Ivies’ death is opportunity, ‘community’ shills for Wall St. and other

Opinion

editorial

By Post Editorial Board

Campus watch: Ivies’ Death Is Opportunity

“Those who still believe that Harvard, or Penn, or Yale, or any of our other venerated universities are salvageable will likely experience disappointment,” argues Tablet’s Liel Liebovitz. “As long as the DEI machinery continues to hum, it will offer preposterous courses, exclude groups it finds undesirable, excommunicate its foes, and expunge all but the beliefs it champions” — and removing its “apparatchiks from every major institution may be too tall a task.” Indeed, “the struggle to eliminate DEI isn’t about subtracting one or two university presidents.” But this “collapse isn’t a tragedy. It’s an opportunity”: “Our more promising thinkers are already crossing the Charles River for more fertile environs,” like the University of Austin or Florida. “Let’s follow them there instead of chasing Harvard’s lost excellence.”

From the left: ‘Community’ Shills for Wall St.

“Last July, the Federal Reserve and other financial regulators proposed rules on bank capital standards,” notes The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, requiring some “banks to hold more capital against loan losses” to discourage “the kind of high-profit/high-risk banking practices that crashed the economy in 2008.” That would ding profits, so “the big banks have mounted an all-out war against these rules, using community organizations, small businesses, and civil rights groups as fronts,” claiming this would impact “worthy activities such as lending to small businesses and low- and moderate-income homebuyers.” But the rules “apply only to the 33 largest banks, which do a minuscule share of the nation’s mortgage lending” and would “raise the banks’ own cost of funding loans by just 0.03 percentage points.” Shame on groups “including the NAACP and the Urban League” for sharing these lies.

Conservative: Biden’s Foolish LNG Freeze

The White House pause on “new permits for exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, is a desperate move by a desperate president,” thunders Rupert Darwall at The Spectator, a pander to climate activists who won’t admit that if “American producers of natural gas are prevented from meeting European demand,” other suppliers, like Qatar, will step in. “America’s European allies have been desperately seeking to end their dependence on imported Russian gas,” since in 2022, Putin slashed “gas supplies in an attempt to soften up European resolve to support for Ukraine.” Biden’s isolationist energy policy “ignores those threats and undermines America’s allies.”

Liberal: The Lesson of Dems’ War on Nader

In 2004, the Democratic Party launched “an extraordinary . . . campaign of litigious harassment” to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot, recalls Racket News’ Matt Taibbi. “Twenty years and multiple political upheavals later, the Democrats are taking the sabotage game it played in 2004 up a notch or ten” with “the ten million criminal indictments and the recent ballot disqualification attempts” against Donald Trump. “Looking back, it’s clear Trump’s unsanctioned run and win were the violations of ‘norms’ Washington insiders were most furious about. Now, when politicians talk about protecting ‘democracy,’ what they really mean is restoring those old barriers of entry.” If Democrats’ current “efforts fail, even more extreme action is surely coming, and ‘protecting democracy’ is the pitch they’ll use to sell it.”

Election beat: Why Is Joe Running?

“It comes too late,” laments The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., “but starting to crystallize in the press is the off-the-record question heard from senior Democrats,” especially after Donald Trump’s romp through Iowa: If Trump is “such a danger to America, democracy and apple pie, shouldn’t Mr. Biden be heeding voters, stepping aside and opening the door to a new generation of Democrats” who can “put up a better show” against Trump? If Biden “heeded the wishes of apparently 70% of voters,” he’d be freer to take some steps, such as against Iran, that might be good for the country. And fresh Dem faces could compete to take on Trump — and, “in all likelihood,” become the next president.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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