Foreign desk: Trump’s Iran Game-Changer
“Iran’s most important military proxy has begun taking credit for terror attacks committed nearly four decades ago,” notes The Tablet’s Lee Smith. Hezbollah is at long last owning up, for example, to the 1983 Beirut bombing that killed 241 US Marines. The reason: “to scare Americans now that Donald Trump has thrown the regime in Tehran off balance by changing the 40-year-old rules of the game.” By killing Qassem Soleimani, “Trump is holding Iran accountable for the actions its proxies take in its name” so “the leverage gained by helping America play make-believe is gone.” It is only through Western appeasement “that an obscurantist regime whose major exports are energy, pistachios — and terror, of course — appears like a formidable adversary”; now “Trump has knocked Iran down to its natural size — and likely made Americans safer from Iranian aggression than they have in fact been at any point in the last 40 years.”
From the left: Democrats’ Constructive Chaos
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi calls the Democratic contest “the most unpredictable primary race ever,” as “a year-long process traditionally used to hone consensus among donors and media has achieved the opposite.” The New Hampshire primary, where, as Andrew Yang notes, a vote “traditionally has roughly 1,000 times the influence of a California vote,” is supposed to work like this: The “out-of-town press invades” the state “like a siege army, and leans into a presumed frontrunner until he or she wins.” But this year, says Taibbi, not even party elites are “close to agreeing on who might be the best choice to take on Donald Trump.” What happens “if voters decide to think completely for themselves, and pick a candidate not approved by the party or major media”? Well, “no one knows … since we’ve never seen it, at least not on the Democratic side.”
Eye on 2020: Facebook Nixes Warren Censorship
“It’s a bad week to be Sen. Elizabeth Warren,” quips the Washington Examiner’s Brad Polumbo. First she was “resoundingly mocked” for her “cringe-worthy” attempts “to be relatable to millennials” and polls showed her “struggling in New Hampshire.” Then Facebook rejected her “campaign clamoring and calls for censorship.” The “long-time critic of social media companies” wants Facebook “to censor her political opponents” under the guise of fact-checking them. But that’s “an inherently subjective process” — and with a staff that “overwhelmingly leans liberal,” Facebook’s fact-checks would “punish Republicans and conservatives” most. Its new political-ad rules show Facebook “isn’t falling for Warren’s pro-censorship narrative” — and Polumbo hopes “voters won’t either.”
Culture critic: Against Tribalism
“Perhaps nothing so animates the progressive Left today,” argues Joel Kotkin at City Journal, “as the notion of an increasingly race-conscious society, segregated by ethnic identity and dismissive of the traditional ideal of assimilation.” It’s no longer the “reactionary Right” but lefties who “embrace a worldview that defines individuals by race.” Yet, while “woke” intellectuals envision “separate ethnic communities allied against white supremacy,” trends such as an increase in racial intermarriage suggest most of society is headed for an “erosion of racial categories.” The big threat: If “racialist ideology” continues to gain “adherents in the press and academia” and “Americans permit our multiracial society to devolve into ruinous tribalism,” then the country will never be able to “heal its current divisions.”
Education beat: A Foreign-Funding ‘Black Hole’
“Six prominent US universities failed to report a combined total of $1.3 billion in foreign funding,” reports the Clarion Project’s Alex VanNess. A Department of Education investigation found that schools including Rutgers and Cornell took money from China, Qatar, Russia and others, but ignored their “clear legal duty” to report it. Foreign donations are “a black hole,” a DOE lawyer says, because schools “routinely” fail to report them. Many come from governments “that run influence operations in the US to try to mold public opinion and policy.” The top known donor is Qatar,” giving $1.5 billion to 28 universities since 2012 — including $340 million to Northwestern for a partnership between the university’s journalism school and Al Jazeera, which “has a long history of spreading anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and support for terrorist groups.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Kelly Jane Torrance
