So much for Rand Paul’s evil master plan
The Senate has now passed the aid bill for Ukraine. President Biden will sign it into law imminently. It’s a reminder that although Rand Paul did shamefully delay it by a week, he did not “block” the legislation – as so many headlines falsely claimed at the time. He was only ever going to be able to slightly delay it like this.
To be clear, Rand Paul may have indeed done some damage. Could Ukraine have used that aid a week sooner? Absolutely. And Rand Paul deserves all the condemnation in the world for this. But even when he delayed this bill, it always had a 100% chance of passing within a matter of days. Headlines misled people to believe the bill was dead.
It’s a reminder that the major media outlets can get away with misleading, hyperbolic, clickbait, and even outright false headlines any time they want – so long as they do it in a doomsday fashion, so audiences are too enraged to realize they’re being emotionally manipulated. And once the doomsday headline proves to have been overstated all along, audiences are too relieved to even realize they were initially tricked by those headlines. This cycle of misleading doomsday headlines won’t end until you, the audience, get wise to it.
