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This is nothing compared to other Ukrainian public relation efforts.
First there was picking American transgender woman as official spokesperson for Ukrainian army, who then went on unhinged rant threatening to kill "Russian propagandists" all over the world.
(speaking in English, not Russian, so it is clear that it were not Russians in Russia who were target of this threat)
This speech is there, it is something you will hear from mouth of cartoon Evil Mastermind(TM) in corny B movie, just before Action Hero(TM) storms in and drops the villain into his/her/their/zir/xir own shark tank.
Someone in charge then noticed this does not make Ukraine look exactly like Avengers team and decided to suspend Cirillo.
So sanity prevailed and all will be good (optics) from now?
Well, Zelensky just decided to make honorary "ambassador of Ukraine", of all people, Marina Abramovic, world famous performance artist.
It sounds like 4chan fake news prank, but it is real, reported by mainstream media(and then vanishing from their pages).
Ukraine knows well what it is doing, Ukraine tries hard to signal it is on the right side and win hearts and minds.
Hearts and minds of people who matter, not yours.
edit: links
Think you mean this as a reply, rather than a top level thread.
I think the thing that gets me about Pizzagate is that (like the Tim Ballard / Sound of Freedom stuff) it completely misunderstands who the victims of the 'real life' versions of these things are. They're pretty much never middle-class white American or Western European kids. This is the 'Taken' fantasy. When rich and powerful people commit this kind of sexual abuse, they go abroad to do it, the victims are powerless people from third-world countries born into impoverished families in remote communities usually already connected in some way to organized crime. Nobody super rich is risking jail by abusing white american kids in the basement of a DC restaurant, just like no child trafficker is risking a mega police operation, arrest and a long, long, long time in jail by kidnapping Liam Neeson's rich white American daughter off the streets of Paris. Even Epstein switched very quickly from preying on Manhattan private school girls to largely pursuing penniless (often illegal) Hispanic migrants in the dirt poor West Palm Beach suburbs.
But sex trafficking of poor Guatemalans or Cambodians is a lot less interesting to the conservative audience than blonde whites having it happen to them, so storytellers are forced to improvise.
Jeffery Epstein was picking up local white girls in Florida. I don't think any of them would have qualified as middle class, but several of them lived with at least one gainfully employed parent. Virginia Guiffre (the girl in the famous Prince Andrew picture) was working at Mar-a-Lago when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her, which makes her at least respectable working class.
OTOH, it does look like he was picking on girls who were screwed up in various ways. For example, Virgina Guiffre had already been sexually abused by two men (one in her mother's house, one while living as a runaway) before moving in with her father, and was trying to become a masseuse.
The Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association targetted some kids from normie families who were sufficiently functional to be regular churchgoers. (Although the majority of the victims were children in Church-run children's homes, it was buggering the altar boys which gave the scandal legs). In the UK, the sexual abuse extended to pupils at Ampleforth, which was the most expensive and socially prestigious private school in the north of England. The other smaller religious sex abuse scandals tend to follow the same pattern.
The Penn State sex abuse scandal and similar scandals in youth sports (which is as lousy with sex abusers as the RCMBLA) involved student-athletes as victims, who tend to be middle-class, or at least respectable working class.
So although the "Taken" fantasy is almost entirely a media creation, it definitely isn't the case that normie middle-class white American kids are safe from sex abuse. It's just that it tends to involve corrupt authority figures, not stereotypical predators.
WARNING FOR PARENTS - THIS IS IMPORTANT - YOUR KID IS NOT PROTECTED FROM SEXUAL ABUSE BY CORRUPT AUTHORITY FIGURES BY YOUR MONEY, POWER OR COMMUNITY STANDING UNLESS YOU ACTUALLY DO THE WORK OF PROTECTING THEM. This starts by giving them the tools to talk to you about dodgy shit, and making sure they feel safe doing so.
Was the Penn State sex abuse scandal real? I remember reading a very convincing takedown which suggested that it was not. But of course it's been memory holed.
Does anyone have a link?
Yes, it was very real. There are a certain segment of Penn State football fans who refuse to believe anything negative about the program, and while this is usually limited to making excuses for Joe Paterno, a few have gone off the deep end and claimed that the abuse never happened. There is some question as to what exactly Mike McQueary witnessed that led to the coverup that got higher-ups indicted, but without that there are still enough known victims that it's clear Sandusky was an abuser. The allegations that kicked off the grand jury investigation were recent and unrelated to those that were reported on the most.
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