As a writer, podcaster, and columnist for TRNN, Adam Johnson has been one of the fiercest, sharpest, and most consistent critics of legacy and Western media’s roles in laundering, obscuring, justifying, and manufacturing consent for crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza genocide by Israel and with the full support of the United States. But critique is not enough anymore; to ensure that these horrific crimes don’t continue, we need accountability for the political actors and media organizations that made it happen, or helped. At a live event hosted by Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Baltimore, Maryland, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Johnson about his new book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, and about how to hold media organizations accountable for their roles in manufacturing the conditions for genocide.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. As a writer, podcaster and a columnist for us here at The Real News, Adam Johnson has been one of the fiercest, sharpest and most consistent critics of legacy in Western media’s roles in laundering, obscuring, justifying and manufacturing consent for crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza genocide by Israel with the full support of the United States. Crimes committed in our name and with our tax dollars and the media cannot be let off the hook for its despicable role in all of this. As Adam writes in his new book, How to Sell a Genocide, the media’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza, “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 holy asymmetric campaign carried out by Israel with the full backing of the US to destroy in whole or in part the Palestinians of Gaza.” Listen, critique is not enough anymore.
If we are going to ensure that these horrific crimes don’t continue, then we need accountability for the political actors and the media organizations that made it happen or helped. We need a reckoning, but we’re not going to get one if we don’t fight for it. And Adam’s new book, in my opinion, gives us the data and the receipts and the analysis that we need to fight better and to actually win. I cannot recommend it enough and I am so proud to call Adam a friend and a colleague. He is a vital member of the Real News team and he has done a vital service to all of us in writing this book. So go check it out yourself and let us know what you think and let me know what you think about this conversation that I had with Adam Johnson about his new book at a live event at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse here in Baltimore on May 23rd.
Well, again, welcome, welcome everyone. Thank you so much to Red Emmas for hosting this important discussion tonight about Brother Adam Johnson’s vital new book, How to Sell a Genocide, The Media’s Complicity and the Destruction of Gaza Out Now with Pluto Press. It is an invaluable read and I cannot stress enough the duty that we have to know what’s in this book. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t say it to just chuck my buddy up. Adam, I’ve gotten the pleasure and honor of growing up with you over the past 10 or so years in the media ecosystem, the left media ecosystem, and then get to know you, get to be friends with you, get to work together. I wanted to say first that I know we joke a lot that what are we doing? We’re just podcasters. We’re not that out there doing the real work, but I wanted to thank you for doing the work that you do at Citations Needed and Everywhere Else.
Thank you for writing this book because even if you on your side through the microphone don’t see it or you on your phone tweeting at people and Dunking on people don’t see it, so often you and Nima, especially through citations needed, but now with this all your writing, you give us so many of us the language that we’re looking for to articulate what we’re feeling and sensing, but don’t have the time to process and don’t have the ability to find those words. And in this book, you have given us a tremendous amount of necessary ammunition to focus what we have known and sensed but not been able to fully articulate. And so I wanted to first acknowledge that. Second, I wanted to acknowledge here at the top that of course both of us as journalists here in the United States, a media critic journalist, however Adam wants to identify himself, we of course must have a moment of silence to honor those of our journalists and media making colleagues who have been slaughtered in this genocide and who continue to be slaughtered in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran.
So can you please join me in just a quick moment of silence to honor our fallen comrades and to thank them for their invaluable sacrifice.
Okay. Thank you all so much. All right, brother out. Like I said, your podcast and my podcast started around the same time. We got into this game around 10 or so years ago and we’ve gotten to working with each other. We publish your invaluable column at the real news now and for a few years now and you guys should absolutely read it. So I wanted to start there and ask if you could talk about how you got into media criticism and why. But then let’s talk about that growth process and let’s talk about what it was like to be a media critic as a genocide was unfolding in Gaza and what about all of that propelled you to move beyond podcasting and article writing into writing this book?
Adam Johnson:
Well, thank you for that introduction and thank you for having me here. Right Emma’s is of course a write a passage. You’re not really a leftling writer if you don’t come here. So I’m glad to be here. It’s huge, but it’s a very well organized operation, so thank you. Yeah, so I don’t talk about myself a lot, mostly because I don’t know, I feel like it’s genuinely quite boring, but I’ve always been interested in language and how language can shape our reality and my entry point into the left such as it was, the immortal science, whatever you wish to call it, I was late to the game. I mean, I was basically 29, 30 years old when I started exploring those ideas and media was a way I was like the entry point into that. And I’ve always thought media criticism is an entry point into asking bigger questions.
It’s a gateway drug. The podcast is meant to be a gateway drug. I’m like in the school yard pedaling left wing ideology like, “Come here kid, listen to citations needed.” It’s sort of vaguely liberal coded, but it’s not. So my goal is to be on one of those Glen Beck chalkboards. And so that’s how I, as an entry point into asking bigger questions because I think once one erodes the artifice of media, which we kind of imperfectly refer to as small L liberal media or center left media or mainstream media, I think it’s a gateway to ask bigger questions because once the artifice begins to crumble, I think you sort of ask yourself, well, okay, if this kind of officialdom, if the thing that is these very important people behind desks and these kind of prestigious institutions are basically full of shit, then you have to ask yourself, what do we build as an alternative to that?
