Conservative: The Experts’ ‘Competence’ Deficit
The theme of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, “rebuilding trust,” acknowledges “that something has gone wrong,” notes Walter Russell Mead at The Wall Street Journal, and that’s a “good start.” But it “doesn’t go far enough.” Russian and Chinese attempts to steer American opinion need addressing, yet “people aren’t losing trust in their leaders because disinformation has muddled their brains,” but because “they sense that the establishment’s approach to the chief problems of the day isn’t working. This isn’t, at its core, a crisis of trust” but of “competence.” “ ‘The emperor has no clothes!’ is the cry of populists everywhere. To render this message ineffective, Davos Man doesn’t need image consultants and disinformation specialists. He needs to get dressed.”
Eye on Iowa: How Joe Boosted Donald
Donald Trump’s Iowa appeal was real, but “the entrance and exit polling also indicated that Trump is winning as much because President Joe Biden is losing, explains Tiana Lowe Doescher at the Washington Examiner. Crucially, “the overwhelming majority of Iowans” in entrance polling “said that they prioritized a candidate who shared their values or fights for people like them, with just 11% prioritizing the ability to beat Biden.” And: “Trump supporters made up 81% of those who prioritize their candidate fighting for people like them.” Why worry about the incumbent, when GOP voters “can see just how weakened the now 81-year-old Biden has become as he heads into 2024”?
From the right: Trump’s Telling Triumph
“A measure of [former president Donald Trump’s] insurmountable strength within the party is that he not only beat Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy” in Iowa, “he also overcame all of the institutional powers backing them,” argues Daniel McCarthy at CNN. “The forces arrayed against Trump are significant not only for their funding and their grassroots networks, but for the ideological commitments they represent. Voters faced a philosophical choice, not just a pick of personalities.” “The DeSantis campaign and its outside allies spent $35 million in the state” over the last year, and Haley spent “$37 million as of Friday.” “DeSantis and Haley were well-financed and politically experienced opponents,” but “as Iowa shows, even strong rivals can’t touch Trump.”
Science desk: Biden’s Measles Epidemic
“Immunization rates are declining” for measles, warns Merrill Matthews at The Hill, “and the Biden administration deserves some of the blame.” “Before the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden expressed his COVID-19 vaccine doubts.” But “once Biden won the election, he and Democrats flipped” to “a vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 or more employees and later all federal employees, including the military.” They even “oversold the benefits of the COVID vaccines.” “Mandates and broken promises helped undermine public trust not just in the COVID shots, but of vaccines generally.” Now, “the CDC is reporting the highest U.S. exemption rate ever recorded” for measles vaccines. “You can’t be a vaccine skeptic before an election and a vaccine hawk afterwards and not raise doubts among the public.”
Culture critic: Who Are the Real Haters?
Tyler O’Neil at City Journal warns that the Biden administration has “enlisted” the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) “in its crusade against ‘domestic terrorism.’ ” Famous for “suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy” in the ’80s, the SPLC now uses “a ‘hate map’ that plots mainstream conservative and Christian groups alongside chapters of the Klan.” It labels Moms for Liberty a hate group because the parents-rights outfit “opposes CRT and sexualized lessons in schools.” But the SPLC has its own ties to domestic terrorism: An SPLC lawyer faces domestic terrorism charges for participating in “a Molotov cocktail riot in Atlanta” last March and it has “defended Antifa after its members’ destructive riots in the summer of 2020.” Needless to say, “President Biden seems willing to ignore the SPLC’s troubling recent history to silence critics of his DEI agenda.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board