Eye on DC: A Huge Change, Barely Noticed
“People have barely noticed” that Donald Trump “repealed affirmative action by executive order,” marvels Christopher Caldwell at The Free Press, though it’s “the most significant policy change of this century,” since affirmative action has been “the longest and costliest moral crusade in American history.” Had the “affirmative-action scheme been devised for anything but desegregation, it might have been considered sinister and totalitarian,” inflicting as it does “doses of remedial racism” on “20 percent of the American workforce.” That was something “the public could not tolerate and neither government nor business could avow. A climate of dishonesty was the result.” “Ten presidents managed to insulate affirmative action from public accountability. Then it became obvious to the public that changing anything would require dismantling everything.
Journalist: Dems Must Kill Lawfare Mindset
Democrats don’t need “literal murder of the lawyers who dominate the party” to return to power, muses Alexander Nazaryan at UnHerd, but must drop “the lawfare that has blinded Democrats to what politics is all about.” A “lawyerly frame of mind” led Democrats to pursue Donald Trump using “various avenues of lawfare.” “After Trump pardoned all of the J6 rioters,” progressive Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner vowed to bring his own charges, forgetting that he was elected to fight the “crime and drug overdoses continuing to plague the city.” Forget “politics by lawfare” — voters want “a Democrat who knows how to throw a punch on behalf of working people.”
Education desk: Culture Wars Cost Billions
“The culture war is costing school districts billions,” warns Reason’s Emma Camp. A report from the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access surveyed “67 school districts nationwide” about outlays on “issues such as critical race theory, book challenges, gender-related debates and other politicized topics” (which included “increased security costs,” such as hiring armed plain-clothes police to monitor school-board meetings) that totaled “$3.2 billion during the 2023–2024 school year” alone. And many “teachers, counselors, and administrators” have quit “because they did not want to work in such a divisive setting,” costing resources to find replacements. In short, culture wars, like those waged overseas, are expensive. “When the debate over school curriculum becomes a fierce, divisive fight, districts are forced to divert funding away from students and toward responding to security, legal, and public relations concerns.”
From the right: Trump’s Iconoclastic 2nd Term
“Move fast and break things” seems to be “the operating procedure of President Donald Trump in these first weeks of his second term,” and it’s been met “so far with surprisingly little backlash,” observes the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone. First was “Trump’s executive orders dismantling the misnamed diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus.” Then, his “highly publicized deportations of criminal and other illegal immigrants.” “A third change that didn’t get front-page headlines but is likely to endure” is the overturning of Biden EV regulations. “The DEI lobby,” “the open-doors immigration lobby” and “the climate control lobby” all “prevailed utterly in setting Biden administration policy.” “Now, as Trump moves and breaks things, they are responding not with a bang but a whimper.”
Tech beat: DeepSeek’s Lesson for Capitalism
“The success of DeepSeek,” China’s “more cost-effective” AI competitor, “reveals the futility of U.S. sanctions,” scoffs George Gilder at The Wall Street Journal. While Team Biden was “captured” by “the world’s most ham-handed national-security socialists,” China commands some of its “most nimble capitalists.” Their answer to US “‘Stargate’ program socialism” aimed at doing “more with more” is to “do more with less.” And by “discrediting U.S. sanctions and subsidies,” they’re “performing a service for U.S. capitalism.” Since DeepSeek uses microchips more efficiently, it’s “favorable to the U.S. economy.” Its “wafer-scale integration” foreshadows “a new epoch in the materials science behind information technology.” America’s “national-security apparatus” might back Chinese sanctions, but technology is key to “human progress” — and “intrinsically global.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
