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Victor Davis Hanson responds. (See 1 below.)
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Stratfor and Trump on China.(See below.)
Some interesting op eds:
Hillary is LurkingHearing Hillary announce a third presidential bid would be like hearing your dentist say he has to go ahead with that third root canal, and he just ran out of Novocaine. More
Democrats Brace for War over Supreme CourtThe Democrats are telegraphing they will go scorched earth to fight whomever President Trump nominates. More
Josh Dawsey, WP
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Liberals really have no desire to provide opportunities for black Americans. (See 2 below.)
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1)The Mythical Trump Hydra
Dick
1)The Mythical Trump Hydra
We forgot that hydras are mythical creatures and only the delusional believe them to be real.
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Many are the hissing heads of the polycephalic Donald Trump—at least according to the progressive Left and the NeverTrump Right, who see the president of the United States as some sort of mythical nightmare. Here are a few of his supposedly monstrous manifestations.
Trump, the Profiteer
Candidate Trump never really wanted to be president. His entire amateurish and buffoonish candidacy was designed only to enhance his brand. Once he was unexpectedly elected, Trump was more shocked than anyone, and quickly sought to maximize his profits from the Oval Office. Thus, followed the constant progressive evocation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution to prevent chronic Trump profiteering.
In reality, the Trump empire reportedly has declined by nearly $1 billion in net value, aside from the tens of millions of his own money that Trump spent on the 2016 campaign. Trump’s business interests are the most thoroughly investigated of any recent president in memory. Obama and the Clintons made millions from their presidencies; Trump may well end up losing billions.
Trump, the Liberal
NeverTrumpers insisted that the politically polymorphous Trump was lying about his hard conservative agendas during the 2016 primaries. In truth, they warned, Trump was a Manhattan liberal wolf in right-wing fleece clothing.
If ever elected, Trump would adopt progressive abortion policies, become another radical environmentalist in the fashion of a squishy Arnold Schwarzenegger, select liberal justices like his moderate federal justice sister, ignore evangelicals, and in general defer to the liberal foreign policy establishment. In sum, Trump would keep none of his conservative promises and govern to the left of the McCain wing of the Republican Party
In reality, the Heritage Foundation in January 2018 found that the first months of the Trump Administration were more conservative than any prior Republican in recent memory, including Ronald Reagan at a commensurate time in his first term. Trump’s positions on illegal immigration, deregulation, foreign policy, and social issues such as abortion and radical environmentalism are markedly to the right of most in the Republican Party.
Trump, the Russian Asset
Trump ran for president to enhance his prior partnership with Vladimir Putin. His team connived and colluded with the Russians to ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat and, in quid pro quo fashion, endangered U.S. security by giving concessions to their Russia puppet-masters. Trump admired autocrats like Putin, so it was natural that he would favor Kremlin interests rather than those of his own country. It would be embarrassing to list all the distinguished pundits who assured us, in the frenzy of May 2017, that Trump would certainly soon be indicted, impeached, or disgraced due to his slam-dunk collusion with the Russians.
In reality, Trump utterly rejected Obama Administration’s appeasement policies—the so-called Russian reset—that included a hot mic promise to be “flexible” about (read: discontinue) agreed-upon joint missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. Robert Mueller spent $32 million and 22 months to find Russian “collusion” or “obstruction” of such an investigation. Yet, Mueller’s hyper-partisan legal team found no instance of collusion and no proof that Trump could be legally indicted for obstruction of justice.
In reality, and in contrast with the Obama Administration, Trump slapped tougher sanctions on Putin’s circle; pumped far more U.S. oil and gas that helped lower world energy prices to Putin’s chagrin; killed scores of Russian mercenaries in Syria; vastly beefed up the U.S. military; jawboned NATO into spending more on collective defense against Russia, while withdrawing from asymmetrical short-range missile treaties with the Kremlin due to Russian cheating. All the former and current federal officials, who peddled the “collusion” and “obstruction” mythologies eventually were rendered as incompetent partisans who dishonestly promulgated fantasies at best and outright lies at worse—among them John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Gerald Nadler, and Adam Schiff.
Trump, the Unhinged
Donald Trump is mentally and physically ill, unfit to be president, and thus should be removed under the 25th Amendment. His ample girth, garish orange tan, and comb-over pompadour hairstyle, horrific diet, chronic insomnia, age, and stress offer proof that he is unhinged and delusional. He is a sick man, who can scarcely utter a coherent sentence and is suffering from pre-dementia as he rails about buying Greenland.
