The first casualty of war is the truth

Journalists and editors—joined by a President—spread dangerous lies inviting yet more death & destruction

This week offered multiple case studies in disinformation and propaganda spread by sources ranging from MSNBC to the White House itself. The militarism enabled by failures of institutional journalists has led thousands to their graves, and international human rights to their ruin.

Photo by: Ali Hamad, Wikimedia Commons

Journalists have a job to do

One reason I focus so much of my ire on journalists and editors is because they are supposed to play such a crucial role in ensuring legitimacy, transparency, and accountability in government.

Their failures cascade well beyond their profession. By leaving the public blind to important issues (or by legitimating outright lies), journalists ultimately enforce ignorance on the electoral process that, in turn, allows militarism to increasingly threaten democracy—as we were warned that it would.

When I discovered the depravity of our electoral system’s corruption in 2020, I learned that there are many ways to rig an election, and that political parties routinely do so.

Stuffing ballot boxes was the traditional technique. Hacking voting machines might be a newer one. A president trying to strong arm election officials is no less outrageous.

But throughout, controlling the press is one way that capital in the United States has successfully co-opted both of the major political parties and effectively rigged elections in its favor. The press plays a crucial role enabling corruption that journalists are ethically committed to instead exposing and holding accountable.

Voters rely on journalists to make informed decisions, but the willingness of editors to suppress facts inconvenient to Wall Street and the Pentagon, while amplifying every lie they spin on behalf of corporate profits and weapons manufacturers, ensures the ignorance of voters.

Crises inevitably result.

The mounting global climate catastrophe and the war in Gaza offer two among any number of tragic—and preventable—examples.

MSNBC shows its true colors

Few examples demonstrate an abdication of responsibility better than MSNBC marginalizing each of its several Muslim anchors in the wake of the war in Gaza. A cable content producer prominently featuring opinions alongside reporting, the network’s status as a “news outlet” may be debatable. For better or worse, many viewers rely on MSNBC for what they perceive as facts.

When I ran for office, I spent years hoping that MSNBC might take note of our campaign, since our efforts offered the chance for progressive rhetoric about any number of issues to find some basis in policy. My platform proposed novel policy solutions to climate chaos, healthcare, labor, education, policing and judicial ethics.

But MSNBC is not interested in the issues that concern Democratic Party voters. The network is most interested in propping up the corporate leadership of the Democratic Party.

The illusion of inclusion at MSNBC follows a predictable pathway of demographic co-optation on which the Democratic Party largely relies. I’ve written about how that is one reason why the presidential campaign of Cornel West could be so incredibly significant: he, better than any other previous presidential candidate, is poised to expose the lie at the root of the Democratic Party’s co-optation of Black Americans in the service of supporting white capital.

MSNBC choosing to hire Muslim anchors in the first place was significant. Removing them from the air after they demonstrated the independence to report on current events with greater accuracy than their colleagues is inescapably more significant.

Mehdi Hasan, Ali Velshi, and Ayman Mohyeldin have each shown the courage to report the facts from the War in Gaza, in spite of the Washington spin machine dedicated to portraying Palestinians as animals and their resistance to illegal occupation as terrorism.

In response, MSNBC:

did not air a Thursday edition of The Mehdi Hasan Show on its streaming platform, reversed course on its plans to have Ayman Mohyeldin fill in for Joy Reid’s 7 o’clock show on Thursday and Friday and intends to have Alicia Menendez replace Ali Velshi this weekend….

More significant than MSNBC hiring them in the first place, or removing them when they did their jobs, is the stunning silence across the rest of the institutional press while observing a demographic—and ideological—purge of its own ranks. Some even came to the defense of MSNBC, accepting claims by NBC that the surprise moves at MSNBC were merely “coincidental.”

It’s not as if Muslim journalists are being sidelined by news outlets based on their religion. They’re being removed based on their awareness of systemic injustices in which their respective institutions have been actively complicit for 75 years.

Nor is this the first time that MSNBC has purged its ranks to stifle dissent from the unrestrained militarism that drives each of the corporate political parties. 20 years ago, MSNBC removed legendary anchor Phil Donahue from the air in retaliation for him questioning official narratives promoting the war on Iraq that ultimately proved to be lies.

Truth is the lifeblood of democracy. It is also the first casualty of war.

Americans might think ourselves insulated from international conflicts, but our inability to gain access to independent reporting about global events has already wrought havoc on our own futures. Indefensible policy decisions made possible by widespread ignorance have eroded our nation’s international standing, undermined the legitimacy of our own elections, filled our prisons, enabled continuing human rights abuses, placed the future at incalculable risk for ultimately foolish purposes, and driven an accelerating upward transfer of wealth.

International relations, and the recurring failures of journalism that poison them, hit much closer to home than most Americans realize. 

Editors—and elected officials—amplify discredited lies

For days, news outlets around the world parroted the discredited claim that Hamas had beheaded Israeli babies. In this case, it’s not only journalists who deserve critique and accountability for amplifying orchestrated lies, but also President Joe Biden, who himself repeated those claims, and even claimed to have seen photographs that ultimately did not exist.

This is far from the first time that Biden has lied to the public. Before winning the White House in a spectacular display of national amnesia, he had been driven out of several presidential campaigns before by controversy surrounding his unapologetic lies about everything from his own record to current events and the economy. 

