Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Podcast, Episode 28
How to Sell a Genocide
Guest: Adam Johnson
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski with episode 28 of Antifascist Dad podcast. How to Sell a Genocide with Adam Johnson.
Adam Johnson: The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times I think really did cross into overt incitement such that I do believe they are fundamentally broken organizations that cannot be reformed. The fact that they're imperial laundromats for liberals is why they exist. It's why the New York Times exists. Right? It's fundamental to their program and has been for the last few decades.
Adam Johnson: You can't sell the Iraq war without the New York Times talking about yellow uranium or whatever in Iraq. You need them as a kind of, as a validator and as a high leverage intervention to justify things like UNRWA is Hamas, aid workers are Hamas. Al-Shifa is actually a secret command and control center. Mass rapes were Hamas policy. These fundamental axioms of genocide were essential to the genocide and they cannot exist without the New York Times. No other publication has that kind of credibility and gravitas and mainstream kind of truth curation that they have. It doesn't matter how sloppy their reporting is, how tabloid it is, how racist it is, how reliant on Israeli sources they are, how sleazy they are, how bad faith they are, because they are, they're all those things. And I document it very, very carefully. Their role is to sell the thing that's already been decided without your buy-in or consent. Their job is, it was very clear that on October 8th or 9th they were going to attempt to remove the population or to engage in widespread collective punishment. That decision was made. It was bought in by Joe Biden, it was bought in by Tony Blinken that they were on board for it. And then everything else followed from that. Then it was just about selling that, selling that genocide. That's why that's the name of the book.
Matthew Remski: For housekeeping, you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name and I'm at YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. The Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast where subscribers get early access to every second part of these main-feed episodes, including this one. And this is the last time I'll be able to say this. You can pre-order my book through the link in the show notes. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. It is published finally on April 26th.
So you just heard my guest Adam Johnson off the top there mentioning his book. It's called How to Sell a Genocide, and it came out yesterday. That's Tuesday, April 21st, from Pluto Books, with all royalties going to the Middle East Children's Alliance.
Adam is a media analyst whose writing has been featured in the Nation, In These Times, the Intercept, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle, but not the New York Times or Washington Post, as you can imagine from that opening clip.
But I have listened to Adam with his colleague Nima Shirazi on the excellent media criticism podcast Citations Needed for years now. That show is riveting. Can't recommend it highly enough.
And it's not only because of its withering insight into how legacy liberal center-left media, the papers and platforms and networks that all educated people are trained to respect and trust, routinely take dictation from government hacks to carry water for or run cover for the capitalist and imperial status quo, but also for its combination of deep research and acid humor. And with regard to that last aspect, you're going to hear Adam say a few times in this conversation, it's not about me. My feelings are irrelevant. Here's the data. And yet you'll also hear that he brings an emotional valence to this work that matches its grisly reality. And that affect, in my opinion, is the perfect foil for what he would call the fart-sniffing smugness of establishment journalism.
Now, I am so moved by that passion that I have to say that editing this interview is like being in the studio for some sort of jazz recording session, and it got me thinking more deeply about the communication styles that cut through noise. But to avoid gumming up this episode with too much of that, I just direct you to the Patreon episode that follows up on this interview. It's out now for subscribers, in which I contextualize what I think Adam achieves rhetorically against the liberal fog that he is battling.
Now onto the book. I'll give a brief summary here and then let Adam run with it in the interview. But because the interview is almost an hour, which is enough, but it also means that there are some key points that we don't cover. I'll come back after the interview to flag those.
How to Sell a Genocide is a data-driven indictment of the US establishment media's role in facilitating the destruction of Gaza. It analyzes over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV segments for language, sourcing, grammar, positionality and assumptions to find that center-left outlets provided essential PR cover for the Biden administration and Israel by constructing what Johnson calls moats of rationalization.
China help liberal audiences cope with the obvious and undeniable cruelty live-streaming into their phones.
Now Johnson indicts systematic dehumanization strategies, the ISIS-ification of Hamas via debunked atrocity propaganda and linguistic double standards where emotive terms like massacre or slaughter are reserved almost exclusively for Israeli victims.
He details and quantifies instances of shifting responsibility that create the illusion of a kinder, gentler mass death.
He talks about the smugness of what he calls faux-savvy realism or gee whiz, it's just so complicated. How could we ever change the status quo?
And as you'll hear, he also identifies three presidential archetypes: helpless Biden, fuming Biden, and third party -- I'm just a well-meaning umpire here trying to call balls and strikes -- which was used to distance the White House from the consequences of its material military support.
Now, as a control test, Johnson uses the empathy afforded to Ukrainians in the shadow of directly named Russian aggression compared to the natural disasterizing of Palestinian deaths. He writes about how campus antisemitism narratives have been used to criminalize anti-war dissent and neutralize domestic opposition.
For Johnson, our legacy media largely functions as an imperial laundromat, manufacturing consent for a genocide authored and defended by elite liberals. Here's my conversation with Adam Johnson.
Adam Johnson, welcome to Antifascist Dad. It's great to have you here.
Adam Johnson: Thank you for having me.
Matthew Remski: Congratulations. I need to say first off, on an incredible feat of data analysis and moral courage. It's like the two wings that make this book fly. Of course you've got a lot of support around you. You couldn't have done this alone. To whom are you in debt? That's where I want to start.
