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Iconoclast: Make America Normal Again
“Beneath the folds of each of our two political parties, a hidden party struggles to emerge,” argues Francis Buckley at RealClearPolitics, eager to “Make America Normal Again.”
The Democratic Party’s “continued existence depends upon” these voters, but it must “become the party of the people it cast out” and “compete for the votes of people with whom they lost touch” — Catholics, union workers, parents with young children.
Dems will have to “abandon the conceit that their opponents are either bigots or stupid.” The hubris that “nearly destroyed the Democratic Party” is strong and “can be seen in the Trump GOP.”
MANA Democrats are needed “because the alternative of a one-party state cannot be good for the country.”
Ed desk: Colleges’ Trump Challenge
“U.S. college campuses have been humbled” by the Trump win, observe Ilya Shapiro & Noam Josse at City Journal, as “students’ dismay at Trump’s victory contrasts with their jubilant, headline-grabbing anti-Israel activism.”
Indeed, “the 2024 election was a profound rebuke of the wokeness that universities have unleashed in the last decade.”
Campuses are “the last bastion of support for ideas such as racial preferences and speech codes.”
If “the illiberal takeover of higher education proceeds apace,” then “these institutions will become increasingly irrelevant in American public life.” (Yes: “Ravings about decolonization and gender theory are nonstarters for ordinary Americans.”) Trump has a mandate “to help halt the ongoing radicalization of America’s colleges and universities.”
Climate beat: Rich Nations’ ‘Immoral’ Shell Game
Wealthy nations have pledged to “spend $300 billion annually on climate reparations,” but they’re not likely to shell out any new cash, predicts Bjorn Lomborg at The Wall Street Journal.
They’ll only “do what they’ve done before: raid development funds.” Yet “climate aid is the worst way to improve quality of life or prevent deaths.” It’s “dwarfed by the good” such money could do if used for “childhood vaccines or improving crops.”
“When people need jobs and food, it is immoral to give them solar panels instead.”
President-elect Donald Trump should refocus “development spending on smart investments.”
Otherwise, “poorer nations will suffer under a sort of climate colonialism” as Western elites “take money away from the fight against poverty” to build their “climate delusions.”
From the right: Countering a Hegseth Smear
Compact’s Sohrab Ahmari debunks a New Yorker piece that cites anonymous sources to claim Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth “ ‘was forced to step down’ as president of the advocacy group Concerned Veterans for America amid ‘serious allegations’ of misconduct.”
In interviews, Ahmari explains, “Two former senior leaders of CVA have denied the ‘whistleblower” allegations.’ ”
Former CVA senior adviser Sean Parnell slammed the claims as “complete fabrications”; another vet said the “false allegations” were “made by a group of disgruntled employees fired by Pete.”
He left after disagreeing with funders over policy, they say, and Ahmari argues Hegseth’s confirmation hearings should focus on “the evolution of his thinking on American security,” not “decade-old personnel smears strenuously denied by his fellow veterans.”
Conservative: Jealous Judge v. Tesla Stockholders
Delaware Judge Kathaleen McCormick in January voided Tesla’s 2018 deal to pay Elon Musk $50 billion “if Tesla did astonishingly well,” as she found the company’s board “was not sufficiently independent” and “concluded that the package was not ‘fair,’ ” recalls National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford. “Our apparatchik class” — which “is what members of the judiciary are” — doesn’t “think much of the business class” and “dislike its maverick entrepreneurs even more. They also dislike what those mavericks are paid.”
And now the “highhanded” judge has rejected “as irrelevant” two shareholder votes reaffirming the bonus, though it’s “an expression of what the owners of the company wanted for their company.”
No wonder far fewer US firms dare stay public: It “opens companies up to the impositions and depredations of an apparatchik class that may have interests contrary to those of the shareholders.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board