#California’s self-made disease and other commentary

Steven Greenhut at The Orange County Register agrees with President Trump: California is a “cautionary tale” as it “bounds” from crisis to crisis. The latest: “raging wildfires” sparked, in part, by “poor land management, ill-conceived liability and insurance laws and the misuse of firefighting budgets.” Add the state’s homeless scourge, housing costs, “clogged” roads, squandered billions, “eye-popping public-sector pay deals” and “stagnant” schools, and the Golden State becomes a picture of failure. “California isn’t the only state with problems, but most of them are the result of government inefficiency and malfeasance.” Officials “refuse to consider nongovernment approaches”; instead, their solutions are always the same: “Raise taxes on the rich.” California isn’t yet Detroit, “but don’t forget that 60 years ago, Detroit was one of the nation’s great cities.”

Iconoclast: The Medieval Left

President Trump’s critics are “getting all biblical over COVID’s visitation upon the White House,” observes Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill. “Karmic retribution” is “only a slightly more PC, hippyish way to say what people in medieval times thought about plagues: that they were divine punishment.” Critics “have imbued COVID with moral power and even political authority,” for Trump’s “sins” are “fundamentally political”: He “has bristled against the rule of experts and the contemporary liberal orthodoxy that says science has all the answers to our political and moral problems.” The critics suggest “if Trump stays in power, America will be visited by floods, fires and plagues; death will come to your door; pestilence will be visited upon the land.”

From the right: The Menace of Critical Theory

President Trump’s recent moves to stop the use of critical race theory in training federal workers should only be a start, Lindsey Burke and Mike Gonzalez argue at National Review. The broader disease of critical theory — which holds that all whites are hopelessly racist, while minorities lack all moral agency — is rampant in US education. “If you or your son or daughter is in a university, studying some form of this will be unavoidable. In fact, even children in K-12 schools cannot escape being force-fed these theories.” Indeed, The New York Times’ anti-American 1619 Project, now “a curriculum being used in some 4,500 classrooms across the country,” is only the latest manifestation. Critical theory dominates schools of education, where “critical pedagogy” “divides individuals into groups of either ‘oppressors’ or ‘oppressed.’ ” Key to the solution: “States should ensure that parents get the transparency they deserve about what their children are being taught in public schools.”

Media critic: Leave ACB’s Faith Alone

The anti-religious sentiments targeting Amy Coney Barrett’s faith group, People of Praise, are ultimately “either the result of willful ignorance or a disingenuous attempt to portray charismatic Catholics in a negative light,” charges Dale Coulter at First Things. People of Praise emerged from the global charismatic movement of the 1960s, emphasizing “a strong sense of the personal presence of Christ, empowerment through the Holy Spirit, a deep love for others . . . and spoken utterances that approximate human languages (speaking in tongues).” Pope Francis instituted an ­international council to oversee such groups, and “many charismatic Catholic communities, including People of Praise, are in good standing” with the Vatican. It’s obvious that “members of People of Praise are normal Christians,” so critics should “leave her religion, including its charismatic dimension, alone.”

Conservative: Ignoring Joe’s Decline

With President Trump sidelined by COVID, asks The Boston Herald’s Howie Carr, will the media finally pay attention to Joe Biden’s “obvious mental decline”? Of course not. For months, mainstream outlets have ­refused to examine the ex-veep’s “incoherent babbling” — such as, among other whoopsies, claiming COVID has killed 200 million Americans, bungling what FEMA stands for and forgetting the opening words of the Declaration of Independence. As the campaign winds down, expect the media to ignore this obvious senescence, “even though the video evidence is at their fingertips.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board