Reason’s Fiona Harrigan writes, “Just days into 2022, multiple military bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria came under attack. Two drones carrying explosives were destroyed last Tuesday as they headed toward U.S. troops in western Iraq. The next day, rockets and indirect fire hit bases in western Iraq and eastern Syria. And last Monday, two armed drones were shot down as they approached a facility housing American advisers at the airport in Baghdad.

19 years in Afghanistan and we’re finally out. Now, 19 years in Iraq, and we still fight. @Fiona_Harrigan explains what @JoeBiden should do:https://t.co/glvan793VI

— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) January 13, 2022

Though there were no casualties, the Iran-backed militias behind the attacks have made clear that they will continue. That alone should encourage the Biden administration to get American soldiers out of harm’s way—and if it doesn’t, the faulty justifications keeping troops in Iraq and Syria should…

Dan Caldwell, vice president of foreign policy at Stand Together and a Marine veteran of the Iraq War, calls this change in mission ‘a distinction without a difference’ and says ‘an American military presence in Iraq and Syria is not required for our safety nor for the protection of our vital national interests.”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s JD Tucille writes, “It’s no secret that governments worldwide are increasingly hostile to scrutiny of their conduct. But, at a moment when too many media outlets see their role as working with the state to reinforce official narratives, one advocate of press freedom reminds us that the struggle isn’t over the ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ called out by opportunistic politicians, it’s over control of information. Will people be free in the future to decide for themselves what’s truth and what’s BS? Or will we be spoon-fed whatever the powers-that-be endorse?

‘Governments realize that they are in an existential battle over who controls information, who controls the narrative, and they are waging a frontal assault against independent journalism around the world,’ Joel Simon, the exiting head of the Committee to Protects Journalists (CPJ), told CNN’s Brian Stelter…

Governments are in no position to save us from bad information because they’re a major source of the stuff themselves and, if allowed, can use force to impose their versions of reality on dissenters. https://t.co/KJtiWMOrHr via @reason

— J.D. Tuccille (@JD_Tuccille) January 10, 2022

Free societies recognize that it’s a lot more dangerous to let government officials designate what constitutes capital-T Truth than it is to respect people’s rights to decide for themselves. When officialdom makes the call, legitimate news outlets get called ‘fake,’ as former President Trump often smeared his critics, extremists get conflated with opponents of school policies, as the Justice Department did last fall, and claims that COVID-19 originated in a lab leak in China are suppressed as conspiracy theories before later earning respectful treatment.

Truthful information doesn’t require a government seal of approval because government officials are as flawed and biased as anybody else.”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s Matt Welch writes, “President Joe Biden on Tuesday afternoon made some more public remarks about the still-spiking omicron variant of COVID-19. It wasn’t pretty.

Of particular interest was the president’s insistence on continuing to call it a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ a slogan that was unwise in July, untrue by December, and unbelievable at a time when the positive case rate in a 62 percent fully vaccinated country just reached an all-time high.

“This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” @JoeBiden continues to say, as case rates hit record highs in highly vaccinated states https://t.co/JmFjW7XldI

— reason (@reason) January 4, 2022

‘Those who are fully vaccinated, especially those with the booster shots…you can still get COVID, but it’s highly unlikely, it’s very unlikely that you’ll become seriously ill,’ Biden said, accurately. But then: ‘This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.’

If the pandemic indeed no longer applies to me, my family, and the vast majority of people I know (about half of whom seem to have contracted COVID over the past month), then I have a couple of follow-up questions, beginning with: Why on earth is my vaccinated 6-year-old, all the vaccinated kids in her class and after-school, and all her vaccinated teachers and supervisory staff, being forced by state law (influenced directly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to wear masks all day long?”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s Robby Soave writes, “There are many Republicans and Democrats who want to scrap Section 230 entirely: President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) have all denounced the statute’s protections for Big Tech companies. Getting rid of Section 230 wouldn’t solve the problem of overly aggressive fact-checking and content moderation, though. On the contrary, it could very well exacerbate it. The more liability Facebook is subjected to, the less permissive it is likely to be.

Facebook labelled one of my articles “false information” and threatened to punish @reason because of it. So I contacted the third-party fact checker, Science Feedback. They admitted they screwed up (!) and changed their evaluation. Bizarre.https://t.co/BTuqifokW5

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) December 29, 2021

But that doesn’t mean the status quo is particularly satisfying. It’s good that the fact-checker reversed course in my case, but needless to say, Facebook should revisit its formal, contractual relationship with an organization that routinely misquotes the people it scrutinizes.”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s Matt Welch writes, “On Monday morning, Anthony Fauci, the chief White House medical adviser, re-floated the trial balloon of imposing a federal vaccine requirement for domestic air travel.

Vaccine passports for domestic flights would require the creation of a national medical database, which holds ominous civil libertarian implications. All for a policy that would likely have a marginal public health impact. So yeah, it’ll probably happen. https://t.co/sWPa64SHOm

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) December 28, 2021

‘That is just another one of the requirements that I think is reasonable to consider,’ Fauci told MSNBC, while refusing to divulge whether he has made that recommendation to President Joe Biden. ‘You know, there’s requirements that you might want to get if you want to get into college, or you want to go to a university, or you want to work in certain places. When you make vaccination a requirement, that’s another incentive to get more people vaccinated. If you want to do that with domestic flights, I think that’s something that seriously should be considered…’

The positive health impact of barring the 70 million or so non-fully-vaccinated Americans ages 5 and older from air travel is likely to be closer to marginal than overwhelming. Airplane trips thus far during the pandemic have been almost preternaturally safe from COVID spread. Existing vaccine mandates, meanwhile, have failed to move the needle on vaccination rates.”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s Matt Welch writes, ”This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated,’ Biden emphasized, on the same day that the omicron variant produced a one-day positive-case increase of 16 percent in highly vaccinated New York City. ‘That’s the problem. And so everybody talks about ‘freedom,’ and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anybody else? What about that?’

