This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 22 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined today by Adam Johnson, journalist and author. He has a book coming out next week that I think is one of the more important books about politics you’re going to read this year. It’s called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. Adam, welcome.
Adam Johnson: Thank you for having me on.
Bacon: So talk about the general argument of the book. I think “the media’s complicity” gives some sense of it, but talk about what your book is about and the time period it’s in.
Johnson: I focus primarily on the first year, from October of 2023 to October of 2024, because when you write a book, you have to stop the clock somewhere, otherwise you’ll just keep updating it ad infinitum. But with a specific focus on what I argue as really the first three to six months, when the genocide I thought became codified and cemented—as Israelis would say, the facts on the ground were affirmed. And there was a moment early on—there were several moments early on—when there would have been an outrage or an upswell or an intervention to stop it, and the media had a critical role in dampening those, obscuring those, or downplaying those.
And then of course—it being a Democratic president meant that there was a different set of incentives, a different dynamic that required political and I guess PR attempts to dampen outrage from what people were seeing every day in their social media feeds, which was an endless stream of carnage specifically targeting children coming over their Twitter and TikTok feeds.
And the media—the media is defined in the context of this book as—it’s a very imperfect term, but we say center-left or liberal media, not in the Rush Limbaugh sense, but the sort of small-l liberal media, quote-unquote mainstream media, or media that historically, editorially, has endorsed Democrats—I think is one kind of objective [measure].
I think if you probably asked them, they would effectively say they are—they wouldn’t probably put it in those terms—but they would not act like they care about the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians, outside of some neocon conservative trap about freedom—or whatever, freedom from Hamas. So it’s not really a contested space. And as writers, we typically try to write in contested spaces.
And what I argue is that the center and “center-left” media was central to selling a genocide. And it’s not just a title that I picked to be provocative—I think in key ways it was a sales job. And that decisions were made—decisions were decided behind closed doors within the White House, and within and by elite foreign policy circles—and that the media’s job, largely, and specifically the outlets we studied in great quantitative detail, was to spin for, obfuscate, obscure, and to sell what was an indefensible position.
And the ways in which they did it changed over the first few weeks and ultimately the first few months. And so those really key, critical moments—when the genocide became, I thought, effectively fait accompli cemented based on the narrative and situational dynamic in Gaza—is really what I focus on.
Of course that isn’t to obscure the responsibility of the subsequent Trump administration and their role in the starvation campaign in 2025. And of course there are still—750 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire in October of last year. And that’s all important and perhaps worthy of another book. But that’s not what this book is about.
It’s about primarily the first six months—but really the first year—of not only the White House’s role in the genocide and their central role in the genocide, but also the media’s role in providing the moral and narrative collateral to sell that genocide.
Bacon: Let me zone in on a couple of things you said—so the idea is essentially that liberals—so it’s a Democratic president, so liberals purport to care about human rights more than conservatives. So the liberal president can’t just do something seen as evil without some kind of cover. And so that’s why Biden needs the media to explain the war in a way that liberals can feel okay with. And then also, secondly, the outlets you talk about tend to be consumed by a lot of liberal audiences, right?
Adam Johnson: Yeah. There’s a 2015 poll that shows that 30 percent of Republicans support bombing Agrabah, the fictional country from Aladdin. Republicans are broadly going to just be pro-war, pro-genocide as a rule—not categorically, and I know there are some divisions around that now that have emerged—but statistically speaking, they’re not a demographic you need to win over from a sales standpoint.
Liberals—when you’re trying to sell a war—as anyone who remembers The New York Times’s essential and high-leverage role in selling the Iraq War knows—are essential to making wars, or in this case a genocide, bipartisan. It’s the thing that needs to be sold. It’s the high-leverage thing you need to have.
And so there’s more emphasis on selling liberals, or at least getting them off your back and ameliorating their cognitive dissonance and preventing them from going out in the streets or joining campus protests, because that becomes a critical fulcrum to apply pressure on the powers that be.
And so that’s why that’s the focus. It’s a baseball term, high-leverage. But if I’m a closer and I come in with the bases loaded, one out, ninth inning, that’s more meaningful than if I come into a baseball game up eight runs. So Democratic support, liberal support gets it from that 40 percent to that 60 percent, to that 65 percent that’s necessary. And that requires a sales job. It requires narratives, it requires convincing, it requires—
And obviously much of this predates October 7th—the broad dehumanization of Palestinians, the facile “human shields” narrative, all the—again, even the terrorist framework and epistemology is itself a racist double standard that had developed over decades. And then after October 7th, there was a lot of ad hoc interventions to effectively hand-wave away what was increasingly manifestly nihilistic violence and indefensible.
And then of course, once you get to December of 2023 and January 2024, no one even bothers defending it on the substance—then you pivot into the sort of meta-narrative around, oh, we’re working on a ceasefire, Biden can’t stop it even if he wants to. So really those—
Johnson: Yeah. There’s broad consensus around the ideological premises around Zionism—that’s not really contestable, that’s largely bipartisan, especially with the older generation, especially with people in leadership roles. Yeah. The idea that—
Johnson: Yeah. Again, there wasn’t a lot of salesmanship that went on, but they certainly worked with the White House to curate certain narratives without any skepticism. And these were tropes and modes of propaganda that had been developed prior to October 7th. And in fact I wrote about them with respect to, for example, Biden’s shift in support for Saudi Arabia—there were very similar dynamics with the helpless Biden and the angry Biden and the like. So all those things had antecedents outside the context of Israel, but they’re a necessary feature to liberal self-identification.