In reality, Trump easily aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which calibrates pre-dementia, administered by his presidential physician—a test that Joe Biden, presidential aspirant, might have far greater difficulty passing. In terms of age, Trump seems far more vigorous than most men at 73—and downright youthful compared to a faltering and often confused and addled 76-year-old Biden. Trump is able to speak extemporaneously for extended periods of time while holding the attention of an audience of thousands. No one seriously believed that talk of removal through the 25th Amendment was anything other than a last-ditch effort to remove Trump from office after the failure of impeachment proceedings and the Mueller investigation.
Trump, the Racist and White Supremacist
According to this narrative, and to paraphrase the New York Times, after the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Mueller investigation, progressive elites and the media scrambled hand-in-glove to resurrect a new narrative that might remove Trump from office—given that obstruction and collusion stories were exposed as partisan fantasies.
Trump expressly condemned white supremacists and Antifa thugs after the violent confrontation in Charlotte. His chief sin was saying that both those who were there to protest in nonviolent fashion white supremacists, and those who were not white supremacists but opposed the toppling of Confederate statues, were alike “fine people.” He later emphasized his disgust with and opposition to white supremacy as he has most recently following the El Paso shooting.
Trump’s real crime in matters of race and ethnicity is that, all during his pre-presidential career and during his time in office, he simply ignored race and thus felt no compunction about deriding anyone—white, black, brown, Asian, or Latino. And such equal opportunity invective and personal disparagement are seen in our race-obsessed culture as proof of “racism” and “white supremacy” by a failure to exempt the non-white.
In reality, a recent Zogby poll suggests that Donald Trump may well attract more combined Latino and black voters than any recent Republican president. The current minority unemployment rate may well be the lowest in history—a fact quietly acknowledged by millions of minority youth who for the first time in their lives are being courted by employers. Certainly, President Trump’s has not used inflammatory explicit racialist language in the fashion of Joe Biden, Harry Reid—and Barack (“typical white person”) Obama.
Trump, the Incompetent Buffoon
Trump is purportedly an utter incompetent executive. His administration is in shambles, directionless, characterized by massive firings, resignations, and utter chaos—reflective of his previous bankruptcies, failed business ventures, thrice-married personal life, and constant Twitter vendettas. The Trump economy, social policy, and foreign policy are in freefall. We will be lucky to avoid a depression or major war—or both—by 2020.
In reality, previous presidents had not achieved 3 percent annualized GDP growth since 2006, prior to the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. Unemployment is at near-record peacetime lows. Interest rates and inflation are low. Gas and oil production is at record highs. The United States is finally addressing three decades of Chinese commercial banditry and neo-imperial aggression. Most in the know privately criticized the Iran Deal and the Paris Climate Accords, but few other than Trump thought it possible to exit both. Many NATO allies are addressing broken promises to spend more on defense. Trump entered office with North Korea pointing nuclear-tipped missiles in our direction. International organizations and transnational elites are as loud in their hatred of Trump as privately many foreign bureaucrats appreciate the Trump standoff with China and his tough stance with North Korea and Iran.
The Trump, the Certain Loser
Trump was shocked by the improbable 2016 victory, and supposedly he has already accepted defeat in 2020. Indeed, he may prefer in 2021 to exit to an obscure retirement, defeated, exhausted, and repudiated. Trump accepts that he has driven the brightest Republican minds out of the party. Meanwhile, Trump supposedly disgraced conservatism by bringing in the carnival crowd of Omarosa and Anthony Scaramucci, and thus just wants everything to go away. He will go through the motions of reelection in 2020, but privately concedes that he has failed, disgraced the country, and will be happy to leave with his tail between his legs.
In fact, in 2016 the outspent Trump ran a far more efficient and effective campaign than did Hillary Clinton, especially in the field of sophisticated analytics and electronic data, in targeting swing-state voters who mattered rather than dispersing finite resources in areas that had no role in winning the Electoral College. His energy dwarfed the anemic efforts of a younger Hillary Clinton.
In 2020, Trump has already raised vast sums of money, will field an even more sophisticated team of data and social media analysts, and fully expects to defeat his Democratic opponent and use the ensuing four years to advance his agenda, by sealing the border, reforming legal immigration, forcing bilateral symmetry with China, addressing massive national debt, and translating his nationalist-populist agenda into Republican orthodoxy.
The problem is not Trump’s crisis of confidence, self-reflection or depression, but whether his mid-70s health will match his schedules.
