The US-Israeli war with Iran is spiraling into a regional catastrophe, and the number of dead is rising quickly. While President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the war hawks in their cabinets are responsible for this illegal war, they are not the only ones with blood on their hands. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Abby Martin, host of The Empire Files, and Adam Johnson, co-host of Citations Needed, about how Western media and American politicians in the Democratic “opposition” have helped manufacture the conditions for war with Iran.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome everyone to the Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Urged on by Israeli Prime Minister and Genes Adair, 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. US and Israeli forces have been accused this week of seemingly indiscriminate bombing of Iran as the country’s Red Crescents 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 US-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 is retaliated by striking multiple US military bases in the Middle East, including facilities in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. The US military has confirmed that six American soldiers were killed in Sunday’s strike in Kuwait. Americans are being urged to leave 14 countries in the region because of serious safety risks. And the US embassies in Beirut, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are closed. But wait, it gets worse. As Stephen Prager reports at common dreams, at a briefing on Monday, as President Donald Trump unleashed what has been called a carpet bombing of Tehran, a combat unit commander reportedly told non-commissioned officers that the commander-in-chief was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth.” The complaint sent by one of those non-commissioned officers was just one of at least 110 similar reports received by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation since Trump first launched strikes on Saturday.
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 warhawks are not the only ones with blood on their hands. And today, we’re going to talk about how Western media and American politicians in 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 US-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?
Adam Johnson: Well, I think much of the heavy lifting was done prior to the bombing. Obviously, decades of anti-Iran-Iran sentiment and 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 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 tempt to try to get it pulled, 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 have not had a nuclear weapons program. In at least 25 years, this is something US 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, this is a very common thing, has been, 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 the primary core of anti-Iran propaganda because it’s not like obviously Iran doesn’t fund or arm Al-Qaeda or ISIS. As far as I can tell, it’s not invading California or New York. So to get the average American to care, they have to have this specter of a 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 Sharazi 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 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 Suni 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, et cetera.
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 US 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 four 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. 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 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 just assert these extreme mechanisms of violence.
And our media will 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, 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 surfaced air capacity. So they are firing on US 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 nut cases, they have hand wringing. They’re happy it’s happening. You’re kind of Atlantic magazine types, but your Anapplebombs or Elliot Kohns, 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’s been looking forward to his entire professional life. This is someone who promoted conspiracy theories about Saddam Hussein having links to nine eleven, who promoted conspiracy theories about Hezbollah’s sleeper cells, blowing up strip malls in the 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 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 and there’s not really a dictator on offer. And so it’s obvious the goal is to just do what they did to Lebanon, and to 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.
Maximillian Alvarez: Abby, let’s toss it to you. How would you read the media’s response to this war?
Abby Martin: Well, it just reminds me, as Adam was talking, the Ronkin Suskin quote from New York Times being told by Carl Rove, 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 the world stage. I remember all the European leaders who are the doormats for US imperialism came out and they’re just like, “Well, we didn’t like the way … Let’s not talk about legality now. Maduro needed to go. ” And we’re seeing the exact same rhetoric.
We’re seeing the exact same acquiescence cowtowing 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 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 US has directly committed since Vietnam. And the way the media was reporting on it, buried. 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 and, 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, Akhmedjada 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 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’s 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 and our names be carried out with the just complete and utter complicity and compliance from Western media.
Maximillian Alvarez: I want to tug on that thread just a little more. And I mean, Abby, your career arc basically tracks across the beginning of the disastrous invasion of Iraq to now. And you have been a participant in that media struggle since way back then, all the way to now. And I just want to unpack a little more for folks watching and listening the path that got us here, like you both said, and like it has done with Palestine, the entire US 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. 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 we get and that we don’t get, but 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.
Adam Johnson: I mean, I always think back to 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, 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, John Stewart directs a movie called Rosewater about a reporter, 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 hand wring about Iran being paranoid about journalists being spies. And it’s just this constant, everything we do that undermine the regime is sort of cool.
It just now, we just found out Israel hacked into the traffic cameras 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 themselves bombing places. They had a car bomb go off in Tehran. And then you turn around and you say, “Oh, well, 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? 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 industry, but it would be 10 times, a hundred 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 see each country, when you surrounded on all sides by … Everyone’s seen the map of Iran with all the military bases. When you invade both their neighbors in 2001 and then 2003, when you constantly say, “We’re going to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” 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 from nonstop.” It’s like, well, what do you expect them to do? Seeing 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 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 lumbol sense. I mean, center left, like democratic media is context. You can’t have any context to anything. History starts on October 7th, 2023. History in Iran starts January 1st of this year when the protest began. You’re not allowed to have any context for anything. And so 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 whatever it is now, 31 months in Gaza. And then of course they blow up this girls school and 160 dead kids. And 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 and 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 reelection 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.
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 a theocratic regime or 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 US or Israel does. They have zero liberal motivations and Biden had zero liberal motivations for freeing the people of Gaza or whatever kind of Retkan clap trap the New York Times or the Atlantic wishes to 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. 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 liberate the protesters or whatever.” He sent out two half-ass tweets and then never mentioned it again. They don’t care about any of that shit. And the extent to which the liberal media intervenes and does all this, 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. Obviously, they’ve killed 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.
Abby Martin: Yeah. I mean, I agree that I think right now the US 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 US 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 warhawks … Look, Israel has congruent interests with the US. The US has congruent interest 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 war is the best chance at peace.” I mean, we cannot get more cartoonists 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 seeded to the inevitability that this was the outcome. 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 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 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 the diplomatic 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 onto 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. “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 effectless psychopaths. “I mean, the shortsightedness of all this is just absolutely astonishing. So yes, they are going to use the Gaza playbook to every country that is 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.
