Biden’s internet boondoggle, who are the real fascists and other commentary

Libertarian: Biden’s Internet Boondoggle

President Biden’s $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment plan “is an obscene amount of money to invest in technology that will be obsolete by the time it’s built,” snarks Reason’s Ronald Bailey. “The stated goal of BEAD is to ‘connect everyone in America to reliable, affordable high-speed internet by the end of the decade.’ ” Yet “90.5 percent of American households are already signed up for internet download speeds of 100 Mbps or more.” So “private broadband companies are already providing access to faster and increasingly cheaper internet services” and likely “will finish the job well before Biden’s BEAD boondoggle gets off the ground.”

SCOTUS beat: Another Day Democracy Didn’t Die

“The fall of American democracy arrived yesterday morning with a thud,” scoffs Jonathan Turley at The Hill, as Tuesday’s 6-3 decision in an election-law case gave the lie to “liberal law professors and pundits” who’d claimed “the Supreme Court was about to carry out a long-planned ‘coup’ and ‘power grab.’ ” Somehow it doesn’t “matter that the court, with its conservative majority, has delivered repeated victories for the Biden administration,” that “the conservative ‘coup’ never came,” or that “for every case with six conservatives voting together, there seems to be one with three conservatives voting together in dissent.” Indeed: “The next Supreme Court coup conspiracy theory is likely already in the making.”

From the right: Catholic Schools Correct on COVID

“Catholic school students have consistently overperformed public school systems since the lockdowns,” note the Washington Examiner’s editors. Why? “In summer and fall 2020 and even into 2021, the Biden campaign and administration, hundreds of large public school systems, and the teachers unions set fear as their guiding star,” but Catholic schools trusted the science showing “children were exceptionally safe from COVID” and “generally opened in fall 2020 and remained open in person all year.” This “made a big difference”: Testing shows that “Catholic school students have consistently outperformed public school students in math and reading in both fourth grade and eighth grade,” without the record learning loss seen in public schools. “Some local politicians and health czars attacked the Catholic schools for opening,” but “the openers were right about the harms of remote learning and the safety of in-person schooling.”

Conservative: Who Are the Real Fascists?

“MSNBC’s Joy Reid recently accused presidential candidate Ron DeSantis of ‘running the most openly fascist campaign I think I’ve ever seen,’ ” and President Biden gave a prime-time speech about defending democracy from “semi-fascism” — yet, quips The Federalist’s David Harsanyi, many Democratic ideas “are . . . well, let’s call them fascist-adjacent.” When Biden vows to “remake” the auto industry, where does he “derive his power”? When “constituents complain to school boards, the Justice Department chills speech by labeling them domestic terrorists.” Indeed, it’s hard to “think of a single major Democratic” initiative that doesn’t involve “compulsion.” That doesn’t make Joy Reid or Joe Biden “worse than Hitler,” but they, “and those like them, are illiberal actors who are a far bigger threat” than DeSantis.

Gadfly: Obama’s ‘Populism’ Bungle

“It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth,” ex-prez Barack Obama told CNN recently — to which National Review’s Jim Geraghty smirks: Obama “and his wife are walking, talking, ‘massive concentrations of wealth,’ ” with “the largest book deal in history, $65 million,” a Netflix deal “worth an estimated $50 million,” a $25 million Spotify deal and six-figure speech fees. As for Bam’s claim that inequality will “fuel the kind of mostly far-right populism,” Geraghty counters: “Right-wing populists in the United States adore a man who lives in a mansion in Mar-a-Lago and who brags about how wealthy he is.” They’re not “even necessarily on the bottom half of the nation’s income scale.” Obama’s just “not interested in updating or revising his assessment” from 2008 that the right’s driven by small-towners who bitterly “cling to guns or religion.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board