I don’t have that issue at all with it, and it’s a video. I have any of the reloading/resetting issues you have. It’s a static page for me.

Here is the text under the video: “The US-Israeli war with Iran is spiraling into a regional catastrophe, and the number of dead is rising quickly. While President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the war hawks in their cabinets are responsible for this illegal war, they are not the only ones with blood on their hands. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Abby Martin, host of The Empire Files, and Adam Johnson, co-host of Citations Needed, about how Western media and American politicians in the Democratic “opposition” have helped manufacture the conditions for war with Iran.”

Here’s a transcript of the video: The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome everyone to the Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Urged on by Israeli Prime Minister and Genes Adair, Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump thrust the United States into a war with Iran on Saturday, committing what critics say may be the worst foreign policy decision in history. US and Israeli forces have been accused this week of seemingly indiscriminate bombing of Iran as the country’s Red Crescents said that at least 555 people have been killed amid reports of fresh mass casualty attacks across the country. And now, a shocked globe watches in horror as the US-Israeli war with Iran boils over into a deadly regional disaster. Since the start of the war, Israel has sent troops into Lebanon and ramped up its illegal annexations of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.

Iran is retaliated by striking multiple US military bases in the Middle East, including facilities in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. The US military has confirmed that six American soldiers were killed in Sunday’s strike in Kuwait. Americans are being urged to leave 14 countries in the region because of serious safety risks. And the US embassies in Beirut, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are closed. But wait, it gets worse. As Stephen Prager reports at common dreams, at a briefing on Monday, as President Donald Trump unleashed what has been called a carpet bombing of Tehran, a combat unit commander reportedly told non-commissioned officers that the commander-in-chief was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth.” The complaint sent by one of those non-commissioned officers was just one of at least 110 similar reports received by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation since Trump first launched strikes on Saturday.

Regardless of the Trump regime’s saber rattling and half-baked justifications for this illegal war, it is clear that neither Trump, Netanyahu, nor Iran have the sole ability to control the outcome here. The proverbial Pandora’s box of war has been opened. A lot of people are going to die, and the geopolitical and economic shockwaves are already being felt around the globe. And to be 100% clear, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are the ones responsible for this war and whatever comes next. That is patently obvious, but they and their cabinets of warhawks are not the only ones with blood on their hands. And today, we’re going to talk about how Western media and American politicians in the supposed Democratic opposition have also helped manufacture the conditions for this war. And I’m extremely grateful to be joined today by two guests who are going to help us dig into this.

Abby Martin, legendary journalist, documentary, filmmaker, and host of the Empire Files, and Adam Johnson, writer, media critic, co-host of the Citations Needed Podcast, and a columnist for us here at the Real News. Thank you both so much for joining us today. I want to dive right in and focus on the media’s complicity in this US-Israeli war with Iran. So Adam, I’m going to toss it to you first and I want to ask you guys, in your assessment, how have legacy media outlets responded to the war with Iran over the past week? And what does that response tell us about the media itself?

Adam Johnson: Well, I think much of the heavy lifting was done prior to the bombing. Obviously, decades of anti-Iran-Iran sentiment and our media, there’s been this quote-unquote nuclear threat from Iran. I think the conflation of their civilian nuclear energy program with some sort of proto-nuclear bomb has been probably the most successful if you sort of polled. I talked to some pollsters about polling this question last June, and none of them ever did, but I think it’s actually quite urgent. And I’m going to tempt to try to get it pulled, but if you ask the average American, “Do you think Iran has a nuclear weapon?” My guess is you’d say probably 60, 70% would say yes. And you see this slip up all the time. I mean, either intentionally or unintentionally. CBS news under Barry Weiss claimed that Iran had one in one social media post two days ago.

