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The Commentary Magazine Podcast

The Closing of the Journalistic Mind

The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Commentary Magazine

News Commentary, Politics, News

4.64.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2020

⏱️ 54 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Some shocking (and confusing) good news today on both the economic and pandemic fronts: the nation’s staggeringly high jobless rate began to recovery in May and New York City, the epicenter of the outbreak in America, recorded zero deaths related to COVID-19 on Thursday. What are the political implications of all this? Also, it’s day two of the meltdown inside the New York Times over the placement... Source

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily podcast today is Friday, June 5th, 2020.

0:29.1

I'm John Pajor, it's the editor of commentary magazine, the 70-odd-year-old monthly of intellectual analysis, political

0:34.9

property and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective. We invite you to join us at commentarymagazine.com where we give you a few free reads and ask you to subscribe with me as always,

0:45.9

senior editor Abe Greenwald. Hey Abe. Hi John. Senior writer Christine Rosen. Hi Christine. Hi John. And associate editor Noah Rossman. Hi Noah. Hi John.

0:56.5

So everybody is gobsmacked by the news that the unemployment rate fell this month.

1:07.5

Apparently we got two and a half million new jobs in May. No one was expecting this. People were expecting me and I'm going to go from 15 to 20 and said it went down what a point in a couple of decimals,

1:28.5

a point and a half something like that down to 13 point something or other. So as is always the case when there is unexpected news, some people who should know better like Paul Krugman instantly decide that there's a conspiracy of foot to juice the job numbers and I bring this up only because in 2012 during the reelection of Barack Obama.

1:56.5

In I think September of 2012 there was an unexpectedly good jobs report and Jack Welsh the most respected former CEO in America at the time the former head of GE used on Twitter that maybe somebody had interfered with the jobs report and you would have thought that he had joined the flatter society stories were done about how the Bureau of Labor Statistics people work literally behind glass that is shaded behind locked doors where the people are going to be in the middle of the street.

2:25.5

Lock doors where they don't have phones in order to prevent a leak of the jobs report to so that people on Wall Street couldn't get a heads up so that they could they could do insider trading and you know they they sealed their mouths with epoxy and their you know they they transmitted messages to each other through telepathic means so that no one could spy on it and this was just shocking and one of the people who wrote this very description of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and it's an unassailable information.

2:55.5

The integrity was of course Paul Krugman. Well the reason why you had that news cycle was in order to tar the entire right as a conspiracy minded fringe. It was a political vehicle to try to demonstrate how the right under led by Mitt Romney had to become something of anathema to polite society which of course will not apply to Democrats who have been incubating the theory that Georgia and Florida have been juicing their numbers around COVID for quite a while.

3:25.5

That's some time now that that's virtually in and something you can say now in polite society. But there will be no such right to to tar the Democratic Party as be. Yeah I mean around right.

3:37.5

Right. Around COVID of course the only numbers juicing that we now know about particularly involves the Lancet study of hydroxychloric when published to do a kind of like aha you see it's really bad that Trump is pumping hydroxychloric.

3:53.5

And and New England Journal of Medicine. Oh excuse me and the new it so to study.

3:58.5

Here in the peer reviewed study. Yeah. Well there yeah there are peer reviewed studies and it turns out that they are based on falsified data they have been they have been retracted.

4:08.5

And what are the consequences for that going to be aside from the long term skepticism of the public health regime in the United States that whose integrity was so assumed that everybody didn't even have an argument against the locked you know only only you know flakes and crazy people seem to have arguments against the lockdown since since the data

4:37.5

and the public health officials all were in lockstep agreement well if the public health officials a are juicing the hydroxychloric when numbers solely as a political slam on Trump.

4:51.5

And are now supporting the end of social distancing because it's much more important to protest the killing of George Floyd that it is to prevent the spread of COVID.

5:04.5

Who's going to listen to these people anymore. Well and this is actually disturbing for another reason which is that the politicization of medicine through social justice is an ongoing challenge and particularly in medical schools.

5:18.5

This has been a problem for a while and and a lot of people don't realize that behind the scenes you put an activist in a medical school.

5:24.5

There are real world consequences for people there was a little mini scandal. I think it was in the University of Washington which medical students were angry about the way a certain I believe it was a renal study was worded that took into account different rates of of complications among African American patients.

5:41.5

They said this was racism. This is being taught in a way that's racist. So they had them redo how they're going to teach that in the medical school curriculum and a lot of experts wrote and saying okay well but this is this is science right.

5:53.5

We know that this should be taken into account and that the results are are dangerous for patients if we don't that's one little mini scandal in in a sea of social justice efforts in medicine and science.

...

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