Adam Johnson: A lot of the reporting was done by my partner, Sarah Lazar, and a lot of the research and fact-checking was done by Thomas Birmingham, who works at In These Times, who's an excellent researcher and fact-checker. So they held up half the sky. It's a slog to write a book. I don't like to talk too much about process because my assumption is that people don't really care. But I worked in the restaurant business for 10 years and I'd have this really intense manager who'd always say at least once a day, never let them see you work. Nobody cares about the process. No one cares about how you got to work. It's kind of an oppressive employer thing to bully your employee with. But I actually kind of internalized it, maybe problematically so. So I never talk about process. But in this instance I have to give credit certainly where it's due. So there's certainly a lot of reporting that was done, as I acknowledge in the opening paragraph -- or opening, I think maybe the third paragraph of the book -- which is that this work is building off existing reporting and media criticism. I can list off some of those here. I do a quick acknowledgment that I did not invent all this a priori and I cite Breach Media out of Canada, Electronic Intifada, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Al Jazeera, Writers Against the War in Gaza, the Nation, +972 News, Mondoweiss, Truthout, Dropsite, Real News, In These Times, Prism News, and then there are others who I'm going to leave out. But basically there are independent left-wing media that had done media criticism, much of which I draw on and cite. And I tried to, in a way, kind of put it all together in one place. That was the goal of the book, was to create a one-stop shop, as it were. The original goal was actually going to be a report, but then we started working on it and said this is much bigger than a report. And also nobody reads reports. They kind of come out and they maybe they're cited or a couple of academics will put their hands on them, but it doesn't have a lot of popular appeal. So then we realized it's a book, it needs to have a narrative structure, it needs to make a sort of central argument, but it needs to not be one word longer than it needs to be. It can't be a lot of first person. I avoid any kind of solipsism or personal narrative because I'm not important. I'm a vehicle for the information. And so I think it's pretty lean. It's pretty to the point. That was how we wanted to do it. And it's very rich in data and evidence and citations and it's been fact-checked to hell and back. So we wanted to make it as rigorous and as able to stand up to scrutiny as possible. Because obviously there are people who don't want to believe our argument and wish to dispute our argument. Despite the fact that I think we show that the central premises are quite, I think, unimpeachable. And I think most people know that. I think that there's not a single reporter we talked to -- granted, sample bias, because they're willing to talk to us -- who wasn't like, yeah, obviously the media's bias against Palestinians, clearly. I mean structurally, institutionally, culturally, socially, just broad sort of chauvinism that pervades media outlets that de facto view their job as being aligned with the US or its so-called allies. And they'll criticize around the margins here and there, but fundamentally they view their job as being to support the powers that be. And so I think we show it quantitatively. I think we show how the output is biased and then we attempt to graphically show it. We have several graphs in the book that try to show this bias and then we try to explain why the bias exists, what the mechanisms are. We do reporting where we talk to many journalists who are in these newsrooms, pretty high-level sources at CNN, MSNBC, LA Times, and they explain how these processes happen, how the discrimination happened, how things got edited, how things got watered down. So it's both a reported piece and also a quantitative analysis.
Matthew Remski: Now, in speaking with your sources, the core of the story revolves around, as you're saying, the systematic dehumanization of Palestinian people who join a long line of groups dehumanized by the powerful. As you speak to your sources, as you start doing some conversations around this book, are you seeing more folks wake up to this fact? And what do you see that taking?
Adam Johnson: Waking up to the fact of a media bias? I mean, yeah, I think -- look, you can't have a genocide play out in 4K in real time with daily images of unimaginable horrors. We'll sort of stop it at the ceasefire, quote-unquote. I freeze the book after the first year, basically, because you have to stop it somewhere. When you write a book, you can't keep going. Over and over again for 15 months and then 20 months and then what ended up being 24 months before the so-called ceasefire. But of course, 750 people have been killed since the so-called ceasefire. But just even stopping the clock in October of 2025, you can't see that day in and day out and then hear the bromides and cliches about human shields and right to defend itself and all these kind of brainless thought-terminating cliches and not think: something doesn't really add up here, because the people I'm looking at don't really seem like they have much way of defending themselves on a basic intuitive level. And I think we all were -- I was -- you're fed this narrative about a bunch of cartoon jihadists who simply just hate Jews for the sport of it, or hate America for the sport of it. And they have no secular grievances, they have no dispossession, they have no land claims that were stripped from them, et cetera. And you sort of believe it. And then you start reading and you start looking into it and you say, well, that doesn't really seem right. And this is true, I think, with how anyone begins to dissect kind of US imperial dictates, whether it's Vietnam or the Iraq war or whatever have you. And then you spend 10 minutes looking into it and you say, well, this kind of doesn't really add up. And then from there I think you have to create a structure and explanation as to why it doesn't add up. And I think that on this particular topic it does get a little uncomfortable for people because it obviously can very easily veer into right-wing demagoguery, as a lot of right-wing grifters on social media have attempted to exploit this to that end. But ultimately any kind of sophisticated anti-imperialist lens will make clear what's going on. You sort of don't need this kind of mystical ZOG narrative. It's quite self-evident. And so I think that what the book attempts to do is it attempts to show that beyond a reasonable doubt that someone cannot look at this data, look at the double standards on display both with respect to Israel and Palestine, but also Ukraine -- the Russian invasion of Ukraine 18 months prior versus the destruction, the wholesale destruction and genocide in Gaza -- and not see the world's most obvious double standards.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Adam Johnson: Both editorially and in terms of pundits and coverage on cable news.
Matthew Remski: On one side you're saying that you can't watch this happen and unfold and listen to these bromides and not start to get suspicious. And then you said you take 10 minutes and you look into something and you start realizing that the tendrils of it all are falling apart. On the other hand, you spend an incredible amount of time and effort -- because I think it's needed -- to really pull apart how the illusions come together. And this method involves an extremely clinical approach to grammar, like the use of the passive voice and positionality of sources, the types of words used and how emotive they are. I hesitate to use this kind of overused metaphor, but it really feels like the process of data analysis is like looking through the Matrix code to see how the illusions are generated. Is that kind of what it feels like?
Adam Johnson: Yeah, because you have to quantify the thing that people kind of intuitively suspect. Otherwise it's just an assumption. And so, you know, you note the asymmetry of language is the most -- is kind of the easiest way to do it, or rather the most obvious. It's certainly not easy to actually tease out the data, but it's the most obvious, which is: Israel kills upwards of 20,000 children. The number is almost certainly double that. But just -- that's the actual -- because we don't. People die of starvation and secondary causes and die under rubble. We don't count that. But the number is conservatively 20,000 children killed. And yet somehow, in killing 20,000 children, according to the New York Times and ABC News and CBS News and CNN, they never once committed a, quote-unquote, massacre. They never once, quote-unquote, committed a slaughter, which is a pretty amazing feat, versus October 7th, which was, as we note, constantly referred to as a massacre and a slaughter. And the implication behind the asymmetry of this mode of words -- and this is pervasive elsewhere -- is that Palestinians kill for sport, for sadistic glee, for some sort of racial prejudice or posthumous glory of martyrdom. And Israelis -- and of course the United States more broadly -- only kill because they reluctantly have to. They have no choice.
Matthew Remski: They have to.
Adam Johnson: They have a heavy heart. They have a perpetual heavy heart. They always feel bad about it, they're always sad about it, towards pursuing some nominal military aim. And that central fiction is how you perpetuate this genocide. And it's a central fiction that was propped up by what I broadly define as center-left media. Obviously the right-wing media is just going to be mindlessly racist regardless of what happens. So that's kind of obvious, maybe, but that's not enough to sustain a genocide, especially in a Democratic presidential administration, which was the case for the first year of this particular genocide. You needed an alternative ontology, you needed an alternative moral ecology and framework whereby nonstop slaughter of Palestinians was an unfortunate result of some military campaign and October 7th was the result of a nihilistic, religiously fueled massacre for its own sake. And you could see this in the data. So, for example, we looked at the first 90 days, looking at emotive words. So the word massacre was used in reference to the killing of Israelis by the New York Times 124 times and 0 for Palestinians. Right. Keep in mind that within the first week, the death count was greater in Gaza than it was on October 7th. And then the Washington Post was 50 for Israelis, 0 for Palestinians. Politico was 12 versus 0, AP News was 80 versus 0, USA Today 33 versus 0. And CNN was 43 versus 0. So Palestinians were never afforded, in any of our analysis, the label massacre. Meanwhile, CNN had a few token Palestinian guests that did mention it, for a total of 16 times the word massacre was used to describe the killing of Palestinians and a total of 225 for Israelis. MSNBC was 177 versus 8. We see this repeated with also the word slaughter, which is 53 -- New York Times, 53 to 0. Washington Post, 25 to 0.