But of course, there’s a fatwa against having a nuclear weapon in Iran. They’ve never built one. They have not had a nuclear weapons program. In at least 25 years, this is something US intelligence has affirmed over and over again. But this conflation of their civilian nuclear energy program, which again, dozens of countries on earth have without having a nuke, this is a very common thing, has been, and they’re right under the NFT and other international treaties to have that has been conflated as this constant ticking time bomb threat. I think that’s the primary core of anti-Iran propaganda because it’s not like obviously Iran doesn’t fund or arm Al-Qaeda or ISIS. As far as I can tell, it’s not invading California or New York. So to get the average American to care, they have to have this specter of a nuclear armed madman religious fanatics. And that has been kind of the central conflation.

They don’t make that clear. They repeatedly mislead people into thinking they have nuclear weapons. And I know the New York Times in several instances had to retract making those claims because it just becomes conventional wisdom. And I think that’s probably the single biggest fear-mongering thing one has seen over the last 10 years. It’s something I know that my co-host Nima Sharazi has written about for, gosh, almost 20 years now at this point. That is the central lie. And then of course you have these other lies, this idea that Iran’s the greatest exporter of terror, whatever that means, despite the fact that Israel has killed more American civilians in the past 30 years than Iran has. This is quantifiable. You can count them and look it up. Obviously, Iran supports Hezbollah to a much lesser extent Hamas, but that support is not very significant and also is not quote unquote terrorism in the sense that you and I would understand it in terms of these kind of Suni typically Al-Qaeda or ISIS types, which of course have been historically backed by many of Iran’s primary geopolitical enemies in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, et cetera.

So it’s mostly just kind of racist vibes. It’s sort of like they’re Muslim, they have a cleric and they’re adversarial to US and Israeli hegemony. Therefore, they’re kind of per se always about to kill grandma and attack you. But what’s remarkable about this is despite all that propaganda is how unpopular this is in the polls. There wasn’t a real concerted effort over several months to build. They made an effort by promoting these widely inflated death tolls of people that were killed during the crackdown in early January. I think even anti-government or anti quote unquote regime numbers put at the highest at four to 6,000, but then they started just making it 32,000 and then 50,000. I think some even auctioned off 60,000 because they wanted to have parity with Gaza. These numbers are obviously just not physically possible. That was the primary way they tried to propagandize people to sort of get the liberals to buy in or to care.

But what’s remarkable is how little it’s worked. There’s just broad fatigue around Israel. There’s broad war fatigue in the Middle East. Only 7% of Democrats support this war, which is very, very low. It’s actually, as I noted in my piece for the nation yesterday, that is three percentage points lower than the percent of Democrats who believe that Biden stole the 2020 election for Trump. I mean, it is very, very, very, or stole the election from Trump rather. It is very, very unpopular. More Democrats voted for Trump than support this attack on Iran. And it’s only sort of barely a plurality of support among Republicans. So one of the reasons there wasn’t, of course, a vote in Congress or much deliberation or pitch to the public is because they don’t really need the public’s approval. I think if Gaza and the genocide in Gaza showed one thing is that you can just assert these extreme mechanisms of violence.

And our media will protest around the margins. The New York Times editorial board opposed it, but they only posed it in process terms. They reinforced all the premises, evil dictator, crushing their own people, all the kind of … And so you can sort of create reality, and this is what Trump and what Israel and the United States are doing. They’re kind of creating reality. But Iran, unlike Gaza, has a way of meaningfully fighting back with respect to an Air Force and surface to surface and surfaced air capacity. So they are firing on US military bases. They’re going to obviously kill many American troops. And this is a reality. Again, even for people who are extreme regime change nut cases, they have hand wringing. They’re happy it’s happening. You’re kind of Atlantic magazine types, but your Anapplebombs or Elliot Kohns, they’re sort of hand

Yep, and what sucks, is that even tho you blocked them, they can still see all of your posts, and respond to them with the same attacks, but you won’t see it. Everyone else will. Lemmy is getting more and more toxic.

I did report, and did block. And I got harrassed for reporting. But all good, after blocking and ignoring, I have moved on.

Great points. I’ve seen people on here say that reddit is too conservative for them. Ok, if they think reddit is conservative, yeah, they are freaking extreme. So I think you make really good points!

This is the answer!

