Left-Wing Reputation Assassins Are Targeting Sen. Fetterman and Elon Musk. Here’s Why They’ll Fail.

Let’s acknowledge the obvious before spelunking down our rabbit hole: Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) and Elon Musk might really, truly be guilty of every very nasty, vile, jaw-dropping smear. 

I mean, I doubt it. Seems extraordinarily unlikely. Our media ecosystem, after all, doesn’t just tilt towards sensationalism; it zooms towards it like a speeding bullet. Sensationalism outsells the truth. 

(Mostly because it’s more entertaining.)

That’s great news for the reputation assassins, because a smear doesn’t need to be truthful to stick. It’s just gotta be memorable — and if you don’t believe me, go ask Richard Gere. (I won’t explain. If you know… you know.)

But it’s also great news for victims, because the media’s credibility is in the toilet: Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.

As a result, if the mainstream media can’t quickly overwhelm its target, it usually leads to a frustrating, World War I-inspired cycle of trench warfare, with neither side ceding an inch — or ever gaining an inch.

And eventually, everyone runs out of ammo and heads home.

Over the past few days, shocking stories have emerged about two men that the radical left despises the most. We’ll begin with John Fetterman:

Wall Street Journal (Sept. 3, 2026): Behind Closed Doors, John Fetterman Shows Little Interest in the Work of a Senator

This is the news story that kicked the latest round of Fetterman-bashing into high gear. It paints the picture of a lazy, mentally compromised man who prioritized Fox News interviews over paralyzed military veterans. (A curious allegation, considering that Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are both owned by NewsCorp.)

Liberals pounced because the WSJ validated every left-wing gripe: Fetterman has changed! He’s lost his damn mind! He’s a stooge of Fox News and the Israeli lobby!

John Fetterman is a disgrace. Our state deserves better than a lazy trust fund baby who is too lazy to do the job. https://t.co/B2maiWqGAE

— Congressman Brendan Boyle (@RepBrendanBoyle) September 4, 2026

There is a lot I could say about this report of John Fetterman’s pathetic behavior as a Senator. But between the laziness, disrespect, and willingness to carry water for a foreign government, it shows us something we already know: this man has no sense of duty.

He is not up for… https://t.co/mT95qlSRJt

— Chris Deluzio (@ChrisForPA) September 4, 2026

Fetterman is vulnerable to these attacks because his mental struggles are real: He’s had a stroke and was hospitalized for depression. His medical history makes the allegations sticky.

Furthermore, there’s a political motive: He’s the Democrat that Democrats hate the most.

John Fetterman's had a 108 pt drop in his net approval with PA Dems since 2023.

His net rating is -40 pt net approval with them.

His net popularity with his own party is worse than all senators who lost a primary this century.

There's no historical analog to his unpopularity. pic.twitter.com/r9S0gZjql6

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) March 20, 2026

Back in 2023, [Fetterman] was a Democrat liberal darling. He was at plus 68 points. Look at how low he has fallen, down to negative 40 points. He’s down there with the Titanic among Democrats in this Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And to put a comparison to it, you always hear about how Chuck Schumer is disliked by the Democratic base nationwide. Chuck Schumer has a net popularity rating of about -2 points. He is net 38 points more popular than John Fetterman with Pennsylvania Democrats.

Some of the allegations, however, lose their wallop when placed under a microscope. For example, Mediaite listed this smear among its “5 Wildest Details from the Wall Street Journal’s Bombshell John Fetterman Report”:

Fetterman also backed out of attending the funeral for three police officers killed near his hometown of York last year, according to the report.

After an aide explained that the formal ceremony would last at least three hours, Fetterman responded: “3 hours??”

Told it was effectively three separate funerals, he replied: “This may be a nonstarter.”

It sounds absolutely deplorable — until you learn that Pennsylvania’s other Senator wasn’t going either, and it would’ve required Fetterman to drive 9+ hours to attend all three funerals. (Which is probably relevant, because previous media hit-pieces have accused Fetterman of being a poor driver.)

Another smear in Mediaite’s top five:

The Journal reported that Fetterman frequently refused or canceled meetings with constituents and lawmakers.

When an aide told him Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia wanted to discuss Medicaid cuts last year, Fetterman allegedly responded: “Why do I have to keep having to meet with chop.”

