Mideast beat: Arabs Start To See Sense on Gaza
President Trump’s threat to take over Gaza was “aimed at convincing Arab states” to produce a “tangible plan of their own,” argues Commentary’s Seth Mandel. And now Egypt and Jordan are signaling that they’re “making progress” on that: An “Egyptian-led plan” reportedly would set up temporary safe zones in Gaza. Hamas wouldn’t be invited, though it’s unclear how it would be kept out. Arab states would contribute $20 billion for rebuilding. A Palestinian administration not aligned with Hamas or the Palestinian Authority would run the strip. The arrangement, Egypt hopes, would eventually result in a Palestinian state. Such a postwar reconstruction project offers “a rare second chance not just for Palestinians but for the Arab states.” “Perhaps they’ll start pulling their weight for the first time.”
From the right: Nike’s Fake Feminism
Nike’s “first Super Bowl ad in 27 years” was “an expensive gambit that leaned into woke capitalism and fake feminism,” fumes Jennifer Sey at the Washington Examiner. The ad’s message seemed to be that “women are told they can’t win, they can’t fill stadiums, they can’t be emotional, they can’t take credit,” and should “get out there and fight the man who wants to keep you down!” But Nike was “punching at a fake enemy,” since “female athletes do all of these things and more, all the time.” “In fact, the only thing female athletes are told they can’t do these days is” say that “women’s sports must be for women only.” “Nike has never stood up for women. It just profits off of pretending to do so.”
Advocate: Sic DOGE on Feds’ Homeless Aid
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency should examine “the federal government’s sprawling network of failed homeless programs, riddled with inefficiencies and pouring billions into a crisis that only gets worse,” suggests Michele Steeb at USA Today. DOGE can expose “the vast waste in the federal homeless-industrial complex” and redirect “billions toward policies that will actually deliver results.” The Obama-era Housing First approach “institutionalized dependency” among “those battling addiction and mental illness” by stripping away “accountability.” That left taxpayers funding “a system that fails to deliver lasting results.” America needs a “Human First” approach “that restores dignity, demands accountability, and helps people rebuild their lives rather than just trapping them in a cycle of despair.”
Libertarian: Free Speech Did Not Help the Nazis
“Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan’s casual assertion “that free speech is what empowered the Nazis to take over the government,” is “a profound misreading of history,” scoffs Reason’s Robby Soave. “On the contrary,” Weimar Germany took “increasingly authoritarian steps to outlaw and censor Nazi speech during the 1920s,” but “it didn’t work,” and “when the Nazis achieved political power, they were able to use the government’s vast censorship apparatus to silence their own critics.” Progressives pretend “they’re all for free speech” then “create a new, narrow category of unprotected speech: say, Nazi speech” then broaden that “to include hate speech more generally, and extremism, and misinformation” and “in the case of Germany . . . insults about politicians.” “Americans are rightly proud of our robust First Amendment traditions” because they “stand in the way of such nonsense.”
Academic: The Price of Lost Credibility
While the Trump team’s cuts to federal research funding may slam some projects that “are rigorous, valuable, and unrelated to ideological activism,” explains Jukka Savolainen at Unherd, the hard truth is that “academia’s lack of ideological diversity and embrace of political activism made this backlash inevitable.” Indeed, “decades of contributions from heterodox scholars about the risks of ideological overreach” totals “over 80 books, essays, or other studies that predicted the loss of public trust in higher education.” Now, “If academics want to preserve federal funding, they must first restore credibility. That means recommitting to intellectual diversity, resisting ideological conformity, and acknowledging our role in fostering the polarisation that led to this crisis of confidence.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