And then in some senses, the whole institute, because this book is fundamentally a book about the hypocrisy and the enforcement status of so- called liberal institutions and liberalism. And that’s why chapter seven is basically about that and how Gaza and the liberal response to Gaza and the liberal promotion of genocide, I should say elite liberal promotion of genocide was fundamentally a liberal project for that first year we were documenting. Obviously they were partnered and helped by the right and Republicans in Fox News, but fundamentally would not have been possible without liberal buy-in. And so obviously it very much falls into the wheelhouse of the Citations Deeded Podcast, which obviously critiques the ways in which liberals promote reactionary ideas and indeed work to launder reactionary ideas and make them seem palatable. And so it was a natural fit. And then obviously I had been writing ferociously from the beginning of it because as anyone who knows anything about Gaza knew precisely what was going to happen, it was very clear that on October 8th, when Tony Blinken tweeted out a call for a ceasefire and then subsequently deleted it a couple hours later that this was going to be at best killing an arbitrarily high number of Palestinians in the figures and at worst a genocide.
And of course it largely was a genocide and of course they ended up killing almost certainly over six figures. And so from the beginning, you and I were writing about it and you were letting me use obviously your platform to write about it and write media criticism about it. Much of the book is, not much, but some percentage of the book is readapting writing I did for y’all. So thank you for that because there was not a ton of outlets who were willing to do that, especially in a kind of existential way. And then once we started going, it was like, well, we need to quantifiably show this. So it’s a very data driven book, which is something I hadn’t previously had the time to do and that was central to how we did the book because I didn’t want to just assert it or cherry pick headlines.
I wanted to quantitatively show and establish bias and then from there in double standards and from there we can ask bigger questions once one accepts the premise of that, what is the implications of that? Because it’s a book much like citations needed. It’s a book for liberals. It’s not a book for the left who obviously by definition agrees with me, although I want them to be able to use the data and research and arguments in their daily lives. But it’s a book that is supposed to take someone who’s vaguely liberal or vaguely liberal left or progressive and senses something was wrong and then slowly and meticulously walk them to the water that there’s a larger critique of Zionism and US imperialism and that the media operates as an organ of those institutions not as any kind of neutral or objective, certainly not a counter or an adversary to those institutions.
And so again, I’m pedaling the drugs trying to get people addicted. First one’s always free and that’s kind of the way I approached the book. Now obviously the title’s provocative, but the word genocide I believe is more or less mainstream now. And you can’t get around that word because to do so is genocide denial. It’s something like I think 60 or 70% of Democrats, depending on the poll, believe it’s a genocide. So that itself is no longer even that provocative. What I believe is maybe more novel and useful to liberals in liberal left adjacent types is the concept that they were sold to genocide, that it wasn’t this bumbling accident that kind of happened or this one-off dictator who forced people to do it, but actually had ideological and narrative antecedents that were being pushed by so- called liberal media. So by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC were the primary targets of my inquiry and criticism.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and that tees up kind of like my next question because that was awesome, it was thoughtful. I really appreciated that answer, but I also know the entire time you were screaming and ripping your hair out and like these fucking people look at the lies that I know because Adam would be pitching me. He’s like, “Hey, I got to write about this. ” I was like, “All right, go for it. ” And I knew so much was going through your mind and so much like the rest of us. We were seeing these sort of double standards. We were sort of seeing the kind of dual realities on the TV and on our phones, but again, it needed to go beyond just that sort of sense and needing to quantify and needing to name. And so I wanted to sort of unleash the attack dog, Adam Johnson we all know and love a second.
Let’s name some names here. Who are the worst offenders and why?
Adam Johnson:
Yeah. And I want to preface this by saying that that is the next stage of this project where I’m doing basically taking the 10 worst and we’re naming names and going to try to reach out to them and do more aggressive targeted criticism with like maybe in parallel campaignse because I do think when you criticize the media or the New York Times, it can be a little bit abstract, that which is owned by everyone is cared for by no one to paraphrase libertarians, but I think in some senses you can be too abstract. So the book does name names in retrospect as I’m rereading it, I felt like I probably should have made that more central, a little bit more ad hominem, a little more personal. And that’s kind of the next stage because we need to have accountability. And in parallel, I know others who I’ve spoken to are working on a project to hold Democrats accountable because now as you know, I’m a little bit off topic here, but indulge me.
You have Tony Blinken who covered up war crimes at the State Department. He’s now at Center for American Progress just down the road in DC. Obviously John Finer is at Center for American Progress, which if anyone knows what that is, it’s a ostensibly progressive think tank that’s basically the government in waiting for the next Democratic administration. John Feiner and Jake Sullivan, who also covered up war crimes and sold weapons to a country that knew was committing genocide, have a cheeky little foreign policy podcast on Fox. So what we’re working on with that is what we’re trying to come up with a branding for, but it’s going to be the Genocide 10 or the Genocide 20 where you’re basically pressuring organizations to remove these people from polite society, which of course is a bar that’s below the mantle of the earth. I mean, it’s the lowest bar possible, but right now everyone’s just vibing through it.
