DEI is destroying America, why the classics are back and other commentary

Historian: DEI Is Destroying America

“Diversity/equity/inclusion” is the common thread behind “America’s current crises,” argues Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness. DEI has “birthed” resurgent crime and antisemitism. The “military is short” soldiers, because “white males” fear being called “white supremacists” if they join. Outcries over “the destruction of enforcement” of immigration law are “written off as racism.” Nations like China and the Soviet Union suffered enormously after substituting “race, sex, class, and tribal criteria for meritocracy,” while the smaller, less “materially rich” United States “emerged to dominate the world.” “Yet here we are in 2024, ignoring the baleful past.” America’s future now “hinges on how quickly we discard DEI orthodoxy” and “judge citizens on their character and talent” — if it’s not “already too late.”

Ed desk: Why the Classics Are Back

“Teaching kids to think critically and master old books” is making a comeback, reports The Free Press’ Julia Steinberg. Yes, “this time-honored approach to education has fallen out of favor in recent decades” as “many American schools have prioritized ideology and equal outcomes over excellence.” The comeback “is driven not only by parents’ growing realization” of the replacement system’s “academic failures but a sense that contemporary campus culture lacks much in the way of moral vision.” “Today, more than a million students in the United States, ages five to 18, are receiving a classical education in public or private schools,” likely because “standards have plummeted, schools have become political battlegrounds” where kids are “taught what to think — not how to think.”

Libertarian: Pols’ Blindness on Social Security

“A Republican budget plan released Wednesday included one of the most obvious, low-hanging ideas for shoring up Social Security: Raising the eligibility age for benefits from 67 to 69,” notes Reason’s Eric Boehm. “The White House immediately blasted the proposal,” and “even some Republicans quickly” threw the “idea under the bus.” Yet if politicians are “interested in maintaining Social Security as a functioning program, the real threat isn’t from proposed changes but from doing nothing,” since “benefits will be cut by 23 percent starting in 2033, with further cuts needed in future years, unless policymakers make changes to the program’s fundamental math.” “If a modest, obvious reform is going to be greeted with a caterwaul of partisan demagoguery,” that “says more about the current state of fiscal policy than anything.”

Culture critic: SpaceX Starship Is Awesome

“Of all the things created by humans, a rocket heading for space is among the most spectacular,” cheers Mark R. Whittington at The Hill after the recent test launch of SpaceX’s Starship. Yes, after a first-stage explosion left the craft disintegrating before it could splash down, the FAA ruled “that the test ended in a mishap” so “Elon Musk’s launch company must satisfy the regulators before authorizing a fourth test launch.” Still: “The Starship’s third test was a success not because it met all of its objectives but because it advanced the day when the largest rocket ship that has ever flown will change the face of space travel forever.” For a new generation, “Starship, for what it is doing and what it promises to do, is an awesome vehicle.” We’re not returning to space “out of a fit of nostalgia” but “to make a more glorious future, better than the present.”

Iconoclast: Owens Goes Off the Deep End

“Candace Owens is living proof that anti-Zionism is a gateway drug to anti-Semitism,” cracks Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill. She’s “tumbling in real-time down the rabbit hole of Jew-focused conspiracy theory.” Starting “in November, she slammed Israel for its ‘genocide’ in Gaza,” and she’s also “noisily bemoaned the ‘political Jews’ and the ‘DC Jew[s]’ who play the racism card ‘to basically silence people’ ” before going on to like “a tweet that asked Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the eccentric author and broadcaster and one of her keenest critics, if he was ‘drunk on Christian blood again’.” In all, “Owens seems to agree with her ostensible arch-enemies in right-on Gen Z that Jews are a ‘class of oppressors’.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board