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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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And here he goes doing it in just the past couple days:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1836065799406280838

Claiming that China somehow possesses capacity to detonate electronic devices at will... in the U.S.

Without a single suggestion as to the means they could do it. Like, there's almost zero reason to believe this is true.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1835718296047653161

Here he is giving Kamala credit for increases in U.S. energy production that By the very graphs he posted obviously and clearly began during Trump's term.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1835388262464286853

Here he references data that cuts off in 2022 to dismiss claims about the number of migrants in Springfield in 2024. Then later admits that the number could still be higher and indeed plenty of people post various sources to back up the claim of 20k. Note that you can easily check and see that there was dramatic devolution of the situation in Haiti that might have caused a large uptick in refugees since then!

This is the guy who writes a column claiming to analyze facts and give reasonable conclusions based on those facts.

I don't use the term hack as a trivial thing, but I genuinely believe Noah Smith is a hack.