Progressives and liberals in Congress are doing events now with Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. So really it’s a project fundamentally about accountability. And the reason why that is, and again, it’s going to be an upward battle, but I do think that you can build pressure, especially as every four years when Democrats have to act like they care what progressives or liberals think or even liberals, to be honest, that there needs to be a sense that these people need to be non-grada at the very least. So obviously you would refer them to the ICC for criminal arrest and prosecution for their role and complicity and genocide along with some of these media organs we can talk about. But at the very least, they need to be removed from polite society. And so fundamentally it just becomes a book about accountability because there’s not much else you can do.
And the conclusion I say I’m like the drummer boy and the drummer boy Christmas song. “What is he doing? Plays the drums. That’s all he can do. All I can do is media criticism. And I think like everyone else, as this was unfolding, you felt completely helpless. But I think the lesson you can take away from this and the lesson that Palestinian organizers and BDS organizers always tell you is that you can always contest in the way you can and the spaces you can. Whether you’re a tech worker, you can go on strike or boycott or try to … There’s always something you can do and it’s like, this is the only thing I’m able to do. I don’t have any other skillset or talent. I just know how to do media criticism. So that’s what I did and I tried to do it to the best of my ability.
That’s a very convoluted way of answering your question, but I think what you’re talking about is, what you allude to is the idea of accountability. So who are the worst? The worst were Jake Tapper and Joe Scarborough are featured heavily in this book as just outright genocidal propagandists, outwardly lying, smearing anyone opposing the war. Obviously New York Times, Patrick Kingsley, others, editors at the New York Times were probably certain writers who laundered Israeli intelligence over and over again, which we can get into. Those were the primary offenders. Actually, one of the things I try to do in the book and all the subsequent interviews I’ve done is I try not to flatten the difference that there are some that are worse than others. The New York Times is meaningfully worse than the Washington Post. Washington Post is not good, but they didn’t engage in what I would consider outright genocide incitement.
The New York Times would constantly intervene right when there was some pressure to push Biden for a ceasefire with the most obvious lies and bullshit. I’ll give you an example if you’ll indulge me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I was going to say, keep rolling and let’s talk about some of the worst offenses. If we could give in an ode to citations needed, give me your top three worst tropes or your top three most eye-popping stats from this book.
Adam Johnson:
Maybe let’s start at the beginning then if you’ll indulge me. So very quickly, the idea of a ceasefire needed to be removed from the realm of capital V capital S very seriousness, right? It had to be considered a far left fringe position, despite the fact that every other mowing the lawn episode, which is what Israel calls it when they kill civilians in Gaza as a part of collective punishment, had had a ceasefire. 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, obviously 2009 cast led. But very early on when again, Blinken sends out the tweet and subsequently deletes it, it’s very clear a decision is made that they’re going for it all. They’re going for full-blown ethnic cleansing genocidal acts and at worst from their perspective, killing an arbitrarily high number of Palestinians as medieval reconpense and collective punishment to humiliate them so they will self-deport or leave because Palestinians are a fundamentally inconvenient people to the national methos and mythology of Zionism and anyone who knew anything about Gaza knew that was going to happen.
So within the first few days, you get this what I call isisification of Hamas in the first chapter, which is Hamas cannot have any secular grievances or political causes. They have to be mindless Jihadist cartoons who are just mindless anti-Semites, which as far as … Biden says they had the ancient hatred of Jews, which again, bad luck that the people who drove them off their land happened to have that as their national religion, out of all the gin joints and all the towns and all the world. But the idea that you would provide context was anathema. And so this was disciplined and enforced in a very documented way. First up was MSNBC. So on the morning of October 7th, Ali Valshi is running the desk at MSNBC and he brings in Iman Moihadine who had lived in Gaza for two years. He was by far the most qualified person to talk about it.
And so live on air as the attack is unfolding and we’re kind of getting information trickling in, they do what all journalists are supposed to do. They begin to provide context. They don’t cheer it on. They’re not for it. They’re not like saying, isn’t Hamas great? They’re saying talking about the Nakba, the dispossession, how 75% of the people in Gaza are refugees who were kicked out of their homes and what is today Israel. They’re talking about protective edge in 2014, putting them on a diet, the siege, the lack of being able to travel, all that. All hell breaks loose.
We reported this from two internal sources at MSNBC, which as I’m sure you would imagine was much easier to get sources in than say the New York Times, because a lot of people were ashamed of their role in this and were happy to talk. And this was later vaguely confirmed by the New York Times as well, but they bring in, they being Comcast, it’s the first and since last time they ever directly intervene in MSNBC’s coverage. They bring in Rashida Jones and Caesar Conde, who are the head of MSNBC and NBC News respectively and they say,” Never do that again. “That was terrorism apology. You’re not allowed to provide context for what happened on October 7th and indeed history has to start on October 7th. Nothing can precede it, right? It’s like the big bang. There’s nothing that precedes it. It’s like asking what’s north of the North Pole.