And this goes back to the liberal mythology surrounding liberal imperialism during the Victorian age in Britain, around civilizing missions, and so a lot of this stuff is not new. But it certainly becomes more acute and more adapted to the particulars of Zionism, and particularly this idea that “Hamas must go,” which became this kind of ideological dogma that was almost never contested in mainstream media—despite the fact that everybody knew, including Tony Blinken behind closed doors in January of 2024, that everyone knew that was impossible and in fact was a nonsensical premise.
Bacon: Let’s dive into some of the details here, because some of them are very telling. So talk about—there was some really important analysis of word choice. Talk about the words “slaughter” and “massacre” to start with, and how those were used in the coverage.
Johnson: So one way we approached the idea of bias, right—’cause you have to establish a double standard as an entry point to any allegation of media bias, and you have to do apples-to-apples comparisons. And so what we argue is that the emotive terms—in terms of loading and orienting the audience to solicit a certain emotional reaction to certain kinds of violence versus other kinds of violence—was one objective way you could tease out that double standard.
So when Israelis were killed on October 7th, primarily it was referred to as a massacre, as a slaughter, as barbaric, as savage. You had these very loaded terms—and in the context of “barbaric” and “savage,” racially charged, steeped in orientalist history. Not to get too grad school about it, but I do think it’s real and it matters.
Then when Palestinians were killed, it was obviously more likely to be in passive voice, it was more likely to not have these emotive terms—it was always framed as a bumbling mistake by Israeli and U.S. officials, pursuant to some noble and achievable military objective.
And what we argue is that Israel killed upwards—the number now is roughly 20,000 children, it’s almost certainly double that—buried under rubble, kids who died of preventable disease, children who died of diabetes, children on dialysis, obviously birth defects—obviously tens of thousands of Palestinians have some kind of amputation. And what I argue is that it seems rather unlikely that you would have created such an unprecedented amount of slaughter, an unprecedented—the largest number of child amputees in modern warfare history—without committing a slaughter or a massacre at some point.
So statistically speaking, that feels very impossible. You’re welcome to believe that, but that feels highly unlikely, especially because we know about the myriad war crimes war crimes. We know about attacks on healthcare workers. We know about their openly genocidal statements—which we can get into—where they preview what they’re going to do in terms of collective punishment and killing of civilians.
The percentage of civilians who were killed is—in key ways—unprecedented. Certainly child death is unprecedented. And so let’s look at those emotive terms. And this is a timeline—this was all done manually for this particular count. And this is a timeline of just the first 60 days.
And what you have to understand is that within the first week—actually less than the first week—the death toll in Gaza had surpassed that of October 7th. So it wasn’t like there was—this asymmetry can be explained away by a numbers issue. In fact, it was triple by the end of the first 30 days, eventually quadrupled and quintupled by the end of the 60-day period.
So you had this entirely one-way emotive reaction. The idea was that—editorially speaking—and you can look at this quantifiably, this is not an assertion—obviously I don’t have access to some internal memos, although we do have access to some internal memos, which we go into. But there was clearly an editorial decision to paint Hamas’s attack—or PFLP or PIJ or militants on October 7th—as existing outside of history, existing outside—
Bacon: Actually, you said “editorial decision,” and I wanted to ask about that, because I think you described editorial decisions later on. But having worked at The Washington Post in that period, I want—an editorial decision on “massacre” and “slaughter”—I don’t—my perception was more that people were self-editing to some extent.
In some ways it’s not like, the climate was such that what Israel did was legitimized, what the Palestinians did was not. And I didn’t feel like anybody—it was—may have been more unconscious, in the water, than conscious in a certain way.
And again, we can talk about MSNBC—how in the morning of October 7th they were attempting to editorially—or to contextualize the attack. And immediately Comcast corporate came down and said, never do that again. It was actually the first time that Comcast corporate had ever intervened directly with MSNBC.
But of course, in many ways it is just in the air. And in some ways the sort of specific directives are a little less important. What matters is results, right? The purpose of a system is what it does, and what people’s feelings are, what’s in their heart, are a little less relevant.
Although I will say, from several sources we talked to, the message was received very clearly—less in a direct memo, but more in how people were disciplined. It was more the analogy of the rat in the maze touching the electric wall—he quickly learns what wall not to touch. Now, is there a memo telling the rat what wall to touch? No, but he learns very quickly which walls he’s permitted to touch.
Bacon: My experience was: the pieces I wrote criticizing Israel, particularly early on, were edited so carefully and revised so carefully, it became obvious—oh, I can go through this, or I can just write about something else, because it’s clear this is going to be—yeah. So in another way, what I was getting at was almost worse than a memo. A memo is one thing, a sort of generalized chill effect is another thing. And I think both those things were happening.
Johnson: No, for sure. And those nuances were something we were very interested in interrogating and reporting on. Much of that reporting was actually done by my partner who’s a journalist—I’m not a journalist by trade—Sarah Lazar, who helped me doing that. Because you talk to journalists—and we talked to many journalists, some of whom on the record, others most of course wouldn’t go on the record for justifiable reasons—and we very quickly start to develop a very similar pattern, which is: overt racism towards Arab and Muslim journalists.
They were presumed to be too biased by other reporters at their outlets—even people in their unions—scouring their social media for perceived pro-Hamas bias. And even the most banal statements on Instagram were policed—about letting in aid, or human rights, or some kind of vapid liberal concern—were even disciplined. Highly disciplined, highly monitored.
And of course that was not a standard held for pro-Israel or Zionist journalists, who were allowed to say some of the most vulgar, racist, genocidal comments—or at least approve them or repost them—and that was almost never disciplined. And this asymmetry of enforcement of ostensibly neutral rules was done in a manner that, even in some contexts, I think escalated to outright racial discrimination—not discrimination necessarily for its own sake, but because it became a proxy for Palestine sympathy.
