25 April 2026

The treatment of the genocide in Gaza by the BBC, the Guardian and other components of the British mainstream media has been carefully analysed. Now at last Adam Johnson (pictured) has published a comparably rigorous analysis of the US mainstream media’s treatment of this outrage: he summarises his findings in Mondoweiss this week. As you probably guessed, the picture is, if anything, even worse.

How the corporate media helped fuel Israel’s genocide in Gaza

Mondoweiss speaks with media critic Adam Johnson about his new book detailing how cable shows, newspapers, and online news sites helped build support for the mass killing of Palestinians.

By Michael Arria  April 24, 2026  3Screenshot from November 18, 2023, CNN report by Jake Tapper that disseminated now debunked sources and testimonies of sexual violence on October 7. These false testimonies were used to justify the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

In his new book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, media critic Adam Johnson provides a painstakingly detailed indictment of the Fourth Estate, showing how cable shows, newspapers, and online news sites helped build support for the mass killing of Palestinians.

Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke to Johnson about his study, his conclusions, and the shifting public rhetoric on Israel.

All royalties from Johnson’s book will be donated to the Middle East Children’s Alliance.

Mondoweiss: You talk about the talk about the “ISIS-ification” of Hamas after October 7 and how the American public was primed for revenge by the media in many ways. Can you talk about how they were covered? Was it simply a retread of the kind of stuff we saw during the “War on Terror” or were there new elements?

Adam Johnson: There definitely was a real plug and play aspect to it, so it was similar to what we saw after 9/11, references to Western civilization. We actually counted the amount of times [the media] used the term civilization and in contrast to Hamas. The idea of a barbaric Asiatic horde. We quantified and counted how many times words like “savage” and “barbaric” were used, which obviously have racial connotations, but for some reason get past the liberal, anti-racism censors.

So, there was a plug and play aspect to it. In the first few weeks, the Israeli government paid for a campaign to say Hamas is ISIS. #HamasisISIS, they paid for it on Twitter and on other social media. This was used by everyone from Emmanuel Macron to Lloyd Austin to Netanyahu to Joe Biden because it called upon a very specific mode of nihilistic jihadist violence.

ow, of course, ISIS was a fore

Of course, that was bullshit. Everyone who knew anything about Hamas knew it was bullshit. It wasn’t their MO, had never been their MO before, but this was passed along by everyone from CNN to NBC reporters to Media Matters to a lot of liberal center-left media. President Biden himself said he saw pictures of it, which obviously he couldn’t have because it’s not something that ever happened.

It was debunked, but the damage was already done. The public was already primed for revenge. This early attempt at atrocity propaganda, and these lurid tabloid claims of hyper-gratuitous violence, were essential to really removing the idea of a ceasefire, which necessarily requires Hamas to remain, if not in power, an armed force within Gaza, from the realm of of political seriousness, as I detail in the book.

This was affirmed by everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders, who went on CNN and CBS in November and December of 2023, respectively, and said you can’t have a ceasefire with someone like Hamas who wishes to destroy Israel. Never mind that the government in Israel wishes to destroy Palestine and Palestinians quite explicitly in their charter.

So this kind of moral preening became the way in which you delegitimized calls for a ceasefire, again, in this kind of faux universalist, faux liberal language. This weird thing developed, where calls for a ceasefire became per se a moral endorsement of Hamas, but again, Palestinian civil society calling for a ceasefire is not a moral endorsement of Israel.

This was a totally new and ad hoc talking point that sort of just came and went, but it was all about buying time for Israel to change the so-called facts on the ground and create the conditions and the axioms of genocide such that by the time we really did begin to normalize the concept of a ceasefire, especially after the Biden White House redefined it in February and March of 2024, the basic axioms of genocide were already in place. It was too late because really the intervention to stop the genocide could have happened between October to December 2023.

Once that time came and went, thanks largely to to liberal center-left media, defending and deflecting the left-wing criticism or anti-genocide criticism for the White House, the genocide was a fait accompli. It was pretty much already decided because the so-called war on Hamas, or the goal to “eliminate Hamas,” was already tattooed into the liberal psyche as something that was both possible and morally defensible, despite the fact that it was obviously neither.

