After this Braindead Elon and Vivek Take, Can We Please Stop Taking Fareed Zakaria Seriously Now?
Photo via screenshot of CNN
Being a media critic can often feel hopeless. You destroy your brain watching cable news so you can warn people not to do that, then you find yourself out in the world and hear people repeating the same braindead tropes you spent the day studying and debunking. While most people understand that the mainstream media is depraved and relies on untrustworthy and self-serving narratives in their bid to explain the world to you, that generally does not translate to the actual ideas and talking points that come out of the CNN’s of the world.
It’s not normal folks’ fault that they are led astray. I have long written about our continually degrading informational environment and how hard it is for people like me who do this for a living to keep up with good sources of information. Cable news has a similar effect to air pollution in that people know it is bad and wish someone would do something about it, but they are surrounded by its ubiquity and inevitably all of us will be poisoned by it in some way.
Which brings me to Fareed Zakaria, an eminently mediocre person’s idea of a smart person. Zakaria does the Very Serious cable news anchor shtick as well as anyone, and he has earned a sterling reputation his work has not remotely justified. One of his most famous quotes was “I think Donald Trump became president last night” after bombing Syria in 2017, which is the most succinct description of cable news’s bankrupt value system that I have ever heard. He was one of the lazy pundits who mischaracterized Bernie Sanders’ positions and wrote in 2016 that Bernie would be the perfect running mate for Donald Trump. Zakaria has also been caught plagiarizing and is not one to consistently cite his sources when he provides his viewers with evidence or information. He’s a hack.
Over the weekend, Zakaria added to his legacy of fundamentally unserious “journalism” that only serves to enrich and protect the Beltway establishment, calling Vivek Ramaswamy and America’s preeminent ketamine-posting enthusiast “brilliant,” in defiance of all available logic and evidence.
“Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be in charge of DOGE, are both brilliant, and the federal government has clearly become too expansive…”
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) November 24, 2024 at 5:07 PM
I am so sick of Freed Zakaria getting a pass despite being every bit as craven and clueless as anchors like Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. Vivek calls himself a Harvard-trained “scientist” to trick rubes like Zakaria, but as real journalists at the New York Times noted, “The reality of Mr. Ramaswamy’s business career is more complex, the story of a financier more than a scientist, and a prospector who went bargain hunting, hyped his vision, drew investment and then cashed out in two huge payouts.”
Ramaswamy’s initial foray into the business world was a gigantic failure, launching the largest initial public offering in the biotech industry’s history, only to see his Alzheimer’s drug fail two years later, destroying the value of the company. But because this is America and we prioritize capital over people, Vivek was still able to spin off pieces of the business and make a ton of money for himself through what was effectively a classic pump and dump scheme.
Elon’s idiocy is well-documented at this point, and it takes someone with a severe case of Cybertruck poisoning to think that he is anything other than the dullard his quadrillion 3 a.m. posts on Twitter have proven him to be. Not to mention that even if you did take Zakaria’s childish viewpoint of Vivek and Elon as fact, the idea that supposedly brilliant scientists and engineers would know the ins and outs of government waste can only be believed by someone with severe brain damage.
As anyone who actually has studied government waste knows, the main problem is with contractors, not the federal bureaucracy, and the word “contractor” did not even make an appearance in Zakaria’s six-minute segment about how to streamline the government. The FBI detailed the “largest domestic bribery and bid-rigging scheme in the history of federal contracting cases” in 2013, when Kerry Khan was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison as the mastermind behind “a billion-dollar government contract [that] was about to be steered illegally into favored hands in exchange for sizeable payments under the table.”
Just last month, Cask Technologies and former company executive Mark Larsen were indicted for bribing a government employee in order to win lucrative government contracts. Last year, three military contractors were sentenced “for their roles in a multi-year procurement fraud scheme related to more than $7 million in federal government contracts.” I can go on and on and on with countless examples of contractor fraud that wastes billions of dollars of taxpayer money. If you really want to go after government inefficiency, the government itself has long told us through indictments that there is an endless amount of waste and fraud done through government contractors.
Elon Musk is a very large contractor for the government, and the fact that he is focusing on the federal workforce and publicly threatening rank-and-file government workers is proof of how this Department of Government Efficiency sold as a new revelation is just a continuation of American conservatism’s bid to “starve the beast” since the late 1970s. That Zakaria just completely misses this immense conflict of interest and passes it by to lick Elon’s boots is another data point in a long career of his work that is antithetical to journalism. Fareed Zakaria exists solely to protect elite Beltway interests, and it’s long past time that we started treating him with the respect that his career has earned him.