But more often it manifested as you just got pushed, moved off the desk, or moved off the beat, and you were told to do something else. And to the extent to which you were reporting on it as an Arab or Muslim journalist, you had to effectively signal your loyalty with all kinds of bromides about October 7th—savage, barbaric, savage, barbaric, savage, barbaric—and then when you talked about Palestinian deaths mounting in the tens of thousands, have died as they went after Hamas command and control centers underneath every single civilian infrastructure—so that was the way you signaled your loyalty to the specific narrative.
And the nuances of that actually ended up being very interesting, because that’s something that I think a lot of people ask—they say, how does that happen? Because I think a lot of lefties—and this is what we really wanted to do, we wanted to make this book as empirically driven and as approachable for normies, rather than just beating over your head a bunch of left-wing assumptions—we wanted to show you how these mechanisms work, to the extent we could, and show how the self-editing, how the racial—it’s outright ad hoc racial discrimination—how signals were sent from certain media owners who sent out statements on October 9th, 10th, and 11th saying very clearly: again, October 7th exists outside of history, it’s a unique and unforgivable war crime.
And then it’s very clear that, okay, this is now something that’s being indexed as ontologically evil, versus the quote-unquote “military response” from Israel, which is always going to be framed as something unfortunate, with a heavy heart—a reaction. And to the extent that tens of thousands of people are killed, it’s just tens of thousands of collateral damage episodes for which we are all very—tear emoji—sad about, and it’s just going to keep happening nonstop for years on end.
Bacon: Talk about the casualty counts, because this is the one place where I think it’s very explicit—the White House, how we describe the Ministry of Health and so on. I want you to tell it, because that was very explicit: the White House decides something and then the media decides to create a new policy to describe casualties. So talk about that.
Johnson: So to really talk about the pejorative of “Hamas-run health ministry”—which became the way in which we effectively did what I call liberal genocide denial, it was soft genocide denial—it’s the way you say, According to the Hamas-run health ministry, 300 people, including 40 kids, were killed today in [Gaza]. Now most people are going to hear that and say, oh, Hamas-run—they’re just a bunch of terrorists, they’re basically ISIS, it’s all just made up.
Now, everyone who knows anything about Gaza, and anyone who knows anything about Israel before October 7th, knows that the Hamas-run Health Ministry has a history of being very accurate. And we know that because the U.S. State Department uses those numbers. The World Health Organization uses those numbers. Mossad uses those numbers. And in fact, there was a study done comparing the Hamas-run Health Ministry casualty counts from the 2014 bombing of Gaza—Operation Protective Edge—versus the IDF’s official numbers that came out months later, and they were off by seven percent. So if anything, they’re very conservative.
And again, I can’t stress this enough: everybody knows that—the White House knew that, any expert knows that, Zionist propagandists know that, Israel knows that. Everybody knows that. But we had to invent a fake thing that everyone could throw out—and that is again the perfect kind of illustration of liberal bad faith. Everybody—it’s technically accurate, but obviously very much misleading. Much like the word “ceasefire,” which we can get into later.
Bacon: Did that come from Biden originally? Did Biden initially do that? And then the—
Johnson: No, so Biden denied the death counts around the same time, but the actual signal—and that helped a lot. And we had sources say that when Biden denied those death counts, that really sent a signal that this became more socially acceptable.
But really what you have to go back to is the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing on October 17th, that Israel said was an errant PIJ rocket—which, again, I don’t think anyone believes, because 1,500 PIJ and Hamas rockets landed in Israel in the first three months and killed a total of 12 people. But they want us to think one single PIJ rocket errantly landed in Gaza and killed up to 400 people. Again, you’re welcome to believe that all you want, but I don’t.
And then that became—The New York Times had a headline that said, Hospital Struck by Israel—I’m paraphrasing here a little bit, but it’s “Hospital Struck by Israel, According to Gaza Officials”—and then all the Zionist crybully groups, literally all of them, led by [the] ADL—which are all just pro-Israel lobbying groups for the most part—they said blood libel, you’re accusing Israel of committing this crime. And then there were riots in various Muslim-majority capitals, there was real outrage, and a lot of people thought, okay, this is the moment where there’s going to be so much pressure that Biden’s going to have to wrap this up.
Forensic Architecture has since done subsequent analysis of the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing and found Israel told dozens of distinct and separate lies about that. I don’t know why you would lie so much about something you had no responsibility for, but that aside—it became this conventional wisdom that, oh, we got that one wrong, this was actually an errant PIJ rocket. And the editorial standard that had existed prior to that—and by the way, still exists in Ukraine and other war zones, right—this is a completely boutique and novel editorial standard invented entirely for Israel.
And then later—in Iran, by the transitive property—it was also applied to the U.S. bombing of the Minab school girls. And then this really became—when it was like, oh, we’re just going to go all out on genocide—because now when these obscene death counts come out again, hundreds a day—at one point there was a thousand in one day, especially in October into November to December—then it was, oh, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, 55 children were killed, and then that became a way of basically just numbing, soothing cognitive dissonance—which was the key role that the media played here—which is: man, this seems bad. Oh, but it’s a little tabloidy. Let’s throw in something there that makes it seem less horrible, because clearly we can’t be doing that. Clearly the good Israelis can’t be doing that. Clearly old Uncle Joe can’t be doing that. So there’s something shady going on here.
