#The vanity of ‘white guilt’ and other commentary

Even after telling a crowd he was “coming to grips with my own brokenness,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was booed and asked to leave a demonstration for refusing to defund the Minneapolis Police Department.
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“Clarion declarations” by whites of their “racial blameworthiness” simply don’t have “the texture of guilt,” declares Lionel Shriver at Spectator USA. Rather, they’re “prideful,” a “form of showing off.” Some “confessions” are also “defensive,” an attempt to avoid possibly violent attacks — but “you get canceled anyway.” With so many whites now “frantically competing” over “who can appear more self-excoriating,” the world is “in danger of installing heritable guilt as morally valid,” even though none of us chooses “our race, sex or natal nationality.” It makes no sense to “feel ‘guilty’ or ‘ashamed’ about something you didn’t do”; it’s “not only ridiculous. It’s vain.”

Libertarian: GOP Health-Care Backfire

Even ObamaCare supporters now view the program as “a placeholder more than a permanent solution” — yet, sighs Reason’s Peter Suderman, Republicans refuse to say how they’d replace it. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, for example, recently “dodged questions about the particulars” of a Republican plan. Indeed, since the 1990s, the GOP has focused on “being the opposition” to Democratic proposals rather than “developing a substantive alternative” to the current system. That has “given Democrats the upper hand” — the reason we’ll likely see a “government-run public option” become “a mainline position rather than a progressive outlier.” In “the court of public opinion,” after all, “a bad argument wins over no argument just about every time.”

Russiagate watch: Will the Guilty Face Justice?

“Where the hell is John Durham?” asks Julie Kelly at American Greatness. Attorney General Bill Barr appointed the prosecutor in May 2019 to “investigate the corrupt origins of the FBI’s probe into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and government efforts to sabotage” him when he took office. “Yes, the coronavirus crisis slowed” court proceedings, but it’s still “hard to understand why clear-cut evidence of criminal misconduct hasn’t been enough to justify a single indictment.” The Justice Department Inspector General’s report “outlined extensive instances of abuse of power,” and Jim Comey deputy Andrew McCabe “admitted lying to federal investigators under oath three times.” Yet trials against Trump associates, such as Michael Flynn, “drag on.” It’s been four years since “Barack Obama’s top henchmen concocted and executed the biggest political scandal of all time,” and the political clock is ticking: “Indictments announced even this summer undoubtedly will be condemned as attempted election interference.”

From the left: John Roberts’ Political Genius

Chief Justice John Roberts “played the term perfectly” in his attempt to “prioritize public respect for the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary” and still advance conservative goals, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark ­Joseph Stern contend at Slate. Remarkably, Roberts managed to convince both liberals and conservatives that they won cases. He knew that “a term filled with one conservative triumph after another” would give Democrats “ammunition to run against the court,” so he repeatedly joined the liberal justices while tacitly achieving conservative victories, including laying the groundwork for abortion restrictions. Ironically, his “endless maneuvering” to prevent the court from appearing political “requires him to act politically.” And therein lies his genius: He’s ­simultaneously getting what he wants while cultivating “more trust in the court.”

Religion beat: Fight for Jews, Christians

The press may overlook the persecution of Christians and Jews in the Middle East, laments Dmitri Solzhenitsyn at National Review, but over the past century it has fueled drastic attrition: Christians now make up just 5 percent of the population, down from 25 percent a century ago, while just 4,315 Jews remain in the Arab world, versus 880,000 in 1948. Fortunately, President Trump has been “unequivocal in his demand” that all nations join in the “urgent moral duty” of curbing religious persecution. America has never been “prone to cowering in the face of danger, especially when important principles are on the line.” So here’s hoping Trump remains committed to fighting for tolerance and “any ­future president likewise takes up this mantle.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board