Trump Is What He Always Was
The strange thing about these various hydra heads of Donald Trump is that very few of them were based on any empirical evidence. Instead, they revealed more about the conspiracist than the object of his conspiracy theory—namely a pathological hatred of Trump and his supporters that blinded them to the actual record of governance.
In truth, Trump was never hard to figure out. While his narcissism and ego may in part have driven him to run for president, far more important was his sense that the country was mired in stagnation and frequent self-inflicted miseries, and that his own unorthodox theories about overregulated business, Chinese cheating, European free-riding and mercantile trade policies, and overregulation would allow American free-market capitalism to lift the country out of self-induced lethargy.
Call all of that hocus-pocus or sheer craziness, but it is sincere nonetheless. Trump is what he always was: he believes that he is a self-anointed updated version of the anti-hero who claims the crude skill sets to confront the cattle barons of the world—with the full knowledge that by doing so, his beneficiaries will soon resent they ever stooped to call in such a crass outsider—a realization that explains Trump’s constant efforts to win praise and to be appreciated.
Otherwise, we forgot that hydras are mythical creatures and only the delusional believe them to be real.
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1a) Trump — or What, Exactly?
Let’s compare Trump’s policies and behavior to that of prior presidents — and to his 2020 opponents’.
In traditional political terms, there is always an alternate agenda to an incumbent president’s that reasonable voters can debate.In Trump’s case, two massive annual budget deficits — coming on top of the previous two administrations that doubled the national debt — seem fair game. No president for the past 19 years has sought to offer any remotely sane budget. And with still relatively low interest rates, massive federal spending, a $22 trillion national debt, and an annual deficit of nearly $1 trillion, it is hard to imagine, in extremis, that there remains any notion of “stimulus” or “pump-priming” left.
Yet we hear little about such financial profligacy.
Not a word comes from Trump’s critics about the need for Social Security or Medicare reform to ensure the long-term viability of each — other than the Democrats’ promises to extend such financially shaky programs to millions of new clients well beyond the current retiring Baby Boomer cohorts who are already taxing the limits of the system.
To counter every signature Trump issue, there is almost no rational alternative advanced. That void helps explain the bizarre, three-year litany of dreaming of impeachment, the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller special-counsel investigation, Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti, Trump’s tax returns, White Supremacy!, Recession! — and Lord knows what next.
The subtext of all these Wile E. Coyote all-too-clever efforts at trapping road-runner Trump is not just the wish to abort an elected presidency; they’re offering the heat of hatred rather than the light of a viable political alternative.
China
The pushback against Trump on China is that tariffs are taboo and dangerous. Perhaps. But no serious critic has offered any other strategy to counter four decades of systematic Chinese mercantilism and economic exploitation.
Do any believe at this late date that the Chinese juggernaut wishes to pause to discuss at length patent infringement, copyright violation, dumping, currency manipulation, technological expropriation, systematic espionage, or massive subsidized surpluses — given that its comprehensive assault on the international commercial order has made China the second-richest country in the world?
The Western world’s cumulative appeasement of Chinese buccaneerism since 1980 is no longer viable in 2019. At least it is not if the United States wishes to maintain its global influence, protect its allies, and ensure prosperity for its hollowed-out interior.
Yet for decades, we heard nothing but more diplomatic pabulum from the Chinese as they appeared sober and judicious at global G-something summits and left with poorly disguised contempt for their silly Western appeasers. In terms of commercial magnitude, six months of retaliatory tariffs are small beer compared with 30 years of currency manipulation, forced technological appropriation, and copyright and patent theft.
Oil and Gas
We hear little about the Trump effort to green-light more leasing and production of natural gas and oil, efforts that have already made the U.S. the No. 1 producer in the world.
For all the talk of “climate change,” does the Left tell us how many barrels of oil per day and cubic feet of natural gas they would wish to curtail, or whether the resulting higher costs for fuel, heating, and power are worth the cutbacks, or whether we wish to return to strategic dependence on Persian Gulf psychodramas? Do they have a plan to deal with Indian and Chinese coal-burning if we were to radically cut the use of clean-burning natural gas? Do they know why the signees of the Paris climate accord for the most part have not and will not meet their promises while the U.S. has?
In truth, Trump’s critics mostly stay silent, given that Sarah Palin’s 2008 much-reviled “drill, baby, drill” call to lower costs and achieve independence from Middle Eastern oil has more or less proven wise.
