Abby Martin: Western Media’s Complicity in US-Israeli War on Iran
Abby Martin and Adam Johnson expose the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, citing 555 deaths from indiscriminate bombing and retaliatory strikes across Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, and the UAE. They blame Trump and Netanyahu for this illegal imperial aggression driven by oil interests, accusing Western media like the New York Times of manufacturing consent through decades of propaganda that conflates Iran's civilian nuclear program with non-existent weapons capabilities. With only 7% of Democrats supporting the war, they condemn Schumer and Jeffries for delaying a War Powers Resolution vote while ignoring overwhelming opposition. Ultimately, the hosts call for rejecting the current electoral system to organize against an empire running a "hit list" against sovereign nations like Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. [Automatically generated summary]
Urged on by Israeli Prime Minister and Jennesedair Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump thrust the United States into a war with Iran on Saturday, committing what critics say may be the worst foreign policy decision in history.
U.S. and Israeli forces have been accused this week of seemingly indiscriminate bombing of Iran, as the country's Red Crescent said that at least 555 people have been killed amid reports of fresh mass casualty attacks across the country.
And now, a shocked globe watches in horror as the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran boils over into a deadly regional disaster.
Since the start of the war, Israel has sent troops into Lebanon and ramped up its illegal annexations of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.
Iran has retaliated by striking multiple U.S. military bases in the Middle East, including facilities in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
Regardless of the Trump regime's saber-rattling and half-baked justifications for this illegal war, it is clear that neither Trump, Netanyahu, nor Iran have the sole ability to control the outcome here.
The proverbial Pandora's box of war has been opened.
A lot of people are going to die.
And the geopolitical and economic shockwaves are already being felt around the globe.
And to be 100% clear, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are the ones responsible for this war and whatever comes next.
That is patently obvious.
But they and their cabinets of war hawks are not the only ones with blood on their hands.
And today, we're going to talk about how Western media and American politicians and the supposed Democratic opposition have also helped manufacture the conditions for this war.
And I'm extremely grateful to be joined today by two guests who are going to help us dig into this: Abby Martin, legendary journalist, documentary filmmaker, and host of The Empire Files, and Adam Johnson, writer, media critic, co-host of the Citations Needed podcast, and a columnist for us here at The Real News.
Thank you both so much for joining us today.
I want to dive right in and focus on the media's complicity in this U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
So, Adam, I'm going to toss it to you first, and I want to ask you guys, in your assessment, how have legacy media outlets responded to the war with Iran over the past week?
And what does that response tell us about the media itself?
Well, I think much of the heavy lifting was done prior to the bombing.
Obviously, decades of anti-Iran-Iran sentiment in our media.
There's been this quote-unquote nuclear threat from Iran.
I think the conflation of their civilian nuclear energy program with some sort of proto-nuclear bomb has been probably the most successful if you sort of polled.
I wanted pollster, I talked to some pollsters about polling this question last June, and none of them ever did, but I think it's actually quite urgent.
And I'm going to attempt to try to get it polled.
But if you ask the average American, do you think Iran has a nuclear weapon?
My guess is you'd say probably 60, 70% would say yes.
And you see this slip up all the time.
I mean, either intentionally or unintentionally.
CBS News under Barry Weiss claimed that Iran had one in one social media post two days ago.
But of course, there's a fatwa against having a nuclear weapon in Iran.
They've never built one.
They've not had a nuclear weapons program in at least 25 years.
This is something U.S. intelligence has affirmed over and over again.
But this conflation of their civilian nuclear energy program, which again, dozens of countries on earth have without having a nuke, right?
This is a very common thing, has been, I think, and they're right under the NFT and other international treaties to have that, has been conflated as this constant ticking time bomb threat.
I think that's really the primary core of like anti-Iran propaganda because it's not like obviously Iran doesn't fund or arm al-Qaeda or ISIS.
It's not, as far as I can tell, it's not invading California or New York.
So to get the average American to sort of care, they have to have this specter of a kind of nuclear-armed madman, religious fanatics.
And that has been kind of the central conflation.
They don't make that clear.
They repeatedly mislead people into thinking they have nuclear weapons.
And I know the New York Times in several instances had to retract making those claims because it just becomes conventional wisdom.
And I think that's probably the single biggest fear-mongering thing one has seen over the last 10 years.
It's something I know that my co-host Nima Shirazi has written about for, gosh, almost 20 years now at this point.
That is the central lie.