Matthew Remski: And we know that some of those distinctions are literally codified in style guides. We don't know all of how that works, but there are some indications -- there's leaked information about how that was actually formalized.
Adam Johnson: Right, yeah. So Mark Thompson, who's the head of CNN, sent out a memo on October 26th effectively saying that every time you mention the death count in Palestine, you have to mention the death count on October 7th. The idea is that this issue of First Blood -- which could really be its own book -- is so central to how you morally position the nonstop slaughter that no matter what happens, we must remind audiences that the Palestinians started it. Now, of course, never mind that the same number of children who died on October 7th died in the West Bank alone prior to October 7th in 2023 alone. Never mind the bombing in 2021. Never mind the bombing in 2018, the March of Return, which saw hundreds of people sniped, which Israel gleefully celebrated. Never mind the subjugation, the occupation. Never mind the starvation -- quote-unquote putting Gaza on a diet, as they called it. Never mind the various mowing-the-grass campaigns, the bombing campaigns in Gaza. There were several before October 7th. Never mind 2014, where upwards of 550 children were killed and 1,500 civilians were killed in a bombing campaign. It always has to start -- history has to start -- on the morning of October 7th. That is directed down from management at CNN. And CNN, just the same -- when you email them, and I asked them, because the New York Times did get back to my comments -- I said, why is it that only Palestinians can commit massacres and slaughters and Israelis can't? And this was posed to other New York Times reporters by Breach Media and others. And the basic answer they always give is: because it's different. It's just argument by racist tautology. Well, why is it different? It just is. Because they have embedded in their mind, either through Zionist indoctrination or war-on-terror indoctrination or whatever it is, that Palestinian violence necessarily and axiomatically must be gratuitous and pointless and purely based on -- it's for the lulz, right? It's terror for its own sake. And Israeli violence by definition cannot be. So you can kill 20,000 children, 20,000 children with lives and universes and mothers and fathers, create tens of thousands more amputees with no arms and no legs. Gaza has the largest population of child amputees in recorded history. And you can do that. And every one of those bombings, and every one of those murders, and every one of those sniper shots, and every one of those drone strikes, and every one of those instances of mowing people down as they waited for food at these so-called aid sites -- every single one of those was just a bumbling, unfortunate collateral damage of an otherwise justified military campaign. Now this does not pass the most basic sniff test. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up. And this asymmetry in coverage is predicated on these racist Zionist ontologies that by definition Israel cannot commit these types of massacres. Now they would maybe concede that some wacko JDL terrorist may have done such and such, the kind of fringes, but the IDF, the state, cannot commit massacres, it cannot really appear to commit rape even if it's caught on video. And to the extent to which they do commit these crimes occasionally, they won't be described in these emotive terms, these emotionally charged ways. And also they'll be dismissed as not essential or axiomatic to the system itself. And this is what I call the entirely asymmetric line-item veto. So morally speaking, you're permitted -- politicians in America, when asked about Israel, they'll say: what about them bombing this ambulance, or bombing a refugee camp and killing 500 people in one day. They're given an ever-expansive line-item veto. They can say, well, that was bad, we need to rein this in. This is an unfortunate excess. But I fundamentally blah blah blah support Israel's right to exist. Meanwhile, those who are perceived as Israel and the US's enemies, whether it be Hamas and Hezbollah, are categorically, ontologically evil. And you can't line-item veto that. Right? You can't go on a panel and say, well, yeah, they did some stuff on October 7th that I think is bad and they need to rein it in. But fundamentally they have a right to defend themselves. Right? You would be dismissed from popular opinion. And so there are all these double standards you're just constantly working against, where no matter how many people Israel kills, no matter how many people it slaughters or murders -- and this is true for the United States as well -- they're never seen as fundamentally bad. They're always kind of in need of reform. You know, you have these terms like rein them in, you know, get rid of Netanyahu and that'll solve the problem, even though he's frankly to the left of public opinion in Israel on this issue. I used to talk about this with Saudi Arabia, how Iran and these other regimes were ontologically evil, but Saudi Arabia, because they were a US ally, were always in a state of reform. They were on a 250-year reform plan and they were going to get around to it eventually, but you had to be patient with them. They were just an errant child. And you see this with Israel as well. They're never fundamentally bad. They're always in need of some kind of restraint or reining-in or like a 10% reduction. You'll see this a lot with a lot of the kind of revisionist liberal takes now, where they say, look, at first it was righteous. Israel had a, quote-unquote, right to defend itself. Capital R, capital D, capital I. Right to defend itself. But they killed too many. Rahm Emanuel recently said this on the Vox podcast -- but they killed too many Palestinians. And I always want to ask, what is the appropriate number of dead Palestinians, do you think? Is it 5,000? Is it 10,000? Because if they killed too many, by definition you have some number in your head about what would have been okay, right? And then you ask the corollary question to that, which is: how many Israelis deserve to be killed to establish Palestinian security? Is that 5,000? Is that 10,000? Is that 20,000? What's that number? So you have these brainless cliches people throw out to ameliorate cognitive dissonance and to ignore the difficult questions that are required to talk about a political solution to this particular so-called conflict.
Matthew Remski: There's a moment in which your name appears in that email inbox and whoever's supposed to answer it, they go, oh God, it's Johnson. It's Citations Needed. It's Breach. And there isn't the capacity to sort of get out of that particular mindset, which I feel is so culturally imbued with a kind of exceptionalism with regard to the established point of view. And it reminds me -- I feel that somewhere in my mind, I'm 10 years old, and if I think of the sort of graphic splash of the big three networks, you know, six o'clock newscasts, or the header of the New York Times, I'm immediately calmed by the feeling that the adults will now be telling me the truth about things. They have the correct words for things. They know how to frame and phrase the news of the world. It's an enormous sort of feeling that we have, I think collectively, or that a lot of people have, around legacy media. And I'm just wondering what -- like, you're describing the elements that make that up. But why do you think that feeling is so thick and stubborn for so many people? And what's the payoff for believing it?
