Hillary aide: Don’t Discount Trump’s Survival Skills
Former Clinton staffer Ronald Klain warns, “It is dangerous to underestimate” President Trump’s “survival skills” — as Democrats did throughout the 2016 campaign. For one thing, he says in The Washington Post, Trump is “an incredibly skilled politician” who “spent 30 years laying the groundwork for his run.” Moreover, “there is the power of the presidency, and Trump’s ability to use its allure as a bulwark against accountability.” He still commands the continued loyalty of his most devout supporters, while many others would just be happy to “normalize Trump and get ‘back to business.’ ” So the president “may even be at his most dangerous in ‘wounded animal’ mode.”
Crime expert: Don’t All Black Lives Matter?
The “routine taking of black lives by other blacks generates no interest in the mainstream media,” complains Heather Mac Donald at City Journal, citing a cellphone video that “didn’t make it to CNN or MSNBC”: a black man in Chicago being beaten to death with a bottle of liquor by an attacker who, despite a long criminal history, was still “on the streets committing more mayhem, contrary to the ‘mass incarceration’ conceit that black males are targeted with endless draconian punishment for minor transgressions of public order.” Last year, 4,300 people, including two dozen children under 12, were shot in Chicago, “but because the victims were nearly all black, few pay attention — besides the police.” Bottom line: “If you want fewer police in your neighborhood, make sure that people are not killing each other.”
From the left: Dems Falling for Fake News on Russia
There’s “a new and growing sector of the Internet that functions as a fake news bubble for liberals,” something Zack Beauchamp at Vox dubs “the Russiasphere.” It focuses “nearly exclusively on real and imagined connections between Trump and Russia. The tone is breathless: full of unnamed intelligence sources, certainty that Trump will soon be imprisoned and fever-dream factual assertions that no reputable media outlet has managed to confirm.” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) “was forced to apologize for spreading a false claim that a New York grand jury was investigating Trump and Russia.” His sources? The Russiasphere’s Louise Mensch and Palmer Report. We’re rapidly reaching the point, Beauchamp warnes, “where accepting the Russiasphere’s fact-free claims becomes a core and important part of what Democrats believe.”
Campus critic: Here Comes Social-Justice Math
Thanks to an online course this summer offered through EdX, “middle school math teachers can learn how to incorporate social-justice issues like racism and privilege into their classrooms,” reports Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform. Course developers claim that “setting the mathematics within a specially developed social-justice framework can help students realize the power and meaning of both the data and social justice concerns.” So it suggests math lessons like “Unpaid Work Hours in the Home by Gender” and “Race and Imprisonment Rates in the United States.” It also references “ ‘mathematical ethics,’ which refers to the notion that math is often used as a tool of oppression.” Yet developers insist “this is not an opportunity for a teacher to impose his or her beliefs on the students.”
From the right: No Protests Over SNL ‘Fat-Shaming’
Where, ask the editors of PopZette, was the feminist outrage when Saturday Night Live “used questionable means to mock” Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders? Sanders, they note “is shown as clumsy and dumb, with a particularly over-the-top Southern accent. She’s also seen midway through the sketch, coming from backstage munching on an apple.” Indeed, “even CNN’s Chris Cuomo felt the depiction of Huckabee” as fat and dumb “went too far.” But he’s been “a lone dissenting voice among a group of people who seem not to care about taste when it comes to criticizing conservatives.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann