There is a scripture in the tradition I was raised in that says you shall know them by their fruits. By this measure, by the fruits of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Baghdad and Kabul and Gaza and now Tehran, the United States has made itself legible to anyone willing to read.
Somewhere in the south of Iran, a father is holding what remains of his child. He arrived too late. This is how the United States introduces itself to the world, over and over and over again, and it is from this knowledge, the knowledge of what America does and not what it says, that I write.
In the days since the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the ensuing war, I’ve sought out information from outside the sphere of U.S. propaganda. I’ve read dispatches from scholars reporting under bombardment in Tehran, Lamerd and Minab. I now receive much of my news from independent sources like 404 Media, Drop Site News, Breaking Points, and Breakthrough News, as opposed to the corporate, imperialist, American media, even the supposedly liberal outlets, who all fall in line in times of war, justifying atrocities, normalizing barbarism, or engineering complete blackouts of information they’d prefer the American masses never see.
I began expanding my information horizons a few years ago, and when I did, I quickly realized how stupefied I, as an educated and well-read Black person living in America, had been. But more importantly, I began to understand why so many who live under the boot and the bomb of the American gangster regime describe it as the most destructive entity in the history of the human species.
What could be more indicative of the United States’ demented ideology than opening a war by massacring 165 Iranian schoolgirls? The U.S. and Israel claim the school was next to an IRGC base, and used this to justify the mass slaughter. Nearly all of the girls were between seven and twelve years old, sitting in the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab on a Saturday morning, the first day of their school week, when a missile tore through the building during a class change. Families had not yet arrived to pick up their children when the roof collapsed and buried them. And then, hours later, a strike on a sports hall in Lamerd where dozens of teenage girls were at volleyball, basketball, and gymnastics training. Twenty volleyball players killed. A 15-year-old named Rabab Dehdasht. A 16-year-old named Elahe. Their fathers ran through congested streets toward rubble and screaming and the smell of gunpowder so thick it made breathing nearly impossible.
And then the carpet bombing of Tehran, a city with nine million people within its limits and nearly seventeen million in the metro, the same population density as New York. Imagine bombs falling on Manhattan. Imagine ten waves of airstrikes over five days on a city that size and then try to tell me who the terrorists are.
Already, more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran according to human rights monitors, almost certainly far higher, obscured by an internet blackout that has dropped connectivity to four percent of normal. The bodies are still being pulled from rubble. And still the regime speaks of “objectives.”
Three days before the first bombs fell, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said publicly that a historic diplomatic agreement was “within reach.” This was not the first time. For years, since Trump unilaterally backed out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the Iranians have sought peace with the United States. And many times, the Trump regime feigned interest in diplomacy, dangling negotiations like bait, only to use the process to map Iran’s leadership, lure them into the open, and slaughter them all at once. Diplomacy as ambush. Peace talks as targeting intelligence. This is what the American empire means when it says ‘negotiation.’
The United States is the only country to have ever deployed the most dangerous weapon in the known universe, the nuclear bomb, incinerating tens of thousands of human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and mutilating and mutating survivors for generations. Yet that same country claims the moral authority to determine who may have nuclear weapons. This is a country that has overthrown governments on every inhabited continent. That backed Saddam Hussein until it didn’t. That armed the mujahideen until they became the enemy. That told the world Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a lie that cost over a million lives, and now recycles the exact same playbook, the exact same language, the exact same senators standing at the exact same podiums, for Iran. Trump stood in the State of the Union and called Iran’s nuclear ambitions “sinister,” echoing almost word for word the fabrications that preceded the destruction of Iraq and Libya.
The fact of the matter is that no American or European should have an opinion on the matter of any country having nuclear capabilities. Not when America sits atop the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet. Not when it is the only nation to have used one. Not when it has spent the last century toppling democracies, installing dictators, and then bombing the countries it destabilized into submission under the banner of freedom. The hubris required to claim moral authority over the weapons question while actively carpet bombing a sovereign nation is so total, so absolute, that it passes beyond hypocrisy into something more honest: empire, naked and unashamed.
