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Conservative: Trump Is Making Us Freer
“By now, two months into [Donald] Trump’s second term, I had expected to be embarrassed and outraged by our new president,” reports USA Today’s Nicole Russell. Instead “I feel lucky” to “witness to some of the most radical changes ever attempted in the federal government.” “President Joe Biden drove the country to the far left, losing control of our borders” and “driving up the budget deficit and the national debt.” Meanwhile, “from taxes and the economy to the border and government efficiency, Trump is driving ideas that will restore liberty and promote prosperity.” “My litmus test for Trump’s efficacy” isn’t “normalcy,” but whether he’s “supporting ideas and policies that make my family and me more free.” “Trump is doing exactly that.”
Ed watch: Good Riddance to DEI Statements
The University of California has announced its campuses will “no longer be able to require diversity statements in hiring,” cheers Duncan Hosie at the Los Angeles Times. That’s an “important win for the principle that universities should be engines of inquiry, not theaters for ideological performance.” “Rather than fostering diversity in a broad, humanistic sense, the statements morphed into ideological litmus tests — bureaucratic hurdles cloaked in the rhetoric of inclusion.” Unsurprisingly, “diversity statements have become an easy caricature for the Trumpist right — a totem of leftist overreach that fuels the right’s destructive efforts to dismantle the modern university.” The antidote is not a reprisal from the authoritarian left, but a return to core principles like “a pluralism of ideas and a respect for disciplinary expertise.”
Eye on Albany: Behind Gov’s Energy-Tax Delay
“Governor Hochul has further delayed what amounts to a tax on energy until after the next general election,” observes the Empire Center’s Cam Macdonald. Her centerpiece “cap and invest program for greenhouse gas emissions” is now in “a data-gathering phase that won’t be complete for two more years” — “five months after she hopes to be sworn in for her second term.” The additional delay comes “more than a year” after recent climate laws’ “most impactful regulations were to be in place.” In the short term, the extra time spares energy users “the burden of bearing additional costs from cap and invest.” But it’s still “bad news for greenhouse gas emitters planning future cost inputs for their businesses.”
From the left: AOC — the Left’s Next Oops?
Picking AOC as “the face of a left populist movement is the latest episode of the longest-running television show in history, How Will the American Left Screw Up This Time?” quips Racket News’ Matt Taibbi. Why? Well, her “goofy takes need not be fatal to an economic populist enterprise,” but “what is fatal is economic populism that doesn’t know anything about economics.” Witness her mantra of “you just pay for it” on Medicare for All, or the fact that the higher taxes sloganized on the clothing she loves to model will pay for only “5% of her platform.” “Every dips–t legacy pundit in the country is cheering the AOC rallies” — which is how you know the left “is really on its deathbed. I guess it deserves to be.”
Energy: Exporting Emissions, Importing Virtue
Headlines “framed it as another Trump tariff story” when Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened a 25% retaliatory charge on energy exports to America, notes Marc Oestreich at Reason. “But the real story of the Northeastern energy crisis is more than cross-border drama.” Fact is, “U.S. regulators and lawmakers have been kneecapping American electricity production with regulation after regulation, smothering new projects in the name of preservation, wetlands, or the northeastern bulrush sedge.” Rather than build capacity, “we import Canadian power to keep the emissions off our ledgers like mafia accountants, cleverly skirting the law” while pretending we’re becoming “cleaner, greener, and smarter.” Meanwhile, our “lights flicker” and “bills climb.” “It’s a simple formula: export emissions, import virtue.” “We’re not out of energy. We’ve just outlawed reality.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board