News Brief: Pundits Speed-Run 15 Months of Iraq War Propaganda for Iran in 5 Days
Citations Needed | June 17, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener-funded, so all your support is incredibly appreciated. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations Needed, and, Adam, today, we are continuing to cover what we are seeing in the media and political discourse around ongoing Israeli war crimes in Iran, the bombing and attacking of Iran, of civilian centers, of its infrastructure and the attendant and all too unsurprising, sadly, way that the media is framing these Israeli attacks and Iranian response and retaliation and self-defense. And we are seeing all of the tropes. We are seeing all of the talking points that we have not only discussed on Citations Needed now for eight years, but what people who have covered Iran, people who have covered media coverage of, quote-unquote “foreign policy,” certainly media coverage of anything that Israel does, we are seeing this play out. I have been covering this now for nearly 20 years myself. We are literally seeing the checklist of common stereotypes and tropes and narratives play out daily in our media.
Adam: Yeah. So we are speed-running every argument for the war in Iraq, which took about 15 months, in about five days with respect to Iran. It’s not universal. There’s been some pushback in the CIA sort of world vis-a-vis David Ignatius of The Washington Post, but there’s a lot of people itchin’ and gunnin’ for regime change in the administration as well, of course, in US media. So let’s break down what those primary talking points are and why they’re bullshit. Number one, this idea that, this sort of ticking time bomb narrative, this 24, Jack Bauer is looking, you know, sort of hunting in Iran for some nuke that’s about to go off, and that they must bomb Iran, and therefore overthrow the regime because they not only have, or are about to have, they’re always kind of, again, two to four weeks away, or two days away, or three days away, or months, quote-unquote, “months away” from having a nuclear weapon. And then presumably they’ll use it. They’ll lob it at Tel Aviv and, I guess, Washington, DC?
Nima: Well, right. That’s the kind of often unspoken, but also frequently spoken, idea that were Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, something they have never attempted to do. They don’t have a nuclear weapons program. This has been affirmed time and again, including by the US intelligence services. But let’s say all the things that are not happening happened. And the, what we hear all the time, the mullahs, spooky word, foreign religion, the mullahs in Iran would not hesitate, we hear this all the time, would not hesitate to use that nuclear weapon against, you know, its suspected targets, in Israel, in the United States, in Saudi Arabia, around the region, around the world, and that, you know, it would not be acquired for deterrence, for power, for power projection, for self-defense. No, no, no. This would be an Islamic bomb that would instantly be dropped on all unsuspecting, peaceful, peace-loving civilians around the world.
And we’ve seen all of these tropes. I’ve been covering these tropes for well over a decade. You know, whether it is the ticking time bomb or the nuclear negotiations. The clock is ticking. We’re going to get into the more recent examples of this. But just for some context, as far back as 1992, the New York Times was reporting that, in light of then-accusations over Iran’s atomic ambitions, obviously, this was over 30 years ago, but of course, they were just years away from getting a bomb, if not weeks. The New York Times reported, again, this is 1992, that the Israeli government of then Yitzhak Rabin had the, quote, “sense that the region’s nuclear clock is ticking,” end quote. Later, in a 1996 speech before a joint session of Congress, then-Likud leader and now currently still Likud leader and Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, warned, again, this is in 1996, that, quote, “if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind,” end quote. He added that Iran must be prevented from, quote, “acquiring atomic power,” lamenting, of course–what else, Adam? — quote, that “time is running out,” end quote.
Adam: Yes, and so we’ve been hearing this song and dance for years, but now, because Hezbollah has been weakened, Iran’s ally in Syria is no longer, and Gaza is, of course, completely decimated and subject to an ongoing genocide, Israel feels like it’s time for regime changes now, so it must manufacture an urgent, sort of ticking-time-bomb threat. Now this is obviously total fiction. We talked about this last week. We had some comments. People have been like, Well, what about the IAEA report? I don’t know. That could have been days away. So to those skeptics, those who think that we’re sort of being pollyannaish about Iran’s evile intentions, don’t take it from us. Don’t take it from left-wing polemics. Don’t take it from the suspiciously Islamically named Nima Shirazi. Take it from the US intelligence officials, who CNN found a leaked intelligence report and published it on Tuesday, June 17, that said, quote,
US intelligence assessments had reached a different conclusion — not only was Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing, according to four people familiar with the assessment.