And then, of course, you have these other lies, this idea that Iran's the greatest exporter of terror, whatever that means, despite the fact that Israel has killed more American civilians in the past 30 years than Iran has.
This is quantifiable.
You can count them and look it up.
Obviously, Iran supports Hezbollah to a greater, a much lesser extent, Hamas.
But that support is not very significant and also is not quote-unquote terrorism in the sense that you and I would understand it in terms of these kind of Sunni typically al-Qaeda or ISIS types, which of course have been historically backed by many of Iran's primary geopolitical enemies in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, etc.
So it's mostly just kind of racist vibes.
It's sort of like they're Muslim, they have a cleric, and they're adversarial to U.S. and Israeli hegemony.
Therefore, they're kind of per se, always about to kill grandma and attack you.
But what's remarkable about this is despite all that propaganda is how unpopular this is in the polls.
There wasn't a real concerted effort over several months to build.
They made an effort by promoting these widely inflated death tolls of people that were killed during the crackdown.
in early January.
I think even anti-government or anti-quote unquote regime numbers put at the highest at 4,000 to 6,000.
But then they started just making it 32,000 and then 50,000.
I think some even auctioned off 60,000 because they wanted to have parity with Gaza.
These numbers are obviously just not physically possible.
That was the primary way they tried to propagandize people to sort of get the liberals to buy in or to care.
But what's remarkable is how little it's worked.
Even for that, there's just broad fatigue around Israel.
There's broad war fatigue in the Middle East.
Only 7% of Democrats support this war, which is very, very low.
It's actually, as I noted in my piece for the nation yesterday, that is three percentage points lower than the percent of Democrats who believe that Biden stole the 2020 election for Trump.
I mean, it is very, very, very, or stole the election from Trump, rather.
It is very, very unpopular.
More Democrats voted for Trump than support this attack on Iran.
And it's only sort of barely a plurality of support among Republicans.
So one of the reasons there wasn't, of course, a vote in Congress or much deliberation or kind of pitch to the public is because they don't really need the public's approval.
I think if Gaza and the genocide in Gaza showed one thing is that you can kind of just assert these extreme mechanisms of violence and our media will sort of protest around the margins.
The New York Times editorial board opposed it, but they only posed it in process terms.
They reinforced all the premises, right?
Evil dictator, crushing their own people, all the kind of.
And so you can sort of create reality.
And this is what Trump and what Israel and the United States are doing.
They're kind of creating reality.
But Iran, unlike Gaza, has a way of meaningfully fighting back with respect to an air force and surface to surface and surface to air capacity.
So they are firing on U.S. military bases.
They're going to obviously kill many American troops.
And this is a reality.
Again, even for people who are extreme regime change nutcases, they have hand-wringing.
They're happy it's happening.
You're kind of Atlantic magazine types, but you're an Apple bombs or Elliott Cohn's.
They're sort of hand-wringing about process.
But ultimately, it's their Super Bowl.
This is the moment that editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, has been looking forward to his entire professional life.
This is someone who promoted conspiracy theories about Saddam Hussein having links to 9-11, who promoted conspiracy theories about Hezbollah's sleeper cells blowing up strip malls United States in 2002, someone who constantly trial ballooned airstrikes on Israel during the Obama administration.
So, for a lot of people, this is a long day coming.
And the assumption is that once you humiliate and subjugate Iran with this, with these, I don't think they're really going for regime change.
I don't think anyone really believes that, mostly because any regime that replaces this regime would still be anti-Israel because they're bombing their fucking girls' schools.
So, and there's not really like a dictator on offer.
And so, it's obvious the goal is to just do what they did to Lebanon, which is into Syria, which is to sort of just pound it into submission and to indiscriminately kill civilians until they have full reign over the skies and sea.
And that's really what you're seeing.
So, you're seeing a kind of indiscriminate bombing, as you noted, because that's part of the Israeli and part of the American strategy.
It's to inflict violence on civilians, specifically children, to get a military actor to capitulate.
Abby, let's toss it to you.
How would you read the media's response to this war?
Well, it just reminds me, as Adam was talking, the Ron Susskin quote from the New York Times being told by Karl Rove, you know, we create our own reality, and you guys are just left to report on what we do.
That's the way the world works.
And it really has been laid bare with this kind of naked, belligerent, aggressive colonialism.
I mean, let's not forget that Iran holds the third largest oil reserves in the world.
So, we're talking about literally just two months after the flagrant kidnapping, the brazen black bagging of a sovereign leader overseeing the largest oil reserves in the world with little controversy from like the world stage.
Like, I remember all the European leaders who are the doormats for U.S. imperialism came out and they're just like, well, you know, we didn't like the way, you know, let's not talk about legality now.
Like, Maduro needed to go.
And we're seeing the exact same rhetoric.
We're seeing the exact same acquiescence, kowtowing to this insanity from these global leaders because they're just complicit.
I mean, they are appendages to this system and they have been vying for this for decades.
One of the biggest, I think, misconstrued understandings of the situation is that Israel has forced America's hand into this, somehow absolving the great Satan.
Look, this is the ritual sacrifice to the oil dragon.
This is what America does.
This is all for oil.
It always has been.
And they will not, they do not care about the human casualties or the environmental toll of anything that they do.
So, this is just pure savagery and barbarism.
But, like Adam's articulating, this does not happen in a vacuum.
The media has laid the groundwork for all of this.
I mean, they're doing the exact same playbook, just like they did in Gaza, obfuscating who's perpetrating the atrocities.
I mean, 150 children.
I mean, on the first day, one of the worst atrocities that the U.S. has directly committed since Vietnam.
And the way the media is reporting on it, buried, right?
The leads buried in paragraph seven.
The headline is just like, yep, this happened.
It was really bad.
Well, who the hell did it?
Who did it?
And then you see again the confusion.
Oh, well, it was a misdirected missile.
Well, that's what they said.
And everyone is just again trying to confuse and obfuscate who the perpetrator is of the atrocities.
And then, of course, the European doormats go out there and they're just like, how dare you?
How dare you respond to an attempt to completely destroy your country, taking out of your supreme leader, all of these politicians, Ahmed Anjad, it would be like bombing Bush at his ranch now.
I mean, this is absolutely insane, the way that this has been normalized and accepted by the world.
So, you know, when you give someone an inch, they won't stop.
And this is what happens when you incubate a planet, incubate a world order that lets war criminals run free, gallivant around the world selling books, going on Ellen DeGeneres' show, going to baseball games and being a good old boy.
This is what happens when you look forward and not backward.
This is what happens with a world that has total impunity for a military empire brutalizing and subjugating the planet.
And the media plays right along.
It is horrific and disgusting to see another war of aggression in my name, in our names, be carried out with the just complete and utter complicity and compliance from Western media.
You know, like you both said, and, you know, like it has done with Palestine, the entire U.S. legacy media machine from the New York Times to Hollywood has been manufacturing fear of Iran and manufacturing consent for eventual war or regime change war in Iran for basically our entire lifetimes.
Western Media's War on Iran00:14:43
And I wanted to just kind of go deeper on that to not only highlight some of the specifics that you guys already highlighted, like the headlines that we see, the perspectives that that we get and that we don't get.
But like, let's talk about this as sort of like a Western kind of media system that creates this kind of, at worst, a hunger for war or at best, a total lack of care when war happens.
I mean, I always think back to the, when they, when, uh, when they made Argo in 2012, the Ben Affleck movie about them producing a fake film to rescue the hostages or whatever, some sort of, you know, even though it was all Canadians, but they made a fake movie and had a fake director and a fake producer to go rescue hostages during the Iran hostage crisis in the 70s.
And it was this fun caper.
And then two years later, 18 months later, Jon Stewart directs a movie called Rosewater about a reporter, I guess a videographer for Newsweek who's arrested by the Iranian regime and tortured or whatever.
And it's like, you just gave a best picture to a movie about using artists and reporters and journalists as spies.
And then 18 months later, you handring about Iran being paranoid about journalists being spies.
And it's like, it's just this constant, like, everything we do that undermines the regime is sort of cool.
You know, it just now, we just found out, you know, Israel hacked into the traffic cameras of in Tehran.
We found out, of course, last year that they had hundreds of spies in Iran that were, when they were bombing, that were giving away positions and then themselves bombing places.
They had a car bomb go off, right, in Tehran.
And then you turn around and you say, oh, well, you know, everything else that happens in Iran is that they're just an oppressive regime.
And it's like, can you imagine if there was that level of infiltration in the United States from a hostile foreign power, right?
Russia put up Facebook ads and we had a two-year meltdown in this country.
Just imagine if they were paying people within the United States to blow up car bombs and to assassinate scientists and to assassinate academics.
We would be the most paranoid security state in history.
We already are the most paranoid security state in history, but it would be 10 times, 100 times worse.
And so there's this double game that's been going on for years where it's agitation, spying, provocation.
And then anytime there's any form of security repression, it's, oh, they're authoritarian, blah, blah, blah.
And that isn't to say that everyone they arrest is guilty or whatever.
That's not the point I'm trying to make.
But it's like when you siege a country, when you surround it on all sides by, everyone's seen the map of Iran with all the military bases, when you invade both our neighbors in 2001 and then 2003, when you constantly say we're going to bomb, bomb bomb Iran, right?
As John McCain did, if you have op-eds in the newspaper from high-level senators, from Brett Stevens saying we need to bomb Iran non-stop, it's like, well, what do you expect them to do?
Seeing, you know, instead of death to America, we love America?
I mean, so there's this mutual antagonism, well, largely one directional antagonism.
And then the second Iran does anything to assert its sovereignty or is remotely paranoid about the intentions of people who visit, it's, oh, they're cracking down.
They're authoritarian.
And it's, it's also cheesy and simplistic.
And that's where I think the kind of liberal interventionism comes in, because it doesn't give anything any context.
It doesn't give any context to anything.
The worst word you can use in liberal media, and I don't mean that in the rush lumbal sense, I mean center left, like democratic media, is context.
You can't have any context to anything.
History starts on October 7th, 2023, right?
History in Iran starts January 1st of this year when the protests began.
You're not allowed to have any context for anything.
And so, you know, that's why it's almost shocking.
And it's not a word I use a lot because I think whether or not a pundit is shocked is not inherently interesting, but it is to me shocking how unpopular this is, how much fatigue, how much skepticism people have for this war machine that just simply wasn't the case even five years ago.
And obviously Gaza, I think, is the primary reason for that.
I think there's only so many dead kids you can see on your screen to where you go, oh, well, they probably had it coming.
I mean, you have it nonstop for, you know, whatever it is now, 30, you know, 31 months in Gaza.
And then, of course, they blow up this girls' school and 160 dead kids.
And like, it just feels like the sort of normal torrent of human shields and democracy and freedom, it's not working and they don't really care.
And my sense is that they probably see this as their last shot.
That public support for Israel is plateauing.
This is why JD Vance, who of course is running in 2028, he's doing the Biden, right?
He's leaking all these stories talking about how upset he is about going to war against Iran, how he secretly opposes it.
He's doing the angry, hopeless Biden kind of laundering through the New York Times to really any reporter who will listen because he knows this isn't popular.
And so you have this raw, unchecked carnage for people who aren't running again for re-election, run by religious fanatics, both Christian and Jewish religious fanatics who are hell-bent on carrying out this agenda.
Obviously, there are resource motives, as Abby points out.
And there's no sense that there would be any, to the extent to which so-called liberals prop this up, it's we, you know, we get, and I put we in this category because I think maybe I can fall victim to it sometimes, is we get caught up in this progressive narrative of like, well, they're, you know, they're, they're a theocratic regime or they're, you know, they oppress their own people.
And it's like, you're welcome to believe that.
And that's all fine.
But what's important to understand is that that literally has no bearing on what the U.S. or Israel does.
They have zero liberal motivations.
And Biden had zero liberal motivations for like freeing the people of Gaza or whatever kind of retcon claptrap the New York Times or the Atlantic wishes to sort of use to justify it.
And so I think one thing we have to stop doing is acting like, especially with someone like Trump, who doesn't even run through the motions, right?
He doesn't even bother to act like he's, I mean, this was actually the first time he did it.
He's like, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to liberate the protesters or whatever.
He sent out like two half-assed tweets and then never mentioned it again.
Like, they don't care about any of that shit.
And the extent to which the liberal media intervenes and does all this, like, well, pox them both their houses stuff.
It's like, look, the United States is running through a hit list right now of countries.
They are starving Cuba.
They are starving and attacking and hijacking the natural resources of Venezuela.
They will kill tens of thousands of people in Iran.
They will turn Iran into another larger Gaza until they submit to their whims, right?
There's obviously they've killed 500, more than 500 people in Lebanon during the so-called ceasefire in Lebanon.
They're running down a hit list of countries.
We just don't have time to look for the perfect victim.
We have to acknowledge what's going on and talk about the ways in which empire is running through a hit list.
And we need dramatic interventions and we need them fast and to stop carrying water for these faux humanitarian and human rights concerns, which no one in power cares about.
