Conservative: China Bloc’s ‘Wedge’ Drive

“Moscow is expanding its violation of Western sovereignty in new and volatile ways,” warns Commentary’s Seth Mandel, while Chinese spyware was just found in “spy drones used by Britain’s elite special forces,” surely not “the only case in which Chinese parts are sending data back home.” But “testing the West’s defenses this way is typical behavior from the wider China-led bloc.” Many of Hamas’ rocket attacks before Oct. 7 “were meant to test Israel’s missile defense but also to see how the IDF responded,” and “the propaganda campaigns that fuel anti-Western activism are a key part of this” total-spectrum warfare, which is “intended to isolate members of the alliance of democracies to prevent them from sharing military knowhow and intelligence.” The US must be “clear-eyed” about those “seeking to drive a wedge between us and our allies.”

From the left: DNC Out To Void Your Vote

This month, the Democratic National Committee means to “ban state parties from using ranked choice voting to select delegates in the 2028 presidential primary cycle,” fumes Cynthia Richie Terrell at RealClear Politics. Argh! This reform gives “a second chance to voters whose candidate finishes below the 15% threshold that the party establishes to earn delegates.” Where used in 2020, it ensured that “voters ended up with their vote counting toward a candidate earning delegates.” Polling by Terrell’s group RepresentWomen found 78% of voters favor having the “flexibility to support their preferred candidate” much more than letting parties “control who’s on the ballot.” Ranked choice also rewards “the candidate who can help unify the party,” no long forcing “voters into limited choices they didn’t ask for.”

Wildfire watch: The World Is Burning Less

Headlines about wildfires in Canada miss “the most remarkable fact” about the fires: This year, every continent is “burning less than usual,” reports Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal, with North and South America both at a “record-low burn” since 2012. Smoke deaths, the “deadliest aspect of fires,” are also down. Most media coverage “cherry-picks” smaller areas experiencing lots of fires, ignoring the broader picture, “positive news in fire statistics” that should “give pause to climate alarmists.” Yet climate isn’t the “main determiner” for wildfires and “decarbonization” is not the solution. The real answer is “adaptation,” particularly “prescribed burning — deliberate, controlled fires that clear out the deadwood and undergrowth that turn ordinary fires into monsters,” a practice that “Canada has all but abandoned.”

From the right: ‘Woke 2’ Will Be Crazier Still

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just waved off “Woke 1,” the “unhinged cultural revolution” we had during COVID, as “crazy.” But if AOC could be swept up in “mass societal hysteria” once, than “it can easily happen again,” argues the Washington Examiner’s David Harsanyi. Most likely, ahead of a “run for the presidency or perhaps for the Senate,” she simply “realizes that woke ideology” just “isn’t liked by vast swaths of the public,” so downplays it. Woke 1’s “high-tech progressive jihad used public shame, intimidation and “economic ruin” to determine which words and ideas were allowed — but “what kind of crazy” is in store when “Woke 2 gets its hands on state power?”

Education beat: Head Start Is a Failure

“Head Start does not ‘work,’ ” roars Heather Mac Donald at City Journal. “The most significant research ever done on Head Start” revealed “that any early gains in school readiness among enrollees had faded by the end of first grade and were absent by third grade” — and all efforts “to discredit this ‘fadeout’ effect have failed.” That prompted attempts to show it had “non-cognitive benefits, such as alleged small improvements in high school and college completion rates, workforce participation, and wages,” but “later studies dispute even those findings.” These programs, and add-ons like Mayor Mamdani’s $9 billion free-child-care program, really succeed “only for the interest groups that get paid regardless of whether their work accomplishes anything.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board