From the left: Fearmongers’ Laughable Defense
Racket’s Matt Taibbi eviscerates Hamilton 68’s pathetic response to his Twitter Files exposé, which showed the group falsely treated hundreds of real Twitter users as Russian bots, prompting countless bogus “news” stories. Hamilton is pretending reporters simply misunderstood the research, but the outfit’s principals routinely did media hits claiming they were tracking “bots” and “never complained about all the headlines” like “The Russian Bots Are Coming.” Fact is, “the Hamilton 68 people” took “ordinary accounts with opinions [they] deemed to be in sync with Russia, and called them part of a ‘network’ that was ‘engaged with Russian propaganda.’” Then they “basked in every opportunity to speak on TV and to newspapers and at schools and think tanks and even congress, offering themselves as primary witnesses for a tale about ongoing ‘cyber attacks.’”
Enviro desk: Fact-Checkers’ Climate Misinformation
“Partisan ‘fact checks’ are undermining open discourse about important issues, including climate change,” frets Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal. Polar bears have become the iconic symbol of the “climate apocalypse,” although “the best data show that far from dying out, their numbers are growing.” Their population stands “at 22,000 to 31,000” — “higher than the 5,000 to 19,000 polar bears scientists estimated were around in the 1960s.” Climate change wasn’t the problem: An international agreement that “limits polar-bear hunting” took aim at the real threat. That shows “we need to use good data rather than defaulting to ideologically inspired narratives.” Given that “some 700 polar bears are killed by hunters each year,” if we want to save them, “why not stop shooting them?”
Ed watch: Down With the College Board!
Despite White House support for “its new, openly Marxist high school class,” the College Board “appears to have backed down after Gov. Ron DeSantis’ refusal to allow the class into Florida,” notes Joy Pullman at The Federalist. But the board “deserves continued scrutiny”: A “company that puts out such materials into classrooms” can’t be trusted to fix them. It has “previously responded to criticism of overt leftist curricular bias by obscuring yet retaining that bias.” “Time to be done trusting the College Board.”
Foreign desk: Don’t Cry for Vlad
It’s “testimony to how badly Russia is losing the war” that “the same crew that have been blaming the war on Ukraine and the West” are “now actually using the threat of Russian collapse” to “encourage the West to stop arming Ukraine,” marvels Timothy Ash at the National Post. They ask what Russian President Vladimir Putin might do if he loses — and suggest any successor could be even worse. But there’s “always” been “an off-ramp for Putin” — ending the war and reaping the benefits of reduced sanctions. We shouldn’t feel any “obligation to help him secure some kind of ‘win’ in Ukraine for fear about how poor old Russia will handle defeat”; we’re not “Putin and Russia’s social worker or psychiatrist.” We should decide on “what is right and best for us” — and that means helping Ukraine win.
Culture critic: A Tipping Point for Tips
As Spectator World’s Matt Purple picked up a pie, the man behind the pizzeria’s cash register “seemed to slip into a persistent vegetative state.” Still, the credit-card screen showed various percentages: “I was not just asked for but pressured into furnishing a tip for someone who very well might have been a Disney animatronic.” “Tipping is one of America’s greatest institutions,” but it “always meant some kind of exertion on the employee’s part.” If “everything merits a tip, then nothing merits a tip.” Washington, DC, is even phasing out “its tipping wage.” Yet: “Any American who’s ever been to Europe and bristled at the coldness and inefficiency of the service understands that our arrangement works best.” “If we universalize and thus devalue tipping,” we won’t get “universally polite” service — everyone will become “my rigor-mortis pizza gargoyle.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board