Unquote. So I believe in ours, we were like, Yeah, maybe they’re a year way. Turns out we were too conservative. Turns out they’re actually three years away, which, by that logic, pretty much a dozen, two dozen countries are three years away, right? It’s sort of, I mean, it’s a meaningless concept.
Nima: Not only is it a meaningless concept, it also assumes that it’s three years from a starting point that has not started yet. It’s not three years from today. It’s three years from when the Iranian leadership decides to militarize and weaponize its civilian, peaceful, safeguarded, heavily-monitored nuclear-enrichment program. If that decision is made, which has not been made, according to US intel assessments, and this has been consistent for decades–decades! — that it has not made that decision. Iranian leadership is not building a bomb, is not enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels. We hear this a lot in news reports, Iran has been deemed by the IAEA to have been enriching uranium to higher levels than before. Which, fill in the blank. Ooh. You mean nuclear-bomb grade? No. No. To 60%, which is used as a bargaining chip, right, higher than the, say, 3% that it takes to run a nuclear power plant. Higher than the, say, 5% or so that it takes for cancer treatment isotopes. Yes, to 60% right? Which seems like a lot, that is a lot. But uranium needs to be enriched to 90% to be used in a nuclear weapon.
Iran has never done that and never been accused. I want to stress that. Never even been accused of producing weapons-grade uranium. So when you hear that they are producing more highly-enriched uranium than before, well, sure, because they want to strike a deal that allows them to continue domestic enrichment, because that is part of how they maintain their independence from the nuclear apartheid system, which is run by a lot of Western states primarily, deciding who gets to have nuclear power and who doesn’t. If you have domestic enrichment, right, you are able to produce that fuel to power power plants in your own country, you are then not susceptible to being cut out of that system. You are not susceptible to sanctions in that area. You are not susceptible to being cut off from acquiring that fuel and having your power plants shut down by the US or others and so you do that domestically. That is what Iran insists on. It is not budging on that. It never has. Once it made this decision, once it knew it was not going to get international cooperation for its nuclear program, which, as we’ve said before, Adam, should be guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They are guaranteed international cooperation, which they have never gotten.
Adam: For the millionth time, we will point out that Israel does not ascribe to any of these safeguards whatsoever, and has undeclared nuclear weapons.
Nima: Right. Israel not only has no safeguards over its nuclear program, they also have an arsenal of probably far more than 100 nuclear bombs, totally unmonitored, unsafeguarded. This is very rarely, if ever, discussed in the press. And so, just to stress again, dear listeners, Iran does not have an active nuclear-weapons program. It probably never has. And even assessments by the US intelligence services, that has confirmed that Iran is not quote-unquote, “weeks away” from having enough nuclear fuel enriched to 90% weaponized levels to create, you know, however many nuclear bombs. No, no, no. The US Intel agencies say, at most, it’s about three years away from doing that, from the point that it begins doing that, which it has not begun.
Adam: And this leak clearly came from the CIA. I mean, who thinks Israel is completely batshit. So critical support for the CIA, I guess. And let’s talk about the–uh-oh, Citations Needed canceled.
Nima: You heard it here first.
[Laughter]
Adam: Let’s talk a bit about, so whenever the US wants to overthrow a government, what’s the first thing one sees? Typically, it sort of trickles in over a few years or months, but you start seeing the stories about how effectively the government that we wish to destroy and the society we wish to collapse, is actually one big hostage situation where the Regime, the the capital-R Regime, has everyone in basically a big prison. And if we kill the prison guards, they’ll be liberated and be free. And so the people secretly yearn for Israeli and US bombs. And there were two cartoonishly dishonest, lurid, corny, disgusting articles that came out that we want to focus on, that paint this narrative in a way that is not sourced. I mean, literally, citations needed. I mean these are, both the Economist and Washington Post article will discuss have no sourcing whatsoever. They’re just vibes, okay.
