Hello folks and welcome to the Antifada this is a Sean K B solo episode

but I'm here with an excellent guest that is Adam H Johnson, writer and also co-host of the

excellent citations needed podcast. Adam, thanks for being with us today.

Thanks for having me. What inspired me to finally have you on the podcast was the reaction starting a couple weeks ago when

Joseph Robinette Biden basically went forward with the Trump plan to withdraw American troops

from our 20-year engagement in Afghanistan and the media had an absolute meltdown and in fact watching these war-mongering cycles on TV talking about humanitarian

intervention, about how we need to keep troops for another 20 years, about all the backbiting,

about, you know, incremental policies of both of the parties.

It really made me feel like we were back in 2001 to 2003 when you had a kind of full court press on

behalf of the media in this country helping to drive us into war.

So I felt mad in a way that I hadn't felt mad in maybe 16, 17, 18 years, which is impressive in this very cynical age that we live in.

Do you want to talk a little bit about Biden's pulling out of Afghanistan and the media reaction to it?

Well, you know, anytime, you know, I think some people maybe who aren't too intimate with,

I guess, left-wing media analysis, they'll say, like like the media does X, the media does buy,

and I'll say, oh, there is no sort of media.

There's kind of a thousand different voices

who act kind of autonomously and sort of arrive

at independent conclusions.

And it's difficult to kind of have an object lesson

where you say, well, if we did have a state-run media,

as they say, a sort of top-down traditional state-run media

model, and an alien sort of emerald. down traditional state-run media model.

...