Bacon: I want to come back to Uncle Joe right now. This, as a political reporter, was the one thing that I found to be the most obviously bad faith of the coverage—every day, it felt like for a while it was like: Joe Biden is really flustered about this, he called Bibi Netanyahu three times and yelled at him, but he won’t—so talk about—you all detailed that. Talk about that a little bit.
This sort of—you call it the Biden distancing—and I’ve never—and we’re seeing that a little bit right now, a little bit of the—Bibi Netanyahu’s in control and Trump can’t do anything either. But I think in the Biden example it was more important, because liberals needed to get a sort of free [pass]—their president was not doing the genocide or helping, it was Israel—our president was trying to stop it. And so talk about the Biden distancing and how that came about and what it meant.
Adam Johnson: So this was effectively done in three ways. I divided it into three categories, which is: number one, helpless Biden; number two, fuming, deeply concerned Biden—these are various tropes and then three, third-partying, which is a variation of an anti-labor propaganda concept where you distance the worker from the union. But in this case, it was like a perverted inverse version where we were distancing the United States—and Biden in particular—from the genocide that they themselves were arming, funding, and carrying out.
Like, this became most absurd with the humanitarian aid drop during the summer of 2024, when everyone’s saying the U.S. quite literally attempted—at least engaged in elaborate theater—an attempt to circumvent their own blockade. The height of absurdity, right? Rather than just saying, Israel, we need to pull back on this blockade that we’re supporting militarily—we were creating a fake [pier]. And then of course those packages fell from planes and ended up killing several people, because that’s the least efficient and most dangerous way to get aid in. And so these three tropes—
Number one was helpless Biden. Around late 2023, when you really couldn’t defend the genocide in principle or on substance, what’s the next best thing you do from a public relations standpoint? You render the question non sequitur. You say, you know what, I can’t defend this, but it doesn’t matter—there’s nothing we can do about it. So, enter helpless Biden, where you had dozens and dozens of stories about how it wasn’t whether or not Biden wanted to stop Israel, it’s that he was unable to.
And here’s just a few examples. Right from November of 2023, The Washington Post: “White House Frustrated by Israel’s Onslaught but Sees Few Options.” Oh darn it, no choice. The New York Times from the day after: “Biden Confronts the Limits of U.S. Leverage in Two Conflicts,” right—there’s always these “limits things he can do,” right. And then we have Politico from the next day after that: “Why the U.S. Isn’t Stopping the War and Other Middle East Realities”—reality. Very savvy. Can’t stop it.
Then The Washington Post again, in March of 2024: “How Biden Became Embroiled in a Gaza Conflict with No End in Sight.” So he’s constantly in a quagmire—he’s pulled in and he’s forced into it. The Washington Post, six months into the Gaza War: “Biden Confronts Limits of U.S. Leverage.” And so in each one of these articles, if you actually read the article, they never establish—and by the way, for the record, just because I think it’s important: we later learned from Israeli officials that Biden never asked for a ceasefire.
So we know the premise that he wanted one was fundamentally false. He wanted one insofar as Israel said, yeah, let’s do it—he was never going to use the actual leverage that he had to compel one. And if you’re not going to use all the tools in your arsenal, you cannot simultaneously say you truly want something.
The analogy I use is: it’s as if Dave Roberts, the manager of the LA Dodgers, sat Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Max Muncy, and Will Smith on the eve of Game 7 of the World Series, and people were like, what are you doing? And he’s like, I really deeply want to win the World Series. No—nobody would believe that, right?
Johnson: So Biden takes removing, arming, and backing Israel militarily off the table from day one. He’s consistent about it until he leaves office. That means he never really wanted a ceasefire. And Israel later confirms that. And it was just obvious to anyone watching, because the U.S. is the most powerful empire in human history, and if they wanted Israel to stop—again, a country the size of New Jersey—they would have stopped. They simply didn’t want to.
But what they understood is they had to look like they wanted to, because the PR was horrible. They were losing their base, they were eroding support. And obviously there was this embarrassing, emerging uncommitted movement. And so helpless Biden created the idea that whether or not he wanted to—whether or not it was good—was removed from the debate. And then it became “limits of his power.”
And this was usually sourced—in fact, I did a statistical count of sourcing for this—93 percent—
Bacon: — almost never sourced to any person, right?
Johnson: No, it was sourced to anonymous aides, right. Yes. That’s what I mean. This is right. This is pushed by Biden aides to get—yes—the left and anti-genocide activists, and at this point really just a broad liberal consensus against the genocide, off of his back.
And then of course Aaron David Miller shows up in almost every one of these—he’s Biden’s hack in the foreign policy establishment—and he comes in and says, eh, Biden can’t really do anything about it. And then invariably, at the end of all these sort of expert claims that he’s actually helpless to do anything, they always say, but even if he could, he probably wouldn’t—he has a deep-seated ideological commitment to Israel. Then it’s like wait a second. So it’s not that he can’t, it’s that he doesn’t want to. So just say that, right?
Johnson: And this absurdity kept going on. And what I compare it to is the difference between a plot and a sketch—a plot moves forward, right, there are beat changes, characters develop, the MacGuffin goes from X to Y, things move forward. A sketch is the same basic premise with different variations over and over again, and the absurdity of that repetition teases out the humor of the situation. And this is fundamentally a sketch—whereas most sketches are in and out in under five minutes, this went on for almost 15 months.
You had some variation of the exact same article. And then you have the parallel version, which is upset or frustrated Biden, which is number two—where he’s secretly about to break with—he’s always perpetually and asymptotically about to break from Netanyahu, that mysteriously somehow never comes.
And that just got people off his back. And that, combined with their redefining of the ceasefire in March of 2024, basically worked. It was probably the most successful public relations campaign—certainly the most successful public relations campaign of my adult life. And people bought it.