It’s ontologically impossible. And that was reflected in the coverage. Then on March 9th, there’s a company-wide call at MSNBC according to our two of our sources where they bring in Martin Fletcher, who’s the longtime NBC news correspondent who has since retired and he had family who were injured on October 7th. He himself had served in the IDF and he jumps on a conference call with all of MSNBC and NBC News and gives the playbook. He says,” Palestinians aren’t real. They weren’t a people until 1967. They’re invented by Arab nations. Jews are the real Palestinians. These are direct quotes, more or less. And Israel left greenhouses in Gaza. You’re kind of typical really racist anti-Palestinian vomit. And that becomes the official line in MSNBC. And if they say, if you have any questions, you go to Martin Fletcher because he’s the longtime NBC correspondent. CNN does something quite similar where Mark Thompson issues a memo on October 26th where he affirms an existing policy, which was probably more informal saying, you cannot mention the suffering of Palestinians or these Palestinian death counts without prefacing it with October 7th.
So that way it has to be framed by definition as defensive and you can’t talk about anything that basically comes before it. And so you would have a story, you were allowed to say, “Isn’t it sad this Palestinian died or there was this explosion that killed 15 people, but you always have to say as a military response to October 7th.” And so these policies very initially make it so you cannot provide context. Context is anathema. It is not allowed because it’s viewed as Hamas propaganda or terrorism apologea. And this therefore reduces, and of course you have the parallel atrocity of propaganda with the beheaded babies on October 11th. A story completely invented out of whole cloth that’s spread by everyone from Nick Robertson at CNN to Sarah Sidner who says it live on CNN where she says, “The Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office has confirmed that there were several beheaded babies at the Kabutsum.” Now the Prime Minister can’t confirm his own racist propaganda.
That’s absurd, but that was the editorial standard. You could basically say whatever you wanted about Palestinians. And then once the story was … And then of course Biden says he saw video of it, which he of course did not because it never happened and slowly tweets are deleted, people kind of issue very opaque apologies, but very early on they had to be this cartoon ISIS-like entity because you had to make a ceasefire impossible. And this was affirmed by progressives in Congress who refused to call for a ceasefire for months. Obviously Rokana, Elizabeth Warren, I think most cynically and most, I think high leverage was Bernie Sanders who went on CNN and CBS News in November and December of 2023 respectively and said, “I don’t know how you have a ceasefire with a group like Maas who seeks Israel’s destruction.” Now nevermind, of course, that Israel seeks Palestinians destructions.
Nevermind that a call for a ceasefire is not a moral endorsement of an organization. It’s just a call for a ceasefire. And this was affirmed by CIP, Matt Duss, who was like supposedly the far left progressive poll of so- called progressive foreign policy. He goes on democracy now and says, “Bernie Sanders has a good point. I’m paraphrasing, but something to that effect.” He basically affirms the logic of that. So it’s a far left position, a radical pie in the sky. You get a dozen articles in the Atlantic saying a ceasefire is impossible. Meanwhile, we’re getting 300 day dead, 500 dead a day. They kill almost 6,000 people in the first 11 days. They’re averaging about 550 dead people a day, 30% of whom are children. And you could not talk about a ceasefire mainstream media. There was no mention of it in New York Times.
The New York Times editorial board and Washington Post editorial board supported. Everyone is in this stories about how it’s eight billion, nine elevens or some kind of fatuous nonsense like that. And it’s immediately indexed in this kind of war on terror civilization versus this vague Asiatic ward who again are presented as this cartoon villain with no political grievances. And that right there cements creates the inevitability of genocide because if you have to defeat Hamas, you by definition cannot do that. They are a gorilla force, an indigenous guerrilla force. Unlike ISIS, they’re not who are foreign mercenaries. They are of Gaza. They live in Gaza. They are Palestinians in Gaza and they support hovers between 40 and 55% in Gaza. It’s a litle higher in the West Bank, but they’re Palestinians, like all grill military movements that are national liberation movements, again, whether you like them or not, doesn’t matter.
They’re not going to just surrender. And this is something Tony Blinken himself affirms behind closed doors in January of 2024 when Andrea Mitchell reports that Blinken tells Nanyahu that Hamas cannot be defeated militarily. Now, a reporter worked their salt would say, “Well, wait a second, then why are we arming and funding this extensively military operation?” But this is the kind of Orwellian inverse reality we operated in for several months where everything is a contradiction. And then of course, which we can get into, and I’ll maybe let you interject here so I’m not droning on, but then you get into the ceasefire redefinition in late February, early March of 2024 where ceasefire is polling at about 75% Democrats don’t even bother at that point defending the genocide on first principles or as such. Then they move into the helpless Biden fuming Biden. We’re actually working on a ceasefire.
