There are few things the mainstream media loves doing more than trying to make the conservative Justices on the Supreme Court look out of touch, ignorant, and/or factually challenged on legal matters. That is exactly what happened last week in the aftermath of a decision from the SCOTUS on a vaccine mandate/religious freedom case out of New York.
On Thursday, our nation’s highest court rejected a legal challenge from New York health care professionals who sued Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) over the state’s health care worker vaccine mandate put in place in August 2021 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) before he resigned in disgrace.
Justice Clarence Thomas was one of three on the court (Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito were the others) who argued that they should have heard the case. In Thomas’ dissent (see here, pages 47 and 48), he cited claims from the plaintiffs about how the vaccines were developed:
“Petitioners are 16 healthcare workers who served New York communities throughout the COVID–19 pandemic. They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”
Seems pretty straightforward, but that’s not how media outlets like Axios, Politico, and NBC News initially reported Thomas’ remarks. For instance, in the below tweet, you’ll notice Axios falsely claimed it was Thomas’ opinion:
Not only that, but in their original report (which has since been corrected – sort of), they also made several false and irrelevant claims, as noted by author Dale Franks among others:
NBC News got in on the act as well:
They were called out on it by Ed Whelan, but as of this writing, both the tweet and the original story are still up:
In a now-deleted tweet, Politico did the same thing:
This was their “correction”:
Keep in mind, too, that even if this was Thomas’ opinion, it has a solid basis:
“In various stages of vaccine development and manufacturing, some of the COVID-19 vaccines used cells originally isolated from fetal tissue (often referred to as fetal cells), some of which were originally derived from an aborted fetus.”
In other words, the big “Clarence Thomas said something and we should all be concerned!” story was not a story at all, whether the opinion was one he cited or his own. Politico, NBC News, and Axios all should have deleted their reports out of embarrassment, but I guess that’s just too much to ask.
Multiple Twitter users traced the genesis for this media hoax back to two left-wing writers – Vox’s Ian Millhiser and Mark Joseph Stern from Slate – both of who are notorious for getting it wrong:
Aiding and abetting these “news” organizations were Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler, who – shockingly enough – did not even bother to do his job on this one:
… and a couple of “disinformation experts,” including Nina Jankowicz:
Just incredible. It’s as if all of these people who were spreading the fake news conspired together to (once again) prove conservatives right about them. They really do make it too easy sometimes.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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