After being told the hospital was concerned about vaccines and Medicaid, he replied: “Well I’m not,” before adding: “I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC.”

It’s a brutal allegation, because it implies that Fetterman is indifferent to the suffering of cancer-stricken kids. (That monster!)

But the CBS article makes it clear that Fetterman had already met with the people from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia multiple times!

If you’re a Fetterman-hater, the most compelling evidence probably came from Adam Jentleson, the senator’s ex-chief-of-staff, who fed anti-Fetterman stories to New York Magazine in 2025:

There are many crazy things about this story, but one is that this is an entirely new group of staff who have rotated in and apparently find themselves horrified at Fetterman’s behavior. https://t.co/kLHzOCJAMH

— Adam Jentleson (@AJentleson) September 4, 2026

He’s not wrong. It is concerning that different teams of staffers have all gone on the record against Sen. Fetterman, warning that he’s mentally compromised and behaving erratically. 

Could this be explained by Fetterman’s staffers consisting of Democrats — and within the Democratic Party, there’s far more currency in bashing Fetterman than supporting him?

Maybe. (Either way, Fetterman would be wise to revamp his hiring process. And update his NDAs.)

But Fetterman will survive. These smears will have no long-term leverage over him, because: 

Fetterman would be wise to respond by releasing a statement that recounts the many, many times he’s met with his constituents — including war veterans, hospital execs, sick kids, and the families of fallen officers. 

And then… simply move on.

This will blow over, with the ugly allegations reduced to an internet meme: The next time Fetterman appears on Fox News, left-wingers will snicker that he’s probably blowing off that adorable kid from the Shriners Children’s commercial, but everyone else will shrug their shoulders.

It’s a slightly different story for Elon Musk. His latest PR woes are just beginning.

Hollywood Reporter (Sept. 2, 2026): Elon Musk Unmasked in Alex Gibney Documentary: ‘Insane a Person This Chaotic Has So Much Power’

Alex Gibney is a big-time documentary filmmaker. In 2010, Esquire declared he was “becoming the most important documentarian of our time” — and since then, he’s made widely-praised exposés about Scientology, Steve Jobs, and Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos.

By all accounts, his upcoming film, Musk, will be a strikingly negative take on the world’s wealthiest man. Elon Musk— whom Gibney didn’t interview — has called it a hit piece.

It’s a hit piece

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 7, 2023

The Hollywood Reporter article hyped the film and its (many) smears — such as Musk rigging the 2024 presidential election with his “space lasers”:

Two revelations, or at least intimations, especially stand out, both involving elections and Musk’s alleged techno-surveilling means of moving them for Republicans. In one, Musk ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, a central figure in the documentary, describes the events of Trump’s election in November 2024. Musk, she says, had a “degree of certainty” about the results before they came in that “I had never seen before.”

“He had told me [before the election] he was going to unleash the ‘anomaly in the matrix,’ ” she recounts, as a text exchange between them pops up onscreen backing up the claim. We see Musk telling her, “I have ten thousand lasers in space.”

“So you think he was referring to Starlink?” Gibney asks off-camera. St. Clair replies, “I mean, I don’t know where else he has space lasers.” Gibney leaves the text’s meaning hanging — was this a troll or a confession? — but hints he is taking it seriously when he then says in his patented voiceover, “What is Elon building, what are his goals, what are his actual motivations, and do we even know this man at all?”

Is Gibney an unbiased director? Of course not. Hollywood Reporter even recounted his editing tricks:

As Gibney sits in the edit bay adjusting small details — “Let’s let Trump’s voice go on longer and more distorted so it reads like it’s in Elon’s head,” he says during an Oval Office scene — his worldview comes into focus. Gibney’s tendency is to see the darker side of power and the powerful side of technology, tendencies that cast him as an outlier in the 2010s but have made him more relevant as the years have gone on. [emphasis added]

And Gibney’s bias was confirmed by Gibney:

“People assume because [Musk is] very rich that he’s not crazy,” [Gibney] says. “But the terrifying thing might be that he’s crazy and he’s very rich and powerful. That’s the warning bell the film sounds.”

