Media watch: New Lies About Hunter’s Laptop
Journalists with major companies “outright” lied to perhaps millions on Twitter when they claimed a new report from the director of national intelligence “confirmed” that Russia engineered last fall’s story — reported by The Post but censored by social media — about e-mails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, observes Glenn Greenwald at his Substack page. “Hey, New York Post and everyone else who got suckered into the ridiculous Hunter Biden Laptop story. Take a bow,” tweeted HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte. Yet the report, on foreign threats to the 2020 election, actually made no mention of the Hunter story. Nor did it even offer any evidence for its assessments. And though some journalists “were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim,” many refused, causing the lie to keep spreading.
From the right: The Gaslighters Get Gaslit
“Who gaslights the gaslighters?” White House press secretary Jen Psaki, of course, quips Grace Curley at Spectator USA. “The liars are being lied to, and it is a sight to behold.” Example: Psaki asserting that Team Biden “has a handle on the overwhelming influx of illegals at the southern border” — when “the number of unaccompanied minors in Border Patrol custody is at an all-time high.” Even “far-left news outlets are pushing back” on her claim that President Biden “inherited a broken system” from his predecessor, since the surge “came after Biden’s administration reversed a number of Trump-era policies.” “For four years the press treated the American people like credulous morons,” and now “the BS artists are being served malarkey.” What a “well-deserved comeuppance.”
Libertarian: The Steep Price of Joe’s Tax Hikes
President Biden’s “plan to hike taxes on individuals and corporations” to offset another “splurge of government spending” would cost the nation a large number of jobs and lower wages for workers, warns Reason’s Eric Boehm. “Every dollar the federal government drains from the economy is a dollar that cannot be used to grow a business” or pay workers. The “corporate tax hike alone would reduce long-term economic growth by about 0.8 percent, kill 159,000 jobs and reduce wages.” Yet the Biden administration seems determined to lock in the “symbolic win” of undoing 2017’s tax cuts, even if it means making “things even harder” for Americans as they emerge from the pandemic.
Conservative: Biden’s ‘Malarkey Maneuver’
President Biden is using his standard tactic — what National Review’s Jim Geraghty calls “the Malarkey Maneuver” — to address his “first major crisis”: the situation on the southern border, “now worsening by the day.” Whenever Biden is accused of something unsavory, “he just emphatically insists it isn’t true and hopes that resolves the issue.” “My son did nothing wrong!” “This never happened!” “You’re a lying, dog-faced pony soldier!” Now, in his recent interview with George Stephanopoulos, he simply denied that his “policy shifts prompted the current surge of migrants heading toward the US-Mexico border.” Biden wants folks to believe “it’s just a coincidence that this migration surge intensified the way it did after he took office — and that it’s just a matter of post-pandemic economic conditions and the hurricanes.”
From the left: Reopen Schools Now!
At New York magazine, Jonathan Chait fears the pandemic’s “gravest catastrophe” may be “a generation of schoolchildren whose formative years were irrevocably stunted” by a year-plus of public-school closures. Problem is, opening schools “requires negotiating a gamut of government guidelines, negotiation with often recalcitrant teachers’ unions and persuading parents who have (in some cases) come to see in-person schooling as a serious risk.” Yet “the weight of evidence strongly suggests in-person schooling, especially of younger students, poses a small health risk.” Even “the guideline that students must maintain six feet of distance in schools has no value” — it’s utterly unsupported by science. Reopening opponents pretend students haven’t actually lost ground, but kids are “watching the hourglass run out on opportunities to learn they will never have again.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