Okay, what’s your definition of ceasefire? And then you hear their definition and it’s simply reasserting terms of capitulation, reasserting demands of surrender by Hamas, which of course has not been the definition of ceasefire for 5,000 years of human warfare. Ceasefires, both sides ceasefire and you come to a political solution, not I win and you surrender. That’s just you winning. But then that becomes the oralian definition that’s broadly adopted by the media. And this goes on for months and months and months and months and months. It was based on a fundamental contradiction and the only people who ever pointed it out were people like left wing critics on like, “This doesn’t make any sense.” And so that’s all documented in the book. Basically with the argument is that within the first few weeks really, the White House doesn’t even defend it as such. They simply try to move it into the non-sequitur by playing up this idea that Biden is either helpless, which again, the media assisted these laundering operations or that he’s very mad.
He was always sort of vaguely upset all the time. It’s what I call the asymptotic break with Netanyahu. I can read you some examples if you’ll indulge me. I know I’ve been rambling here for a bit, but I do think these are very illustrative.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Bro, people literally came out in the rain to listen to you talk.
Adam Johnson:
There’s talking and then there’s talking. But sorry, I’m going to make sure I get … So this is, I think, critical and this is when you get these, I think, fairly sophisticated liberal interventions of inventing reality, which I think was one of the reasons people felt like they were going insane at the time because it was all premised on a contradiction. So you had this idea of the helpless Biden, which I’ll skip and get to the fuming Biden. So this was a media trope. There’s literally dozens of these articles, but I documented the top 10 and then we did a source analysis. So 94% of the sourcing for these stories are White House aids and very quickly one can realize why they would be painting this narrative because they themselves know it’s indefensible. They themselves want to go in and out of liberal and progressive circles.
So the decision is made to distance the White House in some kind of narrative or abstract sense while painting them as working towards a ceasefire or some peaceful resolution, sufficiently removing them from the genocide that they themselves are arming, supporting and diplomatically providing cover for. So you have November of 2023, it begins in earnest with NBC news. The gap between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government over Gaza future is widening. Ooh, it’s widening. CNN, December of 2023, unprecedented tensions, unprecedented. Watch out. Between White House and Netanyahu as Biden feels political price for standing with Israel. Axios, our friend Barack Rive, who we can get into January of 2024. Biden, running out of patience with Bibi as Gaza war, it’s a hundred days. Washington Post the next month, Biden moving closer than ever to a breach with Netanyahu over a war in Gaza. CNN March of 2024, how a brief exchange and a call explains the strained Biden Netanyahu relationship associated press, Biden cajoles Netanyahu with top talk.
Ooh. Politico, March of 2024, from I love you to asshole how Joe gave up on BB after decades of building a close personal friendship with Netanyahu, Joe Biden has had it with the Israeli Prime Minister and he’s hitting him hard and it may be working spoiler. He did not hit him hard and it did not work. So there’s this alternate reality where Biden, who’s the most powerful person on earth, is somehow unable to get a country the size of New Jersey who’s 75% of their weapons company in the United States, 100% of their weapons arms reshipments come from the United States, cannot operate militarily for more than a week or two without support from the United States because obviously because of a tax in Yemen and Lebanon and elsewhere is bumbling, simply just a dottering old man who’s working really hard for a ceasefire for fucking ostensibly for nine months and he just darn it Chucks can’t get one.
And what we later learned, which I think is important is that Israeli prime minister at the time, Michael Hertzog, tells Israeli media in April of 2025 that Biden quote, “Never asked for a ceasefire not once.” He never asked for a ceasefire. And we know that because there wasn’t a ceasefire and he’s the most powerful person in the world. So there was this alternate reality that had to be painted where he was working for a ceasefire, but really what he was working for was, “Hey, Nanyahu, I’m not going to use any leverage, but would you mind?” And so the analogy I use is it’s like LA Dodgers, I know you’re an LA Dodgers fan, Dave Roberts right before the World Series saying, “I’m going to bench Shohei Otani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freedman and all my all stars, and we’re going to put in the AAA baseball team, but I’m tirelessly working to win the World Series.” I don’t think anyone would find that to be credible.
He would be committed and people would think he’d lost his mind, but Biden repeatedly said, “I’m not going to condition military support, but I’m working for … ” That’s literally the only leverage that would do that. And everybody knew this at the time and there was precedent for it in 2021, Biden pressured Netanyahu to stop. And so it all got sort of mystified. Aaron David Miller shows up, he’s one of these Biden Hacks, one of these pro- Israel hacks who shows up and says, “Well, Biden couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. ” And then every time he shows up in the New York Times or Foreign Policy Magazine or Washington Post to kind of give this pat line about how Biden, because you had in parallel with fuming, you had helpless. So he was also helpless. He would always end it by saying, “But even if he could, he wouldn’t.” And you’re like, “Wait, what?
” So he doesn’t want to, because they’d say, “Oh, but he’s a hardcore supporter of Israel.” And it’s like, yeah, that’s the point. And so this was obviously crazy making for a lot of people who were reading this thing, pointing out that it didn’t make any sense and had all these contradictions and was based on the analogy I give is it’s like theater 101, the difference between a sketch and a plot is a sketch. A plot moves forward, it has beats, things change. A sketch is the same gag three or four times that you get out in under four minutes. This was a sketch.This went on for 10 months. You had these articles, literally over a hundred of these articles, you can find them. And you would think an editor worked their salt after the 70th fuming Biden story would raise their hands and say, “Wait, is Biden changing any policy?” No, but he’s generally mad.
