An “analysis of Justin Trudeau’s decision to institute Canada’s Emergencies Act and seize funds during last year’s trucker protests” contained much criticism, yet media accounts of it resemble “all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger,” thunders Racket’s Matt Taibbi. In the wake of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, “a new P.R. campaign was born, selling a generation of upper-class kids on the idea of freedom as a stalking-horse for race hatred, ignorance, piles, and every other bad thing a person of means can imagine.” Freedom is now “only safe . . . when doled out by ‘responsible’ people, college-trained in the art of harm avoidance.” Fact is, “Too much citizen freedom really is a problem for people like Justin Trudeau, who rightly fear a throw-the-bums-out campaign. But in democracy, bums sometimes need throwing out.”
The top “priority for educators,” post-pandemic, should be ensuring students don’t fall into the “learning loss trap” but “this is not where we find ourselves today,” laments John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot. Schools ought to be places where kids are “well prepared to be future workers” and “good citizens,” not “a playground for left-wing social justice fads or right-wing reactionary politics.” “Discrimination and ideology” have no place in schools; the chief goal instead is “grade-level proficiency in math and English.” Kids should graduate “with the academic foundations necessary for success in life and work.” So: “For the sake of future generations, let’s end the culture war on America’s schools and focus on achieving these basic goals in all our schools.”
Carmel HS just outside Indianapolis, notes Reason’s Emma Camp, “spends significantly less per pupil” — “$3,500 to $6,000” — “than public high schools in Indianapolis” but enjoys both a “massive and well-manicured suburban campus” and “71 percent of students are proficient in math, and 89 percent are proficient in reading” vs. “6 and 26 percent” in Indianapolis City Schools. “Indianapolis public high schools are failing — but it isn’t for a lack of money.” In fact, “The correlation between funding and school quality is extremely weak.” But “student poverty has a large effect on school performance,” so “it’s unlikely that two schools with very different student populations can end up with the same results — no matter how much money gets spent.”
US intelligence officials are reportedly looking at whether China’s spy balloon was “diverted off course by strong winds” rather than sent here intentionally to spy, grumbles Liz Peek at The Hill. If the aim is “to curry favor with Xi Jinping by burying China’s misbehavior, the public will be outraged,” especially those “already concerned” that President Biden “is compromised by his family’s business activities in that country.” Many are “on high alert for evidence that Biden is acting to appease Beijing”; the delay in bringing down the balloon “seemed to provide” confirmation. If the prez buys the “accident” excuse, it’ll “only reinforce speculation that Biden has some reason to go easy on Beijing.”
It was “unwise of President Biden to caution Israel” over recent legal changes that put checks on the power of its Supreme Court, argues Ruth Wisse at The Wall Street Journal. “In the absence of a written constitution, Israel’s Supreme Court insists that its power transcends the power of other branches of government”; indeed, critics argue that “the judiciary holds greater power in Israel than in any other Western democracy.” But Biden’s remarks come as the American left wants to substitute “egalitarian outcomes for equal rights” often by explicitly limiting the power of the US Supreme Court — “no surprise” given that “conservative justices seem to hold sway.” “This asymmetry is warning enough against attempts” by Americans “to interfere in the workings of a fellow democracy.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board