Yeah, I mean, I agree that I think right now the U.S. is hitching its wagon to the best political capital that Israel will ever have.
They know that they've lost the public consciousness forever.
And I think similarly to U.S. Empire, they know that this is their best shot to ram through.
I mean, it's the chaos presidency.
It's every outlier ramming through the most insane fanatical agenda, attaching themselves to Trump.
And so all the Iran war freaks and war hawks.
Look, Israel has congruent interests with the U.S.
The U.S. has congruent interests with Israel.
They're not identical, but let's not absolve the decades-long campaign to oust the Iranian government.
I mean, obviously, this goes back to the ousting of the Shah and everything that happened after that.
I mean, to Adam's point, it's amazing to see Barry Weiss's free press editorializing, basically saying not only war is peace, literally.
That was literally a headline saying this is this war is the best chance at peace.
I mean, we cannot get more cartoonish than that, but also literally saying what's going to happen to Iran's nuclear weapons now as if they had them.
I mean, the last attack, Trump was saying they obliterated the nuclear arsenal.
So, where is it?
And also, how are we not talking about the environmental impact of just if it is there?
They're just bombing the hell out of nuclear reactors?
I mean, all of it is just absolutely mind-blowing and insane.
But going back to the root of this, it's almost like everyone ceded to the inevitability that this was the outcome, right?
For decades, all we've been hearing is Iran is the mass architect of the global war on terror.
All these other countries were just stepping stones to get to the big prize.
This is what we've been hearing in a bipartisan fashion through every administration.
Let's not forget what Obama did, even though he was working on the nuclear deal, the Stuxnet virus that, you know, that put a computer virus in Iran's nuclear reactors or whatever the hell, the nuclear energy program.
I mean, all of it is just so, so insane.
And so, again, when you create a world where this is the rhetoric and there's no differentiation between this is the outcome, it's just a singular line all toward this.
It's just how are we going to get there?
So, there's a diplomatic, you know, pretense of human rights and democracy that's always been the veneer of the neoliberal wing of the ruling class.
But now everything is removed.
Everything's naked and exposed.
And that's not even being held on to by the so-called opposition leaders.
They're just saying, look, we just want Trump to make his case.
This is a big deal, guys.
We just, what's your case, Trump?
It's like, well, it's a little too late for that, isn't it, guys?
We're in full-blown World War III now.
So great job, you feckless psychopaths.
I mean, the short-sightedness of all this is just absolutely astonishing.
So, yes, they are going to use the Gaza playbook to every country that has not bowed out of the dictates and subjugation of global capital at the barrel of a nuclear-armed gun.
And all of the cartoonish rhetoric, it's so infantilizing and absurd, but it doesn't even matter.
It's a paper tiger.
It's so desperate and extreme, they don't care.
They didn't need to build up a propaganda campaign.
They know that there's no opposition to this in terms of the representation.
And they don't care that Americans don't support it because we live in an oligarchy.
There's no democratic control whatsoever over what our politicians do in our names.
So we have to act quickly and we have to organize accordingly.
And that comes with mass education because we can no longer trust any media institution to tell us the truth whatsoever.
If the Gaza genocide has not exposed that, then frankly, we're lost.
I mean, I can talk a bit about the democratic response.
I mean, I wrote about it in The Nation, and I obviously wrote about it for the real news.
I did a sort of more updated version yesterday, because I think that's really key here when you talk about this complete divorce between the base of even, let's just say, let's just focus on Democrats, who, again, only 7% support this war, 76% oppose.
And those are, that's a 10 to one.
I mean, that's almost unheard of for issues, pretty much any issue, right?
It's less popular than herpes, right?
Yet we have the Democratic leadership in Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who spent eight days from when the New York Times broke the story of Trump planning an attack on Iran on February 18th, okay?
Breaking news, New York Times, everyone can read it.
February 19th, ish, 20th-ish, Massey and Khanna proposed their war powers resolution within 48 hours.
And then from then until February 26th, February 27th, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer don't issue a single press release or a single social media post about Iran.
Whenever they're asked about it, they deflect and make process concerns.
He needs to come to the American people, make his case, and then they immediately switch to talking about the economy.
So you have this, you have this agreement through silence because they can look at polls just like you and I can and they see how unpopular it is.
Yet, Chuck Schumer, who again told Brett Stevens two years ago that his primary job as one of the two most powerful Democrats in Congress was to, quote, keep the left pro-Israel, unquote.
