#2020 race was already tight and other commentary

Former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump are in a tight race for the White House.
AP

The horse-race narrative du jour is that Joe Biden has “left his basement” over fears that “the race is tightening,” snarks The Week’s Matthew Walther. Growing public alarm over leftist violence in the streets likely has something to do with it, but “the extent to which we are seeing a shift in polls is just as likely to reflect what the actual state of the race has been for some time, which is to say, as close as any election in modern history.” The president’s support has always been somewhat obscured by the “shy-Tory” effect: Voters don’t dare tell pollsters they secretly support Trump. His chances, moreover, “have never been as bad as some people . . . have led themselves to believe.” Indeed, Walther expects Trump to pull “another narrow victory.”

From the right: California’s Ugly New Curriculum

The ethnic-studies “model curriculum” California is poised to mandate for K-12 kids makes The New York Times’ radical 1619 Project look “moderate,” warns The Wall Street Journal editorial board. The program aims to build “possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes [sic] collective narratives of transformative resistance,” says the state Education Department’s Web site. Course outlines seem to require “student political activities,” with “approved topics” on “racism, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, access to quality health care, income inequality,” etc. — raising “First Amendment concerns.” One outline “tips its hat” to ideas that “echo anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” with students writing papers on US events that “led to Jewish and Irish Americans gaining racial privilege.” “Moderate” liberals need to read this “ugly stuff,” contend the editors; “responsible statesmen” ought to “stop it.”

Academia watch: Fear in the Faculty Lounge

John McWhorter reports in The Atlantic that he has “been receiving missives since May almost daily from professors living in constant fear for their career, because their opinions are incompatible with the current woke playbook” — including 150 in one three-week period. “I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.” A professor who “committed the sin of ‘privileging the white, male perspective’ in giving a lecture on the philosophy” of a Founding Father praised by Frederick Douglass had to “sit in a ‘listening circle,’ in which his job was to stay silent while students ­explained how he had hurt them” — “a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.” Few letter-writers are conservative. “It is now no longer, ‘Why aren’t you on the left?’ but ‘How dare you not be as left as we are.’ ”

Security beat: Biden vs. the Intel Consensus

Joe Biden and other Democrats have long slammed President Trump for ignoring Intelligence Community findings, notes Susan Crabtree at RealClearPolitics, but now “the shoe is on the other foot for Team Biden,” as Joe (“with help from the media”) is “discounting major aspects of official intelligence assessments — especially as they pertain negatively to his campaign.” His problem: The intel community’s top elections analyst has found “Moscow favoring a Trump win and Beijing hoping for his loss,” meaning China wants a Biden win. Biden’s camp claims Trump ­appointees are skewing the intelligence, which means that “the unprecedented distrust of the ­intelligence community on both sides will no doubt continue long after the last votes are counted.”

Virus desk: Science Isn’t Guiding Schools

Local governments from Virginia to California are opening day-care centers in the same buildings they decline to open for actual teaching, notes Erin Hawley at USA Today. Part of it is “the hypocrisy of the teachers’ unions — while it’s unsafe for unionized teachers to teach, it’s perfectly fine for usually non-unionized workers to provide child care.” This, despite “growing evidence that in-person education is possible,” as kids under 10, especially, are safe. In all, “the decision about whether to reopen schools is one that should be made based on the best available scientific data.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board