DEI machine grows stronger, critics target homeschooling parents and other commentary
Harvard watch: DEI Machine Grows Stronger
“After Claudine Gay’s dismissal as Harvard president, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) complex is already regrouping,” argues Eric Kaufmann at UnHerd: The school created “an anti-Islamophobia committee alongside the antisemitism committee” and “nominated an anti-Zionist” to help lead the antisemitism group.
“Faced with pushback from outside its walls, the university has circled the wagons.”
Indeed, “the DEI complex on campus is shape-shifting, hiding affirmative action under misleading euphemisms here, bolting on some anti-antisemitism there.”
And donors aren’t “anti-woke heroes”: “They have punished elite universities for alleged antisemitism rather than their poor record on freedom.”
“So long as our highest moral ideals and sacred taboos revolve around racism, sexism and LGBT-phobia, elite institutions will be incentivized to push the identity politics agenda.”
From the right: Biden Erodes Medicare Advantage
“It’s the Biden administration, not Republicans, which is cutting Medicare Advantage benefits and threatening high-quality health care for seniors while making the debt even bigger in the process,” warns Drew Johnson at Fox News.
“The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will release a boring-sounding ‘rate notice’ relating to Medicare Advantage in the coming weeks” that could “further incentivize seniors to move away from Medicare Advantage plans and toward traditional Medicare fee-for-service.”
Last year, CMS hid “stealthy cuts to Medicare Advantage” and “famously messed around with Medicare Advantage’s star rating program.”
“These changes could squeeze $600 million to $700 million out of Medicare Advantage in 2025. All of this makes Medicare Advantage less appealing to seniors, which is a bad deal for the rest of us as taxpayers and future retirees.”
Education: Critics Target Homeschooling Parents
“Homeschooling is surging, as parents want more agency over their child’s education,” cheers Reason’s Aaron Garth Smith.
With an estimated 4.7% of kids now homeschooled and “public school enrollment down by nearly 1.3 million students” from pre-pandemic levels, status-quo defenders are “taking notice and calling for more oversight.”
They focus on states where it seems child-abusing parents “took advantage of lax homeschooling laws to hide their abuse from authorities,” but deeper analysis shows “no evidence that homeschool abuse is even a problem to begin with.”
Plus, “homeschool regulations might not protect kids from abuse” but “they do increase administrative burdens, infringe on curricular choices, and subject families to harassment” by regulators.
Rather than “worrying about homeschoolers, policy makers should figure out why millions of students are leaving public schools in the first place.”
Conservative: Sue Those Traffic-Blocking Goons
“Did you know you have a right to snarl traffic?” asks The Wall Street Journal’s Jason L. Riley sarcastically.
“Me neither.” Yet officials at Washington’s Reagan National Airport seem to “think it’s embedded in the U.S. Constitution”; a traffic alert they sent “warned travelers to expect delays “due to [an anti-Israel] group in vehicles exercising first amendment rights in roadway.”
For months, “demonstrators have been throttling highways and byways across the nation.”
In New York, a man dubbed “Mr. Brooklyn” had to push protesters away to get through.
Few are prosecuted, but attorney Ted Frank at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute believes victims can sue to stop them.
One problem: Victims fear reprisals. Hmm: “Maybe Mr. Brooklyn is available.”
Court beat: Get the Homeless off Our Streets
“The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, dealing with whether the homeless have a constitutional right to camp on public property,” notes Judge Glock at City Journal.
“The Court may soon overturn rulings by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that have greatly contributed to the West Coast’s homelessness crisis.”
Even “Left Coast” progressives have opposed the rulings, which “resulted from pure political preferences, untethered to legitimate constitutional grounds.”
The Ninth Circuit judges “seemed to think that they were being compassionate to the homeless” but, instead they “wound up worsening the very crisis that they hoped to prevent.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board