Biden claimed to have stood in solidarity with the civil rights movement, citing a political arrest that never happened as a supposed demonstration of his moral courage. Not only did he lie to steal the valor of activists who showed the courage that Biden lacked, but his lies also aim to obscure his work as a senator that actively undermined the civil rights movement’s goals.

Biden claimed to have declared a climate emergency, when he has done no such thing and—like Obama—ultimately only expanded fossil fuel extraction beyond the baseline of his predecessor.

Biden’s long-standing propensity to bend, distort, and manufacture reality bears a close relationship to that of his nominal antagonist in the presidential race, Donald Trump. Their shared attributes are just a few of the reasons why Americans have grown so thoroughly disillusioned with the escalating farce of the 2024 election.

It is also another reason why Democrats who rally behind Biden effectively aim to leap from a frying pan into a proverbial fire. One hopes they might relent, if only to avoid dragging the rest of us with them.

But don’t hold your breath.

Hamas throws Netanyahu a lifeline

It’s always ironic when political actors empower their antagonists. It is even more so when they rescue them from their otherwise seemingly inevitable fates to revive their careers.

That’s the story of Dan White ultimately making Dianne Feinstein Mayor, and then a Senator, by assassinating Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco City Hall in 1978.

That’s also the story of the United States empowering and enabling Saudi Arabia under the administrations of presidents from both of the corporate political parties over the last 50 years. 

That’s also the story of Obama. In 2008, he campaigned for the White House on ending the war in Iraq and re-establishing human rights, only to give the CIA a free pass for torture—and in the process, sacrifice the legal victory for human rights established by the Second World War, 60 years after our forebears won it on the battlefield.

That’s also the story of Democrats getting rolled by the national security establishment, and increasingly falling for predictable lies enabling industrial fossil fuel extraction that, in turn, threatens all life on the only planet we know we can inhabit.

This, even after the CIA publicly admitted this week—after 70 years—that its 1953 intervention in Iran undermined democracy. Why does it take 70 years and an official admission for journalists to simply observe what is already apparent based on the public record?

Last week, Hamas threw a political lifeline to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by invading Israel. He had already announced reforms to Israeli governance that had prompted massive dissent, including unprecedented mobilizations and rallies drawing support even from within the military itself.

Netanyahu had engineered his own domestic political crisis, which Hamas inadvertently helped him hurdle by uniting the entire country behind him.

On the one hand, the right to resist unjust rule is embedded in the very theory of government legitimacy on which our own legal system relies. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. established it himself, although he carefully limited the resistance he prescribed to nonviolence.

Put another way, without rights, laws have no legitimacy. Yet too many observers forget the relationship between those two seemingly overlapping spheres, not realizing that the erosion of rights alongside the extension of law is the most reliably paved pathway to fascism.

Genocide, as the world watches and cheers 

This weekend, Israel escalated its assault on northern Gaza, displacing a million people while leveling entire city blocks.

Collective punishment is an international crime and violation of human rights, yet elected leaders across the United States have cheered it on. Active support from Washington continues to enable the Israeli military as it escalates and expands its retribution to now force displacement on an entire civilian population—yet again.

The collective punishment inherent in Israel’s armed occupation of Palestine since 1948, as well as its longstanding blockade (which has escalated into an outright siege), settlements on disputed territory, and sustained violence towards non-combatants, were all bad enough.

This weekend’s attacks on Gaza have escalated those longstanding abuses and threaten to conclude an unfinished genocide. Yet among western leaders, patterns of deference and complicity remain (with only a handful of exceptions) a disturbing consensus. 

What is happening in Gaza is ultimately the entire world’s responsibility. It could have been prevented if the international community had simply defended human rights at any point in the last 75 years.

Yet, instead, discrete acts of terror—which are effectively inevitable wherever populations are denied basic human rights—have been met by escalating violations of human rights. The war crimes committed by Hamas when murdering Israeli civilians earlier this month have been used to justify ever more severe and expansive retaliation by Israel.

This pattern has grown painfully well-established over the past three generations. The past week’s escalation into outright war continues a terrifying pattern, one in which the entire globe is complicit.

Ultimately, the world’s failure to have supported human rights in Palestine so speaks to inherent limits in the United Nation’s structure. On the one hand, the U.N. General Assembly has passed dozens of resolutions condemning one or another international crime by Israel in the context of its illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

Yet Israel enjoys impunity because of its relationship with Washington, which wields its veto on the Security Council to insulate it from any meaningful accountability. The Security Council structure allows member states—all nuclear powers—to effectively stand above international law, as the United States has long done.

Until member states submit to international law and allow adjudication by bodies like the International Criminal Court, none can plausibly claim any legitimacy to stand for human rights. America bears particular responsibility, both because our nation once did so much to establish international human rights before abandoning them to our own leaders, and also because a bipartisan consensus in Washington has done everything conceivably possible to instigate violence from afar.

Paid subscribers can access a poem written by an iconic Black poet whose canonical work reflecting on the Black experience in America carries inescapable parallels with Palestine. While many Americans remain brainwashed about the reality on the ground in the Middle East, poetry offers a way to connect situations across contexts and—hopefully—work around implicit biases.

I’ll also throw in a link to one of my original songs addressing the intersection between human rights abuses in Palestine and those in the United States.

Nothing disturbs me more than America’s commitment to militarism, except what it portends for the future we all share.