Hi all, hope you are well.

My book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, is out in one week (4/21) and I am publishing an excerpt below from the first 12 pages which includes the introduction and beginning of chapter one. Pre-orders are always appreciated and help a lot and it’s available —

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Remember that 100% of the royalties are going to the Middle East Children’s Alliance For Peace.

I don’t like to publicly discuss process often, but I did want to note writing this book took almost two years and countless hours and your support for this Substack helped make doing this project possible, so thank you.

Adam

INTRODUCTION

“They are deceiv’d that acquiesce to things which they have heard, and believe not what they have seen.”

—Thomas Bartholin, The Anatomical History (1653)

In analyzing how American media helped create the political, ideological, and moral conditions for mass death in Gaza from October 2023 to October 2024, one must always make clear the stakes, situate the media criticism in the context of the actual humans who died—those who had limbs blown off, their children starved to death, watched loved ones waste away from preventable disease, saw their families torn apart. Lives upended, dreams snuffed out. Whole universes destroyed with the push of a button, the casual firing of a sniper rifle, the command to “remove a threat” from a faceless AI-assisted officer in an air-conditioned room. Death counts are abstractions: Numbers don’t register on a gut level, anything over what can be counted ceases to have significance in our mind’s eye, so it becomes cold, academic, numbing.

This is before the statistics detailing mass death on an unprecedented scale run through the normal Western cognitive dissonance filters that, of course, existed long before October 7, 2023: The Hollywood-curated heat ripple sunrise with the Islamic call to prayer in the background signaling a wholly different world, the soothing “they’ve been fighting for thousands of years” faux-savvy pseudo-history, the “War on Terror” framework that reduces all their violence to sadistic glee and ours to a reluctant, if messy, “Defense of Civilization.”

Center-Left mainstream news media in the US didn’t invent these initial prejudices but they certainly played to them, lent them fake intellectual credibility, built off of them, and constantly pandered to their corrosive and reductive version of history and present—all to create space for a Democratic president arming and funding what would end up being one of the worst, if not the worst, human rights crimes of the 21st century.

This book will argue that this process was neither inevitable nor self-sustaining: It took deliberate choices by deliberate moral actors—editors, reporters, bookers, producers, and TV personalities—who decided, early on in the so-called “Israel–Hamas war,” that defending the powerful and spinning a fictional narrative to soothe Western liberal audiences was more important than speaking plain truths, than defending a dispossessed people from a wholly asymmetric campaign carried out by Israel with the full backing of the US to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians of Gaza.

Like any good media critic, my job is one of prosecutor. What this book seeks to do is not to make this case with polemic or ideological assertions, or selective examples of bad coverage, but with robust data. By pulling from over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV clips in nine major outlets, and showing all the work in open source format, by interviewing sources who were in the room, and using comparative analysis of other contemporary conflicts, I will attempt to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the genocide in Gaza was enabled, facilitated, and cheerled by establishment US media providing cover for months of a nihilistic campaign of starvation, bombing, arbitrary detention, shooting, and sexual violence.

And in doing so, we will always come back to the actual humans who actually died, who suffered, who lost arms, loved ones, homes, family heirlooms, and whole worlds. They existed and exist, they are real, they lived and had joy and hopes. And, as I will show, there’s a direct line between their subjugation and slow deaths buried under rubble, and American media’s decision to incite against them, dehumanize them, ignore them, strip them of their history and their narratives, and prioritize domestic political convenience and crude chauvinist narratives over doing what news media’s job ostensibly is: to tell the truth.

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

In alignment with determinations from Amnesty International,¹ Human Rights Watch,² Doctors Without Borders,³ the United Nations,⁴ and the consensus among genocide scholars,⁵ I chose to use the word “genocide” to describe the course of events outlined in this book, beginning on the evening of October 7, 2023, into the present. I made this decision and chose to use it in the title of the book, not to be provocative for its own sake, but because it is both a consensus in the academic and human rights world and also an objective, well-documented feature of our reality. My goal with this book was to write a sober, approachable, data-driven account of how the media provided cover for Israel’s destruction of Gaza—whatever one chooses to call it. In doing this, I wanted to describe, in clear and specific terms, the methods and explicit motives of US and Israeli officials without being needlessly polemical or hinging too much of my argumentation on totalizing, emotionally-charged terms. But reality is reality, and trying to discuss this destruction of Gaza without positioning it in the context of genocide would veer from sober and understated to dishonest and—frankly—what amounts to genocide denial. Throughout the book, I will thus use the term genocide and, when appropriate, ethnic cleansing. I will also employ more generic terms in the interest of variety and popular understanding, namely “war,” “conflict,” and related language. The point in doing so is not to undersell the totality of genocide, or to convey false symmetry, but to make the text more readable and varied.

A small portion of this book will draw on previously published analysis and data, versions of which have run in the Nation,⁶ the Column,⁷ the Real News Network,⁸ and In These Times.⁹

SCOPE OF THE BOOK AND THE MOATS OF RATIONALIZATION

The book will not focus on the conservative or MAGA media’s dehumanization of Palestinians for the simple fact that the pernicious nature of their media regime is not in doubt or dispute. Outlets like Fox News, Daily Wire, right-wing AM radio, Sinclair News, and the pages of the Wall Street Journal are, for the most part, openly genocidal against Palestinians and make no pretense otherwise. They are proudly so, and any book detailing their torrent of incitement would likely be met by the reporters, pundits, and columnists under their employment with an “Okay, and?”

Thus, my focus will be on what I broadly call Center-Left, liberal, legacy, or even mainstream media. None of these three terms is ideal; they all have limitations and carry their own baggage. “Center-Left” implies a neat ideological orientation that undersells the diversity of thought within the media organizations I will be discussing. “Liberal media” has, of course, its own right-coded history. “Mainstream media” has become a pejorative associated with unsophisticated internet missives against such outrages as basic fact-checking and sensible appeals to authority. Nevertheless, in the absence of a perfect term, and given my queasiness with attempting to coin my own taxonomy, I will use these pop terms throughout the book, often interchangeably, while still acknowledging they are far from perfect. Put simply: I am concerned with media primarily consumed by Democrats that has influence on both Democratic voters and the broader Democratic Party ideological universe.

Why? Because, as I will argue in this book, there was a Democratic president in office when the genocide began in earnest, and support from Democrats in Congress and in the think-tank and media world was dispositive in continuing said genocide during the given time frame of my study. Obviously, President Trump has since overseen and co-authored the genocide in Palestine, and his responsibility—and the responsibility of the broader, openly pro-genocide Republican Party—should not be ignored or downplayed.¹⁰ But that responsibility is beyond the scope of the book, which focuses on the nominal leftwing party backing the arming and funding of the destruction of Gaza.

But most acutely, it’s simply a matter of timing. The reality is that once the initial shock and anger over the sheer brutality of Israel’s military campaign wore off after the first three to six months, the pressure to change the dynamics and compel Israel to agree to a ceasefire grew all the more difficult. Once the “facts on the ground” were established and daily mass deaths in Gaza began to be totally normalized in the American public’s mind, and removed from the daily front pages, efforts to end the genocide became far more difficult. Thus, the first year, and the first few months in particular, will primarily be the focus of the book. It was during this timeframe that the fundamental logic and axioms of the “war on Hamas” were cemented, and therefore genocide in Gaza became a fait accompli.

In this book, I will structure the pernicious role of Center-Left media in what I will call the “Moats of Rationalization.” The basic concept for this model is the nonstop destruction of Gaza for the twelve months I cover here, the sheer brutality and one-sidedness of which was obvious from the onset, and that was impossible for any otherwise moral person to ignore outright. So an elaborate framework of excuse-making, deflection, faux-savvy realpolitik, orientalist tropes, and glaring double standards emerged to justify the White House’s lockstep support for producing carnage everyone could easily witness across their social media timelines on a daily basis. Living in a world where our government, especially a Democratic president, could not possibly be supportive of such manifest cruelty, Moats of Rationalization emerged to allow the average media consumer—and media worker—to cope with the undeniable, and untenable war crimes being carried out by their leaders before their eyes. These Moats of Rationalization ran the spectrum from outright support for mass death to desperate liberal-left argument by Non Sequitur and argument by Trolly Problem, as seen overleaf.

Where Center-Left media intervened, and what we will mostly cover, are items three through seven. The primary role of our Center-Left media, I will argue, was not to accurately convey reality but, for want of a better descriptor, to make their readers and viewers feel better—to give them ready-made talking points pursuant to moats three through seven. To make them feel better about their country, their president, their party, their institutions, and themselves. It was to rationalize, negotiate, obscure, and, ultimately, deny the most inconvenient of truths: a genocide carried out, defended, and authored by elite liberals and liberal institutions.

They would, among themselves, never put it this way, but the outcome was the same. As sources from CNN to CBS to MSNBC repeatedly conveyed to me, it was never framed in such sinister terms within the newsrooms or over after-hours cocktails. It was, instead, packaged in the far more reasonable language of “nuance,” “lowering the temperature,” “combating antisemitism,” savvy appeals to “complexity,” and “limits on American power.” And, as November 2024 got closer, not poisoning the well too much with minority and young voters, and preventing Trump from marching back into the White House. All seemingly high-minded, all—in isolation—even sensible. But all very much, at least in principle, not the role of media. Truth took a back seat to feelings, the urgency of stopping a clear-as-day genocidal campaign in its infancy, and to the short-term electoral needs of Democrats.

So what followed was, I will argue in this book, the most consequential media scandal of the 21st century—more deliberate, more high-leverage, and more deadly than the build-up to the Iraq invasion, and, to this day, far less truly understood. The consequences of widespread media complicity in the Gaza genocide are still not fully appreciated; the impact—especially among the younger, more social media-oriented public—still not fully internalized. This book seeks to be a corrective, not to save Center-Left media from itself, or to try and improve it—indeed, such a task is well beyond my moral or intellectual scope—but for history, for those interested in posterity and what occurred in late 2023 into 2024, and for other media analysts and activists to build from. But, most of all, it’s a book for those interested in the truth in and of itself. And in a world where all intellectual output seems to have to fit a partisan narrative or serve some broader nonprofit goal of liberal improvement, I think there’s something to be said for the truth for its own sake.

CHAPTER ONE: “40 beheaded babies,” the ISIS-ification of Hamas, and how to prime the American public for revenge

There are many false stories justifying the destruction of Gaza. But to zero in on an object lesson in media complicity, especially in the early days of the assault when the American public was being primed for a long, brutal campaign of mass removal and death, there is no story that was more consequential for setting the stage than the supposed beheading of 40 Israeli babies. This claim went viral and quickly entered into the public consciousness—repeated even by the president of the United States.

Other reporters, academics, and commentators have done detailed work debunking this claim and tracing the media’s complicity. This includes early skeptical reporting by Electronic Intifada,¹ Business Insider,² the Intercept,³ Mondoweiss,⁴ and Aljazeera.⁵ I will expand on their findings but also seek to position the story as part of a broader PR campaign, and a much longer effort to obscure the antecedents of Palestinian violence and index the conflict in a plug-and-play “War on Terror” framework that Western audiences could easily dissect—and just as easily dismiss as mindless violence.

In the wake of the Hamas-led October 7 attack that left roughly 1,200 dead in southern Israel, when information was pouring in from Israeli officials and reporters on the ground, one story in particular struck a chord with an outraged public ready to believe just about anything about the “terrorists” in question: that rescue workers had found the remains of about “40 beheaded babies” at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, one of the communities attacked by Hamas and other Palestinian militants that Saturday morning. On October 10, Israeli news channel i24 reported that it had received “confirmation” from soldiers that “40 babies/children were beheaded.”⁶ That same day, a spokesperson for the IDF repeated this claim to Business Insider.⁷ And on October 11, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN that babies and toddlers were found with their “heads decapitated” in Kfar Aza kibbutz.⁸

In the days just prior and after, this claim was repeated, without evidence or skepticism, by CNN’s Nic Robertson,⁹ CNN’s Abby Phillip,¹⁰ Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz,¹¹ New York Post’s Olivia Land,¹² CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell,¹³ New Lines’ Lisa Goldman,¹⁴ The Hill’s Laura Kelly and Sharon Udasin,¹⁵ CBS News’ Holly Williams and Erin Lyall,¹⁶ an un-bylined piece at Reuters,¹⁷ Sky News’ Yashee Sharma,¹⁸ MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, NBC News’ Peter Alexander, Summer Concepcion, and Megan Lebowitz.¹⁹ And, live on-air, CNN’s Sara Sidner and Hadas Gold somberly repeated the claim on October 11, without an ounce of skepticism.²⁰ “We have some really disturbing new information out of Israel,” Sidner said, looking into the camera, doing her best Walter Cronkite. “The Israeli Prime Minister’s spokesman just confirmed: babies and toddlers were found with their heads decapitated … that has been confirmed by the Prime Minister’s office.”

Sidner called the claim “beyond devastating,” then went on to lament, “For the families listening, for the people of Israel, for anyone that is a parent, who loves children, I don’t know how they get through this.”

Sidner then threw it over to a CNN reporter in Jerusalem, Hadas Gold, and implied the decapitation of babies would make peace or a ceasefire with Hamas an impossibility. Gold replied, “How can you when you’re dealing with people who would do such atrocities to children, to babies, to toddlers?” Gold again said the report had been “confirmed” by the prime minister’s office and proceeded to compare the alleged atrocity to the Holocaust. She responded to a Hamas denial that it had decapitated babies as not credible because “we literally have video of these guys, of these militants, of these terrorists, doing exactly what they say they’re not doing to civilians and to children.”

But no such video existed or currently exists because it never happened. It was a lie thrown out on-air by Gold and Sidner to millions of viewers.

The idea that a government cannot “confirm” their own self-serving tabloid claims appears not to have crossed the minds of CNN’s Standards department. The shocking viral story culminated with President Joe Biden telling reporters that not only had Hamas decapitated children, but that he had seen photos of the horrors himself.

“I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” he said at a public event on the afternoon of October 11.

Quickly, an unsourced, unverified rumor had made its way from Israeli officials to American reporters and into the statements of the most powerful person in the world. There was only one problem: The story was a whole cloth fabrication. Traced to Israeli military personnel and ZAKA, a Far-Right “disaster response” organization with a long history of fabulism, the gruesome tale didn’t need to be true—it just needed to serve the function of ISIS-ifying Hamas in the mind of the American public. By the time it was debunked or walked back by those attempting to maintain credibility, the meme had already spread, and the dehumanization of an entire population was sufficiently underway.

#HAMASISISIS AND THE UTILITY OF THE “WAR ON TERROR” FRAME

Israeli propagandists didn’t pick the “40 beheaded babies” narrative at random. It was chosen because it called on very specific anti-Arab, anti-Muslim tropes that could easily be internalized and instrumentalized by the Western audiences they relied on for political and military support. Indeed, the media grammar for essentializing Palestinian violence as inherently nihilistic and cruel has been long in the making, propped up by years of “War on Terror,” clash-of-civilization frameworks that positioned all Islamic, Arab, or Muslim-coded violence as something carried out for the sole purpose of sadistic glee, racial hatred of Jews, or an attempt to “martyr” oneself to achieve posthumous religious glory.

