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Believing this requires significant sane-washing of the last 8 years of media. I mean, to pick a random example off the top of my head that Youtube reminded me, Joe Biden's mental decline. The behavior of those in the media is completely unhinged and totally detached from reality, not to mention nakedly self serving. They've gaslit all of the country on an industrial scale about innumerable topics, or instituted a bizarre form of cognitive mutilation where you are only permitted to think of fact in ways they have told you that you are permitted to think of them. Impossible tangles of double-think abound for sex, gender, crime, equality, equity, you name it.
I would hope Elon has better sources of information than I have. But, to pick at Zelensky's 4% approval rating Hanania leads with, is it even possible to know what the real number might be? Also, I'm supposed to be assessing these "debunks" in a media environment where all the election polling around our own election was purposeful lying. Trump's internal polls showed him winning. Biden and then Kamala's internal polls showed him winning. At no time during the entire election cycle did anyone's internal polls show anyone but Trump winning. Public polls on the other hand, with the exception "low quality" pollsters like Rasmussen, all showed Harris winning. The Harris campaign even went so far as to gaslight the nation claiming Trump was lying about his internal polls as a pretext for election denial.
So why should anyone believe anything these people say about Zelensky's poll numbers? How can they possibly claim to be more credible than just making shit up? If Trump and Elon want to parade around some fake numbers the IC gave them that serve their agenda, they are in good company. Well, maybe not good company, but you know what I mean. Don't pretend this is a deviation.
I mean, this is just naked revisionist history and sane washing right here.
What past is he talking about? "Misgendering" was a ban on sight offense on every social media platform. Books about it were banned, at least temporarily. Liberals didn't calmly argue with conservatives about where to get news from, they banned it. It's pure imagination that anyone, anywhere, was calmly debating what sources of information were preferable to seek the truth. It was a boot stomping on a human face thinking the roles would never be reversed.
Furthermore, I keep going through Hanania's supporting evidence, like "Editor-in-chief of The Federalist joins others in repeating repeating the completely made up lie about Zelensky meeting with Democrats beforehand." except, oh wait, here is a Democrat tweeting about meeting Zelensky before the Trump meeting. Just finished a meeting with President Zelensky here in Washington. He confirmed that the Ukrainian people will not support a fake peace agreement where Putin gets everything he wants and there are no security arrangements for Ukraine. . Did the original rumor name the wrong Democrats? Yes. Is it a made up lie that Zelensky met with Democrats beforehand? Absolutely not.
Frankly it's barely worth the effort to continue to pick apart these sour grapes that Hanania isn't making the living on Twitter that he used to or expected to. Though I am especially tickled he cites Elon being on the wrong side of an argument with Sam Harris about how bad COVID was going to be. The same Sam Harris who has horribly beclowned himself with extremely motivated reasoning about the measures that he still believes were justified to deal with it. Elon might have been wrong about the numbers, but he was directionally correct about how serious to take it. Especially in retrospect, and especially compared to Sam Harris.
No matter what you believe about the validity of polling, "Zelensky has an approval rating of 4%" does not pass a basic sanity check at any level. He's a wartime president, if his approval was really just 4% in a time like this he'd be shunted aside at warp speed. There are plenty of people in Ukraine at the moment with both the willingness and the ability to remove what would be a hysterically unpopular president with relatively little hassle if it came to that.
My point is not that I believe Zelensky has a 4% approval rating. It's that Hanania is point of fact wrong that the lies Trump & Elon are telling are in any way, shape, or form morally or qualitatively different than the lies the last regime told, and especially not in any way that makes them look worse. He's sanewashing the last 8 years of neoliberal hegemony in media and the deep state because in his little bubble, they weren't that bad.
OK but if you are Trump and Elon and you want to stay in power it would probably behoove you not to repeat the mistakes of the last guys.
Particularly with Elon. Like – Trump's entire shtick is being "directionally accurate" where he says "look windmills have killed a million birds, literally a million, they are counted as COVID deaths, folks" and only humorless scolds and fact-checkers take that as anything but a joke with a nugget of truth (wind turbines kill a lot of birds!)
But Elon's whole deal as I see it is that he's suppose to be a smart nerdy engineer, and so he should care about precision as part of his PR, or so it seems to me. (I suspect being "directionally correct" works much better in engineering than one might initially think, but you needn't generalize that unnecessarily.)
Maybe! But that is criticism unrelated to Hanania's thesis which he is absurdly and laughably wrong about.
No he isn't. Not one thing was wrong. Musk has a disdain for the truth and has been caught doing nothing but blatant lying. What are the lies you accuse the establishment of? Because if you look a little deeper I believe you will see that they aren't lies but a shaping of the truth and that's a massive difference. This is literally what the media has been doing forever. The richest man in the world tweeting that zelensky has 4% approval is a new level of insanity and a blatant lie. You can't equalize these two things , they are not the same. And in fact no, Elon wasn't 'directionally correct' about covid. That's a massive discussion that can't be given a 'truth' 'lie' response , and that's the exact difference. What can be true or false is sam harris's point , that 35k deaths did appear and that 600k cases did appear. These are both TRUE.
"Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
"We are building a democratic society in Afghanistan."
"Our test grades are low because we don't spend enough on education."
"Race-based caps on school discipline will lead to better outcomes."
"COVID was not a lab leak."
"Police routinely kill unarmed, compliant black people."
"Joe Biden is mentally competent."
"The laptop is Russian disinformation."
"Insurrectionists murdered a police officer on Jan 6th."
"Rittenhouse is a white supremacist murderer."
"The BLM protests are mostly peaceful."
"Antifa is just an idea."
"Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist."
...Off the top of my head. There are plenty more where those came from.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "shaping of the truth"?
Iraq was a failure of the establishment and also a failure of the anti-establishment. It was supported by a large majority of rural, working-class, no college degree, salt of the Earth white people. The modern Right is incapable of telling those people they are wrong on any issue, so we know what they'd do if the war happened today.
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What blatant lie? You have literally zero evidence that z's approval rating isn't 4%. Not one shred of it. You also have no evidence that Musk didn't make that claim in good faith.
Of course it's true that it's extremely unlikely that a wartime leader has only a lizardman level of support. But crazier things have happened many times. So maybe before calling Elon a liar, you should consider that you, in fact, are the liar.
Its very easy to find evidence that shows that its not even close to 4. Its easy for me , for you and for Musk. I dont need evidence to claim he didnt make it in good faith , a lie even when said because of lack of knowledge , that also supports the position of the enemy of the person you are lying against. Certainly this statement cant then be made in good faith. It is a result of a person consuming too much Russian propaganda and there is nothing you can say that will make the facts change. I am not a liar since I havent made any wrong statements because unlike Musk I fact check my opinions heavily.
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