Okay. Well, how is that a story? Because these were curated by the White House. All the sources are Biden aids or phone calls they know are recorded. It’s obviously-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Biden pops can of spinach and like Shakesphist at Netanyahu.
Adam Johnson:
And that’s why they have to use these meaningless puffy language about unprecedented about to. So you have this asymptotic break that always approaches zero but mysteriously never gets to zero. And then they do what they were trying to do, which is wait it out. And this is a book about buying time and about liberal hand waving and time wasting and pseudo savvy negotiations. It was about maintaining the status quo and buying time. And the reason why you buy time as any good public relations person will tell you is because you cannot defend the actual thing that’s happening. And that was the theme that we saw over and over and over again. And mainstream media just laundered that obvious self-serving bullshit over and over and over again.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well put. And obviously the whole while you’ve got this historical rupture that is occurring in large part because of media and our relationship to media, right? The disconnect between this reality obscuring power serving, genocide enabling, like all of that is being undercut by the innocence destroying images that we’ve all been bombarded with on our phones, not just the younger generation, but yeah, of course a lot more in the younger generation, which is why right now TikTok fucking sucks. You know why? Because in 24, Biden and the Democrats answer to like, what are we going to do about the public turning on us about because we’re selling a genocide that they’re not buying, we’re going to take over the fucking platform that they’re seeing it on.
Adam Johnson:
Well, they forced to sell to the Ellison family who are the single biggest donors of the IDF.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Which is, there you go. So that’s what we got. Thank Biden for that too. But I wanted to kind of ask a question here, Adam, about the why. There are a lot of potential whys here, right? But it’s obviously something we all need to be empowered with to talk with clarity but nuance about because as all of this is unfolding, regular people who are trying to make sense of the horrific reality that they’re seeing and the lies that they’re being told or the obscuring that’s being done in front of them, if they’re not getting the answers that they’re looking for, a lot of horrible ideas and conspiracies fester. A lot of hatreds and prejudices emerge. It is no coincidence that there has been rises in antisemitism while this is all happening because people are being told if you are opposed to this, you’re against all Jews.
And so a lot of people are saying, “Well, I’m opposed to that. ” So I don’t know what to tell you, but I don’t want to see a child be cut in half, blown to bits, crying over- That’s obviously because
Adam Johnson:
You’re a racist.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. So the point being is that amidst all of that crap, there are very real truths here about CNN’s like Jerusalem Bureau, everything basically being reviewed and rubber stamped by the IDF. But that itself is not the whole of the explanation, right? It’s not just a sort of like Israel is telling all these newsrooms what to do, but I wanted to ask if you could sort of help us navigate the why this is being done and where it’s coming from. I’ll put it
Adam Johnson:
In these terms. And this is where I think a dialectical criticism is useful because the book is not called How to Sell Genocide because I’m trying to be provocative. It is a genocide was decided in Washington and in Tel Aviv and in the halls of power and then liberals are fundamentally a broker between the ruling class and the plebs, right? They come in and say, “Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of it. I’m going to sell what you got and meanwhile I’m going to tell them I’m going to sell them what you got.” So this is fundamentally about a decision was made, then it had to be sold and it’s an unseemly business, but once that decision’s made, what other option is there? You think they’re going to criticize, I mean, you think they’re going to criticize the genocide? You think they’re going to suddenly start putting their support behind Palestine?
No. So everyone, again, eventually around the margins, you have some pushback, but fundamentally on a structural level, the US media, whether it’s Vietnam or Iraq, is liberal, imperialist at its core, that’s its primary function. If the New York Times didn’t help sell the genocide, then there would be no New York Times. That is their social function. By definition, that’s what they exist to do. And so the decision was made and it was bipartisan and the worst place to be in the world is on the business end of a bipartisan consensus in Washington because what is the mechanism of pushback? There isn’t one. What a bunch of crusty leftists in a bookstore somewhere, they don’t get shut. You have no power didn’t fucking matter. And though by the way, you have to vote for us anyway because something, something Trump, right? And they knew that and this is under … Which I understand is that the engine that drives this is elite immunity.
When Barack Obama says, “We’re not going to prosecute torture under Bush. We have to move forward, look forward, not backwards.” When we, again, prosecute nobody for Vietnam except for some half-ass reforms, that’s a cycle of elite immunity. And every decision that was made by Tony Blinken and John Feiner in the fateful days in October and November of 2023, they knew they could just bypass it. No future administration’s going to hold them accountable. Certainly Republicans aren’t going to hold Cabo because they agree. And so they were banking on that. They were banking on Israel committing a very two, three month mass expulsion, genocide, getting their recompense and then vibing past it to the presidential election and extorting people with the specter of Trump, albeit a real specter, but nevertheless, that was part of the plan. So there’s a cycle of elite immunity that makes it so, who’s going to hold these people accountable?