Rather than attempting to contextualize violence, explain its motivations—whether targeting civilians or combatants, whether justified or not—there was an early effort by both media decision-makers and pro-Israel pressure groups to ISIS-ify Palestinian militants, to reduce their motives to, at best, a racial hatred of Jewish people or, at worst, nihilistic jihadi bloodlust. The fact that Hamas had long been in violent conflict with ISIS and had a completely different theological and ideological program wasn’t important.²¹ What was important was to say Hamas and ISIS in the same sentence as much as possible. This was a strategy adopted by the Israeli government, which pushed out ads promoting the hashtag #HamasisISIS on social media and repeated this “Hamas is ISIS” talking point during every media appearance in the weeks after October 7.²² (It’s worth noting that in June 2025, Israeli outlet Haaretz reported that the Israeli military had been arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza to counter Hamas, a fact publicly confirmed by Netanyahu’s former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.)²³

It was a message other Western leaders embraced. On October 10, President Biden said in a speech, “The brutality of Hamas’ blood-thirstiness brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS.”²⁴ US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told an Israeli audience on October 13 that what Hamas did was “worse than ISIS.”²⁵ On October 24, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared alongside Netanyahu and proposed an international coalition like the one that fought the Islamic State. “France is ready for the international coalition against Daesh,” he told reporters, “in which we are taking part for operations in Iraq and Syria to also fight against Hamas.”²⁶

It was a talking point repeated, with little pushback, in American media. A review of the first month of coverage in both print and online media post-October 7 shows that Hamas was equated with ISIS in USA Today, CNN.com, Politico, the New York Times, Axios, Associated Press, and the Washington Post 149 times, largely reprinting uncritical quotes from Israeli and US officials. There were also 102 mentions in these publications of “beheadings,” the most infamous of these being the “beheaded babies/children” claim that, after it was debunked, vaguely drifted into generalized “beheadings” to avoid outright lying. The ISIS-ification of Hamas was much worse in cable news, with on-air CNN voices equating Hamas with ISIS 350 times and MSNBC commentators doing so 369 times in the first month of the war. CNN mentioned “beheadings,” including nonexistent beheadings of babies and infants, 77 times, and MSNBC did so 82 times.

What occurred on or around Saturday, March 20 in the Indian ocean during an alleged “Iranian attack” on the joint British-US airbase Diego Garcia?

For obvious reasons—namely the vastness of the Indian ocean and the rapid and classified nature of missile attacks—all anyone seems to know is what British, American, and Israeli authorities have told reporters. No independent observers saw a missile launch from Iran, no independent observers have examined recovered debris, no independent observers even know for sure if a missile was launched in the first place. All anyone knows, by all accounts, is what their respective governments have told them. This makes the central claim since echoed dozens of times in Western media—that “Iran Targeted Diego Garcia Base With Ballistic Missiles”—an assertion, an allegation.

An allegation, it’s worth noting, Iranian officials have strenuously denied and the Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte says NATO “cannot confirm” was Iran.

Yet, without an ounce of critical reporting from mainstream Western press, this allegation has quickly morphed into an unequivocal fact, something that we know for sure happened, and the purpose of reporting is to sort out what to do about this major escalation. Critical questions like, “How do we know for sure this was Iran?” or “How do we know, if it was Iran, how far the missiles made it?” remained unasked, much less answered:

• Wall Street Journal: “Iran Targeted Diego Garcia Base With Ballistic Missiles”

• New York Times: “Iranian Missiles Strike Far-Off Target, but U.S. Remains Out of Range Iran’s attempted attack on a military base 2,500 miles away raises questions of the reach of its arsenal.”

• CNN: “Iran launched missiles at US-UK military base in the Indian Ocean. Here’s what that says about its capabilities”

• BBC: “Could Iranian missiles reach London and Paris? Iranian missiles have tried to target the joint US-UK military base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.”

None of the reports are framing the “attack” as an allegation made by one party about another party in a war. They are all presenting this missile launch as per se true. The stakes for this claim, it’s important to establish, couldn’t be higher. As President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aggressively lobby European countries to join their war effort, namely to help “open up the strait of Hormuz,” the incentive to inflate the threat posed by Iran to Europe is clear. Indeed, the coverage of the “attack” was centered almost entirely on its implications: that it somehow proved Iran was not only lying about the range of their ballistic missiles, but could now “strike major cities in Europe”:

This isn’t a Tet Offensive or sinking of the Lusitania-level news event, of course, but it’s somewhere on the spectrum—an inciting incident, a “wake up call” on the severity of the “Iranian threat to the West” being packaged by pro-war propagandists as a call to arms. Given these potentially high stakes, one would think it extremely important that Western media handle these allegations with care and nuance, and demand more proof than simply the say-so of obviously conflicted governments. Instead, outlets are mindlessly embracing the premise without any independent confirmation and running with the panicked implications of the allegation. What we’ve seen over the past few days has been, almost to the outlet, mindless stenography. Britain, the US, and Israel have said it happened, therefore it happened and countries in the same military coalition get to “confirm” each others’ self-serving claims.

This is another example of the double standard of burden of proof when it comes to attribution. As I’ve detailed elsewhere (and do so in greater detail in my forthcoming book), after the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing on October 17 2023 in Gaza and the subsequent crybully campaign launched by pro-Israel pressure groups, major outlets like the New York Times and CNN do not ascribe blame for a particular bombing until after the IDF themselves claims responsibility. This is a totally novel standard invented just for Israel on October 18, 2023 and it is now being used for Israel and—by the transitive property—the US in its attack on Iran. Meanwhile, Iran is afforded no such burden of proof and is considered guilty until proven innocent. I asked New York Times reporters Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt via email Monday why the Times took five days to attribute the Minab school bombing to the US because, as the Times comms department insisted, they needed to “work to collect evidence,” but immediately took as fact Iranian responsibility for the alleged attack on Diego Garcia without a shred of independent evidence. They did not return my request for comment.

I have also reached out on social media to reporters from the BBC and CNN to see why they, too, have accepted this narrative at face value without any independent corroboration.

Some outlets went further than irresponsible copy-and-pasting, even reporting that Iran claimed credit for the attack—which they, of course never did. NBC News’ Freddie Clayton asserted in his initial report that Iran “claimed“ credit for the attack, citing (without any link) Iranian media outlet Mehr. “Iran fires missiles at remote U.K.-U.S. base, claiming long-range capabilities it previously denied,” read the headline. The sub-headline would then add, “Tehran claimed the strike demonstrated capabilities for long-distance attacks, with Diego Garcia the same distance from Iran as much of central Europe.”

There’s only one problem: Tehran never claimed anything of the sort.

What Clayton was clearly doing was just paraphrasing a claim made by The Times of Israel, which claimed (also without a link) Iranian news agency Mehr news took credit for the launch. The issue is The Times of Israel is an Israeli government mouthpiece and didn’t actually cite any Iranian officials claiming anything. After I pointed this out on social media Sunday night, NBC News stealth edited their article, changing the headline and lede from Iran “claiming” it has long-range capabilities to saying the alleged attack “suggests” Iran has long-range capabilities. The headline/subhead was changed from “Iran fires missiles at remote U.K.-U.S. base, claiming long-range capabilities it previously denied” to “Iran fires missiles at remote U.K.-U.S. base, suggesting long-range capabilities it previously denied.” And the lede was changed from “Iran has fired missiles at the joint U.K.-U.S. Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean, claiming the strike shows it is capable of longer-distance attacks than previously known” to “Iran has fired missiles at the joint U.K.-U.S. Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean, suggesting it is capable of longer-distance attacks than previously known.”

So, while Clayton continues to state as fact an unsubstantiated claim made by government officials, he at least is acknowledging Iran taking credit for the attack is something he and the Times of Israel just made up. So, progress of sorts.

Did Iran attack Diego Garcia? It’s, of course, possible. It’s possible the Iranians are lying and, for some reason, not fessing up to their own attempt at intimidation. But what we have now is two competing claims by two conflicted parties. There is no objective reason why Western media should be privileging certain governments’ claims over others. Doing so is pure chauvinism. Instead of doing their putative jobs—demanding independent evidence, digging further, asking difficult questions to those in power—Western media is playing the role of court stenographer, dutifully repeating the government’s version of event without any critical lens. This version of events, it’s worth emphasizing, has the potential to drag Europe into this war and escalate an already devastating and pointless war of aggression into something much larger and deadlier.

It’s difficult to scientifically measure relative media importance or emphasis, but there are some benchmarks one can use as a reference point for objective media priorities: Sunday Morning News shows, the front page of major newspapers, and Nightly News broadcasts. These aren’t exact metrics, but they’re a useful window into corporate media priorities, not just what is covered but what is highlighted, blared at media consumers, what is deemed worthy of national attention.

Using these as a guide for what US media finds important, it’s clear that the US-Israeli airstrike on a girls’ school in Minab, which, as of now, has the exact same death count as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, is of little importance.

The February 28 US-Israeli attack did not merit a single front-page story from February 28 to March 4 in The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal. These outlets did cover it, but relegated the story to the back pages, as in A11 for The Times. It was an afterthought to a much grander narrative of “Decapitation strikes” and “Iranian counterattacks”.

The network Sunday news shows displayed a similar indifference.

Only one of the three network Sunday News Shows, ABC’s This Week, mentioned the Minab bombing. NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’ Face The Nation did not despite it happening more than 24 hours prior. Meet the Press did find time to center Israeli victims of an Iranian strike however, interviewing reporter Richard Engel from the blast site. “Richard, you’re at the site of an Iranian missile strike,” Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker threw to Engel. “We can see some of the damage behind you. Tell us what you’re learning this morning.”

“This was a single ballistic missile according to an Israeli official and at least nine people were killed here,” Engel tells viewers. “They are still looking through this site trying to secure the area. There was so much damage. They do not — they do not know if the victims were men, women or children. The bodies were that disfigured.”

CBS’ Face The Nation not only did not mention the Minab bombing, it didn’t mention Iranian civilian deaths at all, instead only noting US and Israel “targeting Iranian air defenses, launchers and missile stockpiles and Iranian regime infrastructure.” But, like Meet the Press, they did manage to center Israeli victims. “An Iranian missile strike overnight in the heart of Tel Aviv left a woman in her 40s dead and more than 40 injured, including seven children,” Charlie D’Agata reported to anchor Margaret Brennan.

The evening news programs did not fare any better. None of the three major evening news programs have dedicated a stand-alone segment to the mass killing event or done any original reporting or in-depth coverage at all, instead only mentioning the Minab attack in brief throw-away lines as part of broader war recaps, before quickly centering US and Israeli denials and framing the upwards of 168 deaths as mere “state media” “claims.”

CBS Evening News relegated the story to three throw-away mentions in its four broadcasts, centering Israeli and US denials and framing the deaths as “Iranian state media claims.”

“Iranian state media said more than a hundred were killed at an elementary school,” CBS’ Charlie D’Agata told viewers on March 1, before quickly cutting to happy crowds of Iranians and adding, “Some Iranians cheered in the streets at the news of the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”

“Over 500 people have been killed,” CBS’s Matt Gutman said on the March 2 broadcast, “according to the Red Crescent, including at a girl’s elementary school where Iranian state media claimed more than 100 children were killed.”

CBS News’ March 3 broadcast again mentioned the mass deaths in passing, but this time they doubled as IDF PR rep, immediately pivoting to anchor Tony Dokoupil interviewing, in person, an IDF spokesman who denied any involvement. “In Iran, the Red Crescent says nearly 800 have died in 4 days of bombings. And today in the city of Minab, a mass funeral was held for what the regime claims were girls killed in an elementary school. Rows of graves seen awaiting coffins,” Dokoupil says over b-roll before cutting to him chatting with an IDF spox. “I don’t think war is inevitable,” IDF spokesman Adaf Shosani tells Dokoupil. “IDF spokesman Adaf Shosani denied Israel is responsible.” Dokoupil somberly adds before letting the IDF get the final word: “We’re doing everything we can to be as accurate as we can and making sure that we are not targeting the civilians because they’re not, we’re not at war with them.”

NBC nightly news also did not dedicate any segments to the Minab bombing, only managing two throw-away mentions in its general “war” update in its Feb 28 and March 2 broadcasts. “[Iranian] officials say a girls school was hit this weekend, with dozens killed. The US says it’s investigating” Richard Engel mentioned in his round up of events.

ABC World News Tonight also gave the attack two throw-away mentions in its February 28 and March 1 broadcasts. In its brief mentions it, like CBS and NBC, centered US denials and alleged investigations. “Iranian state media claiming an airstrike on a girls school in the southern city of Minab left dozens dead,” ABC’s David Muir tells the viewer, “the US, now investigating, working to verify that report, saying it would never deliberately attack civilians.”

Grieving in Iran was either framed by ABC News as ideological ranting or secretly supportive of the bombing. “Protesters across Tehran shouting Death to America,” Muir tells his audience, “while others in Iran are quietly celebrating, hoping for a new future”.

If 168 people, overwhelmingly little girls, were killed in a school bombing in Israel, there is little doubt it would have been plastered all over major newspapers, led nightly broadcasts, and been asked about on the Sunday News programs. But—as the over 20,000 dead Palestinian children killed by a US-backed, Israeli genocide in Gaza affirm—Muslim and Arab life is simply not important, their children’s deaths are simply factored in, they’re collateral damage in a noble War on Terror, a perhaps regrettable “claim” that’s always “being investigated” but never held to account, much less elevated to moral outrage or sustained media scandal. The box is checked, a reporter does a write-up, aspersions are cast with “Iranian state media” or “Hamas run health ministry” qualifiers, and everyone moves on. Just another faceless three-digit number of Muslim children extinguished from existence and relegated to A11 in the US and Israel’s seemingly endless Middle East “wars.”

In response to a massive labor strike last Friday and two recent, caught-on-camera extrajudicial killings of activists in Minnesota, Democrats are scrambling to catch up to outrage among their base—and the population more broadly—over Trump’s brutal, violent, and terror-driven “immigration crackdowns.” Senate Democrats, feeling this pressure, are using their considerable leverage over the passage of a pending federal spending bill to push “reforms.” This Afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced the agreed upon reforms, which are, per Sahil Kapur of NBC News: (1) Ending roving patrols; tighten the rules on warrants and require ICE to coordinate with local authorities, (2) Enforce accountability; a uniform code of conduct, (3) Requiring masks off, body cameras on, agents carry ID.

These proposed reforms range from trivial to actively harmful. Once again, public outrage and calls for meaningful change are being squandered on cosmetic tweaks and PR-driven non-interventions that will ultimately do little to meaningfully alter the incentives for Trump’s DHS mass deportation terror campaigns targeting major cities and states throughout the country. Put another way, Democrats are gearing up for a redux of their infamous 2020 kneeling kente cloth moment: shallow symbolism and feigned empathy combined with superficial reforms.

Before analyzing the problems with the reforms on offer by Senate Democrats, it’s important to understand, as I noted in The Real News a week ago, that ICE’s budget has more than tripled in the past year, from roughly $10 billion in 2024 to almost $30 billion in 2025. As Lindsay Koshgarian and Sarah Lazare detailed at In These Times, if ICE were a national army, it would be the 13th biggest in the world, larger than the militaries of Poland, Italy, Australia, Canada, Turkey, and Spain. Last year, the federal government received, via Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” a staggering $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement through September 2029. On an annual basis, Koshgarian and Lazare note, “this adds about $42.5 billion per year for immigration enforcement.”

It’s from this place we must begin any discussions of “reform.” An entity that has tripled in size with the explicit mandate to round up, deport, and terrorize immigrant communities—while punishing anyone who gets in their way—cannot be meaningfully challenged without addressing the funding source for this mandate. With this in mind, let us breakdown the major issues with the proposed reforms:

1. End roving patrols; tighten the rules on warrants and require ICE to coordinate with local authorities. As many scholars have noted, Trump arresting people without warrants is already unconstitutional and illegal, but his DHS is doing it anyway. Passing laws to enforce existing law may dissuade the Trump regime in some contexts, but it’s unclear why Trump wouldn’t just ignore the new law since they duly ignored the previous one. It’s also not clear how the bill language will end up defining “roving patrols” or prevent their use, or—most important of all—what mechanism Congress would use to hold the Trump administration accountable to these standards. This type of administrative tweaking presumes a level of law-following and good faith the Trump administration has shown no evidence of abiding by.

