Centrist: Face Subway Reality
“Nothing [Jordan] Neely did remotely justified” the chokehold that led to his death after he menaced straphangers last week, yet political leaders have “ignored the experience of legions of subway-riding New Yorkers,” grumbles The New York Times’ John McWhorter. As a daily subway rider for decades, “I can testify” that about once a week, “one can expect to be in a car” with someone “menacing” others. “These men are often not plangent but furious.” They yell into “individual faces,” stomp, “ball their fists,” curse. They “make you genuinely afraid that you are about to be assaulted.” Some advise putting up with being made “uncomfortable.” But that word “vastly understates how one feels”: “terrified.” Fact is, Neely “did deserve restraint.”
Econ watch: The Feds’ Political Mortgage Moves
“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are changing how they price mortgages,” notes City Journal’s Nicole Gelinas: “Fees for borrowers with big down payments and good credit scores will go up, and fees for borrowers with smaller down payments and worse credit scores will go down.” Yet the feds aren’t “trying to help poorer home buyers” — “lower-credit, lower-savings homeowners” would “increasingly default” in “any recession.” No, “the new fee structure” is merely “a tiny bit of political insurance” to “prop up the lower half of the housing market ahead of the 2024 election.” It’s more proof that “banks should be doing” mortgage pricing “based on the risk profile of a given borrower, and with no government guarantee.”
Campus beat: Kafkaesque DEI
As with Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” who “never learns what he’s alleged to have done wrong,” law professor Scott Gerber grouses in The Wall Street Journal that “offenses I’ve allegedly committed haven’t been revealed to me.” With no specifics, Ohio Northern University moved to dismiss him on grounds of “collegiality,” though “insufficient ‘collegiality’ isn’t listed as adequate cause in ONU’s faculty handbook for dismissing a tenured faculty member.” He guesses it’s about his objections to ONU’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies, such as noting that “efforts that don’t include viewpoint diversity would lead to illegal discrimination in employment and admissions.” Certainly, “I learned as I was marched out of my classroom by men in uniform, dissenting from DEI can turn anyone into Josef K.”
Foreign desk: Bragg’s Embrace of China’s Spies
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office hosted a top diplomat from the “Chinese consulate-general in New York just hours before federal prosecutors unsealed a case implicating” him “in a wide-ranging espionage and harassment scheme” targeting “critics of the Chinese regime,” reports Jimmy Quinn at National Review. Worse still, the diplo “promoted the CCP’s hardline views on Taiwan and human rights atrocities.” And “in 2022, senior Chinese consular officials visited the secret Chinese police station in Lower Manhattan.” Now, “dissidents and human rights advocates urged Americans to take the CCP’s transnational repression threat more seriously” — though nothing has “dissuaded local and state officials in New York from continuing to engage with China’s diplomatic presence in Manhattan.”
From the right: Dems’ Debt-Ceiling Hypocrisy
Democrats’ opposition to “even a modicum of responsible budgeting” in debt-ceiling talks does “not make any sense,” fumes The Federalist’s David Harsanyi. Addressing the limit “would entail Senate Democrats passing a bill and then negotiating with House Republicans, who have already passed a bill raising the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion into 2024.” But “until this week, Democrats wouldn’t even talk to Republicans on the matter.” “Outlets like The New York Times simply” ignore the GOP bill because it calls for “a return to last year’s discretionary spending levels,” nixing plans to add 80,000 IRS agents, “a rollback of some ‘green energy’ boondoggles, and so on.” Dems refuse to budge, and “President Biden is now pondering invoking the 14th Amendment and simply ignoring the debt ceiling,” all while the left pretends Republicans are the problem. Fact is, Republicans “are objectively correct today in arguing that we need to slow spending and mitigate debt.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
This story originally appeared on NYPost
