Conservative: Dems Totally Gaslit Us on Platner

“Even before all the scandals,” fumes National Review’s Jim Geraghty, the left celebrated disgraced Democrat Graham Platner “with an astonishing degree of credulity and acclaim,” given his total obscurity and “poppycock” public persona. As “disturbing revelations” from his past piled up, Platner insisted “he had no other dark secrets,” and “Democrats lined up to endorse him” even though (or maybe because) “he had just arrived on the scene.” His only strong belief was that “Israel was evil and controlled Washington,” but top Democrats insisted this “scuzzy” candidate was “solid and reliable.” Such massive “gaslighting” by the Democrat leadership served to conceal the fact that “Graham Platner is an awful human being,” a fact that was “as hidden as a supernova from the start.”

Democrat: The DSA Is Wrecking Our Party

“The democratic socialist surge” has “stunned the nation,” observes Evan Barker at the Free Press — but “I wasn’t surprised”: “I taught DSA-aligned staffers how to build a money machine for the left; coached progressive politicians on how to speak to donors; and collaborated with billionaires to create a robust fundraising network.” But I also “witnessed a daily bashing of white people, animosity for the ‘deplorables’ who voted for Trump, deep hatred of men, and an obsession with race that infiltrated every conversation.” The only hope? That Democrats “condemn” these radicals’ “belief systems” and show the world how they’ve driven “the party of the working class” to abandon “every ideal it claims to represent.” Otherwise, “this far-left earthquake . . . will not stop in deep-blue cities.”

From the right: The ‘Commie’ Title Fits

In his Mount Rushmore speech, President Trump warned that “our American identity [is] under a renewed attack, a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism,” yet a week later, “more socialists had won Democratic Party primaries,” grumble the Washington Examiner editors. Many Democrats view the DSA “as invaders who used the Democratic Party’s structure to power their campaigns” — to defeat incumbent Democrats. No surprise, “there hasn’t been a lot of noise from mainstream Democrats in defense of the DSA.” But that’s also because Dems know that “for some of the DSA winners, the communist label either fits or comes uncomfortably close.” But Trump is right: Communism “the enemy of free people everywhere” — and it “never works.”

Legal take: The ‘Predictable’ Justices Are Libs

Critics slur the Supreme Court’s conservative majority as a “predictable bloc,” yet it actually “has fluid majority coalitions that don’t produce consistent conservative wins,” correct Elizabeth Price Foley and Mark Pinkert at The Wall Street Journal. Unlike the Democrat-appointed justices, their Republican-tapped counterparts have outliers who often stray from originalism toward other methods of interpretation. In Trump v. Slaughter, all six Republican-appointed justices used originalism, but Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh abandoned it “in favor of pragmatism” in Trump v. Cook, proving their “methodological flexibility” gives liberal justices the ability to win. Ironically, Dems’ demands to “pack the court” would create what they wrongfully claim is happening now: a “partisan branch, producing predictable results and destroying the judiciary’s independence forever.”

Real-estate: How Biden Drove Up Housing Costs

Home prices and rents “increased by 30%” after millions of illegal immigrants flooded into our country under President Joe Biden’s “lax” border policies, notes The Washington Times’ Kelly Sadler. A study shows “a 1% increase in unauthorized workers . . . corresponded with about a 2.2% rise in home prices,” because “homebuilding did not keep pace with the rising demand.” Indeed, the “border crisis” accounted for “100% of all rental growth” in New York and California. The Trump administration is working to “ensure taxpayer-funded housing programs” are not benefitting “illegal aliens,” yet nonetheless, Biden’s red-carpet approach to the waves of illegal immigrants that headed for America “did indeed place the American dream of homeownership out of reach for many U.S. citizens.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board