2. Enforce accountability; a uniform code of conduct. Like many of the proposed reforms, the devil is very much in the details. It’s unclear how much power Congress or states would have to “enforce accountability” while Trump’s cartoonishly corrupt DOJ continues to investigate and threaten state lawmakers and leaders with prison time. Demands for state-led probes into the murders of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and the dozens who have died in DHS custody are sensible in principle, but this dynamic is easily gameable, as we’ve seen with similar requirements by Congress the Trump DOJ release the Epstein files, which has resulted in a disclosure of a less than 1 percent of the files.

3. Require masks off, body cameras on, agents carry ID. As I also explained in The Real News last week, the abuses, kidnappings, and killings are not because those doing them are anonymous. Masking prevents real-time ID’ing and “doxing” from activists but does nothing to create real accountability. What emboldens abuses from DHS agents is open signaling from the White House that, in the event they abuse, kill, or wrongfully kidnap someone, they’ll have the backing of the federal government and receive zero punishment. These superficial measures do nothing to alter this calculus.

Meanwhile, reforms proposed by the progressive wing of House Democrats aren’t much better and suffer from much of the same myopia. They do include more substantive demands, such as banning arrest quotas and demanding “ICE and other agencies to withdraw from Minneapolis and stop terrorizing any additional American cities.” (ICE leaving Minnesota was a key demand of the January 23 economic shutdown.) But it’s unclear how Congress would define, much less enforce, these parameters. And most conspicuous of all, their demands make zero mention of reducing DHS’s obscene budget. For the supposed left flank of acceptable opinion in Congress, it’s staggering that there is no mention of DHS’s unprecedented funding levels in any of these demands.

What is essential to understand is that it’s from this obscene budget that ICE and CBP are able to run Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s terror campaign at scale. This injection of $170 billion last year, on top of their baseline budget, is how the DHS can scale up hiring, how they can offer $50,000 sign up bonuses to new, ideologically-motivated recruits, and produce the mass saturation of armed agents to blanket multiple cities to create the requisite tension needed for their liberal city harassment and mass deportation campaigns.

The fact that progressives in Congress aren’t even advocating DHS’s budget return to its 2024 levels, or a reduction of ~66 percent, shows just how far to the right the Overton Window is. This should be a common sense, likely very popular, minimum ante to any discussion of meaningful reform—instead it’s relegated to the fringes of activist Twitter.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz defends much of his inaction and acquiescence to Trump by claiming that to push back too much is to play into Trump’s hands: “They want a show,” Walz told protestors after the DHS killing of Renee Good, “we can’t give it to them.” Sen. Murphy, who is leading Democrats’ “reform” messaging, took it a step further, explicitly stating that Trump’s crackdowns were about creating a “pretext for Trump to take over elections in swing states.”

This is almost certainly true, but Murphy and Walz are ignoring the obvious implication of their premise: Why would Congressional Democrats vote to continue fully funding the primary tool for Trump to carry out this power grab? Why would Senate Democrats, after these token reforms, be fine maintaining ICE and CBP’s massive budget, permitting it to continue disciplining liberal cities, extorting them for their voter rolls, and potentially using ICE and CBP as an occupying or intimating force in the event Trump wants to corrupt—or outright steal—the 2026 midterm or 2028 elections? If liberals in Congress really believe that DHS agents are doubling as a brown shirt force for Trump (which they, in key ways, already are) then why are they supporting the continued tripling of the brown shirt force’s budget without so much as a public argument otherwise, much less a public fight? They either don’t actually believe this is a real threat, or they have some other secret mechanism of preventing the eventuality they are arguing is only months away.

Even if electeds are balking at “abolish” language, there’s a large grey area going totally unexplored. The fact that there’s no discussion of reducing DHS funding at all, or bringing it back to its 2024 levels by clawing back or redirecting the $170 billion in supplemental funds, is especially conspicuous when you consider that this is a position to the right of the public in general. A plurality of Americans now support abolishing ICE (46 percent for, vs. 41 percent against) and 76 percent of Democrats do. Meaningful budget cuts to the DHS are the compromise, centrist position. Yet Senate Democrats, and even supposed progressives in the House, don’t mention budget cuts in their messaging at all.

None of it makes any sense. At least it doesn’t outside the limited and professionally impotent corridor of Washington’s consultant class. For weeks, building up to this fight, a sprawling network of billionaire-backed Groups from Searchlight to David Shor’s Blue Rose to Third Way have been warning Democrats not to embrace “abolish ICE” or any budget cuts to the program. Per usual, this concern-troll posture is advanced under the banner of pragmatism and electoral necessity, not ideology. But the goal is very much about ideological discipling. The goal is to provide a veneer of empiricism to a predetermined conservative script and keep Congressional progressives focused on cosmetic or trivial reforms in lieu of expanding the debate into the realm of sizable funding cuts.

Outside observers cannot, of course, know for sure if there was a top-down party mandate to ignore the potential for defunding ICE and CBP. But given the uniformity of messaging, even among progressives in Congress, it is playing out this way in effect, if not intent. Those defending these reforms would say they are advancing what is possible, that these agenda items are simply what Congressional Republicans could potentially agree to. But Democrats have dispositive leverage at the moment. They can refuse to fund the DHS and take the debate to the public who, outraged by the visuals of kidnapping and murders, are on their side and, poll after poll shows, are very much amenable to meaningful, budget-based reform. The urgency to fund DHS is entirely on the Republicans’ part. By starting negotiations without challenging the premise that ICE should be the 13th largest army in the world, by refusing to go after the source of their power—their obscene budgets—congressional Democrats begin “negotiations” in an already right-wing, weakened framework. The fundamental problem with ICE and CBP abuses and killings is not a lack of “training,” or a lack of cameras capturing their lawlessness, or their lack of properly filled out legal paperwork or masks. It’s carte blanche immunity by the White House, fueled by their record-breaking budget. Democrats in Congress have little control over the former, but they have tremendous power over the latter. Their unwillingness to seize the moment to meaningfully and substantively rein in the power of Trump’s DHS by seeking to slash their $170 billion+ budget shows they are unable, or unwilling, to meet the moment.

Last weekend, the richest person in the world and owner of the most politically influential social media app in the world, Elon Musk, again endorsed overt white nationalist propaganda. And once again, the “global leader in combating hate,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, have nothing to say about it at all. Let us take a look at some of the posting Musk did in support of his paranoid racist Great Replacement Theory in the past few days:

• On January 8 he responded “100%” to a tweet that read, “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive.”

• On January 10, he responded “yes” to a tweet that read, “what they’ve managed to accomplish in South Africa is what they want to inflict on all of us The anarchotyranny, expropriation, and race communism that destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa are the same things they are bringing to America and the rest of the Occident to turn us into the Global Favela.”

• On January 11, he said “this is what will happen to America” in response to a tweet that said, “We are saying this since 2015: the ‘South African scenario’ is our future if we don’t start remigration.” [remigration” is a white nationalist talking point popular in Great Replacement Theory]

• On January 11, he replied “true” to a tweet that read “Remigration is a moderate position. Demographic replacement is an extremist position.”

• And on January 11, he responded “Unfortunately, this is where America is headed” to a tweet that explicitly endorsed Rhodesia’s apartheid system:

This isn’t, of course, the first time Musk has decided to spend his weekends promoting antisemitic, anti-black conspiracy theories. Back in September, as I noted at the time, Musk rushed to exploit the high-profile murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska to push out his Great Replacement Theory narrative. “White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of global population,” Musk posted on September 6, 2025. This was in response to Italian fascist account @RadioGenoa posting, “In 1900 white population of world was 36%, today it is 8%.” In response to a tweet from another far-right account that week claiming that “Africa has 54 countries, Asia has 48 countries. There are 51 countries with a Muslim majority. Nobody from Africa, Asia or a Muslim country needs to come to Europe or the USA for asylum,” Musk replied, “This is not accidental. The radical left is importing voters. And it’s a sure way to win if not stopped.”

This is all textbook Great Replacement Theory rhetoric and it’s all being ignored, once again, by the so-called Anti-Defamation League. I contacted the ADL for comment but, just as they did last September, they have ignored my request.

A year ago, the ADL infamously downplayed Musk’s two, clear-as-day nazi salutes he threw live on TV, calling them “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.” The organization somehow knew they “were not a Nazi salutes,” and demanded “a bit of grace” for the wayward mega-billionaire.

Great Replacement Theory, as the ADL itself notes on its website, promotes the idea that as part of an antisemitic conspiracy, “native white Europeans are being replaced in their countries by non-white immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, and the end result will be the extinction of the white race.” Musk’s manic ranting about a conspiracy involving the “demographic replacement” of whites could not be any clearer in its Great Replacement ideology, yet the ADL—to say nothing of our media—have decided to just ignore it.

Musk, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is simply too big to fail. He’s by far the richest person on earth (clearing the No. 2 person on Forbes wealthiest person list, Mark Zuckerberg, by over $125 billion) and is expected to be the first trillionaire in the coming years. Another reason Musk gets a pass is that, in addition to agreeing to censor pro-Palestine speech and doing the IDF propaganda tour in 2023, Musk is currently distributing Starlink internet connection to demonstrators protesting against the Iranian government, a mass uprising that Israel, and thus the ADL and its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, seek to exploit for their own ends.

So, the question remains: What line would Musk have to cross for the ADL to condemn him and do so by name? It’s not throwing nazi salutes. It’s not posting explicit Great Replacement content on his platform. It’s not promoting racist conspiracy theories and praising apartheid Rhodesia. Presumably, if Musk were to criticize Israel, Greenblatt would rush to condemn him as an antisemite. But, one can logically infer, so long as he doesn’t do this, and indeed works to advance the interests of Israel, he seems to be immune to criticism from the “leading anti-hate organization,” no matter how unhinged, racist and explicit he makes his racism.

As Trump ramps up his belligerence against Venezuela, murders scores of Venezuelans in cold blood, parks the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, six destroyers, 75 aircraft and 33 amphibious assault ships right off their coast, orders the CIA to depose Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro , and makes clear he is seeking regime change, American media is predictably falling in line. Press outlets are helping not only soft pedal Trump’s brazen war-mongering but are, increasingly, providing ad hoc international legal legitimacy to Trump’s clearly illegal, unprovoked attacks and potential invasion of Venezuela.

In his latest escalation, Trump “seized” a Venezuelan oil tanker in international waters claiming it was violating US sanctions. Right on cue, The New York Times, among others, rushed to lend credence and faux legal legitimacy to this unilateral act of piracy. Here’s how Times reporters Nicholas Nehamas, Tyler Pager, Farnaz Fassihi, and Alan Rappeport described the hijacking of another country’s ship in international waters in their December 11 report:

The use of U.S. military and law enforcement forces to seize a foreign oil tanker on the high seas is unusual. But the Skipper had been on the radar of the U.S. government for several years, as part of a so-called ghost fleet that smuggles black market oil around the world. Venezuela and Iran have each made extensive use of such ships to smuggle oil and evade international sanctions.

There are two significant lies in this paragraph. First off, the Venezuelan oil in question was not “black market” oil and, relatedly, Venezuelan oil is not subject to “international sanctions.” It is only subject to US sanctions and US secondary sanctions, which are sanctions the US imposes on countries that trade in Venezuelan oil but are not, themselves, sanctions on Venezuela from the countries themselves. Venezuelan oil exports are only “black market” to one out of the 193 UN member states: the United States. To be clear, other countries other than the US, namely EU countries, have imposed light sanctions on specific Venezuelan officials but not oil exports. The only country that has done this is the United States.

I reached out to Times reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Farnaz Fassih asking them if they could cite which specific “international sanctions” Venezuela is violating by shipping its oil to other countries. If they return my request for comment, I will update accordingly.

CNN would also spread this critical misinformation, writing in its December 12 report that “Venezuela is home to the planet’s single-largest known mass of crude oil, but international sanctions and a deep economic crisis have crippled the country’s oil industry.” But, again, Venezuela’s oil industry is not under international sanctions, just US ones. ABC News would join in playing the role of imperial hall monitor, writing, “An ABC News analysis of satellite imagery and tracking data shows the oil tanker seized by the U.S. off the coast of Venezuela may have manipulated its location data — an apparent attempt, experts said, to circumvent restrictions imposed by sanctions.”

While technically true (unlike what CNN and the New York Times wrote), it is misleading in that, like almost every other major report on the tanker hijacking, it heavily implies Venezuela was doing something illegal or shady by exporting its own oil while taking measures to avoid US resource theft. ABC News, like dozens of outlets before it, simply assumes the role of US government sanctions cop without mentioning that Venezuela is under no legal or moral obligation to follow US law. It is only under legal or moral obligation to follow Venezuelan and international law—neither of which it is violating.

Why is this subtle ideological work so pernicious? Because what CNN, ABC News, and The New York Times are doing, with varying degrees of implicit and explicit deceit, is rushing to create the vague whiff of international legitimacy to what Trump is doing—for which there is none. Venezuela is not violating any international law, so one is simply being heavily implied or outright fabricated. Trump stealing their oil tanker is just Might Makes Right bullying without any legal or international basis.

This posture is a common trope in Western media, which often plays the role of US government sanctions enforcer, writing breathless “investigations” about the various ways Official Bad Guy countries “evade” US sanctions without ever noting that it is indeed quite unusual for countries to follow laws of other countries. In February 2024, the New York Times dedicated four reporters and 3,000 words to “reveal how lax government oversight allowed shadowy oil tankers, covered by American insurance, to fund Iran’s regime.” At no point in their deep investigation, which reads like a US State Department memo, did they ever mention that Iran, like Venezuela, is under no moral or legal obligation to follow US law, just as the US is under no moral or legal obligation to follow Venezuelan law or Iranian law, or Azerbaijani law or Serbian law. Indeed, this is what international law is supposed to be for, but the US almost entirely abandoned the concept, refusing to join the International Criminal Court (and has recently imposed sanctions on it for its indictment of Israeli officials). The US has also refused to join major international legal arrangements like the ban on cluster munitions, Mine Ban Treaty, Arms Trade Treaty, Law of the Sea Treaty, Kyoto Protocol, Convention on Biological Diversity, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and many others.

Absent this desire to join the international community, the US has—through sheer power and assertion, and with the US media’s dutiful help—simply made up an ad hoc “international law” as a foggy PR veneer based entirely on the say-so of US officials.

But isn’t Venezuela a Baddie country? one may ask. Even if one accepts this premise this does not confer any legal or moral right for the US to steal their oil. Indeed, if international bodies or large cohorts of countries sanctioned oil exporters because of oil exporters’ lack of democracy then we would have no global oil markets.

But for Times editors and reporters, these bigger questions are not worth interrogating. Who gets to make these ad hoc determinations? What legitimacy does the US have to steal the oil of other countries? Do governments backing what was increasingly seen as a genocide in Gaza have any right to enforce ersatz legal regimes on other countries without any international legitimacy? None of these deeper, more interesting reporting questions, are something the Times is examining. It was simply assumed US dictates are logical and justified, and the role of US media is to make sure other countries are abiding by these dictates.