And yet the empire requires a story, it cannot simply bomb. It must be seen to have been provoked. And, that story requires language. Notice how American media describes Iran as a “regime” while the United States, currently governed by the most lawless, fascist, authoritarian administration in its history, an administration that kidnaps foreign heads of state, bombs sovereign nations without congressional authorization, engages in genocide, and deploys its police to murder its own citizens, remains simply “the government.” We may assume this to be a neutral linguistic choice but in fact it is the vocabulary of empire, inherited from the same Orientalist tradition that has always needed to render its targets as something less than legitimate before it destroys them.
Because, you do not bomb a government. You dismantle a regime. The word does half the work before the missile arrives. We just watched it happen in Venezuela. We watched it happen in Libya. We watched it happen in Iraq. And now, with Iran, the script runs again: call it a regime, call it brutal, call it repressive, and the moral groundwork for whatever comes next has already been laid.
And then there is the matter of the numbers of protestors that Iran has killed. In Gaza, it took the American press over a year to even begin acknowledging the scale of the death toll, and many outlets still refuse to cite Palestinian health authorities without heavy qualification. But in Iran, within weeks, Western media began circulating figures of up to 36,000, a number many outlets sourced from an organization called Iran International. Search Iran International’s website and you will find no editorial board, no staff page, no transparency about who produces its reporting. What you will find, if you look beyond the site itself, is that The Guardian reported in 2018 that the channel received $250 million in funding linked to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. Iran’s intelligence ministry has designated it a front for Mossad. The channel operates with no visible accountability, no named reporters, no identifiable editorial leadership, and yet its figures are repeated on CNN, in the Times, across the entire Western media apparatus as though they are established fact.
The point here is not to adjudicate Iran’s internal politics while it is under active bombardment by two nuclear-armed states. The point is to see clearly. A country of ninety million people is being carpet bombed during Ramadan. The sources being used to justify moral ambivalence about that bombing are funded by the governments doing the bombing.
When the campaign to manufacture consent for this war began, with Western media coverage of the mass protests that erupted in late December and the resulting internet blackout in January, it was unexpectedly difficult to find information that provided real nuance about the situation. Was it a CIA and Mossad campaign of targeted psychological warfare and misinformation? Or did the everyday people of Iran have real grievances with their government? Understanding the situation required days of research, because if history teaches anything, it is never to take the United States at its word. Not when it claims to bomb Nigeria to save Christians. Not when it kills innocent fishermen to “stop Venezuelan drug trafficking.” Not when it assassinates Gaddafi, who they also claimed was massacring innocent protesters.
The answer, as with most things worth understanding, is complicated, and deliberately so. The protests were real, triggered by a currency collapse and soaring inflation and decades of crippling U.S. sanctions that have strangled the Iranian economy. They spread to over 120 cities across every province. But simultaneously, what Western media could not or chose not to report, was a covert operation underway to hijack those protests from within. During Israel’s twelve-day war against Iran last summer, Israel confirmed it had over a hundred agents operating inside the country. The Mossad smuggled weapons, drones, and explosives into Iranian territory. Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo wrote on X: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”
Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu told Army Radio: “I can assure you that we have some of our people operating there right now.” The mayor of Tehran reported that on a single evening, fifty banks and thirty mosques were set ablaze. President Pezeshkian alleged that foreign agents had attacked a bazaar in Rasht and set mosques on fire. The Iranian government used all of this to justify a broader crackdown on dissent. But the critical point is that the presence of foreign intelligence provocateurs was not merely an Iranian government talking point. It was confirmed, openly and proudly, by the intelligence services themselves. The Mossad never denied it. They bragged about it.
What emerged was a situation engineered for maximum exploitation: real economic grievances weaponized by foreign intelligence, repackaged by Western media as a pure, uncomplicated democracy movement, which then became the moral justification for a bombing campaign that would kill some of the very people who had been protesting. The playbook is older than any of us. It is the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup against Mosaddegh, updated for the social media age. The protests are real. The hijacking is also real. Both things are true. And the inability or unwillingness of American media to hold both truths simultaneously is not an accident. It is the function of the Capitalist White American Imperialist Press.
There is another tradition of journalism in this country, one that runs from Ida B. Wells documenting lynchings the white press ignored, to the Black Panther Newspaper telling the truth about conditions Black people endured, to the Black radical press that has always understood that the same violence America exports abroad, it perfects at home. That tradition does not hold both truths because it is balanced. It holds both truths because it is honest. And it is from that tradition that this publication reports.
