports community must wake up — and speak up. We need to realize that the authoritarian Chinese government isn’t our friend. The Communist Party is a brutal dictatorship that has weaponized economic power to achieve ideological and political compliance.” After all, “History has shown what is possible. Bill Russell stood up against racial injustice. Muhammad Ali protested the Vietnam War. Arthur Ashe spoke out against apartheid in South Africa.”

To regain the trust they lost during the pandemic, public-health authorities like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration must confront “mission creep,” Dr. Jonathan M. Ellen prescribes at City Journal. Such institutions traditionally focused on communicable diseases, keeping food and water free of contaminants and tracking Americans’ health. Now they’ve “expanded into areas that are important — racial disparities in health care, climate change — but are better viewed as political matters” that “should not be entrusted solely” to health experts. Such issues require “a balancing of competing costs and benefits and should be decided by officials accountable to the wider public.” Public-health agencies need to “exercise more humility.”

Last week, “we quietly entered Year Three of the COVID-19 pandemic,” notes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. The “first known patient was a 55-year-old Hubei province resident, diagnosed on Nov. 17, 2019,” though Patient Zero could have been one of “the three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology” who sought hospital care that same month. Now “a minor rise in cases has a bunch of media voices warning” that “gathering for Thanksgiving dinner” would be “reckless and risky,” yet “cases are no longer the most useful measuring stick for the severity and risk of this pandemic.” In fact, while COVID cases recently rose slightly, hospitalizations and deaths declined. Stop the scaremongering: Most “hospitals have plenty of capacity to handle any post-Thanksgiving surge.”

A long New York Times Magazine essay “attempts to head off well-deserved criticism of” the “forthcoming book version of the 1619 Project,” but it looks “woven of the same wish fulfillment as the original,” snarks Peter W. Wood at The Federalist. “Several statements by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s lead author and architect,” were “contrary to established facts,” including the claims “slavery was somehow new to America in 1619,” “the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery from the threat of emancipation” and “plantation slavery was the foundation of American capitalism.” The book will “support the well-financed and deeply institutionalized effort to force on American children and adults an aggressively false account of the American past.” It’s “mythmaking of a particularly vicious sort” — “aimed at fostering racial resentment and political division.”

Kibbutzers are urging Kyle Rittenhouse to “sue those who spent the last year smearing him with lies,” reports Spencer Brown at Townhall. “Countless tweets, articles, and interviews from elected officials, so-called legal experts, athletes, and reporters . . . could be defamation suit fodder.” It’s not just CNN and MSNBC regulars: “The roster of potential targets for lawsuits include members of the Squad and President Joe Biden, who used his smear of Kyle Rittenhouse as a white supremacist in a campaign ad.” And: “In the wake of Friday’s verdict, those who lied about Kyle Rittenhouse were either silent or, more frequently, spent the afternoon doubling down on their lies.” — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board