China, for example, has sanctioned, among others, US corporations Saronic Technologies, Aerkomm, and Oceaneering International. Does this unilateral action by China mean all these companies’ sales to Taiwan, in direct violation of Chinese sanctions, render them “black market” sales? Would the Times refer to them as such without quotes and a heavy dose of irony? Would reporters write long, detailed scandal-toned reports on how these US companies are sneaking around to “evade” these “sanctions”? No, because this would be absurd toadism for a government. And media, at least in theory, is not supposed to play the role of police on behalf of governments, whether they be Chinese, Iranian, Venezuelan or American. Their role ought to be to best accurately convey objective reality without bias in favor of any powerful institution, which would mean seeking to contextualize and complicate American media consumers’ ignorance about the legal authority of US dictates, rather than simply take for granted their prima facie moral and legal authority.

But US media simply accepts, without pushback or critical thinking of any kind, the US State Department’s premise that the US is the leader of the whole world and gets to unilaterally dictate what is and isn’t “international law.” But they can’t. That’s the thing about international law: It requires some degree, any degree, of international democracy and buy-in. But only one country is sanctioning Venezuela’s oil sector—the United States. If the New York Times or CNN wish to make clear they think the US is de facto dictator of the whole world and ought to have the moral authority to determine what every other country must do with its natural resources then they should say that. They should be nice, obedient state media and make their fidelity to Trump’s dictates clear to the reader rather than misleading its readers—either through implication or explicit lying—that Venezuelan oil exports are breaking international law which they very much are not.

Hi, I’ve written a book that is coming out April 21 of next year. It’s available for pre-order now at Pluto Press’ website or Amazon. (Obviously, ordering from the former is preferable but do what you must.)

I’ve spent the better part of the last year writing it. It’s a detailed, data-driven analysis of center-left media’s role in selling the American public on the genocide in Gaza. It was born out of my Nation series on this topic but is 90 percent new analysis, and data and 100 percent of the royalties go to The Middle East Children’s Alliance for Peace.

Here’s an overview that should give you a sense of scope:

• Introduction

• 1. ’40 beheaded babies’, the ISIS-ificiation of Hamas, and how to prime the American public for revenge

• 2. Who is allowed to be human?

• 3. How U.S. media helped the Biden administration distance itself from the Horrors of Gaza

• 4. Covering war crimes like earthquakes

• 5. How the New York Times helped Israel militarize civilians and humanitarian workers in Gaza

• 6. Sunday Morning news shows, editorial boards, Morning Joe, and how ‘Agenda Setting’ news limited the debate to ‘how many Palestinian should die’

• 7. Selective empathy and liberalism’s crisis of legitimacy

• 8. ‘Anti-semitism’ show trials and the smearing of campus protests

• 9. The Atlantic, ‘Day After’ wish-cashing, and soft-pedalling mass killing for the tote bag set

• Conclusion

Thank you!

It’s rare in politics that a politician openly discusses their true, cynical motives for doing something that is extremely violent and controversial. Indeed, out of opening numbers for broadway musicals, humans rarely lay out their true feelings, motives, and aims. But, in the United States, we have Donald Trump as our president, someone who, for all of his destruction, death and self-dealing, every now and then, openly explains his motives. As he pointedly did in 2023 to an audience in North Carolina while lamenting his 2020 loss, telling the crowd, “when I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. [Had I won in 2020] we would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil.”

Fairly important context when attempting to assess why Trump has recently ratcheted up attempts to overthrow the government in Venezuela and install his preferred MAGA-aligned alternative.

One would think this open admission, supported by mounds of additional evidence, would remove the need for guesswork, pontification, and the typical capital-A Analyses over The Why of an extremely unpopular and potentially disastrous military action. But, then again, one of Western media’s primary purposes is to presume good intentions on the part of the US and its allies, even when it’s someone as cartoonishly imperialist as Donald Trump.

In recent explainers about Trump’s Venezuela policy and motives, the BBC, Washington Post, and Politico published thousands of words, interview experts, and try to suss out what’s behind Trump’s brazen attempts to overthrow the government in Caracas. But not a single one seriously entertains the possibility that Trump is interested in Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest known oil reserves in the world.

In its explainer, “Warships, fighter jets and the CIA - what is Trump’s endgame in Venezuela?” the BBC’s ​​Ione Wells and Joshua Cheetham make no mention of oil or natural resources. Their piece hints at a potential ulterior motive—“Why this probably isn’t just about drugs,” reads one subheadline—but proceeds to say nothing about what the motive other than “drugs” could be. The article predictably props up every justification for regime change and interviews only pro-regime change experts.

In two recent articles on the subject, (Trump beats the drums of war for direct action in Venezuela [10/22/25], Maduro braces for a U.S. attack; Venezuelans worry more about dinner [11/1/25]) The Washington Post spends hundreds of words pontificating about Trump’s motives without mentioning resources or oil once. The latter article, by Ana Vanessa Herrero and Matthew Hay Brown, did insist that “ordinary Venezuelans” don’t really care about a US military attack, a claim they back with a grand total of two interviews with “ordinary Venezuelans.” This claim is contradicted by surveys on this particular question, with only 10 percent of even anti-Nicolás Maduro Venezuelans supporting U.S. military intervention, according to a September 2025 poll conducted by Panterra.

In an October 23 Politico Q & A with Trump’s former Venezuela ambassador, James B. Story, about “What Trump’s Venezuela Strategy Is Really About,” reporter Eric Bazail-Eimil did not ask about—much less mention—natural resources as a potential motive. All of the nominal anti-drug motives were simply taken at face value. One can see similar omissions in countless cable news segments on the topic, where Trump’s desire to control Venezuela’s immense resources is just not broached, much less centered as a motivating factor.

Indeed, with one exception (a single USA Today article from October 18, 2025) Trump’s 2023 comments about wanting to seize Venezuela’s oil have not been mentioned in any major western outlet: not in the New York Times, not the Washington Post, not the BBC, not CNN, not MSNBC, not ABC, NBC, or CBS News. They are inconvenient to the go-to narrative populating Western media, that of Trump as sincere, if brazen and misguided, anti-drug warrior. So they are simply ignored, despite their urgent relevance to his military build up and threats.

But Trump himself isn’t the only source for oil as a motive. Former Deputy Director and acting Director of the FBI during Trump’s first term, Andrew McCabe, claimed in his 2019 memoir that in 2017 Trump told intelligence officials in a private meeting, “I don’t understand why we’re not looking at Venezuela. Why we’re not at war with Venezuela? They have all the oil and they’re in our back door.” And this sentiment is, of course, consistent with numerous other times that Trump openly talked about seizing other countries’ resources:

• Iraq: Trump has repeatedly claimed the US “should have kept the oil” when it exited Iraq.

• Syria: In 2019, Trump told reporters he left troops in Syria “only for the oil.”

• Greenland: Since taking office in January, Trump has repeatedly claimed he would seize Greenland for its rare earth minerals, such as lithium and titanium.

• Panama: Since taking office in January, Trump has repeatedly laid claim to the Panama canal for its strategic importance to US empire.

• Ukraine: In exchange for continued military aid in its war against Russia, Trump compelled Ukraine to hand over mineral rights to the US and US companies, something Trump boasted about.

Trump is openly motivated by a desire to control the resources of other countries and has been for decades. Indeed, it’s his most consistent, publicly espoused motive behind his foreign policy—dominance and extraction for US corporate profit.

A report yesterday in Semafor shows this fact is certainly on the minds of US investors chomping at the bit to “invest” in (see: take control and profit off of) Venezuela’s myriad natural resources. According to Semafor:

In addition, UBS’s chief investment office put together an eight-page memo last month that focuses on “visualizing the day after tomorrow” in Venezuela. The research document highlighted the Trump administration’s “hawkish approach” towards Caracas and noted that “Venezuela’s transition away from Chavismo could unlock major opportunities,” in part because of its oil reserves and “severely underutilized economy.”...

In addition to its oil reserves, UBS cited Venezuela’s “fertile soil” and notes it occupies a prime location “to develop as a transportation hub for the Americas and Europe.”

So why is this motive almost never entertained by US media? Why is it ignored by the BBC, Politico, The Washington Post, and CNN reports when laying out the reasoning behind the White House’s military build up and threats? It’s not some dot-connecting, red yarn-corkboard-in-the-gargage conspiracy: Trump himself has made clear that he wants the US and its companies to control Venezuelan oil. And his preferred replacement for Maduro, María Corina Machado (who recently repeated January 6 conspiracy theories claiming Maduro rigged the 2020 election for Joe Biden) has promised as much, telling Donald Trump Jr. on his podcast last February, “we have more oil [than Saudi Arabia], infinite potential. And we’re going to open markets. We’re going to kick [out] the government from the oil sector. We’re going to privatize all our industry…this country, Venezuela, is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people that are going to make a lot of money.”

Trump is a violent man, a man who doesn’t care for people he sees as weak, subhuman, or racially inferior. He’s an unmitigated chauvinist and a liar. But he’s a relatively honest man when it comes to laying out his own motivations, and he has shown little interest in running through the motions of liberal human rights pretenses. His preferred pretext, “going after drug cartels,” is taking up all the space in media discourse, but it’s not remotely sufficient—nor, as some of these articles gingerly note, does it make any sense as an anti-drug action. So why the sudden interest in regime change in Venezuela? Is oil the only reason why Trump and his band of committed neocons want to overthrow the government in Venezuela? Of course not. But it is a major one, and we know it’s a major one because Trump has openly said as much. It would be useful if our media quoted Trump’s own motives for attacking Venezuela when seeking to understand his motives for attacking Venezuela.

For the past week, multibillionaire Elon Musk has been exploiting the horrific murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska to promote his long-held, and long-documented Great Replacement Theory narrative. Zarutska, who was apparently stabbed to death while riding the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina has become a cause célèbre among far-right media figures, who are using the incident as evidence of out-of-control crime in Democratic-controlled cities, despite crime falling perspicuously across the country over the past year and, in Charlotte in particular. Not content with the run-of-the-mill racism, Musk has taken the outrage one step further, openly embracing the narrative that it’s further evidence that the white race, such as it is, is under coordinated attack by “the left” and forces of immigration to replace the white population in a torrent of tweets and retweets.

“White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of global population” Musk posted on September 6 in response to Italian fascist account @RadioGenoa posting “In 1900 white population of world was 36%, today it is 8%.” In response to a tweet from another far right account claiming that “Africa has 54 countries, Asia has 48 countries. There are 51 countries with a Muslim majority. Nobody from Africa, Asia or a Muslim country needs to come to Europe or the USA for asylum.” Musk replied “This is not accidental. The radical left is importing voters. And it’s a sure way to win if not stopped.”

This is all textbook Great Replacement Theory rhetoric and it’s all being ignored, once again, but the so-called Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL, and its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt who claim to be “a global leader in combating hate” and “combating antisemitism” predictably had nothing to say about the world’s richest person and owner of the world’s most politically influential social media website spreading overt antisemitic conspiracies for the better part of a week.

The ADL ignored multiple requests for comment about whether they oppose Musk’s latest Great Replacement tirade, or whether they even indexed it as such. They also did not respond to inquiries as to whether Musk or any of his affiliated organizations were funding the ADL.

Great Replacement Theory, as the ADL itself notes on its website, advances the idea that as part of an antisemitic conspiracy, “native white Europeans are being replaced in their countries by non-white immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, and the end result will be the extinction of the white race.” Musk’s tweet commenting on nonwhite countries followed by “This is not accidental. The radical left is importing voters” and “White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of global population” meets any objective definition of Great Replacement conspiracy peddling.

It’s not the first time Musk has trafficked in Great Replacement rhetoric. Musk received modest backlash (not from the ADL, of course) when he said in March of this year that his so-called “department of government efficiency” (DOGE) will “turn off fraudulent payments of entitlements” to “illegals,” as he listed off government programs including social security, Medicare, unemployment aid, disability and small business loans. “If the Dems can bring in 200,000 illegals and get them legalized … even without cheating, if you bring in illegals that are 10 [times] the voting differential in a swing state, it will no longer be a swing state,” Musk said. “And the Dems will win all the swing states in a matter of time.”

In 2023, Musk replied to an antisemitic account endorsing Great Replacement Theory and blaming “Jewish communities” for conspiring “against whites” by saying “this is the actual truth.” This garnered brief but limited backlash.

No doubt feeling pressure to say something, Greenblatt responded by mildly chided Musk on X/Twitter, screencapping the tweet but not mentioning Musk by name, “At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one's influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories.”

Soon after, Musk did a propaganda tour of Israel, took photos with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wore IDF dog tags, and recited every pro-genocide justification during his media appearances, thus absolving him of his overt embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories. He didn’t need to denounce or apologize for his trafficking in antisemitic conspiracies as such, just support the state of Israel and its campaign of extermination in Gaza.

Since then, the ADL has pulled its punches and avoided criticism of Musk, culminating in its now-infamous downplaying of Musk’s clear-as-day Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration this past January.

The backlash, even from liberal institutions typically indifferent to the ADL’s slippery and bad-faith invocation of antisemitism, was fierce but—again—faded quickly. The ADL tried to save face by mildly criticizing Musk for making light of the subsequent outrage with a torrent of nazi puns but this, again, was in the “Do Better” mold, not in the totalizing, hysterical condemning terms Greenblatt reserves for advocates of Palestinian rights like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Zohran Mamdani, or when Greenblatt equates wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh with a Nazi swastika, as he did on MSNBC last year.

As Tamar Manasseh noted in The Forward in January, this isn’t the first time the ADL has been extremely selective about who it fiercely condemns and who it lets off the hook. Detailing the ADL’s double standard for the black community, Manasseh notes that while Musk was afforded “grace” after his inauguration nazi salute, Whoopi Goldberg was publicly condemned and dressed down on national TV for comments far less offensive than a sieg heil.

The ADL is, at its core, a shakedown operation for the Israeli government and its violent policies towards Palestinians. It uses the language and pretense of anti-racism stateside to protect Israel’s left flank from human rights concerns, and smears any substantive critics of Israel as antisemites—all while, conspicuously, going light on or ignoring major antisemites so long as they toe the line on Israel.

The ADL has a long history of overt advocacy for U.S. and Israeli policies of aggression towards Palestinians, and of using research and reports to attack the left, and anti-racist movements more broadly. One of its key methods is to draw false equivalencies between critics of human rights abuses against Palestinians, and Nazi or white supremacist extremists, is premised on the false assertion that any criticism of the Israeli government is antisemitic. In 1967, Dore Schary, national chairman of the ADL, slammed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an anti-racist organization, for criticizing the Israeli government in a newsletter. Israel’s critics are extremists, Schary told the ADL’s executive committee, and "they have gained an audience and made an impact, both of which can grow." In 1993, the ADL was the subject of lawsuits and law enforcement investigations for secretly spying on thousands of political activists for decades, including Arab-American groups and critics of the Israeli government. The organization’s intelligence gatherer of 32 years, Roy Bullock, is alleged to have also surveilled the United Auto Workers union, the NAACP, and anti-apartheid activists, at the behest of the South African government. In the mid-1980s, the ADL launched a propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela, and slammed the African National Congress as "totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American."

Despite his open advocacy for the nation-state of Israel, his selective focus on antisemitism when it suits Israel’s short term political interests, and his history of racism against black activists, Greenblatt is still given pride of place in US media, where he seemingly has a standing invitation at outlets like MSNBC and New York Times where he is treated as a good faith warrior against “hate.” No amount of selective and racially-loaded outrage appears to undermine this wholly undeserved image. Greenblatt ignoring Musk’s latest antisemitic conspiracy-mongering is just one more point of evidence for how cynical and instrumentalized the ADL’s feigned outrage really is.

