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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.
I must begrudgingly second FC here, your assessment does not square with how I remember the political climate of the 2000's, unless you really want to lump Michael Moore and Adbusters in with MAGA.
(Admittedly, Moore himself did make comments around 2016 to the effect of "Trump and MAGA is what the neoliberal establishment deserves.")
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...I don't know if you're old enough to remember the events of the 2000s first-hand, but in that era, rural, working-class, no college degree, salt of the earth white people believed that they had their own elites. George W Bush was president, and was at least attempting to implement policy at the federal level in direct service to Red Tribe and its values. The anti-establishment of the time would be the grass-roots antiwar types.
Then why are Liz Cheney and John Bolton urging people to vote Democrat?
You may be reluctant to recognize it, but the last ten years has been one long campaign within Red Tribe to purge the neocons. That effort has been wildly successful, to the point that the neocons attempted to defect to the Democratic party, and now with the defeat of Harris appear to have collapsed as a coherent faction. It is true that Red Tribers are not giving speeches about how the 2000s hippies and Noam Chomsky were totally correct, but what they have actually done is change their policies and their coalition on a fundamental level.
Blue Tribe, by contrast, absolutely smothered its peace movement the moment Obama was inaugurated and is now the party of imperial wars and armament corporations. The fact that you have not received emotional gratification from the Red Tribe public should not outweigh the concrete changes that have in fact happened. The most significant break from this pattern, Biden apparently forcing through an Afghanistan withdrawal, also appears to be an example of the deep state resisting the lawful authority of the President.
It's been one long campaign to purge anyone who doesn't support Trump. Neocons are fine as long as they support Trump.
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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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