Before liberals knew him as the butt of a Hamilton joke, John Adams once said: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

But as the Great Airline Meltdown of 2022 illustrated last week, today’s media now routinely does that altering — by promoting or suppressing facts based on which party and which infantilized audience they serve. That is a problem not just for air travelers, but also for our entire democracy.

To review: As up to one million travelers were stranded by Southwest Airlines over the holiday season, The Lever uncovered documents (here, here, here and here) showing that Democratic state officials and congressional lawmakers had repeatedly begged Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to toughen rules to deter airlines from mistreating their customers.

As those documents and our new video detail, Buttigieg — the sole airline regulator under federal law — has plenty of power at his disposal. But he’s refused to use that authority, even after Southwest had experienced a similar meltdown a year ago. As William McGee of the American Economic Liberties Project put it: “Southwest was inevitable after[Buttigieg] failed to punish awful behavior all year.”

Buttigieg’s inaction was part of a larger pattern of lax regulation and weak enforcement that by some measures have been even weaker than those under the Trump administration. This is hardly surprising, considering Buttigieg is a political appointee who had never managed a major transportation system before being given his Cabinet job. His formative experience was working at a corporate consulting giant that would later suggest ways airlines could extract more fees from passengers.

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