Democratic Party consensus over Gaza is beginning to buckle under the increasingly-difficult-to-deny reality of genocidal intentions and policies, with polls showing only 8 percent of Democrats support Israel’s “war.” Now, liberal institutions and media that spent the better part of two years ignoring this reality, deflecting from it, or overtly supporting it, are seeking to cover their asses and spin their way back into the good graces of progressives and basic common decency. Out of all the talking points in support of this pivot, one has emerged as a clear favorite, a sort of compromise position for the Pod Saves set: acknowledge that Israel is committing genocide (or something close to it) but limit the damage by reducing the moral outrage to the machinations of one man, Benjamin Netanyahu.

It’s not a new line: it’s been the go-to liberal zionist limited hangout since criticism of the US and Israel’s destruction of Gaza began to emerge among Democrats in late 2023 and early 2024—a popular tic, for example, of Sen. Bernie Sanders. It’s not Israel’s genocide, we are told, but “Netanyahu’s war.” This framing enjoys meaningful overlap with the Bumbling/Fuming Biden alternative reality constructed in liberal media throughout 2024, complete with antisemitic undertones that an otherwise decent Biden was somehow being manipulated by the wily and cunning Israeli prime minister.

Most of the recent high-profile “breaks” with Israel by Democrats in Congress have limited criticism along these lines. “It is clear that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s personal and political interests are guiding Israel’s actions,” wrote New York Rep. Dan Goldman. “He is beholden to the extreme right.”

“Do I think the relationship between Israel and the Democratic Party is irreparably damaged? The answer is no,” New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said recently. “Do I think the relationship between Netanyahu and the Democratic Party is irreparably damaged? The answer is yes.”

“I supported Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas after Oct 7th horrific terrorist act,” California Rep. Ro Khanna told AIPAC on Twitter. “Netanyahu's policies lost young Americans.”

“This interview is the first time I felt like I had any understanding of what problem the GHF was supposed to ‘solve’ and it's a political one,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said on Twitter. “A big part of Netanyahu's coalition wants ZERO aid entering Gaza.”

“Netanyahu is a bad actor, he’s continued the war for political purpose…this is not a partner we can count on,” Pod Saves America’s Tommy Vietor lamented on a recent episode.

A recent, widely shared report in The New York Times echoed this conventional wisdom. “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power,” the Times headline read. “Secret meetings, altered records, ignored intelligence: the inside story of the prime minister’s political calculations since Oct. 7.” The chatter around the article was uniform: Netanyahu had “dragged on” the war against popular will for "political gain.” One Bad Man was not only forcing the leader of the most powerful empire in human history to do its bidding—he was forcing the Israeli people as well.

There’s a problem with this formulation: It is a complete fiction. Not only are neither Trump nor Biden being “pulled into” anything, poll after poll shows the most extreme and genocidal policies of the Netanyahu government are not only popular in Israel, but, in key ways, to the left of Israeli society. It’s not that, as Chris Hayes says, “a big part of Netanyahu's coalition wants ZERO aid entering Gaza.” It's that a big part—indeed, 68 percent according to one recent poll—of Israeli society wants zero aid entering Gaza.

Netanyahu has “dragged on the war” because the “war’s” objectives are extremely popular among top politicians in Israel, Israeli society more broadly, and among political elites in the US.

One April 2024 Pew poll showed that only 4 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that Netanyahu had “gone too far” in Gaza, and 34 percent of Israelis (including Palestinian Israelis, so the number is likely much higher) saying he had “not gone far enough.” By that time over 35,000 Palestinians had been killed. The primary line of criticism from Netanyahu’s political opposition over the past few months, in addition to corruption charges totally unrelated to Gaza, is that Netanyahu refuses to expand the military draft to Israel’s ultra-orthodox communities. In April of this year, former premier Naftali Bennett lambasted Netanyahu not for his backing of genocide, but his policy of “preventing the military enlistment of the ultra-Orthodox,” saying it was keeping Israel in a stalemate with Hamas in Gaza. “The stagnation in Gaza stems directly from government policy that deprives the IDF of the main tool required for victory: fighters,” said Bennett, who the Times Of Israel said was “widely seen as gunning to replace Netanyahu.” A survey conducted by Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University and published in Haaretz in May, found that 56 percent of Jewish Israelis supported the “transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.” Respondents were asked whether they agreed with the position that the IDF, "when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants." Nearly half, 47 percent, agreed. According to another poll from the Israel Democracy Institute, conducted at the end of July, a vast majority of Israeli Jews—79 percent—say they are "not so troubled" or "not troubled at all" by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.

This isn’t to make a totalizing moral claim about every individual Israeli—there are indeed dissidents and conscientious objectors, including Israeli youth who are refusing compulsory conscription into the Israeli military over ethical objections. The problem is, if they all gathered in the same place, they could probably not fill Wrigley Field. And there’s no reason to believe they have any real impact on what Israel does or will do in the near future. The point is not to be smug; indeed, as a white American living on colonized land among a population where 30 percent Republicans agree we should bomb Agrabah, the fictional country from Aladdin (PPP, 2015), I am very aware of how violent and racist my own society can be. But, in the context of Gaza, poll after poll shows that Israelis are overwhelmingly genocidal in their attitudes and axioms. Whatever the reasons, whatever the colonial indoctrination, whatever the internal propaganda, whatever the racism at work, Israeli society, especially its body politic, remains in a genocidal fervor almost two years on, and overt support for starvation, ethnic cleansing and mass killing remains the majority position among Israelis. It is moral and journalistic malpractice to act as if it isn’t.

Polls show this is far less so in the United States: A clear majority of Americans are against Israel’s operations in Gaza and want to stop arming Israel. And since the United States is a co-conspirator in Israel’s genocide, it logically follows that this disconnect is the best place to focus activist attention to finally create real leverage on ending the genocide. Again, this is not because Americans are inherently morally superior—it’s because their foundational genocide and subsequent colonial state formation was achieved decades before Israel’s even got underway. Indeed, this issue is not even particularly sectarian: according to a May 2024 poll by Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, approximately 30% of American Jews agreed that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza, with 38% of American Jews under 44 years old holding this position.

Focusing on One Bad Man prevents us from interrogating the ideological structures at work, in this case, the political ideology of modern zionism, which is predicated on the goal of Jewish demographic supremacy. And any call for ethnic supremacy necessitates the expulsion of those who are the wrong ethnicity, a reality that holds true whether one identifies as a liberal or progressive, or a conservative or an extremist. This fundamental component of zionism eclipses all else. Calls for social democracy and healthcare and good liberal public goods or even scholarships for some Palestinians mean little when your political system requires constant expulsion and displacement. The logical end point of this view is playing out today with Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza, and liberal zionists, as well as fanatics on the right, deserve blame.

Beyond the fact that it’s without empirical basis, there’s a more urgent, practical reason why One Bad Man Theory must be rejected: its obvious political utility in maintaining the logic and basis for the genocide. This particular genre of Liberal Cope is immensely popular for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it argues, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, that the US does not need to cut off arms to Israel, nor does there need to be a move to boycott all of Israeli society, because—don’t worry, we are assured—an anti-war, anti-”Netanyahu” movement is perpetually around the corner to stop the horrors we are witnessing on our social media timelines on a daily basis.

This spin is popular with everyone from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times to Zack Beauchamp in Vox, both of whom have been aggressively making the case that Israel can, and is, working to effectively sort out its own genocide problem internally—ostensibly, because we are perpetually on the brink of a liberal anti-Netanyahu political movement that will win power and end the “war” in Gaza. Like an MSNBC NeverTrump Republican waiting for the “fever to break” and the base to turn on Trump, liberal zionists await an enlightened, supposedly humanitarian zionism that’s always just around the corner, but strangely never materializes.

Alas, we have no indication it will. In a recent debate I had with Beauchamp on Twitter over this issue, his primary piece of evidence—indeed, the only real peice of evidence any of this crowd can concoct—is polls showing a majority of Israelis now support a “hostage deal.” When I noted that the majority of Israeli society supports the basic aims of the ongoing genocide, he claimed “this is false, 70 percent supported Phase 2 [of a hostage deal] of the agreement earlier this year which would have traded IDF withdrawal for hostage release (no other conditions) and linked to a poll that does indeed show this.”

But the devil is very much in the details. The majority of Israelis are indeed partial to a “hostage deal,” with the emphasis on word on hostage: the overwhelming liberal position is that Netanyahu should work out a deal to get the remaining hostages back then go back to destroying Gaza. This is a position Netanyahu has, not incorrectly, argued is not tenable and would require Israel to effectively trick both Hamas and the US, something unlikely to happen. Which is why Hamas, no doubt able to read the same polls, has never been willing to agree to a deal that would simply permit Israel to get its captives back then commence leveling, bombing, starving, and destroying Gaza. Put another way, Israeli society, like all societies, is complex and contains glaring contradictions in its preferences, but one through-line is consistent in polling: the Israeli public, and their representatives in government, largely do not oppose the genocide in Gaza or any of its most extreme depravities. And neither do Presidents Biden and Trump—and the majority of Democratic and Republican lawmakers. We know this because they keep supporting, arming, and funding the genocide.

It is vital to be clear-eyed on the different political views among the US versus Israeli public, because we need a sober assessment of how we can end the genocide as quickly as possible. The only real meaningful opposition in the immediate future can come from an American public, pressuring its representatives into shifting positions and making support for Israel as an ethnostate—not “Netanyahu”—irrevocably, politically toxic. Sitting around and waiting for Israel to reform itself is obviously not going to rectify an urgent situation, and the only logical way to pressure Israel is to cut off its arms and isolate it from the Western economies it depends on. This does not mean that those doing the work of trying to chip away at this support and chart another path forward, based on equal rights, are wasting their time. Israel has vocal supporters of the Palestinian-led movement for BDS, for example, and it does have an anti-Zionist left, however marginalized. Yet, it is not analytically sound to claim that this cohort is winning the day in Israel. It is unfortunately very fringe and will likely remain so in the near future.

Thus, attempting to frame the issue as the work of One Bad Man—and make no mistake, he is a bad man—reduces the issue to a personality dispute with no underlying conditions or causes. The very logic of zionism requires the removal, killing, and dispossession of an inconvenient people. The debate, such as it is, has always been about whether this process is slow and subtle, given cover by a fictitious “peace processes,” (so-called liberal zionism), or whether it is out in the open, overtly genocidal, and accelerated in its violence and removal (the far right for whom the genocide is now being pinned). This logic of zionism, of ethno-supremacist state-building between the river and the sea, whatever its flavor, remains the fundamental problem, not one uniquely Machiavellian politician who, we are lead to believe, is carrying out a genocide more or less by himself. The demand now, more than ever, has to be isolating and cutting off Israel, as such, not just One Bad Man. It’s the demand of virtually all of Palestinian civil society, and it’s the only logical fulcrum to meaningfully change Israel’s campaign of lawless, nihilistic violence. Attempting to bifurcate a country that is currently in a genocidal fervor from its leader—who largely represents the public consensus among Jewish Israelis on Gaza—does nothing but provide cover for the former and seeks to pin US and Israel’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza entirely on the latter.

It’s been a month since New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s now infamous “globalize the intifada” interview with Bulkwark podcast where, apropos of nothing, the conservative media outlet decided to tee up an allegedly scary protest chant and demand their guest condemn it. Mamdani did not, instead giving a nuanced answer about how he understood why some may find it offensive, but made clear he thought its usage was not antisemitic, much less a call for violence. Mamdani went on to win the primary the following week and skyrocketed to national stardom as the odds-on favorite to become New York City’s 111th mayor. As Yousef Munayyer noted in the Intercept last week, Mamdani was correct to not condemn the phrase because, in addition to the whole Do You Condemn? routine being a bad-faith, unwinnable bully campaign, it’s also a false narrative driven by ignorance and demagoguery.

Nevertheless, the Do You Condemn? attacks keep coming—from New York “business leaders” to The Guardian to NY1 to the pages of the New York Times. Despite clarifying his comments dozens of times now, and some say walking them back a bit, it doesn’t seem to matter. Every single media interview Mamdani has from now until election day (and likely long after) will demand—anew—he condemn the phrase.

The whole episode is cynical and manipulative—all smoke and no fire. Pro-Israel pressure groups use the squishy language of anti-racism to demand the media “hold Mamdani accountable” for a phrase that he—and this is important—never actually used. A standard, that, at least from the so-called Anti-Defamation League (ADL), they have never once applied to a pro-Israel politician. As I laid out in In These Times earlier this month, these ginned up scandals reflect a specific playbook to discipline politicians critical of Israel. None of it is in good faith, concerned with “protecting Jewish New Yorkers,” or any such high-minded goal. The end game is not even to get Mamdani to condemn “globalize the intifada”—it’s to get him to embrace the baseline liberal zionist position on Israel and reject BDS. Until he does this, there'll be countless other words, phrases, random signs, and random tweets he’ll be extorted into “condemning” in an infinitely regressive and unwinnable game of Do You Condemn?.

One month into this episode, it’s useful to stop and take stock, to pause and consider just how disproportionate and all-consuming the “globalize the intifada" pseudo-scandal has become. We’re so used to these ginned up “antisemitism” scandals we lose sight of just how divorced from objective reality they are, how much they take a very real, very violent, very high-stakes military campaign of human misery and widespread destruction and push the debate into the world of semantics, solipsism, and hurt feelings. We lose sight of what they crowd out, how artificial they are, and what larger bipartisan crime they’re attempting to obscure and defend: namely the on-going, 651 days of genocide in Gaza.

So let us compare coverage of the “globalize the intifada” story with that of stories of actual death and actual human stakes in Gaza—objectively major stories that should, I will assert, generate far more outrage and news coverage than whether a mayoral candidate condemns three words he’s never actually said. For the purposes of comparison we will look at The New York Times, the most influential paper in the country, and one month of its coverage for the following topics. Detailed data can be viewed here.

• "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (June 18 - July 18 2025). The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a US-Israeli joint production that, according to Amnesty International has "weaponized aid” and resulted in almost daily massacres at the aid sites as thousands of deliberately starved Palestinians line up for minimal food rations. Over 800 aid-seekers have been killed since the fake disrubution sites were set up in May 2025. NYT articles this month: 13.

• Starvation as weapon of war in Gaza (June 18 - July 18 2025). Gaza is currently the ‘hungriest place on Earth’ with all of its people at risk of famine, according to the UN. This is a deliberate siege tactic being used by Israel. NYT articles this month: 5

• Child “amputee(s)” in Gaza (June 18 - July 18 2025). Gaza is home to, by far, the largest number of child amputees on earth, with over 4,700 cases. They require constant medical and psychological care which is impossible given the broader attacks on Gaza’s almost nonexistent health system. According to Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem Israel actively denies treatment to over a 1000 of these amputees. NYT articles this month: 2

• Amnesty International's July Report on Israel using "aid" to facilitate genocide (July 3 2025 - Present): The shocking report details how Israel has deliberately gutted and attacked proven aid channels in favor of its limited “aid” program designed to kill, humiliate and facilitate population transfers. NYT articles on report: 0

• February 2024 Flour Massacre that killed 120+ (Feb 29 - March 29 2024). In February 2024, over 120 people were killed while seeking food from aid trucks on the coastal Al-Rashid Street in Gaza City. NYT articles one moth after massacre: 7

• "Hind Rajab” (January 29 - March 1 2024) A five-year-old Palestinian girl was murdered by the IDF along with six of her family members and two paramedics, who were gunned down on January 29 2024 by Israel forces as they attempted to rescue her. It made international headlines but barely a blip in US media. NYT articles one month after her killing: 2

Total NYT articles: 29

• "Mamdani” and "Globalize(d) the intifada" (June 18 - July 18 2025) NYT articles one month after Mamdani was first asked about “globalize the intifada”: 32

  

All told, this means that the New York Times ran more articles about Mamdani and the phrase “globalize the intifada” than it did, during their relevant month time periods, about Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid site killings, starvation in Gaza, child amputees in Gaza, a July 2025 Amnesty International's Report on Israel using "aid" to facilitate genocide, the February 2024 Flour Massacre, and the January 2024 killing of Hind Rajab combined (32 vs 29).