Bacon: Are you describing a successful public relations campaign? Are you describing a media that agreed with him? Is the media being persuaded here? I guess it’s hard to know, but is the media being persuaded by Biden, or does the media agree with Biden, and therefore it’s not a Biden—their writing—as I was struck, as you were talking, but most journalists pride themselves on writing original articles, and a lot of journalists pride themselves on being critical of the president and being skeptical of him. So the fact that—or they would say that at least to themselves.
Johnson: I think it’s a couple of things. Number one is just pure chauvinist assumptions about American benevolence, right—the assumption is that Netanyahu’s gone rogue and Biden can’t—it’s not realistic, because a lot of this is just creating the ideological limitations of what you can even talk about, right?
And so the idea that the U.S. could ever meaningfully discipline or pull back support from Israel is just not on the table. It’s seen as absurd, right—similar to like having a ceasefire with Hamas was absurd, until it wasn’t. And those ideological premises and limitations are severely enforced. They’re enforced through the think-tank world, which of course is funded by either Zionist billionaires or weapons contractors or these kind of spook-show factories. They’re disciplined by editors who—again, it’s like Fareed Zakaria—they all go to the same conferences, they all go to the same serious think-tank events. And there are just axioms you accept.
And one of those axioms is that Israel’s defense is non-negotiable, that there’s no limit to how many Palestinians you can slaughter—there’s maybe some squeamishness around it, or better ways we can manage it—but the idea that you would ever “abandon” Israel, or threaten to abandon them—which is really all you have to do to get them to do X, Y, and Z—is just not part of that ideological assumption.
And then you have this other idea, which I think is more maybe partisan cognitive dissonance, which is: clearly our guy can’t be really supporting this, it has to be—he’s being pulled into it, he’s being forced into it, he’s being tricked. And this is where—
Bacon: —you didn’t give this as much, but there was a lot of—I remember a lot of talk about: we can’t criticize Biden because he has to win the election. And that was—so—
Johnson: That becomes more—yeah, that becomes more acute of course in the summer of 2024. Yes. There’s this idea—and you even saw that kind of disciplining language like eight, nine months out from the election, where it’s yeah, but Trump would be worse. And it’s okay, but Biden—no one’s forcing Biden to do any of this. So the uncommitted movement, others are trying to do him a favor—which, again, we now know statistically based on [FLAG: “IMEU polls”—please verify this organization’s name against audio] polls was a factor. Was it the factor in 2024? We can never know, but it’s—
Bacon: Certainly hurting Michigan, we know that for sure.
Johnson: Yeah. It certainly diminished progressive energy, diminished things that are maybe more difficult to quantify.
And then there was this popular talking point as well: oh, Trump is working with Netanyahu to undermine ceasefire talks. And it’s like—this is a non sequitur. Biden can just assert a ceasefire whenever he wants. What secret deals Trump has with Netanyahu just—
Johnson: —it doesn’t matter, because he can just make a decision. No one’s forcing Biden to do anything. And if it’s a conspiracy between Trump and Netanyahu, then why is Biden in on the conspiracy? Why not just assert his authority as commander in chief? And if you can’t do that—if there’s some mysterious geopolitical dark matter involved here—then we don’t have a democracy. Then there’s something more problematic going on here.
And then something doing a lot of that begins to lean into anti-Semitic tropes, to be honest—this idea that Israel controls the president, Israel controls the United States. Because it becomes a comforting lie. It’s the same reason why [someone like] Joe Kent goes on Tucker Carlson and talks about how well, Trump’s inclination is really towards peace, but the Israelis keep pressuring him. And it’s like: when are you guys going to wake up and realize that they’re on the same team? They share power.
Bacon: We have power. Yeah.
Johnson: Yeah. It’s not as if there isn’t pressure—it’s not as if Miriam Adelson—it’s not as if there isn’t an Israel lobby. Clearly there is. But the idea that they can somehow force Biden or force Trump to do anything that they’re not necessarily inclined to do already is delusional. And it’s because what it does is it helps with the nationalist conscience—our sort of liberal, and to some extent conservative, idea that we’re fundamentally good.
And that dynamic—that idea that Biden was this doddering old fool who was being manipulated by the wily Orientals—I think was essential to painting an image. We couldn’t confront reality. We couldn’t confront what was in our eyes, which is that Biden is a hardcore, committed Zionist. He’s a racist who doesn’t care about Palestinians. I think that’s pretty clear.
He wasn’t even good at the fake hand-wringing, which Tony Blinken did, right? He didn’t even bother with that. And he demonstrably does not view them as having a legitimate right to their land and views them all as cartoon terrorists. And that was it. Full stop.
And in January of 2020 when AIPAC used dark money to spend all those ads against Bernie Sanders in South Carolina and Nevada and Iowa—that’s why they did it. They did it because they knew that Biden was a committed Zionist. And that was one of the reasons—that was one of the ways in which Barack Obama reassured the Democratic establishment when he picked him as his vice president in 2007 or 2008. So that’s it. That’s the answer.
There’s nothing more complex, there’s no seven-dimensional chess, there are no bear-hug strategies. He’s not changing anything from the inside. He just agrees that Hamas is this ontological evil, Palestinians have no legitimate grievances, and them dying doesn’t really bother him.
Bacon: Let’s do two more questions on the book itself, then I’m going to cover a couple of things outside of it. Talk about Claudine Gay and the hearings and the anti-Semitism-on-college-campuses rhetoric, and what role that plays.