The simple fact is that the American media markets war, packaging it for consumption by an audience trained to experience the destruction of other people’s countries as content, as spectacle, as something that happens on a screen between commercial breaks.
The U.S. has acknowledged that six American military members are dead, although both Iran and independent analysts estimate the number is already upwards of 500. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Iran has launched retaliatory strikes across nine countries. Hezbollah has re-entered the conflict. NATO intercepted an Iranian missile heading toward Turkey’s airspace for the first time in history.
And the empire is losing. Not in the way American media frames losing, such as a question of willpower or messaging, but in the material, mathematical reality of modern warfare. Professor Jiang, a game theorist whose 2024 prediction that Trump would win the election, start a war with Iran, and lose it, has rocketed him to among the most sought after analysts in recent days, recently did an interview on popular YouTube channel Breaking Points which now sits at over 6 million views in three days, where he said that Iran has spent twenty years preparing for exactly this conflict. He explains how Iran launches drones that cost $25,000-$50,000 apiece, and the United States fires interceptors worth tens of millions of dollars to stop them, often unsuccessfully. Verified video from Israel this week showed eleven separate American-made interceptors fired at a single Iranian ballistic missile. All eleven missed. The US is already racing to resupply, requisitioning interceptor stockpiles from South Korea because its own manufacturing cannot keep pace. Former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Sir Richard Shiref called Trump and Hegseth “gung-ho nutters without a proper strategy,” invoking Sun Tzu: tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Israel, the silent partner whose fingerprints are on every phase of this war, from the Mossad agents who burned mosques during the protests to the joint operation they codenamed “Roaring Lion,” is faring no better. Iranian missiles are penetrating Israeli air defenses with increasing frequency as interceptor stockpiles run dry. Iran has struck Ben Gurion Airport with its most advanced Khurramshahr missiles, capable of carrying multiple warheads. Hezbollah has re-entered the conflict from Lebanon. The Israeli regime that pushed for this war, that Netanyahu told Sean Hannity would “usher in an era of peace,” is now watching its own cities come under sustained bombardment while its protector bleeds out across nine countries. The USS Abraham Lincoln has been forced to retreat from the Strait of Hormuz twice in five days. The Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain has been struck. American embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have shuttered. The empire that believed it could shock and awe a nation of ninety million into submission is discovering what every empire before it has discovered: that the people you bomb do not surrender. They remember.
Mohammad Marandi, a professor at the University of Tehran who’s become one of the most prominent anti-imperialist english language speakers on the internet, spoke as airstrikes fell on the city around him. He described the reality that no American broadcast will show. “The Americans have struck hospitals, the Red Crescent headquarters, emergency services buildings, and Iranian state television, twice on consecutive nights,” he documents. Americans and israelis have used double-tap strikes, a strategy where they bomb a target and then bomb it again as rescuers arrive to pull survivors from the rubble. And yet every night, in squares across Tehran, under active bombardment, crowds of Iranians gather to mourn and to resist. Marandi, himself a veteran, who has lived through two previous American wars against his country, says that Iran’s key military assets are deep underground and inaccessible to American bombs. The Americans cannot reach what matters. So they bomb what they can reach, which is schools and hospitals and homes and television studios and the bodies of children.
Iran has been preparing for it since the United States named it the “axis of evil” over two decades ago, building underground bases across the Persian Gulf region, developing its own missile and drone programs at a fraction of the cost of American weapons systems. Iran’s Foreign Minister, asked on NBC about the possibility of a ground invasion by the Americans, responded with three words: “We are waiting.”
This war is led by what many have come to describe as the “Epstein Coalition.” It is marketed by a media apparatus that has the blood of every Iraqi and every Afghan and now every Iranian child on its hands. And it is profited from by a class of tech and AI billionaires who have turned killing into a growth industry and mass death into a Series F funding round.
Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei used a phrase that has traveled far beyond Iran’s borders, adopted by people across the Global South who have no loyalty to the Islamic Republic but who have arrived at the same conclusion from their own experience. He described America as ‘The Great Satan.’
After America slaughtered millions in Iraq on a lie. After it killed thousands more in Afghanistan. After hundreds of thousands in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. After kidnapping a state leader in Venezuela. After starving and terrorizing Cuba for sixty years. After building concentration camps on its own soil and deploying its police forces to murder Black people in the streets of its own cities. I think I understand the Great Satan now.