Hakeem Jeffries and the House of Representatives is the biggest recipient of APAC money and pro-Israel money more general, $1.4 million.
And when he was raised to what at that time was the Speaker of the House, The Guardian said this is great for pro-Israel groups.
He's a staunch supporter of Israel.
Obviously, APAC is pushing this war.
Pro-Israel money is pushing this war.
Now, Hakeem Jeffries, again, he's in a very tight spot.
He's in a very progressive, very left-wing district.
He ostensibly represents a liberal opposition party.
So in the event that you find yourself in a situation where you need to support the interests of the war machine and APAC more specifically, what do you do?
You deflect, you hand-ring, and you rely on process critiques.
And process critiques are fundamentally a way of saying no comment because inertia is working in your favor, right?
You know, an object in motion will remain in motion unless otherwise acted upon.
And he saw the gathering storm of the invasion, the bombing.
He knew it was happening, and they didn't say anything.
And they didn't say anything because, and I think this is a logical inference.
I am speculating, because he agrees with it and he likes it until upward pressure got too intense within the House of Representatives where he said, okay, well, Massey and Khanna can force a vote anyway because war powers resolutions are privileged.
And so let's co-opt it and let's say, okay, we'll do it next week, right?
Next week, March 1st or 2nd, over the weekend.
Let's take a weekend off.
Let's go to Benihana's.
Let's take our kids to the park.
Let's, you know, let's maybe go kick back some cold ones, right?
Watch, you know, watch some college basketball, whatever they want to do.
No rush, you know, no big deal.
So then 12 days after he amasses this, or rather 10 days after he begins massing this Sermada, right?
Everyone knows Trump attacks on a Saturday morning.
He did the same thing with Venezuela almost to the minute, right?
Saturday morning at 1230.
It's why I stayed up late that night because I assumed it was going to happen and it did.
I should go to bed at 11.
I'm an old man.
I hope you've been in the polymarket, man, and made some, made 500 grand like some of the.
Yeah, that's true.
I could have.
And everybody knew that if it was going to happen, it was almost certainly going to happen either the prior Saturday or that Saturday.
But don't worry, let's delay the vote till Monday.
Oh, mysteriously, it happens.
Oh, oh, man, that's so bad.
I cannot believe that he went to war with Iran.
So you have a fake helpless, a fake weak, a fake opposition party running through the motions, despite the overwhelming wishes of its party, right?
The same corner PAC poll says 95% of Democrats, which again, you could not get 95% of anybody to agree on anything, said that Trump needed to go to Congress before he launched a war.
Okay.
Fake Opposition Party00:02:23
So they knew this.
They can, again, they can look at the same polls we can, but they had to square the circle of their support for Israel and for Zionism more broadly and for American imperialism more broadly.
And so they did the only thing you can do in that situation, which is, I don't know.
Let me look at the paperwork.
You know, where's my wallet?
You know, I'm kind of late to a thing.
And so they serve their primary function.
And now we're not even getting an award powers vote till Thursday, which again is over two weeks from when the Sermada began.
There's absolutely no reason why it needed to take this long.
There's no reason why they needed to take eight days to even nominally support one.
I think it's very clear, and this has been something that's reported by Dropsight and others, that they are intentionally delaying the vote.
I think that is anyone with two brain cells can see that.
But they can't look like they are because it's unpopular with Democrats 10 to 1.
And so they served their primary function, which is to obfuscate, delay, hand-ring, and obsess over progress.
And then after the bombing, both Schumer and Jeffries released statements, which both focus exclusively on process.
Trump has not made his case to the American people.
He needs to come to Congress.
Okay, well, do you oppose the war as such?
Do you suppose bombing as such?
He needs to make his case, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
So this is the nominal, and I think Abby's right.
Like the people who are launching this war know that.
They know that the only real opposition could come from Congress to the extent that's even possible.
Democrats, specifically in Congress, of course, Republicans are a bunch of mindless rubber-stamping MAGA cultists anyway.
But to the extent to which there would be meaningful pushback, it could come from Democrats.
But the Democrats in charge were both axiomatically pro-Israel.
And so what people wanted didn't really matter.
Abby, I want to bring you back in here and ask if you have any more thoughts on that and the sort of Democrats' role in this.
But also, I'm thinking about your newest documentary, Earth's Greatest Enemy, and how you portray beautifully, harrowingly, terrifyingly, the bipartisan consensus around the imperial war machine and how that plays into and is the greatest contributor to the climate crisis.