Adam Johnson: There's no worse place to be than on the business end of a bipartisan consensus. So if both parties -- quote-unquote both parties -- in the United States support a war or a genocide or whatever have you, that's good enough for mainstream media. The Zionist project in Israel and the war state more broadly -- the American war state more broadly, which has 800 military bases throughout the world -- has long been a bipartisan project, just as English imperialism was a bipartisan project. You can go back and read -- I just finished reading Legacy of Violence, which is an excellent book on liberal imperialism in the 19th century. And the range of debate was not: should we be colonizing India? It was the Whigs and then later Labour saying, well, we need to do it more benevolently. We need to have a civilizing mission. We need to expose them to Christianity, we need to discipline them X percent versus Y percent. And the Tories saying, well, we need to have full state takeover and we need to discipline them. So the debate was: how do we do imperialism? That was the extent of the debate. And you can go back and read the debates that were happening, whether it was Edmund Burke or Benjamin Disraeli or then later the Labour Party. It was like, the civilizing mission was taken for granted. And when you have 800 US military bases throughout the world, it naturally follows that that will develop a moral ecology around it. And it's not that much different than 19th-century liberal imperialist ecology. It has many similar dynamics. There's a kind of vague civilizing mission. We care about democracy and human rights. We stand up for blah blah blah. You have Samantha Power, the kind of fatuous responsibility to protect stuff. And you fund all these NED groups, you fund these kind of good government groups, you fund these supposedly freedom and democracy groups throughout the world. And it becomes this sprawling moral regime of so-called alleged moral progress that just happens to have 15 aircraft carriers and be able to launch assaults anywhere and 5,000 nukes. Right? That is incidental. We're basically Human Rights Watch with nuclear weapons. And this framework begins to sort of inform an entire liberal worldview about our job as the reluctant empire. And you hear this too: if we didn't do this, it would be this other evil empire. It would be Russia or China. This is kind of the last liberal retort. When you basically call them violent hypocrites, they'll say, well, we're better than China. Well, you know, again, you can go back and look at the debates about why they should not outlaw slavery in the British parliament in the 1780s. And what was the number one argument? If we outlaw slavery, France will just have more slaves.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Adam Johnson: You know, the Ottoman Turks. Whether it's King Leopold II in the Congo -- what was this? British imperialism viewed itself as a better alternative to King Leopold. And indeed, Joseph Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness, constantly praised the British Empire for being benevolent. Meanwhile, he writes the most popular scathing critique of imperialism. But it's just the other guy's imperialism, right? And then what did King Leopold say? He said, oh, well, we're protecting them from Arab slave traders. And I'm sure the Arab slave traders had some other line they would give. And we could sort of keep going and going. But ultimately, it's the logic of the drug dealer: if I don't sell cocaine to these middle schoolers, someone else will. And so this logic becomes the animating principle of how those who grow up in that liberal milieu -- and I'm using lowercase-l liberal, right, kind of the Western liberal tradition -- everyone's a reluctant imperialist, nobody kind of wants to do it, but we have no choice. Everyone's very serious. You go to the same conferences, you go to CSIS and CNAS, you go to the same Davos. And everyone kind of has the same basic outline and outlook, and they have differences around the margins. But ultimately, we're the good guys. The West has a civilizing mission, and everyone who meaningfully fights back is ontologically evil and a terrorist, which is very coincidental. It kind of worked out well for them. That is just how they view the world. I don't think they put much thought into that. And so they internalize that long tradition of liberal imperialist arrogance when they begin to sit down and write these things. And this came up a lot with the word terrorist, which has a very interesting history in terms of editorial standards. So around 2015, both BBC and AP abandoned the word terrorist because there was a lot of scholarship and a big movement to say: look, this word is obviously just a racist watchword. It has no consistent application, it has no meaning, it has no epistemological value. It's just a boogeyman word you throw out to delegitimize certain violence over others.
Matthew Remski: Well, why did they listen to that scholarship to begin with? Because I remember that part from the book.
Adam Johnson: You know, sometimes the liberal state improves itself. It's not totally static. But then of course the New York Times largely abandoned it. In fact, the New York Times in the years prior to October 7th almost never used the word outside of quotes. It was viewed as being unserious and not really particularly necessary either.
Matthew Remski: Right?
Adam Johnson: And then on October 7th, they started using it hundreds more times because you realize you can't sustain this moral ecology without it. It doesn't really work without it. Without removing Palestinian violence from history and from politics and from secular grievances, you can't really justify any of these double standards you need to create. And again, Zionist advocacy groups worked for decades to create this category of terror and terrorism as something that is somehow intellectually useful as a moral distinction between our violence and their violence. And the way it was coded -- and the way I think on some intuitive level some people kind of embraced it -- was that they would have this image of like ISIS, right, attacking civilians or walking into a strip mall and killing people. And if that's the only context they used it in, they would A, have to apply it also to Israel bombing refugee camps. But B, you would really have to remove a lot of the supposed terror distinctions of the so-called Iranian proxies. Right? Like when they say Hezbollah's a terror group and they cite an example, what's the first example they always give? A, attacking US troops in Iraq, and B, attacking the Marine barracks in 1983 in Lebanon. Yeah, well, that's just attacking military targets. That's not terrorism in any kind of popular sense of the word. Right. But that's the beauty of the term. It's completely malleable. It can kind of mean whatever you need it to mean at the moment. That moral ecology is how you create this regime of double standards. And it's how otherwise kind of savvy -- and again, you see it with words like barbaric, like savage. I talk a lot about that because these are obviously very orientalist and racially coded and they're never used for Israelis and they're never used for Americans. But they're used repeatedly and quantifiably to reduce Hamas and Palestinian violence of any kind -- or whether it's PIJ or PFLP or whomever -- to this kind of Asiatic horde that is looking to invade our precious white West. And there's really no liberal reason why these terms should be used. They're very obviously racially coded.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Adam Johnson: And yet they're very popular and pervasive.
Matthew Remski: This notion that terrorist as a term is buried with a certain amount of criticism and opprobrium and real discussion of what it actually means. But then the contradictions that are revealed by October 7th mean that it has to be drawn out like some secret weapon. That's an amazing kind of moment. I think that's really telling.
Adam Johnson: Well, I mean, you know, there's a rise of other terms too that we quantitatively show. The most popular -- I think the most widely known -- is the Hamas-run health ministry pejorative.
Matthew Remski: Right, right.
