Libertarian: About That UN ‘Mass Extinctions’ Warning

“A new United Nations report won lots of headlines repeating its claim that the global rate of species extinction is massively accelerating, with 1 million now at risk. But Ronald Bailey looks under the study’s hood for Reason and finds plenty of problems. Notably, “insect extinction estimates are where the numbers really get boosted,” since the authors basically assume that 10 percent of insect species are at risk, and bugs make up 75 percent of the world’s species. The biggest problem, notes Bailey, is the authors’ proposed fix: Most of the eco-friendly “transformative changes” they seek “are already happening as a result of the economic growth the UN agency wants us to steer away from”: World population is leveling off, urbanization has people exiting the countryside and “both global income inequality and gender inequality are falling.”

Political scribe: China’s Monstrous War on Muslims

“Somewhere between one and two million Uighur Muslims are being held in Chinese internment camps,” observes The Week’s Matthew Walther, while millions more are under constant state surveillance. That’s why, Walther writes, “I have no patience for what I have come to think of as China Respecter Man, a ubiquitous figure in American media” whose favorite pastime are “tut-tutting President Trump’s attempts to remake America’s trade relations with Beijing” and praising Chinese prosperity. “What China Respecter Man never talks about is how China’s prosperity, real or imagined, is made possible”: through horrific repression of the kind meted out to the Uighers.

Catholic writer: What Jean Vanier Taught Me

At The Catholic Herald, JD Flynn recalls how he and his wife “knew nothing about Down’s syndrome” when the couple adopted two children with the condition. It was Jean Vanier, the Canadian humanitarian who died Tuesday, “who taught us that our two children, who seemed so very different from us, were really quite the same.” Like all people, they “needed most to love, and to be loved.” Vanier founded L’Arche, or the Ark, a movement that brings together people with intellectual disabilities and their non-disabled peers to live together as friends. Writes Flynn: “Vanier taught that the invisible disabilities are usually more profound. That fear and loneliness, bitterness and anger are the things that cripple us, or blind us. He taught that all of us have those disabilities. And he taught that trusting one another with our weaknesses leads to peace.” Flynn concludes: “May Jean Vanier rest in peace. And may his work in continue by the grace of God.”

Anti-Semitism watch: Jews Best Abandon Elite Colleges

For a century or more, American Jews rightly saw education at elite universities as “a magical wardrobe that led into a Narnia of possibilities,” says Liel Leibovitz at Tablet. But with the alarming rise of Israel-obsessed anti-Semitism at those same colleges, “that door is now closing.” Case in point: New York University’s decision to award one of its highest honors, the Presidential Service Medal, to Students for Justice for Palestine, an outfit notorious for anti-Semitic stunts such as “handing out fake eviction notices” to Jewish students and “forcefully crashing a campus celebration of Israel’s Independence Day, seizing Israeli flags, and setting them on fire.” NYU’s celebration of SJP and numerous episodes of the kind show it’s time for Jews at elite institutions “to get out, and fast.”

From the right: Blas’ Hopeless, Hilarious White House Bid

At 6-foot-6, de Blasio may be the world’s largest twerp,” quips Kyle Smith at National Review. The New York mayor is “unmistakably large but barely in charge.” That reputation renders his rumored presidential bid all the more “hilariously futile.” The polls are brutal: “He sits at 0 percent in Iowa. He’s at 0 percent in New Hampshire. A Quinnipiac poll taken in March showed that, among New Yorkers, he is the least popular presidential candidate in the immense field.” No wonder Hizzoner is constantly remaking himself, first as “Mayor Marx” and now as the climate-change-obsessed “Green Giant.” The various shifts, Smith argues, fail to mask “the sheer scale of his incompetence” back home.

— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari