Why reparations won’t work, why Putin must lose and other commentary
From the right: Why Reparations Won’t Work
“Reparatory payouts” for slavery like those proposed in California, thunders Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness, “are dangerous” in our “multiracial, intermarried, assimilated, and integrated postmodern America”: They’d require “the sort of sick rules of past racialized societies such as the Old South” or “Hitler’s Germany” to determine who is black. Also: “Are whites with Confederate ancestors more culpable than Michiganders or Ohioans” for the evils of slavery? Further, “slavery itself did not enrich generations of subsequent Americans”: The Confederate states were “far poorer” than Union ones. And the “lesson from the $22 trillion record of Great Society compensatory payouts” is “that massive infusions of federal money are more apt to ensure social disruption and dislocation than alleviate them.
COVID watch: Bivalent Booster BS
Federal ads pushing bivalent COVID booster shots include “deceptive advertising,” notes The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley. The feds ordered “vaccine makers to produce” the shots and recommended “them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.” Neither Pfizer nor Moderna “conducted a randomized trial” of the new shots, instead designing “their studies to get the results they wanted. Public-health authorities didn’t raise an eyebrow.” The reality: “Covid vaccines mitigated severe illness while most Americans gained immunity through natural infection.” Even with “a growing consensus that we need better vaccines and treatments to protect those still at risk,” we “also need honest public-health leaders.”
Food lawyer: Climate Warriors Have a Cow
“Dutch livestock farmers are increasingly outraged” over a 2019 court ruling that’s forcing “thousands of them out of the business — by design,” reports Reason’s Baylen Linnekin. “The ruling ordered the Dutch government to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020”: nearly double the cuts since 1990, within just a year. (It failed.) That led to a government plan to “radically” cut the number of livestock, sparking farmers’ “fury.” Activists also target meat consumption: “We are expected to believe eating meat is callous and dumb because these increasingly vocal and bold activists tell us so,” yet “meat is no less valid or deserving of protection than any other food.” “Climate change is a problem”; “banning meat is not the answer.”
Campus beat: Penn Biden Center = Corruption
The classified docs found at Joe Biden’s old office highlight the unsavory nature of the Penn Biden Center itself, fumes Charles Lipson at Spectator World: The center was “purpose-built to give Biden’s inner circle a snug resting place as they waited for Joe to run again,” while the ex-veep’s “position there was richly paid and required almost no work.” Worse, it “provided a hidden way for donors, both foreign and domestic, to cull favor with a prospective presidential candidate, fatten his wallet, and do it all behind closed doors.” The university insists the center got no “donor funding, aside from a few thousand dollars,” but doesn’t address cash “transferred from one university account to another to mask its origins.” And Penn got some $30 million “from well-connected Chinese nationals after the Center was established.” Did Joe benefit improperly “from the many profitable contacts his family had with foreign entities, some of them corrupt”?
War watch: Putin’s Terror Must Lose
After Russia’s Jan. 14 bombing of a Dnipro residential building, which by one count killed 45 and injured 75 more, “the West needs to recognize that” while “Russia cannot win” in Ukraine, “it can continue with its genocide” until stopped by force, argues Alexander J. Motyl at The Hill. “Ukraine must receive — immediately — all the heavy weapons it needs to stop Russia and drive it out of the territories it seized.” All the “mass rapes, the kidnapping of children, numerous torture chambers, Nazi-style executions, and the wanton destruction of civilians and their homes” show that “nothing less than a Ukrainian victory will end the strategic and human rights nightmare that is Putin’s Russia,” and “a prolonged stalemate means the death of hundreds of thousands.” The West “can watch Ukrainians die and lose, or it can help Ukrainians survive and win by doing everything possible to stop Putin’s Russia now.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
