And Another Thing

The dedicated “fact-check” outfit is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet. The crisis of professional “fact-checking” is not new. For more than 15 years, observers have watched with alarm as the genre degraded itself for the benefit of petty partisan politics. Yet little has been written about the discipline in its present state. Its original raison d’être long discarded, it lingers now as a zombie, ambling aimlessly in pursuit of mindless satiation.

Surprise, surprise. Many of those who promised during 2023 and early 2024 that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” are now deeply concerned about President Trump’s mental acuity. Thanks for reading And another thing ...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Told you this was coming. Those “We missed the story” mea culpas from a while back were never about contrition, or even real embarrassment.

A flock of do-gooders harass a diner in Washington, D.C., for declining their demand that she raise her fist in solidarity with capital-B black lives. The diner later explained that she actually agreed with the mob, but also believes it’s never good to reward peer pressure.(Washington Post. Aug., 2020) We’re living through a real-life attempt to erase the recent past.

The media-assisted campaign to undermine and delegitimize the U.S. Supreme Court, thus making it ripe for “reform,” continues apace.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey did something remarkable this weekend: it officially grossed more than $1 billion. Not bad for a three-hour, R-rated retelling of an Iron Age poem. Yet the two groups one might expect to be most excited by the film’s financial and critical success, the hardcore Right whose chief concern is the preservation of Western values and heritage and the author whose “feminist” translation served as a blueprint for the script, are seething.

Anthony Fauci’s recent appearance before Congress is a good reminder that his reign of error would not have been possible without a deeply partisan and starstruck press. As Fauci sat last week before members of Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment and wriggling in his seat like a toddler, one could not help but be reminded that this man was sold to the public as a real-life, living saint. He was treated as a savior — even as he lied through his teeth.

It is becoming harder to discern whether Zohran Mamdani is a run-of-the-mill political hack or genuinely believes he’s the sovereign ruler of an independent nation-state. Time will tell, I suppose.

I made this in Excel. It is neat. Remember that period after the 2016 presidential election, when a bunch of reporters convinced themselves that we were entering a new golden age of journalism? It feels like 100 years ago. Today, back in reality, the news media rank among the least-trusted institutions in the United States, according to new Gallup polling. Only 17 percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspaper reporting, down one point from last year.

“These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” Graham Platner’s once-ascendant candidacy for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat collapsed spectacularly last week. In an 11-minute, self-pitying rant, the self-described communist suspended his campaign, blaming everyone but himself for the half-dozen personal scandals that derailed it. He also announced that he would file the paperwork to withdraw his name by today’s deadline.

For the last decade or so, the press have produced endless handwringing over the rise of President Trump and “MAGA-aligned” Republicans. What they describe as a “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party is indeed alarming, as the GOP refashions itself into something more like a personality cult. On the other side of the aisle, the radical progressive and socialist takeover of the Democratic Party is also alarming. Yet one would hardly know it based on the relatively muted news coverage.