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Good Thursday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill’s Top Opinions.

“People are far more credulous than they used to be.” That’s the first of several explanations for how the North Shore Leader, a weekly Long Island newspaper with a circulation of 5,000, was able to expose Rep. George Santos’s (R-N.Y.) corruption four months before any other media outlet.

The explanation was offered by the Leader’s owner, Grant Lally, to former U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, who interviewed Lally about his paper’s work to draw attention to Santos’s lies and deceptions.

Israel, who once represented Santos’s district in Congress, writes that the Leader “alone picked up and ran with the DNA helix of lies spun with other lies to produce a life that never existed. Its reportage was the result of a mix of good sources and old-fashioned journalistic gum-shoeing…”

“It may not get a Pulitzer,” Israel concludes. “but if there is an award for 'I Told You So,' give it to the North Shore Leader.”

Read Israel’s entire op-ed here.

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MORE TOP OPINIONS

As Russia weakens, whoever has soldiers and guns will survive

By ALEXANDER MOTYL, professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark

If Russia continues to lose on the battlefield, if Putin’s fascist regime continues to lose legitimacy and weaken, if the economy continues to shrink, if popular protest grows as the numbers of Russian casualties approaches 200,000 and if the state’s capacity to maintain law and order declines — all perfectly plausible “ifs” today — then whoever has soldiers and guns will survive and thrive.

Read the op-ed here

Congress should be able to function in a crisis; Republicans just made that more difficult

By NORM ORNSTEIN, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

COVID-19 was a wakeup call, creating the real possibility of massive quarantines of lawmakers and of transportation shutdowns. This national crisis revived the importance of making sure, at a time of peril, that the United States had a functioning Congress that could appropriate money, legislate to deal with economic, national security and public health and safety issues arising from the pandemic or another catastrophe.

Read the op-ed here

Vaccine hesitancy is surging again regardless of the science

By Dr. Marc Siegel, professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health

The true science is being obscured beneath the politics and the country’s growing division. Lawsuits over vaccine side effects may follow and are sure to obscure the benefits of a useful, still effective, and essentially safe vaccine especially beneficial in high-risk groups, including those over the age of 65.

Read the op-ed here

Circling Valkyries over the Kremlin

By JONATHAN SWEET, retired Army colonel, and MARK TOTH, retired historian and economist

Grumblings are coming from within the various sociopolitical inner circles in Moscow, and they are increasingly more overt in nature. This suggests Putin is becoming more vulnerable. 

Read the op-ed here

QUICK TAKES

• Did a Democrat leak the Biden ‘filegate’ scandal to the press?

• Did Biden just give Trump a ‘get out of jail free’ card?

• Biden gets real on immigration

• We have tools to protect the immunocompromised from COVID-19 — time to use them

The Hill's Top Opinions is written by Daniel Allott, an opinion editor at The Hill and the author of “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey Into the Heart of a Divided Nation.”

Views expressed by contributors are theirs and not the opinion of The Hill.

Check out The Hill's Opinion section online for the latest. Interested in submitting an op-ed? Click here. If you find this newsletter useful, please consider recommending it to others: thehill.com/opinion.