#Bailouts favor blue states and other commentary

Federal figures show that March’s $2.2 trillion Cares Act “disproportionately benefited blue states that imposed stricter coronavirus lockdowns and have been slower to recover economically,” notes The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Democratic-run states got nearly twice as much aid per capita as GOP-run ones yet continued to suffer higher ­unemployment. “Earnings dropped most in states like New York (36.8 percent), New Jersey (31.5 percent), California (30.8 percent).” Notably, “state and local government accounted for less than 10 percent of the earnings declines” in these states, which crushed their economies and are now demanding more relief. “The economic intelligentsia is warning that the recovery will run out of steam without another multitrillion-dollar relief package, but then why are states that received more government largesse” doing “so much worse economically?”

Foreign desk: The Epochal Israel-UAE Treaty

Despite the “relentless” media criticism of the Israel-United Arab Emirates treaty, the monumental step “commits the two countries to a relationship far warmer — and with far more intensive cooperation in economic, scientific and social fields — than the cold peace Israel has with Egypt and Jordan,” argues Orde Kittrie at The National Interest. By vowing “full normalization,” the treaty “seeks to expand the pie, transforming Arab-Israeli relations from the current zero-sum conflict into win-win cooperation to achieve mutually beneficial peace and prosperity” — a “stark contrast” to the previous dynamic. The “entire region would benefit from following the UAE’s lead and transforming Arab-Israeli relations from unproductive conflict to fruitful cooperation.”

Prof: My School Demands That I Lie

Nicholas Meriwether explains at The Hill that he sought a civil compromise with the student in his Shawnee State University philosophy class who demanded he use particular pronouns, including using the student’s chosen name and no pronouns at all. But school officials insist his only choices are to use each student’s preferred pronouns — or no gender terms at all, for anyone. “This would require me to speak the ­English language as it has never been spoken in the history of Western civilization.” He refuses to imply “a man is a woman, or a woman a man” — “to effectively lie and so violate my conscience as a philosopher and as a Christian,” so he has sued. Critics call his position “free speech gone wild”; would they say the same to “a Jewish professor who is fired for refusing to respond to a neo-Nazi student with a Sieg Heil salute”?

Critic: Crouch’s All-American Culture Game

The late cultural critic Stanley Crouch “was one of America’s great raconteurs: at once urbane and down-home, witty, cutting, always ­impassioned,” recalls Adam Shatz at The New York Review of Books. “It’s no wonder” Saul Bellow and Philip Roth “befriended him. In his reverence for books and art, his loathing of academic cant and his love of intellectual combat, Stanley was one of the last old-school New York intellectuals.” His great love was jazz, which he saw as “not only the ­expression of American democracy” but “the only working model of meritocracy in America, other than sports. Rather than bemoan its ­absence in other arenas, he wanted to build on the example.” That a self-made black man “like him could become one of the country’s best-known cultural critics” was “proof of his convictions about the democratic nature and ‘rich mulatto tones’ of American culture.” His politics were “a politics of self-respect and black middle-class pride, white liberals be damned.”

Eye on Washington: Khashoggi’s Legacy

Jamal Khashoggi’s “dream” of a DC organization “to promote democracy in the Arab world” has been realized two years after the Washington Post writer’s death at the hands of Saudi agents, reports The New York Times’ Ben Hubbard. Khashoggi’s friends and colleagues have launched Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, to carry on his legacy by publishing “articles by political exiles from across the Middle East” and tracking “the roles of foreign governments in promoting or hindering democracy and rights” in the region.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board