Trump is making us freer, good riddance to DEI statements and other commentary

Conservative: Trump Is Making Us Freer“By now, two months into [Donald] Trump’s second term, I had expected to be embarrassed and outraged by our new president,” reports USA Today’s Nicole Russell.Instead “I feel lucky” to “witness to some of the most radical changes ever attempted in the federal government.” “President Joe Biden drove the country to the far left, losing control of our borders” and “driving up the budget deficit and the national debt.” Meanwhile, “from taxes and the economy to the border and government efficiency, Trump is driving ideas that will restore liberty and promote prosperity.” “My litmus test for Trump’s efficacy” isn’t “normalcy,” but whether he’s “supporting ideas and policies that make my family and me more free.” “Trump is doing exactly that.”Ed watch: Good Riddance to DEI StatementsThe University of California has announced its campuses will “no longer be able to require diversity statements in hiring,” cheers Duncan Hosie at the Los Angeles Times.

That’s an “important win for the principle that universities should be engines of inquiry, not theaters for ideological performance.” “Rather than fostering diversity in a broad, humanistic sense, the statements morphed into ideological litmus tests — bureaucratic hurdles cloaked in the rhetoric of inclusion.” Unsurprisingly, “diversity statements have become an easy caricature for the Trumpist right — a totem of leftist overreach that fuels the right’s destructive efforts to dismantle the modern university.” The antidote is not a reprisal from the authoritarian left, but a return to core principles like “a pluralism of ideas and a respect for disciplinary expertise.”Eye on Albany: Behind Gov’s Energy-Tax Delay“Governor Hochul has further delayed what amounts to a tax on energy until after the next general election,” observes the Empire Center’s Cam Macdonald.Her centerpiece “cap and invest program for...