Obviously, determinations of news value are inherently subjective. But there is no credible moral or journalistic reason why these six major stories involving Israeli war crimes should be a fraction as important as whether or not a mayoral candidate condemns a phrase that he never said and, even if he had, has not caused anyone any harm beyond some third or fourth order abstraction about “promoting antisemitism.”

Over 17,000 children have been killed over the past 20 months in Gaza, in reality. There are almost 5,000 new child amputees in Gaza as a result of the US-Israeli bombing campaign. They are real and they are really suffering. There are hundreds of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of children, starving right now in Gaza, in reality. There are hundreds killed a week in daily “aid massacres” facilitated and backed by the United States, in reality. Right now, in the third dimension of reality, there are real people being wiped out every day with American bombs and American weapons, in what virtually every major humanitarian organization, medical organization and genocide scholar agrees is a genocide. These crimes, of course, are sometimes mentioned in the New York Times—given an article or two, written about in clinical, even sometimes remorseful tones. But their cause is obscured, they have little urgency, few faces, fewer stories, no sustained media coverage, no narratives beyond the sporadic Oh, Dearism laments.

And most important of all, the politicians voting to arm and fund their mass killing are never asked to condemn any of it. They are never asked to condemn the over 500 genocidal comments made by Israeli officials who—unlike protestors at Columbia—actually have the capacity and history of carrying them out, in reality. They are never asked to condemn genocidal statements made daily on Israeli TV, posted on social media by Israeli soldiers, said by Israeli politicians—two of whom are currently wanted by the International Criminal Court and just met top electeds from both parties.

Will Cory Booker be asked to condemn Yoav Gallant’s openly genocidal statement on October 9, 2023, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”—which, most important of all, he subsequently carried out to the tee, killing and maiming tens of thousands, in reality?

Will Mamdani’s opponent Andrew Cuomo, who volunteered to defend Netanahyu in ICC court, ever be asked to condemn Netanayhu’s genocidal “Amalek” comments, which—again—preceded an actual genocide, in reality? Will he ever be asked to condemn Netanahyu’s open and ongoing plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians? Will Mamdani’s other opponent Eric Adams, who has lavished nonstop, unqualified praise on Israel as it carries out genocide, be asked to condemn genocidal comments made by Israeli President Isaac Herzog ("It's an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved—it's not true.”), a politician Adams embraced that previous summer?

Will any of the hundreds of American politicians who vote to arm and fund the destruction of Gaza ever be asked to condemn Israel’s wholesale disregard for international law? Which is, again, an actual thing that’s actually happening, rather than a theoretical thing that could maybe sort of inspire someone to do something at some unknown time in the future. A letter floated by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) earlier this month asking lawmakers to condemn Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza could only garner 19 supporters. 19. Will any of the 516 members of Congress refusing to support this baseline gesture of humanity be asked why they “refuse to condemn” the mass starvation of children in Gaza?

They will not. Because the Will You Condemn? game is bad-faith, racist, and selectively enforced. We have a nonstop media meltdown over words. Words Mamdani never even said. Meanwhile a scattering of articles, no tough media questions, and zero sustained coverage or urgency—to say nothing of moralistic demands those backing the genocide “condemn” anything—when it comes to the material reality of mass death being carried out with American money and bombs that is actually happening in reality. That is currently torturing kids, that is currently killing scores of civilians a day, in reality. In the actual real world that actually exists.

Early Sunday morning Iranian time, the United States directly entered Israel’s war on Iran by bombing what President Trump said were three “nuclear facilities.” While the full scope and death toll of the attack are not yet clear, what is apparent is that direct US attacks with 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs and cruise missiles mark the opening of a direct war with the potential to unleash widespread death and destruction in Iran, and lead to a wider regional—or even world—war.

The minutes and hours following this attack, just like the moments leading up to it, are vital for any effort to stop the war before it is in full swing. But during this critical time, well-placed lawmakers and pundits who are supposedly critics of the Trump administration instead used their platforms to circulate a pernicious lie that is on par with the “weapons of mass destruction” falsehoods about Iraq the administration of George W. Bush purveyed 22 years ago: that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

Live on CNN, Jake Tapper asked Anderson Cooper, “Even though President Trump did describe the strikes on the three sites—Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan—as having been completely and totally obliterated, really it's a question of how accurate that is. Is there any of this weapons program left at all?”

But Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, according to the US government’s own intelligence. The annual threat assessment published in March 2025 by the Director of National Intelligence says, “We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei] has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

And intelligence assessments leaked to CNN and the Wall Street Journal also find that there is no nuclear weapons program. According to CNN, US intelligence consensus is “not only was Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing, according to four people familiar with the assessment.”

And if one has any doubt, the New York Times reported Thursday that the Trump White House was not acting on any new intelligence, but simply providing a “new analysis of existing work,” which is to say they are completely ignoring the US intelligence consensus and coming to a conclusion they want to sell a war. “None of the new assessments on the timeline to get a bomb are based on newly collected intelligence, according to multiple officials,” the Times’ Julian E. Barnes reported.

If Tapper has information about an active Iranian nuclear weapons program, he is breaking major news and should probably frame it as such. But of course, he does not, and is merely repeating a key piece of fear mongering used to justify a catastrophic war—and not for the first time. On June 13, Tapper also referred to the “Iranian nuclear weapons program” live on air, again completely contradicting the whole of US intelligence consensus.

But there is another rhetorical sleight of hand being widely used: outlets and lawmakers are referring to Iran’s “nuclear program,” but framing it in such a way that it sounds vaguely weapon-y and scary. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released a statement that said "President Trump took action against Iran tonight in what appears to be a limited contained strike. We are still waiting to understand the extent to which that action has deterred Iran's nuclear threat. The United States must not rush into war with Iran.”

But what “nuclear threat” is being referenced here? Does Senator Sheehan believe that Iran should not be allowed to have a civilian nuclear energy program? If she is claiming Iran has a nuclear weapons program, what is her evidence? Is it a “threat” if a country, according to US intelligence, is “not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon,” and if it decided to do so would be “up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing”? Of course, calls for the United States not to rush into war are good, but a key part of deescalation is dispelling key myths used to justify Trump’s war of aggression—something Democrats repeatedly refuse to do.

Indeed, Rep Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) went on cable news and repeated this lie when trying to promote diplomacy. While calling for Trump to “get back to the bargaining table” on CNN Wednesday, Krishnamoorthi told anchor Sara Sidner, “Let's make sure that we end this nuclear weapons program once and for all.” CNN also allowed H. R. McMaster to claim, live on air this past Friday, that Iran “restarted” their “nuclear weapons program” in 2018. Both claims are false, both claims are casually aired to millions of Americans.

False claims or insinuations about Iran having nuclear weapons or a nuclear weapons program are not a simple slip of the tongue or semantics: They are being used by both Israel and the United States to argue that a catastrophic war is both urgent and necessary. It’s a scare phrase used by everyone from Vice President J.D. Vance on Meet the Press to Democrat-turned-Trump-champion John Fetterman to the President of the United States. “Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity, and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's No. 1 state sponsor of terror,” the president declared in a press conference following the bombing. Israeli and White House officials—as well major Democratic leaders—repeatedly making references to “nuclear threats,” “nuclear sites,” “and nuclear weapons programs” gives the public the impression that Iran has nuclear weapons, and the attacks are aimed at eradicating an active threat. Even if they don’t use the exact term “active nuclear weapons program,” the effect of this rhetorical sleight-of-hand is clear. The bombing was an “incredible and overwhelming success that devastated Iran's nuclear program,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth proclaimed this morning, in a statement clearly referencing an active threat.

There is an urgent push to try to stop a war. Emergency protests across the country have already been called, and anti-war lobbyists and some lawmakers are sprinting to use a War Powers Resolution to slam the brakes on what the president is doing. This is the context in which these unhelpful and confusing statements about Iran’s nuclear program are being circulated, though, to be sure, not every major Democrat is complicit. Chris Murphy, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders, and a few dozen lawmakers are leading the charge to rein in Trump’s lawlessness, and doing so without reinforcing the false premises of the bipartisan war party.

In reality, this war is being waged by two nuclear weapons powers—the United States and Israel—against a country that does not have nuclear weapons or a nuclear weapons program, according to the overwhelming consensus of the US intelligence community. The propaganda effort to suggest otherwise requires a constant conflation of a civilian nuclear program with the vague impression that Iranians are not only secretly working on a nuclear bomb, and not only days away from having one, but somehow going to use it against the United States and its allies. It’s a pervasive, deliberate distortion of truth that our media should be working to explain and correct and clarify for an understandably confused public—not, at best, permit this constant innuendo to be emanated without pushback or, at worst, explicitly advance the lie of an “Iranian nuclear weapons program” themselves.

Human Shields discourse has always been a brainless, dehumanizing talking point—a way for liberals to hand-wave away the endless slaughter in Gaza and, better yet, pin the obscene death toll of Palestinians on “Hamas” or other militants. Hamas, the argument goes, “embeds itself among the civilian population” and thus takes moral responsibility for any carnage Israel’s jet fighters, snipers, and shelling visit upon a largely defenseless and besieged Gaza population. It’s a convenient talking point, to say the least. It feels superficially true, appeals to people’s racist reptile brains, and gives Israel license to kill as many civilians as possible because, we are constantly reminded by US media, virtually all of Gaza is over tunnels and thus contains 2 million human shields. It’s cheap, it's easy, and—most important of all—gets Western leaders funneling bombs to Israel off the hook, which is always the place everyone must end up.

Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran last week, and Iran’s subsequent attack on Israel, however, has exposed just how hollow this talking point is. Let us examine a recent throw-away line in a New York Times article explaining the latest escalation. It’s noteworthy because reporter Isabel Kershner casually admits that Israel, based on US media’s criteria for Hamas, is engaging in textbook human shielding:

“the [Israeli] military maintains bases and camps in many populated areas, as well as in more remote parts of the country. A residential tower block that suffered a direct hit early Saturday is part of a popular entertainment district, filled with cafes and restaurants. It is also close to the main military and government headquarters in Tel Aviv, which was most likely the intended target.”

In response to the Times report, former head of Human Rights Watch Ken Roth tweeted out, “Israel's close intermingling of military and civilian sites makes it difficult to know what Iran is aiming its missiles at. When Hamas does this in the tiny Gaza Strip, Israel accuses it of using human shields.”

This is a polite and diplomatic way of stating what has long been obvious: If our media held Israel to the same standards it holds Palestinian militants, it would conclude that Israel routinely uses its own population as human shields. “Human shielding” has a very specific legal definition in international law, namely the “intentional co-location of military objects (personnel or materials) and civilians with the specific intent of deterring or preventing the targeting of those objects.” It doesn’t mean military personnel and assets are in vague proximity to civilians and civilian infrastructure, as is casually stated by US media when hand-waving away the carnage emanating from Gaza. Indeed, in their July 2024 report detailing Hamas war crimes, Human Rights Watch makes mention of Hamas using human shields but strictly in the context of October 7 and their use of Israeli hostages while escaping from Southern Israel. Conspicuously, HRW makes no mention of Hamas using Palestinians themselves as “human shields.” This is because a guerilla force existing within a civilian population, whether Vietnam or Afghanistan or Gaza, is not per se evidence of human shielding, for the obvious fact that the mere existence of non conventional military actors does not render an entire civilian population among whom they exist and interact fair game for mass killing.

The media almost entirely ignores this legal definition and instead has invented a new one—and one that, apparently, only applies to Hamas. According to data gathered for an upcoming book, “human shields” or “human shielding” was used in the first 90 days of the conflict to describe alleged actions by Palestinians 888 different times on CNN and MSNBC. Despite numerous documented cases of the Israeli military actually using Palestinians as human shields, reports of Israel doing so were mentioned on-air zero times by CNN and MSNBC during our survey period. Print media was just as one-sided. When it comes to references to the use of “human shields” or “human shielding” by Israel in the first year of the conflict in The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico and Axios, there were only five—all in The Washington Post. In contrast, mentions of “human shields” or “Human shielding” by Palestinian militants were 231 (The New York Times 150; Washington Post 22, Politico 56, Axois 3).

It’s simply accepted dogma on cable news and print media that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as “human shields” despite no credible human rights group making this claim. Their primary evidence supporting this dogma? Let’s examine one popular example: Novemeber 2023, CNN’s Jake Tapper, in one of his more cynical, smarmy pro-genocide sermons, began a viral segment lamenting the suffering of the Palestinian people dying from Israel bombardment, but then pivoted to blaming Hamas, using every Human Sheilds trope in the book. He says or implies in the segment Hamas is guilty of human shielding because:

• “Hamas, which hides and fires rockets at Israel from among the Palestinian people, from among civilian homes.”

• Accuses Hamas of preventing Palestinins from from leaving Gaza

• “Hamas embeds within the Palestinian population.”

• Accuses Hamas leaders of hiding in tunnels.

So let’s recap Israel’s actions over the past four days, using Tapper’s own criteria:

• Israel hides military assets among civilian homes and civilian infrastructure ✓

• Israel prevents its population from leaving ✓

• Israel embeds military assets under and around civilian population centers ✓

• Israeli military leaders hide in underground tunnels ✓

One can expect Tapper, therefore, as an exemplar of consistency and intellectual honesty, to condemn Israel for its use of human shielding. But alas, no condemnation will be forthcoming, because, when it comes to reporting on Israel and its wholesale destruction of Gaza and routine violation of human rights law, double standards are par for course.

CNN’s Jim Sciutto gave the game away too during last October’s low intensity volley between Iran and Israel, when he made Tapper’s exact same Human Shields argument when describing the risks Israel put its civilians in. But he did not, of course, connect these dots, or put it in Tapper’s moralizing terms.

“The US intel view that among the targets were Israeli airfields, but also, and this is crucial, the headquarters of Mossad, the international intelligence service of Israel, which is inside Tel Aviv,” Scuitto said live on air. “It's in the northern part of Tel Aviv, but it's in the city. It's in a densely populated area. And, of course, the concern is if you're firing, even though Iran might consider that a military target, it is in a densely populated city.”

So Israel maintains its primary command and control center in a “in a densely populated area”? This sure seems like Jake Tapper’s first and most important evidence for Hamas “hiding and firing rockets at Israel from among the Palestinian people.”

The reality is neither Israel nor Hamas “use their population” as human shields in any meaningful sense (indeed, maintaining popular support among their people while doing so would be impossible). They both sometimes use enemies as human shields-–Israel far more than Hamas—but what they are doing is what a military actor in a small, densely populated country under threat of air attacks would do: maintain military infrastructure in urban areas and hide key military leadership and assets under tunnels to avoid detection and assassination. When Hamas does this it’s viewed as a nihilistic strategy of death, of thanatos-fueled sympathy-farming. When Israel does it, it’s given fawning write ups about how prepared and techno-savvy they are. The difference is not substantive, but only one of budget: Israel has better tunnels, better tech, and less need for using this system because they spend most of their time bombing extremely poor people without the capacity to fight back. This dynamic changed last week when Israel launched a war against Iran and, unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran has the ability to inflict real damage on Israel’s cities and military infrastructure. So: cue Israel checking every human shield box in a matter of days. It’s almost as if the fact of military-civilian proximity is an inevitable and essential feature of heavily militarized, largely urban societies fighting what they view as existential conflicts of survival, rather than a diablogical jihadist strategy of soliciting civilian death unique to one side and one side only.

