Conservative: Bernie’s Profitable Public Service

For all that socialist Bernie Sanders talks about “the collective good,” his “30 years in Washington, DC,” have largely helped his own good, notes Peter Schweizer at Fox News — making the senator and his family “quite wealthy.” Case in point: When Vermont elected Sanders to Congress in 1990, his wife Jane became “one of her husband’s top aides,” eventually “setting up a company that operated under three different names to provide income tied to Bernie’s political career.” That extended to his 2016 presidential campaign, which “brought in a huge sum of money,” of which “nearly $83 million” went to a “mysterious limited liability company” tied to Jane Sanders. In short, Sanders has always made sure that taxpayer and donor money “went to the family.”

Eye on 2020: Dems’ Freak-Out Over Sanders

“With Bernie Sanders gaining steam a week before the Iowa caucuses, tormented Democrats are second-guessing” their “hands-off” approach to him, reports Politico’s Natasha Korecki. “They fear” a left-wing version of 2016, when “mainstream Republicans scoffed at the idea that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination, until he became unstoppable.” The Dem establishment worries “a self-described Democratic socialist would cede must-win battlegrounds to Trump,” but it’s “caught in a catch-22: Attack Sanders and risk galvanizing his supporters and turning him into a martyr of the far-left. Or leave him alone and watch him continue to gather momentum.” Some say “Sanders’ competitors should have hit him harder on the debate stage and on the campaign trail.” But after Hillary Clinton declared “nobody likes” him, she “suffered a backlash, and Sanders has only gained strength.”

Culture critic: More ‘Appropriation’ Censorship

The initial rave reviews for Jeanine Cummins’ latest novel, “American Dirt,” should have made for a “grand old-fashioned literary success story,” sighs The American Conservative’s Robert W. Merry — but it tells of “a desperate mother fleeing Mexican narco gangsters with her 8-year-old son in a frenzied quest for safety in the United States,” and critics decided that Cummins has “no business writing about the travails of Mexicans.” New York Times reporters Jennifer Schuessler and Alexandra Alter even seem to suggest that “there is a legitimate debate over who gets to decide how a story is told before any book is published or perhaps even written,” Merry says — an argument with “a tinge of totalitarianism.” The simple response: “Let writers write,” because the critics’ arguments are “a danger to the principle of free expression.”

Media watch: The Reporters People Trust

When she “taught at Washington and Lee University last spring,” the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito would “buy a couple dozen copies” of The News-Gazette, the weekly newspaper in Lexington, Va., for her class. It showcased “the importance of localism and community in the digital age” for her students — after all, “the most trusted news stories come from reporters who are actually part of the localities on which they are reporting.” Yet “more and more local newspapers across the country are closing,” forcing locals to rely on national media. That’s why community newspapers are “needed and critical,” as News-Gazette publisher Matt Paxton puts it; by avoiding “the general polarization of national politics,” they are “the heart of where the trust in news lives.”

Education beat: ‘1619’ Debunked, But in Schools

Buffalo, Chicago and Washington, DC, are all moving to K-12 classroom use of The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine series that, Reason’s Robby Soave explains, “posits that the institution of slavery was so embedded in the country’s DNA” that “the American Revolution was launched” to ensure its survival — even though top liberal historians have called it “flat-out wrong.” One of its most egregious claims: Plantation economics led directly to modern capitalism. “Mandating the use of The 1619 Project in K-12 curricula is at best premature until these issues are resolved and the Times makes a good faith effort to answer its critics,” historian Phil Magness told Reason, adding that “it continues to be marred by its empirically debunked and explicitly anti-capitalist assessment of the economics of slavery.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Kelly Jane Torrance