Adam Johnson: 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 focus on Democrats who, again, only 7% support this war, 76% opposed. And that’s a 10 to one. I mean, that’s almost unheard of for issues, pretty much any issue. It’s less popular than herpes, right? Yet we have the Democratic leadership in Chuck Schumer and Hakim Jeffries who spent eight days from when the New York Times broke the story of Trump planning an attack on Iran on February 18th, breaking news, New York Times, everyone can read it. February 19th-ish, 20th-ish, Massey and Khana 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 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. 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 astonished support of Israel.” So 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 interest 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. An object emotion 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 Khana 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. Next week, March 1st or 2nd, over the weekend, let’s take a weekend off. Let’s go to Bini Hanna’s, let’s take our kids to the park, maybe go kick back some cold ones, watch them college basketball, whatever they want to do. No rush, no big deal. So then 10 days after he begins massing this armada. Everyone knows Trump attacks on a Saturday morning. He did the same thing with Venezuela almost to the minute, Saturday morning at 12:30. That’s why I stayed up late that night because I assumed it was going to happen and it did. I usually go to bed at 11:00.
I’m an old man.
Abby Martin: Hopefully you bet on Hollymarket man and made 500 grand like some of these interviews.
Adam Johnson: Yeah, it’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, man, that’s so bad. I cannot believe that he went to war with Iran. So you have a fake helpless, a fake week, a fake opposition party running through the motions despite the overwhelming wishes of its party. The same Quinnipiac poll says 95% of Democrats, which again, you cannot get 95% of anybody to agree on anything said that Trump needed to go to Congress before he launched a war. So they knew this. 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, blah, blah, I don’t know. Let me look at the paperwork. Where’s my wallet? I’m kind of late to a thing. And so they served their primary function. And now we’re not even getting an award powers vote until Thursday, which again is over two weeks from when the sermata 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 Dropsite 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 one. 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 Jeffrey’s release 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. So this is the nominal, and I think Abby’s right, 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.
Maximillian Alvarez: Abby, I want to bring you back in here and ask if you have any more thoughts on that and the sort of Democrat’s 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. And I think another unspoken factor here that is becoming more and more imparent 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 US is going through like knocking off Venezuela, now Iran, and it wants to take Greenland. You could also look at that as going to the global grocery store and stockpiling for Armageddon. They’re going around taking oil, rare earth, minerals, like resources that they want to stockpile here for what they know is a coming global crisis.
Abby Martin: Yeah. I mean, it’s like old school, just the Berlin Conference. I mean, colonial power’s coming and just carving up Africa. I mean, it is just absolutely, again, just so brazen hearkening 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 US empire. And 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 savagery. And it’s really hard to even find words to describe what’s going on day to day because it is so rapid. The atrocities are happening so rapidly. And I think that’s psychologically part of the impact 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 is 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 shortsighted collective suicide of what they’re doing. But we’ve been on a path charting toward this inevitability and we’ve lived under a system that has incubated these conditions. And so Trump did not … None of this happens in a vacuum. 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 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 seeded 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, 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 shortsightedness 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 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 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.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and just kind of on that final point, for those of us who lived through the disastrous US invasion of Iraq and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as you guys said, this all feels depressingly familiar. And Trump campaigned on being the supposed peace president. He and his future cabinet members said that the US 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? Will we ever learn not to fall into the same trap over and over again?
Abby Martin: I mean, I think if the Gaza genocide and Kamala’s and Biden’s participation and subsidization where he’s bypassing Congress a hundred 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. 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? I mean, the answer and the solution is working outside of the system of death and destruction and what creative and capacity that we can, but we have to figure it out and we have to do it now.
Adam Johnson: I don’t have a prescription, mostly because that’s out of my pay grade. I will say what we shouldn’t do is dilute ourselves as to the reality of reality. And 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. I want to say it was the Mike Davis quote about hope, don’t hope. Or he says, “Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight, absolutely.” 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’s true that these systems are fundamentally broken.
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 subscribing to discrete substacks. I mean, that’s how I make a living. I’m not being pejorative, but what I think it does require as a first step is a sober analysis of what’s going on. And yeah, I think again, you have this fire hose of horrors and that’s by design. That’s part of Project 2025. It’s part of the imperial … When we’re putting out fires to protest Iran, we’re not protesting Gaza. When we’re protesting Gaza, we’re not protesting the mass firing of academics and 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’s the strategy. They’re far more resourced. They have way more psychotic lawyers that go up the ranks. They’re ideologically motivated and they all get rich doing it because they all have seven or eight big donors who will support that. 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 diluting oneselves into thinking that these systems will somehow help us out. So I don’t know. I get asked that a lot. And your media criticalwill say, “Okay, well, you snarky asshole, what’s your solution?” And the reality is I don’t know.
That’s not what I do. And there are those who do do that. And I think it’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 Core 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 US Empire. Don’t accept all the premises of imperial aggression. I’m not saying you got to do the opposite or overcorrect, but just try not to jump on every single manufactured narrative right before we starve or obliterate a country would sort of be my advice.
Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you everyone for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast. And I want to thank our guests, the great Abby Martin and the great Adam Johnson for all their time and insight today. If you want to see more coverage and hear more conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Now. So head on over to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you, it really makes a difference. For the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and please take care of each other.
