Biden uttered a muddled response that sounded like a defense of state’s rights and localism and eventually finished by abruptly saying, “My time’s up, I’m sorry.” Although one debate does not make or break a campaign, Biden’s terrible performance was enough to raise concerns among Democrats about what his campaign is all about and whether he is really the most electable candidate on the bunch.

Perhaps the point hardly needs to be made anymore, especially after Thursday’s debate: Political correctness, on matters of race and gender, is mainly a weapon liberal elites use in their careerist battles with each other.

Almost nobody has ever liked busing. Mostly what people want is a good school in their own neighborhood. And for every complicated position on busing, there are good reasons and bad. White families have repeatedly shown that they will take measures to keep their kids away from Black students. But why should Black families have their children shuttled all around just so that white families can check off “diversity” on their school experience list?

…every minute Marianne Williamson spent talking could have been gone to a serious candidate discussing climate change or immigration or peace in the Middle East. Another is that fringe candidates provide fodder for Trumpist media outlets to make fun of Democrats as being the party of moonbeam politics. But the biggest reason not to let fringe candidates into the debates is that sometimes one of them becomes president.

…while it is fun to scoff at her hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides, it is easy to forget that hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides are extremely powerful and popular among a massive subset of Americans, many of whom represent the exact sort of voters who decide Democratic primaries. I’m not saying Marianne Williamson will be president someday. But I am saying that 2012 me, like “everyone else,” thought Donald Trump was a joke.

Marianne Williamson is a major-minor candidate for president, or a minor-major candidate for president. She believes that America is suffering from a spiritual and moral rot. She believes that the rot can only be healed if an empathetic and loving leader, equally versed in American history and culture, takes the helm… In many ways, Ms. Williamson is a strange sort of photonegative, a parallel yet opposite image of President Trump…

Despite the abysmal failure of realestatepolitik in Korea, Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, another callow real estate scion, are now attempting to apply it to the West Bank and Gaza Strip… Lack of funding is actually the least of Kushner’s problems. The Kushner plan puts the unpaid cart before the nonexistent horse in what is essentially a war zone.

The Palestinians could go even further and use this moment to present a Palestinian peace plan that marries economic development with clear, realizable political goals. The world will see that the Palestinians are not simply rejectionists, but that they have legitimate demands and they won’t be bought off.

At certain times it seems as if the Trump administration wants us all to turn into American business people. Or it believes that we (and by “we,” I mean Israelis and Palestinians) are already Americans. Bahrain might serve as a reminder that we aren’t.

To the extent that some Jews think eradicating evidence of the faith of others can only protect their safety or even their sensibilities, they are doing neither religious freedom nor the country any good. To the contrary, by demonstrating hostility to and intolerance for the faith or the symbols venerated by other Americans, the ADL and other supporters of Ginsburg’s position are setting us up for unnecessary conflicts that are bad for America, as well as the Jews.

We believe they and other municipalities that have similar displays of the Latin Cross as a war memorial should now find a way to relocate these crosses to private land where they will not send a message of religious exclusion and secondary status to Jews and other non-Christians.

Finally, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor) wrote an impassioned old-fashioned separationist dissent. Two thousand years of history have not wiped away the Christian symbolism of the cross, she wrote, and the majority’s suggestion that 95 years have done that to the Bladensburg cross is spurious.

The implications of this logic are chilling. What happens when a student suggests that looking at photographs of the My Lai massacre in history class is too traumatic? Should newspapers avoid printing upsetting images that illuminate the crisis at the border, like the unforgettable one of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, facedown, drowned in the Rio Grande?

Today, opponents of the mural appear largely indifferent to what the offending images actually represent, preferring to view the images out of context as if they only depict slaves and a dead Indian. But wouldn’t it be more offensive had Arnautoff left out the history of slavery and the genocide of native peoples from his mural? Would these opponents of the mural prefer a sanitized depiction of history that omits the oppression of their ancestors?

Joely Proudfit, chairwoman of American Indian Studies department at California State University at San Marcos, who met with the Reflection and Action Group, said any historical value the mural has doesn’t justify its presence at a public high school. She said its image of a dead Native American contributed to a narrative of Natives as “dead and defeated,” and that those who sought to keep the mural at the school were putting “art over humanity.” “If they think these murals are more important than our future . . . then those people need to have their own conversations with themselves,” she said, suggesting the work’s supporters should “raise the funds, remove the walls, replace the walls.”