[Former Secretary of State Antony] Blinken himself told Netanyahu behind closed doors on January 16th, 2024, according to Andrea Mitchell at NBC News, that defeating Hamas was militarily was impossible, which is obviously true for anyone who knows anything about anti-colonial resistance.

Whatever one thinks of Hamas is irrelevant. They still have a a meaningful amount of support within Palestinian society. They are, of course, not alien to Palestinian society. They are Palestinian themselves. The people who make up Hamas and Hamas leadership are largely orphans of of previous Israeli bombings, and they themselves are the descendants of those ethnically cleansed from parts of Israel.

So, this idea that they were this exogenous kind of ISIS-like entity was not something that anyone who understood Gaza note knew to be true, but it became this kind of go-to media cliche, even so-called progressive foreign policy leaders like Matt Duss and Center for International Policy (CIP) made the argument that Israel had a right to sort of target Hamas, which is, of course, absurd and was never something that was ever going to happen in any meaningful sense, because the fundamental grievances are secular.

They’re fundamentally political. The solution was and remains a fundamentally secular and political issue. This wasn’t the sectarian conflict that you that it was often portrayed to be, despite, of course, the Islamist flavor of Hamas, which of course is is real and it exists, but it’s not ISIS, right? It’s not this kind of nihilistic death cult backed by Emirati or Saudi money. It is its own independent and resistance movement with organic support within the Palestinian society, although, of course, it’s not uniform.

I wanted to talk about this trope that anyone who has followed these issues has seen implemented many times. We saw it repeatedly with Biden and now we see the media do it with Trump.

You write about “Helpless Biden,” “Frustrated Biden.” and “fuming, deeply concerned” Biden. It’s this idea that the most powerful person in the world, a guy who is leading a government that’s giving Israel weapons, is growing upset with Israel. They’re always allegedly nearing a breaking point with Netanyahu.

Can you talk a little bit about that trope, how it gets implemented and why and what kind of what you make of it?

The liberal establishment and the White House itself very quickly stopped defending the “war” on principle. It was indefensible.

So, they quickly realized that they needed to maintain the arms and the military support and intelligence support, but needed to look like they were gesturing towards something like a ceasefire or proto-ceasefire to get human rights groups, you know their left wing flank, anti-genocide protesters, and of course, foreign leaders who increasingly were disgusted by what they were seeing, off their back.

So a typical kind of liberal, or liberal imperialist framework, that dates back to the British Empire is this idea of what I refer to as third partying, which is to [frame] the U.S., not as an active participant in a genocide, which they manifestly were, but a humanitarian third party attempting to intervene and broker some kind of so-called ceasefire.

When the Uncommitted Movement developed in February of 2024, and was looking to pressure Biden in these kind of pro forma primaries, specifically in Michigan, they realized they had a major PR problem on their hand, and they could not defend the “war” as such. So what they did is that they pivoted to this idea that, oh, they were secretly working to end it, but it was this process that was going to go on indefinitely.

Of course, it ended up going on for almost a year. The ceasefire theater, the ceasefire performance was a way to distance Biden from the genocide he was supporting, while feigning anger and disappointment publicly.

This had antecedents, specifically around Saudi Arabia, when [Trump] was leveling Yemen in 2020. Biden came into office, he said he was going to make Saudi Arabia a pariah. Then, of course, he turned around and shipped them half a billion dollars in weapons. He needed to look like he was very concerned and hand-wringing over human rights while just keeping it business as usual.

So you have a system where a bunch of Biden aides anonymously, for the most part, leak these stories about how angry he is behind closed doors. This happened pretty much right away. In November of 2023 you had these angry Biden stories that were leaked to the press. I did an analysis of the sourcing for these. 92% or 93% were anonymous Biden aides, or they were Aaron David Miller, whose job was to come along and talk about how helpless and angry Biden was.

This was something that got repeated again and again. NBC News from November of 2023: “The gap between Biden administration and Netanyahu government over Gaza future is widening.” So here we have it widening. CNN from December of 2023: there’s “unprecedented tensions between White House and Netanyahu as Biden feels political price for standing with Israel.” Barak Ravid of Axios, January of 2024: “Biden running out of patience with Bibi as Gaza hits war as Gaza war hits 100 days.” Washington Post February of 2024: “Biden moving closer than ever to breach with Netanyahu over war in Gaza.”

