Media watch: Strange Death of Fact-Checking
“Under President Biden, fact checkers are enjoying what feels like extended vacations,” snarks The Hill’s Joe Concha. “CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale . . . appeared or was mentioned on CNN more than once per day, on average” in 2019 and 2020. Now? “Dale has not conducted even one fact-check of the president since June.” And “White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre . . . has been fact-checked only once by Politifact since June” and never “by Factcheck.org, the Associated Press, Reuters, Washington Post or CNN” despite obvious lies on the border. This is why “nearly half of independents feel” fact-checkers favor one side. Real “fact-checkers must hold lawmakers and other public officials accountable without favor to party.” Our “fact-checkers are mostly on a four-year sabbatical at this point. And it’s pathetic.”
Conservative: Socialist Billionaire Dodges Taxes
Patagonia founder and “self-described socialist” billionaire Yvon Chouinard’s move to transfer “control of his company to a newly founded environmentalist organization” also allowed “Chouinard and his family to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal capital-gains taxes and estate and gift taxes,” notes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. He’s clearly one of the “surprising number of enormously wealthy people” who “don’t like to acknowledge that they are enormously wealthy” and even “want you to feel guilty about your dreams of getting rich one day” yet will dodge “capital-gains, gift, and inheritance taxes.” “Just about everybody hates paying taxes, but only some of us are honest about it.”
Libertarian: NYC’s Profitable ‘Bureaucratic Maze’
Harlem homeowner Serafim Katergaris had “to pay a fine to the city for a code violation he not only didn’t commit but had no way of knowing about,” marvels Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. New York City slapped him with a fee for not having a boiler inspected — before he bought the place, which no longer had a boiler — and “allowed no appeal.” And “his Kafkaesque ordeal is no isolated incident. The city’s building regulations have long been used to victimize the innocent and to fill government coffers.” In fact, the “building codes are designed to be insurmountable for anybody who doesn’t give city officials what they want. And, more often than not, what they want is to be bribed.”
Chicagoland: Radical Pols Fuel Soaring Violence
“Mayhem” in Illinois is intensifying, thanks to “feckless” Gov. J.B. Pritzker, “radical” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and “Soros-backed, corrupt” Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx, fumes Steve Cortes at Patria. “This unholy trinity of criminal-coddling politicians” is creating “a crisis for suffering citizens and demoralized police.” Chicago’s horrific 490 murders in 2019, pre-COVID, zoomed to 800 in 2021. Carjackings, 303 in 2014, are on pace to hit 1,904 this year, with “six times as many Chicagoans being violently kidnapped or ejected from their cars.” The nightmare is invading the suburbs, too. And when Pritzker’s new law scrapping “bail requirements for even super violent criminals” takes effect Jan. 1, it’ll place “citizens and cops at the mercy of dangerous cretins charged with the most serious offenses.”
Gadfly: Elite Meltdown Over Swedish Vote
That the Sweden Democrats, a right-wing nationalist party that’s anti-immigrant and anti-Islam, won a fifth of the vote in last week’s parliamentary elections “has shaken . . . liberal elites around the world,” smirks Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill. “They seem to be clocking, finally, that their cultural and political values are not safe anywhere. Not even in Sweden.” Yes, the party has “disturbing origins,” but its largely blue-collar voters aren’t in revolt “because they’re racist,” but in rejection of “an establishment that seems to be in wilful denial about the problems confronting society, and which will brand you a hateful bigot if you dare to raise those problems.” “Crime and violence have soared,” with half of convicted rapists “born outside of Sweden.” And this year saw “Islamist uprisings across Sweden.” Yet the establishment refused “to talk about Sweden’s transformation from a relatively stable welfare-oriented society into a nation beset by gang violence and identitarian grievance.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