I really thought that the whole “pandemic of the unvaccinated” slogan had been retired in the age of omicron. But the president was using that more-than-mostly-false formulation less than 2 weeks ago.https://t.co/NZupW1XgSm

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) December 27, 2021

What about that indeed. New York City’s one-shot vaccination rate (of 92 percent for adults, 83 percent for kids between 13 and 17) ‘rivals any number in the free world,’ Politico’s Jack Shafer observed last week, and yet somehow my vaccinated teen and boosted self spent Christmas under quarantine. The fact-checkers over at The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact generously rated Biden’s ‘vaccinated…do not spread the disease’ claim as only ‘mostly’ false, despite epidemiologist quotes like ‘[the] statement is not accurate,’ and ‘vaccinated individuals can definitely infect other people.”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s Robby Soave writes, “The U.S. government is unlikely to ever defeat COVID-19 in the same sense that it defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In the meantime, the government is claiming more and more power for itself; this power is being wielded by the agencies least accountable to the democratic process, and it is being used to enact harmful restrictions on people’s lives that will apparently last for years, for decades, or forever. Americans still remove their shoes and belts in order to board air planes, even though the event that inspired this policy happened more than 20 years ago—and even though the evidence against this policy is overwhelming.

“It’s kind of like we’re halfway through World War II, and you decide, well, I think I’ve had enough of this,” said Fauci.”

We will never defeat covid in the sense that we defeated Nazi Germany. If this is what we’re waiting for, we’ll wait forever.https://t.co/PSCwS3lE7n

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) December 20, 2021

The Faucists clearly want to make masks just as permanent as the TSA: Indeed, they have said so explicitly, as Fauci just did. At every stage of the pandemic, public health bureaucrats have uttered some version of the sentence Now is not the time to ease up. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not as long as they are in charge.”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s J.D. Tucille writes, ”The US government’s indictment poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad,’ Amnesty International objected to the U.K. High Court decision. ‘If upheld, it would undermine the key role of journalists and publishers in scrutinizing governments and exposing their misdeeds would leave journalists everywhere looking over their shoulders.’

Everybody should get journalistic freedom, not just people who publish what the government likes. https://t.co/u0N1mF0THU

— reason (@reason) December 13, 2021

‘Today’s ruling is an alarming setback for press freedom in the United States and around the world, and represents a notable escalation in the use of the Espionage Act in the ‘War on Whistleblowers’ that has expanded through the past several presidential administrations,’ the Freedom of the Press Foundation commented…

‘This is the first indictment of a journalist and editor or publisher, Julian Assange,’ Daniel Ellsberg, who released the documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, pointed out in 2019. ‘I see on the indictment, which I’ve just read, that one of the charges is that he encouraged Chelsea Manning and Bradley Manning to give him documents, more documents, after she had already given him hundreds of thousands of files. Well, if that’s a crime, then journalism is a crime, because just on countless occasions I have been harassed by journalists for documents, or for more documents than I had yet given them.”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s Eric Boehm writes, “President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act is likely to end up costing taxpayers about double what the official price tag suggests, and much of that hidden cost will end up being added to the national debt.

If all the Build Back Better plan’s proposals were made permanent, the final price tag would be $4.8 trillion and the bill would add about $2.8 trillion to the deficit.https://t.co/eUhD1G1eRQ

— reason (@reason) December 2, 2021

That’s the conclusion from two independent analyses of the proposal released in recent weeks. Both rely on a key assumption that did not figure into the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of the bill: that the Build Back Better plan’s various policies will be in place for at least the next 10 years.

‘The Build Back Better Act relies on a number of arbitrary sunsets and expirations to lower the official cost of the bill,’ explains the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit that advocates for balanced budgets. The group’s newly updated analysis of the Build Back Better plan finds that the package will cost an estimated $4.8 trillion over 10 years if all provisions are made permanent—double the price tag applied by the CBO last month.”

Read the entire column.

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In pushing to pass the spending bill, Biden and his fellow Democrats in Congress are doubling down on a strategy of ignoring voter problems in favor of irrelevant party priorities https://t.co/DN1AFKn7sH

— reason (@reason) November 30, 2021

Reason’s Peter Suderman writes, “One of the strangest ticks of left-leaning punditry over the last year has been the contention that if Democrats in Congress didn’t join together to pass some sort of climate and social spending bill—the various multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation packages that have gone under the label Build Back Better—then President Joe Biden would have presided over a failed presidency. The idea was that without this legislative package, Biden would have no accomplishments, no legacy, and nothing to show for his years in office with congressional majorities. Without the spending bill, Biden and the Democratic Party were doomed.

On the contrary, the evidence suggests that Biden is already presiding over a failed presidency—and passing the spending bill could further cement that failure.”

Read the entire column.

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