One of the more tedious, fruitless, morally vacuous political “debates” is between those who argue that organizations that sought to pressure Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and the voters angered and disgusted by Harris’ refusal to break from Biden on his support for the genocide in Gaza, are somehow responsible for the horrors unleashed by the Trump regime. The general argument is: Yes, Harris supported a genocide at a 7, but Trump supports it at a 9, so anything that falls between 7 and 9 on the genocide scale should require some deep introspection and soul-searching from those who were viewed as insufficiently nice to Harris on the topic of Gaza. Including, it turns out, those like the Uncommitted Movement who still largely supported her and explicitly told people not to vote for Trump. Here is a recent, typical tweet from the Kamala Harris campaign’s former director of Rapid Response:

Some on the other side counter that Harris would be “worse on Gaza.” But this, to me, was always absurd, mostly because Trump had already been president and was a glib, violent, hardcore zionist when he was. There was a brief period after the Trump-imposed ceasefire on January 19 that some “Trump would be better” types spiked the football, but this, clearly, turned out to be premature. The point is: I think morally healthy people don’t really fall in either camp—and think the whole back and forth is depraved and bizarre. The idea of putting two candidates, one in a counterfactual alternative universe, in some type of genocide horserace while said genocide is ongoing is the lowest form of political discourse: pointless, smug, partisan, and cruel. The very premise of the “debate,” of course, makes little moral sense. Putting the burden of winning elections on dinky nonprofits and obscure, powerless voters, rather than the extremely powerful people in charge, is the exact wrong way to view politics and political obligations.

So, the question for me is: Six months after the election, how can the energy and anger that goes into these tedious recriminations be parlayed into something constructive and useful? Something that can actually help the people in Gaza, rather than scoring online points for people seeking to Look Correct. Once again, it ought to involve redirecting our animus away from each other and towards those with actual power. Thus one fruitful step (and one, incidentally, that would help boost the case for those looking to score political points against Uncommitted and other “Gaza voters”) would be for Harris to publicly criticize Trump over Gaza, to articulate what her surrogates repeatedly claim: how she would, in fact, be “better on Gaza.” What are the specific steps Trump is taking—from explicitly endorsing ethnic cleansing to continuing the Biden policy of unconditional arm sales—that she would not have done, and why are they bad?

Harris has made several public statements since she lost the election last November. She has (correctly) criticized Trump over his tariff policies, his immigration policies, and his reckless rhetoric around taking over Canada and Greenland. She’s emphasized the importance of “self care,” she’s criticized Elon Musk meddling in Wisconsin politics. She praised the release Hamas captives in February, and she made a second statement celebrating the release of Hamas captive Edan Alexander last week. But she has, somewhat conspicuously, been completely silent on Trump’s genocidal Gaza policies. She has made no mention in speeches, social media, or any of her public statements about the accelerating humanitarian disaster in Gaza since Israel imposed a total aid blockade on March 2 and began a new bombing campaign on March 18. Over 3,000 dead Palestinians under Trump’s watch, and the only two vaguely related statements she’s made have been entirely about Israeli captives. If Harris would be meaningfully better on Gaza—as her high-profile supporters keep insisting—someone should tell Harris this, since she doesn't seem to know.

Slimy reporters and pundits keep shoving microphones in front of “Gaza voters” asking them if they regret not voting, trying to gin up viral gotcha coverage. Perhaps one of these dozen high status media types can try interrogating the whole basis for this enterprise and take their tremendous media resources and ask Harris if she, in fact, agrees with their premise in the first place.

Harris joining calls from anti-genocide activists and progressives in Congress seeking to pressure Israel with an arms embargo, and demanding Trump end his genocidal policies—with real leverage, not just vague appeals to “ceasefires talks”—would help Harris partisans score the political points they desperately seek to rack up and, far more importantly, would add pressure on the White House and normalize other Democrats coming out and opposing Trump’s genocidal policies more forcefully. Harris is the presumptive front runner for the 2028 Democratic Primary, and given Biden’s rapid deterioration, the most influential and popular Democrat in the country, other than Barack Obama. If she would have indeed been “better on Gaza” rather than a lateral pass who would have more or less let Israel continue destroying Gaza as Trump has—with some nicer rhetoric and a couple more bags of flour—she should come out and say so. She should say what those differences would have been and leverage this distinction for the broader good of helping Palestinians in Gaza.

As she continues not doing so, as she continues to shrug in the face of an unfolding exterminationist campaign, the smug “cc uncommitted movement” counterfactuals begin to look more and more like fanfic than a useful political or moral analytic.

On April 3, I documented for The Real News how popular news media—namely the Sunday morning news programs, nightly news, and The New York Times front page—were largely ignoring the escalated bombing, indiscriminate killing, and starvation campaign on Gaza that recommenced on March 18. 21 days later, the media blackout is even more jarring.

While American media does, of course, cover the humanitarian crisis and daily maiming and killings in Gaza below the fold and in a matter-of-fact war reporting manner, any urgency around the genocide, or focus on US’s support for it, is all but dead.

Nowhere is the absence of urgency any more glaring than the total erasure of Gaza from the “agenda setting” Sunday morning news shows that both reflect and curate Washington political priorities for the week. In the 5 episodes each for the four Sunday News Shows—ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, and CNN’s State of the Union—for the weeks of March 23, March 30, April 6, April 13 and April 20, Israeli’s assault on Gaza, and the Trump administration’s full-throated support for it, has not been discussed or mentioned once. That’s 880 minutes of “agenda setting” debate, discussing, and reporting that did not see fit to mention the US support for what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both call an ongoing genocide.

One would think the US backing what top human rights groups call an ongoing genocide—made even more acute by the US and Israel cutting off all aid on March 2—would rise to the level of something that ought to be discussed in the corridors of Washington, but alas support for the genocide is largely bipartisan and thus not worthy of mentioning beyond sterile dispatches and Oh, Dearism natural disaster reporting.

Despite Israel killing almost 2,000 Palestinians since they broke the ceasefire on March 18, the subject of Gaza has barely registered a blip in the nightly news coverage as well. In the 78 episodes the three major network nightly news shows have aired, there’s only been two segments about Gaza: one 4 minute 17 second segment I noted in The Real News from March 26 on CBS Evening News, and another 1 minute and 44 second segment about the IDF killing 15 medics that aired on ABC’s World News This Week on April 3. In over 1,500 minutes of evening news from the three major networks since March 19 only 6 minutes, or less 0.4 percent, has been reporting on Gaza. NBC Nightly News has not covered the suffering in Gaza at all since March 20, but it did take time out on April 13 to do a 1 minute 46 second profile on an Israeli captive still being held in Gaza.

Since March 20, The New York Times has run a total of three front page stories about Gaza out of roughly 220 total front page stories (two on April 6/April 8 about the IDF killing of medics in Gaza and one April 3 about Israel “Initiating Tactics to Hold Gaza Territory”) By way of comparison the Times has run 12 front page stories about Ukraine. “For Ukraine’s Sick Children, a War Within the War,” read one sympathetic front page headline from March 26. “Attack Devastates Ukrainian City,” read another on April 14. Front page coverage of Gaza, when it does exist, does not lead with Palestinian suffering or humanity but instead Israeli denials or sterile coverage of IDF “tactics”.

Whereas the approach to covering Gaza under Biden, and during the Harris campaign it logically implicated, was to cover campus protests (almost always disparagingly), “Muslim voter” outrage (always condescendingly), and the way the “war” was dividing Democrats, it no longer serves this function and is thus now just normal bipartisan background noise in Washington. To the extent it was prioritized briefly from time to time in late 2023 and throughout 2024, it was because protests forced the issue, but now that campus protests have been largely snuffed out thanks to mass arrests, police raids, hundreds of deportations and disappearings, and a parallel media effort to paint anti-genocide protests as quasi-terror attacks or proto-pogroms, this angle no longer presents itself. Instead, we have a steady state of mass death, cosigned by both parties and spearheaded by Trump, that everyone in power either supports or has chosen to ignore. A consensus popular news media is more than happy to go along with.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, has been at the center of a national story after he was “inadvertently” included in a group Signal chat with administration officials as they planned a deadly bombing in Yemen. Much of the coverage has focused on the mishandling of military secrets, rather than the impact of the bombings themselves, targeting the poorest country in the Middle East, which the United States has helped bomb and blockade for over a decade. Goldberg is not just an observer: He is contributing to this disregard for Yemeni lives, and his dismissiveness sheds light on why he was an administration media contact to begin with.

In an interview that aired on March 26, Deepa Fernandes, one of the hosts of NPR's “Here and Now,” interviewed Goldberg about the “group chat heard 'round the world” that included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance. During one portion of the interview, Fernandes did something few other journalists are doing. She asked Goldberg about the Yemeni people who were killed in the bombing, which took place on March 15.

Deepa Fernandes: There's little talk of the fact that this attack killed 53 people, as we mentioned, including women and children. The civilian toll of these American strikes. Are we burying the lede here?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, those, unfortunately, those aren't confirmed numbers. Those are provided by the Houthis and the Houthi health ministry, I guess. So we don't know that for sure. Yeah, I mean, obviously we're, well, I don't know if we're burying the lede, because obviously huge breaches in national security and safety of information, that's a very, very important story, obviously. And one of the reasons, you know, it's a very important story is that the Republicans themselves consider that to be an important story, when it's Hillary Clinton doing the deed, right? So that's obviously hugely important.

But yeah, I think that covering what's going on in Yemen, the Arab and Iran backed terrorist organization, the Houthis, that are that are firing missiles at Israel and disrupting global shipping and occupy half of Yemen, and all kinds of other things in the US, you know, and the Trump administration criticizing the Biden's response and Europe wants Trump to do more. I mean, yeah, there's, there's a huge story in Yemen. But Yemen is, as you know, is one of the more inaccessible places for Western journalists. So maybe this becomes like a substitute for a discussion of Yemen. I don't know.

Goldberg not only seems unconcerned about the death toll and eager to cast doubt on its veracity, but he also appears unprepared for the question. It’s as though it didn’t occur to him that the substance of the Signal exchange itself—the bombing—might be a legitimate topic of conversation, and he seems eager to move on.

This is despite the fact that there is evidence in the exchange itself that the United States hit a civilian site in the bombing. Waltz wrote in the Signal chat that the US military had bombed a residential building. “The first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” Waltz wrote in the chat, to which JD Vance replied: “Excellent.”

Yet, as Nick Turse noted for The Intercept, “So far, however, there has been little focus on the specifics of the attack, much less discussion of the fact that one of the targets of the March 15 strike was a civilian residence.”

The story of US belligerence in Yemen should be a huge one. Since 2015, the US-Saudi coalition has used American manufactured bombs to hit wedding parties, factories, a school bus, and a center for the blind. It’s difficult to know the exact death toll, but around three years ago, the death toll from direct and indirect consequence of war surpassed 377,000. Direct bombings by both the Biden and Trump administrations threaten a wider war, and have occurred in lockstep with US support for Israel as it has ruthlessly bombed and attacked Gaza since October 7.

Goldberg, of course, was included in that group chat because he was a contact of someone on the administration’s thread, and his history of laundering the US military’s mass atrocities is a good indicator of why. In the lead-up to the US-led war on Iraq, Goldberg was central to peddling the disproven conspiracy theory that Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda, a key lie of the George W. Bush administration, used to justify the invasion. One month before the US started the war, he went on NPR to discuss “Possible Links Between Iraq and al Qaeda and Evidence That the Iraqis May be Trying to Evade Weapons Inspectors.”

Goldberg has a long career of uplifting the media narratives of the United States and its allies, including a big piece in 2010 where he floated justifications for a possible Israeli war on Iran. Like many of the Iraq War pushers, Goldberg’s lies about Iraq did not harm his career, but marked its ascent. Under his tenure, the Atlantic has shut out Palestinian voices and stories, as the US has helped Israel wage genocide in Gaza.

Goldberg’s dismissal of Yemeni deaths is not a small detail of this blockbuster story, but a central component. One way to get on the speed dials of high-level officials is to have a proven career of doing their bidding.

As we see wall-to-wall coverage of the Signal leaks on supposed liberal networks like MSNBC, it’s important to remember that the primary scandal is the bombing of Yemen, a reality that the network has long obscured. As The Column’s Adam Johnson noted in July 2018, at that point it had been a year since MSNBC had mentioned the US backed destruction of Yemen. Yet during that same period, MSNBC had done 455 segments on the Trump-Stormy Daniels affair. As media reports and House Intelligence Committee hearings ignore the human toll of US military attacks, we continue to see the ascent of those who have built their careers on directing public attention away from the people the United States kills.

In 2002, Columbia University Pulitzer Prize board member, alleged “anti-authoritarian” expert, and Atlantic Magazine columnist Anne Applebaum explicitly advocated in Slate magazine that Israel kill Palestinian journalists for the crime of making Israelis and Americans look bad. In her article, “Kill The Messenger,” there is little subtlety or equivocation about not only Israel’s right to blow up Palestinian media infrastructure, but to kill reporters for simply doing their job:

“...the official Palestinian media is the right place for Israel to focus its ire. In fact, in the reporting of the Middle East conflict, which almost always focuses on yesterday’s violence and today’s body count, the crucial role of the Voice of Palestine—the official broadcasting arm of the Palestinian Authority—has often been overlooked. Nor is the problem just radio and television. If you want to understand why the Oslo peace process failed, or where suicide martyrs come from, it is worth taking a closer look at all the Palestinian Authority’s official media…

Until then, the Voice of Palestine will remain what it has become: a combatant—and therefore a legitimate target—in a painful, never-ending, low-intensity war.”

This article, which Applebaum has never explained or renounce, is useful when contextualizing the current witch hunt on college campuses targeting anti-Gaza genocide protestors under the Planck Length-thin auspices of promoting “student safety” and “combatting anti-semitism.”

What’s especially noteworthy is that Applebaum never even bothers laundering her promotion of the execution of Palestinians media workers in the language of “terrorism” or “material support for terrorism”—she is simply lobbying Israel kill Palestinian media workers for the mere fact that they are making Israel and the US look bad. Indeed, a key example of coverage justifying their killing Appelbaum cites is an extremely banal political cartoon. As she writes:

…they are subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, anti-American. A recent cartoon in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the Palestinian Authority official daily, showed a blindfolded George Bush aiming missiles indiscriminately at a dartboard covered with the names of Arab states. One of his darts had hit the bull’s eye marked “Afghanistan.” Another had gone astray and hit an Arab man in the back. The caption read, “The war in Afghanistan is only the beginning.” While there is plenty of other anti-Americanism in other Palestinian media, and indeed in Arab media everywhere, this is the voice of the Palestinian Authority, the government of Yasser Arafat, a frequent visitor to the White House.

Applebaum believes a cartoon depicting George W. Bush as a warmonger makes Palestinian media a legitimate target worthy of summary killing. “Anti-Americanism,” one is lead to believe is not only a form of racism but a mode of speech that strips one of their protected civilian status.

This is an extraordinary, illiberal, and racist opinion, yet Applebaum is allowed to remain in good standing among liberal and academic elites because racism and casual bloodlust targeting Palestinians and Arabs simply doesn’t register or matter in the “student safety” calculus.

