▪️Yesterday, the usual suspects breathlessly jumped on the “Israel bombed a hospital” story. Twitter (X) sleuths quickly debunked this, showing it was a rocket from Islamic Jihad fired from Gaza that malfunctioned and was an own goal, but the damage was already done. Of course, Tlaib and Omar still haven’t corrected or removed their tweets.
https://x.com/geoconfirmed/status/1714390254935851272?s=61&t=wYS_HEkyKg4NfAC06jGdAg
▪️Not only was the story completely wrong, now it appears the rocket only hit the hospital’s parking lot, resulting in little damage to the hospital itself. The claim that 500 died comes from the terrorist regime of Hamas, yet got uncritically broadcast by so many.
https://x.com/radiogenoa/status/1714622731264614449?s=61&t=wYS_HEkyKg4NfAC06jGdAg
▪️Nearly all western media outlets (AP, NYT, BBC, CNN, etc.) ran stories about the hospital bombing, relying on Hamas as their source. Technically, the headlines were correct that “The Gaza Health Ministry says” but once shared it became viewed as fact.
▪️Not one outlet independently vetted it, they uncritically broadcast Hamas propaganda as news. The result was not just misinformation spread to millions, but riots and demonstrations across the world at US Embassies, stoking flames of war.
▪️It was wild watching the debunking happen. As more and more evidence came out that the rocket came from Gaza there were all sorts of rationalizations by people that it still couldn’t be from Gaza because they don’t have a rocket big enough to blow up a hospital. Which, of course, didn’t happen anyway. Don’t follow these sorts of people.
It’s funny to see the left use the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the right did a year ago regarding the jobs numbers being downwardly revised. So many on the right, who knew nothing of how the jobs numbers are calculated or why they revise them, were convinced the downward revisions were a conspiracy to help Biden win.
If people want to have a debate about the birth death model or the survey methods, ok, but that’s not what’s happening here. Most people are under the delusion that the BLS report is the govt reporting every job created and lost, and are thus easily swayed it’s rigged when it suits their political ends.
This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 ...