The Economy
What exactly are the Never Trump and progressive alternative agendas? In the latter case, are we to expect that top income-tax rate of 70 percent, a wealth tax, the Green New Deal, reparations, free health care for illegal aliens, Medicare for all, cancellation of $1.5 trillion in college debt, and free college tuition will avoid the now looked-for recession?
Have we heard a serious solution, like that offered by the Simpson-Bowles commission, from anyone? Or detailed arguments that we could sit down and politely negotiate with China to deal away the asymmetries it has so carefully built over the past 40 years?
Is unemployment at 3.7 or 3.8 percent dangerously too low? Did the Trump administration overheat the economy when its first two years of GDP growth were stronger than the last two of the prior administration’s? Was record-low minority unemployment somehow a problematic development? Where I live in impoverished southwestern Fresno County, most would prefer a suddenly “wrecked” Trump economy to the near-decade of stagnant growth and high unemployment after 2008.
So we need some alternate guidance from Trump’s critics for an economic blueprint that will best Trump’s stock-market gains, low inflation, increased workers’ wages and family income, and low unemployment rather than the same old, same old “I can’t believe he tweeted that!”
Illegal Immigration
The prior Republican-establishment position on illegal immigration was summed up best in Jeb Bush’s comment that illegal entry was an “act of love” for many immigrants, as well as in the open borders–abolish ICE–blanket amnesty–sanctuary-city mantras of many of the current Democrat presidential field.
Trump has not closed the border and made immigration strictly a legal enterprise. But to that aim, he has shut down the government, fought in the courts to build the wall, issued executive orders to contravene Obama’s second-term open-borders mandates, juggled funding from a variety of agencies, and jawboned Mexico nonstop.
Most believe that Trump, in exchange for the completion of the long-ago congressionally mandated wall and border security, would be willing to deal, by offering some sort of green-card option for illegal-immigrant residents who have not broken the law, are working, and are not on public assistance. But such a compromise is not what progressives envision as “comprehensive immigration reform,” given their Electoral College dividends rendered by generations of massive illegal immigration. Progressives apparently believe that, without importing constituents, their agendas simply are not persuasive. So they’ll likely never close the border to illegal immigration or embrace meritocratic legal immigration or deport those who have broken criminal statutes or who are not working.
Foreign Policy
Do we hear calls to return to the Iran Deal? Has Iran since 2018 shown us that it is a reliable partner that respects international commerce, does not support terrorism, and never really had any plans to become nuclear?
What are the advantages of returning to the Paris climate accord? Or reentering the missile deal with Vladimir Putin? Who was subverting NATO: the reckless, tough-talking Trump, or the German-led membership that never had much intention of meeting their prior “2 percent” promises? How exactly did Barack Obama’s whines about “free riders” persuade some NATO nations to reconsider their broken promises on defense expenditures?
Were Hamas and the Palestinians really still refugees after nearly 75 years, an era that saw all the other refugees of the world of that bygone era — Jews from the Middle East, Germans from Eastern Europe, and the Volga German-speaking Russians of the Soviet Union — ethnically cleansed from their homes long ago and considered citizens or residents of their new homes and refuges?
Did Jerusalem — historically, politically, and culturally — have no claim as the capital of the Jewish State?
Perhaps the old Agreed Framework, the six-party talks, the South–North Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the Jimmy Carter shuttle diplomacy, the scores of U.N. resolutions, and the on-again/off-again “tough” sanctions had made real progress with North Korea — and to such an extent that it did not have nuclear-tipped missiles pointing toward the West Coast when Trump entered office?
Was ISIS really a jayvee bunch, and were Obama’s strict rules of engagement for the American military the right way to stop the jihadists’ signature primeval terror?
Was the prior relationship with Vladimir Putin the right one: six years of abject appeasement followed by furor that he mocked our efforts to convince Russia to emulate something like California and that he saw our serial magnanimity as a weakness to be exploited rather than as generosity to be repaid in kind?
When a nation’s Russia policy goes from “it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space. . . . This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility” in a blink to a Russian colluder under every bed — is that really an approach Trump could build on? When one compares actual U.S. policy to Russia before 2017 and after 2017, why do disinterested experts find Trump’s far tougher?
The Media
But the tweets, we say.
Granted, Trump has no need to burn up presidential time stooping to spar with the likes of irrelevant George Conway or Anthony Scaramucci. I agree that the back-and-forth with the “Squad” does not merit Trump’s attention and crowds out mention of his economic and foreign-policy records.
But then again, I and my family were not libeled as traitors, crooks, deviants, and imbeciles, and put in legal jeopardy for 22 months as the media and ex-Obama officials ginned up hoax after hoax. If I had been, perhaps I might have stooped to express outrage on Twitter.