So let’s start with the Economist, which did, of course, The Economist was, if you recall from our episode on the Economist, was central to the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973 and, in fact, distributed copies of the Economist to the generals in the military. After he was killed by junta forces in 1973, their Latin American editor cheered in the halls of the Economist back in London. So this is, obviously, the Economist has supported coups in Venezuela. Supported coups in support of the Iraq war. You name it. The Economist is an imperialist rag. Everybody knows that. But it’s read by sort of aspirational liberals who sort of want to be in the know. So we have this article, “Will Iran’s hated regime implode? Its default is to defy aggressors, not to capitulate,” unquote. So clearly, they’re asserting a premise here, which is, Iran’s regime is hated.
Now, you’re probably wondering, what Pew poll or what survey or what Harvard study are they citing to show that the regime is hated in any sort of existential way, right? Sort of versus, you know, a lot of Americans hate Trump or hate Congress, but obviously there’s a huge gap between that and wanting China to bomb us and overthrow the government, right? Those are sort of two distinct things. But when you’re doing the orientalist navelgazing, you conflate those two things, internal and organic discontent with whatever the government under the target in the crosshairs of US empire is, suddenly becomes the same thing. You hate them, and you pray for Zionist bombs to come blow up your fucking apartment building to liberate you from this hostage situation.
Nima: So with that in mind, this is what the Economist published on June 16, 2025. Adam, as you said under the headline, quote, “Will Iran’s hated regime implode?”
Adam: “Hated regime.”
Nima: Indeed. And the article begins like this, quote,
Iran’s regime is often described as decaying, corrupt, bankrupt and despised by its citizens. Is it about to collapse? Israel’s shock-and-awe campaign continues relentlessly: on June 16th it said it had “full air supremacy over Tehran”. Cars have streamed out of the city in recent days (pictured below). Its shops are shuttered. On social media some Iranians have celebrated the assasination of their generals with emojis of barbequed meat. The humiliation illuminates the failure of the regime’s military strategy and, some hope, may trigger an uprising or a coup d’état, in turn creating chaos or national renewal. Yet Iran’s default is to defy its aggressors, not to capitulate. And an extended war with large civilian casualties could act to rally public opinion in an intensely nationalistic country, allowing the regime to survive and redouble its efforts to race for a bomb.
End quote. Okay, so this is, like, 100% horseshit. Every fucking sentence.
Adam: So we’re vibing here, man, we’re just, this is like going to a tarot-card reader.
Nima: Oh, yeah. The Iranian people are just diggin’ having bombs dropped on them. They really love this.
Adam: And you would think that if you have a headline that says, “the hated regime,” right, that is sort of existentially hated in some meaningful way. And I, you know, the Economist, I think, okay, they have some bullshit study they cooked up by the State Department or some pro-Israel organization that shows, you know, 51% — no, they don’t even do that. They don’t even fucking bother. They’re just like, Yeah, they’re hated. And what’s your basis for this? Because, quote, “on social media, some Iranians have celebrated the assassination of their generals with emojis of barbecued meat,” unquote. Now, I don’t know about you, but random social media accounts claiming to be from Iran, which may or may not be. Was it two? Was it seven? Was it 100? What does that mean?
Nima: Oh, you don’t know that, Adam? If one allegedly Iranian person posts one emoji, that actually speaks for all of us. You know that, right?
Adam: We really shouldn’t have elections anymore. We should just count the nominal tweets from people in the United States and see what the sentiment is and do a sentiment analysis, and just have that be whatever policy we have.
Nima: So now we are moments away from a new Iranian uprising or coup d’etat because, the Economist tells us, it is not being bombed that is going to have Iranians rally around their country, their communities, their families, their neighbors, their people. No, no, no. It’s that the capital-R Regime is exploiting this moment to quote, “rally public opinion in an intensely nationalistic country,” end quote. So again, this, you know, mysterious Persian nationalism, you know, Oh, wow, they are a fiercely nationalistic people. We have millennia of history going back. Yeah, people don’t like being bombed. People don’t like fucking being bombed.