Stockpiling for Armageddon00:07:02
And I think another unspoken sort of factor here that is becoming more and more apparent in the actions of this administration and the sort of end times fascist motivations that are seemingly driving it is the hit list that Adam mentioned that the U.S. is going through, like, knocking off Venezuela, now Iran, and it wants to take Greenland.
Like you could also look at that as like going to the global grocery store and stockpiling for Armageddon.
Like they are going around taking oil, rare earth minerals, like resources that they want to stockpile here for what they know is a coming global crisis.
It's like old school, just the Berlin conference.
I mean, colonial powers coming and just carving up Africa.
I mean, it is just absolutely, again, just so brazen harkening back to the worst period of colonialism.
And that's exactly what we're seeing.
A literal hit list of all the remaining countries that have not bowed down to the dictates of U.S. empire.
And it just, you know, to starve out Cuba, to actually apply this horrific genocidal model of siege, sanctions, starvation to tens of millions of people around the world.
It's just, it's, it's savagery.
And it's really hard to even like find words to describe what's going on day to day because it is so rapid.
The atrocities are happening so rapidly and so.
And I think that's psychologically part of the impact, right?
And the intent is to flatten it out.
And so it makes it harder to react because it's so paralyzing and it's such a full frontal assault and multi-pronged assault, both domestically and internationally.
But I think what's happening here, it's just such a hollowed out core of a desperate and dying empire that is seizing up.
But when you're a hammer, every problem's a nail.
So that's exactly what we're seeing.
There's no creativity about how to get us out of this short-sighted collective suicide of what they're doing.
But this has been, we've been on a path charting toward this inevitability, and we've lived it under a system that has incubated these conditions.
And so Trump did not, you know, none of this happens in a vacuum.
Like Trump was given this and he's been blessed to do this.
And I think what's so fascinating to me is all of the good faith takeaways of Trump's rhetoric during his first term.
We lived through this maniac who expanded the empire on every front during the first term of his administration.
And somehow he got whitewashed and rehabilitated, even by some people in these alternative media spaces as an anti-deep state, anti-war guy.
And it's really just horrifying and disgusting that we can take anything these people say at face value.
And so here we were tricked again.
But I think, you know, to Adam and your point, the American people are so deeply detached from what the ruling class is doing in our names.
That's in part why Trump has been so successful because the opposition, the feckless fake opposition party, they ceded all the ground to Trump to basically seize that momentum of fake news, legacy media, how we were being lied to.
Everyone innately knows that we've been lied to for decades.
Our media has acted as extensions of the ruling class, of the imperial war machine.
And so that was really smart of Trump to siphon all that energy and then monopolize and tamp down on just opposition with right-wing machinery of the media.
But when you go down to now what the thesis of the movie is and how that all interlocks, I mean, again, this is a bipartisan consensus of just global capitalism reigning supreme and bowing down to the dictates of big oil.
And so for the longest time, of course, you had the neoliberal establishment trying to paint us as the benevolent empire, right?
As trying to be the arbiter of human rights and democracy.
It is so fake.
They can't even use that as a defense anymore.
So it's just naked.
It's completely naked.
They're intertwining with the Trump administration and they still continue to defend someone on one hand that they call a tyrant, a would-be Hitler.
But this is the position that they love.
They love not having power.
They love campaigning on somehow opposing fascism while granting Trump and greenlighting every single cabinet pick, every single policy position, continuing to vote for his insane military budget.
Because when it comes to war, that's fine.
Even if it hollows out all the material conditions of the working class here and drives us off a cliff, it doesn't matter because that's the short-sightedness of this prophet.
It's enforcing a fossil fuel infrastructure, even though it's going to kill the planet and kill us all.
And it's absolute lunacy and it needs to be stopped.
And I have no idea.
We have to have a block, an alternate block to somehow push this power structure, which they have prevented us from doing.
In the UK, the Greens now have more polling support than like labor.
I mean, we are so far gone here.
The rest of the world's ready to go.
They're waiting for Americans to wake up, but it may be too late.
Well, and, you know, just kind of on that final point, you know, for those of us who lived through the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as you guys said, this all feels depressingly familiar.
And, you know, Trump campaigned on being the supposed peace president.
You know, he and his future cabinet members said that the U.S. wasn't going to be getting mired in more foreign wars like this.
The media lapped it up and now here we are.
How the hell do Americans get out of this death spiral?
