From the right: Enough with the Secular Saints

Commentary’s Sohrab Ahmari poses a pointed question in the wake of the Parkland massacre: “What does a decent society owe to the victims and survivors of major disasters and mass violence?” Liberal activists and the news media “instantly elevate” them “to the status of civic or secular saints, whose victimhood supposedly renders their opinion on public affairs unimpeachable.” Coverage of the March for Our Lives activists has been “reverent, full of awe and piety and sacred devotion—the kinds of emotions that used to be reserved for, well, religious subjects.” The goal, he says, is to “short-circuit debate about matters over which reasonable Americans might otherwise disagree.” But while victims and survivors “can alert us to injustice” and “awaken our moral indignation,” they “can also be wrong.”

Law prof: Repealing 2d Am. Weakens Constitution

Noah Feldman at Bloomberg finds it “understandable” that retired Justice John Paul Stevens wants to repeal the Second Amendment, given what they both consider the Supreme Court’s “misinterpretation of it to protect gun sales.” But such a move “just because the Supreme Court got it wrong” would be “a terrible idea.” It undercuts “the very idea that the justices have the authority to interpret the Constitution to apply and expand basic rights.” The Bill of Rights, of which the Second Amendment is a part, “has been around since 1791 without alteration. That very antiquity strengthens its protections — all of them.” And “opening the Pandora’s box of changing our fundamental rights . . . threatens the very structure of the Bill of Rights itself.”

Policy expert: Prez Should Reject Diversity Mandate

Energy Secretary Ryan Zinke is being hammered by liberals and the news media for allegedly saying (he denies doing so) that diversity is “not important.” If true, though, City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald says President Trump should offer Zinke “loud and unequivocal support” for rejecting “identity politics in favor of meritocracy.” Yes, “sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t.” But “it doesn’t matter,” because “diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal.” That, however, “constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom” of Washington and the elites. So Zinke is under attack for reportedly embracing “Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind, merit-based society” — a notion that was “once the definition of fairness” but now is considered “vicious and intolerable.”

Conservative: Bolton on Korea ‘Nixon in China’ Moment?

For all his “outwardly hawkish rhetoric,” suggests Ed Rogers at The Washington Post, National Security Adviser John Bolton “is an accomplished diplomat” with “experience that will serve this administration well.” And when it comes to North Korea, he may prove to be “a man who has met his moment.” Pyongyang has no more aggressive critic than Bolton “and the North Koreans know it.” So do Republicans — and while they “would have never accepted a deal made by President Barack Obama,” Bolton is a different matter. He also “has a track record of proving his critics wrong.” So while he might not be able to keep President Trump from tweeting, “maybe he can stop Kim from launching a nuclear warhead.” Ironically, notes Rogers, that “may prove easier.”

Political scribe: Trump Stormy Unlikely Accomplices

Reaction to the Stormy Daniels interview on “60 Minutes” has been “unusually repulsive,” complains The Week’s Damon Linker: Americans turn “thoroughly ordinary and sometimes even sordid individuals into role models, heroes and protagonists in grand, unsubtle morality plays.” Don’t fault her, though: She’s just trying to make a buck and “that’s the way things work in a culture of sleaze.” But while she’s targeting President Trump, “she’s also his accomplice in helping to transform American public life into a sewer — or rather, in transforming it into even more of a sewer than it already was. And all of those treating Daniels as a hero are her accomplices in turn.” Reacting to this “whole squalid spectacle with anything other than disgust for everyone involved [does] the country and its culture no favors at all.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann