From the right: Collusion for Biden

“We’ll never know what effect the ‘October Surprise’ of 2020, the New York Post’s reporting” on Hunter Biden’s laptop, “might have had on the election” if it “received wider circulation,” notes The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker. But it “so alarmed” “enough influential people” that “they pulled off one of the greatest disappearing tricks since Harry Houdini made that elephant vanish from a New York stage.” National-security and intelligence veterans rushed to validate media and tech suppression of the Post stories. “Now we can guess why so much US intelligence has been so faulty all these years. Either these 50 or so grandmasters of international espionage are completely unable to distinguish Russian disinformation from real information, or they prostituted their credentials in a naked act of political hackery.” The “deeper shame” is that none will pay a price.

Media watch: ‘Fact-Checkers’ Killing Journalism

“A cadre of fact-checkers has marched through the institutions of journalism,” observes Jacob Siegel at Tablet — turning reporters “into rent-a-cops whose job is to enforce an official consensus.” With “hundreds of millions of dollars in funding,” this “industrial fact-checking complex . . . trades on readers’ respect for older journalistic values like objectivity without acknowledging the role of the prestige media in deliberately undermining those values” by “enforcing loyalty to progressive ideas that can’t survive on their own.” This was all “constructed to solve an unproved assertion: that a lack of government regulation over social media swung the 2016 election.” Which suggests that “the convergence of government power with fact-checking is neither a conspiracy nor an accident.”

Libertarian: Progs Want Biden to Do Their Work

Progressives in Congress are “pushing the Biden administration to take executive action on a host of issues that Congress apparently can’t or won’t deal with,” reports Reason’s Eric Boehm. That includes “banning gas and oil drilling on federal lands” plus “fixing problems with the Affordable Care Act and overhauling the immigration system.” But “every member of the progressive caucus in Congress is, by definition, a member of Congress capable of writing and introducing legislation,” so getting this done is their job. “The executive branch does not exist so ideas that cannot get the requisite votes in Congress can become national policy.” If these progs “want to advocate for executive action,” they should leave Congress to “become lobbyists.”

Legal beat: Telling Questions KBJ Won’t Answer

As “Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats incessantly remind us” that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will make history if she becomes “the Supreme Court’s first Black woman,” it’s remarkable that “she can’t say what a woman is,” quips Andrew McCarthy at Fox News. On Tuesday, “she testified that she can’t ‘provide a definition’ of what a woman is,” even when offered Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s. “See what seven years at Harvard can do for you!” In reality, “it is not that someone as erudite and sophisticated as Judge Jackson can’t tell us the answer. It is that she won’t.” She also dodges any question seeking “to get a read on how she decides what the law is” because she “grasps that we wouldn’t like the answer very much.”

Iconoclast: Ailing Dems Need New Trajectory

“Democrats need to find a way back to their historic base of working-class and minority voters,” warns Joel Kotkin at Spiked. With “the probability of a significant loss” in the midterms, expect “a full-scale brawl over the party’s trajectory.” Voters receptive to Dems’ “traditional, economic-centered social-democratic message” are “less enthused about the priorities of the now dominant progressives,” especially climate-change activists. Cultural issues (especially crime) are another “fault line between the bulk of the electorate and the tin-eared elites.” Voters want a “focus on their concerns, as opposed to mainly environmental or cultural concerns.” The “takeover of the party by the super-affluent of Manhattan, Menlo Park or Malibu” drives its “shrinkage outside the big inner cities.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board