Libertarian: Biden Deepens Supply-Chain Woes
“President Biden seems to be doing his best to prolong” our “economic woes,” grumbles Kristin Tate at The Hill. “With the holidays around the corner, Americans are experiencing inflated prices, goods shortages and long shipping times.” Yet Team Biden is poised to “hike prices and cause more empty shelves” by requiring jab proof to cross the US-Canada border, when “20 percent of Canada’s truckers are unvaxxed.” This “will further ensnare the arrival of both raw materials and finished goods into the country.” More: Biden may close “a major natural gas pipeline from the Great White North because of ‘climate change’ concerns,” hitting US consumers with rising fuel costs. “Everyday concerns of Americans struggling to pay their bills or fill their cars with gasoline are being dismissed.”
From the Right: ‘Latinx’ = Electoral Poison
Progressives’ insistence on the word “Latinx” alienates Hispanics, warns Alex Perez at Spectator World. In a new Politico poll, “only 2 percent of Hispanics refer to themselves as Latinx,” so the push to normalize the term shows progressives “have little interest in learning about the groups they hope to assimilate into their increasingly fractured political coalition.” While “progressives are quick to submit to these language shifts due to their white guilt and conformism,” they “fail to understand that this bureaucratic impulse does not comport with the sensibilities of working-class Hispanics.” Indeed, “40 percent of Hispanics are offended by” the term and “30 percent are less likely to vote for a politician who uses it.” Beware: “With Hispanics already shifting to the right, Democrats can’t risk using a term that will alienate the demographic.” In short, “Latinx is toxic.”
Education beat: ‘Systemic’ Racism’ vs. . . . Asians
What the NAACP calls “systemic” racism looks “an awful lot like what Asian-Americans are experiencing these days, especially in education,” rails The Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn. E.g.: San Francisco’s school board replaced “competitive admissions” with a lottery at the “crown jewel” of its public-school system, Lowell High, to reduce the number of Asian kids there, critics say. When a judge ruled that the board didn’t give proper public notice for the switch, the superintendent claimed it would be “logistically impossible” to reverse course. “Translation: Even when Asian-Americans win, the system ensures they still lose.” How “ironic” that the same board that invoked “pervasive systemic racism” to ditch “Lowell’s merit-based admissions is now using the system to ensure fewer Asian-Americans get in.”
Peanut gallery: If Baldwin Fired in Anger . . .
“Legal experts are speculating that ‘rageaholic’ Alec Baldwin deliberately fired his gun in anger” at “Rust” director of photography Halyna Hutchins, reports Debra Heine at American Greatness. They cite “several previous incidents in which the actor had been provoked into a rage,” including multiple incidents with reporters. One lawyer “suggests that Baldwin did not appreciate being ordered around by a young, female cinematographer.” If he indeed fired in anger, even thinking the gun unloaded, then a charge of “criminally negligent homicide is definitely within the realm of possibility,” Hutchins concludes.
Pandemic journal: De Blasio’s Vax Overreach
“Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to expand vaccine mandates to young children is too hasty, unnecessarily coercive and impractical,” declares Reason’s Liz Wolfe. Parents must vaccinate 5- to 11-year-olds “if they want to bring the kids to any indoor restaurant, fitness center or entertainment venue” or have them join “such extracurriculars as sports, orchestra and dance” — “those same ones they took an involuntary, collective hiatus from for much of 2020.” This keeps “families with unvaccinated little ones from participating in normal city life.” It’ll also hit tourism, since most countries haven’t OK’d COVID jabs for kids. And for what? “Fewer than 700 COVID deaths have been reported among kids nationwide,” with just 146 among kids 5 to 11. Blas is creating “a new underclass composed, oddly, of the tiny humans threatened least by the virus.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board