[…]

Gibney says the whimsical device comes in service of a larger truth: the unmasking of a man who has aggregated power only by duping us into thinking we should give it to him. “The Great and Terrible Oz kept people in check because they were afraid of his visage that loomed over everybody, and he used that power to exert an enormous amount of control,” Gibney tells me. “But when a little dog pulled aside the curtain, and you can see a frumpy man operating gears and levers, suddenly he wasn’t so terrible and he wasn’t so great.”

Nearly 40 paragraphs down (!), Hollywood Reporter revealed who, exactly, inspired Gibney to make a film about Musk:

For someone who has made a career scalpeling the powerful, it perhaps comes as a surprise that Gibney had never thought of making a documentary about Elon Musk before — and in fact resisted the idea when the Chinese former real estate baron Zhang Xin suggested it to him in 2022 — feeling like so much had been said and, also, wasn’t Musk sometimes a force for good, remaking industries at will?

Zhang Xin and her husband, Chinese real estate mogul Pan Shiyi, have clear and obvious ties to the Chinese government. It’s a necessity, because Chinese businessmen who run afoul of the Chinese government will share the fate of fellow real estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang.

Isn’t it kinda-sorta relevant that an anti-Musk movie was inspired by someone with close ties to communist China?

When it comes to Elon Musk, China isn’t unbiased either. Between the space race, AI competition, and the electric car marketplace, weakening Musk would almost certainly leave China in a better position.

Another contradiction: On one hand, Gibney goes on and on about how singularly powerful — and uniquely dangerous — Musk is. Everyone’s afraid of him: Their knees shake and their hands tremble. Why, Musk is untouchable!

Yet oddly enough, the world’s biggest platforms bent over backwards to fund his anti-Musk movie!

Gibney sought early financing partners. He found a group of liberal-adjacent production companies ready to work with him, including Anonymous Content (Orwell: 2+2=5), the upstart doc banner Double Agent (run by an indie film veteran named Dana O’Keefe and joint venture of the narrative film producers Black Bear Pictures and New Regency) and Zhang Xin’s Closer Media.

Given the sensitivity of taking on one of the world’s most powerful men (who already viewed the movie as a hit piece), those producers might have expected that they would have to finance the making of the film itself without a sales partner. But when producers took the project out to the market, they were taken aback.

Companies that liked to play it safe were willing to take on the far right-flirting Musk. (It was, crucially, before he joined the Trump wagon, but still.) Most notably: Netflix, which pursued a deal despite the streamer avoiding globally polarizing topics like Jamal Khashoggi, surprising even some of the producers. [emphasis added]

So the initial idea came from someone with intimate ties to China. Then “liberal-adjacent” companies provided the funding — along with a company that the person who has ties to China controlled. (I’m guessing that when Zhang Xin suggested the Musk movie, she also made it clear that she’d financially support it. Be a wacky coincidence if she didn’t.)

Y’know why Musk assumes it’ll be a hit piece?

Because he’s not stupid.

Musk’s best bet is to laugh off the film. Don’t do what Scientology did and buy a full-page ad in the New York Times to rebut it; your response will give the story longer legs — and the film extra publicity.

Instead, sic your lawyers on any actionable claims, ignore the rest, and limit your reaction to a VERY small number of X posts.

Because either way, the film is gonna get out. Gibney might be biased, but he’s still a talented, well-funded filmmaker. With HBO as his platform, his film will attract millions of eyeballs — it’ll probably be well-constructed and highly entertaining — and it wouldn’t be a shocker if Tinsel Town’s left-leaning thought leaders pushed it for an Academy Award.

But just as Fetterman, Gibney and his fanboys have no leverage over Musk. He exists on a separate canvas. They can kvetch, moan, and accuse Musk of stealing elections with space lasers (which, I assume, he borrowed from the Jews). They can call him a sociopath, a madman, and a monster who once read a comic book as a man was dying.

And y’know what? 

All the people who already believe the worst about Musk will believe it — and no one else will.

The bad news is, the latest smears against Fetterman and Musk won’t be forgotten, because the internet never forgets. Democrats with a vested interest in tearing them down will use these smears to score political points. The reputational damage will be real.

But it won’t be fatal.

After all, it’s just entertainment.

One Last Thing: 2026 will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the future of our country teeters in the balance.

Never before have the political battle lines been so clearly defined. Blue wave or red wall, one way or another the 2026 midterms will transform our country.

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