I don’t have an answer for you, OP. I will say that Lemmy is the angriest social media platform I have ever been on. I have never seen so many angry people who will actually stalk people (across mulitple posts) they disagree with, as I have seen on Lemmy. I’ve seen people here advocate for murder and torture of people and/or politicians they don’t agree with. It’s crazy!

Where ya been? See: !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

thx

Meh, I consider .world to be reddit. The rest of Lemmy is cool tho! :)

You’re right. Staying quiet is not admitting anything, but it does leave a false accusation hanging.

Calling everything AI does not stop AI. It only makes real artists want to stop sharing. That hurts the art community, it hurts Lemmy, and IMHO, hurts the world a little too.

My step-by-step posts were not made for @dontsayaword@piefed.social . I made those posts earlier to show new artists that ya don’t need lotsa money to make comics. I use the cheapest Amazon pencils and pens, take photos with my phone, and finish everything with free software on an ancient desktop. Photopea, GIMP, Linux Mint, free fonts.

My girlfriend’s daughter is 10 yrs old. Draws constantly. Today we’re gonna sit down to draw together because I bought her a new sketchbook. The odds of her making a living with art are already low. They were low for me too, but I was able to do it. Different world today, tho.

So she’ll probably draw for fun, and share things for free. Now imagine her opening the comments and seeing “AI slop” and “clearly AI” on something she worked hard on.

If kids and beginners get falsely called AI over and over, a lot of them will just stop sharing. That’s why I defended. :)

Nevermind! lol Just today: https://piefed.social/comment/10024544

Even after pics of my process from a blank piece of paper to posting it on lemmy. There are just some people that are gonna see ai everywhere they look. Glad I’m retired, cuz having these conversations in the workplace would have driven me crazy. lol

Maybe you are mistaking computer being used for post design clean-up/layout as ai. Because I have detailed what I do, step-by-step with pictures of my process: https://reddthat.com/post/59476267

And even more examples of my step-by-step processes:

https://reddthat.com/post/58923858

https://reddthat.com/post/58650560

https://lemmy.world/comment/21579257

I’m older than your grandma, and I’ve been a professional artist and writer for over 25 years. Long before ai.

Are you an illustrator or cartoonist or graphic designer? Because everything I do is very common in the industry. In fact, most cartoonist use the computer more than I do, because they sketch on the computer w a tablet, whereas I still do my layout w sketchbook, pencils, and pens, before I convert to electronic file.

If seeing me draw an image, step-by-step, then seeing me layout out my stuff on computer, step-by-step, then me telling you the fonts I use, the computer software I use, and my computer desktop system, fails to convince you, then nothing will.

I’ve literally showed my entire process.

It’s a quick one-panel gag comic, that you’re supposed to glance at for 10 seconds, maybe chuckle, and move on. It ain’t that deep or serious. I write, draw, and post comics all day every day, to my comm, !cartoons@reddthat.com. I’m doing my best to add original content to Lemmy to help it grow.

There’s really nothing else I can do about you insisting something is ai. That’s on you, not me. I wish ya luck out there, and I appreciated ya giving me your thoughts.

Well, it’s mostly a non-issue now that I have plenty of posts of my work process with pics of every step. I haven’t been accused of being ai for a bit now. lol

Thank you! I’ll experiment with that today. :)

Yep, a drabble is exactly 100 words, which I wrote for this project. Though I changed up the ending a little for the final project in my other post to make it stronger ending.

I write a drabble every single day, and have been for several years.

And “ickglob” just popped into my head one day (as do most of my ideas), so I have no explanation for that. But I love that it means “I believe” in German. I had no idea and have never looked it up. But knowing that it means that makes it way cooler to me now! lol

I’m using this community to experiment with storytelling.

It does to me. But usually, all it says to me is, “Goodbye!”

Just in case, ya should throw $10,000 at me so I can go fuck myself too.

Thank you! I’m trying to create these as formats that work best for phone scrolling/reading, but my layout makes for the worst thumbnails for the comm. I can’t seem to control what the thumbnails look like, so thanks for taking the chance and reading it! ❤️

As long as I can get overnight shipping…

❤️