Like, will we ever learn not to fall into the same trap over and over again?
I mean, I think this is if the Gaza genocide and Kamala's and Biden's participation and subsidization where he's bypassing Congress 100 times to sell weapons directly to Israel.
I mean, if that did not reveal very plainly that there is no opposition party, that if you care about the violence externalized by our empire, by our military empire, and how that impacts every living person on the planet, you are not going to get any advocacy from the Democratic Party.
That is plain and simple.
I'm not saying it's completely pointless to run DSA, PSL, pro-Palestine candidates and local city council and mayoral races and stuff like that.
I just think this empty vessel of electoralism on a federal level is sucking all of our energy, depleting our energy when we need to somehow organize outside of this structure of electoralism because it's completely hollow and bankrupt.
Sober Reality Over Delusion00:04:30
And for the longest time, they've hoodwinked everyone.
They co-opted all of our struggles, sold it back to us.
And so I think right now we're getting back to the basics, the foundational understanding that capitalism is driving this collective insanity and collective suicide.
And so synchronizing all this, synthesizing all this is something that I've actually never seen in my life.
I'm 41 years old.
I've never seen a movement of tens of millions of people around the world, Americans caring about people outside of their country, having Gaza be the kind of key to understanding our collective liberations intrinsically tied to everyone else's.
So this is something that, as bleak and horrifying as the world stage is, I find it motivating and a space that's opening because to our points earlier, the violence is so extreme and the propaganda has become so cartoonishly desperate that they are literally treating us like children.
And so it really doesn't take much cognitive levels or critical thinking skills to understand that all of these people are lying to us and none of them have our best interests at heart.
The question is, what do we do with that information?
The answer and the solution is working outside of the system of death and destruction and what creative capacity that we can, but we have to figure it out.
We have to do it now.
I don't have a prescription, mostly because that's out of my pay grade.
I will say what we shouldn't do is delude ourselves as to the reality of reality.
And like, you know, I'm a media critic.
Maybe this is a bit of a dodge, but I don't know what the solution out of it is.
But I do know that we're not going to ever get out of any problem by not having an accurate and sober assessment of reality.
It's like the Mike Davis quote about, you know, hope, don't hope.
Or he says, you know, fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely.
Like, I don't, and I really don't care if you have hope, but it's good if you do.
But what I think is important is, I think that was in reference to Stalingrad.
I don't remember the exact quote, forgive me, but I think that it is, you know, it's true that these systems are fundamentally broken.
You know, what that means to reform that, or if it could be reformed, that is obviously something that I'll leave to Abby.
I don't know.
I do know that whatever that solution looks like, it has to involve some kind of labor because there's no other muscle in any meaningful sense.
I know it's not going to just be, you know, subscribing to discrete substacks like what I, I mean, that's how I make a living.
I'm not being pejorative.
But what I think it does require is a first step is a sober analysis of what's going on.
And Yeah, I think, you know, again, you have this fire hose of horrors.
And that's okay, and that's by design.
That's part of Project 2025.
It's part of the Imperial, like, you know, when we're putting out fires to protest Iran, we're not protesting Gaza.
When we're protesting Gaza, we're not protesting the, you know, the mass firing of academics and, you know, gutting of unions.
When we're fighting that, we're not fighting climate change.
Remember climate change?
Remember when we used to care about that before liberals replaced caring about climate change with abundance?
I mean, that is, that's the, that's the, that's the strategy.
They're far more resourced.
They have way more, you know, psychotic lawyers that go up the ranks.
They, you know, they're ideologically motivated.
And they all get rich doing it because they all have, you know, seven or eight big donors who will support that.
And so, you know, I think that's how do you create space to really organize and to push back against these forces?
Again, I don't know.
I'm a simple country media critic, but I do know that one must have a sober assessment of reality before one can move forward rather than deluding oneself into thinking that these systems will somehow help us out.
So I don't know.
I get asked that a lot.
Your media critic will say, okay, well, you snarky asshole.
What's your solution?
And the reality is, like, I don't know.
Like, that's not what I do.
And there are those who do do that.
And I think that's important for people to figure that out.
But I would say, well, the one thing you can do, especially if you're, I think, in the United States or this so-called Imperial Corps or whatever, is to just do no harm.
At the very least, just don't make it worse.
Don't jump on every single outrage and demagogue against those in the crosshairs of U.S. Empire.
Don't accept all the premises of imperial aggression.