Free-marketeer: You’ve ‘Won’ a Higher Electric Bill
Yonkers residents who didn’t read an apparent junk-mail notification and opt out will be stuck with electric bills nearly 19% higher, warns James Hanley at The Wall Street Journal, as they’ll automatically get switched to “sustainable” power. “This stealthy price hike — not to mention the sneaky packaging of the official notification — evidently comes with the endorsement of Mayor Mike Spano,” who’s likely “thinking of running for governor someday and looking for ways to demonstrate his environmentalist bona fides to progressive New York state Democrats.” This move to “simply gouge those who don’t carefully read every notice they receive from the government” is “especially unfair . . . to Yonkers’ poorest residents, who already pay electricity rates more than 30% above the state average and almost twice the national average.”
Liberal: The Left Patronizes Minorities
“The left’s obsession with race is alienating minorities,” declares Debra Soh at The Globe and Mail. Some may think “the marginalized” relish “Democrats’ non-stop insistence about advancing racial justice.” But “polling data beg to differ,” and no wonder: The term “ ‘people of color,’ ubiquitous on the political left,” yokes “non-white people under the assumption that, by virtue of not being white, we are indistinguishable from each other.” It’s “racist,” and “contradictions abound”: Minorities “can have their POC status revoked and replaced with ‘white privilege’ if they succeed in society or behave in a way that leftists don’t appreciate.” Like people of all races, we don’t “appreciate being spoken for or told how to think.” Many don’t believe “race is the most important thing” about us, and we’re “tired of being lectured to by woke white people.”
Libertarian: Race Theory Is Failing Our Kids
Salinas, Calif., teacher Kali Fontanilla in fall 2020 found her English-as-a-second-language class was having big trouble with a state-mandated course on privilege, intersectionality and institutional racism, reports Reason’s Robby Soave. It had students ranking “their various identities with corresponding colored strings to create intersectional rainbows” and “hosting a mock trial where they accuse[d] various historical persons of being complicit in the genocide of Native Californians.” She says the kids also hated it: “Most of [my students] are just like, ‘Why do we have to take this class?’ ” Soave notes the “irony in requiring members of an ethnic minority to study this, and an even greater irony in the fact that such students were struggling intensely with the course.”
Conservative: Chaos Is the New Normal
“Chaos is the new, the intentional, normal. A pandemic of nihilism has been unleashed upon the land,” thunders Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness. People struggle “to buy food, gas, and cars. The police are under attack and being killed on the street. The public is bewildered about criminals not being punished, workers paid to stay home, and biological men commandeering women’s sports.” Why the madness? Well, “cognitively challenged” President Biden can’t seem to reject the agenda of “the hard Left of the Democratic Party” nourished by the hyperrich Silicon Valley donors and the “hypocritical professional classes” who bet “that their money, influence, and power will insulate them” from the madness.
Pandemic journal: Time for New Strategies
“The balance of power between human and virus is shifting,” cheer Therese Raphael & Sam Fazeli at Bloomberg Opinion: We’re “better armed against a lesser enemy,” so “it’s time for our COVID response to change.” Thank Omicron’s rapid peaks and lesser potency, plus rising levels of natural and vaxxed immunity. “The old self-isolation rules make little sense for a virus that has the severity of the common cold in most cases,” plus: “Work-from-home rules and schooling also need rethinking.” Soon, we’ll need to ask “how much vaccinating to do”: “It may be enough to offer variant-specific vaccines to over-60s and other vulnerable groups every six or 12 months, while making further vaccination optional for others.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board