Adam Johnson: It's the most bad-faith PR campaign ever. So prior to October 17th, the Al-Ahli hospital bombing, which is really the critical moment when the genocide gets cemented -- becomes inevitable -- ten days after October 7th, there was a massive explosion at Al-Ahli hospital. It is almost certainly caused by Israeli mortar fire. The conventional wisdom quickly becomes it's an errant PIJ rocket. Now PIJ and Hamas, just for point of reference, in the first three months fired 1,200 rockets that landed in Israel. So they actually made impact in Israel and they killed a total of 12 people. They want us to believe that one errant PIJ rocket landed in Gaza and killed between 300 to 400 people. That strikes me as pretty unlikely. But let's grant that. Let's say it exists in the fog of war -- we don't know. But what happened was the New York Times followed its traditional protocol and had a headline that said Israel bombs hospital. Something to the effect of Israel Bombs Hospital Killing Hundreds. According to Gaza Officials. This was the standard and remains the standard in every other war zone, whether it's Ukraine or in northern Africa or wherever people are fighting. They use the preponderance of evidence, cite attribution, and say X person bombed Y place. Then, once there's some ambiguity -- after Israel gets caught lying and making up phone calls -- there's some ambiguity about attribution for the Al-Ahli hospital bombing. The Zionist bully groups jump on this -- ADL, others -- call it blood libel, incitement. They create a successful bully campaign. And there are two major editorial changes that happened at the New York Times and at CNN. We know for sure, and almost certainly happened elsewhere. But those are the only ones we have documentation of. That is: A, from now on, after October 17th, the New York Times and CNN cannot attribute Israeli responsibility for a bombing until the IDF confirms it -- which is a new editorial standard heretofore unknown. So whenever Israel doesn't want to acknowledge a bombing because it looks bad PR-wise, or they can acknowledge it two weeks from now, they just won't take credit. Then you start to see the ubiquity of headlines like Blast in Gaza Kills 12, Explosion in Gaza Kills 15. Unknown origin becomes the sort of editorial ethos -- the natural disasterification, which is chapter four.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Adam Johnson: And then a second dynamic happens which is: from then on they have to credit the Hamas-run health ministry, with the obvious implication being that these are boogeyman terrorists who can't be trusted and are unserious and they inflate numbers. So basically these horrific numbers that are coming across your screen -- 200 dead, 300 dead, 500 dead a day in the first weeks and months of the genocide -- basically just ignore that, it's Hamas-run. And this is very effective at dulling the outrage. And what they didn't acknowledge was -- and this is where it's deeply, deeply cynical and, I think, very deliberate -- was that the Hamas-run health ministry figures had a history of being extremely accurate, if not undercounts. And we know that because they were used by the World Health Organization, they were used by the US State Department, they were used by Human Rights Watch. And then in the 2014 bombing, so-called Operation Protective Edge, there was a comparative analysis between the IDF's final numbers and the so-called Hamas-run health ministry and they were off by 7%.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Adam Johnson: So it's effectively a rounding error. So we know that these numbers had a history of being accurate. Everybody knew it. The State Department knew it, Tony Blinken knew it, Human Rights Watch knew it, everybody knew it. But then suddenly it was: oh, we have to cast aspersions on these numbers.
Matthew Remski: It's happening in the field of journalism. I mean, if all of these agencies are using Hamas numbers to begin with, and there's a history of that and they've been verified, then really the sort of wholesale invention of this phrase -- this deflectionary and discrediting phrase -- is a journalistic innovation that comes out of the collusion between these legacy platforms.
Adam Johnson: Yeah. And prior to October 7th, it had been used by the New York Times maybe once or twice in certain contexts, but from October 7th to October 17th it wasn't used at all. It was not on CNN, it was not on MSNBC. It was not used at all. And then once the Al-Ahli hospital bombing happens, there's a crybully campaign by these pressure groups like the ADL and others. Suddenly it's everywhere, hundreds of times, over the next few months. And this really becomes, when you realize -- oh, this is going to be a genocide -- they needed a rhetorical thingamajig to have liberals basically ignore the massive death count that was coming out of Gaza.
Matthew Remski: This is incredible because you're actually also saying that by tracking the language of how this is reported out, that this is kind of like a parallel track for determining the presence and existence of a genocide -- one that is running alongside whatever people are able to do with regard to counting bodies.
Adam Johnson: I mean, there were several different examples of this. Let's take for example the idea of a ceasefire being considered unserious or not morally defensible because such-and-such Hamas is blah blah blah, raped, murdered, did all this kind of boogeyman stuff that exists outside of history and outside of politics. I mean, obviously they murder people. Clearly that was not the precedent. So on October 7th, Tony Blinken tweets out a demand for a ceasefire, because that was protocol. That's what diplomats did, because they knew the only thing that comes from not doing that is just mindless bombing and violence. He quickly deleted it within hours. And then five days later, on October 13th, he issues a memo saying US administration officials are not allowed to use the word ceasefire. They're not allowed to use the C-word, because it had a very specific meaning and everybody knew what it meant. And there's a reason why Oxfam and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and the entirety of Palestinian civil society called for a ceasefire, because it had a precedent from 2021 and 2018, 2014, 2009. Right. But then we had to mystify it and rarify it. What is a ceasefire? I don't know, is it -- can you really have a ceasefire with -- and then people like Bernie Sanders go on CNN and CBS and do what I think was probably one of the most high-leverage, most unforgivable things, which is to affirm this position, to say -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- but: how can you have a ceasefire with a group like Hamas who seeks to destroy Israel? Right. Now, wait a second. When did this call for a ceasefire become a moral endorsement of a particular party? Palestinians are calling for a ceasefire and they're not endorsing Israel. So what does that even mean? But then it became this thing where it was like, you just fundamentally cannot have a ceasefire. And then once that became established as the mainstream left-wing opinion, the sort of far-left flank of acceptable opinion, then it was over. Then the genocide was effectively a fait accompli.
Matthew Remski: At that point, I want to turn back to some of the affect that covers this over, while also covering the ass of kind of liberal self-perception. And I think you cite Adam Curtis's concept of oh-dearism as a kind of strategy for positioning yourself in sort of moral righteousness, even though you're endorsing horrible things. And it seems to be effective because it identifies an affect of helplessness and apathy off the bat in whoever's commenting on the situation. It's like a kid saying aw shucks and kicking at the ground. Is that something that you had to sort of see and break through and feel its implications of?
Adam Johnson: Well, when you can't defend something on principle, what do you do? You try to make it a non-sequitur.
Matthew Remski: Right?