So this is what I call the asymptotic break with Netanyahu that is always about to happen, but never happens. Probably the funniest one was from Politico in March of 2024: From ‘I love you’ to ‘asshole’, How Joe Biden gave up on Bibi after decades of building a close personal friendship with Netanyahu. “Joe Biden has had it with the Israeli prime minister. Now he’s hitting him hard and it may be working.”

New York Times, May of 2024: “Biden’s clash with Netanyahu over Gaza. Here’s Barak Ravid again: White House cancels meeting and scolds Netanyahu in protest over video.” That one is referencing one of their myriad war crimes caught on video.

So you would think that after literally the hundredth version of this article is published, where there’s some alleged asymptotic break with Netanyahu, some supposed anger, there’s usually a phone call that they know is recorded. You would think the average skeptical editor, well, Wait a second. We’ve done this article now 100 times. It’s been nine months, eight months, whatever it is. Why are we still doing this asymptotic break that never happens? There’s never any withdrawal of actual weapons. There’s never any policy change. It’s just rhetoric and supposed kind of palace entry and theory of mind reporting without any, again, material shift.

I compare it to the difference between a sketch and a plot. A plot moves forward. A plot has beats, characters develop. The rabbit’s foot goes from you know Istanbul to Prague, right? Something happens. Whereas a sketch is the same three or four gags with slight variations.

This was fundamentally a sketch. It was not a plot. Nothing ever happened. It was the same story written over and over again, often by the same journalists. The most egregious example is [the New York Times’s ] Peter Baker, who wrote dozens of these articles. He writes an article basically saying that Biden’s pressure on Netanyahu is working because Israel has delayed its Rafah invasion. Then two days after that article comes out, Israel invades Rafah, kills thousands of people and levels a city of 850,000.

So in retrospect, we look at that article about Biden’s anger and pressure on Netanyahu working. Was that a genuine reflection of a reality or was it a way for the Biden White House to wash its hands of an invasion they knew was about to happen? It’s very clear, I think, what it is. It’s a public relations trope to distance the White House from the carnage that it is manifestly funding, arming and supporting because they knew it was unpopular, they knew it was unpopular with their base, and they knew it’s just indefensible, and they knew that the people who occupy the Biden White House are thinking one thing and one thing only, which is, I cannot be tainted with this genocide. I need to distance myself from it because later on, when I’m looking for work at Center for American Progress or liberal think tanks or other administrations, I can say, we were secretly working on a ceasefire.

The whole premise is, of course, absurd. Israeli officials have since said that Biden never asked for a ceasefire. They’ve confirmed that verbatim. So this was an entirely alternate reality designed for liberal and liberal consumption so people could point to it say, “Look, he’s working on a ceasefire” It’s like the peace process. It’s this thing you can point to.

The corollary to this was the “Helpless Biden.” Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t change it because this or that excuse, which I call, moats of rationalization. There’s always this thing that’s imposed on him by an outside mysterious geopolitical dark matter. Oftentimes, it does veer into antisemitism because it’s this idea that, oh, he can’t take away weapons because then AIPAC will punish them. Wait, he’s the most powerful person in the world. Why not? Or you hear that Netanyahu has manipulated him. This pictures [Biden] as a doddering old fool being manipulated by the oriental wiles of Netanyahu, whose charm and and manipulation is unmatched. You can just manipulate every president.

However, the Occam’s razor answer is that they both agree on the genocide, but politically it’s so toxic they have to create an alternate reality where there’s this alleged ceasefire negotiations that, again, never go anywhere because they’re fake and they’re not real. Egyptian mediators basically said as much in late 2024. They said this is for public consumption in the United States. These are not real negotiations. To the extent to which there were some real negotiations, it was over a temporary pause for a week or two for captive exchanges, but never a lasting ceasefire. That was never on the table, something since affirmed by Israeli officials who were in the room, because there was never any credible threat of withdrawing support.

