Top of the Fold

• Abrams “apologizes” to defuse hypocrisy charge: As the cries over hypocrisy got louder following Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s elementary school photo op wherein she sits maskless surrounded by a bunch of masked students, she issued an “apology” calling her decision a “mistake.” Yet even in her “apology” she shaded the truth by claiming she was following protocols and just for a moment removed her mask for the photo. Other accounts and photos show that she went maskless for much of the visit. It’s not that a maskless Abrams somehow posed a COVID threat to the students — if anything, given her obesity, it was the students who posed a greater threat to her. The problem is Abrams herself — her lust for power and her desire to impose leftist ideology onto Georgia. Her “apology” was solely motivated by political calculations.

• Is Loudoun County planning to arrest maskless students? Not only have Loudoun County, Virginia, schools thumbed their collective nose at Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s order banning schools from imposing mask mandates, but public school leaders are also planning to have maskless students arrested. In a February 1 email with the subject line “Mask Enforcement,” John Clark, director of safety and security for Loudoun County Public Schools, instructed school principals to alert law enforcement against parents and even students who fail to follow the mask mandate on school grounds; they’re to be considered guilty of trespassing. LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler claims the report is false, but Loudoun County is being sued by Governor Youngkin for its school mask mandate.

• The government gets it wrong on masks again: The CDC recently published a graphic depicting the supposed efficacy of different types of masks against COVID. The graphic states, “People who reported always wearing a mask in indoor public settings were less likely to test positive for COVID-19 than people who didn’t.” However, there’s a significant asterisk that’s affixed to the claim, which the fine print states: “Not statistically significant.” In other words, the claim highlighting the graphic is in fact meaningless, as there is no data supporting it. Significantly, the claim that a cloth mask lowers positive testing odds by 56% deserves far more than an asterisk. The statistically shoddy study itself concluded that wearing a cloth mask actually increased one’s chance of a positive COVID test by 17%.

• Yet another “hate crime” hoax: Last fall, a black female student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville claimed to have been the victim of a hate crime as she reported finding racist messages stuck to her dorm door as well as receiving racist text messages and death threats. Students protested and called for the expulsion of a “white female student” who was under investigation. The head of the Black Student Union predicted that the population of black students at the school would shrink if the school did not kick out the white student. However, following the investigation, the white student was cleared and the student who claimed to be the victim has been charged with disorderly conduct for falsely reporting a hate crime. The more people cry “racism” when there is none, the harder it becomes for those who are victims of genuine hate crimes.

Government & Politics

• Democrats and Leftmedia (but we repeat ourselves) busy tossing their COVID failures into the memory hole (PJ Media)

• Chris Cuomo wants as much as $60 million from CNN amid Jeff Zucker exit (Page Six)

Culture

• National Police Association blames “left-leaning policies” for deadly crime spikes, “vilification of law enforcement” (Daily Wire)

• Alleged sex traffickers, rapists, antisemites remain on Spotify without issue while Rogan faces boycott calls (Fox Business)

• Elite Christian school in New York considers racially discriminatory hiring practices (The Federalist)

• Private DC school forced kindergartners to march around with BLM signs and chant (Not the Bee)

• Big name Southern Baptist church brags about “transgender, LGBT, straight, single, married, divorced, and cohabitating people” serving in their church (Not the Bee)

Economy

• U.S. trade deficit hits $859 billion in 2021 and shatters record (MarketWatch)

• Americans racked up $1 trillion in debt in 2021 (TheStreet)

World

• Uyghur skier who became the face of China’s Genocide Olympics and carried the Olympic torch “disappears” (Daily Mail)

• “These restrictions have led to terrible division”: Alberta ends its vaccine passport (Toronto Star)

Closing Arguments

• Policy: By design, Biden’s border crisis actually his biggest success (Daily Signal)

• Satire: Olympic skier makes incredible jump over concentration camp prison yard (Babylon Bee)

For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit Headline Report.

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