Adam Johnson: And this was something that was done very, very effectively, which is that, okay, clearly we can't defend this -- by December 2023 especially. You can't really defend this. So what you do is you have to make Biden appear helpless. He can't really do anything about it. He actually is -- he's changing things from the inside. He's doing a bear-hug strategy, right? He's actually wearing a wire for Amnesty International in these conversations. He's doing a Serpico deep-cover. So you have these alternative realities where he's upset about it. He's actually changing behavior from the inside. And this curated narrative is leaked by his aides to the New York Times, to Barak Ravid at Axios. So there's this kind of illusion of progress. So you don't really need to protest or shut down the airport or shut down college campuses because he's working on it, he's on it. He just needs a little more time. Then weeks go by, months go by and more dead kids pile up and you think, well, I don't know, man, this doesn't really seem very credible. And then they say, oh, actually, you know what, he actually can't do anything about it because if the US cut off Israel, they would just go to Russia or China. So you're just in what I call the moats of rationalization -- you're just inventing new arguments that are oftentimes just kettle logic. They contradict each other, right? So before it was: he shouldn't cut off weapons because he can change them more, or reform them more, if he's actually on the inside. And then it was: oh, he can't do it. And then it's: if he can do it, but he shouldn't do it because if he does it, Russia or China -- whatever -- there's always some bullshit reason why the US was helpless. And this need for helplessness was born from a PR necessity -- nobody could defend what was actually going on as such. So we had to come up with arguments by non-sequitur. And this was a huge market. Aaron David Miller, who's a total pro-Israel lobbyist effectively within the Democratic Party, becomes Biden's biggest defender. He writes pieces in Foreign Policy, he's quoted in, God, every goddamn New York Times article on this. Like, you know, Biden is seeing -- you get these very savvy articles about the limits of American power and how he's helpless to do anything. And Aaron David Miller would pop up and say, even if he wanted to stop him, he couldn't. And then he would have a throwaway line saying, well, he doesn't want to because he's deeply committed to Israel. And it's like, well, okay, so it's not a matter of can't, it's a matter of won't. And you had this sophistry just play out in liberal discourse over and over and over again. Meanwhile, just death after murder after murder, after starvation, dying of diabetes, being taken off dialysis, hospitals being bombed, medical workers being bombed, ambulance workers being bombed. And meanwhile this totally not-good-faith, fart-sniffing argument about what Biden could and couldn't do. And then later it's revealed, after Biden leaves office, Israeli officials outright say he never asked for a ceasefire. Obviously he didn't. He asked for better PR and they couldn't deliver it because they're run by a bunch of fanatics. And that was it. So it was a completely made-up narrative that did nothing but take pressure off Biden.
Matthew Remski: This is one of the most memorable parts of your analysis -- you create this sort of triple archetype that Joe Biden sort of plays out. It's like something out of Joseph Campbell, like three masks of the liberal hero. You say -- so you've already referenced the helpless Biden. But then there's also the fuming and deeply concerned Biden. And then there's the third-party, sort of standing outside, not quite trying to call balls and strikes -- the referee Biden. Can we just run through those? Because they're all working together and it seems like they provide these three sort of goalpost-changing opportunities for whoever's using them.
Adam Johnson: There was helpless Biden, which we've gone over, which is the idea that he can't do anything. Then there's fuming angry Biden, which there were dozens and dozens of stories -- which we document in excruciating detail -- of Biden-about-to-break-with-Netanyahu stories.
Matthew Remski: He's almost had it.
Adam Johnson: He's always almost about to break from them. And let me read some of those headlines. I think it's important to cite examples here to give a sense of. Here's just a handful of headlines I'll read. These are in sequential order starting in November of 2023 and going on throughout the year. The gap between Biden administration and Netanyahu government over Gaza future is widening. Ooh. Unprecedented tensions between White House and Netanyahu as Biden feels political price for standing with Israel. Biden running out of patience with Bibi as Gaza war hits 100 days. All right, he's almost there, guys. Just give it one more minute. Biden moving closer than ever to a breach with Netanyahu over his war. That was the Washington Post. CNN: How a brief exchange in a call explains the strained Biden-Netanyahu relationship. Okay, we're now in April of 2024, and we have Associated Press: Biden cajoles Netanyahu with tough talk, humanitarian concerns, but Israeli PM remains dug in. Well, darn it, he tried his best. Politico, March of 2024: From I Love You to Asshole -- How Joe 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. Says Politico in March of 2024. I guess nothing happened there. New York Times, May of 2024: The Long, Tortured Road to Biden's Clash with Netanyahu over Gaza. We're still clashing, we're still angry. And then, of course, New York Times, August of 2024: Killing of a Mosque Leader Fuels More Tension Between Biden and Netanyahu. So they're always asymptotically about to break up, but somehow mysteriously never do.
Matthew Remski: You know, the other thing that happens there is that I think they have to create a kind of soap opera between these two individuals to divert attention from what's being live-streamed on social media.
Adam Johnson: Yeah. And so you can look up the sources of these stories. Right. This is important. 94, 93, 92% of them, depending on which of these three tropes we're looking at, are sourced from Biden aides or Biden media allies. They're just obviously working this narrative to create the illusion of tension where there is none, to get pressure off Biden to do an actual arms embargo -- which was the demand from every single humanitarian, medical, and Palestinian group on Earth -- because they didn't want to do that. So you had to relieve pressure. And this idea of tensions and about-to-be-breaking-with was essential to kind of -- again, you would see this. There would be protests, there'd be activists, people would light themselves on fire. And then in response people say, look at this article in Politico, they're about to break up. There's tension there. Look at this article in the New York Times.
Matthew Remski: As if Joe Biden watched Aaron Bushnell go up in flames and said, God damn, I really have to talk to Bibi one more time.
Adam Johnson: I'm almost there. Right. Well, and that's the thing, is that there's no evidence of any of this. There's no evidence of any meaningful break. Now, to the extent to which there was tensions, and I'm sure there was, it was: Bibi, can you stop killing as many children? Can you sort of help me out PR-wise? But that's not really a break. That's just about optics. That's not a material change. And that's the thing. These articles never -- nothing ever changed. I compared them to a sketch. It's just the same bit over and over again in the course of my research, a year. But of course it went on much longer than that. In fact, they still do it for Trump. They'll still do kind of helpless or angry Trump articles too.
