The New Republic’s Jon Chait has done it again, launching one of his signature hack takedowns against the Cato Institute’s Alan Reynolds, a pseudo-expert who is challenging the top academic economists studying income inequality in a transparent attempt to muddy the waters.

But what makes Chait’s piece particularly excellent is his deconstruction of the PR tactics used to create uncertainty about complex scientific issues:

But whether the missing data would make inequality look worse or better is really beside the point. Reynolds’s role is merely to point out that the data is imperfect. The skeptic challenging the expert consensus must be fluent enough in the language of the experts to nibble away at their data. (The evolution skeptic can find holes in the fossil record; the global-warming skeptic can find periods of global cooling.) But he need not–indeed, he must not–be fluent enough to assimilate all the data himself into a coherent alternative explanation. His point is that the truth is unknowable.

You might suppose that somebody in Reynolds’s position would do everything he could to mask his own ideological preferences in order to lend credibility to his research. But Reynolds is completely up front about his beliefs…

Introducing ideology into a debate is one of the think-tank hack’s strongest weapons. It demystifies a complicated issue, moving it from the realm of science into the realm of politics. The think-tank hack confesses he has his biases but then claims that his opponents in academia or government do, too. Evolution is the secularist science establishment’s campaign to discredit religion; global warming is being pushed by regulators who would gain enormous power from new pollution controls; et cetera.

Since the goal is not winning these debates but merely achieving symmetry, the hack’s most effective technique can be taking the accusation that would seem to apply to him and hurling it at his opponents. “The politically correct yet factually incorrect claim that the top 1 [percent] earns 16 [percent] of personal income appears to fill a psychological rather than logical need,” Reynolds writes in the Journal. “Some economists seem ready and willing to supply whatever is demanded.” So, while you might think Reynolds is a hack mining the data for results that would conform to his political preferences, he has already made the same charge against the other side. Who can tell who’s right?