Conservative: It’s Good To Be Clarence Thomas
At 72, cheers The Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “is coming into his own.” That’s because conservatives’ 6-3 majority on the court means Chief Justice John Roberts switching sides and voting with the liberals won’t be enough to win the day — and Thomas, with his seniority, would then get to write the majority opinion. Thomas has made “powerful contributions” through his dissents, concurrences and other commentary, so now Roberts “has an incentive to side with conservatives so he can write a majority opinion more narrow than what Justice Thomas would likely write.” On the Supreme Court, it’s “good to be chief” — but “right now it may be better to be Clarence Thomas.”
Conspiracy beat: Randi Pushes Crackpot Theory
American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten “endorsed the theory that Rebekah Jones was fired” as a Florida “Health Department dashboard manager last year, because she refused to artificially lower the state’s reported COVID deaths,” reports National Review’s Zachary Evans. In an “exchange with journalist Samuel Bravo,” Weingarten said Gov. Ron DeSantis “lies and fires people,” citing Jones and asserting that Florida has “been hiding cases” — and she didn’t back down when NR questioned her. In reality, Jones’ claims have been decisively debunked. Notes Evans: “Weingarten and the AFT have pushed to keep schools closed” for a year, “claiming that in-person learning would lead to a rise in community transmission, though data drawn from Florida” and other places that reopened schools show otherwise.
From the left: Don’t Deify ‘Fact-Checking’
The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact has withdrawn its “Pants on Fire” ruling on claims that COVID-19 may have originated in a Chinese lab after “officials and mainstream press shut down most every discussion on that score” for a year, notes Matt Taibbi at TK News. This flags a larger problem: Many outlets “trumpet fact-checking programs as a way of advertising a dedication to ‘truth,’ ” when the real work is “less about determining fact than about preventing the vast seas of ignorance underlying most professional news operations from seeping into public view.” The “press mostly mishandled COVID-19 reporting,” treating “critical issues” such as mask use and lockdowns “as culture-war narratives” and “using the misguided notion that the news is an exact science to promote the worse misconception that science is an exact science.” We “look like jerks pretending we can fact-check the universe. We’d do better admitting what we don’t know.”
Foreign desk: Biden’s Indefensible Iran Cave
“Reviving a fatally flawed, outdated deal that strengthens the world’s top terrorist regime should not be President Biden’s objective,” declare Mike Waltz and Len Khodorkovsky at The National Interest. Team Trump brought Tehran “to the weakest point since the 1979 Islamic Revolution,” with 20 countries halting oil imports and 100 corporations leaving the Iranian market. Regime leaders estimate US sanctions cost Iran $200 billion. “That’s $200 billion less to fund its terrorism abroad and atrocities at home.” Too bad Biden ceded this massive “advantage.”
Expert: ‘Stop Trusting the Experts!’
At RealClearPolitics, computer scientist Bruce Abramson poses tough questions for those mindlessly mouthing “Follow the science”: “How are data collected and reported? What theories guided the design of the models that process the raw data? What studies validated the models? How sensitive are the models to variations in inputs?” And so on. “Anyone surprised by such questions can’t plausibly claim to understand the science, much less to follow it. Most likely, they’ve confused ‘the science’ with a selected scientist, a claimed scientific consensus, or the scientific establishment. Or, worse, partisan politics masquerading as science.” That, sadly, is exactly what happened during the pandemic. Few Americans who “trusted Dr. Anthony Fauci” to make “drastic impositions on our lives” realize they’re not following “the science” but “an idiosyncratic” immunologist.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
