#Teachers vs. science (and kids) and other commentary

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s decision not to carry out any in-person instruction come fall “was a political victory for teachers and a defeat for families, science and opportunity for all,” sighs Bloomberg Opinion’s Virginia Postrel. The inordinate risk-averseness of union-backed teachers who pushed for the move runs against what science tells us: namely, “that children are unlikely to transmit COVID-19” to other kids or adults. Plus, “in a city where President Donald Trump is the devil,” whatever he stands for — opening schools, for example — “must be a bad idea.” Ignored in the decision-making were the many poor and immigrant “kids who already start at a disadvantage, have no parent at home to coach them through the lessons . . . and have limited Internet access.”

Pandemic journal: A College-Sports Calamity

Some “100 colleges and universities with lucrative football and/or basketball programs,” including Stanford, are “facing an unparalleled funding crisis” owing to the coronavirus lockdowns, reports National ­Review’s Jim Geraghty. Playing football is impossible without “some risk of spreading the coronavirus,” after all, but if “all non-conference games are canceled, schools will lose about $160 million.” Worse, the cancelations will devastate college athletes, often young men from “poor backgrounds” who “chose to risk a career-ending injury” for a college scholarship and a chance at a professional contract.

From the left: The Real Racist

Daniel Bergner’s New York Times profile of “White Fragility” author and “anti-racism trainer” Robin DiAngelo reveals just how “kooky, harmful and outright racist” her ideas are, argues New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. For DiAngelo, individual merit is “a myth to be debunked,” and even a remarkable figure such as Jackie Robinson is “a mere pawn of systemic oppression.” Her ideas, moreover, “literally replicate anti-black ­racism,” with a call for “whites-only groups” to discuss “racial consciousness.” She and other “trainers” go so far as to criticize hard work, “objective, rational thinking” and “careful planning” as racist. Far from being “anti-racist,” the ideology DiAngelo peddles looks “very much like racism itself.”

Conservative: Biden’s Lost Cause

At American Greatness, Conrad Black shrugs off polls showing Joe Biden with commanding double-digit leads over President Trump: ­“Almost all of these polls are of echelons of the population and not of likely voters, and there is always a reticence among pro-Trump respondents.” What “Democrats and their media toadies” ignore is that the president has time and again proved “practically indestructible.” This is the same man who mounted a business comeback after “he was technically insolvent, facing approximately 100 banks that had loaned him several billion dollars.” The year 2016 likewise saw him pull off the seemingly impossible: winning a presidential election after “his party chairman and even his vice-presidential candidate” ran away from him and his scandals. Trump just possesses an “impenetrable resistance” amid his own storms.

Iconoclast: An Upper-Middle-Class Revolt

While its slogans sound radical, Michael Lind writes at The Bellows, “the goal of so-called progressivism in 2020s America is to expand employment opportunities for college-educated, center-left professionals, while adding new wings to the welfare state that are tailored to their personal needs.” Understanding its class dynamics, he argues, reveals the true nature of the unrest roiling America: as a war of the upper middle against the working and lower-middle classes. “The slogan ‘Defund the Police’ is interpreted by the bourgeois professional left to mean transferring tax revenues from . . . mostly unionized but not college-educated” workers to college-educated “professionals” such as themselves. Free college and debt forgiveness would likewise “disproportionately benefit the professional bourgeoisie.” Bottom line: This is “social democracy for the professional class.”

— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari & Karl Salzmann