Maverick podcaster Joe Rogan has called out journalists in the US who are treating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a war hero since the Russian attack on the country. Previously, Ukraine was perceived in the West as a corrupt hellhole and its leader as a would-be authoritarian, so the U-turn is “confusing,” Rogan said on his show on Saturday.
“This is one of the things that is so weird is that they were very disparaging of Ukraine. They were talking about [the] massive corruption of Ukraine and how horrible it was over there. And now all of a sudden they are looking at it like they’re heroes,” he observed.
Rogan offered a collection of articles in the Western press explaining Ukraine’s corruption problems and the increasing slide towards authoritarianism under Zelensky as well as his alleged personal grift.
“We are supposed to take a hard-right turn, a veer away, a hard angle away from the narrative that was being pushed just a couple of years ago. And we are supposed to just ignore all this stuff now,” he said, describing the situation as a “fog of information distribution.”