The Year in Exaggeration – WSJ

When Republicans (or, for that matter, Democrats) cast doubt on election outcomes they may be full of baloney, but they aren’t “fascists” who denigrate elections rather than demand that they be fair. Hysterical claims about the “death of democracy” had to be rapidly walked back everywhere after Democrats had a good midterm and evidence accumulated that “stop the steal” mainly undermined the appeal of its author. Perhaps the best sentence about the modest contribution of the Jan. 6 Committee came from a European observer who reminded us that, after all, “what threatens democracy is not erroneous beliefs or fake news but a social and economic crisis that political elites are incapable or unwilling to address.”

Reverse hysteria also got a workout in 2022, as the media hysterically proclaimed

John Durham

a failure for non-hysterically going about the job he accepted, namely examining the FBI’s actions in the Trump-Russia investigation without going overboard with criminal allegations.

The reverse hysteria was the media’s way of continuing to ignore the accumulating picture drawn now by two sets of Justice Department investigators, of an FBI that repeatedly invoked dubious or false “Russian intelligence” to meddle in domestic presidential politics between 2016 and 2020. Notice that Republicans, in their own account, leave out the single most consequential of these episodes, the FBI meddling in 2016 that backfired and likely defeated

Hillary Clinton.

Reverse hysteria helped to obscure another important story. Police killings of blacks, while gaining saturation coverage, actually are a smaller share of all black homicides than for other racial groups. That share likely got even smaller in 2022 for a horrifying reason: an increase in black homicides overall. One study found that while gun homicides of white males remained flat at roughly 3 per 100,000, they jumped an astonishing 60% for black males in the previous two years, to 56 per 100,000.

This phenomenon, apparently related to a crisis in black-police relations after the

George Floyd

murder, goes unmentioned by many for whom putatively “black lives…