Without that credible threat..then how sincere are you? The analogy I use is what if [Los Angeles Dodgers Manager] Dave Roberts before Game 7 of the World Series. If he says, I’m going bench Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and the entire starting lineup, and out our AAA team, but don’t worry, I really want to win the World Series. If he had said that people would commit him to an insane asylum. You would think he had lost it. Meanwhile, Biden can say, I’m forfeiting my entire leverage, which is military support and weapons, but don’t worry, I secretly want a ceasefire.

Well, clearly you don’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have you wouldn’t have benched Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Shohei Ohtani. There was this bizarre alternate universe where there was a fake ceasefire. I’m just some guy on Twitter and in 2024, I wrote a piece in The Nation saying, the supposed ceasefire negotiations are fake. They’re never going to go anywhere. Then cut to almost a year later and it takes Trump coming into office to impose a temporary pause, which, of course, was later later dissolved.

What prophetic skills did I have? I had none, zero. I just could read the actual things they were saying, which were nonsensical. This ceasefire theater that we dragged on and on and on for months, these palace intrigue stories about how they were working really hard on it. If Dave Roberts brought in the AAA team, I’m sure they would genuinely be working really hard to to win the World Series. However, the whole premise where you take out your leverage means any discussion or any argument after that is utterly meaningless.

This was something that liberal and center-left media indulged constantly. CNN, MSNBC, just thousands of articles about these ceasefire talks that were all Potemkin ceasefire. They were all theater because their fundamental premise made no sense.

Then from that premise, you had basically what was just kayfabe. It was theater. It wasn’t real.

In addition to print media and online media, you also cover some of the cable news shows and morning talk shows. This is a place where people a lot of people get information, actually. You center in on Morning Joe, which is a popular show. We were talking about the “War on Terror” earlier and during that time, cable shows almost never had antiwar voices on, or actual Iraqis. By the same token, I imagine very few Palestinians have actually been invited on these shows. What did you see when you took a deeper look at these programs?

That was kind of agenda setting, because Biden’s favorite show was apparently Morning Joe, which he watched obsessively. Of course, he didn’t need Morning Joe to be a glib Zionist and a racist, but it certainly didn’t help.

Morning Joe, in the year of study we did, had not a single Palestinian guest. Meanwhile, it had a revolving door of Israeli officials, generals, and Zionist cry bullies like [Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who was apparently, from what I can perceive, sleeping in the green room at MSNBC. He was there all the time. [Senator] Adam Schiff and him, I guess, just have a bunker there like in the Navy.

These shows, in the two years that I studied from October of 2023 to October of 2025, and it’s probably still the case, but I haven’t done a recent study in the last six months, did not feature a single Palestinian guest with one exception. That was CBS Face the Nation on November 7th, 2023. They had Palestinian ambassador from the UK on for six minutes or maybe seven minutes, and that was it.

So, Meet the Press, This Week with George Stephanopoulos and CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash and Jake Tapper did not feature a single Palestinian guest in the first two years of the genocide, and I don’t think have yet today.

That’s pretty extraordinary, especially when you count the dozens of Israeli officials and, of course, dozens more U.S. officials. You know, Tony Blinken,
[Former Biden Principal Deputy National Security Adviser] Jon Finer, [former Spokesperson for the United States Department of State] John Kirby basically also lived in those respective green rooms and nothing from any Palestinians.

I suspect the reason why is less so because there wasn’t some enterprising producer who didn’t think about it. I think that they had a very hard time finding a native informant with any credibility within the world of of Palestine, like Palestinian civic society or diaspora. It’s not like other countries the U.S. tries to destroy where you have like 10% of the elite you can kind of peel off to go in there and spout off the liberal Zionist lines.

For a while, they tried to bring in [Palestinian activist and attorney] Noura Erakat, who did the forward for my book and is a very well-respected legal scholar. She wouldn’t play ball. She went on CBS and ABC and they would try to ask her, “do you condemn Hamas?” questions. She would reject the premise and go on about war crimes. They deleted it from the internet and never called her back. It’s detailed in my book and detailed in her forward actually.