Imagine, if you will, a Columbia professor or Pulitzer prize committee member advocating the summary killing of Israeli or American media workers because they undermined the cause of Palestinian liberation in their reporting. If this article surfaced it would stir up immediate outrage and condemnation, the academic in question would be quickly fired, apologies would be made and and new policies would be promised. But with Applebaum calling for the killing of Palestinian reporters, an article that goes semi-viral on Twitter every few months, no one cares. Nothing happens. It’s just another routine, normal Serious Foreign Policy opinion from a Serious Foreign Policy Expert.

Columbia University President Katrina Armstrong is currently working with Trump officials, DHS, ICE, and other government agents seeking to deport and imprison anti-Israel protestors for the simple fact that—according to Trump officials themselves— they have ideological viewpoints the Trump regime doesn’t like. Columbia, and many other universities, are maximally complying with these demands ostensibly to promote “campus safety” and “combat hatred.” Indeed, making students “feel safe” has been the high-minded liberal reason for virtually every university administrator cracking down on free speech, both before and after Trump took office. “We are focused,” Armstrong said in a press release last year, “on ensuring [student] safety, supporting their wellbeing, and protecting their ability to learn.”

“I have said it before, and I will say it again,” Armstrong insisted, “discrimination and harassment, including hate language, calls for violence, and the targeting of any individuals or groups based on their beliefs, ancestry, religion, gender identity, or any other identity or affiliation have no place at Columbia.”

Except that it does. Columbia, which manages and awards the Pulitzer prize, has no problem putting someone with a history of advocating the killing of Arab civilians in a position of power, helping determine who in journalism is worthy of its highest award, and creating an atmosphere on campus that makes clear to its Palestinian students that they are subhuman and unworthy of normal protections under the laws of war.

By all objective metrics, a Seig Heil-ing, stimulant-addled mega-billionaire, who no one elected, is now personally running a blatantly illegal assault on the administrative and liberal state. I won’t take too much space recapping what has transpired over the past two weeks, but Musk and his team of cultish zoomer flunkies have thus far threaten to shut down, or are in the process of shutting down, in whole or part, USAID, Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), General Services Administration (GSA), Small business Administration (SBA), and a host of potential federal government agencies. And they have reportedly gained access to the sensitive personnel information of millions of government workers and average Americans alike.

According to Caleb Ecarma at Popular Information, who cites an OPM staffer, Musk and his hand-picked agents “have illegally installed a commercial server to control federal HR databases that contain sensitive personal information, including SSNs, home addresses, and medical histories.”

It’s a total bloodbath, wholly illegal, and potentially will––and in some cases already has-–thrown tens of thousands of people into destitution and disarray. It’s a nightmare scenario and one developing so rapidly that, by the time you read this, it’s likely gotten much worse. Especially since Democratic leadership seems to be, at least for the moment, more checked out than the dad from Home Alone.

There is a lot of good, real time-reporting on what’s going on—the bulk of it not in mainstream media, of course. Rolling Stone, Wired, several independent, user-supported outlets are properly conveying the stakes (forgive me if I left anyone out). I won’t attempt rehash their work, which you should definitely follow, but rather take time out to recap how major outlets failed to—or deliberately set out not to—convey the far-right ideological agenda that was “DOGE” in the run up to Trump winning the election and taking office. Repeatedly, time after time, Trump and Musk’s explicit, well-documented anti-liberal, racist, anti-trans, anti-worker, anti-woman, anti-disability justice agenda was outright ignored, and The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN ran with the framing that “DOGE” was some good-faith, post-ideological effort to “cut costs,” “find savings,” and “increase efficiencies”

Let’s take a look at a sampling of their coverage:

New York Times

• Musk’s Slashing of the Federal Budget Faces Big Hurdles (11/27/24)

  • “Savings”

  • “budget-cutters”

• Musk Cost-Cutting Effort Is Being Guided by Health Entrepreneur (12/06/24)

  • “Cost cutting effort”

  • “efficiency panel”

  • “the cost-cutting project”

• Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs (1/12/25)

  • “cost-cutting”

  • “potential savings”

Washington Post

• Elon Musk’s wish list for DOGE (12/21/24)

  • “government efficiency commission”

• Musk’s DOGE weighs recommendations to cut federal diversity programs (1/16/25).

  • “the nongovernmental fiscal-efficiency group”

  • “the efficiency group”

  • “Proposed savings”

CNN

• Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ in Trump administration (12/24/24)

  • “a government efficiency commission”

  • ​​”reducing waste in government spending”

  • “combating waste, fraud and abuse”

• DOGE vs. DEI: Republicans’ promise to purge government diversity initiatives could be wide-ranging, and hard to pull off (12/19/24)

  • “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the two billionaires tasked with slashing government waste”

  • “Republicans looking to cut spending across Washington”

Words that are not used at all in any of these articles: “right-wing,” “ideological,” “conservative,” or, most important of all, any mention, even implicitly, of Musk’s personal far-right ideological disposition. One could read all of these articles and come away with the distinct impression that, while the actors in question are vaguely Republican, their motive is the post-ideological streamlining of “waste.”

One particularly egregious article that was published long after it was clear what Musk was doing was “Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines” (1/30/25) by Michael D. Shear of The New York Times. The article tried, and failed desperately, to situate Musk’s illegal far right coup as simply a more extreme version of bipartisan “balance the budget” politics.

“There is a long, bipartisan history of attempts to rein in spending and address concerns about government inefficiencies,” The Times subheadline tells us, “though the parties have grown increasingly divided about what to cut.”

I’m the first person to criticize Democrats for pushing austerity measures and embracing right-wing framing on the issue of government spending. But clearly what Trump and Musk are unleashing on the federal government is light years beyond Obama era Bowles-Simpson or Biden’s “balance the budget” rhetoric. Musk is unilaterally slashing large sectors of the liberal and administrative state without any legal or congressional authority to do so. It’s not part of some normal, bipartisan continuum; it’s flagrantly illegal, insecure, motivated by white nationalist ideology, and completely outside the authority of Congress.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” Musk said on Twitter Monday morning, sounding like a 15 year old from 1998. Does this sound like someone genuinely concerned with “finding savings” in the federal government? Or does this statement, and his years of incendiary, manic, white nationalist posting, indicate someone who—perhaps—has an ideological agenda? An agenda that he wasn’t coy about despite the New York Times repeatedly attempting to pretend otherwise.

It’s worth noting that not all of Musk’s attacks on the administrative and liberal state are equally pernicious. There are real issues with USAID and its role as a soft power arm of meddling US imperial bureaucrats, as well as a political shield for U.S. atrocities, from Yemen to Gaza, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere. But USAID also does objectively useful work because many countries grow dependent on them, and it’s very clear that, based on recent statements made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, what is most likely going to happen is the sinister activity USAID does will simply be folded back into the State Department directly or the CIA (as it used to be) while the Incidentally Good Stuff USAID does will be be eliminated. Despite his faux libertarian posturing, Musk, of course, doesn’t care about the anti-imperialist argument. He hates USAID because he thinks it helps keep black and brown people alive, which—by virtue of the US being a largely unipolar empire—it very much does, regardless of motives.

The Times, Washington Post and CNN were not alone in having a blasé attitude about DOGE in the run up to Trump taking office. As I noted at In These Times, many Democrats indulged the patently false “cost savings” premise, and made no effort to paint it as a far right coup on the liberal state—which it clearly was. Pod Saves America’s Tommy Vietor treated DOGE as a good-faith effort that was simply misguided, and establishment journalists frequently mocked or downplayed its potential to disrupt our government.

This is part of a much larger media regime that, above all, must assume good faith from those in power, no matter their past lies, far-right ideological beliefs, or brash and illegal behavior. Let us call it the “Inverse Power-Skepticism Principle, which can be seen here:

There are simply different editorial standards for people like Musk, who can spend the better part of five years posting white nationalist memes, libeling and lashing out at critics, promoting racist conspiracy theories, and mocking trans people, but still is presented by Respectable Media Outlets, as someone concerned with deficits who would simply wants to “reduce waste” and “find savings.” Meanwhile, those far from the halls of power, Official Enemy States and activists are assumed to be inherently ideological and motivated by political ends. Take, for example, a Times report by Reid J. Epstein detailing some Democrats wanting to meaningfully reform the police in 2020. The word “progressive” is used five times, the word “activists” four times. They are presented—correctly and accurately—as ideological agents with an ideological agenda, not above-the-fray wonks seeking “efficiencies” in crime policy. No such ideological labeling is given to far-right, extremely wealthy political agents. Even those as nakedly ideological as Musk, even after he did a Sieg Heil three times on stage on live TV, the Times continued to orient his attack on the liberal and administrative state as just another attempt to “reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.”

And now we are seeing the result of this anodyne, cold, View From Nowhere coverage of Trump and Musk’s extremist agenda: liberal institutions and the population, more broadly, caught off guard by what is—and always has been—a far-right, illegitimate attack on workers, women, trans people, disabled people, seniors and the broader the liberal state. It would have been useful had major media made it clear months ago this is what was happening, rather than treating us as a post-ideological belt tightening project by patriotic billionaires.

Last night, the three major networks did reports on the deadly LA fires, and none mentioned climate change’s role in making these large fires more likely and more severe.

CBS Evening News did a 4-minute, 20-second segment, NBC News did a 6-minute segment, and ABC World News did a 5-minute report. None of them mentioned climate change at all. Network nightly news programs are, of course, not the whole of TV media. But they are the networks’ flagship news programs, and a useful sampling of how corporate media editors choose to frame major news events.

This is a common convention of the “extreme weather” genre as climate chaos makes these destructive events more and more common: simply report the human suffering and sensational images, and make no mention of the human causes of the horrors people are seeing on their screen. Strip what is fundamentally a political story of all politics, and index the trauma squarely into the Oh, Dearism genre of passive reporting.

That escalating climate chaos will result in more frequent and devastating wildfires is beyond dispute. As Axios notes today in their explainer, ”LA's wildfires sparked by rare collision of climate factors”:

The wildfires are the result of an unheard-of combination of factors at this time of year — the worst high wind event in Southern California since 2011, plus some of the driest conditions on record for early January.

• Downtown LA has received just 0.16 inches of rain since May 6 of last year, making it the second-driest period on record for May 6 to Dec 31, according to the National Weather Service.

• January is typically during the region's wet season.

• Bone-dry conditions in Southern California contrast with the northern parts of the state, where atmospheric rivers have squelched fire risks.

• Even worse, the region had an unusually hot summer that dried out vegetation even further.

…Climate change is intensifying hydroclimate extremes, both wet and dry, including weather whiplash events where California see-saws between the two.

In 2022, a United Nations report concluded that the risk of wildfires around the world will surge as climate change intensifies. According to the New York Times:

It is a stark warning about the increased heat and dryness that human-caused global warming is bringing about. Nations and localities need to prepare better for the dangers, the report’s authors said… “The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes,” said the report, which was published on Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Program. The report, produced by more than 50 researchers from six continents, estimated that the risk worldwide of highly devastating fires could increase by up to 57 percent by the end of the century, primarily because of climate change.

CBS News’s Jonathan Vigliotti, in his report, comes tantalizingly close to mentioning a broader issue at hand, telling viewers, “Southern California has seen back to back to back fires. This one [in reference to images of a fire on screen] just ten miles away from last month’s fire in Malibu. In November, fires destroyed more than 200 structures 30 miles north of here in Ventura country.” But the line of inquiry ends here. There’s a trend, but it’s unclear if anything is causing it. Just really bad luck I guess.

These devastating wildfires are not random acts of God. They are fueled and made far more likely by human-made climate change, a dynamic that will only get worse if those in power fail to act and reverse the US’s record fossil fuel production. But why would politicians and CEOs feel any pressure to respond to these catastrophic events when so few in the media center the role of fossil fuels in the destruction and death? Given the extremely high stakes and the limited timetable, in a sane world, wouldn’t every story about extreme weather events not only mention, but make central, carbon emissions’ role in fueling the destruction?

Connecting the human stakes of out-of-control climate chaos and the often dry science of climate models has been an almost impossible task for climate activists and scientists. Corporate news media—with its focus on one-off human interest and sensationalist images, rather than the why of the story—seems dead-set on making sure it’s a connection that remains largely abstract and impossible to make in the public’s mind.

The primary criticism of US media’s coverage of Gaza isn’t that major outlets don’t cover it, it’s that they covered it with clear bias, contempt for Palestinians, casual racism, and a seemingly endless supply of new euphemisms and excuse-making regimes to obscure the US role in the horrors coming across people’s social media timelines. But increasingly, as the banality of ethnic cleansing begins to set in after 15 months of bombing, displacement, destruction, and deliberate starvation, US media has taken a new tack to the “Israel-Hamas war”: downplay and ignore it.

As of the morning of December 17, the topic of Gaza did not appear on the online front pages of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today, CNN, or MSNBC.

The New York Times, while doing an in-depth piece on the suffering in Gaza every few weeks, in addition to the occasional “hoping for a ceasefire” nonstory, has largely ended its drumbeat of coverage. There was no mention of the Gaza conflict on the online front page of The New York Times the mornings of December 7, December 8, December 9, December 10, December 12, December 13, December 14, or December 15.

Thus far in the month of December, the New York Times has not run a single print front-page story on Gaza in 17 days. Amnesty International’s determination on December 5 that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza did not get a blurb on the following day’s front page, much less a story. By way of comparison, in April 2022, Biden accusing Russia of genocide got a front-page story (“U.S. Debates Using Hague Court To Investigate Russian Atrocities”), as did Western countries’ claims of Russian war crimes two days later, complete with a 18-point font in its lead story (“GROWING HUNT FOR SIGNS OF WAR CRIMES”).

It’s not as if there haven’t been stories to highlight and put on front pages. In the past week:

• Dozens killed in airstrikes across Gaza Sunday

• The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) denounced Israel’s killing of four Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past week

• An Israel airstrike killed Palestinian grandfather Khaled Nabhan, a Palestinian grandfather known for his emotional goodbye to his 3-year-old granddaughter who was killed in an Israeli attack in November of 2023

• Israel bombed another UN-run school killing over 20, including several children

• The official death toll (likely much larger) surpassed 45,000

• Israel shelled and raided a UN-run school killing 15

• Israel bombed and killed over 50 people in one day (Dec 14)

• Israeli air strike on Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee killed dozens

• An Israeli strike in Gaza killed at least eight people from the same family, most of them women and children

All of these are objectively horrific and newsworthy, all exterminated whole worlds with the push of a button, all of them are in direct violation of the International Court of Justice’s requirement Israel cease its military operations in Gaza. All of these crimes are being armed and funded by the US government. But, 437 days on, it’s now the new normal—barely worthy of mention, much less front page news.

The reason why the increased downplaying of Gaza should strike an ominous tone, in addition to the fact that it’s objectively dehumanizing, is that central to Israel's genocidal strategy was, no doubt, the assumption that eventually the horrors emanating from Gaza would simply be seen as routine and not worthy of sustained news coverage, much less outrage. That the starvation, displacement, bombing and destitution would be seen as “factored in” to the reality of the world. The same logic has animated Israel’s endless military occupation and apartheid system in the West Bank, and before October 7, its 17-year policy of sieging, starving and “mowing the grass” in Gaza. Israel can change the “facts on the ground,” withstand the global outrage, and—over time—create a new reality that simply is. The horrors in Gaza have not let up; indeed, in key ways they’ve gotten worse. Letting US media settle into a new reality where the mass killing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza is an unremarkable fact of life, worthy of an article here and there but not sustained coverage, would be both a moral outrage and, in every way that matters, exactly what Israeli media strategists were counting on.