Eye on ’28: Yes, AOC Is a Real Threat
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “boasts three indispensable factors for a successful presidential race: national name recognition, the capacity to raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and insatiable media interest,” observes Mark Halperin at The Free Press. She “understands that modern politics is part ideology, part organization, and part show business, and she does not pretend to be offended by the performative superficialities of the profession.” And if she’s “the dominant progressive candidate” in the primaries, she could keep “accumulating delegates while her establishment rivals carve each other up.” So “the question increasingly is not whether she will run. It is what happens to the rest of the Democratic field if she does.”
Midterms beat: Trump’s Stump Struggles on Iran
With the Iran war in “stalemate and midterm elections less than three months away, Trump is asking voters for time,” argues the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. Witness his recent long ad lib at his Garden City rally on public safety, where he digressed to confess he’d used the military “a little bit more than I wanted to, frankly” to stop Iran from going nuclear, then latter suggested, “You have to pay a little bit more” as an unfortunate result. Argh: “Talk to any Republican strategist handling midterm races, and he will tell you that GOP voters’ biggest concern about the war is the fact that it has resulted in higher gas prices.” The speech “showed Trump struggling with the war,” as he likely will, until he “can figure out a way to extricate himself from the mess in Iran.”
Libertarian: Our Dumb Anti-Data Center Fight
“It’s a tough time to be a data center,” quips Reason’s Robby Soave. They’re essential to our future, but the rise in opposition “is rapid and sudden.” But: “Why are people so furious about buildings?” Well, they’re “falling for popular but incorrect talking points about how data centers are gobbling up resources.” Supporters “need to do a better job explaining to the public that they create huge amounts of value, for the country overall as well as the communities where they’re built,” like noting that “they generate so much money for Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, that the local government was able to cut everybody else’s property taxes.”
Conservative: Arday the Martyr?
The left’s rush to blame the “racism” of the “mainstream media” for the alleged “lynching” of “disgraced Cambridge professor” Jason Arday is a “blood-curdling, inflammatory lie” with “showtrial” overtones, thunders Spiked’s Tom Slater. The “attempt to turn Arday into a saintly victim of a racist press” serves “as a platform on which to pursue pre-existing political agendas,” including the “rotten, racist ideology of DEI.” Yes, mourn Arday’s suicide, but “the truth matters”: He was not “martyred by a vicious media,” but “credibly accused of falsifying data” and passing off other people’s words as his own. Had Cambridge “refused to participate in the fantasy land” of Arday’s hagiography, “he might never have become the story of this long, hot summer.”
Humanities watch: Mellon’s Narrow Agenda
Philip Brian Harper, a top officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “the country’s largest private funder of the arts and humanities,” just addressed charges that Mellon has “embraced a vision of progressive social justice” and funded “advocacy groups designed to resist higher education reform.” But City Journal’s John Sailer finds it not much of a defense: “Harper makes clear that identity and demographics are central” to Mellon’s project now. It’s pretending that it “funds scholarship on ‘our collective understanding of the human experience’ ” — yet every grant Harper cites as evidence “deals with a demographic identity category,” meaning “race, gender, sexuality, and perhaps disability status.” Indeed: Mellon-funded fellowships overwhelmingly “focus on identity, racial groups, or trendy social-justice causes,” so “any scholar applying” will see “his best shot is to shoehorn his research into these categories” — if he can’t, don’t “bother applying.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
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