So, they had a hard time finding native informant Palestinians to come on and spew the kind of liberal Zionist clap trap that’s the acceptable discourse. [Atlantic editor] Jeffrey Goldberg did manage to pull a few out of obscurity from NATO funded think tanks, but, really, it’s basically three guys. They have no connection to Palestinian civil society and they have no respect within that world because, again, the fundamental premises of liberal Zionism is inherently dehumanizing. You’re effectively asking Palestinians to co-sign their own their own erasure from society. There’s no market for it, so you just ignore Palestinians. And to the extent to which you have the other side, you bring on [former Executive Director of the UN World Food Program] Cindy McCain to appeal to their humanity and that’s it.

[The double standard] is also reflected in the output of how Palestinians are spoken about versus how Israelis are spoken about, which I detail with a lot of data. With Israeli deaths, their use of emotive terms versus Palestinian deaths, which are in a passive voice and don’t have emotive terms and are spoken very clinically and in very anodyne terms. This is reflected both on cable news and print.

We saw these anti-genocide protests across college campuses during the genocide and you write about how these were covered by the media. We saw these show trials with these university presidents, who were basically pushed to resign over this alleged boom in antisemitism on their campuses. A lot of your chapter on this is about how anti-Zionism and antisemitism are openly conflated by the media. Talk about the overall coverage of those protests and the way in which mainstream media framed the debate and the battle on campuses.

Every single media outlet had to have their very serious antisemitism on campus trend piece. If you actually go through the [antisemitic] examples they cite, as we did in excruciating detail, we went through five of the major stories, NBC News, CNN, etc. The vast majority of cases are just people doing open pro-Israel advocacy being counter-protested or, in some cases, attacked. Now, that isn’t to say attacking people is justified, but they were not attacked or accosted or confronted because they were “Jewish students.”

They were accosted or approached or yelled at or counter protested because they were engaging in open Zionist political activity, oftentimes recruiting for the IDF. Again, all while human rights groups already had consensus that this was a genocide.

So this constant smol bean “Jewish students” framing for people engaged in open Zionist activity, oftentimes on the payroll of pro-Israel organizations and lobbying groups, was really how you’ve pumped up these numbers and inflated this so-called threat. Now, there was there was a handful of genuine antisemitic incidents where people on college campuses were attacked because they were visibly Jewish, but they were not attacked by pro-Palestine students. These were unrelated or kind of vigilante. They had no connection to any of these pro-Palestine organizations, no connection to any of the pro-Palestine groups or Jewish Voice for Peace or any of these groups.

There was this constant conflation, innuendo, and smearing of campus protests as a hotbed of [antisemitism] that had zero empirical basis and, of course, many of these groups were paid to go try to incite responses and to try to play up this victim narrative. These pro-Israel vigilantes on campuses, like for example, at UCLA and Columbia, sprayed chemical agents or attacked people with batons, but these attacks were, of course, never framed as anti-Palestinian racism or anti-Muslim bias or Islamophobia. They were framed in entirely secular terms. Meanwhile, almost all pro-Palestine activity was framed in the sectarian discourse as attacks on Jewish students.

Of course they also erased and removed from the conversation the meaningful Jewish leadership in these campus campus protests. They erased and removed the participation of Jewish groups and religious and cultural celebrations at these at these campus protests. They framed it purely as Jewish students versus proto-Hamas, proto-pogroms. Then the ADL would step in and present themselves as the arbiter of of the platonic Jewish voice, [even though] if you look at the opinions of Jewish Americans under the age of 25 on college campuses, the majority of them believe that Israel is committing genocide.

So even the ADL’s own self-professed, self-appointed representation of this platonic Jewish student is not reflected in polling. This constant sectarian framing, this mopey framing, this disingenuous conflation of Zionism with Jewish culture and ethnic and religious life was baked into the cake of how these fake antisemitism panics manifested.

Throw that on top of the fact that you had these show trials where where high profile university presidents were were dragged in front of Congress by Republicans and asked these dopey, racist leading questions. “Do you condemn, globalize the intifada?” They would say, well, no, because that’s just an Arabic term that means uprising. And then the headline became “President refuses to to condemn calls for genocide on Jewish students.” The implication being that there was a call for a genocide on Jewish students. Of course there wasn’t. There was zero calls for genocide of Jewish students. It was a pure hypothetical about an Arabic term that they misrepresented and demagogued based on reptile-brain ignorance about what the word intifada means.