In the age prior to Trump, what exactly was the status of the media?
In truth, it was mostly an extension of the progressive party, with a veneer of sober and judicious bipartisan pieties — while, after 2016, several media watchdogs have scored the media as 80 to 90 percent anti-Trump.
Trump’s crime is that, without sanitized surgical gloves, he completely ripped the scab off what we call “journalism” and exposed a festering wound of narcissistic, mostly incompetent, and utterly partisan reportage.
Indeed, we knew what was beneath but dared not touch the scab. We had smelled the fetid pus when journalists rallied around the mythographer Dan Rather, chatted in the JournoList files, and competed to toady up to Hillary Clinton in Wikileaks’ trove of Podesta emails. Dean Baquet’s latest New York Times pep talk about the next “racist!” newspeak to follow the failed Mueller hoax was thus anticlimactic — well aside from the epidemics of #MeToo accusations not usually associated with woke, progressive journalistic professionals.
We know that the New York Times, so eager to accuse Trump and the nation at large of serial racism, is itself fond of publishing anti-Semitic cartoons and hiring those with a paper trail of racism and anti-Semitism as its editors, reporters, or editorial-board members, as we see with Sarah Jeong, Jonathan Weisman, and Tom Wright-Piersanti.
Trump did not destroy CNN or the New York Times as viable news organizations. He had nothing to do the past three years with their suicidal abandonment of ethics, professionalism, and disinterested reporting.
For the collapse of American journalism, and the media in general, media outlets should ask a variety of their own journalists about their roles in torching their own profession, whether by unprofessional personal conduct or violations of professional standards. Start with Donna Brazile, Mark Halperin, Matt Lauer, Mark Leibovich, Charlie Rose, Glenn Thrush, Matt Taibbi — or the CNN teams that occasionally gave us lies and false scoops, or sometimes just made things up or got all their details wrong, as did Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Manu Raju, Brian Rokus, Jake Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris who peddled falsities or were forced to retract or resign. Trump did not force CNN’s Kathy Griffin to produce a decapitation video, or prompt CNN’s Reza Aslan’s “piece of s***” commentary, or urge the late Anthony Bourdain to joke about poisoning the president, or convince an entire CNN news team to do their on-air “hands-up” dance to spread the inflammatory lie that Michael Brown was murdered by the police. No one forced CNN to hire the admitted liar-under-oath James Clapper, or more recently, Andrew McCabe, who is facing criminal referrals for lying to federal investigators.
Conduct
But we are told that the boisterous Trump, our first president without military or political experience prior to his election, has disgraced the office. In his 30 months since January 2017, how exactly has he done so, at least by the somewhat low bar of past presidential standards?
Did Trump conduct liaisons in the presidential bed or restroom or office in the manner of liberal lions such as FDR, JFK, or Bill Clinton? Did he habitually use the N-word or expose himself to staffers, as did the great civil-rights icon LBJ?
Is his terminal health condition now kept from the media in the conspiratorial fashion of Woodrow Wilson or FDR?
Is the Trump Foundation flush with infusions of hundreds of millions of dollars, as was the case with the Clinton Foundation during Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state? Does President Trump have a tendency to get handsy at public events, or come up behind female teenagers or blow in their ears à la Vice President Joe Biden? Did he weaponize the IRS, the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA the way Obama-administration officials did to sabotage a political opponent’s campaign? Has Attorney General Barr surveilled the communications of Associated Press reporters in the fashion of Eric Holder?
Or perhaps Trump’s twitter crudity is shocking given the sober comportment of his current would-be presidential opponents. Has Trump, then, promised to take Joe Biden behind the gym and physically beat him up, or warned Cory Booker that in a testosterone rage he would beat him up too, as both have bragged about doing to Trump? Did he whip racial animosity in the manner of Elizabeth Warren by falsely alleging that the Ferguson shooting, thoroughly investigated by the Obama Justice Department, was murder?
Has Trump punned about Kamala Harris not coming out of an elevator alive?
Did he egg on Johnny Depp, Madonna, and a host of other creepy celebrity has-beens to brag about the ways to assassinate a president? Would current Democratic–primary leader Joe Biden be willing to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test, given to Trump (who aced it) to remind his critics that he was not demented as they serially alleged?
The progressive party, many past presidents, the media, and Hollywood didn’t need to be schooled by Donald Trump on the arts of crudity, unprofessionalism, and unethical behavior.
