Hate-targeting efforts ineffective, ‘Young Guns’ era comes to close: Commentary
Campus watch: Targeting ‘Hate’ Won’t Work
“Doubling down” on the very “practices that led to the pro-Hamas fever” at universities “is sure to fail,” thunders Heather Mac Donald at The Wall Street Journal. Schools are vowing to address anti-Jewish and other “hate,” yet they have “no capacity” to do that, nor should it be their mission. “In the name of rejecting hate,” they built “DEI bureaucracies,” put certain facts “off-limits,” forced faculty to justify research in terms of “inclusion,” expanded “protected” groups and “shrank” the “haters” to “an ever smaller subset of white males.” The key problem: “The anti-Western ethos” that’s “colonized” curricula. Higher ed needs to reject “victim ideology” and counterbalance the “anti-Western ideology that undergirds the anti-Israel coalition.” Such efforts will be fiercely fought, but “on their success hangs a civilization.”
Eye on Albany: NY’s Health-Worker Imbalance
New York’s “health-care workforce is recovering unevenly from the pandemic, with persistently lower employment levels in some areas and robust growth in others,” reports the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. “Home health employment is booming” while care-home jobs are down nearly 20% from four years ago. The hospital workforce is 4% lower in areas outside New York City and its suburbs. This reflects “Covid-related disruptions” and “long-term structural changes that state officials should welcome.” Big hospitals push for increased Medicaid spending that would disproportionately “flow to the relatively well-staffed institutions of New York City,” while upstate communities facing “more acute hiring challenges would receive relatively less.” “Pumping billions more into [Medicaid] should not be Albany’s first and only answer to every issue that arises in health care.”
Israel war: The Day After the End
Israelis “want to know how, apart from defeating Hamas” their nation “defines victory. What, they ask, does the day after look like,” notes Michael B. Oren at Sapir. First? “Gaza’s demilitarization. No more rockets, rocket factories, or underground arsenals.” “Gaza must also be separated from Israel by a cordon sanitaire” and “be internationalized” — the “responsibility of the international community, above all the United States.” But no task “will be more onerous than establishing a benign and responsible Palestinian leadership.” “The Palestinians will first have to accept America’s formula of ‘two states for two peoples’ ”. “The attainment of security and peace will help justify the vast sacrifices Israelis have made. Only then, will October 7 indeed have a day after, and many hopeful days after that.”
From the right: End of the ‘Young Guns’ Era
“Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement that he will resign from the chamber at the end of the year concludes the ‘Young Guns’ era”: He, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor were meant to be “the party’s future” back in 2010, recalls Henry Olsen at National Review. “Under their leadership, government was supposed to get smaller in relative size, and our budget deficits were supposed to be shrinking. Instead, the federal government is ballooning, and our deficits have exploded.” The problem: “Their indifference toward cultural issues meant they were out of touch with . . . their voters.” “Republicans are crying out for practical, principled leaders who can get things done and share their values and priorities. The Young Guns didn’t share the latter and have thus been thrust aside.”
From the left: Sue Away at NewsGuard
Racket News’ Matt Taibbi cheers the Daily Wire/Federalist lawsuit against “the Global Engagement Center, the State Department organization ostensibly dedicated to countering ‘foreign state and non-state propaganda.’ ” That suit alleges State “sponsored NewsGuard and the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index as ‘censorship enterprises’ targeting domestic speech, in direct violation of its charter,” making it a fine “bookend” to the left-leaning Consortium News suit that argues “the Pentagon funded NewsGuard to censor its critics.” It’s government censorship by proxy: When NewsGuard “takes government money and announces an intention to create ‘white lists’ for some [media outlets] and ‘cut off revenues’ for others, that’s the opposite of a ‘marketplace of ideas.’ ”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
