By dishonestly cherry-picking and falsifying statistical data, government officials, government-adjacent NGOs, and news media can either invent facts or omit them as needed when trafficking in falsehoods or promoting desired narratives.

Pretending that any hand-picked correlation is causation (it’s Monday and it snowed; therefore, Mondays are the cause of snow), engaging in biased sampling and polling (like statistician Nate Silver’s now shuttered 538 forecasting model), and ignoring relevant context and countervailing facts can cause the public to have a hall-of-mirrors view of reality.

AI" src="https://images.americanthinker.com/xc/xcqm18tagu2r6hy6zmms_640.jpg" />

Image created using AI.

Whether the topic is economic numbers, alleged disparities in men’s and women’s salaries, or how something (insert here the Democrats’ preferred topic of the day) disproportionately hurts women and minorities, statistics are easily twisted and curated to support a pre-determined conclusion.

When media are peddling a narrative, they frequently begin a sentence with the words “Experts say…”

Who are these mostly anonymous “experts?” They are rarely identified by name in news reports.

Global-warming monger, climatologist, and seeker of government grants, Michael Mann, contrived a widely mocked hockey stick graph as statistical “proof” of catastrophic man-made global warming.

Scandals of statistical deception designed to promote panic about climate change are too numerous to count at this point, even if the media steadfastly refuses to report on them. Still, the term “experts” has almost become an honorific, falsely burnishing a notion of objective empiricism.

“Man on the street” interviews featuring unverifiable, subjective anecdotal perceptions (this summer is definitely hotter than last year! Hurricanes today are more destructive than when I was a kid!) are also used to prop up phony stats and manipulate public opinion.

Snarling, enraged warthog and gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter (D-CA), the Lizzie Borden of left coast politics, cited debunked statistics to claim half a million Californians would die prematurely if California motorists didn’t follow government mandates to drive electric vehicles (EVs).

Yet, the........

© American Thinker