So what we need are not more pathetic abort-the-Trump-presidency melodramas, or ethical sermons from the abjectly unethical, or “Trump is the worst” this or that from historically ignorant pundits.
Instead of vague socialist bombast and promises, where is the actual detailed progressive version of the Contract with America, so voters can read it, digest it, and then decide whether it is superior or inferior to the status quo since 2017? Let us see two antithetical visions of America’s future, and let the voters decide.
For those who insist that “character matters” more than policy, then, let us compare the Trump behavior in the White House since 2017 with JFK’s, Lyndon Johnson’s, and Bill Clinton’s. Let’s compare his supposed efforts to “obstruct” justice with Obama’s actual record of politicizing federal justice, intelligence, tax, and investigatory agencies.
So far, all that is something that apparently no presidential candidate wishes to do.
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2) Blasio Gives Up on Educating Poor Kids
Rather than expanding schools that help minority students, the mayor wants to shut them down.
To say that many liberal elites have all but given up on educating low-income minorities might seem like an overstatement. But when you consider the state of public education in our inner cities, and the priorities of those in charge, it’s hard to draw any other conclusion.
After Labor Day, New York City’s 1.1 million public school students will return to the classroom. The majority of them can’t do basic reading or math, according to state standardized test results released last week. And the numbers get even more depressing when broken down by race and ethnicity. Black and Hispanic students make up 67% of the system, while whites and Asians are about 15% and 16%, respectively. Only 28% of black students passed the math exam, versus 33% of Hispanics, 67% of whites and 74% of Asians. On the English exam, the passage rates were 68% for Asians, 67% for whites, 37% for Hispanics and 35% for blacks.
Sadly, these racial gaps in academic achievement have persisted for decades, and they are a main source of racial inequality in America. Want to help someone avoid poverty or addiction or incarceration? An education goes a long way. The irony is that the same social-justice advocates who obsess over inequality also spurn reforms, such as public charter schools, that help close black-white differences in learning. “City charter schools, now teaching roughly 10% of the city’s student population, markedly outperformed traditional public schools again” on the state tests, reported the New York Post. Fifty-seven percent of charter-school test takers passed the state English exam, and 63% passed the math portion.
Moreover, the highest scores in the state, for the third year in a row, came from Success Academy, a New York City-based charter-school network, where the passage rates for math and English were an astounding 99% and 90%, respectively. Even more impressive is that these charter students are mostly low-income blacks and Hispanics, not middle-class Asians and whites.
If the primary goal were student achievement, Democratic politicians like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio would allow these successful school models to proliferate. But the mayor is far more interested in placating his political benefactors, the powerful teachers unions, which oppose charter schools because they don’t control them. To the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and their thousands of state and local affiliates, public education is more about jobs than about kids. Reforms that marginalize or circumvent union members are rejected, regardless of whether they benefit students. Mr. de Blasio may identify as a progressive champion of the underprivileged, but that’s lip service. The reality is that he’s blocking the surest path to the middle class for the city’s poor by relegating them to inferior schools.
Opponents of school reform insist that a lack of funding is a major problem, but education spending has increased for decades without significant improvements in outcomes. Per pupil spending in places like Baltimore and Washington is among the highest in the nation, but you’d never know that based on test scores. In New York’s poorer neighborhoods, school spending is significantly higher than the citywide average, which in turn is well above the national average.
The claim that racism explains the learning gap also can’t withstand scrutiny, but that hasn’t stopped liberals from making school desegregation a priority. In fact, some of the best public schools in the country are high-performing charter schools with large percentages of black and brown students. That doesn’t mean segregated schools are desirable or that they lead to academic success, but at the very least it does suggest that black children don’t need white classmates before they can learn how to multiply fractions or diagram sentences.
Nevertheless, the left’s ideological obsession with racial balance in the classroom continues. Mr. de Blasio is currently preoccupied with trying to phase out gifted-and-talented programs because they are populated with too many white and Asian students. This is an extension of his beef with the city’s elite public high schools, which admit kids based on a standardized exam. It’s worth noting that even the New York Times has questioned the mayor’s reasoning and the possible fallout. “He risks alienating tens of thousands of mostly white and Asian families whose children are enrolled in the gifted programs and selective schools,” the paper wrote this week. “If a substantial number of those families leave the system, it would be even more difficult to achieve integration.”
You’d think that the main objective of the inequality-obsessed would be to help more minorities meet high academic standards, but Mr. de Blasio and his fellow progressives would rather eliminate the standards altogether. I’d call that giving up on minority kids. What would you call it?
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