“I arrived on Bryn Mawr’s campus . . . in the Fall of 2019,” Jane Kitchen recalls at Common Sense. She loved it. Then came COVID: “The next few months were the worst of my life.” She stayed home “for the entirety of my junior year” — Bryn Mawr’s protocols didn’t make coming to campus worth it. So she started looking to transfer, finding “that almost every school that was operating even remotely normally was overtly religious.” Though she’s an atheist, these schools “were far more aligned with my values like individual liberty, critical inquiry, and diversity of thought than the place that explicitly claimed to be those things.” She’s now in her third week at Hillsdale, “a small school of less than 1,500 students, founded by Baptists in Michigan,” and life is “blissfully normal.”

Substacker Freddie de Boer sees huge similarities between the domestic US responses to 9/11 and COVID. Liberals doomsaying over Omicron (e.g., a tweet warning Americans to be ready for a life rendered “unrecognizable” by the variant) carry a mindset of “mandatory panic, the insistence that anyone who does not allow the crisis to dominate their internal life is somehow guilty of causing it,” which de Boer sees as much like overblown concerns on domestic terrorism post-9/11. Indeed, “many on the left” seek to “turn disaster into opportunity. Even if it’s merely the opportunity to do the only thing that gets them out of bed these days, the opportunity to judge others.”

“Struggling Democratic parents have snapped” because of school COVID policies, warns Bethany Mandel at The Daily Mail. “A single case” of COVID “can lead to a closure of 10-14 days,” with “no routine or steady childcare for parents of small children.” Jersey mom Ashley says she’s “about as lefty as they come” but upset that “kids are masked, have no field trips, no extracurriculars, no sports” and fumes that “Democrats should be paying attention instead of gaslighting me and telling me everything is fine.” During 2021, the number of Americans self-identifying as Democrat or Democrat-leaning dropped from 49% to 42%, notes Mandel, with “the most pronounced shift” coming in the fall, “as children returned to school.”

The public is right to give Bidenomics a thumbs-down, Andy Puzder explains at Fox News. For starters, the 5.7% GDP growth in 2021 was “no surprise” as a bounceback from 2020’s negative 3.4%: “When states reopened, given the depths to which the economy sank, GDP was going to increase no matter what Biden did.” And if “Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion spending spree, which the Democrats passed in March, contributed to 2021’s GDP growth,” it came with “a costly trade-off. That spending fueled a surge in demand, overwhelming already strained supply chains and driving inflation to a four-decade high.” On employment, “we’re still 2.9 million jobs, or 30% [of the total lost in lockdowns], below pre-pandemic levels.” And Republican-led states are doing the best on the jobs front.

“In making race and sex the paramount considerations for his Supreme Court nomination, President Biden will deal another blow to the quality of our most important institutions,” laments Heather Mac Donald at City Journal. With Justice Stephen Breyer retiring and Biden “poised to fulfill his campaign pledge to nominate a black female,” it’s worth revisiting the White House’s February 2021 “little-noticed announcement”: It would skip the American Bar Association’s traditional nominee vetting because it’s incompatible with “diversification of the judiciary.” It’s “a measure of how far the Biden administration intended to stray from even a diversity-driven standard of competence that it saw” identity-obsessed ABA members “as a roadblock.” Bottom line: “The quality of our jurisprudence matters. The race, sex, and ‘gender identity’ of judges do not.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board