Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin laid an ostrich-sized egg on Friday, relying on a badly flawed Business Insider hit piece on Florida losing population under Gov. Ron DeSantis (as Curtis Houck unspooled here). Rubin's headline was "Florida might pay for MAGA cruelty and know-nothingism."
But who looked like the Know Nothing? Rubin reversed the numbers. Twitter's Community Notes jumped in: "674,740 is the number of people who moved TO Florida in 2021, not away from Florida."
Charles Cooke at National Review underlined for everyone that this demonstrated Rubin just posts Fake News without Post editors noticing:
In which Jennifer Rubin writes a piece in the Washington Post on Friday that is based around the massive mistake that Business Insider made—and then corrected—on Tuesday. “Does she have editors?” was just emphatically answered. pic.twitter.com/HeigB7gL2c
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 15, 2023
Cooke also tweeted "It really is jarring to see. When I’ve written for the Post and the Times, I’ve been fact-checked until I bled. I if wrote that there are 50 states, I was asked for a citation. That’s fine—good, even. But, as is evident if you read those papers, it only happens in one direction."
This must have spurred the eventual correction appended to the Rubin mess.
A previous version of this article misstated Floridians' state-to-state migration in 2021. According to the Census Bureau, more people moved into Florida than any other state that year. This version has been corrected.
Along with the correction on Saturday, The Post removed Rubin's claims that more Floridians had moved out of the state than any other state. Rubin originally claimed Florida's loss in population is "more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,’ according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration."
Rubin's thesis was that DeSantis campaigning against wokeness can't possibly be a success, since younger people are woker. "Florida already is one of the states with the oldest average populations, and the MAGA culture wars risk alienating young people and the diverse workforce the state needs...There is little sign that the rest of the country is enamored of censorship, book bans or anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. The question remains whether DeSantis’s act wears thin at home."