And so NPR did this as well, publishing an interview with frequently-quoted Iran expert Robin Wright, where she gave an interview, and in the interview with NPR just the other day, she said this, same thing, quote,
The Iranian regime is very unpopular, but this is a moment where Persian nationalism, which goes back five millennia — people are very proud. They don’t like to be attacked. They want to be the ones to decide their future, not to have another country come in and try to dictate what they do.
End quote. Okay, yeah, this crazy Persian pathology, Adam. Can I just tell you about our crazy Persian pathology for a second?
Adam: Please.
Nima: So here’s the thing about us. We’re an ancient people. We have this mystical and very, very intense distaste for our families being murdered, especially by American and Israeli bombs. There’s just this weird thing.
Adam: It’s very culturally specific.
Nima: I really, it’s super culturally specific to us. Like, you can’t explain it other than the fact that it’s just this Persian pathology that dates back millennia. We’re an ancient people, man. I think more modern countries probably love being freed by Israeli bombs. We’re just not into it. But, you know, we totally understand that NPR and the Economist don’t really know how to assess this, and so it’s really just, it’s just in our fucking crazy brains.
Adam: So then there was the worst example, which we’ll discuss. This will be our third and final example of trying to prop up this because, again, you got to sell liberals, right? The Republicans, the religious fanatics, the Christian Zionists, they’re all gung ho for nuclear war. They don’t give a shit. You don’t have to convince them. You got to convince liberals. And the way you convince liberals, which, again, we learned with Iraq, is what we call Agency Discourse. If you recall our News Brief from November of 2019, during the coup in Bolivia, Bolivia Coup Coverage and the Limits of ‘Agency’ Discourse, we discussed this sort of concept of the people who, the sort of masses of people, again, based on no scientific criteria whatsoever, can sort of be spoken for as having some kind of uniform desire.
Now Iran, like every culture on Earth, is divided. It has divided preferences. Presumably, some hate the regime and want to see it go. Some hate the regime, but don’t prefer to be bombed. Some like the regime and want them to nuke Tel Aviv. There’s all these different sort of opinions, but far be it from the Washington Post, not to sort of give the liberal reader a broad sense that actually, in fact, Iranians, while wary of the whole bombing, you know, our homes and apartments and killing, you know, hundreds of people, soon to be thousands, and threatening to nuke Tehran and issuing evacuation orders of the largest city in the country, they’re hopeful. They’re hopeful, because of the Regime’s iron grip.
Nima: So I’m going to read a couple sections from this Washington Post article that came out on June 14, saying that Iranians are, you know, hopeful about the future that could emerge in their country following Israel’s war crimes against them. And it begins this way, quote,
When Israel launched its sustained assault on Iran’s nuclear program and military leaders early Friday, Sareh began cycling through a range of emotions.
“I felt happiness,” the Iranian woman said, at the deaths of leaders who had long repressed the country’s people.
“Then disbelief,” she continued from her home in the northern city of Rasht. “Then some worry for what would happen next. Then happiness again, for how much power these people felt they had over us, how many of us they killed.” Like others interviewed for this report, she spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld for fear of retaliation from the government.
End quote. So that is how the Washington Post piece starts. Trust us, Iranians are celebrating. They want to be bombed. Sareh says so. And she lives in Rasht, which is an actual Iranian city, so it sounds real.
Then later in the piece, they speak with another Iranian that they found who somehow totally agrees with what the Washington Post wants to put out there, shocking. And Mehrdad, who is a 36-year-old man in the southern city of Bandar Abbas, has said, quote, “he had not been this happy in 10 years.”
The Post continues. Quote,
In late April, an explosion in a major Bandar Abbas port killed dozens of people, one of several deadly events that Iranians have suffered in recent years.
“We have no fear,” Mehrdad said. “We know that even if there’s a war that involves the [Iranian] people, it’s still better than the situation we are in with this government.”
Some used the celebration of Eid al-Ghadir on Saturday to express their glee. Iranians mark the day by buying sweets and gifts for family and friends.
Elham, a 37-year-old woman in the western city of Hamedan, said she saw more Iranians happy and celebrating than during past holidays and suspected they were using it as cover to celebrate Israel’s attacks.