Again, Tony Blinken has the most cushy job right now in liberal politics and he knew that was going to happen. So what’s the pressure, what’s the mechanism to actually push back on this from their perspective? Well, the primary fulcrum of rebellion was college campuses, which is why you had to have this campus anti-Semitism narrative, which was a complete fiction, a complete concoction of these Zionist crime bully groups like the ADL, because that was the one space where there was genuine momentum to create both the spectacle and energy and moral narratives to push back against the genocide, which is why you saw, again, I dedicated an entire chapter to it. I think it’s chapter eight, why you saw these high profile kangaroo trials in Congress where they would bring the president of Harvard and Princeton up. There’s a really clever thing the ADL does where they create what I call meta scandals where it’s all smoke and no fire, kind of like a version what they did to Jeremy Corbin.
They would ask the president of Harvard and Princeton and Yale, they would say, “Do you condemn the term globalize the Intifada?” And they would say, “Well, no, because that just means struggle and it’s a little more complex than that. ” Obviously we would not allow speech that intimidated any group of people, but we don’t condemn that phrase. And then literally the headline the Washington Post is university presidents refuse to condemn calls for genocide of Jewish students. And the average person reads that and says there were calls on campus to genocide Jewish students. There of course was no calls. We had our fact checker look for weeks. There was no such call. It did not exist. It never happened. But the way you do it is you gen up these false scandals and everyone runs for the fucking hills. And this is, if you can check out Steve Thrasher’s book, this is all explained in his book, the overseer class, which came out last week.
I just did an event with him in Chicago and he was kicked out of his teaching job, his 10-year trek job at Northwestern and he now is looking for work and has to freelance because he tried to protect his students on the campus of Northwestern and was beaten by a cop and made a villain by Republicans in Congress and later sold out by all of his supposed friends, several of whom are anti-apartheid scholars and James Baldwin scholars. Excellent book, please read it. And we can talk about the crisis of liberalism because Gaza exposed the vacuousness and uselessness of liberal and liberal institutions. But I’m sorry, I digress. I was talking about the weaponization of the antisemitism charge and how effective it was, but that’s discussed in detail and you can look at the data of … I’m going to mind if I read some data here to sort of cement this a little bit and- Read some data maybe.
Making these claims.
Yeah, here it is. So the mentions of antisemitism versus Islamophobia. So after the antisemitism scandals, which there were dozens on all these campuses, these universities and state legislators would force studies to document this. So even taking the ADLs juiced up stats, which literally say free Palestine is a basically a hate crime, even if you accept that, they were always roughly comparable to episodes of Islamophobia. Yet this was not reflected in the media. So the New York Times made reference to antisemitism on college campuses in our hundred day survey period 412 times and made mention of Islamophobia in and of itself five times and 31 they would mention both. There was sometimes it was like liberal box checking. These are all liberal box joking. Washington Post mentioned antisemitism 197 times and Islamophobia or anti-Arab hatred one time AP News 154 versus four, Politico 370 versus three for a grand total of 1,865 mentions to about 32 mentions of Islamophobia.
So the narrative was entirely one way and I’ll give you another example of this asymmetry and this double standard. I’ll give you one example in Chicago. So DePaul University, there was two students who were active members of the IDF who were on the corner every day doing this like debate me thing, I’m going to defend Israel, defend the idea. They have big Israeli flag and they were there every day. Again, after human rights watch and the International Court of Justice and Amnesty International all confirmed and found that Israel was committing genocide. So they were supporting a genocide, right? Some guy takes it into his own hands and punches him in the face. And what’s the headline the next day in local media? Jewish student attacked an anti-Semitic hate crime. Now it’s possible as an anti-Semitic hate crime, but that would be the worst coincidence ever because the guy was actively engaging in active, visible, pro- Israel activity, but then what the story becomes is about ethnic hatred.
Meanwhile, you had two major incidences, one at UCLA where these pro- Israel vigilantes came in with clubs and beat people, pro- Palestine and Palestinian protestors on campus again, attacked them with wrenches causing severe injury. And then you had the chemical attacks in Columbia in late 2023. Now, no one ever referred to that as anti-Muslim or anti-Arab racism. So any attacks or counter protests of pro- Israel students was always framed in the mobius sectarian terms whereas any attack on Palestinians was purely put in secular ideological terms and that double standard is quantifiable. You can show it and there’s no reason why that should be the case. There’s no legitimate editorial reason why there should be that asymmetry. And this book is about pointing out and quantifying and showing those asymmetries and then going up to editors and saying, “Why did you do this? ” Because we went to the New York Times and said, “Why do you use the word slaughter for the killing of Israelis 140 times, but you never use it for the killing of Palestinians?
