Liberal: China’s in Big Trouble
China’s leaders “haven’t really been dealing with their economy’s underlying problems, they’ve been masking those problems by creating a housing bubble that will ultimately magnify the problem,” warns The New York Times’ Paul Krugman. Indeed, “Chinese investment in real estate now greatly exceeds US levels at the height of the 2000s housing bubble,” prompting worries “that the debt problems of the giant property developer Evergrande are just the leading edge of a broader economic crisis.” And its “autocratic government” is “the kind that in other times and places has tended to respond to internal problems by looking for an external enemy. And China is also a superpower.”
Woke watch: The Vice of Virtue Signaling
“When the economy goes woke, everyone gets dumber and poorer,” declares The Federalist’s Rachel Bovard. Take the Art Institute of Chicago’s mass firing of its docents — “the knowledgeable volunteers who give guided tours of the museum and its art — because they are ‘mostly older white women of above-average financial means’ ” (with time for “18 months of twice-a-week training” and “five years of continual research and writing”) and so not “demographically diverse.” This “frivolous virtue signaling” sacrifices a huge “knowledge base”: “Museum visitors of all financial, demographic and racial backgrounds” will “likely now have an audio tour shoved in their hands and told to muddle through on their own.” Argh! “Woke Inc. remains stubbornly ignorant of who this is all hurting the most.”
History desk: Don’t Cancel Jefferson’s Legacy
The “argument that historical statues are oppressing people of color in the present has become commonplace,” observes Spiked’s Paddy Hannam. The latest victim: the Thomas Jefferson sculpture in City Hall’s council chamber. Statue foes believe “America is drenched in an original sin that it cannot overcome.” Yet slaveowner Jefferson “was key to” the “legacy of liberty” from the country’s founding principles. When “Martin Luther King campaigned for civil rights, he spoke about cashing a check written by the Founding Fathers — a ‘promissory note’ about the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Activists now “view people of color as forever chained to a past they cannot escape.” But we, like King, should aim “to overcome the ills of the past, rather than insisting on being defined by them.”
From the right: Fauci’s Falsehood
“Rand Paul was right — Anthony Fauci is a liar,” blasts the Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams. “Take the word of the National Institutes of Health, which revealed” that the EcoHealth Alliance “violated the terms of its federal grant” and “conducted gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” exactly what health officials, “most notably National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, assured everyone was a preposterous falsehood.” In fact, EcoHealth apprised the NIH of its Wuhan work in 2018 and 2020, long before Fauci told Congress, in fiery July exchange with Sen. Paul, that “NIH had no hand in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s ‘gain of function’ research to mutate animal viruses to infect humans.”
Law prof: Cancel Culture’s High Price
At Quillette, Yale Law’s Peter H. Schuck slams MIT’s “cowardice in the face of intimidation and threats by self-righteous students and their faculty allies.” It had invited U. Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot to lecture “on climate and the potential of life on other planets,” but canceled over complaints that he’d written that “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” on campuses today “violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.” But Princeton faculty then invited him to give the talk there, and “thousands of students signed up” to attend, Schuck cheers. DEI in fact entails “strict regimes of affirmative action based on race, ethnicity, gender, and a few other attributes,” while cancel culture’s “orthodoxies” yield “less genuine diversity.” So “MIT should be ashamed of its craven support for bullying — and perhaps other more principled institutions will heed this simple exemplary lesson.”— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board