This led to a full-blown moral panic and this really culminated in panic around [former Harvard University president] Claudine Gay in December 2023 and January 2024. You had this meta-scandal with her plagiarism. We compare the coverage to the coverage of the killing of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old in Gaza who was mowed down along with her family by Israeli troops. It was an act of of just abject horror that went viral around the globe, and could have been a culminating moment of galvanizing against the genocide.

This is completely completely ignored in the U.S. media. It doesn’t make the front page of the New York Times once. It isn’t mentioned on MSNBC in the one month after her murder once. It’s mentioned on CNN twice in two segments and they’re throwaway segments in the middle of the day that no one really notices or pays much attention to.

Meanwhile, you have the Claudine Gay “scandal” which completely consumes media. What’s important to understand is that it’s a completely meaningless story. It has no inherent news value whatsoever at all. It’s just a manufactured scandal about someone who may, or may not, have committed plagiarism 20 years prior, but they needed a scalp. They needed someone to be disciplined and punished to send a message, not only for university administrators to crack down on protesters, but for protesters, saying, we’re gonna ruin your life and we’re gonna call you an antisemite and that’s gonna stick with you for the rest of your life.

I’ll give you an example. This is a one month study for after the respective Claudine Gay and Hind Rajab stories broke. Claudine Gay was mentioned in the New York Times 79 times versus two mentions of Hind Rajab. Washington Post had Claudine Gay mentioned 23 time versus two for Hind Rajab. AP was was eight versus one. Politico is 57 mentions of Gay versus zero mentions of Hind Rajab. CNN had 409 mentions on air of Claudine Gay and 29 mentions of Hind Rajab. MSNBC had 210 mentions of Gay versus zero Hind Rajab.

What I assert in the book is, objectively the Hind Rajab story is more important than whether or not Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, may or may not have committed plagiarism/not condemned this expression that nobody said. This is totally all smoke, no fire. It’s a Jeremy Corbyn-esque antisemitism scandal where, if you look at the details, you can’t even remember where it started. It’s just this thing that metastasizes and has no basis in reality.

I think that’s a huge indictment. By the way, that same month where [Gay’s scandal was covered so much] we also compared it to child deaths because that month was the highest month of child deaths. It was roughly 3,000. At the same time, there 95 articles in the survey of mainstream media articles we covered, Washington Post, New York Times, Axios, etc. There were 95 articles about Claudine Gay and only six focusing on child deaths, which again, there were 3,000 child deaths during that survey period..

It’s simply not relevant. It gets a passing mention. You get maybe one article here and there. But meanwhile, we have this constant hysteric nonstop centering of this made-up Claudine Gay scandal, which was predicated on, of course, just disciplining university administrators to crack down on on students. It’s a very it’s a very efficient way of doing it because by bringing them up in front of the cameras in Congress and calling them all antisemites, they effectively have to adopt these rules to “prevent antisemitism.” You look at the rules and it’s just cracking down on campus protests, free speech, and pro-Palestine activity and smearing them all as antisemites.

I wanted to bring this to current day. We talked about the Iraq War, where there was this infamously terrible reporting from the mainstream media. Having said that, the war was a lot more popular among the US population than Trump’s bombing of Iran has been. By the same token, as you know, we’ve seen dozens and dozens of polls showing that the U.S. population has soured on Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship. This was true of Democrats for a while, but the genocide has just pushed it to an unprecedented level. I think the last poll I cited in a story was an NBC News one showing that only 13% of Democrats view Israel positively. Israel could obviously count on Republican voters for a long time, but even that seems to be shifting, at least among young Republicans and we see some dissent in Trump’s base even.

In terms of media coverage, do you think this will change anything? It’s been interesting to see you know people like Rahm Emanuel fluctuate their public position…

Well, the J Street cutoff military aid thing is a Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham talking point.

Yes, exactly. That’s the new thing.

It’s quite clever.

This idea that Israel should pay for its own genocide is the big stance now. But it still represents a rhetorical shift, so these people certainly see the writing on the wall.

It certainly signals something, right?

Yes, it signals something.