End quote. Later, the Washington Post continues to quote Elham as saying this, quote,
“I’m not scared, nor do I have hope for the future,” she said. “Things are so difficult here and hopelessness has taken over so much that I don’t have any particular emotion. …
“It’s like we’re all at the end of the line. We’re like dead people who appear to move like the living.”
End quote. And so this idea that Iranians so hate their government that they are dancing with glee and using the cover of religious celebrations to actually, you know, express their happiness that Israel, of all fucking countries, that Israel is bombing them right now, is so batshit crazy.
Adam: Well, I mean, look, let’s start from this premise, right, which is that, if someone turned this in to me, and I was an editor, in any other context, I’d say, you can’t just cherry-pick three people and present them as representing the Iranian people, which is the obvious implication of this article. Countries with tens of millions of people have a diversity. I can find, I can go to a fucking Revcom meeting and interview three people. I can go to the, you know, redneck convention. I can go to fucking Bass Pro Shop. I mean, the idea that you’re gonna, like, handpick three people, I mean, it’s insane. I know rule of thirds is in journalism. But these aren’t statistically meaningful.
There are polls of Iranians. They do exist. And polls show, again, it depends on when you take the poll, a combination of discontent with the government, a combination of different religious and ethnic concerns, almost uniform hatred of Israel, and most part, a hatred of the United States. But these don’t say, I want to be bombed. I mean, that’s the thing. They keep making this leap from like, Yeah, people are, you know, angry at the government, or, you know, have issues with the the way the economy in Iran is, which is, you know, not good right now and again, that’s to a large extent, due to US sanctions, which punish people who trade with Iran, secondary sanctions, right? But again, this idea that people in Iran are just sitting around begging to be bombed by Israel is completely fucking insane. It has no basis in reality.
Nima: And not only bombed, Adam, because it is also the flowers-and-candy, greeted as liberators trope, which we’ve seen time and again.
Adam: They tried this with Gaza for 10 minutes. If you remember, I wrote about it for The Real News. Eli Lake was like, Oh, the people of Gaza want Israel to bomb Hamas. But that was obviously too absurd, because of the collective punishment and the starvation, no one sort of buys that, and they are introducing the Dahiya doctrine, which is the Israeli doctrine of punishing civilian and civilian infrastructures to get a government to submit. I’m going to venture a guess. I don’t have a poll, I don’t have PPP, I don’t have Pew or Reuters, but I’m going to, I’m going to venture a guess if we polled Iranians and were like, Hey, do you want to be subject to Israeli bombs for the next six months? They’d probably say no. I think that would be the overall majority. But the image these articles are painting, again by just handpicking three people. I mean, whatever. I’m sure they’re real people. I’m sure they’re not totally making up quotes. But who knows? You guys, you got to take their word for it.
Nima: Well, because they also. Ask it under this you know, they’re speaking with us under a condition of anonymity, not because of anything else other than retribution, possible retribution or retaliation from their own government.
Adam: But then it’s like, even if that’s 100% true, it’s still not a meaningful statement. I can find three people who believe in anything. If someone came up to me and was like, I interviewed Adam Johnson to get the views of the American public on the American government, I’d be like, What? No, I’m not representative at all. Why are you interviewing me? [Laughs] I mean, if they interviewed Nima, Adam, and Sarah Lazare, and were like, What are your thoughts on Israel? That would not be a statistically meaningful representation of American public opinion.
Nima: Yeah, they also wouldn’t interview me.
Adam: Well, right.
[Laughter]
Nima: But, you know, yeah, maybe they should start asking women in hijab in Iran, who absolutely hate that ridiculous law, what they would do with their hijab were an Israeli soldier to enter their home. And I think, by and large, I’m going to venture to say 99.9% of those women would use that hijab, which obviously they wouldn’t be wearing inside, to strangle that soldier to death. So the idea that, you know, Iranians are waiting to be liberated, again, by the fucking US, by Israel, is so outrageously absurd that you kind of imagine all of these articles being, like, a coordinated intelligence effort to just justify the ongoing war crimes that are being subjected to the Iranian people right now.