Johnson: So that plays a central role, because very early on people saw the growth of the campus protesters, which were really going to become a fulcrum for—as it was in Vietnam, or pretty much any other major war, campuses are always a site of mass unrest and disturbances. These are people who are idealistic, they’re not bought off, they don’t really have an employer necessarily who can fire them, right?
And so these Zionist bully groups—they manufacture these fake antisemitism scandals, and there’s a playbook to it. And they would drag the presidents of these universities up and ask them a bunch of hypotheticals, one of which was—and this is all Republicans, for the record, that Democrats—and Democratic-aligned media completely vindicated and validated and treated like it was in good faith.
They would say: would you ban someone from using the term “globalize the Intifada”? And what they said was—which, again, is not a call to kill Jews, even though that’s what they said it was—the term just means uprising, or to shake off an oppressor. And they would give some answer, without necessarily knowing the demagogic heat that was about to come down on them. They would give some answer about how, well, it’s context-dependent—obviously any threats towards students are not acceptable, but language in and of itself about Intifada is not a punishable offense.
And then the headline quickly became: University Presidents Refuse to Denounce Calls for Genocide on Jewish Students. And people read that and think: people on campus are calling for genocide of Jewish students. But it was entirely hypothetical—it was all smoke and no fire—and it relied entirely on a misinterpretation of a spooky Arabic word. Forgive me—
Johnson: I’ve been talking a lot. So then you have this entirely manufactured campus antisemitism scandal.
Now, were there instances of antisemitism on campus? There were some—none of which, by the way, came from anyone directly involved with any of the Palestinian organizers, right? There were some instances of hate crimes, but nothing could be linked to a specific organization. But overall, the vast majority of the supposed on-campus antisemitism stories that were being published were students being harassed—or in some cases attacked. And you could say, that’s not good—but they were being harassed or intimidated or counter-protested because of explicit pro-Israel activity.
And then you would see the headline and it would say, Jewish Student Is Yelled at by Such-and-Such. And they would turn it into this ethnic or sectarian conflict when it was very clearly ideological. Because Zionism is an ideology—it’s not something you adopt at birth, it’s not a religion, it’s a political project. And this conflation was central to creating this constant, nonstop narrative fed by groups like the ADL and others of just this fake antisemitism scandal.
And meanwhile, you go to a university campus—as I did at DePaul, as others did at Columbia and elsewhere—and there were Seders, and there were Jewish organizations, there’s Jewish Voice for Peace. And it was pretty kumbaya, it was pretty chill. It was not sectarian. It was very clearly anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist. And this narrative didn’t fit their narrative, so they mostly just ignored a lot of the Jewish leadership, and a lot of the involvement of Jewish groups, and repeatedly reduced—the conflict on campus, such as it was—to Jewish students versus pro-Palestine protesters, to put it generously.
And then this really reached its fake panic when it came to the Claudine Gay pseudo-scandal, which then became a meta-scandal around whether or not she committed plagiarism 25 years ago. And what they needed was a scalp—they needed someone to get fired to send a message to the universities to discipline their students. And then of course, later on, they expelled thousands of students, disciplined hundreds more in various ways, expelled certain professors. And of course later, during the Trump administration, arrested dozens and deported several more based on their advocacy—on pure free speech grounds. And this was pushed by these—again, complete bogus conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, which is again really central to how this is all propagandized.
And we didn’t have any liberal—really any skeptical—reporting in the media. Everyone bought it, right? Dozens of these stories about antisemitism on campus, and there’d be some student at the pro-Israel society—active membership in the IDF—sitting on some chair looking out a window, and they would do that pose they do when someone’s suffered some transgression. They would do that, and also be very mopey.
And then you’d read the details and it would say, oh, this person’s an active IDF member. Like, clearly they’re not being oppressed because they’re Jewish—they’re being opposed because they’re part of a genocidal military. Like, everyone knows this is fucking stupid. And everyone knows this is fucking absurd. But the worst thing you can do is call a liberal a racist, and they run for the fucking hills. If you threaten them with this label of anti-Semitic or racist, everyone turns their fucking brain off and acts like any of this is in good faith—when everybody knows it’s not.
And again, it’s not as if there weren’t various—there were a couple of anti-Semitic incidents. With millions of college students on thousands of campuses, yeah, you’re going to have some idiot who does something that’s racist towards Jewish people, and that should be condemned, that should be called out. But it wasn’t this pervasive issue that was omnipresent.
To the extent to which it was ever studied, there was no study that found it was more pervasive than anti-Muslim or anti-Arab violence. But of course, again, as we statistically show, the coverage was overwhelmingly about antisemitism—despite the fact that their own internal reviews on the subject matter found almost exact parity between the two, to the extent to which—even if you do inflate the antisemitism numbers with anti-Zionist incidents. And I can read you those statistics if you’d like, in terms of—
Bacon: Let me ask something else. Can you hear me?
Bacon: Okay. I want to go to the conclusion, because I think this is an important point here. Because I am often reading books hoping for some—that describe problems—hoping for some solution. But I’ve read your work, so I was somewhat skeptical there’d be some seven-point plan. And your conclusion, though, I think is important. I want to have us read here: “Mostly, I think the genocide in Gaza will be put into a memory hole, forgotten or dismissed as a lefty obsession.” And then a few lines later, you say: “Those who backed the destruction of Gaza are too big to fail, and their left wing is too sophisticated when it comes to absorbing popular discontent into nonprofits, et cetera—there will be no mea culpas in 2033, no political careers derailed, no pundits saying how they got it wrong, because that’s not how things work anymore.”