Matthew Remski: You use this metaphor of sketch versus -- I mean, the opposite is what -- the play, the fully formed narrative -- it's a plot, it moves forward. Things change. A sketch, nothing changes. It's just the same gag over and over again. And now sketches aren't supposed to last more than five minutes, but this lasted for 15 months, and we got the same article over and over again, and nothing ever changed. And you would think that an editor worth their salt would, after the 15th angry Biden story, when Barak Ravid or Peter Baker at the New York Times pitched it to them, they'd say, I don't know, guys, you've been writing this one for like a year now. Nothing's really changed. Are we sure this is a reflection of reality and not just spin that's being spoon-fed, baby-bird-fed to us? But no, they just kept publishing. And Peter Baker in May of 2024 did one of these -- I read off one of those headlines -- angry, helpless Biden is upset with Netanyahu. And then he makes the argument that it's actually working. And the reason he cites is that Israel has postponed its invasion of Rafah indefinitely and that this is evidence that his bear-hug strategy is working. Now, two days after that article published, Israel invaded Rafah and killed thousands of people. A city of 850,000 people is now a desert. It's the dark side of the moon. No one lives there anymore. So was the purpose of that article to accurately reflect a genuine break between the two, or was that article to effectively provide PR cover for what everybody knew was about to happen by distancing the White House from the carnage in Rafah and elsewhere? And I think the answer is pretty obvious. I think the purpose of those stories, in retrospect especially, is so bleedingly obvious. And it was to distance the White House from the carnage it kept arming, funding, and militarily supporting, because they could not withstand the pressure in the United States, where the unpopularity of this was obvious. It was obvious from the get-go. And so they built up an alternate reality based on what was effectively just theory of mind and court gossip. And it worked. That's the thing -- it worked. It mostly got them off their backs, as did their ceasefire rebranding in March of 2024, when they just effectively redefined ceasefire to mean Hamas surrender. And then that mostly worked. It got people off their back. And then this sort of culminated with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the DNC in August of 2024, which I witnessed myself. I was writing for the Nation, and I was there at the United Center in Chicago. And she said that Kamala Harris was tirelessly working -- tirelessly working -- on a ceasefire, which of course was the central lie of this administration, which existed to get pressure off of them. And by saying that, you effectively call all the protesters outside and all the Uncommitted movement morons, because why would you protest something if they're tirelessly working for it? It doesn't make any sense, right?
Matthew Remski: In fact, you're going to inhibit their tireless work if you keep protesting. You're going to get in the way.
Adam Johnson: You're going to get in the way. And that was deeply offensive to a lot of people, I think, for very good reason, because it effectively trivialized the protest movement, which was premised on the assumption -- or the belief, which is obviously empirically true -- that they were not pressuring Israel for a ceasefire. A fact later confirmed by Israelis themselves. And you didn't need to be a genius to know that it was obvious at the time that he wasn't genuinely pressuring for a ceasefire, because he never threatened to withdraw weapons. And that's the only -- if you really care about something, you use your leverage. And the fact that he preemptively and fundamentally never used leverage meant that all the rhetoric and all the posturing and all the huffing and puffing was theater. It was for PR. That was all it was ever for.
Matthew Remski: I've been listening to you for years, Adam. And what I consistently hear is a kind of burning, white-hot rage that is responding to all of these pretenses. And you can do this in a podcast, you can do it in magazine articles, you can do it in a book. I want to get your opinion on whether anyone is able to do this -- or is anybody doing this -- as a beat reporter who relies on access, or in the on-the-ground press pools that we're hearing from. Like, is there a way in which in-person manners helps dig these moats of rationalization?
Adam Johnson: I mean, there is some decent reporting at some mainstream outlets. But it's very rare. And I really try not to flatten everything. Like, I would say some of the reporting done, for example, by Evan Hill at the Washington Post to debunk the Al-Shifa Hospital command and control center narrative was genuinely very useful. But that's very rare. It's very hard. Those people don't usually last very long. They're usually filtered out in the hiring process. Because when you write for a serious publication -- a capital-S, capital-P serious publication -- you have 10 years of auditioning for that role. And you audition for that role by doing very specific things, by signaling very specific ideological commitments, and by limiting what you investigate and what you report on to very specific things. So that's done through a filtering process. This is not a unique observation. This is manufacturing consent 101. It's kind of done through a filtering process. They're obviously not going to bring someone in to the New York Times who -- you can be in the IDF, right? You can be a prison guard and run the Atlantic magazine. You can be in the US military. You can be Jim Sciutto, who worked at the State Department in public relations between stints at ABC and CNN. That's fine. But you can't have any affiliation or sympathy with any quote-unquote enemy states or even a political party like Hezbollah in Lebanon. If you're just from a family that's a member of Hezbollah, which a quarter or a third of the country is, you're considered a boogeyman terrorist who can't be trusted. Whereas of course that same standard doesn't apply to anything involving the US military or Israel. And Writers Against the War in Gaza have done excellent work documenting this double standard. So it's all filtered out. I mean, the New York Times relied -- in their mass rape story from December of 2023, Screams Without Words -- the Israeli reporter they relied on was routinely liking genocidal comments on Instagram and Twitter. I mean, comments about making Gaza a butcher shop and all this other sort of extreme rhetoric. That's never going to disqualify her at the New York Times. And the double standard is patently obvious and everyone sees it. And so the way you ideologically discipline is through selective evocation of universalist cliches, right? You can't say -- if I'm the New York Times, right, I'm supposed to be cosmopolitan and universalist and highbrow and thoughtful and I'm supposed to be liberal. And liberalism is fundamentally an alleged universalist ideology. So you can't just say, ah, might makes right, I'm a Zionist, fuck all the Arabs, whatever, I support Israel. Like, you can't do that. So what you do is you have to selectively evoke ostensibly universalist principles. Well, I don't support killing civilians. Well, Israel killed 20,000 children. Well, that doesn't really count. That was an accident. They didn't really mean to. They had no choice. All the children were maliciously put on top of the bad guys underground. Okay, well, that seems a little pat, but sure, right? I don't support terrorism. What does terrorism mean? I don't really have a definition for it. Why do only Palestinians commit massacres? I don't know, they just do. There's no reconciliation with the fact that they're just ideologues. They're just ideologues who support the Zionist project. They support US imperialism. They support the sort of Western ideal of imperialism. So they can't say that. So they have to reverse-engineer these elaborate sort of pseudo-universalist principles. And that contradiction just can't be reconciled with what we see. And that's why they sort of just don't answer questions. Like, getting the New York Times to even reply to me was very hard. They won't really reply to you. They don't talk to you. And when they do, it's usually through pro forma language. And what they always do is hide behind this: well, we get criticism from the Israel side all the time. And we do our best. They do this golden-mean bullshit. We do our best to strike the right balance. And it's like, yeah, because they're a bunch of ref-working fanatics. Of course they're just going to bully you. I mean, conservatives think that liberal media is always out to get them. I mean, that's their job. Their job is to constantly work the refs. That's what they do. That's what they're paid to do. So that's not a meaningful indicator of your objectivity. And so they invent this universalism that is complete horseshit. It's not something anyone takes seriously. It's not something anyone outside the Beltway or Tel Aviv takes seriously. Everybody knows they're wanton hypocrites. That, I think, is how you sort of maintain this ideological conformity. And especially in a publication like the New York Times where there's basically no dissent from that uniformity -- they'll occasionally have a kind of op-ed where they allow something remotely subversive once every six months to cover their ass. Or later, when they're accused of pro-Israel bias, they can point to it and say, oh no, no, we had this person or that person say something vaguely negative. And it's mostly just box-checking. It's very sophisticated propaganda. I mean, they're not amateurs. They've been doing this a long time. But if you read the totality of their coverage, it is overwhelmingly genocidal. Which I go into in chapter five, I think -- basically dedicated entirely to the New York Times. The ways in which they boosted the UNRWA is Hamas and Al-Shifa is Hamas narratives was, I thought, crossed the line from kind of normal bad coverage, racist coverage, into outright genocide incitement.