It signals a lack of popularity. I mean, the point of the liberal media propagandizing against Palestinians and the genocide was to buy time, you can’t control people seeing videos and the and the realities of a genocide. You can’t kill 80,000 people and hide it. And you can’t really justify it or explain it because we’re so numb to the “War on Terror” claptrap. It doesn’t really have the same impact anymore. But the goal is to buy time and that’s why so much of the propaganda detail is actually not really on substance. It’s on sophistry and non sequitur and helplessness. It’s this feigned helplessness.

Liberals would always prefer to be incompetent rather than evil. You see this when people would say, “I don’t understand why Biden is not reining in Netanyahu. Doesn’t he know he looks weak?” They don’t care. They want to look weak because they avoid ideology like it’s the plague. You can’t engage in ideological battles, so liberals frame this as something that they were that they sort of lived outside of or had no hand in. No one really made the substantive ideological defense of Zionism or Israel or their “War on Terror.” Maybe people like Joe Scarborough would, but it didn’t really have any juice. It was so obviously bullshit.

Trump comes in and you have this emerging post-liberal order where it doesn’t actually really matter what most people think of Israel because what matters to them isn’t whether Israel is popular, it’s more about [quashing] protest and campus disruption. Are you putting sand in the gears of capital. No? Well, then we don’t really give a shit what the polling says. It doesn’t really matter.

The people who lead the Democratic Party are Hakeem Jeffries, who’s the largest recipient of AIPAC money in Congress, what a coincidence, and Chuck Schumer, who professed to Bret Stephens last year that his number one goal is to keep the left pro-Israel. They’re not going to leave lose they lose their jobs anytime soon. No one’s calling for that. [Even] AOC supports Hakeem Jeffries.

As long as they’re in charge of the party and you have enough time and we have another specter of JD Vance in 2028. You fund enough money and use enough slick pro-Israel propaganda into the empty shirt that the [Democrats] run in 2028, then it doesn’t really matter. It’s not like they’re going to nominate Rashida Tlaib. They’re going to say whatever they say. Again, when Biden ran in 2020, he said he wanted to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state. And guess what? He got an office and he shipped them half a billion dollars and it didn’t matter.

So I’m sure whoever runs in the Democratic primary in 2028 will have highly calibrated, J Street-curated lines about Israel, but as long as Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are in power, and as long as the Republicans remain a staunchly Zionist party, which they will for the foreseeable future, it’s not going matter. It functionally is not going to matter. That’s why this “cutoff U.S. military aid to Israel” line, with a very technical definition of aid being literal funding versus just arming, is so brilliant because it moves it into a non sequitur. It sounds anti-Israel, but it’s a policy initiated by the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Lindsey Graham.

There’s a reason for that because they understand they can read a poll, just like you and I can, and they know how terminal their support is, especially among Democrats. [Their goal] is to take away this line of, “Do you want your taxpayers killing toddlers?” Well, your tax dollars [won’t] killing toddlers, but..American bombs and weapons are so who cares who pays for it?

The Ellison family could pay for what we give to Israel with the money in their couch cushions. The money doesn’t really matter. What matters is keeping the military support and the arms and the technological advantage and the PR support among major media. That’s what matters. This is now a 85-15 issue with with Democrats, but I think one thing one can’t underestimate how sophisticated the liberal Zionist and liberal imperialist framework is at nullifying, numbing, co-opting, and obscuring opposition to this system of violence.

You already see it with J Street doing this U.S. military aid. People talking about how the oppose AIPAC, but then they’re taking money from AIPAC with a Bobby Valentine mustache. They’re just going to spin and twist and distort it and they’re going to shove some liberal Zionist down our throat, whether it’s Ro Khanna or whoever, that if you actually look at their policies they’re effectively no different than J street.

Then once they get an office it’s just going to be business as usual with some more sophisticated frowning and being sad. That’s how the liberal hatred of Israel and the genocide we discussed will actually politically manifest. It’s so easily..managed. I could pretty much predict exactly how they’re going do it, just as I predicted what they would they would do with the ceasefire routine. Again, I have no unique insight. This is just how it works. It’s public relations management and throwing slop to the piggies.