That because—because Barack Obama did win and Hillary Clinton did lose, in part because of the Iraq War. Yeah. So you’re painting a scenario where—because there have been scenarios where the people who got it wrong in 2002 did face some punishment. Some of them, of course, became president, but I think—but—
Johnson: Hillary Clinton’s punishment was becoming Secretary of State, not the Democratic nominee in 2016. That’s why I say I think that—in the liberal imagination, we overestimate the punishment. Jeffrey Goldberg sold a fiction—he argued that Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda and had a role in 9/11, in The New Yorker. This was based on total fabrication. He’s now probably the single most influential middle-brow liberal opinion-setter—he’s the editor in chief of The Atlantic. So like, everybody got a raise who promoted that war. Everyone.
Bacon: I’m glad you said that. Yes. But in this case, you think there’s even less accountability?
Johnson: I don’t even think we’re going to run through the motions on that, because I think that unlike Iraq, it’s not partisan—it was bipartisan. Iraq obviously had bipartisan support, but fundamentally was a Bush thing. And of course had liberal buy-in, with respect to The New York Times and The New Republic and elsewhere.
Bacon: Yeah. That’s honest.
Johnson: But I think we’re beyond that now. I don’t—I think there’s more of an accelerationist mindset. I think liberal accountability—to the extent to which that matters, or credibility matters—it matters less. And I just think also that there’s no mechanism of accountability, really. And I think the form that people are looking at for some kind of accountability—as you alluded to earlier—is the 2028 Democratic primary, where I think this is very much going to be litigated, and that is the only mechanism or venue where I could see perhaps some kind of accountability.
But even that—it’s just, again, it’s the Barack Obama “let’s look forward, not backward” mentality, because that’s how you get ahead in politics. And I wrote a piece for The Intercept a couple months ago where I emailed what I would consider the five leading progressives for 2028—Ro Kahanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Van Hollen—not a candidate necessarily, but someone who’s a progressive stalwart—Rashida Tlaib—I knew she would give me a good baseline answer and she did—and Bernie Sanders. And I asked them: what is your plan for holding Biden officials accountable? Because these are all people who use the word “genocide.” In Chris Van Hollen’s instance, he used “ethnic cleansing,” but still a high crime, right?
Johnson: So based on your definition, they committed a genocide. What is your plan to hold those people accountable? What’s the plan to hold Blinken and Biden and John Finer, Lloyd Austin, and everyone who aided, assisted, and funded and armed what you yourself call a genocide—what’s the plan to hold them accountable? And the only one who gave me a real answer was Rashida Tlaib. She said these people need to be referred to the ICC for war crimes prosecution, which is the answer you’re supposed to give, and it’s a very good answer.
Chris Van Hollen gave a kind of vague response—like, they won’t work in my administration—which again is like: but then you really don’t think it’s ethnic cleansing, then. Because if that’s your punishment—doesn’t—yeah. And then Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and Ro Kahanna just didn’t get back to me, even though I’ve been in touch with their office before. So I know they got the message.
Now look, they’re under no obligation to get back to some asshole media critic—that doesn’t mean anything necessarily—but I do think that if they had an answer, they probably would have given it. And I think that even on the baseline, how are you going to hold people that you yourself say committed genocide accountable? Memory hole. Not going to happen. Not going to happen. The New York Times not going to be held accountable. These institutions are too big to fail. Everyone’s going to move on to something else.
We’re going to get some claptrap about how we have to unite as a party and heal the wounds—all this kind of vapid, pseudo-liberal, soothing PR stuff. And then there’s not going to be any accountability—which again, the lack of accountability with Iraq is why you could have the genocide in Gaza, right? No one’s ever held accountable. And that is just elite consensus. That cycle of immunity is essential to how Washington works. It’s central to how power works.
And again, if Ocasio-Cortez, for example, is going to run in the progressive lane and won’t commit to doing that—then I think it’s fair to say, and I’m not—again, this is a conditional statement, she may change—then she doesn’t actually believe it’s a genocide. And I think that’s the issue here. I think people—it became this buzzword, people used it to signal maximum outrage, but a lot of people are not really taking what that word means to its logical conclusion.
Bacon: It’s interesting you said that, because I was going to ask you—I saw Governor Beshear of Kentucky was interviewed recently by Politico, and he was asked about genocide. He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no—he just said it’s a litmus test and it’s a buzzword.
Johnson: That’s a no.
Bacon: But he—and then he also said Israel has the right to defend itself in other comments. He was trying to say no without saying no, or to dodge the question. But I think you’re saying something different, which is: the people who were saying yes—even—I hadn’t thought about it—the sort of progressives who were saying yes, it’s a genocide, are also not really acting like it.
Johnson: Some are—Rashida [Tlaib] is—
Bacon: Rashida Tlaib, but these sort of—yes. A lot of—yeah.
Johnson: And again, I want to stress that AOC is not obligated to return my emails. So that could change in the future, I want to acknowledge.
Bacon: But she’s—assume she’s asking this in public, she’s had other platforms to say this, it’s not like she’s—
Johnson: Correct. She has never said anything about accountability with Biden. And of course she went on stage at the DNC and said what I would consider to be the central lie of the Democratic role in the genocide, which is that they were “tirelessly working for a ceasefire”—for which she has not apologized, and for which I believe she will have to apologize at some point. I don’t think her people quite understand how angry Palestinians are about that. Palestinian activist groups—and I think that to have any kind of credibility, that will need to be addressed.
Bacon: We should come back to this some other time, because I saw there’s a piece in Axios saying that she finds the left annoying. It was not sourced to anybody. But I do think this—they’ve heard this critique—AOC—and I’m wondering if they think they can move past it.