How is it that Israel killed 20,000 children?” Again, the numbers probably double that, but they killed 20,000 children and somehow managed to never commit a slaughter or a massacre not once. Doesn’t that feel statistically unlikely? And they say, “Oh, it’s different.” Well, why is it different? It just is. But why? Because it has to be, because my entire ideology falls apart if it’s not. So that’s why they create these ontological nonsensical concepts like terrorism. There’s those sort of buzzwords because they’re meant to shut your brain off and to not do critical thinking. And so that asymmetry is, again, extremely quantifiable beyond a reasonable doubt and our numbers are conservative. We didn’t even include opinion columns. That’s how conservative we were. So if you include opinion columns, it’s probably 100% worse. And so that was what people were up against and there was very sophisticated turnkey mechanisms to use basically liberalism against itself.
So anti-hate rules on campus or Title IX or other federal legislation against discrimination was turnkey used against Palestinians, pro- Palestine protestors because to stand up for Palestine was per se, somehow a form of racism. This is why groups like the ADL have ingratiated themselves into anti-racist spaces for so long because they need to use that to defend the left blank of Zionism and Israel, which they’ve done to tremendous effect.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, we could be talking about this for two more hours and I would love to, but I wanted to just sort of talk about accountability and what that looks like and what this book empowers us to do to get it. Because I think we must acknowledge that for three plus years we tried. Not everyone can say that. I imagine if you’re all here, you did. I know and can quantify how much we tried at the real news hundreds of interviews or documentary reports or like original work on the genocide in Gaza Adam column after column interviewed like podcasts, like we post, do what people in Gaza have been asking us to do. Just like, please get our stories out there. Please don’t let people forget about us. Please do something to stop this. And for the rest of our lives, we’re all going to have to be haunted with the reality that we didn’t.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah. Well, one thing is for Israel and the US we’re banking on is that people would grow numb to it. And I think that to some extent that was a correct assumption
Maximillian Alvarez:
That in itself could lead to a very big discussion about why, because I actually think it goes beyond Gaza and it wasn’t lost on me as I was reporting from East Palestine, Ohio around the same time the train in that Ohio town derailed in 2023. And when I was there trying to get their stories up, I noticed that the algorithms they saw the name, a lot of the stories aren’t getting out there. So I’m trying to explain to these Trump voting white working class people who have been poisoned why the internet is suppressing their stories. And so there’s a lot here and again, our goal is not to explain everything in Adam’s book. You got to go read the book and I promise you won’t be disappointed. You’ll be infuriated, but you’ll be empowered by it. But again, the fact is that from algorithmic suppression and platform specific suppression and all these goddamn Trump loving oligarchs owning the media platforms as well as gobbling up the media companies and whether from CBS to HBO to TikTok.
So we got a lot on our plate here and a lot to deal with, but I wanted to ask Adam like, what accountability looks like here because we name names we have thanks to you in this book and everyone who contributed to it, the ammunition that we need to hold people accountable. But I guess I wanted to ask how we do that.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah, because I think that’s obviously the next step. Again, I’m working on projects with that. I know other people are as well. I will say that the writers against the war in Gaza has organized the boycott against the New York Times that I think we should wholly support. It’s been signed by 300 pro- Palestine and Palestinian writers and academics. It’s a subscription and a writing boycott. I know it may seem a little like boycotts can feel a little maybe not that impactful, but I think at the very least that’s a good place to start delegitimizing the New York Times as an institution because I think there’s this idea that you can reform and I think an institution like New York Times is fundamentally unreformable. So seeking to delegitimize it, not like again, indulging it, not when someone gets a job or places an op-ed, you go, “Ooh, you in New York Times.” I think that mentality that we’re going to change it from the inside with an institution like that has to be gone.
So I would check out the writers against the war in Gaza and their boycott on New York Times. Actually going to do an interview with them on Tuesday talking about it because it is like a very, very, very first step. It’s obviously not like in and of itself that, but I think delegitimizing the institutions like the New York Times who, again, we can talk about their interventions where they, I believe, crossed the line into outright genocide, whether it was accusing Honorah, which does the aid and provides food and shelter of being Hamas by laundering bogus Israeli intelligence that fell apart in two weeks, whether it was again, promoting atrocity propaganda, whether it was doing the Al-Shifa hospital command and control center that looked like a bun villain layer and then they got there, nothing was there. The Washington Post debunked it. The New York Times kept trying to put lipstick on the pig for months.
But then this outright genocide denial on healthcare workers, they repeatedly militarized schools, places where people were sheltering children. Everything was a Hamas bunker or … So that would be the first step in my opinion. Secondly would be maybe doesn’t work towards accountability, but again, reach out to your local BDS coordinator, reach out to people who are attempting to delegitimize these institutions that seek their destruction and genocide and it starts there. But unfortunately we just need to be armed with the data and be armed with the critical analysis and seek to, within our own spaces, to push back on those narratives and to delegitimize platforms like the New York Times, who I thought who are uniquely high leverage and uniquely pernicious in selling this genocide.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s give it up for Adam Johnson, everyone. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast and thank you to the great Adam Johnson for this incredible discussion. Again, Adam’s new book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza and it’s out now with Pluto Press, so go get yourself a copy and thank you to Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse for organizing this really great event. If you want to get more coverage and hear more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Now. Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, your family, and your coworkers. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and go to the realnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really does make a difference.
For the Real News Network, this Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.
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