Adam: Yeah, and of course, Democratic leadership supports this. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is openly supporting it. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries released a statement saying, quote,
Pursuant to federal law, I expect to receive a high-level briefing on the unfolding situation in the Middle East from the administration expeditiously. However, in advance of that briefing, there are core principles that remain foundational in the Middle East theater, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the world.
Ah, we have all the cliches.
Israel is an ally and has a right to exist as a Jewish and Democratic state. Our commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad.
Blah, blah, blah. Braindead fucking AIPAC talking points.
Iran is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world and a sworn enemy of the United States and Israel.
It is clear that the Iranian regime poses a grave threat to the entire free world. There is no circumstance where Iran can be permitted to become a nuclear power.
As soon as is practical, it is imperative to find a rigorous diplomatic path forward and avoid any situation where U.S. troops are put in harm’s way.
So we can bomb them, but we don’t want to put troops in harm’s way. So that is the extent of our Democratic opposition. Obviously, Kamala Harris has not issued any statements, has not come out in opposition to Trump’s completely irresponsible, immoral, and vulgar threats to destroy Tehran. So Democratic leadership either openly agrees, like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, or they’re not saying anything. So we don’t really have an opposition party to speak of. We don’t really have oppositional media to speak of. The extent to which there’s any pushback, it’s incredibly measured leaks by the CIA, which is definitely not a good place to be, because probably they’re worried about doing mop-up, but of course, once the decision gets made, they’ll sort of, you know, be good soldiers. It’s not like they’re gonna have a real opposition.
Nima: But in the meantime, if the CIA is, like, the truth-telling good guys right now, shit’s fucked up.
Adam: It’s a bad spot to be in, because, again, we have lockstep bipartisan support for Israel and its genocide because, well, a) because Israel is doing the dirty work that the US national security state wants to do anyway, but to some extent also, of course, any meaningful opposition is, as we saw over the last congressional cycle and the one before, is duly punished by very, very big donations from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. So, yeah, that’s it. There’s not really any opposition. There’s not much skepticism. You can just post the most lurid, anecdotal, ridiculous claims about, you can say whatever you want about Iran, really at this point.
Nima: Yeah. And so I’ll just leave us, and not that this is, you know, at this point, really meaningful anyway, but I will still leave us with the words of the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, which is a weird sentence to say, the assessment that she gave to Congress in late March of this year, less than three months ago, where, once again, as has been affirmed for decades now, that, quote,
[The intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.
End quote. I should also note, the only evidence that there even was a nominal research-based nuclear-weapons research program in Iran prior to 2003 all comes from almost definitely fabricated Israeli intelligence that no one else has been allowed to see, including the IAEA. Just to note that even the accusations of a pre-2003 nuclear-weapons program, nothing went beyond, even under the accusations, beyond any sort of research, but nevertheless, it probably didn’t even exist before then.
Adam: And to be clear, the US, while they’re debating whether or not they’re going to bomb fucking Iran, which is Trump claims he’s going to do, this war and the prospect of war are deeply unpopular. A recent Economist/YouGov poll taken between June 13 and June 16 found that 60% of Americans, when asked if they think the US should get involved in the Israeli-run conflict, said no. Only 16 said yes. 53% of Republicans said no, and 23% of Republicans said yes. This is deeply, deeply unpopular. So I think people see this and they say, Well, wait a second, this is deeply unpopular. Nobody wants this. At the ratio of four to one, nobody wants this. Nobody’s asked for this. Because they haven’t had the year-long propaganda campaign like you had with Iraq, right? Like, this is all kind of haphazard and slapdash, and yet it keeps happening. Again, majority of people support a ceasefire. Majority of people support an arms embargo. Doesn’t matter, because Congress doesn’t represent the interests of the American people when it comes to permanent war. They don’t give a shit. It’s irrelevant.
Nima: So that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Thank you all for listening. Of course, we will continue to do these News Briefs as we are able to, following the media and political discourse on Israeli war crimes in Iran and just what we see in terms of the ongoing tropes and narratives and stereotypes that are rampant in our press that continue to come out, that have been coming out for decades. So stay tuned for more from us. But until then, of course, thank you all for listening. You can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded. That will do it. Thanks again for listening. As I’ve said, I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Tuesday, June 17, 2025.