Johnson: These are infinitely reasonable demands. And look, are there unreasonable people on Twitter who say stupid things about AOC? Obviously. But you can’t just bash the straw man. There’s a steelman left that she will need to address at some point, because it’s clear she’s running for president. It’s clear Ro Kahanna is running for president—he’ll have to do the same with many of his dicey decisions. Again, he was very much against a ceasefire until he wasn’t, right—I documented it at the time. Chris Van Hollen is again someone who himself refuses to use the word “genocide” and was very late coming to the issue. So all of them—AOC, others who run in this progressive lane, such as it is—I don’t think they quite appreciate how skeptical and cynical much of the left is.
And I don’t think I’m just parroting my own viewpoints as the left. My sense is this is a broad issue. One of the things that Gaza was—and is—in key ways, with respect to American politics, is that Palestinian activists made this argument for decades: it’s a canary in the coal mine of selling out.
If you sell out Gaza, you will absolutely sell out everything else, because it’s the easiest thing to forget about, to dispatch. It’s one of the easiest things you can just gloss over and move on past. And if you don’t have convictions with respect to something as obvious as genocide, then you won’t stand for anything.
And I think that is going to be something that has to be explicitly addressed, because I don’t think you can just vibe your way past it. And I do think this book really is about accountability. I know I have a somewhat skeptical conclusion, but that skeptical conclusion is supposed to be an invitation—because there’s a qualifier there at the end, which is: I say “unless something fundamentally changes in our politics.”
Johnson: Which is a pretty heavy qualifier.
Johnson: But I mean it when I say it—I’m not a defeatist. But I do think that one has to be sober and realistic about the sophisticated mechanisms with which this anger over Gaza can and will be massaged and misdirected and disciplined and vote-scolded.
And I think that those techniques—and we see it now, I wrote about it yesterday with this new “cutting off military aid to Israel” talking point that J Street’s pushing—it’s actually quite brilliant, it moves into a non sequitur, or it creates the illusion of distance where there isn’t any. And we’re going to see more of these in the coming years. And so it’s an invitation for people to be rigorous, to be disciplined, and to be intellectually honest. If someone does move on something, you have to credit them for that. But you have to be able to divorce superficial gestures from substantive gestures.
And that’s why independent groups—and even someone like IMEU—is so valuable, because they hold you honest. They’ll be like, this line has actually been shopped by Lindsey Graham and Netanyahu, it’s not a real Israel-critical policy. And there are other groups as well—I hate to name-drop because I’ll forget someone. But I think moving forward, that’s going to be the litmus test.
To the extent it’s even possible—it’s possible that just by the very nature of how democratic politics works and how the media works—we’ll get 5,000 more articles about what Hasan Piker said about Hamas before we get any accountability about the actual genocide, which is—again—almost universally considered an academic consensus as a genocide. That’s my impression. I wrote that conclusion about a year ago, and I’d say nothing has basically changed.
Bacon: Let me close with two related questions. The first is: did any media outlets cover this period—October 2023 to April of 2024—particularly well? Were there any media outlets that were particularly good in that period? I want you to answer that.
And then two—hopefully—I want you to tell people about what’s beyond your book: talk about your podcast and tell people how they can tune into that, because your podcast is one of the best journalism products I consume, particularly in analyzing and understanding the media.
Johnson: Well, thank you. Mainstream media—not really. Like, I give—
Bacon: Yeah, I know, but other media—The Intercept—
Adam Johnson: I’d say Evan Hill did pretty skeptical reporting at The Washington Post—did skeptical reporting that ended up being very useful. I would say he was one of the few mainstream reporters who—wasn’t perfect, but his batting average was above the Mendoza line. And that was a pretty rare exception. I would say alternative media really was the one—Breach Media, Zeteo, and Electronic Intifada—these kind of Israel-critical outlets were all over this before anyone else was, right. And I’m going to leave someone out, and I hate to do that. But The Intercept did—
Bacon: —some of your pieces and some of the—
Johnson: Yeah, so they were asking those skeptical questions.
Johnson: But they’re not—you know what, sure—90 percent of Americans consume mainstream media, they don’t create the sort of—they’re not on the dopey cable news panel shows. And then to your second question: yeah, I have a podcast—it’s called Citations Needed, which is now in its ninth season. Ninth season—I’m getting old. Yeah, it happens to all of us. There’s something about being a 40-year-old podcaster that feels a little less—you’ve got two kids and you’re talking to a microphone all day. And then I write at my Substack called the column and then I freelance at The Real News and The Intercept.
Bacon: Adam, I told you half an hour—we’ve been on for an hour—but I think this was a great conversation. Thank you for joining me. So the book is called How to Sell a Genocide. It’s out—Monday? When is it out?
Bacon: Tuesday. And it’s available at all the various places to buy books, I’m sure.
Johnson: Yeah. It’s available at Pluto Press, it’s available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookstores—I think quite a few bookstores are going to have it, so you can go there. And then Audible—it’ll have an audiobook.
Bacon: Did you read it yourself, or did you just—
Johnson: No, I have a stutter when I read scripts, so it would have taken five years. So we used a thespian. What’s funny is they don’t even let me listen to it ahead of time. So I’m going to listen to it when everyone else does, and I’m hoping it’s—
Johnson: Yeah, it’s pretty intimidating. I’m like, hopefully there are no errors. So we’ll see.
Bacon: Thank you. Thanks for taking the time—I appreciate it.
Right Now With Perry Bacon is a twice-weekly show about national politics with a focus on the radicalism of the Trump administration and tactics to combat it. The program, hosted by New Republic staff writer Perry Bacon on Substack, features in-depth discussions with experts and politicians. It goes beyond the daily headlines to explain why things are happening and put them in a broader context.