They go, oh, well, we’re not giving aid to Israel anymore. Well, then I guess let’s all go home. No, they’re tirelessly working on a ceasefire. Well, never mind then. I guess I don’t know what I was so upset about. I mean, this is so f—ing easy to do.

It’s funny. Before we started talking, I was looking at a J Street email they sent out to supporters and it says one of the big issues with the reoccurring violence in the region is that it leads to growing opposition of Israel. That’s identified as one of the big problems.

Yes, funny how that works.

Where I was going with that question was, as a media critic, do you think this shift among the U.S. population will change the media landscape in any capacity? Do you think there’s more room within the liberal establishment for criticism of Israel…or is the coverage going to remain largely the same, regardless of what the people think?

No, the only thing that’s going to change is more sophisticated public relations. I’m sorry to be cynical, and this is the conclusion of my book and I would bet my life on it. The only thing that’s going to change, especially in the next two or three years, is better public relations.

John Oliver does this whole segment on how bad the genocide is and the starvation and at the end, his prescription is that they need to get Netanyahu out of office. Anyone who’s read a poll in Israel knows that Netanyahu is to the left of public opinion there. His policies are very, very popular. The genocide is popular. Over 50% of Israelis want to commit ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Over 68% are not worried about starvation. Some polls show 70% support expelling Palestinians from Gaza proper. Upwards of 94% supported the bombing in Iran. The issue is not Netanyahu.

They’re already shape-making this to be a ‘one bad man’ theory scapegoat. Again, it’s about preserving the fundamental premises of of ethnic supremacy in the Levant and if you’re not going to challenge that premise in any meaningful way, then we’re just engaging in elaborate theater. You look at Ro Khanna, who is supposed to be on progressive vanguard. He says some good things. He calls it a genocide. He uses the right language. Of course, he won’t hold anyone in Biden administration accountable for genocide. He won’t commit to that of course, because he doesn’t really believe it’s a genocide. It’s kind of ah a buzzword now for a lot of these guys.

What’s your plan to meaningfully alter the dynamic for Palestinians? Oh, we’re going to have the Arab states occupy Palestine. That’s just another Zionist occupier. Who do you think pays the the f—ing military bills for these for the “Arab League states” you’re referencing? They have to go back to this Pope of the Arabs claptrap with MBS and all this liberal Zionist, racist head padding shit. A “de-radicalized Gaza” and it’s just like, oh, this is just more of the same shit.

This is just different variations of genocide. People who are principled, like say Rashida Tlaib, who did say she’s going to hold Biden officials accountable and report him to the ICC and purge them from the party, obviously, they’re not going to get within 500 million yards of the White House.

I think what they properly and accurately assess is that the liberal hatred of the genocide can very easily be folded into a sort of fantasy, liberal Zionist narrative. You already see this with like the Pod Save America guys trying to bully Hassan Piker into saying Hamas exists outside of history. They need to salvage this thing they just simply can’t let go because this particular imperialist colony is so essential to X, Y, and Z.

I get it, it’s messy, it’s complicated. I’m not saying it’s something as simple as, let’s assert a one state solution, but the fundamental premises of liberal Zionists and racial and ethnic supremacy in the Levant are just not gonna be challenged in any way and until you do that, you’re just rearranging the deck chairs in the Titanic.

In other words, what would be the big thing that anyone who’s running the 2028 platform could support and actually implement? Even just the basic arms embargo of Israel, where the U.S. no longer provides weapons so [Israel] has this tremendous military technical advantage to basically bomb and kill and maim whomever they want. Even something as simple as that, like a do no harm policy…like I’m not saying you need to start throwing Molotov cocktails at IDF troops, but just stop arming Israel would be a thing.

That is completely not on the table. That’s not something they support. The “Block the Bombs” bill is partial embargo, but it’s mostly obviously a DOA bill. Does anyone really think that a president Ro Khanna or President Ocasio-Cortez or a Presiden Gavin Newsom is going to get into office and actually have an arms embargo in Israel. What would be the mechanism of accountability to assure that happens?

It’s nothing. It’s going to be a bunch of rhetoric and a bunch of claptrap around this line about cutting off aid, and it’s going to go back to business as usual. I don’t see any other any other way around that unless somebody with some credibility on this issue decides to run for president.