Matthew Remski: Last question, Adam, and it follows up from this. I came away from this book feeling more than ever that in matters of capitalism and empire, North American legacy media is broken, like beyond repair. And you and I do different things. But we both freelance, we both podcast, we both blog, we work on social media. It's not a lot. I think it can be lonely. I think we probably have similar sorts of mental health challenges, but it is simply what we have to build from now. Is that your feeling?
Adam Johnson: Yeah. I mean, it is what it is, right? How I feel is irrelevant to what is. And unfortunately, we just live in a sprawling, flailing empire that is accelerating its violence, accelerating climate change, accelerating inequality. And the media, such as it is, broadly exists as an elite establishment to provide PR cover for those forces, especially with the more ideologically accelerated Zionism. And you can't reform that. I think what you can do is try to give tools to people within those systems to push back. You know, people have said they found some of my reporting useful in other reporting. I don't want to act like I'm the one doing it. In other reporting, they found it useful. In other research by academics, they found it useful to have those debates within editorial board meetings. And it's a gradient. You know, some publications are not as bad as others, and I don't want to flatten it. And this is why I do put the New York Times in a separate category of bad. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times I think really did cross into overt incitement such that I do believe they are fundamentally broken organizations that cannot be reformed. The fact that they're imperial laundromats for liberals is why they exist. It's why the New York Times exists. Right. It's fundamental to their program and has been for the last few decades. You can't sell the Iraq war without the New York Times talking about, you know, yellow uranium or whatever in Iraq. You need them as a kind of validator and as a high-leverage intervention to validate things like UNRWA is Hamas, aid workers are Hamas, Al-Shifa is actually a secret command and control center, mass rapes were Hamas policy. These fundamental axioms of genocide were essential to the genocide. And they cannot exist without the New York Times. No other publication has that kind of credibility and gravitas and mainstream kind of truth curation that they have. It doesn't matter how sloppy their reporting is, how tabloid it is, how racist it is, how reliant on Israeli sources they are, how sleazy they are, how bad faith they are, because they are -- they're all those things. And I document it very carefully. Their role is to sell the thing that's already been decided without your buy-in or consent. Their job is -- it was very clear that on October 8th or 9th, they were going to attempt to remove the population or to engage in widespread collective punishment. That decision was made. It was bought in by Joe Biden, it was bought in by Tony Blinken. They were on board for it. And then everything else followed from that. Then it was just about selling that, selling that genocide. That's why that's the name of the book.
Matthew Remski: Adam, I've got to thank you for your work a thousand times over. I think a lot of people will be really grateful to see what they have intuitively felt in their media environment just sort of represented back to them in hard data. I really hope you keep safe. I hope you're able to continue doing what you're doing for a very long time.
Adam Johnson: Well, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.
Matthew Remski: So that was a lot. And while I think we gave a good overview, there are some key findings that I want to flag and tack onto the end here that I don't think we really got to the heart of. And I'm doing this at the risk of exhausting your bandwidth, but also because I just think this book is so powerful, I want to get all of its main points on blast. So briefly, three other themes that Johnson develops that we didn't significantly touch.
The first one is comparative human value. Now in chapter eight of this book, Johnson shows the prioritization of institutional politics and antisemitism show trials over the lives of Palestinian civilians. And the test case here is the coverage of Harvard President Claudine Gay with that of Hind Rajab, between December 5, 2023 and January 5, 2024. This is a period during which over 3,000 children were killed in Gaza. Gay's professional struggles received far more media attention. And Johnson says that this is part of a kind of selective empathy and the humanity gap that allows legacy media to frame campus protest issues as more newsworthy than industrial-scale slaughter.
Now in chapter five, Johnson shows the coordinated effort to obscure the landmark ruling from the International Court of Justice that was issued January 26th of 2024, that examined genocidal statements made by Israeli officials and concluded that a genocide was plausibly unfolding. Only hours before, this story was kind of preempted by Israeli allegations regarding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. The allegations were that some members of the staff were linked to the October 7th attacks. And major outlets like the New York Times and CNN ran with these unverified allegations, which created a PR counter-narrative that pushed the International Court of Justice ruling off the front pages. And Johnson details many similar examples, but spends a lot of time on this one as particularly illuminating of how legacy media manages unwanted information through selective headline prioritization and sourcing.
And then with chapter nine, Johnson shows how highbrow liberal publications -- specifically the Atlantic -- provided intellectual cover for the genocide through soft-pedaling mass death. And central here is the concept of day-after wishcasting, where the media focuses on future political scenarios as a strategy to ignore ongoing atrocities. This narrative mode allows liberal intellectuals to engage in abstract debates about civilizing missions and reform, while Palestinians in the day, in the moment, in the hour, are starved and bombed. And often the framing is of a conflict between civilizations where the West represents the reluctant benevolent force dealing with the forces of irrationality. And Johnson talks about how this focus on future political solutions functions as a kind of non-sequitur that avoids the immediate need for an end to hostilities, for a ceasefire. So this is the specific output of publications that cater to the Democratic Party intelligentsia, and to this wishcasting that Johnson describes. He also talks about the trivialization of the protest movement by suggesting that the administration is tirelessly working for a future peace. And ultimately these outlets rationalize the genocide by framing it as a necessary step towards this idealized day after, and it becomes a genre of commentary that provides a sophisticated moral and even spiritual bypass for those who would otherwise oppose genocide.
Okay, as I said, the Patreon bonus -- kind of a coda essay -- is up now, where I flip into examining the affect it takes for data like this to break through. Adam has a way about him, and I'll be analyzing how it works through a kind of dead-serious irony and absurdism. And to set that up I'll be looking at the institutional manners and affects -- the habitus, to use Bourdieu's term -- that it cuts through. So you can subscribe to Patreon for instant access to that and help fund this project. Or you can wait for it to appear here in the main feed, because you know I'm a big softie and it'll be out here as part of the educational project of this podcast before long. Until then, take care of each other.
